The Deemster by Hall Caine

Author:Hall Caine
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781776598090
Publisher: The Floating Press

Chapter XXVI - How Ewan Came to Church

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It is essential to the progress of this history that we should leave Dan where he now is, in the peace of a great soul newly awakened, and go back to the beginning of this Christmas Day on shore.

The parish of Michael began that day with all its old observances. While the dawn of Christmas morning was struggling but feebly with the night of Christmas-eve a gang of the baser sort went out with lanterns and long sticks into the lanes, there to whoop and beat the bushes. It was their annual hunting of the wren. Before the parish had sat down to its Christmas breakfast two of these lusty enemies of the tiny bird were standing in the street of the village with a long pole from shoulder to shoulder and a wee wren suspended from the middle of it. Their brave companions gathered round and plucked a feather from the wren's breast now and again. At one side of the company, surrounded by a throng of children, was Hommy-beg, singing a carol, and playing his own accompaniment on his fiddle. The carol told a tragic story of an evil spirit in the shape of a woman who pestered the island in the old days, of how the people rose up against her to drive her into the sea, and of how she turned herself into a wren, and all on the holy day of the blessed Saint Stephen. A boy whose black eyes danced with a mischievous twinkle held a crumpled paper upside down before the gardener, and from this inverted text and score the unlettered cox-comb pretended to play and sing. The women came to their doors to listen, and the men with their two hands in their breeches-pockets leaned against the ends of their houses and smoked and looked on sleepily.

When the noisy crowd had passed, the street sank back to its customary repose, broken only by the voice of a child—a little auburn-haired lassie, in a white apron tucked up in fish-wife fashion—crying, "Shrimps, fine shrimps, fresh shrimps!" and then by a lustier voice that drowned the little lassie's tones, and cried, "Conger—conger eel—fine, ladies—fresh, ladies—and bellies as big as bishops! Conger eel—conger!"

It was not a brilliant morning, but the sun was shining drowsily through a white haze like a dew-fog that hid the mountains. The snow of the night before was not quite washed away by the sharp rain of the morning; it still lay at the eaves of the thatched houses, and among the cobbles of the paved pathway. The blue smoke was coiling up through the thick air from every chimney when the bells at Bishop's Court began to ring for Christmas service. An old woman here and there came out of her cabin in her long blue cape and her mutch, and hobbled along on a stick to church. Two or three men in sea-boots, with shrimping nets over their shoulders and pipes in their mouths, sauntered down the lane that led by the shambles to the shore.

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