The Pirate
I have possessed the regulation of the weather and the
distribution of the seasons. The sun has listened to my
dictates, and passed from tropic to tropic by my direction;
the clouds, at my command, have poured forth their waters.
RASSELAS.
Any sudden cause for anxious and mortifying reflection, which, in
advanced age, occasions sullen and pensive inactivity, stimulates youth
to eager and active exertion; as if, like the hurt deer, they
endeavoured to drown the pain of the shaft by the rapidity of motion.
When Mordaunt caught up his gun, and rushed out of the house of
Jarlshof, he walked on with great activity over waste and wild, without
any determined purpose, except that of escaping, if possible, from the
smart of his own irritation. His pride was effectually mortified by the
report of the jagger, which coincided exactly with some doubts he had
been led to entertain, by the long and unkind silence of his friends at
Burgh-Westra.
If the fortunes of Cæsar had doomed him, as the poet suggests, to have
been
"But the best wrestler on the green,"
it is nevertheless to be presumed, that a foil from a rival, in that
rustic exercise, would have mortified him as much as a defeat from a
competitor, when he was struggling for the empery of the world. And even
so Mordaunt Mertoun, degraded in his own eyes from the height which he
had occupied as the chief amongst the youth of the island, felt vexed
and irritated, as well as humbled. The two beautiful sisters, also,
whose smiles all were so desirous of acquiring, with whom he had lived
on terms of such familiar affection, that, with the same ease and
innocence, there was unconsciously mixed a shade of deeper though
undefined tenderness than characterises fraternal love,--they also
seemed to have forgotten him. He could not be ignorant, that, in the
universal opinion of all Dunrossness, nay, of the whole Mainland, he
might have had every chance of being the favoured lover of either; and
now at once, and without any failure on his part, he was become so
little to them, that he had lost even the consequence of an ordinary
acquaintance. The old Udaller, too, whose hearty and sincere character
should have made him more constant in his friendships, seemed to have
been as fickle as his daughters, and poor Mordaunt had at once lost the
smiles of the fair, and the favour of the powerful. These were
uncomfortable reflections, and he doubled his pace, that he might
outstrip them if possible.
Without exactly reflecting upon the route which he pursued, Mordaunt
walked briskly on through a country where neither hedge, wall, nor
enclosure of any kind, interrupts the steps of the wanderer, until he
reached a very solitary spot, where, embosomed among steep heathy hills,
which sunk suddenly down on the verge of the water, lay one of those
small fresh-water lakes which are common in the Zetland isles, whose
outlets form the sources of the small brooks and rivulets by which the
country is watered, and serve to drive the little mills which
manufacture their grain.
It was a mild summer day; the beams of the sun, as is not uncommon in
Zetland, were moderated and shaded by a silvery haze, which filled the
atmosphere, and destroying the strong contrast of light and shade, gave
even to noon the sober livery of the evening twilight. The little lake,
not three-quarters of a mile in circuit, lay in profound quiet; its
surface undimpled, save when one of the numerous water-fowl, which
glided on its surface, dived for an instant under it. The depth of the
water gave the whole that cerulean tint of bluish green, which
occasioned its being called the Green Loch; and at present, it formed so
perfect a mirror to the bleak hills by which it was surrounded, and
which lay reflected on its bosom, that it was difficult to distinguish
the water from the land; nay, in the shadowy uncertainty occasioned by
the thin haze, a stranger could scarce have been sensible that a sheet
of water lay before him. A scene of more complete solitude, having all
its peculiarities heightened by the extreme serenity of the weather, the
quiet grey composed tone of the atmosphere, and the perfect silence of
the elements, could hardly be imagined. The very aquatic birds, who
frequented the spot in great numbers, forbore their usual flight and
screams, and floated in profound tranquillity upon the silent water.
Without taking any determined aim--without having any determined
purpose--without almost thinking what he was about, Mordaunt presented
his fowlingpiece, and fired across the lake. The large swan shot dimpled
its surface like a partial shower of hail--the hills took up the noise
of the report, and repeated it again, and again, and again, to all their
echoes; the water-fowl took to wing in eddying and confused wheel,
answering the echoes with a thousand varying screams, from the deep note
of the swabie, or swartback, to the querulous cry of the tirracke and
kittiewake.
Mordaunt looked for a moment on the clamorous crowd with a feeling of
resentment, which he felt disposed at the moment to apply to all nature,
and all her objects, animate or inanimate, however little concerned with
the cause of his internal mortification.
"Ay, ay," he said, "wheel, dive, scream, and clamour as you will, and
all because you have seen a strange sight, and heard an unusual sound.
There is many a one like you in this round world. But you, at least,
shall learn," he added, as he reloaded his gun, "that strange sights and
strange sounds, ay, and strange acquaintances to boot, have sometimes a
little shade of danger connected with them.--But why should I wreak my
own vexation on these harmless sea-gulls?" he subjoined, after a
moment's pause; "they have nothing to do with the friends that have
forgotten me.--I loved them all so well,--and to be so soon given up for
the first stranger whom chance threw on the coast!"
As he stood resting upon his gun, and abandoning his mind to the course
of these unpleasant reflections, his meditations were unexpectedly
interrupted by some one touching his shoulder. He looked around, and saw
Norna of the Fitful-head, wrapped in her dark and ample mantle. She had
seen him from the brow of the hill, and had descended to the lake,
through a small ravine which concealed her, until she came with
noiseless step so close to him that he turned round at her touch.
Mordaunt Mertoun was by nature neither timorous nor credulous, and a
course of reading more extensive than usual had, in some degree,
fortified his mind against the attacks of superstition; but he would
have been an actual prodigy, if, living in Zetland in the end of the
seventeenth century, he had possessed the philosophy which did not exist
in Scotland generally, until at least two generations later. He doubted
in his own mind the extent, nay, the very existence, of Norna's
supernatural attributes, which was a high flight of incredulity in the
country where they were universally received; but still his incredulity
went no farther than doubts. She was unquestionably an extraordinary
woman, gifted with an energy above others, acting upon motives peculiar
to herself, and apparently independent of mere earthly considerations.
Impressed with these ideas, which he had imbibed from his youth, it was
not without something like alarm, that he beheld this mysterious female
standing on a sudden so close beside him, and looking upon him with such
sad and severe eyes, as those with which the Fatal Virgins, who,
according to northern mythology, were called the _Valkyriur_, or
"Choosers of the Slain," were supposed to regard the young champions
whom they selected to share the banquet of Odin.
It was, indeed, reckoned unlucky, to say the least, to meet with Norna
suddenly alone, and in a place remote from witnesses; and she was
supposed, on such occasions, to have been usually a prophetess of evil,
as well as an omen of misfortune, to those who had such a rencontre.
There were few or none of the islanders, however familiarized with her
occasional appearance in society, that would not have trembled to meet
her on the solitary banks of the Green Loch.
"I bring you no evil, Mordaunt Mertoun," she said, reading perhaps
something of this superstitious feeling in the looks of the young man.
"Evil from me you never felt, and never will."
"Nor do I fear any," said Mordaunt, exerting himself to throw aside an
apprehension which he felt to be unmanly. "Why should I, mother? You
have been ever my friend."
"Yet, Mordaunt, thou art not of our region; but to none of Zetland
blood, no, not even to those who sit around the hearth-stone of Magnus
Troil, the noble descendants of the ancient Jarls of Orkney, am I more a
well-wisher, than I am to thee, thou kind and brave-hearted boy. When I
hung around thy neck that gifted chain, which all in our isles know was
wrought by no earthly artist, but by the Drows,[36] in the secret
recesses of their caverns, thou wert then but fifteen years old; yet thy
foot had been on the Maiden-skerrie of Northmaven, known before but to
the webbed sole of the swartback, and thy skiff had been in the deepest
cavern of Brinnastir, where the _haaf-fish_[37] had before slumbered in
dark obscurity. Therefore I gave thee that noble gift; and well thou
knowest, that since that day, every eye in these isles has looked on
thee as a son, or as a brother, endowed beyond other youths, and the
favoured of those whose hour of power is when the night meets with the
day."
"Alas! mother," said Mordaunt, "your kind gift may have given me favour,
but it has not been able to keep it for me, or I have not been able to
keep it for myself.--What matters it? I shall learn to set as little by
others as they do by me. My father says that I shall soon leave these
islands, and therefore, Mother Norna, I will return to you your fairy
gift, that it may bring more lasting luck to some other than it has done
to me."
"Despise not the gift of the nameless race," said Norna, frowning; then
suddenly changing her tone of displeasure to that of mournful solemnity,
she added,--"Despise them not, but, O Mordaunt, court them not! Sit down
on that grey stone--thou art the son of my adoption, and I will doff, as
far as I may, those attributes that sever me from the common mass of
humanity, and speak with you as a parent with a child."
There was a tremulous tone of grief which mingled with the loftiness of
her language and carriage, and was calculated to excite sympathy, as
well as to attract attention. Mordaunt sat down on the rock which she
pointed out, a fragment which, with many others that lay scattered
around, had been torn by some winter storm from the precipice at the
foot of which it lay, upon the very verge of the water. Norna took her
own seat on a stone at about three feet distance, adjusted her mantle so
that little more than her forehead, her eyes, and a single lock of her
grey hair, were seen from beneath the shade of her dark wadmaal cloak,
and then proceeded in a tone in which the imaginary consequence and
importance so often assumed by lunacy, seemed to contend against the
deep workings of some extraordinary and deeply-rooted mental affliction.
"I was not always," she said, "that which I now am. I was not always the
wise, the powerful, the commanding, before whom the young stand abashed,
and the old uncover their grey heads. There was a time when my
appearance did not silence mirth, when I sympathized with human passion,
and had my own share in human joy or sorrow. It was a time of
helplessness--it was a time of folly--it was a time of idle and
unfruitful laughter--it was a time of causeless and senseless