Page:The Bondman; A New Saga (IA bondmannewsaga00cain).djvu/47

 ship that sailed the same night. Two days later famine had brought him out of his hiding-place, and he had been compelled to work before the mast. In ten more days he had signed articles as able seaman at the first English port of call. Then had followed punishments for sloth, punishments for ignorance, and punishments for not knowing the high-flavoured language of his boatswain. After that had come bickerings, threats, scowls, oaths, and open ruptures with this chief of petty tyrants, ending with the blow of a marlin-spike over the big Icelander's crown, and the little boatswain rolling headlong overboard. Then twenty-eight days spent in irons, riveted to the ship's side on the under deck, with bread and water every second day and nothing between. Finally, by the secret good-fellowship of a shipmate with some bowels of compassion, escape had come after starvation, as starvation had come after slavery, and Stephen had swum ashore while his ship lay at anchor in Ramsey Bay.

What occurred thereafter at the house whereto he had drifted no one could rightly tell. He continued to live there with the trull who kept it. She had been the illegitimate child of an insolvent English debtor and the daughter of a neighbouring vicar, had been ignored by her father, put out to nurse by her mother, bred in ignorance and reared in impurity.

By what arts, what hints, what appeals, what allurements, this trollop got possession of Stephen Orry it is not hard to guess. First, he was a hunted man, and only one who dared do anything dare open doors to him. Next, he was a foreigner, dumb for speech and deaf for scandal, and therefore unable to learn more than his eyes could tell him of the woman who had given him shelter. Then the big Icelander was a handsome fellow; and the veriest drab that ever trailed a petticoat knows how to hide her slatternly habits while she is hankering after a fine-grown man. So the end of many conspiring circumstances was, that after much gossip in corners, many jeers, and some tossings of female heads, the vicar of the parish, Parson Gell, called one day at the hut in Port-y-Vullin, and on the following Sunday morning, at church, little Robbie Christian, the clerk and sexton, read out the askings for the marriage of 'Liza Killey, spinster, of the parish of Maughold, and Stephen Orry, bachelor, out of Iceland.

What a wedding it was that came three weeks later! 'Liza wore a gay new gown that had been lent her by a neighbour, Bella Coobragh, a girl who had meant to be married in it