Chapter 18

Colin Lothian remained at Lyndardy until the following Monday morning. He slept out in the byre, where such wayfarers as he were always welcome to a supper and a bed, and in the evenings he would come in to the kitchen to sit with my uncle and talk over the affairs of the island, or to read us a chapter out of the well-worn Testament that he carried with him on his wanderings. For Colin was a religious man and loved his Bible. He knew most of the Psalms by heart, and often gathered groups of islanders about him to hear him repeat them. Idlers sometimes scoffed at his fondness for the epistle on Charity; but no one who heard him repeat it could fail to be impressed by its teaching or to recognize the poor wanderer's sincerity.

Colin was the recognized newsmonger of the Mainland, and it was his habit to travel from parish to parish retailing the gossip of the countryside. At farm towns which were situated in remote places he was always a welcome guest. He was well acquainted with the condition of the markets and the state of the fishing and the crops. He knew the price of butter and of oatmeal, of cattle and of sheep, and his information was often of great value to the farmers in adjusting the values of farm produce. With the old men he would laugh over the jokes of days that had been; tell them how laird had gone to law with laird, or how poor crofters had been evicted from their holdings for failing to pay their taxes or their rents. The young women were always ready to hear from him who was to be married at Martinmas, or how Nell So-and-so had been jilted; and he often entertained the young people with strange tales of the brownies, the trows, the kelpies, or other supernatural beings. In this way he supplied the place of newspapers and books, which were scarce commodities in those old days; and he further made himself useful by doing odd work about the steadings and cottages--such as building the peats into stacks for the winter, mending a thatch, or even doctoring a cow.

On the Sunday evening at Lyndardy, while the storm still beat upon the land, Colin sat with us round the fireside and smoked with my uncle Mansie. The talk drifted round to the subject of Carver Kinlay, whose new boat was to be brought from Kirkwall that week. My uncle did not know for what purpose that new boat was built.

Kinlay was a man who had no settled occupation outside his farm. Sometimes, it is true, he went out to the herring fishing when the fish were plentiful, and he thought he could make some money by it, and he often made secret passages over to Scotland for no one knew what trade. But it was for none of these purposes that the new boat was required, for it had been built with a deep keel and a lugger rig, with a view to being a quick sailer.

Now if anyone should know of Carver's purpose, it would be Colin Lothian, and my uncle questioned him on the subject.

"Colin," said he, "they tell me that Carver is gettin' a new boat frae Kirkwall. D'ye ken what he means to do wi' it?"

"That's piper's news," said Colin. "I heard that three or four weeks syne; and I hae seen the boat mysel', on the stocks at Allan Dewar's boatyard. Ay, and a bonnie boat she is! As to what Carver means to do wi' it--Weel, I dinna ken if it be true; but I hae heard that he intends to start as a Stromness pilot in opposition to Sandy Ericson."

"A pilot!" exclaimed Mansie. "Carver Kinlay a pilot! Man, Colin, ye astonish me. Why, the man hasna gotten a certificate!"

"Maybe ay and maybe no; but I assure ye, Mansie, that a pilot he means to be."

Mansie dismissed this notion incredulously; for though Kinlay knew the coast very well, yet the idea of his starting with his limited experience as an Orkney pilot was droll to one who, like my uncle, had been all his life at the work, and knew every fathom of the waters.

But the character of Carver Kinlay--"Crafty Carver" he was called by those who knew him well--was a problem which had not yet been solved. I had myself gathered many incoherent hints relating to him, and, bit by bit, I heard fragments of fact as to his first appearance in Pomona; but on this Sunday evening, as I sat with Lothian and Mansie, I added to these hints some certain knowledge which enabled me afterwards to better understand this man.

The noise of the storm raging outside--the wind and rain beating on the windows, and the sound of the waves breaking against the cliffs--brought the two men to talk about the ships that had from time to time been wrecked on our neighbouring coast. Said Mansie:

"'Twas on a night like this--d'ye mind, Colin?--that the Undine went to pieces on the Gaulton Craigs."

"Ay," said Colin, "weel do I mind it, and weel, I reckon, does Carver Kinlay mind it."

The conversation regarding the incident was disjointed. Let me, therefore, tell the story in my own words.

My father had with his gallant crew gone out to sea one stormy night in the pilot boat. A stiff westerly wind was blowing, and the headland of Hoy was hidden in mist and spray. The Curlew was steered out into the open sea in the hope of falling in with any ship that required piloting into the safe haven of Stromness. Beaten about on the heavy sea, the boat was brought along the outer coast of Pomona until she stood off abreast of the Head of Marwick. Along the coastline of Sandwick, as she sailed back towards Stromness, the waves rose in angry foam against the rugged cliffs. None but men thoroughly accustomed to the terrors of the storm-swept Orkneys could have taken that little craft through such a surging sea, and it was only by the help of the light that was always kept aglow in the windows of Lyndardy farmhouse that they were able to guide the boat in safety.

When the Curlew was abreast of Inganess, Willie Slater, the lookout man at the bow, reported a ship in sight; and as my uncle Mansie lighted a rude torch, made of old rope steeped in the oil of sea birds, my father peered into the darkness and saw a large barque heading towards the land. The blazing light of the torch was presently waved as a warning signal to those on the ship.

The meaning of this was understood too late, for before the vessel could turn she was driven swiftly upon the North Gaulton rocks, and there smashed like a bottle of glass.

Then the sail of the Curlew was lowered, and the boat taken as close as possible to the wrecked ship. The cries of the people on board were heard in the tempest, but there was little hope of saving life. Yet the pilot crew were undaunted by any risks. Four of the men were at the oars; Mansie was at the bow with his flaming torch, and my father at the tiller. They got within hail of the ship, and after an infinite amount of trouble succeeded in saving four precious lives. These four persons were a seaman, a gentleman passenger--who was picked up suffering from a wound he had received in the head when the vessel struck--Mrs. Kinlay, and my schoolfellow, Tom Kinlay.

When they were brought into the boat, Mrs. Kinlay entreated my father not to leave the wreck until he had saved her husband and her infant girl. But after much searching of the water the chance of saving any more lives was so small, and the danger to the Curlew so great, that the boat was brought to the beach at Inganess Geo, where its suffering passengers were landed and carried up to the neighbouring farm of Crua Breck.

The Curlew was then taken back to the wrecked barque. One of the ship's boats had been launched by the skipper and some of the crew, who had endeavoured to save all they could; but the little craft was too frail to stand against the heavy sea; it was dashed against the sunken rocks and all were drowned. My father and his men remained by the vessel until daylight. Among the jagged rocks, when the tide went down, they found the body of a very beautiful woman with the shattered body of a child still clasped in her arms. The infant seemed to have been hurriedly taken from its bed. This fair lady was afterwards recognised as the wife of the owner of the ill-fated vessel--the gentleman my father had rescued--who had been returning with her and their infant daughter to Denmark. The lady's name was Thora Quendale, and it was her tomb that I had seen in the old graveyard of Bigging on that evening when we shared the viking's treasures.

Her husband had remained in Orkney only until he had laid her and the child to rest, when, gathering the few remnants of his property that remained to him from the wreck of his ship, he took a passage in a vessel that happened to touch at Kirkwall for repairs, and with the sailor who had been saved with him he set sail for Denmark. My uncle Mansie said that this Mr. Quendale had promised to my father and others that he would be back again in Pomona in a few months, but since that time he had never been heard of.

Now it happened that on the fifth day after the wreck of the Undine (for such was the vessel's name) my father was taking his small boat round to Borwick, a little hamlet two miles south of Skaill Bay. On passing the place where the vessel struck, now calm and peaceful after the storm, he shortened sail and rowed inshore. A little distance up the face of the red cliff, above the high-water mark, and hidden by a projecting rock, there was a "scurro," or fissure, which opened into a large cavern. He had discovered this cavern when he was a boy, on some bird-nesting expedition; and now, scarcely knowing why he did so--except, perhaps, for the passing thought that some of the wreckage had been washed into it by the high waves--he climbed up from his boat and entered the cave. To his astonishment he found there a half-starved man, who had been on board the Undine at the time of the disaster. Having found the cave in his endeavours to scale the cliff, this unfortunate man had contrived to live there during the five long days and nights since the wreck by subsisting on shellfish, seaweed, and a few sea-birds' eggs.

What surprised my father more than all, however, was that the man had as a companion a helpless little child. Someone on the ship had placed the infant in an empty packing case, which had drifted into the cave. The pilot conveyed the two waifs ashore and took them up to Crua Breck.

The man thus rescued by my father was Carver Kinlay; the little child was Thora.

All that I could learn from my uncle and old Colin concerning Carver, further than this, was that he was a native of the north of Scotland, and that he and his family were passengers on the Danish ship, which was to have put in at the haven of Wick, in Caithness. Careless where he settled down, however, when cast upon the shores of Pomona, he had taken root here, like a weed in a flower garden. He seemed to have had a store of money in the big chest which he claimed from among the wreckage, and circumstances enabled him to purchase the little farm of Crua Breck, together with a fishing boat. The fishing, and a previous knowledge of the Orkney channels, had given him some experience of local navigation; and it was upon the strength of this experience that, having built his pilot boat, he intended to start in opposition to my father.

The greater part of what Mansie and Colin said, as they sat in the comfortable kitchen of Lyndardy, was entirely new to me. I felt a strange pleasure in hearing now, for the first time, that Thora Kinlay owed her life, in some sort, to my own father. When he carried the little girl up to the farm, with a seaman's jacket covering her from the cold--for the women and children had all been in their beds when the ship struck--she was at once claimed by Mrs. Kinlay. They named her Thora, after Mrs. Quendale, who had shown some kindness to her during the voyage, by reason of a resemblance that existed between the two children--Mrs. Quendale's own child and the child of Mrs. Kinlay--both of whom were of a like age.

The story of the wreck of the Undine gave me many matters to ponder over. But the one practical thing that I learnt was this existence of a cave in the North Gaulton cliffs. I had not known that there was such a cave at that spot, although, indeed, I prided myself upon my knowledge of the whole coastline from Rora to Birsay. I accordingly determined to explore the cliff at some future time.