The chaise came to the door in a strong mist. We took our leave in silence: the house of Durrisdeer with dropping and windows closed, like a place dedicate to . I observed the Master kept his head out, looking back on these splashed walls and roofs, till they were suddenly swallowed in the mist; and I must suppose some natural sadness fell upon the man at this departure; or was it some provision of the end? At least, upon our mounting the long brae from Durrisdeer, as we walked side by side in the wet, he began first to whistle and then to sing the saddest of our country , which sets folk weeping in a , Wandering Willie. The set of words he used with it I have not heard elsewhere, and could never come by any copy; but some of them which were the most appropriate to our departure linger in my memory. One verse began—  
Home was home then, my dear, full of faces,
Home was home then, my dear, happy for the child.
 
And ended somewhat thus—
 
Now, when day dawns on the brow of the moorland,
    stands the house, and the chimney-stone is cold.
Lone let it stand, now the folks are all departed,
    The kind hearts, the true hearts, that loved the place of old.
 
I could never be a judge of the merit of these verses; they were so hallowed by the melancholy of the air, and were sung (or rather “soothed”) to me by a master-singer at a time so fitting. He looked in my face when he had done, and saw that my eyes watered.
 
“Ah! Mackellar,” said he, “do you think I have never a regret?”
 
“I do not think you could be so bad a man,” said I, “if you had not all the to be a good one.”
 
“No, not all,” says he: “not all. You are there in error. The of not wanting, my evangelist.” But methought he sighed as he mounted again into the chaise.
 
All day long we journeyed in the same weather: the mist us closely, the heavens weeping on my head. The road lay over hills, where was no sound but the crying of -fowl in the wet heather and the pouring of the burns. Sometimes I would off in , when I would find myself at once in some and nightmare, from the which I would awake strangling. Sometimes, if the way was steep and the wheels turning slowly, I would overhear the voices from within, talking in that tropical tongue which was to me as inarticulate as the piping of the . Sometimes, at a longer , the Master would set foot to ground and walk by my side, mostly without speech. And all the time, sleeping or waking, I the same black perspective of approaching ruin; and the same pictures rose in my view, only they were now painted upon hillside mist. One, I remember, stood before me with the colours of a true illusion. It showed me my lord seated at a table in a small room; his head, which was at first buried in his hands, he slowly raised, and turned upon me a from which hope had fled. I saw it first on the black window-panes, my last night in Durrisdeer; it haunted and returned upon me half the voyage through; and yet it was no effect of lunacy, for I have come to a ripe old age with no decay of my intelligence; nor yet (as I was then to suppose) a heaven-sent warning of the future, for all manner of befell, not that calamity—and I saw many pitiful sights, but never that one.
 
It was we should travel on all night; and it was singular, once the dusk had fallen, my spirits somewhat rose. The bright lamps, shining into the mist and on the smoking horses and the hodding post-boy, gave me perhaps an outlook intrinsically more cheerful than what day had shown; or perhaps my mind had become wearied of its melancholy. At least, I spent some waking hours, not without satisfaction in my thoughts, although wet and weary in my body; and fell at last into a natural slumber without dreams. Yet I must have been at work even in the deepest of my sleep; and at work with at least a measure of intelligence. For I started broad awake, in the very act of crying out to myself
 
Home was home then, my dear, happy for the child,
 
stricken to find in it an appropriateness, which I had not yesterday observed, to the Master’s detestable purpose in the present journey.
 
We were then close upon the city of Glascow, where we were soon breakfasting together at an inn, and where (as the devil would have it) we found a ship in the very article of sailing. We took our places in the cabin; and, two days after, carried our effects on board. Her name was the Nonesuch, a very ancient ship and very happily named. By all accounts this should be her last voyage; people shook their heads upon the , and I had several warnings offered me by strangers in the street to the effect that she was rotten as a cheese, too deeply loaden, and must infallibly if we met a . From this it fell out we were the only passengers; the Captain, McMurtrie, was a silent, absorbed man, with the Glascow or Gaelic accent; the mates ignorant rough seafarers, come in through the hawsehole; and the Master and I were cast upon each other’s company.
 
The Nonesuch carried a fair wind out of the Clyde, and for near upon a week we enjoyed bright weather and a sense of progress. I found myself (to my wonder) a born , in so far at least as I was never sick; yet I was far from tasting the usual of my health. Whether it was the motion of the ship on the billows, the , the salted food, or all of these together, I suffered from a blackness of spirit and a painful strain upon my temper. The nature of my errand on that ship perhaps contributed; I think it did no more; the malady (whatever it was) sprang from my environment; and if the ship were not to blame, then it was the Master. and fear are ill bedfellows; but (to my shame be it spoken) I have tasted those in other places, lain down and got up with them, and eaten and drunk with them, and yet never before, nor after, have I been so poisoned through and through, in soul and body, as I was on board the Nonesuch. I freely confess my enemy set me a fair example of forbearance; in our worst days displayed the most patient , holding me in conversation as long as I would suffer, and when I had rebuffed his civility, stretching himself on deck to read. The book he had on board with him was Mr. Richardson’s famous Clarissa! and among other small attentions he would read me passages aloud; nor could any elocutionist have given with greater the pathetic portions of that work. I would retort upon him with passages out of the Bible, which was all my library—and very fresh to me, my religious duties (I grieve to say it) being always and even to this day extremely neglected. He tasted the merits of the word like the he was; and would sometimes take it from my hand, turn the leaves over like a man that knew his way, and give me, with his fine , a Roland for my Oliver. But it was singular how little he his reading to himself; it passed high above his head like summer thunder: Lovelace and Clarissa, the tales of David’s , the of his , the solemn questions of the book of Job, the poetry of Isaiah—they were to him a source of entertainment only, like the scraping of a in a change-house. This outer sensibility and inner toughness set me against him; it seemed of a piece with that grossness which I knew to the of his fine manners; and sometimes my rose against him as though he were deformed—and sometimes I would draw away as though from something partly . I had moments when I thought of him as of a man of pasteboard—as though, if one should strike smartly through the buckram of his countenance, there would be found a within. This horror (not merely fanciful, I think) vastly increased my detestation of his neighbourhood; I began to feel something shiver within me on his drawing near; I had at times a to cry out; there were days when I thought I could have struck him. This frame of mind was doubtless helped by shame, because I had dropped during our last days at Durrisdeer into a certain toleration of the man; and if any one had then told me I should drop into it again, I must have laughed in his face. It is possible he remained unconscious of this extreme fever of my ; yet I think he was too quick; and rather that he had fallen, in a long life of idleness, into a positive need of company, which obliged him to confront and tolerate my unconcealed aversion. Certain, at least, that he loved the note of his own tongue, as, indeed, he loved all the parts and properties of himself; a sort of imbecility which almost necessarily attends on wickedness. I have seen him driven, when I proved , to long with the skipper; and this, although the man plainly testified his weariness, with both hand and foot, and replying only with a .
 
After the first week out we fell in with foul winds and heavy weather. The sea was high. The Nonesuch, being an old-fashioned ship and badly loaden, rolled beyond belief; so that the skipper trembled for his masts, and I for my life. We made no progress on our course. An ill-humour settled on the ship: men, mates, and master, girding at one another all day long. A word on the one hand, and a blow on the other, made a daily incident. There were times when the whole crew refused their duty; and we of the afterguard were twice got under arms—being the first time that ever I bore weapons—in the fear of mutiny.
 
In the midst of our evil season sprang up a hurricane of wind; so that all supposed she must go down. I was shut in the cabin from noon of one day till sundown of the next; the Master was somewhere on deck. Secundra had eaten of some drug and lay insensible; so you may say I passed these hours in an unbroken . At first I was terrified beyond motion, and almost beyond thought, my mind appearing to be frozen. Presently there stole in on me a ray of comfort. If the Nonesuch , she would carry down with her into the deeps of that unsounded sea the creature whom we all so feared and hated; there would be no more Master of Ballantrae, the fish would sport among his ; his schemes all brought to nothing, his harmless enemies at peace. At first, I have said, it was but a ray of comfort; but it had soon grown to be broad sunshine. The thought of the man’s death, of his deletion from this world, which he for so many, took possession of my mind. I hugged it, I found it sweet in my . I conceived the ship’s last , the sea bursting upon all sides into the cabin, the brief mortal conflict there, all by myself, in that closed place; I numbered the horrors, I had almost said with satisfaction; I felt I could bear all and more, if the Nonesuch carried down with her, overtook by the same ruin, the enemy of my poor master’s house. Towards noon of the second day the screaming of the wind ; the ship lay not so over, and it began to be clear to me that we were past the height of the tempest. As I hope for mercy, I was singly disappointed. In the selfishness of that , absorbing passion of hatred, I forgot the case of our innocent shipmates, and thought but of myself and my enemy. For myself, I was already old; I had never been young, I was not formed for the world’s pleasures, I had few affections; it mattered not the toss of a silver tester whether I was drowned there and then in the Atlantic, or out a few more years, to die, perhaps no less terribly, in a sick-bed. Down I went upon my knees—holding on by the , or else I had been instantly dashed across the tossing cabin—and, lifting up my voice in the midst of that clamour of the hurricane, impiously prayed for my own death. “O God!” I cried, “I would be liker a man if I rose and struck this creature down; but Thou madest me a coward from my mother’s womb. O Lord, Thou madest me so, Thou knowest my weakness, Thou knowest that any face of death will set me shaking in my shoes. But, lo! here is Thy servant ready, his mortal weakness laid aside. Let me give my life for this creature’s; take the two of them, Lord! take the two, and have mercy on the innocent!” In some such words as these, only yet more irreverent and with more sacred adjurations, I continued to pour forth my spirit. God heard me not, I must suppose in mercy; and I was still absorbed in my agony of when some one, removing the cover, let the light of the sunset pour into the cabin. I stumbled to my feet ashamed, and was seized with surprise to find myself and ache like one that had been stretched upon the rack. Secundra Dass, who had slept off the effects of his drug, stood in a corner not far off, gazing at me with wild eyes; and from the open skylight the captain thanked me for my supplications.
 
“It’s you that saved the ship, Mr. Mackellar,” says he. “There is no craft of seamanship that could have kept her floating: well may we say, ‘Except the Lord the city keep, the watchmen watch in vain!’”
 
I was by the captain’s error; abashed, also, by the surprise and fear with which the Indian regarded me at first, and the civilities with which he soon began to me. I know now that he must have overheard and comprehended the nature of my prayers. It is certain, of course, that he at once disclosed the matter to his patron; and looking back with greater knowledge, I can now understand what so much puzzled me at the moment, those singular and (so to speak) approving smiles with which the Master honoured me. Similarly, I can understand a word that I remember to have fallen from him in conversation that same night; when, holding up his hand and smiling, “Ah! Mackellar,” said he, “not every man is so great a coward as he thinks he is—nor yet so good a .” He did not guess how true he ! For the fact is, the thoughts which had come to me in the violence of the storm retained their hold upon my spirit; and the words that rose to my lips unbidden in the instancy of prayer continued to sound in my ears: with what consequences, it is fitting I should honestly relate; for I could not support a part of such disloyalty as to describe the sins of others and my own.
 
The wind fell, but the sea hove ever the higher. All night the Nonesuch rolled ; the next day dawned, and the next, and brought no change. To cross the cabin was scarce possible; old experienced were cast down upon the deck, and one cruelly mauled in the ; every board and block in the old ship cried out aloud; and the great bell by the anchor-bitts continually and dolefully rang. One of these days the Master and I alone together at the break of the poop. I should say the Nonesuch carried a high, raised poop. About the top of it ran considerable , which made the ship unweatherly; and these, as they approached the front on each side, ran down in a fine, old-fashioned, carven to join the bulwarks of the waist. From this , which seems designed rather for than use, it followed there was a discontinuance of protection: and that, besides, at the very of the elevated part where (in certain movements of the ship) it might be the most needful. It was here we were sitting: our feet hanging down, the Master betwixt me and the side, and I holding on with both hands to the grating of the cabin skylight; for it struck me it was a dangerous position, the more so as I had continually before my eyes a measure of our evolutions in the person of the Master, which stood out in the break of the bulwarks against the sun. Now his head would be in the zenith and his shadow fall quite beyond the Nonesuch on the farther side; and now he would swing down till he was my feet, and the line of the sea leaped high above him like the ceiling of a room. I looked on upon this with a growing , as birds are said to look on snakes. My mind, besides, was troubled with an astonishing diversity of noises; for now that we had all sails spread in the vain hope to bring her to the sea, the ship sounded like a factory with their reverberations. We spoke first of the mutiny with which we had been threatened; this led us on to the topic of ; and that offered a temptation to the Master more strong than he was able to resist. He must tell me a tale, and show me at the same time how clever he was and how wicked. It was a thing he did always with affectation and display; generally with a good effect. But this tale, told in a high key in the midst of so great a , and by a narrator who was one moment looking down at me from the skies and the next up from under the soles of my feet—this particular tale, I say, took hold upon me in a degree quite singular.
 
“My friend the count,” it was thus that he began his story, “had for an enemy a certain German , a stranger in Rome. It matters not what was the ground of the count’s enmity; but as he had a firm design to be revenged, and that with safety to himself, he kept it secret even from the baron. Indeed, that is the first principle of ; and hatred betrayed is hatred impotent. The count was a man of a curious, searching mind; he had something of the artist; if anything fell for him to do, it must always be done with an exact perfection, not only as to the result, but in the very means and instruments, or he thought the thing miscarried. It chanced he was one day riding in the outer suburbs, when he came to a disused by-road branching off into the moor which lies about Rome. On the one hand was an ancient Roman tomb; on the other a deserted house in a garden of trees. This road brought him presently into a field of ruins, in the midst of which, in the side of a hill, he saw an open door, and, not far off, a single pine no greater than a currant-bush. The place was desert and very secret; a voice spoke in the count’s that there was something here to his advantage. He tied his horse to the pine-tree, took his flint and steel in his hand to make a light, and entered into the hill. The opened on a passage of old Roman , which shortly after branched in two. The count took the turning to the right, and followed it, groping forward in the dark, till he was brought up by a kind of fence, about elbow-high, which extended quite across the passage. Sounding forward with his foot, he ............