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For if the poorest of the chiefs of the poor isles had his choice of the gallows at once or Tynree for a long habitation, I'm thinking he would cry, "Out with your rope." He will have nothing about him but the flying plover that is so heart-breaking in its piping at the grey of morn, for him must the night be a dreariness no rowth of cruisie or candle may mitigate.
The porter, Hugh MacCalmont, sat up on his elbow at Sholto's salutation, only enough to see his visitor by the glint of the little iron "cruisie" lamp hanging upon the wall. He knew him by the golden chain of office which the Earl had given Sholto. "Captain of the guard," he muttered, "Lord, here's advancement indeed.
Your room is ready for you, sir." As she spoke she was rubbing the meal from her hands, and he stood watching her with delight. He had wondered if her beauty would bear the test of daylight, or if it needed the broad shadows, and the dull glow of the burning turf and the oil cruisie. But she stood directly in the band of sunshine, and was only the more brilliantly fair for it.
We went about on tiptoes as it might be in a house of the dead, and peeped in at the windows at where had been chambers lit by the cheerful cruisie or dancing with peat-fire flame only the dark was there, horrible with the odours of char, or the black joist against the dun sky.
Then they had tea together at Maggie's fire-side, and Allan watched her once more stoop to the glowing turf, and light the little iron cruisie, and rise with the light from it on her beautiful face. The simple household act was always one of meaning and interest to him. He renewed in it that moment of strange delight when he had first seen her.
When they had raised themselves to the stairhead, the stranger opened a door and they went together into a small and lonesome chamber, in the chimla-nook of which an old iron cruisie was burning with a winking and wizard light. "I hae brought you here," said his conductor, "for secrecy, for my Lord disna want that ye should be seen about his lodging.
In the light of a cruisie that hung at the mantel-breas he was a comical-looking fellow with a high bald head, and his eyes, that were very dark and profound, surrounded by the red rings of weariness, all the redder for the pallor of his face. He stretched his legs and rubbed his knees slowly, and smiled on me a little mournfully.
"Woman," said he, "I will have forgotten if the skiff is high on the shore-head, for the wind is away to the west'ard," and he went out into the night. In an hour maybe he was in again and the cruisie lighted, and again he fell on his knees by the side of the bed and prayed aloud, and his wife would be hearing in her sleep. "Lord, look on Thy servant.
The turfs burned red, the cruisie burned low, the wheel "hummed" monotonously, and Maggie stepped lightly to-and-fro before it. In an hour the silence became oppressive, she was sleepy, she wished Davie would speak to her. She laid her fingers on the broad wooden band and was just going to move, when the inner door was opened, and the stranger stood at it.
Diminutive wrinkled women sat on little bits of wet mat in rows, and chopped the "fresh" fish into little morsels with little choppers by the light of little cruisie oil lamps, that flickered and smoked beside them, and lit up their puckered little chocolate faces, glinted on their teeth and gums scarlet with betel, and threw warm lights on the customers faces, who leant forward to close range and haggled, and, I daresay, said the fish wasn't fresh and if they had asked me, I'd have entirely agreed with them.
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