The Merry Men, by Robert Louis Stevenson

Transcribed from the 1904 edition Chatto & Windus edition by David Price, email [email protected]

The Merry Men
and
Other Tales and Fables

by
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

tenth edition

LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1904

Three of the following Tales have appeared in the Cornhill Magazine; one in Longman’s; one in Mr. Henry Norman’s Christmas Annual; and one in the Court and Society Review.  The Author desires to make proper acknowledgements to the Publishers concerned.

Dedication

My dear Lady Taylor,

To your name, if I wrote on brass, I could add nothing; it has been already written higher than I could dream to reach, by a strong and dear hand; and if I now dedicate to you these tales, it is not as the writer who brings you his work, but as the friend who would remind you of his affection.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

Skerryvore, Bournemouth.

Contents

The Merry Men

    i.    Eilean Aros

    ii.   What the wreck had brought to Aros

    iii.  Land and sea in Sandag Bay

    iv.   The gale

    v.    A man out of the sea

Will o’ the Mill

Markheim

Thrawn Janet

Olalla

The Treasure of Franchard

    i.    By the dying Mountebank

    ii.   Morning tale

    iii.  The adoption

    iv.   The education of the philosopher

    v.    Treasure trove

    vi.   A criminal investigation, in two parts

    vii.  The fall of the House of Desprez

    viii. The wages of philosophy

THE MERRY MEN

CHAPTER I.  EILEAN AROS.

It was a beautiful morning in the late July when I set forth on foot for the last time for Aros.  A boat had put me ashore the night before at Grisapol; I had such breakfast as the little inn afforded, and, leaving all my baggage till I had an occasion to come round for it by sea, struck right across the promontory with a cheerful heart.

I was far from being a native of these parts, springing, as I did, from an unmixed lowland stock.  But an uncle of mine, Gordon Darnaway, after a poor, rough youth, and some years at sea, had married a young wife in the islands; Mary Maclean she was called, the last of her family; and when she died in giving birth to a daughter, Aros, the sea-girt farm, had remained in his possession.  It brought him in nothing but the means of life, as I was well aware; but he was a man whom ill-fortune had pursued; he feared, cumbered as he was with the young child, to make a fresh adventure upon life; and remained in Aros, biting his nails at destiny.  Years passed over his head in that isolation, and brought neither help nor contentment.  Meantime our family was dying out in the lowlands; there is little luck for any of that race; and perhaps my father was the luckiest of all, for not only was he one of the last to die, but he left a son to his name and a little money to support it.  I was a student of Edinburgh University, living well enough at my own charges, but without kith or kin; when some news of me found its way to Uncle Gordon on the Ross of Grisapol; and he, as he was a man who held blood thicker than water, wrote to me the day he heard of my existence, and taught me to count Aros as my home.  Thus it was that I came to spend my vacations in that part of the country, so far from all society and comfort, between the codfish and the moorcocks; and thus it was that now, when I had done with my classes, I was returning thither with so light a heart that July day.

The Ross, as we call it, is a promontory neither wide nor high, but as rough as God made it to this day; the deep sea on either hand of it, full of rugged isles and reefs most perilous to seamen—all overlooked from the eastward by some very high cliffs and the great peals of Ben Kyaw.  The Mountain of the Mist, they say the words signify in the Gaelic tongue; and it is well named.  For that hill-top, which is more than three thousand feet in height, catches all the clouds that come blowing from the seaward; and, indeed, I used often to think that it must make them for itself; since when all heaven was clear to the sea level, there would ever be a streamer on Ben Kyaw.  It brought water, too, and was mossy [5] to the top in consequence.  I have seen us sitting in broad sunshine on the Ross, and the rain falling black like crape upon the mountain.  But the wetness of it made it often appear more beautiful to my eyes; for when the sun struck upon the hill sides, there were many wet rocks and watercourses that shone like jewels even as far as Aros, fifteen miles away.

The road that I followed was a cattle-track.  It twisted so as nearly to double the length of my journey; it went over rough boulders so that a man had to leap from one to another, and through soft bottoms where the moss came nearly to the knee.  There was no cultivation anywhere, and not one house in the ten miles from Grisapol to Aros.  Houses of course there were—three at least; but they lay so far on the one side or the other that no stranger could have found them from the track.  A large part of the Ross is covered with big granite rocks, some of them larger than a two-roomed house, one beside another, with fern and deep heather in between them where the vipers breed.  Anyway the wind was, it was always sea air, as salt as on a ship; the gulls were as free as moorfowl over all the Ross; and whenever the way rose a little, your eye would kindle with the brightness of the sea.  From the very midst of the land, on a day of wind and a high spring, I have heard the Roost roaring, like a battle where it runs by Aros, and the great and fearful voices of the breakers that we call the Merry Men.

Aros itself—Aros Jay, I have heard the natives call it, and they say it means the House of God—Aros itself was not properly a piece of the Ross, nor was it quite an islet.  It formed the south-west corner of the land, fitted close to it, and was in one place only separated from the coast by a little gut of the sea, not forty feet across the narrowest.  When the tide was full, this was clear and still, like a pool on a land river; only there was a difference in the weeds and fishes, and the water itself was green instead of brown; but when the tide went out, in the bottom of the ebb, there was a day or two in every month when you could pass dryshod from Aros to the mainland.  There was some good pasture, where my uncle fed the sheep he lived on; perhaps the feed was better because the ground rose higher on the islet than the main level of the Ross, but this I am not skilled enough to settle.  The house was a good one for that country, two storeys high.  It looked westward over a bay, with a pier hard by for a boat, and from the door you could watch the vapours blowing on Ben Kyaw.

On all this part of the coast, and especially near Aros, these great granite rocks that I have spoken of go down together in troops into the sea, like cattle on a summer’s day.  There they stand, for all the world like their neighbours ashore; only the salt water sobbing between them instead of