Читать книгу: «Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 726», страница 5

ROCKBOUND

Of the thousands of tourists who flock every year from all parts of the civilised world to gaze upon the picturesque beauties of the Highlands, to muse among the ruined aisles of Iona, or to listen to the diapason of the sea, as it sinks and swells through the pillared caves of Staffa, few, comparatively speaking, care to go so far north as the Shetlands; yet these islands, though generally bare, have a beauty of their own – the breezy, ever-changeful beauty of the sea.

The scientific tourist will not fail to find something to interest him in Shetland. There are bold headlands, wide reefs of black crags, and a flora which, although neither rich nor varied, has charms for the botanist. There are broad stretches of sandy beach, not so sterile as they look, but affording, in hidden nooks and crannies, no bad hunting-ground for a naturalist out for a summer holiday. If you are a member of the Alpine Club, there are here no mountains for you to climb, but there are cliffs such as might well appal the most practised mountaineer; and in summer there is the sun, shining in a cloudless sky nearly all through the four-and-twenty hours. There in summer, midnight is not like the midnights of more southern climes, but is permeated by the rays of a sun, set indeed, but so soon about to rise, that there is scarcely any absence of light.

If you are a painter, you may have sea-views in abundance. You may choose your own time and place and grouping; early morning if you will, with the white mists rolling in over the shimmering sea, and the clamorous gulls hovering above skerries that are crusted all over with dense clinging masses of sea-weed. Or you may wait till the ascending sun rolls back the curtain of mist, and the sea gleams out before you a wide sheet of burnished gold, spangled with the rocky islets of a storm-swept archipelago. The waves roll in at your feet – long majestic ridges of water, dappled with lines of foam; the wide swell of the Atlantic sweeping in from the far shores of Labrador; while from far inland some tiny streamlet tumbles down to the sea through a natural copsewood of dwarf ash and birch and hazel.

Bold points and headlands stand like brave sentinels far out to sea, sheltering little natural harbours where the fisherman's boat rides in safety. Tiny fiords run inland into deep glens, with here and there a fisherman's hut or a crofter's cottage. Perhaps, however, you may have a fancy for foul weather, when the sky darkens like a pall over the sea, and the storm-fiend rouses himself from his ocean lair, and the tempest-tossed waves scud along in wreaths of foam to break in hoarse thunder upon the shore, or hurl themselves in impotent rage against the face of the steep headland. In Shetland you have grand alternations of calm and storm.

It is perhaps, however, for the student of human nature that Shetland has the greatest attractions. Here he will find a simple, kindly, primitive set of people, of Norwegian descent, but now anglicised in language and usages. They are, however, fond of old legends and stories. Mrs Saxby, the authoress of Rockbound, a Story of the Shetland Isles, in a pleasantly told narrative introduces us to this primitive people. We have for the scene of the story an island called Vaalafiel, five miles long, and a little over two in width, with a tiny harbour, and gray old mansion-house set in a strip of scraggy pine-wood. Vaalafiel, Mrs Saxby tells us, 'is coiled upon the sea much in the way a kitten rolls itself together on the hearth-rug – the creature's paws being represented by the narrow belts of land overlapping each other and forming the arms of our voe (fiord), whose crags are very suggestive of claws. Rising abruptly from the shores of this harbour, the island becomes a hill, whose eastern side is a precipice dipping into the German Ocean. The north point terminates in a bold headland, from whence the hill slopes gradually southwards, until it ends in a beautiful stretch of sand, kissed white by the broad waves of the Atlantic. The neighbouring islands cluster north and south, leaving deep narrow channels, where the two great seas keep up a perpetual warfare; and he is a daring sailor who ventures to cross those tideways when their "dark hour" approaches.'

Under the old house of Vaalafiel and the cliffs adjacent to it were wide underground caverns, such as in the 'good old smuggling times' were no uncommon adjuncts to country houses, and even manses, if they happened to be conveniently near the shore. This smugglers' cave was the scene of a tragedy, such as was of no unfrequent occurrence among desperate men in these lawless days. A hasty blow struck in sudden passion hurried one rash soul to its last account, and darkened as with the brand of Cain the lives of many others. There is an old nurse, full of well-nigh forgotten Norse superstitions, and a little lonely child, the heiress of the rockbound islet, whose dearest pleasure was to watch the sea on the serene summer evenings when the sky became like a poet's dream, and earth and sea put on the glory of the clouds. Mrs Saxby describes 'the Shetland summer night as not dark at all; it is merely a twilight, which is prolonged sufficiently to assume a character of its own. Not dark, not light, not a brief uncertain mingling of both, but a quiet earnest period of rest, when Nature dreams but does not sleep, and yet is not awake. We call it "the dim," and you can discern objects quite clearly while it broods over the earth.' The wild winter nights have a grand storm-driven beauty of their own, when the Aurora Borealis shoots forth a fitful light, and the nursling of the gray North 'catches glimpses of the beauty dwelling in colour.' The solitary child Inga, bearing in her brave little heart the burden of her father's dimly realised crime, yet cleaving to him, because he loves her, with an affection far stronger than that which binds her to her cold unloving mother, develops into a healthy spirited girl. Lonely and prosaic as her life was, it was not, however, without a salutary admixture of holidays and holiday amusements. The lady of Vaalafiel, although a somewhat stern disciplinarian, was wise enough to recognise the truth of the axiom, that 'all work and no play make Jack a dull boy,' and so upon birthdays and such kindred anniversaries she somewhat relaxed the rigidity of her rule. A fat bullock was killed in honour of the young heiress, and Miss Inga's favourite Newfoundland dog (evidently desirous of contributing his share to the feast) went off one night to the hills and ran down half-a-dozen sheep. It was found that he had performed the service of a butcher in a perfectly scientific manner; so the animals were carried home and added to the larder.'

With such a superabundance of pièces de resistance, even the crustiest old bachelor in the world might have found a picnic tolerably enjoyable; and Miss Inga and her young friends had a most delightful day of it in their sweet northern Arcadia, clad as it then was in all its witching garb of summer. 'The sun,' she says, 'rose in cloudless glory, and everything was dipped in sunshine of another kind as well; for Aytoun' (a divinity student quite as fascinating as The Modern Minister) 'had returned for the midsummer vacation, and that would have been gladness enough for me. There were with him some of his college companions, who made sparkling speeches, sang hearty songs, assisted in distributing prizes to the winning boats, and then challenged the islanders to a football match. Which played best is an undecided question to this day, for each side had a method of its own, and did not comprehend that of its opponent. Then the people were gathered on a smooth meadow near our house, and the plaintive Foula Reel called upon old and young alike to join in the graceful and truly poetic dance of Shetland. The natural good breeding of the islanders allowed us to remove every restriction on their pleasure, which was characterised by a hearty enjoyment without the slightest approach to excess.'

As unlike as possible to a heroine of romance, the child reared in this homely fashion is yet sweet enough to carry blessing and love wherever she goes; to heal old wounds with her simple beauty and goodness; to carry peace into the unforgiving relentlessness of her mother's heart; and to efface the blackness of her father's crime (justifiable homicide, a soft-hearted jury would resolve it into) with tender penitential tears. Miss Inga is in truth a very lovable character, innocent, simple, and yet intelligent; gentle and winning in her ways, although she can be spirited and resolute upon occasion; full of affectionate respect for her stern mother, and of deep romantic devotion for her father, for whose sake she marries without love, which no properly constituted heroine of romance ever does or can do, but which many a good woman has done, to find, as she did, peace and household joy and contentment at a good man's hearth.

Many of the descriptive passages in Rockbound are written with considerable vividness and effect, as for instance the storm, through whose agency a crisis in the plot of the tale is worked out. 'A tempestuous morning was breaking, and sea and wind were uttering wrathful warnings of what might befall the unwary fishers who were out on the deep, and I looked out with eyes which scarcely saw – with a mind on which impressions seemed lost. As if still in a dream, I beheld the furious waves come rolling majestically from the far deep and break with thundering sound upon the rocky arms of our voe. As I gazed, there suddenly appeared round a point of the high land a little vessel with closely reefed sails struggling in the sea between Vaalafiel and its neighbouring island. Her hull was partially concealed from my view by the arms of our voe, but very soon I seemed to know that it must be the Seamew, and that she was attempting to enter the harbour; and a thought occurred to me which was suggestive of peril at once: Why do they try to pass through so narrow and dangerous a strait when the storm is at its worst? As if in answer to my thought, the vessel hoisted a flag of distress, probably with a forlorn hope that some wakeful eye might see it, and then she lay to, as trying to advance in the very teeth of the gale. My father, everything, was forgotten in that breathless moment, as I watched my tiny ship thus turn, pause, and enter the rocky path beset by death. She was evidently being driven by cruel necessity to dare so hazardous a piece of navigation, and I soon discerned that she was no longer manageable. Just then a gust of wind still more furious than before caught her at a critical moment, and in less time than I say the words in, she was tossing among some detached rocks at the entrance to the harbour, a total wreck, and likely to go down every instant.

'I had stood terror-bound till then; but the sight of figures clinging to the spars stirred me to action, and I flew to arouse our servants. They were soon hurrying to the neighbouring cottages, in hope of assistance from any men who chanced to be at home; and I ran along the shore until I reached the crags opposite where the disabled yacht lay. I was soon joined there by numerous women and a few old feeble men, who shook their heads and groaned when I frantically implored them to launch a boat and go to the rescue. "There's no an able-bodied man in the island wha kens hoo to handle an oar," they cried; "oor men are a' at the haaf" (deep-sea fishing). "The Lord preserve them this awfu' hoor."'

Then for a touch of simple pathos, take the neglected child's scanty recollections of her unloved childhood: 'One of the few things I remember is that I always wore a black frock. This circumstance is impressed on my mind, because I had, and still have, a perfect passion for rich gorgeous colours. Nature in the gray North seldom gave my eyes a feast of radiant hues; no brilliant butterflies and flowers clothing the earth in the garments of heaven; no winter clusters of red berries and wreaths of evergreen. There were some old pictures in the house in which scarlet shawls and purple curtains played a prominent part, and I spent a large portion of the time usually devoted to sleep by sensible children in admiring these, and conjuring up fantastic histories of each portrait.'

Altogether, the book is sweet, fresh, tender-hearted, like a whiff of the foaming ocean spray, quite out of the hackneyed round, and yet sufficiently realistic to impress the reader with a conviction that it is the record of a life which has been lived, which, if not the highest aim of the novelist's art, is yet an indispensable adjunct to it. We have only to add that Shetland is now easily reached by regular steamers plying between Granton (Edinburgh) and Lerwick, the capital of the islands; while we believe a small steamer plies from Lerwick for local accommodation. A summer cruise in a yacht would, however, be the perfection of voyaging for the purpose not only of seeing Shetland, but Orkney and various intermediate islands, such as Fair Isle and Foula, which are out of the way of general traffic. To visit these distant fragments of land in the north, forming the scene of Scott's vivid romance of The Pirate, would furnish a new sensation never to be forgotten.