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THE TRAGEDY OF MICHAEL STAMP.

THE greater part of his life had been spent upon the island, the little island off the blue green rolling hills of the Northumbrian coast, where rabbits and wild birds and a handful of men and women share the glories of clean sunshine and clean winds. Here he had been born, and here with scarcely a night's exception he had slept; but it is not to be thought that he was wholly insular or untravelled. Every day for thirty years he had driven a queer little shambling yellow trap, laden with letters and parcels and occasional passengers, across the sands to the mainland, and had returned in the same fashion in the evening.

Sometimes, at very low water, those sands were bare and brown and hard, with only one narrow shallow channel to be crossed; and sometimes his steady cob must pick his way for a mile or more with the water washing over the footboard of the swaying trap; but the conditions mattered little to horse or driver. The long line of posts were there as steady guides, and could be followed even in the darkest winter night or when the rolling seafret wrapped the land and sea in a grey misty blanket. Then it was necessary to creep more cautiously from post to looming post, and a man was later in returning to his tea upon the island. That was really all the difference that darkness or eccentricities of the weather made to Michael Stamp. The duty was performed with the mechanical ease of practice, and yet undoubtedly the daily journey and the necessity for conversation with strange folk upon the mainland broadened the man's mind, and lifted him mentally a little above the plane of the shrewdly simple islanders.

It is extremely doubtful if Michael Stamp was fully aware of his mercies during those thirty years. Perhaps if he had been it would have proved him more than human. Not that he was a grumbler or discontented, but he did accept as a matter of course certain divine gifts that are beyond the hope of luckless townsmen. For life upon the island held few anxieties of food or health. Illness was almost unknown, old age was the one mortal sickness, and food of its kind was cheap and good and plentiful. Butcher's

meat might be rare, but home-cured bacon was not, and the boats brought in fish that could be purchased for a shilling a stone.

And there were other better matters provided by the gods for his enjoyment. As he drove towards the mainland, with the good salt smell of the sea in his nostrils, it was given to him to look upon a picture, ever varying but ever beautiful, for the daily sight of which a man might well have sacrificed the chance of wealth. Far away to the left a stately castle towered upon the verge of the sea, and before him rose green sloping pastures that merged into blue and purple hills. The yellow smoky glare of a sunset behind those hills, dancing upon the ripples when the tide is in, or gleaming upon the brown naked sands and burning like a flame upon their shallow pools, can only make a man conscious of the clumsiness of words. Not that Michael Stamp in his great wisdom had need to recognise his limitations and futility. He took such matters as they came, in placid silence.

Wherefore no man may know how he was struck by the dark winding line of the island as he faced it daily upon his homeward journey, or by the glimpse of the derelict schooner fast upon the sands that would never know again the heave and lift of the wild North Sea. And yet, despite his silence, it is probable that he had a certain still affection for his daily round, for the sands and the posts and the sea, for the wild duck and the screaming wide-winged gulls, and above all for the island, with its wild flowers, its wild birds, and its sand dunes, that was his home.

Early in his twenties he had married a mainland girl, and had brought her to a little stone cottage off the straggling main street of the tiny island village. Their one daughter chose the excitements of domestic service in a far-off town, and, when the pain of her departure had been eased by time, Michael and his wife prepared themselves for an old age that should be as peaceful as their youth. But fate had willed otherwise.

Michael was fifty-two when the three things occurred that turned aside the placid current of his life. Within one fortnight he found himself a childless widower and a cripple. His wife had never possessed the stamina of the hardy island women, and when the bleak east winds of that winter were at their keenest she contracted a chill which flew speedily to her lungs. Upon the day they buried her it was broken to Michael that his daughter had died of diphtheria two days before. It is the custom upon the island that the vicar of the little parish, brave above the wont of men, shall go in person

to the cottages when ill news has come that must be told. Michael heard the tidings with a curious simplicity, and walked quite steadily to the service in the little churchyard beside the ruins of the old Priory. That day a substitute drove his trap to the mainland, but upon the following afternoon he prepared to take up the threads of his old life once more.

There was a thick sea-fret that evening, and it is likely that his old mare was rendered restless and uneasy by an instinctive sense of her master's trouble, and by the fact that the hand upon the reins was slacker than usual. She seems to have put her foot into a chance hole on the flat sands, and Michael was found pinned down beneath the trap with two broken ribs and a shattered leg. Had not a farmer's gig come up by fortune he would have been choked by the rising tide five minutes later.

These things are not the final tragedy of Michael's life, of which this story tells; but they left him very old and broken. He was never able to walk again without a stick, and in a few weeks' time his iron-grey hair and beard were white as the creaming waves. He had always been a small man, but now, with his stoop and his lameness, he appeared tiny indeed. He had saved a very little money, and, when his strength returned in part, the Lord of the Manor entrusted to him the care of the Priory ruins. From that day began the second and more striking phase of his life.

The Priory, that, with the Castle, is the chief pride of the island, stands behind the low sea wall, almost within touch of the waves at high tide. It is not proposed to sketch its history here; it is sufficient to say that it was raised in 1093 by Benedictine monks upon the ruins of an old Saxon Abbey that had been destroyed by the ravening Danes. It is built of soft pink sandstone, and with the flush of the sunset upon its crumbling walls it forms a picture sufficiently entrancing. One single exquisite Norman arch rises clear of the rest in a glorious curve, and is a thing to haunt one's dreams. Soon enough the red-tinted ruins threw their enchantment over the soul of Michael Stamp, and took the place in his heart that had been held by his wife and child.

This, in the case of a simple half-educated peasant, may appear an over-statement, but it is not so. The Priory possesses a real and definite magic that is unfailing in its power. Americans have been known to stand before it in unbroken silence, and it is upon record that sternly dissatisfied Scotch tourists have been moved by its witchery almost to tears. Michael Stamp began by being merely

proud of his great trust, but in a little while his pride had merged into a love that was somewhat pathetic in its strength.

He was, as has been said, a very tiny man, and in those days his wrinkled face was almost entirely covered by white hair. His cottage was within a stone's throw of the Priory, and expectant visitors were seldom kept standing for long before the wrought iron gate that had been let into the old red-flushed stone of the entrance. Within a minute they would see him hobbling down towards them on his two sticks, clad in the neat sombre black that he never discarded. His eyes were grey, and as earnest and simple as any child's. His manner, as he made a point in his description of his charge, was sometimes almost threatening in its seriousness.

But most often he would be found, key in hand, within the gate, gazing with absent reverent eyes at the mellow ruined walls that rose around him. The sound of a step would rouse him, and he would gird himself eagerly for his labour of love. His demeanour as he received a stranger was quaintly paternal, and he was swift to gauge his capacities, his interest, and his experience. He would encourage guesses as to the nature of the strange creature carved upon the wall of the winding staircase in the left-hand tower, and finally would answer that it was held by many to be a 'Griffon.' But he left it to be inferred from his grave headshake that he himself had other theories. Beside the bases of the three huge pillars in the chancel he would put the first of his test questions. They tell me they're the same as those in Durham Cathedral,' he would remark, dispassionately, with his pleasant soft northern accent. Now, can you tell me the meaning of those three joined angles cut upon them?"

When, haply, you had confessed your ignorance, he would explain that they were symbolical of the Trinity, and you would feel that you had taken your proper lowly place in his regard. But if you were respectfully eager for information, his kindly patience was worthy of a father with a child, nor did he ever grudge repetition when his musical sing-song was unintelligible to ignorant southern ears.

With grave indignation he used to indicate one pointed arch which stands out curiously among its rounded neighbours. This, it seemed, had been restored in recent years by a good workman but an ignorant man!' Mr. Stamp would say. And then he would point out the piscina, that had been accidentally flagged over by the same too willing hand, and the square cowled monks' heads of stone that you could just distinguish beside the windows. If,

through dimness of sight, or other causes, you could not make these out, he was a little vexed and disappointed, and would take pains that you should do so.

Thence it was his habit to lead the visitor into the outer court, where careful excavations had been made in recent years, and to outline the site of the narrow cloisters, where once the good monks paced with busy beads or chatted in more human fashion. A few yards took you to the foot of the winding stair that once led to their dormitories, and it was not unimpressive to note how the sandalled feet had eaten into the stone steps. Near to this was the Prior's kitchen, with the remains of two wide chimneys still blackened by the smoke of countless fires before which had been prepared savoury dishes for the great ones of the Church. He showed you the surprising thickness of the outer walls, that must once have measured six feet and more, and led you past the ruined library to the lay workmen's buildings. Here had been the stables, and here in a corner was the prison for refractory monks. A grim dreary cell this must have been, lit by one narrow barred window, and secured by a miniature portcullis doorway. Near at hand was the well, somewhat sparsely boarded over, and Michael Stamp never failed to tell the moving anecdote of the two wilful American ladies who would stand upon those boards, despite his entreaties and commands.

'And what happened to them?' you asked in an awed whisper, as he paused dramatically.

'Ah! it stood them,' he always answered, almost grimly. ' But I was main surprised it did ! '

It was unwise to laugh at this point, and in a moment he was pointing to a curious but indefinite hole in the grass-covered stonework beside the wall.

And what think you that that was?' he would ask, quite sternly.

When you had hazarded a suggestion, he would smile whimsically and reveal a certain worldly shrewdness of which you had not suspected him.

There's some who think it was the wine-cellar,' he used to say. 'But is it likely they'd keep the wine out here among the workmen? No, no; I don't think it. Two gentlemen were here a while ago, and they made a suggestion to me which I've come to think may not be wrong. They thought it might have been the bath, with the water from the well quite handy.'

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