Major Vigoureux
by Arthur Quiller-Couch · English · Gutenberg #20863 · 518,320 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Major Vigoureux
Author: Arthur Quiller-Couch
Release date: March 20, 2007 [eBook #20863]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20863
Credits: Produced by Audrey Longhurst and the Online Distributed
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAJOR VIGOUREUX ***
Produced by Audrey Longhurst and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
MAJOR VIGOUREUX
NOVELS AND STORIES BY "Q"
Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Major Vigoureux $1.50
Poison Island $1.50
Sir John Constantine $1.50
The Mayor of Troy $1.50
Shining Ferry $1.50
The Adventures of Harry Revel $1.50
The White Wolf and Other Tales $1.50
The Laird's Luck and Other Tales $1.50
Fort Amity $1.50
Two Sides of the Face: Midwinter Tales $1.50
Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts $1.50
The Ship of Stars $1.50
Historical Tales from Shakespeare $1.50
MAJOR VIGOUREUX
BY
A. T. QUILLER-COUCH
("Q")
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK 1907
Copyright, 1907, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published September, 1907
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. IN THE GARRISON GARDEN 1
II. SERGEANT ARCHELAUS IS RE-FITTED 12
III. THE COMMANDANT FINESSES A KNAVE 28
IV. THE GUN IN THE GREAT FOG 44
V. THE S.S. MILO 56
VI. HOW VASHTI CAME TO THE ISLANDS 71
VII. TRIBULATIONS OF MRS. POPE AND MISS GABRIEL 84
VIII. A BRIEF REVENGE 97
IX. THE SALVING OF S.S. MILO 106
X. THE ADVENTURES OF FOUR SHILLINGS 125
XI. PLAN OF CAMPAIGN 142
XII. SAARON ISLAND 158
XIII. THE LADY FROM THE SEA 174
XIV. AFTER SERVICE 190
XV. BREFAR CHURCH 205
XVI. THE LORD PROPRIETOR'S AUDIENCE 221
XVII. THE LORD PROPRIETOR RECEIVES A DOUBLE SHOCK 232
XVIII. VASHTI PLEADS FOR SAARON 243
XIX. THE COMMANDANT'S CONSCIENCE 262
XX. THE GUITAR AND THE CASEMENT 277
XXI. SUSPICIONS 293
XXII. PIPER'S HOLE 306
XXIII. THE LORD PROPRIETOR HEARS A SIREN SONG 320
XXIV. LINNET SEES A MERMAID 337
XXV. MISSING! 344
XXVI. THE SEARCH 356
XXVII. ENTER THE COMMISSIONER 373
XXVIII. THE FINDING 387
XXIX. CONCLUSION 399
MAJOR VIGOUREUX
CHAPTER I
IN THE GARRISON GARDEN
"Archelaus," said the Commandant, "where did you get those trousers?"
Sergeant Archelaus, who, as he dug in the neglected garden, had been
exposing a great quantity of back-view (for he was a long man),
straightened himself up, faced about, and, grounding his long-handled
spade as it were a musket, stood with palms crossed over the top of it.
"Off the Lord Proprietor," he answered.
The Commandant, seated on a bench under the veronica hedge, a few yards
higher up the slope, laid down his book, took off his spectacles, wiped
them, and replaced them very deliberately.
"The Lord Proprietor? I do not understand--" His face had reddened a
little, as it usually did at mention of the Lord Proprietor.
"Made me a present of 'em," explained Sergeant Archelaus, curtly. "You
don't mean to say you haven't noticed 'em till this minute?"
The Commandant put the question aside. "The Lord Proprietor has no
right to be offering presents to my men--least of all, presents of
clothes."
"If the Government won't send over stores, nor you write for any, I
don't see how the man can help himself. 'Tisn't regulation pattern for
the R'yal Artillery, I'll grant you: not the sort of things you'd wear
on the right of the line. In fact, he told me 'tis an old pair he used
to carry when he went deer-stalkin'."
"They are hideous, Archelaus; not to mention that they don't fit you in
the least."
"They don't look so bad when I'm sitting down," said Archelaus, after a
moment's thought, and with an air of forced cheerfulness.
"If that's all you can say in extenuation!----"
"Well, 'twas kindly meant, any way; for the old ones were a
scandal--yes, be sure. What with sea-water and scrambling after gulls'
eggs, they was becoming a byword all over the Islands."
The Commandant winced, not for the first time in this conversation.
"Treacher makes his clothes last," he objected.
"Sam Treacher's a married man, and gets his bad luck different."
"But--but couldn't you ask Mrs. Treacher to take your old ones in hand
and put in a patch or two? That might carry you on for a few months,
and if you grudge the expense, I don't mind subscribing a shilling or
so."
Sergeant Archelaus shook his head. "What's the use?" he asked. "'Tis
but puttin' off the evil day. If Her Majesty won't send us clothes, we
must fall back on Providence. Besides which, I've taken the edge off
these things, and don't want to begin over again. Last Wednesday I wore
'em over to the Off Islands, to practise 'em on the sea-birds; and last
evening after dusk I walked through the town with 'em--yes, sir, right
out past the church and back again, my blood being up, and came home
and cut a square out of the old ones to wrap round the bung of the
water-butt."
The Commandant eyed the sergeant's legs in silence, choking down
half-a-dozen angry criticisms. No; he could not trust himself to speak;
and, after a minute, cramming his clenched fists into the pockets of
his frayed fatigue-jacket, he swung about on his heel and walked out of
the garden with angry strides.
Was the Lord Proprietor making sport of him?--purposely making him and
his garrison the laughing-stock of the Islands?
The Commandant walked up the road with a hot heart: past the Barracks
and beyond them to the down, where a ruined windmill overlooked the
sea. He wanted to be alone, and up here he could count upon solitude.
He wanted to walk off his ill-humour. But the ascent was steep, and he,
alas! no longer a young man; and at the windmill he was forced to stand
still and draw breath.
At his feet lay the Islands, bathed in the light of a fast-reddening
October sunset. Against such a sunset, if the air be very clear, you
may see them from the cliffs of the mainland--a low, dark cloud out in
the Atlantic; and in old days the Commandant had repined often enough
at the few leagues which then had cut him off from the world, from
active service, from promotion.
Gradually, as time went on, he had grown resigned, and with resignation
he had learnt to be proud of his kingdom--for his kingdom _de facto_
it was. The Islanders had used to speak of him sometimes as The
Commandant, but oftener as The Governor. (They never called him The
Governor nowadays.) His military establishment, to be sure--consisting
of a master-gunner, four other gunners, and two or three aged
sergeants--scarcely accorded with his rank of major; but by way of
compensation he was, as President of the Council of Twelve, the chief
civil magistrate of the Islands.
This requires a word or two of explanation. The Reigning Sovereign of
England retained, as he yet retains, military authority over the
Islands, and from him, through the Commander-in-chief, our friend held
his appointment as military governor. But His Majesty King William III
and his successors, by a lease two or three times renewed, had granted
"all those His Majesty's territories and rocks"--so the wording ran--to
a great and unknown person of whom the Islanders spoke reverentially as
The Duke, "together with all sounds, harbours, and sands within the
circuit of the said Isles; and all lands, tenements, meadows, pastures,
grounds, feedings, fishing places, mines of tin, lead, and coals, and
all profits of the same, and full power to dig, work, and mine in the
premises; and also all the marshes, void grounds, woods, under-woods,
rents, reservoirs, services, and all other profits, rights,
commodities, advantages, and emoluments within the said Isles; and a
moiety of all shipwreck, the other moiety to be received by the Lord
High Admiral; as also all His Majesty's Liberties, Franchises,
Authorities, and Jurisdictions, as had before been used in the said
Islands; with full power to hear, examine, and finally determine all
plaints, suits, matters, actions, controversies, contentions, and
demands whatever, moved and depending between party and party
inhabiting the said Isle (all business, treason, matters touching life
or member of man, or title of land; and also all controversies and
causes touching ships, and other things belonging to the High Court of
Admiralty always excepted)"--all this for an annual rent of Forty
Pounds.
The Duke, in short, was by his lease made Lord Proprietor, with all
civil jurisdiction. But, being far too great a man to reside in the
Islands, or even to visit them, he entrusted his business to a resident
Agent, and deputed his magistracy to an elective Council of Twelve,
over which the Commandant for the time being invariably presided. But
this custom (it should be explained) rested on courtesy and not upon
right. Based upon compromise--for the boundaries between the civil and
military jurisdictions were at some points not precisely determined--it
had been found to work smoothly enough in practice, it had stood the
test of a hundred and fifty years when, in the year after Sevastopol,
Major Narcisse Vigoureux arrived in the Islands to take over the
military command, and the Duke nominated him for the Presidency quite
as a matter of course.
As President, he had power, with the assent of the Court, to inflict
fines, whippings, and imprisonment--this last with the limitation that
he could not commit to any prison on the mainland, but only to the
Island lock-up; and also, if he chose, to prescribe the ducking-stool
for refractory or scolding women. The office carried no salary; but as
Governor under the Lord Proprietor he enjoyed a valuable perquisite in
the harbour dues collected from the shipping. Every vessel visiting the
port or hoisting the Queen's colours was liable, on coming to anchor or
grounding, to pay the sum of two shillings and two pence. All
foreigners paid double. And since, in addition to ships putting in from
abroad, it sometimes happened that two hundred sail of coasters would
be driven by easterly gales to shelter in St. Lide's Harbour, or
roadstead, or in Cromwell's Sound, you may guess that this made a very
pleasant addition to the Commandant's military pay.
In short, for a dozen years Major Narcisse Vigoureux had been, for an
unmarried man, an exceedingly happy one. If you ask me how an officer
bearing such a name happened in command of a British garrison, I answer
that he was not a Frenchman, but a Channel Islander of good Jersey
descent; and this again helped him to understand the folk over whom he
ruled. The wrong-doers feared him; but they were few. By the rest of
the population, including his soldiers, he was beloved, respected, not
a little envied. For a bachelor he mingled with zest in the small
social amusements of Garland Town, the capital of the Islands. He shone
at picnics and water-parties. He played a fair hand at whist. His
manner towards ladies was deferential; towards men, dignified without a
trace of patronage or self-conceit. All voted him a good fellow. At
first, indeed--for he practised small economies, and his linen, though
clean, was frayed--they suspected him of stinginess, until by accident
the Vicar discovered that a great part of his pay went to support his
dead brother's family--a widow and two girls who lived at Notting Hill,
London, in far from affluent circumstances.
In spite of this the Commandant's lot might fairly have been called
enviable until the day which terminated the ninety-nine years' lease
upon which the Duke held the Islands. Everyone took it for granted that
he would apply, as his predecessors had twice applied, for a renewal.
But, no; like a bolt from the blue came news that the Duke, an old man,
had waived his application in favour of an unknown purchaser--unknown,
that is to say, in the Islands--a London banker, recently created a
baronet, by name Sir Cæsar Hutchins.
In general, all Garland Town relied for information about persons of
rank and title upon Miss Elizabeth Gabriel, a well-to-do spinster lady,
daughter of a former agent of the Duke's. But Miss Gabriel's copy of
"The Peerage and Baronetage of Great Britain and Ireland" dated from
1845, and Sir Cæsar's title being of more recent--or, as she put it, of
mushroom--creation, the curious had to wait until a newer volume
arrived from the mainland. Meanwhile, at their whist parties twice a
week, the gentry of Garland Town indulged in a hundred brisk surmises,
but without alarm--"unconscious of their doom, the little victims
played." It was agreed, of course, that the new Lord Proprietor would
not take up his abode in the Islands. For where was a suitable
residence? On the whole the Commandant had little doubt that things
would go on as before, but he felt some uneasiness for Mr. Pope, the
Duke's agent.
Within a fortnight, however, came two fresh announcements, of which the
first--a letter from Sir Cæsar, continuing Mr. Pope in his
office--gratified everyone. But the second was terrible indeed. The War
Office had decided to disband the garrison and remove its guns!
Major Vigoureux' face had whitened as he read that letter, five years
ago. It whitened yet at the remembrance of it. As for his hair, it had
been whitening ever since.
For dreadful things had happened in those five years. To begin with,
the new Lord Proprietor had upset prophecy by coming into residence,
and had reared himself a handsome house on the near island of
Inniscaw.... But here for a while let us forbear to retrace those five
years with their humiliating memories. It is enough that the Commandant
now walked with a stoop; that he wore not only his linen frayed but a
frayed coat also; and that he who of old had so often wished that
England would take note of his Islands against the western sun, now
prayed rather that the fogs would cover them and cut them off from
sight forever. He had practical reasons, too, for such a prayer; but of
these he was not thinking as he turned there by the windmill, and spied
Sergeant Treacher approaching along the ridge, and trundling a
wheel-barrow full of manure. The level sun-rays, painting the turf to a
green almost unnaturally vivid, and gilding the straw of the manure,
passed on to flame upon Sergeant Treacher's breast as though beneath
his unbuttoned tunic he wore a corslet of burnished brass. The
Commandant blinked, again removed his glasses, and, having repolished,
resumed them.
"Treacher, what are you wearing?"
"Meanin' the weskit, sir?" asked Treacher.
"Is it a waistcoat?"
"Well, sir, it used to be an antimacassar; but Miss Gabriel had it made
up for me, all the shirts in store bein' used up, so to speak."
Too well the Commandant recognised it; an abomination of crochet work
in stripes, four inches wide, of scarlet, green, orange-yellow, and
violet. For years--in fact ever since he remembered Miss Gabriel's
front parlour--it had decorated the back of Miss Gabriel's sofa.
"She said, sir, that with the autumn drawing on, and the winter coming,
it would cut up nicely for a weskit," Treacher explained.
"Miss Gabriel," began the Commandant, "Miss Gabriel has no business----"
"No, sir?" suggested Treacher, after a pause.
"You will take it off. You will take it off this instant, and hand it
to me."
"Yes, sir." Treacher obediently slipped off his tunic. "I don't like
the thing myself; it's too noticeable, though warming. Miss Gabriel
called it a Chesterfield."
"It's a conspiracy!" said the Commandant.
CHAPTER II
SERGEANT ARCHELAUS IS RE-FITTED
The Commandant, still with a hot heart, walked for a little way beside
Sergeant Treacher. He carried the offending waistcoat slung across his
arm, and once or twice hesitated on the verge of indignant speech; but
by-and-by seemed to recollect himself, halted, turned, and, parting
from Treacher without more words, marched off for his customary evening
walk around the fortifications.
Let us follow him.
The garrison occupied the heights of a peninsula connected with St.
Lide's by a low sandy isthmus, across which it looked towards the
"country side" of the island, though this country side was in fact
concealed by rising ground, for the most part uncultivated, where
sheets of mesembryanthemum draped the outcropping ledges of granite. At
the foot of the hill, around the pier and harbour to the north and
east, clustered St. Hugh's town, and climbed by one devious street to
the garrison gate. From where he stood the Commandant could almost look
down its chimneys. Along the isthmus straggled a few houses in double
line, known as New Town, and beyond, where the isthmus widened, lay the
Old Town around its Parish Church. These three together made Garland
Town, the capital of the Islands; and the population of St.
Lide's--town, garrison, and country side--numbered a little over
fourteen hundred. Garrison Hill, rising (as we have seen) with a pretty
steep acclivity, attains the height of a hundred and ten feet above sea
level. It measures about three-quarters of a mile in length and a
quarter of a mile in breadth, and the lines of fortification extended
around the whole hill (except upon the north-west side, which happened
to be the most important); a circuit of one mile and a quarter.
[Illustration]
You entered them beneath a massive but ruinous gateway, surmounted by a
bell, which Sergeant Treacher rang regularly at six, nine, and twelve
o'clock in the morning, and at three, six, and nine p.m., and struck to
announce the intervening hours: for the Islands had no public clock. To
the left of this gateway the Commandant always began his round,
starting from King George's Battery, to which in old days the Islanders
had looked for warning of the enemy's approach. Then it had mounted
seven long eighteen-pounders: now--The Commandant sighed and moved
on; past the Duke's Battery (four eighteen-pounders), the Vixen (one
eighteen and one nine-pounder), and along by a breastwork pierced with
embrasures to the important battery on Day Point, at the extreme
south-east. Here five thirty-two pounders--and, three hundred yards
away to the west, in the great Windlass Battery, no fewer than eleven
guns of the same calibre--had grinned defiance at the ships of France.
To-day the grass grew on their empty platforms, the nettles sprouted
from their angles ... and the Commandant--what was he doing here?
I fear the answer may provoke a smile. He was drawing his pay.
The guns, the garrison, were gone these five years; but by some
oversight of the War Office neither the Commandant nor his two
sergeants had been retired. Regularly, month by month, his pay-sheet
had been accepted; regularly the full amount had been handed to him by
Mr. Fossell, agent at Garland Town for Messrs. Curtis' Bank on the
mainland. Clearly there was a mistake somewhere, and often enough his
conscience smote him, urging that he ought, in honour, to call
attention to it. He was defrauding the Government, and, through the
Government, the taxpayer.
Yes; conscience put this plainly enough, and he felt it to be
unanswerable. But if he obeyed conscience and published the
mistake--good Heavens! what would happen to him? Already, three years
ago, the Lord Proprietor had resumed the shipping dues which had made
so welcome an addition to his income. On the strength of them he had
made a too liberal allowance to his brother's widow; and now to
maintain it he was driven to deny himself all but the barest necessary
expenses. Yet how could he cut it down? The two girls were growing up.
Their mother had sent them to a costly school. As it was, her letters
burdened him with complaints of her poverty: for she was a peevish,
grasping woman--poor soul!
Again, if he published the mistake, he impoverished not himself only
but his two sergeants: and Treacher was a married man. He often drugged
his conscience with this. But his conscience, being healthy, was soon
awake and tormenting him.
It humiliated him, too. Government, which sent him his full pay, never
sent him stores, ammunition, or clothing for his men. He wanted no
ammunition; but his men needed clothing--and he dared not ask for it.
Their uniforms were (as Miss Gabriel had more than once pointedly
asserted in his hearing) a scandal to the Islands. Moreover, the price
of hens' eggs ruling high in Garland Town, he had discovered that
gulls' eggs made a tolerable substitute. It was in scrambling after
gulls' eggs for his Commanding Officer that Sergeant Archelaus had
ruined his small-clothes.... And now you know why in the course of his
discussion with Sergeant Archelaus the Commandant had winced more than
once.
Worst of all, the fatal secret tied his tongue under all the many
slights (as he reckoned them) which the Lord Proprietor put on him. No;
worst of all was the self-reproach he carried about in his own breast.
But none the less the Commandant, as a sensitive man, chafed under the
Lord Proprietor's tyranny, which was the harder to bear for being
slightly contemptuous. He felt that all his old friends pitied him
while they turned to worship the rising sun; while, as for Miss Gabriel
(who had never been his friend), he feared her caustic tongue worse
than the devil.
But to attack him thus through his men! Had Miss Gabriel and the Lord
Proprietor conspired to inflict this indignity?
The Commandant was a sincere Christian: ever willing to believe the
best of his kind, incapable of harbouring malice, or, except in the
brief heat of temper, of imputing it to others. In the short three
hundred yards between the Day Point and Windlass Batteries he repented
his worst thoughts. He acquitted his enemies--if enemies they were--of
conspiracy. The coincidence of the two gifts was fortuitous: they had
been offered without guile, if also without sufficient care for his
feelings. But this kind of thing must not happen again, and obviously
the most tactful way to prevent it was, not to remonstrate with Miss
Gabriel or with the Lord Proprietor, but to provide (somehow) his two
sergeants with a re-fit.
The Commandant had arrived at this conclusion and at the Sand Pit
Battery (five thirty-two pounders) almost simultaneously, when, across
the breastwork, he was aware of Mr. Rogers, Lieutenant R. N., and
Inspecting Commander of the Coast-guard, standing at the head of the
slope just outside the fortifications, and conning the sea through a
telescope.
"Hullo!" said Mr. Rogers--a short man with a jolly smile--lowering his
glass and facing suddenly about at the sound of the Commandant's
footfall. "Hullo! and good evening!"
"Good evening!" responded Major Vigoureux.
"Queer-looking sky out yonder."
"So it is, now you come to mention it." The Commandant, shaken out of
his brown study, slowly concentrated his gaze on the western horizon.
"See that bank of fog? I don't know what to make of it. No wind at all;
the glass steady as a rock; and a heavy swell rolling up from westward.
Take hold of my glass and bring it to bear on the Monk"--this was the
lighthouse guarding the westernmost reef of the Off Islands. "Every now
and then a sea'll hide half the column."
"For my part," said the Commandant, "I've been out of all calculation
with the weather for a week past. It's uncanny for the time of year."
"There's the devil of a rumpus going on somewhere, to account for the
sea that's running," said Mr. Rogers, and checked himself in the act of
handing the telescope across the breastwork, as he caught sight of
Sergeant Treacher's waistcoat, which the Commandant was nervously
shifting from his right arm to his left.
"Hullo!" said Mr. Rogers, again.
"It's--it's a sort of waistcoat," explained the Commandant.
"It may be," said Mr. Rogers. "But unless I'm a Dutchman, it used to be
The Gabriel's antimacassar"--and with that Mr. Rogers winked, for he
had (as the other knew to his cost) an artless, primitive sense of
pleasantry. "A _gage d'amour_, I'll bet any man a sovereign. Come now!"
"I assure you----"
"And you two pretending before everyone that you're at daggers drawn!
Trust an old one for slyness!"
(Once again this afternoon the Commandant winced.)
"Oh, but this is too rich!" Mr. Rogers continued, and the Commandant
felt that only the intervening breastwork protected him from a nudge
under the ribs. "I must take a rise out of the old lady to-night, when
we meet at old Fossell's."
"I--I beg you will do nothing of the sort." The Commandant's voice
shook with apprehension.
Mr. Rogers, mistaking the tremor in the appeal, recoiled suddenly from
the extremely gay to the extremely grave. "My good fellow! Of course,
if it's serious!----"
"'Serious!'" The Commandant stared at him for a moment. "Oh, damn the
woman!" he broke out in sudden wrath, and went his way with long
strides, while the Inspecting Commander looked after him with a broad
grin.
The next battery, the Keg of Butter--so called from a barrel-shaped
rock which it overlooked--was built of sods, and had mounted a single
eighteen-pounder, on a traversing platform. Here, on the north-west
side of the hill, the fortifications broke off, or were continued only
by a low wall along the edge of the cliff; and here the path, or _via
militaris_, turned off at a sharp angle and led back towards the
Castle, under the walls of which the Commandant passed, as a rule, to
complete his inspection by visiting the three batteries on the northern
cliffs. But to-day he broke his custom, and returned to the Garrison
Garden.
As he opened the gate, five o'clock sounded from the garrison bell, and
at the first stroke of it he saw Sergeant Archelaus drive his spade
into the soil, draw the back of his wrist across his forehead, and walk
towards the veronica hedge for his tunic.
"Archelaus!"
"Sir!"
"I have been thinking over those trousers--" began the Commandant,
picking his way between the briers that threatened to choke the path.
"And so have I," said Sergeant Archelaus; "and the upshot is, Do you
spell 'em with a 'u' or a 'w'?"
"Now you mention it, I don't feel able to answer you off-hand; not
without writing it down," said the Commandant. "But what on earth does
it matter?"
"Nothin'--except that I was thinkin' to write him a letter, to thank
him."
"For Heaven's sake--" the Commandant began, and checked himself. "I
wouldn't do that, if I were you. In fact, I've been thinking the matter
over, and it occurs to me that I have an old pair of dress trousers
that might serve your turn; that is to say, if you could manage to
unpick the red stripe off your old ones and get someone to sew it on.
They are black, to be sure; but the difference between black and dark
blue is not so very noticeable. And the cut of them inclines to the
peg-top, that being the fashionable shape when I bought them--let me
see--in fifty-seven, I think it was."
"I know 'em," said Sergeant Archelaus. "They were sound enough two
months back, when I sprinkled 'em over with camphor, against the moth."
"I think they will do excellently."
"They'll do, fast enough," Sergeant Archelaus asserted; "though it
seems like deprivin' you."
"Not at all, Archelaus; not in the least. Why, I haven't put on evening
dress half a dozen times since I came to the Islands."
"And that's a long time, to be sure, sir. But one never knows. The Lord
Proprietor might take it into his head, one o' these days, to invite
you to dinner."
"Few things are less likely. And even if he did, and the worst came to
the worst, I might borrow Mr. Rogers', you know," added the
Commandant--and with a smile; for he stood six feet, and Mr. Rogers a
bare five feet five, in their respective socks.
"He might ask you both together. 'Twould be just of a piece with his
damned thoughtlessness."
"Hush, Archelaus!" his master commanded sternly, and reproached himself
afterwards for having felt not altogether ill-pleased.
"Well, sir, I thank you kindly; and I won't deny 'twill be a comfort to
go about with the lower half of me looking a bit less like a pen-wiper.
But what be I to do with the pesky things? Return 'em?"
"On no account. You might even thank him--by word of mouth--if you have
not already done so."
"I haven't. To tell the truth, the pattern took me so aback at first
going off.... But when you came in by the gate, there, I was turning it
over in my mind that the garrison oughtn't to be beholden to a
civilian----"
"Quite right, Archelaus."
"And, that bein' so, it might be dignified-like to return gift for
gift. Now, the Lord Proprietor's terrible fond of bulbs; 'tis a new
craze with him; and in spading over the border here I'd a-turned up a
dozen or so of those queer-looking Lent-lilies you set such store
by----" Sergeant Archelaus pointed towards a little heap of daffodil
bulbs carelessly strewn on the up-turned soil.
These bulbs had a history.
Close on thirty years before, a certain Dutch skipper--his name is
forgotten--happened to be sailing for Bordeaux with a general cargo,
which included some thousands of tulips, and a few almost priceless
ones, for a rich purchaser who wished to introduce tulip-culture into
the Gironde. The Dutchman's vessel was a flat-bottomed galliot, fitted
with lee-boards, but liable to fall away from the wind; and,
encountering a strong southerly gale as he attempted to round Ushant,
he was blown northward into the fogs, and, through the fogs, upon the
Islands.
Against what followed, the chances were at least a thousand to one. His
vessel, blind as to her whereabouts, and helpless among the tide-races,
missed rock after rock, blundered her way past every sunken peril--to
be sure, she was flat-bottomed, but the soundings varied so from moment
to moment that the crew, after running a dozen times to the boats in
the certainty of striking, fully believed themselves bewitched; until,
in St. Lide's Pool, as they made seven fathoms and hoped for open
water, the fog lifted suddenly, and they saw Garrison Hill right above
them.
This befell them a short hour before sunset. The skipper rounded up to
the wind, dropped anchor, got out a boat, and groped his way
shoreward--for the fog had descended again, even more speedily than it
had lifted.
Groping his way, and still attended by his amazing good luck, the
Dutchman, where he had expected rocks, came plump on a pier of hewn
masonry. At the pier-head, which loomed high above them, a man struck a
light and displayed a lantern; and, looking up, the crew were aware of
many people standing there and chattering in the dusk--chattering in
the low soft tone peculiar to the Islanders. The skipper hailed them in
Dutch, and again in French, these being the only languages he spoke.
The Islanders, helping him ashore, made signs that they could not
answer, but took him and his men up the hill to the Garrison, then
commanded by a Colonel Bartlemy.
Colonel Bartlemy could speak French after a fashion, and so could his
excellent wife. Between them they entertained the wanderers hospitably
for the space of five days, at the end of which the Dutchman went his
way before a clear north wind, and in charge of an Island pilot. But
before departing he presented his hosts--it was all that either he
could give or they would permit themselves to accept--with a quantity
of remarkably fine bulbs from his cargo.
Now, possibly, being a Dutchman, he took it for granted that anyone
could recognise these bulbs for what they were. But Mrs. Bartlemy did
not; for she had spent the most of her life in various garrisons, which
afford few opportunities for gardening. None the less, she was, for a
soldier's wife, a first-rate housekeeper; and, supposing these bulbs to
be onions of peculiar rarity, she forthwith issued invitations to the
_elite_ of the Island, and ordered over a leg of Welsh mutton from the
mainland. I will not attempt to tell of the dinner that ensued: for
Miss Gabriel made the story her own, and everyone who heard her relate
it after one of Garland Town's _petits soupers_--as she frequently did
by special request--declared it to be inimitable. Suffice it to say
that the tulips were boiled, but not eaten.
A few bulbs, of smaller size, escaped the pot, and Mrs. Bartlemy, in
her mortification, ordered the cook to throw them away, or (in the
language of the Islands) to "heave them to cliff." The cook cast them
out upon a bed of rubbish in a corner of the garrison garden, where
by-and-by they were covered with fresh rubbish, under which they
sprouted; and, next spring, lo! the midden heap had become a mound of
glorious trumpet daffodils!
So they were left to blossom, refreshing the eyes of successive
Commandants year after year as March came round and the March
nor'-westers set their yellow bells waving against the blue sea. Major
Vigoureux delighted in them--were they not his name-flower? But no one
took pains to cultivate them, as no one suspected their great destiny.
They bloomed year by year, and waited. Their hour was not yet.
"By all means, Archelaus, let us do it tactfully," agreed the
Commandant. "We must suppress those trousers of his at all costs. Yet I
would avoid anything in the nature of a rebuff, and if you think the
Lord Proprietor would be gratified, you are welcome to take him as many
of the bulbs as you please. Only leave me a few; for God knows our
garden has few ornaments to spare."
"I'll take 'em over to Inniscaw and thank him by word o' mouth," said
Sergeant Archelaus, hopefully. "It'll save me the trouble of spelling
'trousers,' anyway."
"It would be easier, as well as more accurate," said the Commandant,
pensively regarding the Sergeant's legs, "to call them trews. Not," he
went on inconsequently, "that I have anything to say against the
Highland Regiments. I was brigaded once for three months with the
Forth-Second, and capital fellows I found them."
With a mind relieved, the Commandant walked off towards the Barracks,
pausing on his way to pick up Miss Gabriel's antimacassar-waistcoat,
which he had taken the precaution to leave outside the gate.
Three-quarters of an hour later he emerged in clean shirt and
threadbare, but well-brushed, uniform, arrayed for Mr. and Mrs.
Fossell's whist-party. As he passed the Garrison gate, Mrs. Treacher,
who sometimes acted deputy for her husband, began to ring the six
o'clock bell. He halted and waited for her to finish.
"Mrs. Treacher," he said, "can you tell me the price of flannel?"
"Flannel," answered Mrs. Treacher, "is all prices, according to
quality."
"But I am talking of good ordinary flannel, fit to make up into a man's
shirt."
"Then you couldn't say less than one-three-farthings, or
one-and-a-ha'penny at the lowest."
"And how much would be required?"
"Good Lord!" said Mrs. Treacher. "As if that didn't all depend on the
man!"
"I was thinking, Mrs. Treacher, to present your husband with one: that
is to say, with the material, if you will not mind making it up."
Mrs. Treacher curtsied. "And I thank you kindly, sir, for 'tis not
before he needs one, which, being under average size and the width just
a yard, as you may reckon, he oughtn't to take more than
three-and-a-half yards at the outside."
"Three-and-a-half at one-three-farthings--that makes--Oh, confound
these fractions!" said the Commandant. "We'll make it four shillings,
and you had best step down to Tregaskis' shop to-morrow and choose the
stuff yourself." He counted out the money into Mrs. Treacher's hand,
and left her curtseying. As he went, he jingled the few coins remaining
in his breeches pocket. They amounted to two-and-seven-pence in
all--and almost a week stood between him and pay-day.
CHAPTER III
THE COMMANDANT FINESSES A KNAVE
"I remember the Bartlemys perfectly," said Miss Gabriel, addressing the
company as they sat around Mr. and Mrs. Fossell's dining-table and
trifled with a light collation of cordial waters and ratafia
biscuits--prelude to serious whist. "I carry them both in my mind's
eye, though I must have been but a tiny child when he succumbed to
apoplexy, and she left the Islands to reside with a married sister at
Scarborough. Very poorly-off he left her. Somehow, our Commanding
Officers have never contrived to save money--even in the old days, when
the post was worth having."
Miss Gabriel said it lightly but pointedly, with a glance at the
Commandant. The company stared at their plates and glasses. It was
well-known that (as Mr. Rogers put it) Miss Gabriel "had her knife
into" the patient man, and there were tongues that attributed her
spitefulness to disappointment. Fifteen years ago, when Major Narcisse
Vigoureux--no longer in his first youth, but still a man of handsome
presence--had first arrived in the Islands to take over his command,
Miss Gabriel was a not uncomely woman of thirty. _Partis_ in the
Islands are few, as you may suppose. He was a bachelor, she a spinster;
she had money, and he position. What wonder, then, if the Islanders
expected them to make a match of it?
For some reason, the match had never come off, and although she might
convince herself that the simplest reason--incompatibility--was the
true one, Miss Gabriel could hardly have been unaware that the women
looked upon her as one who had missed her chance, and even blamed her a
little--as women always will in such cases--in a conspiracy of sex
acknowledging its weakness. Perhaps this made her defiant.
She was handling the Commandant truculently to-night.
"Of course," she continued, "even in those days the post--don't they
say the same in England of a Deanery?--was looked upon as finishing a
man's career. I don't know, for my part, the principle upon which the
Horse Guards--it used to be the Horse Guards--sent Colonel Bartlemy
down to us."
"By selection, ma'am," said the Commandant, still patiently, as she
paused; "by selection among a number of applicants."
"I didn't want to be told that," snapped Miss Gabriel. "What I meant
was, the Commander-in-Chief probably knew something of the man--had
informed himself of something in his record--before sending him down to
this exile."
"And a jolly good exile, too!" put in Mr. Rogers, heartily.
"It used to be," said Miss Gabriel. "This Colonel Bartlemy, for
instance, was a coward. I've heard it told of him that once, during his
command, a sort of mutiny broke out in the Barracks. It happened at a
time when the newspapers were full of nonsense about France invading us
by a sudden descent; and the noise, reaching him in the quarters where
he lodged with his wife and one general maid-servant, put him in a
terrible fright. He had fenced off these quarters of his for privacy,
because Mrs. Bartlemy thought it would be a good deal better for the
maid-servant; and they communicated with the Barracks by a staircase
with a door of which he kept the key. On the first alarm he ran to this
door and called through the key-hole for his orderly; but the orderly,
who himself was taking part in the disturbance, did not hear. So the
Colonel called up his wife and the servant, and joined them at the head
of the stairs after he had slipped on his belt and sword. By this time
the noise below was deafening. The Colonel, putting a brave face on it,
managed to get the key into the lock and turn it. Then, as he flung the
door open, he turned with a bow to his wife and said very politely, in
French--for they were in the habit of talking French before the
girl--'_Passez devant, madame!_'"
"How did it end?" asked Mr. Rogers, after a guffaw.
"Oh, it turned out to be just a barrack brawl. The soldiers were always
the worst-behaved lot in the Islands, and perpetually grumbling--though
in those days," added Miss Gabriel, "I always understood that they were
fed and clothed sufficiently."
The Commandant whitened. Mrs. Fossell, a nervous body in a cap with
lilac ribbon, rose in some little fluster, and opined that it was
almost time to cut for partners.
A few minutes later the Commandant found himself seated opposite Mr.
Fossell, with Miss Gabriel and Mr. Rogers for opponents--Miss Gabriel
on his left. He prepared to enjoy himself, for whist meant silence, and
he could have chosen no better partner than Mr. Fossell, who played a
sound game, and with a perfectly inscrutable face.
"Dear me!" said Miss Gabriel, in the act of picking up her cards, "it
seems as if this had happened a great many times before! What do you
say, Mr. Fossell, to staking half-a-crown on the rubber, just to
enliven the game? You don't object on principle, I know, to playing for
money."
"No, indeed, ma'am," answered Mr. Fossell. "I am content if the others
are willing--not that for me the pleasure of playing against you needs
any such--er--adventitious stimulus."
Miss Gabriel appealed to Mr. Rogers.
Mr. Rogers thought it would be great fun. "Come along, Vigoureux," he
almost shouted, "you can't refuse a lady's challenge!"
What could the poor Commandant do? Almost before he knew he had nodded,
though with a set face, and by the nod committed himself. He felt his
few coins burning in his breeches' pocket against his thigh, as if they
warned him.
But, after all, Fossell was an excellent player. With the smallest
luck, he and Fossell ought to be more than a match for a pair of whom,
if one (Miss Gabriel) was wily, the other played a game not usually
distinguishable from bumble-puppy.
They won the first game easily.
They had almost won the second when a devastating seven trumps in Mr.
Rogers's hand (which he played atrociously) saw their opponents almost
level--the score eight-seven. In the next hand, Miss Gabriel--for this
was old-fashioned long whist--held all four honours, and took the game.
The Commandant looked at Mr. Fossell. But a financier is not disturbed
by the risk of half-a-crown.
Only half-a-crown!--but for the Commandant a week between this
half-a-crown and another.
He wondered what Fossell would say--Fossell, sitting there, so
imperturbable, with his shiny bald head--if he knew.
"Game _and_!" announced Mr. Rogers.
By this time the players at the second table, aware of the half-a-crown
at stake, were listening in a state of suppressed excitement--suppressed
because the Vicar, being deaf, had not overheard Miss Gabriel's
challenge, and the others feared that he might disapprove of playing
for money.
The Vicar, who played against Mr. and Mrs. Pope, with Mrs. Fossell for
partner, had a habit of soliloquising over his hand on any subject that
occurred to him. The rest of the table deferred to this habit, out of
respect or because by experience they knew it to be incurable, since
only by conscious effort could he hear any voice but his own.
By such an effort, holding his hand to his ear, he had listened to Miss
Gabriel's anecdote about Colonel Bartlemy; smiling the while because he
had heard it many times before and knew it to be a good one; innocently
unaware that it covered any caustic subintention. It had started him on
a train of reminiscence which he pursued at the card-table (good man)
for twenty-five minutes, recalling himself to the cards with a faint
shock of surprise whenever it became his turn to play, as one who would
protest--"What, again? And so soon?"
"Yes, indeed," the Vicar's voice struck in across the strained silence,
"there is an old story that Oliver Cromwell left behind him, in
garrison here, a company of the Bedfordshire Regiment, and that in time
they were completely forgotten. (Let me see. Spades are trumps, I
believe.... 'Clubs'? Your pardon Mrs. Fossell, but I remember it was a
black suit.) Yes, and seeing no prospect of recall they married in time
with our Island women, and that"--here the Vicar gathered up a trick
which belonged to his opponents--"is, by some, alleged to be the reason
why the Islanders use a purer English than is spoken on the mainland.
Ah, quite so; yes, I played the ten--then it was your ace, Mrs. Pope? I
congratulate you, ma'am."
The Commandant, overhearing, could not forbear a glance at Miss
Gabriel. It conveyed no resentment, scarcely even a reproach; it turned
rather, as by dumb instinct, upon the author of the wound, and asked
perplexedly:--"What have I done to you, that you treat me thus?" I have
no doubt that Miss Gabriel caught the glance. She did not answer it;
but her grey eyes glinted beneath their lids as she bent them upon the
cards Mr. Fossell was dealing in his usual deliberate way--glinted as
though with a spark of flint struck out by steel.
"The story may be apocryphal," pursued the Vicar, addressing deaf ears
around the other table; "though, for my part, I incline to think there
may be a substratum----"
Mr. Fossell turned up the queen of hearts. The Commandant held ace,
ten, and two small trumps, with a strong hand in diamonds, which Mr.
Rogers, by a blundering lead, enabled him to establish early. Actual
honours were "easy"; but by exhausting trumps at the first opportunity,
he scored three by tricks. The next hand gave their opponents three
points--two by honours, and the trick. Three all.
The Vicar was heard to observe that, on the whole, intermarriage among
the Islanders had not produced the disastrous effects usually predicted
of it; and that, therefore, an infusion of fresh blood, at some date
more or less remote, might reasonably be conjectured, even though
incapable of proof.
The Vicar, as he said this, looked across at Mrs. Fossell
interrogatively. He was really expecting her to lead trumps, but she
mistook him to be asking her assent to his theory. To keep the ball
rolling, she opined that what had happened once need not necessarily
happen again, especially in these days when locomotion was making such
strides. She hazarded this in the lowest key; but it happened in just
that momentary hush upon which the faintest remark falls resonantly.
The Commandant heard it across the room as he waited for Mr. Rogers to
cut the cards; and the Vicar, by a freak of hearing, picked it up at
once.
"My dear lady," he demanded, "are you talking of progenitiveness!"
"N-no," stammered Mrs. Fossell, in confusion. "Nothing of the sort. I
was referring to the garrison here being left out of mind--like the
regiment you spoke of----"
Miss Gabriel tapped the table impatiently. "Mr. Rogers," she said, "I
think we had better attend to the game. Major Vigoureux is waiting for
you to cut." She said it with her eyes upon the Commandant's hand,
which was trembling. He wondered, as he dealt, if she had observed that
it was trembling. If so, had she guessed the true reason?
The score mounted to nine-eight. The Commandant lifted a hand to his
brow as Mr. Fossell, whose turn it was, took up the cards and began to
deal methodically, without a trace of discomposure.
"Half a crown! and if he lost, one penny left to last him to next pay
day!" A terrible thought seized him. "And what if, when he presented
himself at Mr. Fossell's bank on pay-day, the money was not
forthcoming?" Nonsense! He was unhinged.... The money had always
arrived punctually ... but the whole world seemed to be in conspiracy
against him to-night, and his luck along with it.
Mr. Rogers, who had a trick of sorting out his suits between his
fingers, hesitated for a few moments, put his cards together, and with
an air of fierce determination, led a small heart.
Again the Commandant's right hand went up to his brow. The room was
very close and still. But the Vicar remained unaware of the general
excitement, and across the silence the Vicar was heard to say
confidentially:--
"Between you and me there was a time when I hoped our friend the
Commandant might make a match of it."
The poor Commandant!... With his gaze fixed on the cards, he felt that
every ear was listening, every eye turned upon him. He must do
something desperate to break the horrible spell, to turn the luck....
He held ace, king, knave of hearts, and knew well enough that, in sound
whist he ought to play the king. But why had Mr. Rogers led hearts? Mr.
Rogers did not often lead even from a strong suit unless it contained
at least one honour.
The Commandant risked it and finessed his knave. Miss Gabriel had been
waiting, watching him intently. Her mouth shut almost with a snap of
triumph as she put down the queen.
It was, as it happened, the one heart in her hand. She closed her
triumph, a few rounds later, by trumping the Commandant's ace and king.
Mr. Fossell looked at his partner, in sorrow rather than in anger. Mr.
Rogers laughed uproariously as he counted up the tricks.
"Double or quits, I suppose?" he suggested.
But the Commandant rose. "Your pardon, Miss Gabriel," he said, laying
his half-crown on the table, "if I play no more for money to-night.
Indeed, I was going to ask Mrs. Fossell to forgive me if I spoil one of
her quartettes by withdrawing. To tell the truth, I am not myself--a
slight dizziness----"
"A glass of hot brandy-and-water?" suggested Mr. Fossell. "Nay, then, a
thimbleful--I insist!"
The Commandant made his excuses as politely as he could, and found
himself in the street. The night was pitch-dark and the road full of
sea-fog--a fog so thick that it completely shut off the rays of the
many lighthouses twinkling around the Islands, and obscured the few
street lamps that illuminated Garland Town. A slight breeze blew up
from the west and damped his brow; for his dizziness had been something
more than a pretence, and he walked with his hat in his hand.
On such a night a stranger might well have lost his way; but the
Commandant steered for Garrison Hill without a mistake, and up the hill
towards the Barracks. Garland Town is early a-bed. He passed no one in
the streets. But in St. Hugh's, as he went by the closed door of a
cottage, half-way up the ascent, he recalled the night, years ago, of
his first arrival in the Islands. He had come a week before the
garrison expected him, and there had been no one to meet him on the
quay when he arrived in the dusk of an October evening. Darkness had
descended on the Islands before he started from the quay to climb to
his new home; and here--just here, at this doorway--he had paused to
ask his way. The door had stood open then, with a panel of warm
firelight lying across the roadway, and as he halted and peered into
the room--it was a kitchen, and the light from the open hearth glinted
on rows of china plates ranged along the dresser--he saw two girls
beside the fire; the one seated and reading from a book in her lap, the
other on the hearth-mat half reclined against her sister's knee, over
which she had flung an arm to prop her chin as she listened.... He
remembered the sand strewn on the slate floor, the fresh sea-smell in
this room so confidingly open to the night--the scene so intimate, so
homely, that the traveller standing in the doorway with the sea-spray
on his cloak could scarcely believe in the tide-races across which he
had been voyaging for hours. He stood, the hum of them in his ears, a
doubtful intruder; and while he stood, the girl in the chair had risen
and bade him good evening in purest English.
"You have come by the boat? You will be from the mainland?" she said,
and he wondered a little, not being used as yet to hear his country
spoken of as the mainland. "And I am going to England to-morrow," she
added. "The boat which brought you will take me over on its return
journey."
"You know England well, I expect?" He found himself saying this for
lack of anything better.
"She has never been outside the Islands," said her sister, who also had
risen. "And it is the same with me. But to-morrow she is going--" the
girl paused here, not it (seemed) in pain, but wistfully, as in a kind
of solemn awe at the prospect. "We left the door open for father. He
has a fancy to see the light across the road as he comes up the hill.
But he is late to-night at the fishing."
The Commandant, glancing around the room, divined--he could not tell
why--that these girls were motherless. His eyes fell on the open book
which the elder sister laid on the chair as she rose. The firelight
enabled him to read its page-heading, printed in thick, blunt
type--"King Lear"! These girls, the one of them about to visit unknown
England, were reading Shakespeare together.
"_Urbem quam dicunt Romam_"--he felt a wild inclination to question
them, to ask what they expected to learn of England from Shakespeare,
and from that play of all others. But being a shy man, then as ever, he
forbore, and contented himself with asking the way to the Barracks.
They went with him to the door to direct him; and so, wishing them
good-night, he had gone up the hill. That was all. He had never seen
the elder sister again; did not know to this day what business had
taken her away to the mainland, not to return. The younger had married
a pilot, and was now the mother of a growing family in Saaron Island,
which lies next to Brefar, which faces Inniscaw. Her farmstead there
(the solitary one on the island), stood a short way above the landing
quay; and once or twice, catching sight of her in her doorway and
lifting his hat as he went by (for the Commandant was ever polite), he
had found it in his mind to stop and inquire after her sister.
He had never translated this resolve into action. The Commandant--as
everyone knew on the Islands--was "desperate shy," or "that shy you'd
never believe." But the scene had bitten itself upon his memory, and he
recalled it almost as often as he passed the door. He recalled it
to-night, as he stumbled by it in the fog and uphill to his cheerless
lodgings.
What a blind thing was life! blind even as this fog--and his home in it
these cheerless Barracks; to which nevertheless he must cling, in spite
of his honour, an old man, good for nothing, afraid to be found out! He
groped his way to the front door, opened it with his latchkey, lit the
candle which Sergeant Archelaus had considerately placed at the foot of
the stairs, and, climbing them to his bedroom, flung himself on his
knees by the bed.
Now the architect of the Barracks had designed them upon a singular
plan, of which the peculiar inconvenience was that almost every room
led to some other; which saved corridor space, but was fatal to
privacy.
Beyond the Commandant's bedroom, which opened upon the first floor
landing of the main staircase, lay a room in which he kept his fishing
clothes, and in which Sergeant Archelaus sometimes lit a fire to dry
them by.
It was a small room, well shielded from the draughts which raged
through the building in winter; and here Sergeant Archelaus had lit a
fire to-night and sat before it, sewing an artilleryman's stripe upon
the Commandant's cast dress trousers.
Hearing a noise in the outer room, and not expecting his master's
return for at least a couple of hours, he hurried out in some
perturbation, with the trousers flung across his arm--to find the
Commandant kneeling at his devotions.
"I beg your pardon, sir!"
"It's of no consequence," said the Commandant, looking up (but he was
desperately confused). "I--I always say my prayers, you know."
"What? Before undressing?" said Sergeant Archelaus.
CHAPTER IV
THE GUN IN THE GREAT FOG
Politely though he had contrived his departure, the Commandant left
Mrs. Fossell's whist-party to something like dismay. A passing
indisposition--no excuse could be more reasonable. Still, nothing of
the kind had ever interrupted these gatherings within Mrs. Fossell's
recollection, and she could not help taking a serious view of it.
"A passing indisposition," was Mr. Fossell's phrase, and he kept
repeating it--with an occasional "Nonsense, my dear"--in answer to his
wife's gloomy forebodings.
"But I shall send round, the first thing in the morning, to inquire,"
she insisted.
"Do so, my dear."
"It can't be serious, ma'am," Mr. Rogers assured her jollily. "You
heard him decline my arm when I offered to see him home."
"In my opinion," said Miss Gabriel, "the man is breaking up." She
touched her forehead lightly with the tip of her forefinger.
"Breaking up?" echoed her host and Mrs. Pope, incredulous. "My dear
Elizabeth!" began Mrs. Fossell.
"Breaking up," Miss Gabriel repeated with a very positive nod of her
head. "He has not been the same man since the Lord Proprietor took over
the presidency of the Court and he refused, upon pique, to be elected
an ordinary member. Say what you like, a man cannot be virtual Governor
of the Islands one day and the next a mere nobody without its preying
upon him."
"He made light of it at the time," observed Mr. Fossell, who (it goes
without saying) was councillor; "although I ventured to remonstrate
with him."
"And I," said Mr. Pope, who (it also goes without saying) was another.
"In the friendliest possible way you understand. I pointed out that the
Lord Proprietor was, after all, the Lord Proprietor, and, as such, did
not understand being thwarted. Very naturally, as you will all admit."
"It's human nature, when you come to think of it," put in the Steward's
wife (she preferred the title of Steward to that of agent, and was
gradually accustoming society to the sound, even as in earlier years,
when a young married woman, she had taught it to substitute "agent" for
"factor"). If, during the interval when her husband's dismissal seemed
inevitable, she had lost no opportunity of prophesying evil of the new
Lord Proprietor, she made up for it now by justifying his every action.
"If that's the ground you're going on," spoke up Mr. Rogers, who, with
all his faults was nothing of a snob, "it's human nature for Vigoureux
to feel sore. As for the magistracy, he's not the man to value it one
pin. It's the neglect; and to meet the old fellow mooning around his
batteries as I did this very afternoon--I tell you it makes a man
sorry."
If this speech did Mr. Rogers credit he cancelled it presently by his
atrocious behaviour at cards. The symmetry of the party being broken,
Miss Gabriel announced that she had enjoyed enough whist for the
evening, and that nothing in the world would give her greater pleasure
than half-an-hour's quiet talk, with the Vicar--that was, if Mrs.
Fossell and he would not mind cutting out and surrendering their seats
to Mr. Fossell and Mr. Rogers. In saying this she outrageously
flattered the Vicar, with whom it was impossible to hold conversation
in any tone below that of shouting. She meant that she was prepared to
listen; and she knew that no flattery was too outrageous for him to
swallow. She knew also that Mrs. Fossell in her heart of hearts
abhorred cards, and would be only too grateful for release, to look
after the preparations for supper and scold the parlour-maid outside.
So the Vicar and Mrs. Fossell cut out, and Mr. Fossell and Mr. Rogers
replaced them as partners against Mr. and Mrs. Pope.
Mr. and Mrs. Pope always played together. No one knew why, but it had
come to be an understood thing. Of "calls" and "echoes" the play of Mr.
and Mrs. Pope was innocent; but when Mrs. Pope, being second hand,
hesitated whether to trump her opponent's card or pass it, Mr. Pope had
an unconscious habit of saying, "Now dearest," when he desired her to
trump; and another unconscious habit, when Mrs. Pope had the lead and
he wanted trumps, of murmuring, "Your turn, darling." These two habits
Mr. Rogers had noted; and being in merry pin to-night over winning his
half-crown, at a moment when Mr. Fossell, having the lead, appeared to
hesitate (but the hesitation was only a part of Mr. Fossell's
deliberate play), he leaned over and playfully suggested, "Your turn,
darling!"
Mr. Fossell stared in the act of putting down a trump. For a moment he
appeared to think that Mr. Rogers had gone mad; then, in spite of
himself, the lines of his mouth relaxed.
"I do not think," said Mr. Pope, heavily--and the lines of Mr.
Fossell's mouth at once grew rigid again--"I do not think you two ought
to signal for trumps in that fashion."
His partner looked up innocently. In the slow pause Mr. Rogers was
growing purple in the face, when again the Vicar's voice broke across
the silence. "The Lord Proprietor's power in former days--I speak only
of former days--may well have warranted the Government in stationing a
military officer here to keep some check on him. For instance, he
shared all ordinary wrecks with the Lord High Admiral, but a wreck
became his sole property by law, if none of the crew remained alive; a
dangerous reservation, ma'am, in times when justice travelled slowly,
and much might happen in the Islands and never a word of it reach
London."
Miss Gabriel put up both hands--they were encased in mittens, and the
mittens decorated with steel beads--as if to close her ears.
"We must be thankful, indeed," she began, and paused in dismay as the
floor of Mrs. Fossell's drawing-room trembled under her, and at the
same moment the window sashes rattled violently throughout the house.
"Good Heavens!"
"What was that?"
The players dropped their cards. All listened.
"Upon my word," suggested the Vicar, who had heard nothing, but felt
the concussion, "if it weren't positively known to be empty one would
say the powder magazine at the Garrison----"
"Oh, Richard! Richard!"--here Mrs. Fossell came running in from the
dining-room with a dish of trifle in her hands--"Is it an earthquake?"
"I--I rather think not, my dear!"
"At any rate it can't be the end of the world?" She turned and appealed
to the Vicar, and from the Vicar again to her husband. "And if it is
not, I wish you would come to Selina, for she has dropped the cold
shape all over the floor and is having hysterics in the better of the
two armchairs!"
Indeed, Selina's hysterics could be heard.
"Earthquake? Fiddlesticks, ma'am!" said Mr. Rogers, buttoning his
pea-jacket and turning up its collar. "What you heard was a gun. There
is a vessel in distress somewhere, and we shall have my men here in a
moment with news of her."
"But there was no sound," objected Mrs. Pope.
"Fog, ma'am--fog; sound don't travel in a fog, and ships oughtn't to.
There has been a nasty bank of it to the south'ard ever since morning,
and you may bet that's the mischief."
He went into the hall for his lantern, brought it back, lit it, and
carried it out to the front door.
"Whe--ew!" he whistled, as he opened the door and stood, with lantern
lifted high, staring into the night.
The guests behind him wondered; for all was quiet outside--too quiet,
to ears accustomed to the wind which forever sings across the islands,
even on summer days, mingling its whispers and soft murmurings with the
hum of the distant tide-races. But while they wondered, Mr. Rogers's
figure grew vague and amorphous in a cloud of fog that drifted past him
into the passage. The light in his lantern had turned to a weak flame
of yellow, and seemed on the point of dying out.
"Ahoy, there! Is that Mr. Rogers?" called a thin voice out of the
night.
"Ahoy! Mr. Rogers, it is. What's wrong?"
"Thank God I've found you!" The voice sounded suddenly quite close at
hand, and a man blundered against the doorstep.
"Eh?"--the others saw Mr. Rogers give back in astonishment--"The Lord
Proprietor?"
"Safe and sound, too, by Heaven's mercy," said the Lord Proprietor,
plucking off his peaked cap and shaking the water from it. He carried a
lantern, and his jacket and loose trousers of yellow oilskin shone with
the wet like a suit of mail. "All the way from Inniscaw I've come, in
the gig. Peter Hicks and old Abe pulled me, and the Lord knows where we
made land or what has become of them. Man, there's a vessel ashore--a
liner, they say! Didn't you hear the gun a minute since?"
"Yes, yes; but where is she?"
"That's more than I know. Somewhere among the Off Islands; on the
Terrier, maybe, or the Hell-meadows. All I can tell you is that old Abe
brought the news to the Priory, almost three hours ago: his son-in-law,
young Ashbran, had seen her in a lift of the fog--a powerful steamship
with two funnels and a broad white band upon each. She hadn't struck
when he saw her; but she was nosing into an infernal mess of rocks, and
the light closing down fast. I didn't see Ashbran himself; Abe believed
he had put across to warn your men. But as the old man couldn't swear
to it I told him to get out the gig and fetch Peter Hicks, and so we
started."
"I'm wondering why those men of mine haven't brought me warning.
Ashbran can't have reached them."
"He started late, belike, and lost his way in the fog; or it's even
possible--though you won't believe it--that your men started to find
you and have lost themselves. My good sir, you never knew such a fog!"
"Yet I left word with the chief boatman," mused Mr. Rogers. "He knows
perfectly well where I am."
"Does he?" said the Lord Proprietor. "Then it's more than I do. What
house is this?"
"Why, Fossell's. Good Lord! didn't you know?"
"My dear Sir Cæsar--" Mr. Fossel stepped forward solicitously.
"Eh? So it is.... Good evening, Mr. Fossell! That picture of the
Waterloo Banquet seemed familiar, somehow." The Lord Proprietor nodded
towards a framed engraving on the wall. "Yes, to be sure--and
Landseer's 'Twa Dogs.' But this is worse than the Arabian Nights! We
must have missed the harbour by miles!"
"You came ashore at Cam Point, most probably," Mr. Fossell suggested.
"The tide sets that way, and from Cam Point it is but a step."
"A step, is it? Man, I've been wandering in blank darkness for a full
hour. Twice I've found myself on the edge of a cliff. I've followed
walls only to be led into open fields. I've struck across open fields,
only to tumble against troughs, midden heaps, pig-styes. I walked
straight up against this house, supposing myself somewhere near the
batteries on Garrison Hill--though how I had managed to miss the town
was more than I could explain."
"The wonder is you ever fetched across from Inniscaw."
"It's my belief we had never done it, but for the tide. The night was
black as your hat when we started, but fairly clear. We kept sight of
the lamp on the pier-head until half-way across. Then the fog came
down; and then----!"
"Well, it's good hard causeway between this and St. Hugh's," said Mr.
Rogers. "We can't miss it. Afterwards.... However, you'll step along
with me to the Guard-house, Sir Cæsar, and as soon as the weather lifts
at all one of my men shall put you back to Inniscaw."
"On the contrary, my good sir, I go with you."
Mr. Rogers looked at him, as he buttoned up his pea-jacket.
"We won't argue it here," he said. "You don't guess what it means,
though, searching for a wreck among the Off Islands on a night like
this. Not to mention that there's a sea running...."
And yet, apart from the fog, there was nothing in the weather to
suggest shipwreck and horrors. For a fortnight the Islands had lain
steeped in the sunshine of Indian summer; a fortnight of still starry
nights and days almost without a cloud. As a rule, such weather breaks
up in a gale, of which the glass gives timely warning. But the mercury
in Mr. Fossell's barometer indicated no depression--or the merest
trifle. The drenched night air was warm: to Miss Gabriel, inhaling it
in the passage by the drawing-room door, it seemed to be laden with the
scents of summer, and Miss Gabriel had not lived all her life in
Garland Town without learning the subtle aromas of the wind, to
distinguish those that were harmless or beneficent from those that
warned, those that threatened, those that were morose, savage,
malignant, those that piped a note of madness and meant a hurricane.
Nor did the fog in itself appear to her very formidable. To be sure,
she had never known a thicker one; but the Lord Proprietor (saving his
presence) had probably exaggerated its terror. He was--let this excuse
be made for him--a landsman, comparatively new to the Islands.
Probably Mr. Fossell and Mr. Pope and the Vicar took the same view. The
news of the wreck had excited them, and they were offering to accompany
Sir Cæsar and Mr. Rogers to St. Hugh's Town, on the chance of some
information.
"And we had best go with them, my dear," suggested Miss Gabriel to Mrs.
Pope. (Their houses stood side by side and contiguous, on a gentle rise
at the foot of Garrison Hill, where the peninsular of New Town broadens
out and New Town itself melts into St. Hugh's.)
Mrs. Fossel begged them to wait and keep her company until the
gentlemen returned. "It is impossible," she urged as an inducement,
"that Selina can go on making this noise forever."
But Miss Gabriel had taken her decision, and from a decision Miss
Gabriel was not easily turned.
"My dear," said she, reaching for her cloak, "the gentlemen may not
return until goodness knows when, and I have a prejudice against late
hours."
They started in a body. The fog, to be sure, was a deal worse than ever
Miss Gabriel could have credited. Still, the gentlemen using their
lanterns and tapping to right and left with their sticks, they found
the hard causeway, and blundered along it towards St. Hugh's, the
ladies with their shawls drawn over their heads and their heads held
down against the drifting wall of moisture.
They had made their way thus for about four hundred yards--that is to
say, about a third of the length of the causeway--when suddenly the fog
ahead of them became luminous, and they perceived torches waving.
"Mr. Rogers! Is that Mr. Rogers?" called a voice.
"Ay, ay, men!" Mr. Rogers hailed in answer, recognising his coastguard.
"I am coming--fast as I can," he added, having at that moment run into
a wall.
"A wreck, sir!"
"Ay! Where is it?"
"Somewhere beyond St. Ann's, sir, as we make it--out towards the Monk.
There was a gun fired, and Dick, here, thinks as he saw the lighthouse
send up a signal; but lights there's none that the rest of us can make
out----"
"Hark!"
Again the fog shook with the concussion of a gun.
"Due west, as I make it out," said Mr. Rogers. "Are the boats ready?"
"Aye, sir; the jolly-boat manned and off, and the gig launched and
lying by the slip."
"Then run, men!"
"Why, they've left us!" gasped Mrs. Pope, as the glare of the torches
melted into the fog.
"It doesn't matter," Miss Gabriel assured her bravely. "We have only to
keep straight on."
CHAPTER V
THE S.S. MILO
Major Vigoureux fell asleep almost as soon as his head touched the
pillow. He owed this habit originally to a clear conscience, and
although (as the reader knows) his conscience was no longer quite
clear, the habit had not forsaken him.
He dreamed that he was presenting himself at Mr. Fossell's bank, and
giving Mr. Fossell across the counter a number of plausible reasons why
his pay should be handed to him as usual. He knew all the while that
his arguments were sophistical and radically unsound; but he trusted
that he was making them cogent. (Why is it that in dreams we feel no
remorse for our sins, but only a terror lest we be found out? I cannot
tell; but the best men and women of my acquaintance agree that it is
so.) Mr. Fossell preserved an impassive, inscrutable face; but every
time the Commandant ventured a new argument Mr. Fossell's high, bald
head twinkled and suddenly changed colour like a chameleon. It was
green, it was violet, it was bathed in a soft roseate glow like an
Alpine peak at sunset; and still while he argued the Commandant was
forced to dodge his body about lest Mr. Fossell should catch sight of a
mirror fixed in the opposite wall, and perceive how strangely his scalp
was behaving. Finally, Mr. Fossell turned as if convinced, walked away
to an inner room, and came back bearing a bag of money, round and
distended--so tightly distended, indeed, that the Commandant called out
to him to be careful of the contents. But the cry came a moment too
late; for the bag, as it touched the counter, exploded with a dull
report, collapsed, and flattened itself out into a playing-card--the
queen of hearts!
At this point the Commandant excusably found himself awake, and sat up
blinking at Sergeant Archelaus, who stood in a haze of fog by his
bedside with a lighted candle.
"You heard it?" asked Sergeant Archelaus.
"Heard it?" echoed the Commandant, trembling, not yet in full
possession of his senses. "Of course, I heard it. The Bank--." Here he
checked himself and rubbed his eyes.
"You're dreaming; that's what's the matter with you," said Sergeant
Archelaus, using the familiarity of an old servant. "There's a ship on
the rocks."
"A ship? Where?"
The Sergeant, candle in hand, stepped to the casement, which the
Commandant, following his custom, had opened a little way before
getting into bed.
"Lord knows where she be by this time, if St. Ann's pilots ha'n't found
her. The gun sounded from west'ard, down by the Monk."
"Fog, is it?" asked the Commandant, staring about him and remembering.
"Fog it is," answered Sergeant Archelaus, and added, "Poor souls!"
"Thick?" By this time the Commandant had flung back the bed-clothes and
was thrusting his feet into his worn slippers.
"I never seen a thicker in my born days."
"If we had a gun----"
"Ah--if," agreed Sergeant Archelaus, curtly, and turning, let his voice
rise in a sudden passion. "Why did I wake ye? Set it down to habit.
I've known the time when the sound of a gun would have fetched forty
men out of the Barracks to save life or to take it; and a gun within
thirty seconds to alarm all the Islands. But we! What's the use of us?"
"Get on your coat," said the Commandant, sharply, putting on his
trousers. "Get on your coat and run to the bell--that is, if
Treacher----"
But at this moment the muffled note of a bell began to sound through
the fog, vindicating Treacher's vigilance. Treacher, however, was not
the ringer. The Commandant had scarcely slipped on his fatigue jacket,
and begun to search in the wardrobe for his overcoat, when Treacher's
voice sounded up the staircase, demanding to know if the garrison was
awake.
"Awake?" called back Archelaus. "Of course we be, and coming before you
can sound th' alarm. Reach down the bugle, man--from the rock behind
th' door, there--and sound it."
Treacher sounded. He was out of breath, and the two high notes quavered
broken-windedly; but the Commandant's chest swelled with something of
old pride. The alarm would reach the town, and the town would know that
the garrison had not been caught napping. He snatched at the candle
from the candlestick in Sergeant Archelaus' hand and rammed it into the
socket of a horn lantern he had unhooked from the cupboard.
"Come along, men! Keep sounding, Treacher--keep sounding!"
Even so he had called once--a many years ago--in the trenches under the
Redan. Treacher sounded obediently, and down the hill all three
staggered--past the garrison gates, with a call to Mrs. Treacher to
pull for all she was worth--and still forward among the ruts and loose
stones, all so familiar that relying on tread alone (as in fact they
did) they could not miss their way. Below them, along the quay, and on
the causeway at the head of it--voices were calling and lights moving;
but the fog reduced the shouts to a twitter, as of birds, and the
torches and lantern to mere glow-worm sparks. The coastguards were
embarking and the Lord Proprietor, just arrived upon the scene, was
running about--as Sergeant Archelaus put it afterwards, "like a paper
man in a cyclone"--calling out the names of volunteers for the
lifeboat.
If Sergeant Archelaus ever afterwards spoke disparagingly of the Lord
Proprietor's activities that night, something may be forgiven him; as
something may be forgiven the Lord Proprietor--for on such occasions
men blurt out what rises to their lips.
The fog had found its way into Treacher's bugle before our three heroes
reached the quay; but he continued to blow his best; and there, at the
end of the causeway, Sir Cæsar ran into them--ran straight into the
Commandant, almost knocking out his breath--calling, as he ran, for
someone to take bow oar in the lifeboat.
"Will I do?" asked Sergeant Archelaus, coolly, as became a soldier.
"You?" The Lord Proprietor thrust his torch close. "Oh, get out of my
way--this is work to-night, work for men! And you"--catching sight of
the Commandant--"how much do you think you are helping us with this
tom-fool noise?"
The Commandant drew himself erect, but before he could answer, the Lord
Proprietor had gone his way, waving his torch and still shouting for
someone to man the bow thwart.
There was a slow pause.
"Can you get to our boat, Archelaus?" asked the Commandant. The two
sergeants heard his voice drag on the question. They could not see his
face.
"She's afloat, sir," answered Sergeant Archelaus.
"Find the frap then, and pull her in."
"Is it our boat you're meaning, sir?" asked Archelaus, hesitating.
"Certainly."
"There's a certain amount of sea running, sir, out beyond the point."
"I observed as much this evening."
"Very good, sir." Something in the Commandant's voice forbade further
argument.
They were afloat almost as soon as the coastguard, and a full five
minutes before the life-boat. Sergeant Archelaus pulled stroke, and
Sergeant Treacher bow. The Commandant steered, his lantern and pocket
compass beside him in the stern sheets.
The boat--she had once been a yacht's cutter--measured sixteen feet
over all. She was fitted with a small centre-plate, and carried a lug
sail (but this they left behind; it was in store, and would have been
worse than useless). They pulled out into a fog so thick that only by
intervals could the Commandant catch sight of Sergeant Treacher's face,
and Sergeant Treacher's eyebrows and sandy moustache glistering with
beads of mist.
They had left the pier but a short two hundred strokes behind them when
the little tug belonging to the Islands came panting out of the harbour
with the lifeboat in tow, and passed on, blowing her whistle, to
overtake and pick up the coastguard galley. So unexpectedly her lights
sprang upon them, and so close astern that Treacher, with a sharp cry
of warning--for the Commandant's gaze was fastened forward--had barely
time to jerk the boat's head round and avoid being cut down. Then,
dropping his paddle, he made a grab at the painter and flung it,
calling out to the lifeboat's crew to catch and make fast. But either
he was a moment too late in flinging, or the lifeboatmen, themselves
bawling instructions to the tug's crew, were preoccupied and did not
hear. The rope struck against something--the lifeboat's gunwale
doubtless--but no one caught it, and next moment the tug had slipped
away into darkness and into a silence which swallowed up the shouts and
the throb of her engines as though she had dropped into a pit.
"Darn your skin, Sam Treacher!" swore Sergeant Archelaus. "There goes a
couple of hours' pulling you might have saved us!"
"Then why couldn't you have given warning?" retorted Treacher. "Pretty
pair of eyes you keep in that old head of yours!"
"Be quiet, you two!" the Commandant ordered. "They'd have caught the
painter if they wanted us."
He fell silent, bending his head to study the compass in the lantern's
ray. "Not wanted"--"not wanted"--the paddles took up the burden and
beat it into a sort of tune to the creak of the thole-pins. As a young
officer he had started with high notions of duty; nor, looking back on
the wasted years could he tax himself that he had ever declined its
call; only the call which in youth had always carried a promise with
it, definitely clear and shining, of enterprise and reward, of
adventure, achievement, fame, had sunk by degrees to a dull repetition
calling him from sleep to perform the spiritless daily round. He did
not sigh that the definite vision had faded; it happened so, may be, to
most men, though not to all. To most men, it might be, their fate
played the crimp; they followed the marsh-fires out into just such a
blind waste as this through which he and his men were groping--darkness
above and below; darkness before, behind, to right, to left; darkness
of birth, of death, and only the palpable fog between. He did not sigh
for this. What irked him was the thought that while he had followed the
mill-round of duty, strength had been ebbing away and had left him
useless.
Yes, there lay the sting. Twenty years ago how like a schoolboy he
would have dashed into this fog, careless of consequence, eager only to
find where men needed his help! He might have found, or missed; but
twenty years ago men would have hailed his will to help. Now he was
useless, negligible. In an ordinary way these neighbours of his might
disguise their knowledge, through politeness or pity; but at a crisis
like this the truth came out. The Lord Proprietor had treated him as a
pantaloon, and these lifeboatmen--so little they valued him--could not
be at the pains of catching a rope.
He steered, as nearly as he could calculate, west-by-south, allowing at
a guess for the set of the tide. The wall of fog, which let pass no
true sound, itself seemed full of voices--hissing of spent waves,
sucking of water under weed-covered ledges, little puffs and moanings
of the wind. He had reckoned that he was bending around shore to the
south of the roadstead, heading gradually for St. Lide's Sound and
giving the rocks on his port hand a wide berth; when of a sudden
Archelaus called out, and he spied a grey line of breaking
water--luckily the sea was full of briming to-night--at the base of the
fog, quite close at hand. It scared them so that they headed off almost
at right angles. This adventure not only proved his reckoning to be
wrong, but complicated it hopelessly.
They were in open water again, still making--or at any rate the boat so
pointed--west-by-south. The short scare had shaken him out of his
brooding thoughts. He saw now, minute after minute, but the sea beyond
the edge of the boat's gunwale, heaving up and sliding astern as it
caught the shine of the lantern. The lantern shone also against the
knees of Archelaus, and lit up the check-board pattern of the
eleemosynary trousers. It was a provocative pattern, but the Commandant
heeded it not....
He looked up from Sergeant Archelaus' knees to Sergeant Archelaus'
face, and past it to the face of Sergeant Treacher, now a little more
distinct. The two men had been pulling for an hour, and the Commandant
saw that they were tired--tired and very old. He recognised it at first
with a touch of anger. He felt an instant's impulse to curse and bid
them row harder. But on the instant came gentle understanding, and
restrained him.
"Archelaus," he said, "you are the older; take the tiller here and give
me the oar for a spell."
Archelaus was not unwilling. Besides, was it not his commanding officer
who gave the order? He relinquished his paddle with a grunt of
exhaustion, and the Commandant stood up to take it, laying both hands
on it while Archelaus stumbled past to the stern-sheets.... And at that
moment a miracle befell.
The fog must have been thinning. The Commandant, standing with both
hands on the paddle and his face to the bows, saw or felt it part
suddenly, and through the parting lights shone and voices sounded, with
the heavy throb of a vessel's screw.
Clank! clank! and it was on them, almost before Sergeant Archelaus
could let out a cry--the stem, the grey-painted bows of a vast
steamship, ghostly, towering up into night. A bell rang. High on the
bridge--but the bridge soared into heaven--a pilot's voice called out
in the Island tongue. As the great bows glided by, missing the boat by
a few yards, the three men stared aloft until they had almost cricked
their necks; and aloft there, as Archelaus raised his lantern, the
Commandant read the vessel's name--"Milo"--glimmering in tall gilt
letters.
Faces looked down from her rail, faces from the shadow of the
hurricane' deck; a line of faces and all looking down upon the little
Island tug that had fallen alongside and drifted close under the
liner's flank, a short way abaft her red port-light. A murmur of talk
went with the faces, as it were a stream rippling by, and mingled with
the splash of water pouring over-side from the pumps. It sounded
cheerfully, and from the voices on board the tug and in the lifeboat
and galley towing astern our Commandant gathered that the danger was
over. Again Sergeant Treacher hailed and flung a rope; this time the
lifeboat's crew caught it and made fast.
"Reub Hicks is aboard," said a voice, naming one of the St. Ann's
pilots. "He picked her up not twenty furlongs from Hell-deeps after she
had missed the Little Meadows by the skin of her teeth."
"How in the name of good Providence she got near enough to miss it,
being where she was, is the marvel to me," said another.
"She did, anyway," said the coxswain; "for Reub himself called down the
news to me in so many words."
The Commandant gazed up at the gray shadow reaching aloft into
darkness. He knew those outer reefs of which the men spoke. A touch of
them would have split the plates of this tall fabric like a house of
cards. He and Archelaus had witnessed one such wreck, eight years ago;
had waited in broad daylight, helpless, resting on their oars, unable
to approach within a cable's length of the rocks, upon which in ten
minutes a steel-built five-master, of 1,200 tons, had melted to nothing
before their eyes--"the rivets," as Archelaus put it, "flying out of
her like shirt buttons." But that had happened on one of the outermost
reefs, beyond the Off Islands, far down by the Monk Light. How the
_Milo_, no matter from what quarter approaching, had threaded her way
by the Hell-deeps was to him a mystery of mysteries. She was groping it
yet, her engines working dead slow; but the fog during the past hour
had sensibly lightened and Reub Hicks held open water between him and
the Roads, though he still kept the lead going. At the entrance of the
Roads he sent the tug forward to help the steerage, and so brought her
in and rounded her up as accurately as though she had been a little
schooner of two hundred tons.
As the great anchor dropped, and amid the deafening rattle of its chain
in the hawse-pipe, the crew astern cast off and drew their boats
alongside, eager to swarm aboard and hear news of the miracle. From his
galley Mr. Rogers shouted up to the captain to lower his ladder. He and
his chief boatman mounted first, with a little man named Pengelly, a
custom's official, who happened to make one of the lifeboat's crew--for
the _Milo_ had come from foreign, and thus a show was made of complying
with the Queen's regulations. But the whole crowd trooped up close at
their heels, and with the crowd clambered Sergeant Archelaus and
Sergeant Treacher.
The Commandant had given them permission. He would remain below, he
said, and look after the boat, awaiting their report.
The crowd passed up and dispersed itself about the deck, congratulating
all comers, and excitedly plying them with questions. The Islanders are
a child-like race, and from his post at the foot of the deserted
accommodation ladder the Commandant could hear them laughing,
exclaiming, chattering with the passengers in high-pitched voices.
He stood with his boat-hook, holding on by the grating of the ladder's
lowest step, and stared at the gray wall-sides of the liner. Yes, the
ship was solid, and yet he could not believe but that she belonged to a
dream; so mysteriously, against all chances, was she here, out of the
deep and the night.
Someone had lashed a lantern at the head of the ladder. Lifting his
eyes to it in the foggy darkness, the Commandant saw a solitary figure
standing there in the gangway and looking down on him--a woman.
She lifted a hand as if to enjoin silence, and came swiftly down a step
or two in the shadow of the vessel's side.
"You are Major Vigoureux?" she asked in a quick whisper, leaning
forward over him.
"At your service, madam," he stammered, taken fairly aback.
"Ah! I am glad of that!" She ran down the remaining steps and set her
foot lightly on the boat's gunwale. "You will row me ashore?"
"If you wish it, madam." He was more puzzled than ever. He saw that she
wore a dark cloak of fur and was bare-headed. She spoke in a sort of
musical whisper. Her face he could not see. "In a minute or two my
men----"
"We will not wait for your men," she said, quietly, seating herself in
the stern sheets. "They can easily be put ashore--can they not?--in one
of the other boats."
From under her fur cloak she reached out an arm--a bare arm with two
jewelled bracelets--and took the tiller. "I can steer you to the quay,"
she said, and leaning forward in the light of Sergeant Archelaus'
lantern, she lifted her eyes to the Commandant.
The Commandant pushed off, shipped the paddles into the thole pins, and
began to row, as in a dream.
CHAPTER VI
HOW VASHTI CAME TO THE ISLANDS
"You do not remember me, Major Vigoureux?"
The Commandant looked at her, across the lantern's ray. Something in
her voice, vibrating like the rich, full note of a bell, touched his
memory ... but only to elude it.
The face that challenged him was not girlish; the face, rather, of a
beautiful woman of thirty; its shape a short oval, with a slight
squareness at the point of the jaw to balance the broad forehead over
which her hair (damp now, but rippled with a natural wave, defying the
fog) lay parted in two heavy bands--the brow of a goddess. Her eyes,
too, would have become a goddess, though just now they condescended to
be merry.
Tall she was, for certain, and commanding. Her cloak hid the lines of
her body, whether they were thin or ample; but, where the collar
opened, her throat showed like a pillar, carrying her chin upon a truly
noble poise. It was inconceivable (the Commandant said to himself) that
he had met this woman before and forgotten her.
He came back to her eyes. They challenged him fearlessly. He could not
have described their colour; but he saw amusement lurking deep in their
glooms while she waited.
"I am sorry. It is unpardonable in me, of course----"
"And I, on the contrary, am glad," she interrupted, with a laugh that
reminded him of the liquid chuckle in a thrush's song, or of water
swirling down a deep pool; "for it tells me I have grown out of
recognition, and that is just what I wanted."
This puzzled him, and he frowned a little.
"You know the Islands?" he asked. "This is not your first visit?"
"You shall judge if in this darkness I steer you straight for St.
Lide's Quay; and I take you to witness--look over your shoulder--there
is no lamp on the quay-head to guide me, or at least none visible." She
laughed again, but on the instant grew serious. "Yes," she added, "I
can find my way among the Islands, I thank God." And this puzzled him
yet more.
"You know the Islands; you are glad to return to them?"
She nodded.
"Yet you do not wish to be recognised?"
She nodded again. "I came, you see, sooner than I intended. The _Milo_
was clean out of her course."
"That goes without saying," said he, gravely.
"She was bound for Plymouth. So, you see, this little misadventure has
shortened my journey by days." She paused. "No; I ought not to speak of
it flippantly. I shall be very thankful in my prayers to-night ... all
those women and children...."
Again she paused.
"Is my hand trembling?" she asked, lifting it and laying it again on
the tiller, where it rested firm as a rock. Only the jewels quivered on
her rings and bracelets, and their beauty, arresting the Commandant's
gaze, held him silent.
"To be frank with you," she went on, "I left the ship in a hurry,
because I was afraid of being thanked. I don't like publicity--much;
and just now it would have spoiled everything." This explanation
enlightened the Commandant not at all. "Besides," she added with a
practical air, "I left a note with my maid, to be given to the captain;
so he won't imagine that I've tumbled overboard; and she can send my
boxes ashore to-morrow, if you will be kind enough to fetch them before
the _Milo_ weighs."
"But, meanwhile?" he hazarded.
"Oh, meanwhile, I must manage somehow for the night. I slipped a few
things into my hand-bag here." She drew her fur cloak a little aside,
and displayed it--a small satchel hanging from her waist by a silver
chain. The Commandant had a glimpse at the same moment of a skirt of
rose-coloured silk, brocaded in a pattern of silver.
"And when we land," he asked, "where am I to take you?"
"I am in your hands."
He stared at her, dismayed. "But you have friends?"
"None who would remember me; not a soul, at least, in St. Lide's."
"There is the Plume of Feathers Inn, to be sure----"
"If you recommend it," she said, demurely, as he hesitated.
He almost lost his temper. "Recommend it? Of course I don't."
"Well, from what I remember of the Plume of Feathers--unless it has
altered----"
"Wouldn't it be wiser to turn back?" he suggested, desperately, staring
into the fog, in which the lights of the _Milo_ had long since
disappeared.
"What? When we have this moment opened the quay-light? There!... didn't
I promise you that I knew my way among the Islands?"
In the basin of the harbour the fog lay thicker than in the roads, and
they had scarcely made sure that this was indeed the quay-light before
their boat grated against the landing-steps of the quay itself. The
Commandant, after he had shipped his oars and checked the way on her,
pressing both hands against the dripping wall, put up one of them and
passed the back of it slowly across his forehead. He was considering;
and, while he considered, his companion stepped lightly ashore.
"Forgive me," he pleaded, recollecting himself. "At least, I should
have offered you my hand."
"Thank you, I did not need it."
"But listen, please," he protested, scrambling out upon the steps,
painter in hand, and groping for a ring-bolt. "You cannot possibly stay
the night at the Plume of Feathers----"
He heard her laugh, as he stooped, having found the ring, to make fast
the rope.
"Commandant, have you ever travelled across Wyoming--in winter, in a
waggon? Very well, then; I have."
"Surely not in the clothes you are wearing?" The Commandant, as any one
in the Council of Twelve could tell you, was no debater; yet sometimes
he had been known to triumph even in debate, by sheer simplicity. "The
only course that I can see," he continued, "is to seek some private
house, and throw ourselves upon the--er--"
"Front door?" she suggested, mischievously.
"--hospitality--upon the hospitality of the inmates. To them, of
course, I can explain the situation----"
"Can you?"
The Commandant stood for a moment peering at her, and rubbing the back
of his head--a trick of his in perplexity. "Upon my word, now you come
to mention it," he confessed, "I don't know that I can."
"Whom shall we try first? Miss Gabriel?" ("Now, how in the world,"
wondered the Commandant, "does she know anything of Miss Gabriel?")
"Very well; we go together to Alma Cottage--she still lives at Alma
Cottage?--and knock. The hour is two in the morning, or thereabouts.
Miss Gabriel, overcoming her first fear of robbery or murder, will
parley with us from her bedroom window. To her you introduce me, by the
light of your lantern; a strange female in an evening frock; a female
grossly overladen with jewels (that, I think, would be Miss Gabriel's
way of putting it), but without a portmanteau."
"We might try the Popes, next door," suggested the Commandant
flinching. "Mr. Pope is a man of the world."
"Is he?" she asked, after a pause, in which he felt that she struggled
with some inward mirth. "But we cannot so describe Mrs. Pope, can we?
Also we cannot knock up Mr. and Mrs. Pope without disturbing Miss
Gabriel next door."
"Nor, for that matter, can we knock up Miss Gabriel without disturbing
Mr. and Mrs. Pope."
"Quite so; we may reckon that all three will be listening. Therefore,
when Mr. Pope or Miss Gabriel (as the case may be) begins by demanding
my name--which, by an oversight, you have forgotten to ask----"
"Pardon me," said the Commandant, simply, "I did not forget. I waited,
supposing that if you wished me to know it, you would tell me."
"Ah!" she drew close to him, with a happy exclamation. "Then I was not
mistaken: You are the man I have counted to find.... And you are a
brave man, too. But we will not push bravery too far and disturb Miss
Gabriel."
"If you can suggest a better plan----"
"A far better plan. I suggest that you offer me a room to-night at the
garrison."
"My dear madam!" the Commandant gasped.
"It will be far better in every way," she went on composedly; that is,
if you are willing. To begin with, you have rooms and to spare. Next,
there will be no bother in introducing me, except to Mrs. Treacher."
"Ah, to be sure, there is Mrs. Treacher!" the Commandant murmured.
"But, madam, all the rooms in the Castle are unfurnished, ruinous, and
have been ruinous for fifty years. The Treachers occupy the only two in
which it were possible to swing a cat."
"Then we must borrow Mrs. Treacher and take her along to the Barracks
for chaperon. You may leave it to me to persuade her."
Without waiting for his answer she ran lightly up the steps, the heels
of her rose-coloured satin shoes twinkling in the light of the
Commandant's lantern as he blundered after her.
The pavement of the quay had not been laid for satin shoes. Much
traffic had worn the surface into depressions, and these depressions
were fast collecting water from the drenched air. But although the fog
lay almost as thick here as at the foot of the steps, she picked her
way among these pitfalls, avoiding them as though by instinct. Beyond
the quay came a cobbled causeway; and beyond the causeway a narrow
street wound up towards the garrison gate. Past rains, pouring down the
hill, had worn a deep rut along this street, ploughing it here and
there to the native rock, zig-zagging from centre to side of the
roadway and back again obedient to the trend of the slope. But over the
causeway, and up the channelled street she found her footing with the
same confidence, steering far more cleverly than the Commandant, who
followed as in a dream, amazed, oppressed with forebodings. It was all
very well for her to talk lightly of persuading Mrs. Treacher. If she
could, why then she must be possessed of a secret as yet unrevealed to
Mrs. Treacher's husband after thirty-odd years of married life. The
Commandant, too, knew something of Mrs. Treacher ... an obstinate
woman, not to say pig-headed.
Was she a witch--this stranger in silk and jewels who walked in
darkness so confidently up the tortuous unpaved street?--this
apparition who, coming out of the seas and the dumb fog, talked of the
Islands and the Islanders as though she had known them all her life?
As if to prove she was a witch, she paused before the very cottage
which once already to-night had given pause to his steps and to his
thoughts. The fog had been thinning little by little as they mounted
the hill, and at a few paces' distance he recognized the closed door,
daubed over with that same staring paint which your true Islander uses
for choice upon his boat.
"You remember this door?" she asked, pointing to it as he overtook her.
Witch she might be, but why should he give away to her this innocent
small secret?
"Of course I remember it," he answered; "passing it as I do,
half-a-dozen times a day."
"Yes," she said, almost as if speaking to herself; but her voice, for
the first time since their meeting, seemed to be touched with a faint
shade of dejection. "Naturally you would not remember it for any other
reason."
He was silent.
"Yet," she went on, "you really ought to remember that door, Major
Vigoureux, if only for old sake's sake; for it was, I believe, the
first you entered when you came to the Islands. That was in the
year----"
"Never mind the year," interrupted the Commandant, hastily. "I remember
it well. I almost never pass the door without remembering it."
"Ah!" she cried, putting her jewelled hands together, and the
Commandant took it for an exclamation of triumph at her cleverness.
"But other tenants have the house. The man who was master of it is
dead."
"You know everything, it seems to me. Yes; he was a widower, and late
that evening at the fishing. It was an evening when he should not have
been late; for the door stood open for him, and his daughters--he had
two daughters--sat expecting him. It was the open door that drew me to
ask my way." Here he paused.
"Go on, please."
"One of the girls was to leave the Islands next morning for the
mainland, which she had never seen. She told me this. And she sat
reading aloud to her sister, there by the fire."
"Go on."
"That is all. Yes, that is all--except that the book was Shakespeare,
and the girl--" He paused again, staring at her between sudden
enlightenment and stark incredulity. "You--you don't mean to tell me
_you_ were that girl!"
She nodded; and as, forgetting politeness, he held the lantern close to
her face, he saw two large tears brim up, tremble, and hang for a
second before they fell.
"You?" he murmured.
She nodded again. "I am Vashti--Vazzy Cara, they called me, Philip
Cara's daughter. I daresay, though, you never heard my name? No, there
is no reason why you should. And my sister, Ruth----"
"She is married and lives on Saaron Island. But you know this, of
course? You who seem to know everything about us."
"My sister writes me all the news.... So now," she added smiling, "it
is all explained, and there is no mystery about me after all. Are you
so very much disappointed?"
But the Commandant continued to stare. No mystery? That the fisherman's
daughter with the Island lilt in her voice--well he recalled
it!--should have turned into this apparition of furs and jewels?... And
yet the metamorphosis lay not in the furs and jewels, but in her
careless air of command, of reliance upon her power, beauty,
charm--whatever her woman's secret might be; an air of one accustomed
to move in courts, maybe, or to control great audiences, or to live
habitually with lofty thoughts; an air of one, above all, sure of
herself. The poor Commandant had lived the better part of his life in
exile, but by instinct of breeding he recognised this air at once.
Vashti, however, seemed to mistake his astonishment, for she frowned.
"Well?" she asked, a trifle impatiently.
"Your sister never told us," he stammered. "At least--that is to
say----"
"Do you suppose she was ashamed of me?"
"Ashamed?" he echoed, for indeed no such thought had occurred to him.
If ever a man could have taken _honi soit qui mal y pense_ for his
motto, it was our Commandant.
"Ah, to be sure!" she said slowly, but less in indignation (it seemed)
than in disappointment with him. "Naturally that would be the
explanation to occur to you, living so long in such a place."
She turned on her heel, half contemptuously, and resumed her way,
walking with a yet quicker step than before. The Commandant, aware that
he had offended, but not in the least understanding how, toiled after
her up the steep incline to the garrison gate.
They reached the door of the Barracks. To his surprise it was standing
open, and from behind the ragged blind of his sitting-room--to the left
of the entrance hall--a light shone feebly out upon the fog. He could
not remember that he had lit the lamp there, nor that he had left the
front door open.
Vashti paused upon the doorstep and turned to him:
"My good sir," she said curtly, "run and fetch Mrs. Treacher to me, for
goodness' sake."
He hesitated, on the point of stepping past her to open the door of the
lighted room. Her manner forbade him, and he stood still, there by the
doorstep, gazing after her a moment as she disappeared into the dark
hall. Then, as he heard the door latch rattle gently, he turned to
hurry in search of Mrs. Treacher.
He had taken but a dozen steps, however, when her light footfall
sounded again close behind him. She, too, had turned and was following
him almost at a run.
"Why didn't you tell me?" she gasped.
He swung up his lantern. Her eyes were wide with a kind of horror; and
yet she seemed to be laughing, or ready to laugh.
"Tell you?" he echoed.
"Oh, but it was unkind!"
"But--but, excuse me--what on earth----"
"Why, that you were entertaining ladies!"
"Ladies!"
She nodded, still round-eyed, reproachful. "Two of them--sitting on
your sofa! And, I think--I rather think--one of them is Miss Gabriel!"
CHAPTER VII
TRIBULATIONS OF MRS. POPE AND MISS GABRIEL
"We have only to keep straight on," said Miss Gabriel.
"Ye-es," said Mrs. Pope, less hardily. "I really think the gentlemen
might have waited for us."
"For aught they know," said Miss Gabriel, "it's a matter of life and
death. And we cannot be more than two hundred yards from our own
gates."
"In my opinion," persisted Mrs. Pope, who was apt to turn peevish when
frightened, "a man's first duty is to look after his own."
"Is it?" snapped Miss Gabriel, herself no coward. "Well, you must argue
that out with Mr. Pope, if you haven't made up your minds about it by
this time. For my part, I never wanted a man to look after me, I thank
the Lord."
"It would have been more gallant, and that you must allow." Mrs. Pope
stuck to her point (which is a capital thing to do in a fog), but only
to let it go abruptly a moment later. "Besides," she added, "my new cap
is no better than a pulp already. I can feel it. Sopping isn't the
word."
"Fiddlestick!" said Miss Gabriel. "You and your cap!" She, herself, was
not frightened, only a little nervous. "If you ask me, it's better you
were thinking of those poor souls out on the rocks yonder. Little
enough they'll be thinking, just now, of such things as caps!"
"Of course," hazarded Mrs. Pope, after they had groped their way
forward for twenty paces or so, "if you are quite certain where we
are----"
"We are among the Islands," said Miss Gabriel, tartly, feeling the
roadway with the edge of her shoe, for her sole had just encountered
turf; "and this is one. My dear Charlotte, if you could refrain from
bumping into me at the precise moment when I am standing on one
leg----"
"How can I help it, in this darkness?" whimpered Mrs. Pope.
"Besides"--with sudden spirit--"if you want to stand on one leg, I
shouldn't have thought this the time or the place."
"T'cht!" said Miss Gabriel, striding forward with gathering confidence;
but at the seventh stride or so a sharp exclamation escaped her, as she
stood groping with both hands into the night.
"What's the matter?"
"It's a wall, I think.... I had almost run against it.... Yes, this
must be the wall of Buttershall's garden."
"Are you sure?"
"Certain. We have been bearing away to the right; people always do in a
fog."
"Then if this really is Buttershall's garden--and I only hope and trust
you are not mistaken--we can bear away from it to the left, on purpose,
and then as likely as not we shall find ourselves going straight,"
reasoned Mrs. Pope, lucidly.
"My dear Charlotte"--Miss Gabriel was within an ace of calling her a
fool--"if this is Buttershall's garden----"
"But a moment ago you were sure of it!"
"And so I am. Very well then; since this is Buttershall's garden, we
have only to hold on by the wall and go forward, and that will take
us----"
But here the wall ended, and the sentence with it.
"Ai-ee!"
"Are you hurt?... I said," asserted Mrs. Pope, desperately, and with
conviction, "that one of us would break a limb before we finished."
"It seems to be--yes, it certainly is--a pump." Miss Gabriel's voice
had begun to shake by this time, but she steadied it. "For the moment
I--I half thought it might be a man."
"I would to heaven it were!" said Mrs. Pope, fervently.
"My dear Charlotte!"
"My dear Elizabeth, I mean it. And, what's more, I wouldn't care who he
was. A pump? What earthly use is a pump? It must be Mumford's then, if
it is a pump."
"It can't be."
"Why not?"
"For the simple reason that Mumford's is on the other side of the
road."
"Then we _are_ on the other side of the road, as I have been
maintaining all along."
"Would you mind walking round it?... Yes, you are right. It is
Mumford's pump, for I have just bruised my wrist against the handle.
Can you find the trough?"
"The astonishing thing to me," announced Mrs. Pope, groping her way
with trepidation, "is that nobody shows a light. I don't like to call
people unfeeling; but really, with folks in distress out at sea, and
the guns firing, I wouldn't have believed such callousness."
They made the circuit of Mumford's pump, and assured themselves--for
what the knowledge was worth--that it really was a pump, and Mumford's.
But this cost them dear, for at the end of the circuit, or rather of a
circuit and a half, they had lost all sense of their compass bearings.
"And after all," Mrs. Pope began afresh, her mind working
sympathetically in a circle, "I don't understand what Mumford's pump is
doing on the wrong side of the road."
"Don't be a ninny, Charlotte! Of course, it's not on the wrong side of
the road."
"But you said it was." (Pause.) "You really did say so, Elizabeth, for
I remember it distinctly." (Another pause, and a sigh.) "For my part, I
never pretended to have what they call the bump of locality."
The poor lady prattled on, more and more querulously, and to the
increasing exasperation of Miss Gabriel, who on the whole believed that
they were making for home, yet could not shake off a haunting suspicion
that they were moving in a direction precisely opposite. Moreover, the
behaviour of Mumford's pump troubled her more than she cared to
confess, even to herself. It stood on the right of the road as you went
towards St. Hugh's; but they had encountered it upon the left.
Therefore, either they had been walking off the road, though in the
right direction, or--terrible thought!--somewhere or somehow they had
turned right about-face, and were walking away from St. Hugh's....
As a matter of fact, they were bending away from the road in a line
which would lead them past the rear of their own back gardens. Their
feet no longer trod the causeway. They were on turf, and, so far as
they could feel it in the darkness, the turf seemed to be mounting in a
fairly stiff slope. Miss Gabriel stooped to feel the grass with the
palm of her hand, and just at that moment her ears caught the faint
note of a bell, some way ahead.
She stood erect, with a little cry of dismay.
"That settles it. We have turned round!"
"Why, what makes you think so?"
"Listen to that bell! Can't you hear it?"
"Of course, I hear it?" Mrs. Pope apparently was nettled by the
question. "But I don't see----"
"The church bell--we are walking straight towards Old Town."
"It don't sound to me like the church bell."
"That's because of the fog. Nothing sounds natural in a fog.... The
Vicar is having it rung to alarm the people in Old Town. I heard him
say this very night that it used to be the custom when a wreck went
ashore.... Besides, what other bell could it be? There is no other
bell."
Mrs. Pope was silent, though unconvinced. She did not suggest the
garrison bell, for even to her scattered intelligence it was a thing
incredible that they should at this moment be rounding the slope of
Garrison Hill, at the back of St. Hugh's.
"Anything might happen in a fog like this; and if I don't wake up to
find myself over the cliffs, it's no thanks"--bitterly--"to them we
might have relied on. But I don't believe it's the church bell, not if
you went on your bended knees."
"Then, what do you say to this?" announced Miss Gabriel, triumphantly.
Mrs. Pope would reserve her opinion until she saw what Miss Gabriel had
hold of.
"Railings," said Miss Gabriel. "We are at the corner of Church Lane,
and here's the railing close alongside of us. Now we have only to keep
by the railing and feel our way--if you'll follow me--and we must find
the churchyard gate. The man ringing the bell will certainly have a
lantern, and will take us home."
"I don't fancy churchyards at this time of night," said Mrs. Pope; "and
what's more, I never did."
"You must make up your mind to one, then; that is, unless you prefer to
wait here till morning."
They advanced, feeling their way by the rails, Mrs. Pope close behind
Miss Gabriel's heels. The bell continued tolling, not far away; yet
somehow after three minute's progress they appeared to be no nearer to
it.
"Church Lane was never so long as all this," asserted Mrs. Pope, coming
to a desperate halt; "and you needn't try to persuade me."
"It does seem a long way," Miss Gabriel conceded; "but no doubt the fog
magnifies things."
"You had the same tale just now, about the church bell. For my part, I
don't believe in your church bell, and--listen!"
"Eh?"
"It has stopped ringing!"
So it had. It was too much, perhaps, to say that Miss Gabriel's blood
ran cold, there in the darkness, as Mrs. Pope clutched and clung to
her; but certainly her heart sunk.
"All the better," she said, bravely, clenching her jaw that her teeth
might not be heard to chatter. "Whoever was ringing the bell will be
returning this way presently, and we can ask his help."
But here inspiration came to Mrs. Pope.
"It's my belief," she said, "we are not in Church Lane at all, but in
the churchyard; and these rails don't belong to Church Lane, but to old
Bonaday's grave."
"My dear Charlotte! When we've been following them for at least two
hundred yards!"
"My dear Elizabeth, that's just it. We've been following round and
round them, and at this rate there's no reason why ever we should stop,
in this world."
"You don't say.... But, after all, there's an easy way of proving if
you are right. You walk to the left, feeling round them, and I'll walk
to the right, and then, if it really is Bonaday's grave, we shall
meet."
"Oh, but I couldn't! Elizabeth, if you leave me--if once I lose hold of
you--I shall die next moment."
"Then there's only one thing to be done. We must stay here and cry out
at the top of our voices, and both together."
"Yes, yes.... Why didn't we think of it before?"
"For," argued Miss Gabriel, "a bell doesn't ring of itself; and if we
can hear the bell, very likely the man who was ringing it can hear us."
"Will you begin, Elizabeth? I declare to you my whole cage of teeth is
loose----"
"Help!" called Miss Gabriel. Her voice, despite herself, quavered a
little at first. "Help! Help!"
"Help--help--help!" chirupped Mrs. Pope, much as an extremely nervous
person seeks to attract the attention of a waiter.
"Louder ... much louder. He-lp!"
"Help--help--he-lp! Oh, Elizabeth, and in a churchyard, too!"
"Louder still.... He-el-lp!"
"Help!... It's like waking the dead...."
"He-el-lp!"
"Hi, there! Who is it, and whatever on earth's the matter?" answered a
voice from somewhere on their right.
"Oh, listen, Elizabeth! Heaven be praised!..."
"Who is it?" sounded the voice again, and a dot of light shone through
the wall of fog.
"Answer him, Elizabeth!"
"Him? It isn't a man's voice, but a woman's ... unless the fog.... Hi,
there! Help! Here are two ladies.... Why, it's--it's Mrs. Treacher!"
For the fog had parted suddenly, and through it, as through a breach in
a wall, stepped Mrs. Treacher with a lantern, which she held up close
to their faces.
"Eh? Mrs. Pope and Miss Gabriel? Well, I declare!"
"Bless you, Mrs. Treacher! But, however came you here?"
"Why not?" asked Mrs. Treacher, after a pause.
"Here, in the churchyard!... You don't tell me you've lost your way,
too?"
"No, I don't," answered Mrs. Treacher, shortly, lifting her lantern.
"Churchyard? What churchyard?"
"We thought.... We were under the impression...." Miss Gabriel's voice
rocked a little before she recovered her self-command. "Would you mind
telling us where we are, and what railings are these?"
"You're on Garrison Hill," said Mrs. Treacher, who disliked Miss
Gabriel. "And you have hold of the rails round the old powder magazine.
But what you're tryin' to do with 'em, and at this hour of night, I'll
leave you to explain."
But here, for the first time since their troubles began, Mrs. Pope came
to her companion's help. She did so by leaning back limply against the
railings and declaring that she, for her part, was going to faint.
Mrs. Treacher caught her as she dropped, and with Miss Gabriel's help
supported her up the slope to the Barracks, less than fifty yards
above.
"The Barracks?" exclaimed Miss Gabriel, halting as Mrs. Treacher's
lantern revealed to her through the fast-thinning fog a portion of the
whitewashed façade. "Oh, but I couldn't--on any account whatever!"
"You'll have to," answered Mrs. Treacher, shortly, "that is, unless
you'd rather have her laid outside on the bare road, and in a dead
faint, too."
Indeed, Mrs. Pope was in a state of collapse that silenced all
scruples. Mrs. Treacher--a powerfully-built woman--caught up the all
but inanimate lady in both arms, and bore her into the passage, nodding
to Miss Gabriel to unhitch from its nail a lamp which hung, backed by a
tin reflector, just within the doorway.
"Unhasp the door to the left, please. We'll rest her down in the
Commandant's parlour. There's a sofa--though he do mostly use to keep
his books and papers upon it." She laid down her burden. "Oh, you
needn't fear to look about you! The men folk be all off to the wreck,
and won't be back till Lord knows when."
Miss Gabriel, however, was not looking about her. Her gaze, following
the ray of the lamp as she held it aloft, travelled across the stooping
shoulders of Mrs. Treacher and fastened itself upon a garment of
gaudily-striped woolwork--her antimacassar--lying across the arm of the
sofa where the Commandant had tossed it impatiently.
"Terribly messy a man always is when left to himself," said Mrs.
Treacher, rising and stepping to a corner cupboard. "If he keeps such a
thing as a drop of brandy on the premises, it'll be here, I reckon."
But the cupboard was empty. For the sternest of reasons the Commandant
had, for two or three years past, denied himself the taste of strong
waters.
Mrs. Treacher passed the back of her hand across the bridge of her
nose. "I'll step over to the Castle," she announced, "for a drop of gin
I keep against Treacher's attacks." (Let not Mrs. Treacher's idiom
frighten the reader. She meant only that her husband suffered from an
internal trouble which need not be specified, and that she kept the gin
by her as a precaution.)
"And there's a quill pen of the Commandant's on the writing-table," she
added; "if you'll burn the feather of it under her nose."
She bustled off. Miss Gabriel stepped to the table, picked up the
quill, and held it over the lamp's flame; but her eyes still questioned
the antimacassar. She was bending close to it when Mrs. Pope emitted a
fluttering sigh and lifted her eyelids feebly.
"You are feeling better, dear?" asked Miss Gabriel, solicitously.
At this moment the latch of the door rattled gently. She looked up in
surprise, for Mrs. Treacher could scarcely have gone and returned in so
short a while.
The door opened. On the threshold stood a vision--a woman clad in
furs--a woman with diamonds flashing on her white throat where the furs
parted.
Miss Gabriel gasped.
The apparition stood for a moment, looked her in the eyes, and was
gone, closing the door softly.
Miss Gabriel tottered, and sank back against the sofa's edge.
CHAPTER VIII
A BRIEF REVENGE
"Ladies?" ejaculated the Commandant. "In my quarters?"
Vashti nodded demurely. "I think you might have told me," she said in a
tone of mild reproach.
"But--my dear young lady----"
"Thank you--"
"Hey?"
"--for calling me young." She reached out a hand, and, taking the
lantern from him, held it high so that the beams fell on her face. "It
is many years since our first meeting, and unhappily we have the date
of it fixed. Give me credit that I reminded you; for I don't mind
confessing that, though it hasn't come to a quarrel yet, my
looking-glass and I are not the friends we were."
Here, had the Commandant been a readier man, he might have answered
with a compliment, and a truthful one. For indeed it was a very
beautiful face that the lantern showed him, and--here was the strange
part of the business--it had been growing younger since she stepped off
the ship, and somehow it must have contrived, in spite of the darkness,
to convey a hint of its rejuvenescence, for the word "young" had
slipped from him quite involuntarily.
But, after all, there is nothing so subtle as simplicity, and, after
all, the Commandant managed to imply that she must be a witch.
"Then, my dear young lady," he replied, "since you have spirited these
females into my quarters, I can only ask you to go and spirit them away
again."
She shook her head.
"What! You won't?... Very well, then, I must deal with them, while you
go off with the lantern and search for Mrs. Treacher."
"You are a brave man," said she; "and--and I think--by the look of
them--you are going to have great fun."
The Commandant stood for a moment rubbing his chin and staring after
the lantern, as it vanished in the fog. With a shake of the shoulders
he pulled himself together, marched into the Barracks, and boldly
opened the door.
"Miss Gabriel!"
"Major Vigoureux!"
"Certainly, ma'am--these being my own quarters, unless--" He paused and
gazed around, as if to make sure that his eyes were not deceiving him.
"Yes, yes--and at this time of night. As I was just saying to Charlotte
here, 'Think what a terrible construction one might put on it!'"
The Commandant lifted his eyebrows. ("I behaved like a brute," he
confessed afterwards, "but the woman, a few hours before, had shown no
mercy to me.") "Indeed, ma'am?" said he. "A construction? Then you must
invent one for me, please, since I can think of none."
"We have had the most terrible experience, sir--the most terrible
fright! You have seen Mrs. Treacher?"
"Has anything happened to Mrs. Treacher?"
"No--but it all came about through the fog----"
"--and my husband deserting me," put in Mrs. Pope.
The Commandant passed a hand across his brow. The gesture seemed to
express perplexity; in truth it covered amusement and a kind of fearful
joy in his newly-found talent for dissimulation.
"My dear Mrs. Pope," he answered, his voice faltering a little, "You
don't mean to tell me that your excellent husband----"
"Of course she doesn't," snapped Miss Gabriel. "She means to say that
the gentlemen were escorting us home, but, meeting the coastguard with
the news of this terrible wreck----"
"A wreck, ma'am?"
"Why, God bless the man! Don't you know? Haven't you heard the guns
going?... But of course you have. Mrs. Treacher told me you were down
helping with the boats--you and her husband and Archelaus, though what
help you three supposed yourselves capable of giving," wound up Miss
Gabriel, reverting for a moment to her customary manner, "I don't
pretend to guess."
"As for that," the Commandant answered gravely, "I am happy to tell you
there has been no wreck. True, a vessel in distress--a large liner--had
found herself among the Hell-deeps, of all abominably awkward places.
But by the mercy of Heaven she managed to extricate herself, and has
dropped anchor, not half an hour ago, in the Roads."
Miss Gabriel stared. "The Hell-deeps ... and at anchor in the Roads?"
she repeated stupidly. "Oh, will someone kindly tell me whether I am
standing on my head or my heels! A large liner?--the thing's
impossible! And in a fog that thick you couldn't see your hand before
your face!"
"Are you quite sure, ladies," asked the Commandant, still gravely,
"that you are not exaggerating the thickness of the fog, somewhat?"
"What?" Miss Gabriel took him up, like an echo. "When we started for
home and found we were half-way up Garrison Hill, and all the time
convinced we were at Old Town, in the churchyard!"
The Commandant shook his head; and it must be conceded that he had some
excuse.
"But why in the churchyard?" he asked, gently.
"Because of the bell. If it comes to that"--Miss Gabriel threw herself
desperately on the offensive--"how do you account for the woman we saw
here, just now?"
"I beg your pardon? A--a woman, did you say?" (Oh, Major Vigoureux!)
"Yes, sir--a woman; a bedizened woman."
"My dear Elizabeth," pleaded Mrs. Pope feebly, "are we quite sure that
we saw her?--that it wasn't a--a sort of mistake? It certainly
seemed--for a moment---- But really, you know, there is no one in the
Islands----"
"My dear Charlotte, didn't we see her with our own eyes?"
Mrs. Pope sighed. "It seems to me I have seen such a number of
things--of incredible things--to-night."
"You are sure it wasn't Mrs. Treacher?" suggested the Commandant,
wickedly.
"Mrs. Treacher! Mrs. Trea---- Does Mrs. Treacher go about in silks and
furs and low bodices with a thousand pounds' worth of diamonds on her
abandoned neck?"
"Certainly not to my knowledge. But," said the Commandant, turning, as
the door opened, "you had better ask her for yourself."
Now, it may be that Mrs. Treacher had also allowed Vashti to bewitch
her. At any rate, she cordially hated Miss Gabriel, and she took, then
and there, what she herself called afterwards, a strong line.
"What are they wanting to know now?" she demanded, addressing the
Commandant.
"Miss Gabriel wants to know"--he answered, in a husky voice, while he
pretended to trim the lamp--"if you go about in silks and furs."
"No, I don't," replied Mrs. Treacher, setting down the bottle of gin.
"And what's more, I don't go a-sheevoing it around Garrison Hill in the
small hours, and a-holding on to railings, and a-clammering for strong
drink."
"That will do, Mrs. Treacher," interposed her master, suddenly reduced
to contrition at the sight of Miss Gabriel, who stood speechless,
opening and shutting her mouth like a fish. "The ladies have lost their
way in the fog, and were, on the whole, extremely fortunate to reach
here without accident. They will agree, I daresay, that the sooner I
escort them home the better. Fetch me a lantern, if you please."
"It--it is extremely good of you," stammered Miss Gabriel.
"My dear madam!" he protested, with a good-natured smile.
Miss Gabriel did not respond to it. But, though bitterly angry, for the
moment she was cowed, and she made no further reference to the
mysterious lady.
She declined the Commandant's arm. Mrs. Pope, however, took it almost
eagerly, and on the way down the hill he obtained from her a voluble if
somewhat incoherent account of the night's adventures. He did his best
now to make light of them. Accidents even more extraordinary had
happened in fogs before now. He related how two companies of the Naval
Brigade, under Sevastopol, had come within an ace of firing on each
other.... He told of the _Milo_, and her wonderful escape, but said
nothing of Vashti. In the midst of his narrative he found himself
wondering what answer he could make if they questioned him again upon
the apparition.
But neither Mrs. Pope nor Miss Gabriel made further allusion to it.
Their silence, for which at first he was merely thankful, began to
puzzle him after a while.
Could it be possible that he, too, had been cheated by an apparition?
He took leave of the ladies at their respective gates, retiring
delicately as soon as, waiting in the road, he had assured himself that
they were within doors. Miss Gabriel admitted herself with a latch-key.
Mrs. Pope's timid knock was answered by her astonished husband, who,
having just returned from the harbour, and assuming his spouse to be
long since in bed and asleep, had lit a candle to explore the
dining-room cellaret.
The front door was shut on their reciprocal surprise, and the
Commandant withdrew. He had sighed, before now, as he had shut Mr. and
Mrs. Pope's front gate after an evening's whist. Doubtless they were a
stupid couple.
* * * * *
A light shone from the Barracks--from the office window to the right of
the door. Within the office Vashti had dragged the sofa across the room
and sat, with her fur cloak thrown back, toasting her shoes before a
warm fire. In the dancing flame of it her diamonds sparkled as she
turned to him.
"Mrs. Treacher is upstairs," she said, "hunting out sheets to air for
me. Now fill your pipe, please, and sit down and tell me all about it."
Major Vigoureux found an old pipe on the mantel-shelf, dived in the
tobacco jar for a few dry crumbs, filled, and lit and stamped out a
spark that had dropped on the hearth-rug.
"It isn't a creditable story," said he, puffing slowly, and blinking at
the flash of jewels below her white throat. "In fact, I behaved like a
brute."
"Tell me about it," she repeated.
So he told her; and found himself smoking and watching her, while she
laughed softly, leaning forward to the fire, and gazing into the heart
of it.
CHAPTER IX
THE SALVING OF S.S. MILO
Major Vigoreux awoke at daybreak with a vague sense that something
important had happened or was going to happen--a feeling he had not
known for years. It was so strange that he sat up wondering, rubbing
the back of his head.
Then he remembered, and called out to Sergeant Archelaus.
Sergeant Archelaus appeared, a moment later, ready dressed, and on more
than usually good terms with himself. He had indued his master's
trousers, and, save for an unfashionable bagginess at the hips, they
fitted him surprisingly well.
"Good morning, Archelaus. Did you happen to hear, last night, at what
time the _Milo_ weighs anchor?"
"I heard the captain, sir, tell the pilots to be aboard at
half-after-seven. But with a vessel of her size you may count on their
waiting till high-water or thereabouts."
"In any case"--the Commandant consulted his watch--"we have not too
much time. Where is Treacher?"
"Downstairs, sir, along with his missus, stoking the kitchen fire, with
mattresses built up before it like a sandbag battery. Seems to me the
woman's been spending half the night airing one thing and another. She
says the place is like a vault. Not," added Archelaus, magnanimously,
"that I mind her talk."
"Quite right, Archelaus. I particularly hope you won't quarrel with
Mrs. Treacher while she is here waiting on Miss--er--on the lady."
"If," said Archelaus, darkly, "as how I wanted to quarrel with a
female, I should have taken and married one long ago. As 'tis, when the
woman's tongue becomes afflicting, I turns round and pities Treacher.
There's more ways of doing that than in so many words, and you'd be
astonished how they both dislikes it."
"At any rate," said the Commandant, mildly, "they have saved you the
trouble of being late with the fire this morning. So you may fetch me
my shaving-water at once, please."
He sprang out of bed and reached for his dressing-gown, astonished at
his own good spirits. "It does make a difference," said he aloud,
though the remark was addressed to himself.
"It do," said Archelaus, turning in the doorway.
"I--I beg your pardon?" The Commandant turned about, a trifle confused.
"It may seem a little thing; but it gives a man self-respect, and I'm
glad you noticed 'em." Archelaus looked down at his legs, complacently.
"Always supposin'," he added, "they don't take me for a Frenchman,
owing to the fulness hereabouts."
Yes, certainly, it made a difference--to rise in the morning with a
sense of something waiting to be done. So the Commandant put it to
himself while he shaved, standing at his dressing-table under the
barrack window. The window was set high in the wall: too high to afford
him a view of the Islands, even though he stood on tip-toe. But through
it and above the open pane he caught a glimpse of blue sky and
lilac-coloured cloud, touched with gold by the risen sun. He could
guess the rest. A perfect morning!--clean and crisp, with the sea a
translucent blue, and sunlight glittering on the Island beaches; the
air still, yet bracing, and withal ineffably pure--a morning mysterious
with the sense of autumn, but of autumn rarified by its passage over
the salt strait, deodorised, made pure of marsh fog and the rotting
leaf.
The Commandant hummed to himself in the intervals of his shaving, which
nevertheless he performed meticulously by force of habit. It was his
custom to shave, and very carefully, before taking his bath. For years
he had made a ritual of his morning toilet: so many passes of his razor
across the strop (to be precise, one hundred and fifty, neither more
nor less), so many douches with the sponge, so many petitions
afterwards on his knees. Yes, it is to be feared that his prayers, no
less than his shaving, had become a drill, though one may plead for him
that he always went through it conscientiously. A stroke too few across
the strop--a petition to the Almighty missed--either would have worried
him with a feeling that the day had been begun amiss. He was poor, but
with the never-failing well on Garrison Hill he could come clean as the
richest to his prayers. Even Miss Gabriel had to admit that the poor
man (as she put it) knew how to take care of his person.
"We shall be in good time, Archelaus," said the Commandant, with a side
glance at his watch; "that is, if you'll step down the hill and get the
boat ready."
Archelaus, whose hearing had not improved of late, checked himself in
the act of filling his master's tub.
"I didn't clearly catch what you said, for the splashing.... Boat? If
you want the boat, I put her off to the moorings last night. Found her
tied up and bumping against the quay steps, quite as if money was no
object to any of us."
"Thank you. Yes, I relied on your finding and mooring her properly.
Well, now, when you are ready I want you to unmoor her again. We are
going off to the liner to fetch Miss--that is to say--the lady's
boxes."
Sergeant Archelaus faced about slowly, cap in hand.
"Oh--oh!" said he slowly. "Relative of yours, sir?--making so bold."
"Dear me, no; nothing of the sort."
"Paying lodger, perhaps.... Or else we've come into a fortune all of a
sudden, an' that accounts for Treacher's playing ad lib. with the
coals--begging your pardon again."
The Commandant winced, and came within an ace of gashing himself
severely. He had forgotten the penny in his pocket, the gulf between
this and pay-day ... and Vashti, no doubt, was used to fare daintily,
luxuriously!
"I really think"--he turned on Archelaus in sudden anger--"you might
know better than to stare into the glass when I am shaving. Moreover,
you forget your place, and inexcusably, even for an old servant."
Archelaus resumed his filling of the bath, and, having filled it,
withdrew without another word.
Yes; but while the manner of Archelaus' speech had deserved rebuke, in
the matter of it Archelaus was right. The matter of it was urgent, too,
and not to be played with. In an hour or so Vashti would be awake....
She must delay dressing until her boxes arrived; but, once dressed, she
would expect breakfast. The larder, to his knowledge, contained but the
rusty end of a flitch of green bacon--that, and perhaps a couple of
rusty eggs, a loaf, and some salt butter. Fool that he was! And a
minute ago he had greeted the day so light-heartedly!
What was to be done? In the pauses of sponging and towelling himself,
the Commandant asked the question again and again. Could he go to Mrs.
Treacher and borrow back the four shillings he had given her last
night? Fish, new-laid eggs, fresh butter, marmalade, the best tea
procurable in the Islands.... Yes, undoubtedly four shillings would go
a long way towards providing breakfast. But after breakfast would come
luncheon, and after luncheon--
There was Mr. Tregaskis, of the Shop. Mr. Tregaskis sold almost
everything "advantageous to life"--as Shakespeare's exiles said upon
another island: everything from bacon and pickles to boots,
iron-mongery, and sun-bonnets. For twelve years the Commandant had
dealt with Mr. Tregaskis, paying whatever Mr. Tregaskis charged him,
and always in ready money. He knew, moreover, that Mr. Tregaskis gave
credit: and yet, after twelve years of ready-money dealing, he winced
as he saw himself entering the shop and proposing to open an account.
He foresaw himself inexorably driven to it. But he foresaw himself also
stammering out the suggestion with every sign of conscious rascality.
And, after all, was it honest to enter a shop and open an account with
one penny in pocket? Suppose that, next pay-day, no pay were
forthcoming!
He must approach Mr. Tregaskis: there was no help for it. Yet the
prospect pleased him so little that, as he walked down the hill to the
quay, he decided to put off the interview, and was almost running past
the shop (which had just been unshuttered) when Mr. Tregaskis himself
appeared, framed of a sudden in the upper and open half of his shop
doorway.
"Eh? Is it you, sir? Good morning!" he called.
"Good morning! And a fine morning, too, Mr. Tregaskis."
"After a night of marvels. You've heard about the liner, sir, out in
the Roads?... 'Tis all a mystery to me how she ever found her way in."
"I am putting off to learn the particulars. And, by the way, Mr.
Tregaskis"--the Commandant paused--"I intended to call in upon you on
my way back."
"Anything I can do for you, sir, and at any time," responded Mr.
Tregaskis. "I suppose, now," he added, "you'd take it as a liberty if I
was to ask for a seat in your boat?"
"Not in the least. There she is, waiting off the quay steps: so if you
have business on board, put on your hat, come along with me, and
welcome!"
"Thanking you kindly, sir. Which I was reckoning that--she being from
foreign parts and the Islands the first place she've touched at, I
might pick up a bravish order in the way of fresh milk and eggs, not to
mention that Job Clemow sold me half-a-hundredweight of plaice, with a
cod or two, that he took on the spiller yesterday."
"Come along, by all means," repeated the Commandant, moving off towards
the quay steps; and Tregaskis, having tucked his shop-apron around his
waist and run into the back passage for his billy-cock hat, hurried in
his wake.
Reuben Tregaskis--known throughout the Islands as The Bester--was a
genial ruffian of familiar accost, red-faced, round in the stomach,
utterly unscrupulous at a bargain. The Commandant did not like him, and
particularly disliked the prospect of asking him a favour. Most of all
he regretted, as they pushed off, that chance this morning had forced
him to put such a man under a small obligation. He feared that, when it
came to asking leave to open an account, he might seem to be using this
advantage. (Such a fear, it scarcely needs saying, was groundless. In
his business dealings, The Bester was superior alike to gratitude and
rancour, and would bargain with his own mother as with his worst
enemy.)
The Commandant, oppressed with his own thoughts, bent his attention
upon the steering, and punctuated with monosyllables only the exuberant
flow of Mr. Tregaskis' conversation, which, bye-and-bye, as they neared
the roadstead, resolved itself into offers of wagers on the length,
tonnage, and actual carrying capacity of the liner.
She lay very nearly in the middle of the roadstead, broadside-on to the
morning sunshine, and the more the Commandant studied her the more he
wondered at last night's miracle. She had not yet begun to weigh,
though he discerned a couple of St. Ann's pilots talking with an
officer on the bridge. Presently the officer left them, and descended
to the deck, where he stood in the gangway awaiting the boat.
"Major Vigoureux?" he asked, lifting the peak of his cap, as she fell
alongside.
The Commandant, not a little astonished, returned the salutation. "That
is my name, sir."
"I have been expecting you," said the officer. "I am Captain Whitaker,
at your service--the skipper of this vessel, in fact, and thankful
enough, I can tell you, to be alive this morning and in command of her.
Madame's boxes are on deck here, if you do me the favour to climb on
board.... Ah, and here is Madame's maid, to give account of them!"
The Commandant, drawing breath at the head of the ladder, and glancing
down the _Milo's_ majestic length of deck, was aware of four large
trunks, and beside them a neat, foreign-looking woman, who curtsied in
foreign fashion as she came forward.
"M'sieur will take my duty to Madame, and tell her that I have done my
best to pack to her orders. The rest I am to report from Plymouth, when
we arrive."
"And I daresay," put in Captain Whitaker, with an amused turn of the
eye towards the trunks, then back at the Commandant, "Madame would call
these 'just a few necessaries.' Though I say to you, sir," he went on
gravely, "that all the _Milo's_ hold--and the _Milo_ will carry close
on four thousand tons--hasn't room enough to stow what Madame deserves,
be it in clothes or jewels."
"I--I beg your pardon?"
"She hasn't told you? No; I bet she wouldn't," said Captain Whitaker.
"Come down to my cabin, sir, and let me offer you a brandy-and-soda?
No? Then, perhaps, you'll do me the honour to join me at
breakfast--which must be ready at this moment," he added, as eight
strokes sounded on the ship's bell forward. "Never mind the size of the
trunks, sir; one of my men shall help you ashore with 'em."
In the Captain's cabin, which had a floor of parquet and panels of teak
set in mahogany, stood a table with a white cloth upon it, and a
breakfast array of blue-and-white china. A steward, in a blue suit with
brass buttons, brought the meats in dishes of polished electro-plate,
and on a small sideboard stood other dishes with small spirit lamps
burning beneath. The Commandant seated himself; ate, drank, and
marvelled.
"You know Madame?" asked Captain Whitaker, helping himself to a dish of
kidneys and bacon. He nodded, intercepting the Commandant's gaze. "We
keep them in ice, if you're not above trying our fare. You'll find they
are not bad. My other meals I take with the passengers, but I breakfast
alone, as a rule."
The Commandant's mind ran on the breakfast yet to be extracted from Mr.
Tregaskis' shop.
"You know her?" asked Captain Whitaker.
"I once had the pleasure--years ago----"
"If that's so"--Captain Whitaker nodded--"we'll take her praises for
granted. She's great; you can sum it up at that. By the way, did she
happen to tell you why she is leaving the ship here?"
"Yes; she went ashore in a hurry, she said, to avoid being thanked----"
"Then I guessed right."
"--though," confessed the Commandant, "I haven't a notion what she
meant."
Captain Whitaker set down his breakfast-cup and buttered himself a
piece of toast, gazing the while long and earnestly at his companion.
"No? Then I'll tell you. The passengers don't know it as yet, though
I've caught a guess or two flying around; but the truth is sure to come
out, sooner or later. Man, it was she that saved the _Milo_ last night,
in that ghastly twenty minutes before we picked up the pilot.... Oh, I
see by your face you don't believe me!--but you must take it or leave
it. Shall I go on?"
"Go on," said the Commandant.
"We were due out of New York on the 27th, but missed our tide in
clearing and didn't pass the bar till early next morning. We carried
fifty-nine saloon passengers, seventy-five second, and a hundred and
twenty-five steerage, with a crew of a hundred exactly. Besides these
we had the mails--two hundred and twenty bags--and a fair amount of
dollars in specie (I needn't tell how much.) The weather was thick from
the first with a heavy sea running on the other side. We met it full
just outside Sandy Hook, and for three days I pitied the passengers.
The third night out the mischief happened. I had left the bridge soon
after four bells and was just turning in for my beauty-sleep when I
heard an unholy racket below in the engine-room, and felt the ship slow
down of a sudden. One of the rods had kicked loose from its gib and
started to flail around death and destruction. Thanks to Crosbie, our
first engineer, she was brought up before kicking our insides out, and
we hove to; but the repairs cost us close on eighteen hours. By
daybreak the weather was thickening worse than ever, though with no
great amount of wind, and we started again in a fog so thick that from
the bridge you could see her bows, and only just. Well, that's how it
was with us, all the way across. We seemed to carry the fog; and though
it lifted a bit, off and on, it never looked like giving us a chance of
an observation. All yesterday afternoon I was worried by the thought
that we'd overrun our reckoning and must be somewhere near the Islands,
and about two o'clock--though the soundings were good--I ordered the
engines to be reduced below the half-speed at which she was running.
"To ease the passengers' minds I had arranged for a concert in the
saloon after dinner, and Madame--she had booked with us under a name
that wasn't her own to dodge the New York newspaper men, but the
passengers recognized her--had promised me to sing to them. (You have
heard her, eh?--it makes you cry, and not mind, either, who sees you.)
I remember now that she looked at me pretty straight when she gave the
promise, but seeing me not minded to speak, she asked no questions.
"Well, the concert came off. At any other time I'd have given pounds to
be sitting there and listening; but the worry on my mind kept me to the
bridge, and from there I heard her, the notes lifting up through the
saloon sky-light as if heaven and earth had somehow got capsized or
else an angel had come aboard to sing us clear of the fog. There were
three of us on the bridge--myself, and the third officer, Mr.
Francillon, and a seaman called Petersen; and when the song ended--it
was a little Italian something-or-other, very bright and gay--and the
clapping began and the calls for an encore, I couldn't stand it any
longer, and I was afraid she'd be starting on 'Home, Sweet Home,' or
something of that sort, and I didn't want Mr. Francillon to see my
face. So I made up an excuse and sent him off to the chart-house for a
pair of dividers (which I didn't want), and away he went.
"When he was gone I stood by the wheel for a bit listening as the
clapping died down. It stopped at last, and I braced myself up and
waited to have my feelings wrung, when just behind me I heard a step on
the ladder. Of course, I took it for Mr. Francillon returning, and I
wheeled about, short-tempered like, to tell him he needn't be
tip-toeing--we weren't on the bridge to listen to grand opera--when
what do I see but Madame! 'You needn't look so cross, Captain,' she
says; 'for I know well enough I'm breaking all rules, and I'll go away
quietly and sing to them again. But we're somewhere near the Islands,
and the call came on me to warn you!' 'Why, truly, ma'am,' I answered,
'I believe we're not far off them.' 'We're close to them,' she answered
me, nodding her head. 'I'm Island-born, Captain, and I feel 'em in my
blood.' I put this down to craziness--hysterics--or whatever you choose
to call it; but just to soothe her mind and get her down quietly off
the bridge I sang out to the leadsman to know if he had found
soundings. I was bending over the rail when I felt a touch on my arm,
and heard her cry out 'Starboard! Hard a-starboard--hard!'--just like
that." Captain Whitaker dropped his voice to a low, fierce whisper as
he imitated her. "It took the helmsman sharp and sudden, so that he had
begun to put the wheel down before he realised that the order didn't
come from me; and the next moment Madame had flung herself upon it and
was helping with both hands. 'Hullo!' says I, stepping after her
smartly, and as good as asking if she or I commanded the _Milo_. The
passengers below had started to sing 'D'ye ken John Peel?' and were
yelling out a lot of silly hunting-cries with the chorus. I could hear
nothing above the racket. But, sure enough, looking to port over my
shoulder as I laid hand on the wheel to check it, I saw a whitish smear
that meant breakers; and the smear no sooner showed than above it a
great black cliff stood out as if 'twere a moving thing and meant to
carve into us right amidships--a great cliff with a rock on it like the
Duke of Wellington's nose. A man from the top of it could have jumped
onto our bulwarks, and I shut my eyes as it overhung, waiting for the
crash; but it slid by and was gone like a slide you pass through a
magic lantern.
"'Port now! Port for your life!' she called out; and I saw first of all
her hand go out to push Petersen off, and then the little sparks
flickering on her rings as she gripped the spokes, and checking 'em,
dragged the wheel back hand over hand. A man's strength she must have
had. 'Help me,' was all she said, in a kind of panting voice, and as I
caught hold to help it over, 'That was the Head! Hard up, now! and ring
down for full speed!' 'Full speed!' I grunted, yet pressing on the
wheel all the time--'It's stop her you mean, and anchor.' 'What, here?
with Hell-deeps on your starboard bow and a five-knot tide running!
Full speed ahead--there's no room to swing--no, nor half.' She stopped
my hand on the bell and rang down herself, 'full speed ahead'; and the
passengers whooping away at 'John Peel!' all the while.
"Then, as the engines began to run, she looked at me, still holding on
by the wheel. 'They may do it,' she said, 'they may do it. At half
speed she'd never point off, against a five-knot tide.' 'God have mercy
on us!' was all I could say. 'If you know--?' 'Know?' she caught me up.
'I was brought up to know. But she'll never do it if she don't pick up
way.... Ah, that's better!' she said with a kind of sigh staring over
the starboard bow into the fog. 'Now!'--and we held our breath, all of
us; for Mr. Francillon was back on the bridge standing close behind her
and wondering what the devil was up. She let thirty seconds pass, and
then turned to him as if he'd been there all the while and she knew it.
"'Look astern,' she said, 'and maybe, if you're clever, you can see the
Monk.'
"'The Monk!' We cried this out together; for that we had passed the
Monk without sighting her or catching sound of her fog-horns was a
thing incredible.
"'But so it is,' said she. 'We have passed the Monk; passed it close.
Don't I know the Pope's Head on Lesser Teague? Now hard-a-port
still--for we've the Gunnel Dogs somewhere there to leeward, and
they're worse almost than Hell-deeps.'
"We were racing by this time. There was nothing in the world to
see--only the fog, which had turned, within the last minute, to dusk;
and nothing to feel except that we were racing down between the walls
of it like a stick caught in a mill heat. Worse it was; we were driving
down full tilt with a five-knot tide under us. If we struck there was
one consolation; the end would come soon. As 'John Peel' ended we could
hear the tide race take up the tune and hum it on the wind of our
passage; and above it I heard the third officer call out that he had
glimpsed a light astern.
"'The Monk!' said Madame, nodding her head to me to help her in easing
off the wheel.
"And I don't know, sir, if you have ever been through a gale at sea; a
really tight gale, I mean; with a while in it--maybe an hour only,
maybe twenty-four--when the odds are slowly turning against you. Then
there comes a point when, with nothing to show for it, you feel that
you are holding your own; and another point when you feel that, bar
accidents, the worst is over. The sea seems to break just as savage as
ever, and you can't swear that the wind has lessened. You have nothing
to point to, but, all the same, you know, and can thank the Lord.
"That's how it was with the _Milo_. I couldn't say when the danger
ceased; but I found myself looking at Madame across the binnacle lamp
and she was looking at me. My hand went out and I rang down for
half-speed, then for dead slow. We stood there and listened while the
engines changed their beat from one to the other. In the saloon they
had started a comic song with a chorus. Said she, after a bit, 'You can
bring up now and wait for morning. North of the Gunnel here there's an
eddy slack where the tides meet, and you may count on thirty fathoms.'
"I called down to know what the lead reported. I felt my voice shaking
and the leadsman's voice shook a bit too as he called back that he had
found the bottom with the red seventeen fathom mark. Half a minute
later he sang out that his line had lost it. I was just about calling
to let go anchor when away on our starboard bow we heard the pilots
hailing. We sent up a flare, and at sight of it the lighthousemen, away
on the Monk, began banging, and small blame to them!"
CHAPTER X
THE ADVENTURES OF FOUR SHILLINGS
As he finished his story Captain Whitaker stood up and reached out a
hand to open a glass-fronted cupboard in which he kept his books and
papers. The Commandant, mistaking his movement, rose also.
"No, no, sir," the Captain corrected him. "Sit down and finish your
breakfast. The fact is, when her maid, last night, handed me the letter
telling me she had gone ashore, I sat down and wrote an answer. Here it
is, and I was going to ask you to deliver it for me."
The Commandant took it, and placed it carefully in his breast pocket.
"I thank you," he answered, "but I have breakfasted. If you don't
mind--it occurs to me that, if I delay, some of your passengers will
soon be about the decks, and will see the luggage going overside, and
ask questions."
"And that's well thought of," interrupted Captain Whitaker, "though I
expect the luggage is all in your boat before this. How far lies your
house from the quay, by the way?"
The Commandant answered that his house--the Barracks--stood at the very
top of the hill.
"Why, then," said the Captain, leading the way up the companionway,
"the least I can do is to send a couple of my men along with you to
help. Your fellows--you'll excuse me--don't look equal to it.
Pensioners, eh?"
The Commandant winced. "One of them," he answered stiffly, "is on the
active list. His strength would surprise you, sir."
"H'm!" said the Captain, with a glance at Sergeant Archelaus.
"The other--but where is Tregaskis?"
"Gone off, sir, to do business with the steward," explained Archelaus,
saluting.
"The other is a Mr. Tregaskis, a respectable man, and our principal
tradesman in Garland Town. He has a design, I believe, to sell you
whatever you may want in the way of fresh provisions."
"Certainly. The steward can go ashore, too, and do business with him,
and his boat will bring the others back. Here--Hoskings! Arnott!"
Captain Whitaker called to a couple of seamen, and sent a third off to
summon the steward.
Five minutes later the Commandant found himself back in his boat,
seated besides the _Milo's_ steward, and confronting a tall pile of
luggage. The two seamen had already put off with Mr. Tregaskis in the
steward's boat.
"And you will present my duty to Madame?" said Madame's maid, looking
down from the ship's side. "And tell her that I charge myself to see
the rest of her luggage safe to the hotel, where I will report myself
and wait for Madame's orders."
Captain Whitaker waved good-bye. Archelaus pushed off and fell to the
oars. The Commandant took the tiller. As the boat pointed for shore the
garrison bell on the hill rang out nine o'clock.
Nine o'clock! The notes of the bell struck apprehension upon the
Commandant's heart. His guest would certainly be awake by this time,
and as certainly hungry. To be sure, she could not attire herself until
her boxes arrived--at any rate, would not appear. And yet, with such a
strong-willed person, he could not be certain. A lady capable of
landing on a foggy night in an evening gown and diamonds, and of
walking up the street of St. Hugh's in shoes of rose-coloured satin,
might well be capable of descending to breakfast in those garments.
To breakfast!--and as yet that breakfast had to be bought, and on
credit!
He wished now that he had offered to convey Mr. Tregaskis back in his
own boat. He might (he told himself) have broached his proposition on
the way.
The _Milo's_ steward, affably inclined, let fall a remark or two upon
the Islands. He opined that they were quaint. The poor man meant well,
but was a person slightly above his station, and clipped his words.
This gave him a patronising tone, which the Commandant, in his
impatience, found offensive. He answered in curt monosyllables, which
in turn caused the steward to mistake him for a stand-offish gentleman.
The steward was a very resplendent figure indeed. The morning sunlight,
which drew sparkles from the brass-buttoned suit and brass-bound cap
beside him, exposed pitilessly the threadbare woof of the Commandant's
uniform coat. There had been nothing amiss with the coat, yesterday;
nothing to observe, at least--- And, "Confound the fellow!" thought
the Commandant, "how am I to get rid of him and have a word with
Tregaskis?"
For desperate ills, desperate remedies. Drawing alongside the quay,
where Mr. Tregaskis and the two seamen had landed and stood waiting,
the Commandant called upon his best service voice, concealing the shake
in it:
"Mr. Tregaskis!"
"Sir?"
"I desire a word with you."
"Yes, sir."
"And in private," went on the Commandant, stepping ashore and marching
straight up the steps.
"Certainly, sir." After all, and not so long ago, Major Vigoureux had
been Governor and Chief Magistrate of the Islands, with power to
inflict fine and imprisonment. Mr. Tregaskis (conscious, perhaps, of
some close dealings in the not remote past) turned obediently and led
the way to his shop door at the corner of the hill, thence through the
shop, and thence to the threshold of a dark parlour behind it, into
which he was passing when the Commandant's voice brought him to a
stand.
"We will talk here, if you please," said the Commandant.
"Certainly, sir," Mr. Tregaskis turned about.
"I want," said the Commandant, "half a pound of your best tea, half a
dozen new laid eggs, an amount of bacon which I leave to you, and a pot
of marmalade."
"With pleasure, sir. Anything I can do----"
"And on credit."
"As I said sir--to be sure--and hoping that I have given satisfaction
hitherto--" Mr. Tregaskis, still a trifle flurried, fell to rubbing his
hands together, thus producing an appearance of haste before he
actually collected himself and hurried to execute the order.
"Good God!" thought the Commandant to himself. "Am I browbeating this
man?"
He watched as Mr. Tregaskis cut and weighed out the butter and bacon
and tied them up into parcels, with the help of a small boy summoned
from the back premises; or rather, the small boy (Melk by name, which
was short for Melchisedek) did the weighing and tying while Mr.
Tregaskis stood over him and exhorted him to look sharp, or he'd never
make a grocer. The steward watched from the doorway, puffing a
cigarette, and expressed a hope that he was not excluding the light.
The Commandant wished him a thousand miles away. Sergeant Archelaus had
borrowed a light trolley from the quay; the two seamen had loaded it;
and already Madame's luggage was half-way up the hill, and must
infallibly reach the Barracks before Madame's breakfast could overtake
it.
"And when would you like it sent, sir?" asked Mr. Tregaskis, nodding at
the piles on the counter.
"Sent?" echoed the Commandant. "I beg your pardon," he went on hastily.
"I had meant to ask you for the loan of a basket. I will carry the
things myself."
"Indeed, sir?" Mr. Tregaskis hesitated. "You are welcome to a basket,
of course, if you think it wise."
"I am not ashamed to be seen carrying a basket, Mr. Tregaskis."
"No, indeed, sir! But the hill being steep--and a little exercise would
do Melk, here, all the good in the world."
"I prefer to carry the goods myself, I thank you." (Was everybody in a
conspiracy to take the Commandant for a very old man?)
He waited impatiently until the basket was filled, slung it on his arm,
and hurried out of the shop with such impetuosity that the steward,
still lounging in the doorway, had scarcely time to skip into the
roadway and give passage.
"They must be going in for some kind of feast, up to Barracks," said
the boy Melk meditatively, after a pause.
"Why?" asked Mr. Tregaskis, looking up from the counter.
"Because," said the boy, "Old Mother Treacher was here, not ten minutes
ago, and the way she spent her money was a caution. There's the best
part of four shillin' in the till, if only you'll look."
"What did she buy?"
"Eggs mostly--and bacon--and marmalade."
Mr. Tregaskis walked to his shop door, and stared up the hill after the
Commandant.
"Must be going off their heads," he decided, and shook his own
doubtfully. "It can't be a merry-makin' either; for, when you come to
think of it, folks don't feast off such things as streaky bacon."
"Not off this sort, any'ow," airily agreed the steward, who had been
examining a piece on the counter.
* * * * *
The Commandant had started fiercely enough to climb the hill, but by
the time he reached the bend of the hill where stood the cottage which
had been Vashti's home he was drawing difficult breath. Indeed, he was
on the point of setting down his load and resting when, as he turned
the corner, he came full upon Mrs. Banfield, the good wife of the
present occupier, in conversation with Mrs. Medlin, her neighbour
across the road. The two women were staring up the hill, each from her
doorway, but at the sound of the Commandant's footsteps they turned and
stared at him instead: whereat he blushed and hung on his heel for a
moment before charging through the cross-fire of gossip.
"Good morning, ladies!"
"Aw, good morning to you, sir," answered Mrs. Banfield, with a curtsey,
and gazed hard at his basket. "Nothing wrong up to the garrison, I
hope?"
"So far as I know, ma'am, nothing at all."
"Seein' that great stack of luggage go up the hill," explained Mrs.
Medlin, "why naturally it made a person anxious. And when you put a
civil question, as I did to Sergeant Archelaus, and he turns round and
as good as snaps your head off, why a person can't help putting two and
two together."
"Indeed, ma'am, and what did you make the result?" asked the
Commandant, politely.
"Why, sir, Mrs. Banfield here was reckoning that the Government had
sent stores for you at last, and says I, 'You may be right, Sarah, and
glad enough we shall a-be to hear of it, for it do make my heart bleed
to remember old days and see what the garrison is reduced to in vittles
and small-clothes. But,' says I, 'the luggage comes from the great
steamship, and the great steamship comes from America, and that
Government would be sending stores from America, even in these days of
tinned meats, is what, beggin' your pardon, no person could believe
that wasn't born a fool.'"
"Which I answered to Mrs. Medlin," said Mrs. Banfield, "'Granted,
ma'am,' I said, 'but, food or no food, I'd sooner swallow it than
believe what you were tellin' just now.'"
"And what was that?" asked the Commandant, turning on Mrs. Medlin.
"Why, sir, knowing the Lord Proprietor to be no friend of yours----"
"Hush, Mrs. Medlin--hush, if you please!"
"Of course, sir, if you don't want to hear----"
"I certainly cannot listen to any talk against Sir Cæsar. It would be
exceedingly improper."
"I warn' going to say anything improper," Mrs. Medlin protested
stoutly. "And I wonder, sir, at your thinking it, after the years
you've given good-day to me."
"Why, bless the woman!" interjected Mrs. Banfield, "you might talk as
improper as you pleased and the Governor wouldn't understand your
drift--he's that innocent-minded. But what she meant, sir, was that the
Lord Proprietor had turned you out, belike--as everyone knows he has a
mind to--and that a new Governor might be coming in your place."
The Commandant flushed. "My dear Mrs. Banfield, the Lord Proprietor has
nothing to do with the military command here, either to appoint or to
dismiss. I cannot forbid your gossipping; but it may help you to know
that every soldier on the Islands holds his post directly under the
Crown."
Mrs. Banfield gazed at the basket with the air of one who, seeming to
yield, yet abides by her convictions. "The Crown's a long way off,
seemin' to me," she objected; "and contrariwise I do know that when the
Lord Proprietor wants his way on the Islands he gets it. Though it were
ten times a week, he'd get it, and no one nowadays strong enough to
stand up to him."
"My dear Mrs. Banfield!"
But Mrs. Banfield was not to be checked. "He's a tyrant," she declared,
her voice rising shrilly; "and I'd say it a hundred times, though I went
to the lock-up for it. He's a tyrant: and you, sir, are too simple-minded
to cope with 'em. Yes, yes--'a Christian gentleman'--everyone grants it
of you, and--saving your presence--everyone is sorry enough for it. You
wouldn't hurt a fly, for your part. Man, woman, or child, you'd have
every soul in the Islands to live neighbourly and go their ways in
peace. No doubt 'tis good Gospel teaching, too, and well enough it
worked till this rumping little tyrant came along and pushed you aside.
Goodness comes easy to you, sir, I reckon; but it bears hard upon us
poor folk that want someone to stand up for us against injustice."
"The Lord Proprietor, Mrs. Banfield, has a strong will of his own; but
I certainly never heard that he was unjust."
"Then you haven't heard, sir, what's happening over on Saaron?"
"On Saaron, ma'am?"
"On Saaron, sir.... Eh? No, to be sure.... Folks may suffer on the
Islands in these days, but what use to tell the Governor? He was good
to us in his time, but now he has cut himself off from us with his own
troubles.... Did anyone tell you, sir, the text that old Seth Hicks
preached from, over to St. Ann's, at the last service before the Lord
Proprietor closed the Meeting House? 'I will lift up mine eyes,' said
he, 'to the hills, from whence cometh my help,' and then, having given
it out, the old fellow turned solemn-like t'ards the window that looks
across here to Garrison Hill. 'Amen,' said some person in the
congregation; 'but 'tis no use, brother Seth, your seeking in that
quarter.'"
The Commandant, who had set down his basket, lifted it again wearily.
"Mrs. Banfield," said he, "won't you at least put it down to my credit
that, having (as you say) my own troubles, I don't bother my neighbours
with 'em?"
"Why, bless your heart, sir--that ever I should say it--that's what
hurts us sorest! We can fit and fend along somehow, never you mind; but
when for years you shared our little tribylations and taught us,
forrigner, tho' you were, to be open with 'ee as daylight, it do seem
cruel that you can't enjoy a bit of trouble on your own account but you
must take it away and hide it."
The Commandant's eyes moistened suddenly. "Is that how the Islanders
look at it, Mrs. Banfield?"
"It is, sir."
"Well, well," said the Major. "I never guessed.... I am a blind old
fool, it seems. But"--and here, blinking away the moisture, he smiled
at Mrs. Banfield almost gaily--"I can begin at once to make amends. The
luggage that went up the hill, just now, belongs to--to a friend of
mine--a visitor who will be my guest for a short while at the Barracks.
And this"--he tapped the basket--"is for my friend's breakfast. In
exchange for this information you shall tell me now what is the matter
over at Saaron."
"The matter is, the Lord Proprietor has given the Tregarthens notice."
The Commandant's eyes grew round in his head as he stared at Mrs.
Banfield, who answered by nodding her head briskly, as though each nod
was the tap of a hammer driving home a nail.
"What? Eli Tregarthen--that married Cara's younger daughter--that used
to live--" The Commandant recited this much in the fashion of a child
repeating "The House that Jack Built." His gaze wandered past Mrs.
Banfield to the blue-painted doorway behind her.
"It don't matter, that I can see, where the woman used to live," said
Mrs. Banfield; "but it do matter to my mind that a Tregarthen has
farmed Saaron for six generations, and now 'tis pack-and-go for 'em."
"But why?"
"Why?" echoed Mrs. Banfield, fiercely. "Because, as you was tellin'
just now, sir, my lord has a strong will. Because my lord wants Saaron
for his own. Because he wants to shoot rabbits. Because rabbits be of
more account to him than men--and I don't blame him for it, seein' that
all the men on the Islands be turned to mice in these days. Oh, 'tis an
old tale! But there! You never heard of it. You never heard--not
you--that the man was even unjust!"
"But, my dear Mrs. Banfield----"
"Go'st thy ways, good Governor. You was the poor man's friend--one
time; but now there's too much Christianity in you.... And no more will
I answer until you tells me who your guest is, that eats two breakfasts
in one morning."
The Commandant gazed at her in mild surprise. Doubtless he would have
asked the meaning of this cryptic utterance; but at this moment the two
seamen from the _Milo_ issued forth from the gateway up the road; and,
descending a few paces, turned to call back farewell to Mrs. Treacher,
who, having escorted them so far, halted under the arch and stood, with
hands on hips, to watch them out of sight.
"Wish 'ee well, I'm sure!" said Mrs. Treacher. "You understand we be
poor people in these parts."
"Don't mention that, ma'am," said one of the seamen, politely.
"There's no talk of favours, as between us and Madame," called out the
other.
They passed the Commandant and saluted. On a sudden it struck him that
these men would expect a small monetary acknowledgment for their
trouble; and hastily nodding good-morning to Mrs. Banfield and Mrs.
Medlin, he ran staggering up the slope to the gateway.
"Mrs. Treacher!" he panted, dumping down his burden, "I--er--it so
happens that I have no small change about me."
"Me either," said Mrs. Treacher, idiomatically, and bent over the
basket. "What's this?"
"You will forgive my mentioning it, Mrs. Treacher; but these good
fellows very likely expected a sixpence or so for their trouble. If you
wouldn't mind lending me back--for a short time only, a couple of
shillings out of the four that--that I----"
"Very sorry, sir," said Mrs. Treacher, "but I spent 'em."
"What! Already?"
"Which I didn't like," pursued Mrs. Treacher, stonily, "to insult the
lady's stomach with the kind of eatables I found in the larder. So
while you was away, sir, I took the liberty to slip down to
Tregaskisses and lay out three shillings. Which, finding no one in
charge but that half-baked boy of his, I got good value for the money;
and a sight better bacon than this, I don't mind saying--for all you
have been so lavish."
She peered into the basket and looked up sharply. It was a
cross-examining look, and seemed to ask where he had found the money
for all this extravagance. The Commandant, evading it, turned and
stared down the road, where already the two seamen had passed out of
sight.
"You needn't mind them, sir," said Mrs. Treacher, reassuringly. "It's
light come and light go with sailors."
Nevertheless, when the Commandant turned to accept the assurance, half
eagerly and yet less than half convinced, she would not meet his eye;
but picked up the basket and staggered along with it to the Barrack
door. "There's a saying," said Mrs. Treacher, eagerly, halting there,
"that sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. I've found it
comforting before now. But it don't seem to allow for three meals per
diem; and how to make bacon and eggs for dinner look different from
bacon and eggs for breakfast is a question that'll take thought. You
didn't happen to think upon cheese, now?"
"I did," said the Commandant, triumphantly. "There's half a pound of
cheese--the very best Cheddar--or, so Tregaskis assured me."
"Tregaskis!" Mrs. Treacher put down her nose and sniffed the basket.
"Tregaskis never sold better than third-class American in all his
life."
"She comes from America," the Commandant hazarded.
"I shouldn't advise you to build on that," said Mrs. Treacher,
dubiously; "but we'll hope for the best; and with beer in the place of
tea it mayn't look altogether like breakfast over again."
He was stepping into the passage when she touched his sleeve in sudden
contrition.
"I didn't mention it before, sir; but hearing as the sailors had
brought up her boxes, she outs with this and asks me to give it to them
for their trouble."
Mrs. Treacher held out a golden sovereign. The Commandant stared at it.
"You kept it back?" he gasped.
"I had to, sir. A couple of ignorant seamen--that didn't want it,
either!"
"Give it to me!"
"There's one blessing--you can't possibly overtake 'em," said Mrs.
Treacher, as the Commandant snatched the coin.
He gazed down the hill, and decided that to this extent she was right.
With one hand gripping the sovereign, and the other lifted to his
distraught brow, the Commandant strode to the room where Vashti sat at
breakfast. She looked up and welcomed him with a gay smile.
CHAPTER XI
PLAN OF CAMPAIGN
Vashti sat on the low stone wall beyond the Keg of Butter Battery and
gazed out over the twinkling Sound and the Islands. The wall ran along
the edge of the cliff and moreover was ruinous, as the Commandant had
cautioned her when she chose her perch.
For a while she did not appear to have heard him, but sat with lips
half-parted as though they drank in their native air, and with eyes
half-closed--but whether in mere delight or because through the present
they were looking into the past, the Commandant could not determine.
She had invited him after breakfast to conduct her round the old
fortifications, and he had done so in some dread of her questions and
comments. But she had asked scarcely a question and made no comment at
all. She was thinking less of the change in his batteries and defences
than of the change in him, as with a deeper knowledge of women he might
have divined. In the inanimate work of man's hands woman takes no real
interest, whatever she may feign, but of man himself she is insatiably
curious and critical. So while the Commandant, moving with her from one
battery to another, had halted and stared down on the grass-grown
platforms, ashamed and half-afraid lest by lifting his eyes he should
challenge her pity, he missed to perceive and missed altogether to
guess that hers were occupied in taking note of him, of his thread-bare
coat, of the stoop of his shoulders, of the whitened hair brushed back
from his temples.
They had made the round of the batteries in almost complete silence;
and coming to the wall above the Keg of Butter she had perched herself
there and bent her eyes seaward.
She may or may not have been aware that this gave him opportunity to
take stock of her in his turn, and that he was using it very
deliberately, letting his gaze travel over her profile, or so much of
it as she presented to him, and so from point to point of her attire
down to her well-made walking shoes--all with a kind of grave wonder.
Once only he glanced up and to the northward, where low on the horizon
a faint line of smoke lingered in the wake of the _Milo_, already
hull-down on her way; and his glance seemed to ask for assurance that
he was not dreaming, that the steamship had really come and gone and
left him this unaccountable guest.
It was just at this moment that she answered him.
"Yes, I can easily understand that you feel it," she said in a musing
tone.
"Eh?" The Commandant had almost forgotten his warning about the ruinous
state of the wall. His eyes had wandered back from the horizon to the
close coils of hair above her neck and to the lobe of her small ear
which (as he found himself noting) had never been pierced to admit an
earring. She turned, and as she caught his gaze he blushed in no little
confusion.
With the point of her sunshade she indicated the deserted battery on
his left.
"Though I suppose," she went on, still musing, "all these
fortifications were really out of date for years before Government
dismantled them."
"If that were true," he replied, "it would date my uselessness further
back than ever."
"Your uselessness?" she echoed, and now it was her eyes that expressed
a grave wonder. "But you were Governor of the Islands; and you are
Governor still, are you not?"
"These batteries," he went on hastily, "though antiquated, were never
out of date, never useless; and there will be reason enough to regret
them if ever an enemy's squadron makes a pounce on the Islands."
"Poor little Islands!" Vashti looked across the Sound with a smile. "It
seems almost comic somehow that anyone should dream of attacking them!"
"Ah!" said he, almost bitterly, "you have been living in great cities
and enlarging your mind."
"And in great cities, you imply, it is easy to despise, to forget?" She
laughed softly. "Brefar--Saaron--Inniscaw!" she murmured, addressing
the Islands by name, "here is one who tells me I forget you! Sir, we
will take a boat this very day, and I will sail you out to the Off
Islands and prove to you if I forget."
"There is no need, Miss Vashti"--he hesitated over the "Miss," but she
did not correct him, and he went on more boldly. "I had a talk this
morning with Captain Whitaker, of the _Milo_."
Vashti looked up with a quick smile. "He told you?... I am so glad!
Yes, yes: I did not in the least want to have all those passengers
crowding around me and paying me ridiculous compliments. But false
modesty is another thing altogether, and I don't mind telling you I am
quite inordinately proud of myself."
"You have a right to be."
"--as I don't mind confessing that I was horribly afraid at the time.
But I am glad again, that Captain Whitaker told you. It was pretty
good--eh?--after fifteen years."
She asked it frankly; not archly at all, but with a sudden earnest look
that seemed to hold some sadness; and before the Commandant could reply
this sadness grew and became so real that he wondered at his having
doubted it at first glance.
"Fifteen years!" she went on. "We all have a quarrel against time, we
men and women, but on grounds so different that a man scarcely
understands a woman's grievance nor a woman a man's. With you it all
rests in your work. Fifteen years knock holes in your fortifications,
tumble your guns into the sea, send along a new generation of men to
pull down what you have built, to rebuild in a flurry of haste, and see
their work in its turn criticised and condemned by yet a new company of
builders. At this we women only look on and marvel. Why all this fuss,
we ask, over what you do? Why all this hopeful, hopeless craving to
leave something permanent? The Islands, here, will outlast anything you
can build. I come back after fifteen years, and they are unchanged;
they would be unchanged were I to come back after a hundred. The same
rocks, the same bracken, the same hum of the tides; the same flowers;
the same blue here, below us, the same outline of a spear-head there,
beyond St. Ann's, where the tide forces through the slack water; the
same streak of yellow yonder on the south cliffs of Saaron.... Our
grievance is more personal, more real ... and so should yours be, if
you could only see it. It is to ourselves--to you and me, to any man
and woman--that time makes the difference. You worry over your
fortifications. Why? It is in ourselves that the tragedy lies. To lose
our looks, our voice--to grow old and mumble--" She broke off with a
shiver.
The Commandant smiled sadly. He had too much sense to pay an idle
compliment. "If that be the tragedy, Miss Vashti," said he, "then we
are wise in our folly, which bids us rest our hopes in our work though
its permanence be all an illusion. We cannot cheat ourselves with a
tale that we shall not grow old, but we are able to believe, however
vainly, that our work will live."
"Yes," she admitted, "you are wise in your vanity--or would be, were it
wisdom to shut one's eyes to fate. Let us grant that men are happier
than women--than childless women at any rate. You do not know what it
is to be a singer, for instance; to wake up each morning to a fear 'Has
my voice gone? One of these days it will certainly go, but--Lord, not
yet!' We must build on what we have. We must cling to our youth,
knowing that after our youth comes darkness. No, sir, I do not blame
men for setting up their rest upon what they do rather than upon
ourselves; but for setting it upon that part of their work which, being
the more visible, the more visibly decays."
The Commandant pondered while his eyes studied the grass-grown
platform. He shook his head. "You puzzle me, Miss Vashti," he
confessed.
"Why, sir, you have been mooning around these fortifications quite as
though they had made up your life and their ruins stood for your broken
purposes; whereas for fifteen years you have been Governor of the
Islands and my sister tells me you are a good man. Surely, then, your
real life has lain in the justice you have done, the wrongs you have
righted, the trust you have built up in the people's hearts, and not in
these decaying walls which no enemy ever threatened in your time nor
for a hundred years before you came."
But again the Commandant shook his head.
"I say nothing of the first few years," he answered slowly. "I liked
the people and I tried to do justice. But all that has passed out of my
control. The Lord Proprietor takes everything into his own hands."
"Still on the Council--" she urged.
"I am no longer a member of the Council."
"You resigned? Why?"
"Because I saw that Sir Cæsar was bent on humiliating me; and he had
the power."
Vashti prised at a loose stone from the wall with the point of her
sunshade.
"I have read somewhere," she said, after a pause, "that no wise man
should avoid being a magistrate, because it is wrong to refuse help to
those who need it, and equally wrong to stand aside and let worse men
govern ill."
"The Lord Proprietor does not govern ill. He likes his own way; but he
is a just man--" The Commandant hesitated and paused.
"A just man until you happen to thwart him. Is that what you were going
to say?"
"No," he answered, smiling. "I was about to say that once or twice I
have found him something less than fair to me. To others--" But here he
paused again, remembering that morning's conversation on the hill.
"I do not much believe," persisted Vashti, "in men who act justly so
long as they are not thwarted.... But you would remind me no doubt
that, if questions are to be asked and answered this morning, it is I
who should be giving an account of myself. Well, then, I have come to
the Islands with a little plan of campaign in my mind, and last night
it occurred to me suddenly that you were the very person to help. I
am--you will excuse my telling you this, but it is necessary--a
passably rich woman; that is to say, I have more money than I want to
spend on myself, after putting by enough for a rainy day; and I can
earn more again if I want more. I have no 'encumbrances,' as foolish
people put it; no relatives in the world but my sister Ruth and her
children. No two sisters ever loved one another better than did Ruth
and I. We lost our mother early, when Ruth was just three years old,
and from then until she was a grown woman I had the mothering of her,
being by five years the elder. You have seen something like it, I dare
say, in other poor families where the mother has been taken; but I tell
you again that never were pair more absolutely wrapped up in one
another than were Ruth and I. We shared each other's thoughts by day,
we slept together and shared each other's dreams. Oh!"--Vashti clasped
her hands and looked up with brimming eyes--"I can see now how
beautiful it all was."
The Commandant bowed his head gravely. "I can believe it," he said; and
as if he had stepped back fifteen years he found himself standing again
on the hill and looking in upon the fire-lit room--only now the picture
and the two figures in it shone with divine meaning.
"I know what you would ask," she went on. "Why, then, you would ask,
did I ever leave the Islands?... But this had always been understood
between us. I cannot tell you how. For years we never talked about it,
yet we always talked as if, some day, it must happen. The fate was on
us to be separated; and the strange part of it was," continued Vashti,
throwing out her hands involuntarily, and with this action changing as
it were from a confident woman back to a child helpless before its
destiny, "we understood from the first that I, who loved the Islands,
must be the one to go, while Ruth would find a husband here and settle
down, nor perhaps ever wish to cross over to the mainland. You see, of
the two I was the reader; and sometimes when I read Shakespeare to
her--for we possessed but a few books, and some of these, like 'The
Pilgrim's Progress,' had no real scenery in them to take hold
of--sometimes when I read Shakespeare, or 'The Arabian Nights,' or
'Mungo Park's Travels,' and the real world would open to me, with
cities like London, or Venice, or Bagdad, and with woods like the
Forest of Arden, and ports with shipping and great empty deserts, then
Ruth would catch hold and cling to me, as if I was slipping away and
leaving her before the time.... Yet we both knew that the time must
come, in the end. Do you understand at all?" she broke off to ask.
"Yes," he answered. "I cannot tell how, but as you put it I seem to see
it all."
She glanced at him with a quick, grateful smile. "Well, that is just
how it happened, and if I were to explain and explain I couldn't make
it any clearer. You understand, too, there was never any question of my
leaving Ruth until she was grown a woman and could see with a woman's
eyes. Then I knew she was safe. She had more common-sense even than I.
She was born to marry--I never doubted that; but when I saw also that
she was a woman to choose for herself and choose wisely--why, then I
saw also, and all of a sudden, that the time had come and I was better
out of the way; better, because a teacher has to know when to stop and
trust the teaching to prove itself. Else by lingering on, he may easily
do dreadful mischief, and all with the best will in the world. Do you
understand this, too?"
Again the Commandant bent his head; for again, without knowing how or
why, he understood.
"Well, I left the Islands, and there is no need to trouble you with my
own story--though some day I will tell it if you care to hear. It
contains a great deal of hard work, much good fortune, some suffering,
too; and on the whole I am a very grateful woman, as I ought to be....
But we were talking of Ruth. She married, as she was born to marry, and
her husband is a good man. She has children, and her letters are full
of their sayings and doings, as a happy mother's should be. So, you
see, our instinct was wise, and I did well to depart."
The Commandant considered this for a moment before answering: for her
tone conveyed a question, almost a challenge.
"You were wise, perhaps, to go. But why in all these years have you
never come back?"
She looked at him earnestly, and nodded. "Yes," she said, "I was afraid
you would ask that; and yet I am glad, for it forces me to make
confession, and I shall feel better to get it over.... Ruth loves me
still, you see; but, of course, her husband comes first, and after her
husband--if not sometimes before him--her children. That is as it
should be, of course."
"Of course," the Commandant echoed.
"And of course I foresaw it. Remember, please, that I foresaw it before
ever there was a question of young Tregarthen; so that my jealousy, if
you are going to laugh at it, had nothing to do----"
"I am not in the least inclined to laugh."
"Thank you. We were not as ordinary sisters, you see, and ... and there
is another thing I must tell you," she went on with a brisk change of
tone. "Though Ruth and I have always written regularly, there is one
thing I have always kept hidden from her--I mean my success, as you
will call it. At first this wasn't deliberate at all.... A great chance
came to me, a chance so good that I could hardly believe--yes, so
incredible even to me, that I dared not talk of it, but walked humbly,
and taught myself to think of it as a dream from which I must awake,
and awake to find people laughing at my hopes. I hid it even from
Ruth.... Afterwards, when the dream had become a certainty, it seemed
yet harder to tell her. I had concealed so much, and to tell her now
seemed like triumphing over her--so full her letters were of simple
things and of her happiness in them. I was afraid my news would overawe
her, would change her in some way; that she would think me some grand
person, and not the sister to whom she had told all her mind--not, you
must understand, that Ruth could be envious if she tried. But have you
never seen how, when a man grows rich or powerful suddenly, his old
friends, the best of them, draw away from him, not in envy at all, but
just because they feel he has been taken from them?"
"Yes," said the Commandant, "I have seen such cases."
"And I wanted still to be Vazzy to her--even though I must come after
husband and children."
"She knows, then, as little about your--your success--or almost as
little, as I do?" asked the Commandant, quaintly.
Vashti broke into a gay little laugh. "But I am going to tell her now,"
she answered, rising--"and that is where I want you to help me. She has
no idea at all that I am here, and I want--that is my little plan--to
look in upon her before I make myself known. I want to see Ruth--my own
Ruth--moving about her house; to feed my eyes on her good face, and
learn if it has changed as I have tried to picture it changing; to know
her as she has been during these years, not as she will be when we have
kissed and I have told her.... I would steal upon her children, too,
and watch them.... It is wonderful to think of Ruth's children!"
She sprang on to the crumbling wall, and stood erect there, shading her
eyes, gazing towards Saaron Island, where the forenoon sun flashed upon
the beaches and upon the roof of one small farm, half hidden in a fold
of the hills. The Commandant put out a hand to steady her, for her
perch was rickety and almost overhung the sea.
"Ruth is there!... To think of her so happy there--to see her, almost!
Oh, sir--but if you could understand that the nearer I have travelled
back, the more foolish my jealousy has seemed to grow, with every fear,
every doubt!"
"Miss Vashti"--the Commandant spoke seriously, still with his arm
stretched out ready to grip her by the skirt if she should over-balance
herself or the treacherous wall give way--"I am glad, for your sister's
sake, you have come; but I must warn you that all is not right on
Saaron Island."
She turned slowly, and looked down upon him there from her altitude.
"What is not right?" she asked; and, while he hesitated, "You are not
telling me that her letters have hidden anything?"
"No."
"Is it illness, then? Has anything happened to the children?"
"No," he answered again, and without more ado he told her the news he
had heard from Mrs. Banfield.
"But"--she still looked down on him wondering--"but you told me just
now that the Lord Proprietor was a just man?"
"I have not looked at the rights and wrongs of the case," he said
hastily, conscious that he was incurring her scorn. "The Lord
Proprietor may have much to say on his side."
"You have not inquired, then?"
"The news came to me only this morning, quite by chance."
"By chance?" she caught him up, and, springing off the wall, stood on
the firm turf facing him. "But you are, or were, Governor of the
Islands."
Again he bent his head. "I have told you that I no longer serve the
Council even. The Lord Proprietor does not consult me."
Vashti gazed around her, on the broken roof of the ammunition shed, the
dismantled platform, the unkempt glacis below it. "For what work, then,
do they pay you?" she asked, bitterly.
"For none," he answered, but without resentment. "And--excuse me--" he
went on, fumbling in his pocket, and producing a sovereign, which he
tendered to her, "but your mention of pay reminds me to return you
this, which Mrs. Treacher has handed to me. It appears--I must
apologize for her--that she received it from you to give to the men who
carried up your box from the steamer; but that, being a little
frightened at the amount, she withheld it, thinking that possibly you
had made a mistake."
Vashti took the coin. Her face was yet flushed a little--as he read it,
with anger.
"It is true," said she pensively, "that I am fifteen years a stranger
here."
His face brightened. "Ah," said he, "if you will make allowance for
that, we may yet put everything right!"
CHAPTER XII
SAARON ISLAND
Saaron Island lies about due north of Brefar, which looks eastward upon
Inniscaw across the narrow gut of Cromwell's Sound. There was a time
(the tale goes) when these three Islands made one. At low-water springs
you may cross afoot between Saaron and Brefar, and from either of them,
with a little more danger, to Inniscaw, picking your way between the
pools and along the sandy flats that curve about the southern end of
the Sound and divide it from the great roadstead. Also there are
legends of stone walls and foundations of houses laid bare as the
waters have sunk after a gale, and by the next tides covered again with
sand.
But of the past history of Saaron next to nothing could be told, even
by Ruth's husband, young Farmer Tregarthen, who rented the Island and
the one habitable house upon it. He could not even have explained how
so bleak a spot as Saaron had come to possess this farmhouse, which was
one of the roomiest on the Islands. He only knew that it had been built
for one of his forefathers, and that this forgotten Tregarthen, or the
Lord Proprietor who had chosen him for tenant, must have held ambitious
views of the amount of farming possible on Saaron. So much might be
guessed from the size and extent of the out-buildings. The "chall" or
byre, for instance, had stalls for no less than twelve cows, whereas
to-day all the Island's hundred-and-twenty acres barely afforded
pasturage for two. Considering this, he was divided between two
opinions; the first, that his ancestors had pastured their cattle upon
Brefar, driving them to and fro across the flats at low water; the
second, that in the old days the soil had been fertile, and that either
the sand, which drove across it in the prevailing westerly winds,
devastating every green herb, had started its invasion within the last
hundred years or so, or that his forerunners had possessed and lost
some art of coping with it. He had trenched the sand in many places on
the southern and easterly slopes of the two hills into which the Island
was divided, and along the valley between them, and everywhere, at the
depth of two feet or less, the spade found a fine, strong clay, capable
of carrying any crop.
Young Farmer Tregarthen in his slow way pondered a deal over this and
similar problems. Indeed, you might say that in one sense the Island
was never out of his thoughts. He had been born on it. At the age of
sixteen he had succeeded to the farm (though it was nominally leased to
his mother), and to the fight which his father had begun--the warfare
which his enemy, the sand, never allowed him to relax. He could almost
remember his father resuming it and repairing the stone hedges which
enclosed the old fields. In those days Saaron had supported, or failed
to support, five families; but of these all but Tregarthen had lost
their clutch on the barren rock and drifted away to other islands. He
could remember their going. He passed their roofless cottages half a
dozen times a day.
They had subsisted mainly by kelp-making and piloting, helped out (it
is to be feared) by more than a little smuggling. There were
conclusions to be drawn from the cellars in the farmhouse, too ample
for the needs of a small farmer. Tregarthen had a shrewd notion that
most of the guineas which his mother had hoarded in a stocking had come
at one time or another from the contraband trade; also he had a notion
that his father's renewed activities in digging and hedging must have
coincided pretty accurately with the building of the coastguard station
upon St. Lide's and the arrival of a Divisional Officer. But if
smuggling flourished once, it had fallen on evil days, and its secrets
had been hidden from his childhood. Also about that time the pilotage
had decayed in competition with the licensed pilots on St. Ann's, and
but a few hovelling jobs in and about Cromwell's Sound fell to the
share of the men of Saaron. (He could recall discussions and injurious
words, half-understood at the time, faint echoes of that old quarrel
between the two islands.)
But the kelp-making had been in full swing; and the business had a
plenty of mystery and picturesqueness to bite it upon a child's memory.
All the summer through, day after day, at low water, the Islanders
would be out upon the beaches cutting the ore-weed and dragging it in
sledges up the foreshore, where they strewed it above high-water mark,
to dry in the sun. On sunny days they scattered and turned it, on wet
days they banked it into heaps almost as tall as arrish-mows. From
morning until evening they laboured, and towards midsummer, as the near
beaches became denuded, would tail away, in twos and threes, and whole
families, to camp among the Off Islands and raid them; until, when
August came and the kelping season drew to an end, boat after boat
would arrive at high-water and discharge its burden.
These operations filled the summer days; but it was towards nightfall
that the real fun began. For then the men, women, and children would
gather and build the kilns--pits scooped in the sand, measuring about
seven feet across and three feet deep in the centre. While the men
finished lining the sides of the kiln with stones, the women and girls
would leap into it with armfuls of furze; which they lighted and so,
strewing the dried ore-weed upon it, built little by little into a
blazing pile. The great sea-lights which ring the Islands now make a
brave show; but (say the older inhabitants) it will not compare with
the illuminations of bygone summer nights, when as many as forty kilns
would be burn
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