MAJOR VIGOUREUX

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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.

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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.

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 burning together, and island signalling to island with bonfire-lights that flickered across the roadsteads and danced on the wild tide-races. From four to five hours the kilns would be kept burning, and the critical moment came when the mass of kelp began to liquefy, and word was given to "strike." Then a dozen or fourteen men would leap down with pitchforks and heave the red molten mass from side to side of the kiln, toiling like madmen, while the sweat ran shining down their half-naked bodies; and sometimes—and always on Midsummer Eve, which is Baal-fire night—while they laboured the women and girls would join hands and dance round the pit. In ten minutes or so all this excitement would die out, the dancers unlock their hands the men climb out of the pit and throw themselves panting on the sand, leaving the kelp to settle, cool, and vitrify. But while it lasted the boy knew of no excitement comparable with it. Little wonder that he remembered those fiery pits with the dark figures dancing around their brims! But yet more unforgettable was the smell of the burning kelp had been more than enough—that acrid, all-permeating, unforgettable odour. His mother had never been able to endure it. When the wind drove the smoke from the beach, she would shut every door and window, and build up every crevice with a barricade of sandbags; all in vain. It crept into the house, choking the besieged, causing their eyes to smart and their heads to ache, and scenting clothes, linen, furniture. Even the food tasted of it.

The kelp-making, however, was but a memory now, though a pungent one. A night's work at the kiln produced from two to three hundred-weight, and the price in the good seasons ranged from £4 to £5 a ton; so many shared the labour that a family had much ado to earn £10 in a whole season. Under such conditions, too, the work was roughly done. Too often the sides of the kiln would fall in and the sand—always the curse of Saaron—would mingle with the kelp and spoil it. And when some wiser folk in Scotland learned to prepare it under cover, in ovens with paved floors, the Islanders lost their market, almost in a single season.

Tregarthen could recall the kelp-making, but neither the circumstances of the collapse nor the sufferings that followed it. Children observe the toil, but are usually quite blind to the troubles of their elders. He only knew that the poorer families almost of a sudden drifted away from Saaron, that he and his father and mother were left alone on the island, that his father had begun to busy himself with farming and required his help, and that in consequence he was released from lessons. His mother, a farmer's daughter from Holy Vale in St. Lide's—the one nook in the Islands where you lost sight and almost sound of the sea, and could look out of window upon green trees—was a better-most person and something of a scholar. (The Tregarthens had always gone to the main island for their wives.) She taught the boy to read, to write a little, and even to cipher up sums in addition and subtraction. Also she took him over to Brefar to church on every fine Sunday and taught him his catechism, on the chance (often rumoured) that the Bishop would come across from the mainland to hold a Confirmation. But the Bishop of those days had a weak stomach, and, on the advice of his doctor, kept postponing the voyage.

Thus the boy grew up into a strong, slow man, gentle of manners, shy of the sound of his own voice, but tenacious of purpose and stubborn when his will was crossed. Except for the few months when he went wooing after Ruth Cara—in the year after his mother's death—his life, hopes, purposes, dreams and waking thoughts concentrated themselves upon Saaron, and from the day he brought his bride home to it the island became more than ever his sufficing world. He knew a thousand small things concerning it—secrets of the soil, of the tides, of the sand drift—voices of the wind, varying colours of the sea, and what weather they foretold—where this moss grew, that bird nested—in what week the wild duck arrived, on what wind the geese might be looked for, and what feeling in the spring air announced that the guillemots were due. He had learnt these things unconsciously, and was quite unaware of his knowledge, having never an occasion to review it or put it into words. Moreover, it was strangely limited. To his ancestors, to the folk who had lived here before him, he never gave a thought, except to wonder what their tillage had been or why they had rounded off a hedge at such and such a corner. Of the history of his own farm-house he could tell you next to nothing, and nothing at all of the small ruined church he passed at least twice a day—though this testified that Saaron had been populous once on a time. How long had the Tregarthens lived on the Island? How far back beyond the five or six generations attested by the signatures on old leases hidden away in his strong-box? One might as well ask how long the sandpipers and oyster-catchers had bred on their separate grounds under the north slope of the cliffs towards Brefar. On the summit of the hill stood eleven mounds, and in each mound (so tradition said) lay the burnt bones of royalty. Was he, perhaps, descended from these Island kings? Tregarthen would not have given sixpence to discover. They were dead, and less than names: the place of their burial belonged to him, and he had to wring a livelihood from it to support his wife and family. Sometimes, when he thought of his three youngsters—of the boy especially—the man felt a vague longing which puzzled him as well by its foolishness as by its strength; a longing to pass, when his time came, into these barren acres and watch (though helplessly) while his heir improved what he had painfully won. It was absurd, of course, to desire any such perpetuity; wicked, perhaps. It could not be reconciled with heaven and the future life promised by the Bible. Yet it haunted him, though at rare intervals, and not importunately. To the past he gave never a thought.

Ruth Tregarthen, his wife, was one of those women who find their happiness within their own doors. The farm-house stood some way up the slope of the southern hill, facing eastward over the valley which curved a little at its feet and spread into a line of small flat meadows around the East Bay, where the farmer kept his two boats; and the site had been chosen here to avoid the seas which, with a gale falling on top of the equinoctial springs, are driven up the valley from east and west, and meet to form an isthmus, cutting the Island in two.

The state-rooms of the farm-house—parlour, hall, and best bedrooms—looked eastward upon Cromwell's Sound; but the waters of the Sound were hidden from the lower windows by a stout hedge of tamarisk. The kitchen window at the back—by far the largest in the house, as the kitchen itself, where the family took its meals on every day but Christmas Day and Good Friday, was the true focus of the household—looked across the town-place, or farm-yard, upon another tall hedge of tamarisk, above which climbed the hill, steep, strewn with small white stones, shutting out the Atlantic.

The kitchen table stood close beside this window, just beyond the edge of the bacon-rack; and directly opposite, across the wide paved floor, was a wide open hearth, fitted with crooks and brandises, where all the day long something or other would be cooking, and where the night through the logs smouldered and fell in soft grey ash, to be fed and stirred to flame again in the early morning. Yes, and as though this was not enough, the hearth had beside it an iron door which, being opened, disclosed to the children a long narrow hole filled with fire; vision to them of a passage leading straight to hell, though their own mother (and she so gentle) stoked it with bunches of furze, and drew from it loaves and saffron cakes, hot and detectable.

To the children it seemed that their parents seldom or never talked, and never by any chance took a rest.

Their names were Annet, Linnet and Matthew Henry, and this was the order of their ages—Annet nine, Linnet seven, and Matthew Henry rising five. On fine days they attended school at Inniscaw, being rowed to and fro across the Sound by John Nanjulian (Old Jan), the hind, or Stevy, the farm-boy. These, with Melia Mundy, the house-girl, whose parents lived on Brefar, made up Farmer Tregarthen's employ, and took their meals at table with the family.

The school which Annet, Linnet, and Matthew Henry attended had been built by the Lord Proprietor on Inniscaw shore, to serve the three islands of Inniscaw, Brefar, and Saaron. The children brought their school-pence weekly, on Friday mornings; but, of course, their pence did not pay—scarcely even began to pay—for the cost. Also there were days, and sometimes many days together, when no boat could be put across; and, considering this, the Lord Proprietor (who was a philanthropist in his way, but his way happened to be a despotic one) had commanded his architect to prepare plans for a smaller school on Brefar. This, to be sure, would not help the three children on Saaron; but it gave him yet another reason to feel indignant with that fellow Tregarthen for clinging so obstinately to his solitude and barren acres.

The children themselves did not regret living so far from school; for they were ordinary healthy youngsters though brighter-witted than most, and felt as other youngsters feel towards that wise and elderly beneficence which boxes them up in a room for instruction. To be sure they missed the games in the play-ground before and after school; but this was no such loss as the reader, remembering his own childhood, might be disposed to think. For, sad to tell, only a few of the hundreds of thousands of children attending schools really understand games, or can be said to have learnt to play, and the Island children were in this respect some way behind their brothers and sisters on the mainland. If at whiles the small trio looked back wistfully as old Jan rowed them homeward, or if the shouts that followed across the water from the playground now and again reproached them, on the whole they would not have changed places with their school-fellows even at a price. After all, no island in the world could compare with Saaron. Their father had never said this, but they were sure that he thought it; and their father knew everything. As he walked along he would say suddenly, "Go there"—but without lifting his eyes, just waving his hand towards the spot—"and there you will find a bunting's nest, or a stone-chat's"; nor once in a dozen times would he be mistaken.

There were compensations, too, in living on an island where on any morning you might wake and find a gale of wind blowing, forbidding you to go to school. But even in fine weather one could always look forward to Saturday and Sunday, each a whole holiday.

It was Saturday. The three had opened their eyes soon after daybreak and lay in their cots "chirruping," as their mother called it—talking, planning out a campaign of adventures for the long two days before them. The sun shone through their nursery window, which faced the East. They had curled themselves to sleep before the great fog came up and covered the Islands, and the sound of guns had neither awakened them nor reached their dreams. They awoke to a clear morning sky, and while they chatted, waiting the order to tumble out and dress, their father looked in at the nursery door and astonished and excited them with news of a great steamer which had entered the Roads in the night and was already lifting anchor to pursue her voyage.

From the hill above the farmhouse they watched her, after breakfast, as she steamed past the southern point of the island, nosed her way slowly through Chough Sound, between Inniscaw and St. Lide's, and so headed away to the northward until her smoke lay in a low trail on the horizon. They had never before seen a steamer of her size.

Thus strangely began a day which the three had still stranger cause to remember. They had planned to take their dinner wrapped in their handkerchiefs and climb to the old tombs on the hill overlooking Brefar, then to play at being Aztecs, from hints which Annet had dug out of an old History of Mexico on her mother's bookshelf, and at hiding treasure from the Spaniards, whose ships were to come sailing through the Off Islands. Having concealed their hoard, they were either to descend upon the Western Bay, which they called The Porth, and there offer a bloody resistance to the invaders, or (this was Annet's notion, which for the present she kept to herself) to wait until the north channel dried and make a desperate escape across the sands to Brefar. The trouble was, she could not be sure of low water being early enough to let them dash across and back before dusk again. She was a brave girl—a great deal braver, at least in these adventures, than her sister Linnet; but she had to bear in mind that Matthew Henry was but five years old and easily tired, and also that if they arrived home after dusk her mother would be anxious and her father angry. So she nursed the project in her own heart, and when the three had taken seizin of the northern hill, eaten their manchets of saffron cake, and shared their canful of milk, she took up a post from which, while the others scanned the offing for Spaniards, she could watch and time the ebb of the tide on the flats.

The afternoon was sunny; the flat rock on which they were perched lay out of the wind's reach; and to beguile the interval of waiting Annet drew out a book which she had brought with her—a much-worn copy of Hans Andersen which had arrived at Christmas, three years ago, as a gift from that mysterious Aunt Vazzy of whom their mother talked so often. Linnet stoutly maintained that this aunt of theirs, whom they had never set eyes on, must be a fairy herself—neither more nor less; and Annet had her doubts on this point. But the book, at any rate, was real, with a real inscription on the fly-leaf; and the children (though some of the stories puzzled them) believed it to be the most beautiful book in the world.

Each child had a favourite story. Matthew Henry's was "The Tinder-Box," and he would wake in the night from dreams, deliciously terrible, of the three dogs "with eyes as big as coach wheels." Linnet, who had a practical mind, preferred such as dealt with rolling-pins, flat-irons, and shirt-collars, because these were familiar objects, and their histories usually ended cheerfully—(she liked "The Ugly Duckling" because he was a duckling, but objected to much of the tale as being too sad). Annet declared for "The Little Mermaid," which is perhaps the saddest of all; and this was the one she chose to-day, though half-penitently, because she felt pretty certain that it would make Linnet cry.

But to-day Linnet no sooner recognized the opening of the story than she set her face defiantly; and when Annet reached that most pathetic passage where the little mermaid glances down sorrowfully at her fish's tail, and "Let us be merry," says the grandmother, "let us dance and play for the three hundred years we have to live," Linnet lifted her chin, stared hard at the horizon and said resolutely—albeit in a voice that trembled a little—

"I don't believe there are any such things as mermaids!"

Young Matthew Henry opened his mouth and stared, round-eyed at such dreadful scepticism.

Annet, too, gazed up from her book.

"But the story says there are," she answered, simply and gravely.

"Who ever saw one?" persisted doubting Linnet.

"Hundreds of people—" Annet began, and with that, as a shadow fell on the rock, she lifted her eyes and uttered a little cry.

Just above, on the flat tombstone that jutted over the ridge, stood a beautiful lady, and looked down on them.

[ ]

CHAPTER XIII

THE LADY FROM THE SEA

How it happened the children never precisely knew. When they came to compare notes that evening their recollections varied on several important particulars. But this was certain, that before they could rise and run—and Matthew Henry protested that, for his part, he had never an idea of running—the apparition had stepped down from her pedestal and seated herself among them in the friendliest way.

"Good day!" she nodded. "Now let me see ... this is Annet, and this is Linnet, and that is Matthew Henry, and I hope you're all uncommonly well."

Annet gasped that they were quite well, thank you. Who and what could she be, this lady out of nowhere?... Not a witch, for no witch could smile with such a beautiful face or wear such beautiful clothes. On the other hand, Annet had not supposed that fairies were ever so tall. Yet something of the sort she must be, for she knew their names....

"You want to know where I come from? But that is easy." The stranger reached out a white hand with a diamond upon it, and Annet yielded the book to her without resisting. "I come from here"—and she tapped the pages mysteriously.

"But how can that be?" demanded Linnet, who was always the matter-of-fact one. "Out of a book! Such things do not happen."

Vashti laughed merrily. "I assure you," she answered, with a glance at the fly-leaf, "I have been in the book all the while you were reading; and," she added, her eyes softening as they rested on the child, "of you three it is Linnet who is most like her mother."

They had not thought of this before, but she had no sooner said it than they knew it to be the truth; and the discovery made her more marvellous than ever.

"Yes," she went on, "I have lived inside this book; and, what is more, I know the man who wrote it."

She looked around on the three faces; and—so strange are children—for the first time in his life Matthew Henry at once asserted himself as a person entirely different from his sisters. For Annet and Linnet merely looked puzzled; to them the book was a book, just as the hill upon which they sat was a hill, and they had never troubled their heads about such a thing as an author. But Matthew Henry opened his infantine eyes still wider.

"Tell us about him," he demanded.

Vashti eyed the child curiously for a moment before answering. "He lives in the north," she said, "in a city where the sea is sometimes frozen for weeks in the winter, and where night after night you may see the Northern Lights over the roofs. That is why he writes so much of snow and fir-trees and cold winters."

Annet nodded. "I have seen the Northern Lights—once—from Saaron here," she announced proudly. "Father took me out of my bed and held me up to the window to look at them; Linnet, too—but she was too young to remember, and Matthew Henry was not even born at the time."

"But tell us," persisted Matthew Henry, "about the man who wrote the book."

"Well, the Northern Lights were shining in the streets on the night when I met him. I drove to his house in a sleigh from the theatre—if you know what a theatre is?" Vashti paused dubiously; but Annet nodded and assured her—

"That's all right. We don't know about these things, but they are all in the book."

"And so," said Vashti, "is the man himself, or most of him. He was a queer, shy old man, with oddly-shaped hands and feet, but oh, such timid eyes! And he lived in a fine house all by himself, for he had no wife. In the days when he wanted a wife he had been an Ugly Duckling, and now, when he had turned into a swan, it was too late to marry. He was very old indeed; but this was his birthday, and he had lit up all his rooms for us and made a great feast, and at the feast he made me sit on his right hand.... There were princesses to do him honour, but he chose me out because I had sung to him; and the princesses were not angry because he was an old man. Out in the streets the people were letting off fireworks, and while he talked to me I could hear the whole sky banging with rockets and crackers. It put me in mind of his story of 'The Flying Trunk.' But he talked of Italy and the South, because I had come from there; and of the Mediterranean and of beautiful inland lakes which he had known, but would never see again; for he was over seventy. And he told me that, in spite of the snow and frost outside, he could feel the spring coming northward again with the storks. It was the last time (he said) that he should ever see it, but he filled his glass and drank to me because, as he put it, I had sung the South back to him for this last time. So now you know why I was proud to come to you out of his book."

"But," said Linnet, gravely, "we were reading about mermaids; and you can't be one of them, because there aren't any."

Matthew Henry would by no means allow this. "But Jan's father caught one," he objected, "in a pool just inside Piper's Hole, where she was left by the tide. He has told us about her, dozens of times. And besides," he added, getting in a home-thrust, "if there isn't any such thing, why were you crying over the story, just now?"

"I wasn't," contended Linnet, very red in the face. But she shifted her ground. "Why," pointing to Vashti's skirts—"her clothes aren't even wet, to say nothing of a tail!"

Vashti laughed. "My dears, you are both right and both wrong. As for the mermaids, Linnet, they were friends of mine before I reached your age, and you must let me introduce you to one by-and-by, to cure you of disbelieving. But you are right about me. I am not a mermaid; and yet I have come from the sea ... like the Queen Zenobia."

"Who was she?" asked Annet, speaking for the others.

"She was a Queen in Carthage, more than two thousand years ago. She came to the Islands in a ship, to visit the tin-mines which used to lie between them and the mainland before the sea covered them, and from which she drew her great wealth. Her ship arrived in the middle of the Great Storm; and before she came to land, here on Saaron, the waters were rolling over the richest part of all her dependencies. Little she cared; for in the first place she had never seen it, and could not realise her loss, and moreover her ship had been tossing for three days and nights, past all hope, so that she was glad enough to reach a shore, however barren. She reached it, holding on to the shoulders of a brown man, a Moor, who swam for land as the ship began to break up; and the story goes that when his feet touched the sand he fell forward and died, for the swimming had burst his heart. But have you never heard the song about it?" Vashti sank her voice and began to chant, and low though the strain was, and monotonous, the children had never heard such wonderful singing—

It was the Queen Zenobia

With her gold crown,

That sailed away from Africa

With a down-derry-down!

—To westward and to northward

From Carthage town,

Beyond the strait of Cadiz

The sky began to frown.

"Well-a-mercy!" cried her ladies,

All of high renown;

"I think the sea is troublesome

And we shall all drown."

The seas came white aboard

And wetted her gown;

"Would I were back in Carthage

A-walking up and down!

That I were back in Carthage

Which is dry ground,

I would give my jewels

And a thousand pound."

Then round went the good ship,

And thrice she went round,

The third time she brast herself

With a down-derry-down!

Some cried misericordia,

And others did swoun;

But up there stood a guardsman

A naked man and brown—

"You are the Queen of Carthage

And gey young to drown;

But hold you to my girdle

That goes me around;

And swim with me to Saaron,

As I will be bound."

"Your girdle it is breaking

That goeth you around."

"Nay, hold you to the girdle

That is strong yet and sound;

My heart you felt a-breaking,

But here is dry ground."

With white sand and shingle

Major Vigoureux

MAJOR VIGOUREUX

By

A. T. QUILLER-COUCH

("Q")

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONSNEW YORK 1907

Copyright, 1907, byCHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published September, 1907

CONTENTS

MAJOR VIGOUREUX

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK 1907

Copyright, 1907, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS