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 theMilo'ssteward, 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.
TheMilo'ssteward, 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 theMiloissued 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 theMilo, 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 theMilo."
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.