When the chinks of moonlight had been replaced by brighter chinks of sunlight, the new doctor who had come so gallantly to the aid of the sufferers on Cloud Island opened his eyes upon his first day there.
He heard some slight sounds, and looked over the edge of his bed to see a little table set forth in the broad passage between the two stores of hay. A slip of a girl, of about fourteen years of age, was arranging dishes upon it. When Caius scrambled down, she informed him, with childish timidity of mien, that Madame Le Maître had said that he was to have his breakfast there before he went in to see "father." The child spoke French, but Caius spoke English because it relieved his mind to do so.
"Upon my word!" he said, "Madame Le Maître keeps everything running in very good order, and takes prodigious care of us all."
"Oh, oui, monsieur," replied the child sagely, judging from his look of amusement and the name he had repeated that this was the proper answer.
The breakfast, which was already there, consisted of fish, delicately baked, and coffee. The young doctor felt exceedingly odd, sitting in the cart-track of a barnand devouring these viands from a breakfast-table that was tolerably well set out with the usual number of dishes and condiments. The big double door was closed to keep out the cold wind, but plenty of air and numerous sunbeams managed to come in. The sunbeams were golden bars of dust, crossing and interlacing in the twilight of the windowless walls. The slip of a girl in her short frock remained, perhaps from curiosity, perhaps because she had been bidden to do so, but she made herself as little obvious as possible, standing up against one corner near the door and shyly twisting some bits of hay in her hands. Caius, who was enjoying himself, discovered a new source of amusement in pretending to forget her presence and then looking at her quickly, for he always found the glance of her big gray eyes was being withdrawn from his own face, and child-like confusion ensued.
When he had eaten enough, he set to his proper work with haste and diligence. He made the girl tell him how many children there were, and find them all for him, so that in a trice he had them standing in a row in the sunlight outside the barn, with their little tongues all out, that the state of their health might be properly inspected. Then he went in to his patient of the night before.
The disease was diphtheria. It was a severe case; but the man had been healthy, and Caius approved the arrangements that Madame Le Maître had made to give him plenty of air and nourishment.
The wife was alone with her husband this morning, and when Caius had done all that was necessary, and given her directions for the proper protection of herself and the children, she told him that her eldest girl wouldgo with him to the house of Madame Le Maître. That lady, said she simply, would tell him where he was to go next, and all he was to do upon the island.
"Upon my word!" said Caius again to himself, "it seems I am to be taken care of and instructed, truly."
He had a sense of being patronized; but his spirits were high—nothing depressed him; and, remembering the alarming incident of the night before, he felt that the lady's protection might not be unnecessary.
When he got to the front of the house, for the first time in the morning light, he saw that the establishment was of ample size, but kept with no care for a tasteful appearance. There was no path of any sort leading from the gate in the light paling to the door; all was a thick carpet of grass, covering the unlevelled ground. The grass was waving madly in the wind, which coursed freely over undulating fields that here displayed no shrubs or trees of any sort. Caius wondered if the wind always blew on these islands; it was blowing now with the same zest as the day before; the sun poured down with brilliancy upon everything, and the sea, seen in glimpses, was blue and tempestuous. Truly, it seemed a land which the sun and the moon and the wind had elected to bless with lavish self-giving.
When Caius opened the gate of the whitewashed paling, the girl who was to be his guide came round from the back of the house after him, and on her track came a sudden rush of all the other children, who, with curls and garments flying in the wind and delightful bursts of sudden laughter, came to stand in a row again with their tongues outstretched at Caius' retreating form.
The girl could only talk French, and she talked verylittle of that, giving him "yes" or "no" demurely, as they went up the road which ran inland through the island hills, keeping about midway between sea and sea. Caius saw that the houses and small farms on either side resembled those which he had seen on the other island. Small and rough many of them were; but their whitewashed walls, the strong sunshine, and the large space of grass or pine shrubs that was about each, gave them an appearance of cleanliness. There was no sign of the want or squalor that he had expected; indeed, so prosperous did many of the houses look, that he himself began to have an injured feeling, thinking that he had been brought to befriend people who might very well have befriended themselves.
It was when they came out at a dip in the hills near the outer sea again that the girl stopped, and pointing Caius to a house within sight, went back. This house in the main resembled the other larger houses of the island; but pine and birch trees were beginning to grow high about it, and on entering its enclosure Caius trod upon a gravel path, and noticed banks of earth that in the summer time had held flowers. In front of the white veranda two powerful mastiffs were lying in the sun. These lions were not chained; they were looking for him before he appeared, but did not take the trouble to rise at the sight of him; only a low and ominous rumble, as of thunder beneath the earth, greeted his approach, and gave Caius the strong impression that, if need was, they would arise to some purpose.
A young girl opened the door. She was fresh and pretty-looking, but of plebeian figure and countenance. Her dress was again gray homespun, hanging full and short about her ankles. Her manner was different fromthat of those people he had been lately meeting, for it had that gentle reserve and formality that bespeaks training. She ushered him into a good-sized room, where three other girls like herself were engaged in sewing. Sitting at a table with a book, from which she had apparently been reading to them, was the woman in the nun-like dress whom he had met before. The walls of the room were of unpainted pinewood, planed to a satin finish, and adorned with festoons of gray moss such as hangs from forest boughs. This was tied with knots of red bittersweet berries; the feathers of sea-birds were also displayed on the walls, and chains of their delicate-coloured eggs were hanging there. Caius had not stepped across the threshold before he began to suspect that he had passed from the region of the real into the ideal.
"She is a romantic-minded woman," he said to himself. "I wonder if she has much sense, after all?"
Then the woman whom he was thus inwardly criticising rose and came across the room to meet him. Her perfect gravity, her dignity of bearing, and her gracious greeting, impressed him in spite of himself. Pictures that one finds in history and fiction of lady abbesses rose before his mind; it was thus that he classified her. His opinion as to the conscious romance of her life altered, for the woman before him was very real, and he knew in a moment that she had seen and suffered much. Her eyes were full of suffering and of solicitude; but it did not seem to him that the suffering and solicitude were in any way connected with a personal need, for there was also peace upon her face.
The room did not contain much furniture. When Caius sat down, and the lady had resumed her seat, hefound, as is apt to be the way in empty rooms, that the chairs were near the wall, and that he, sitting facing her, had left nearly the room's width between them. The sewing maidens looked at them with large eyes, and listened to everything that was said; and although they were silent, except for the sound of their stitching, it was so evident that their thoughts must form a running commentary that it gave Caius an odd feeling of acting in company with a dramatic chorus. The lady in front of him had no such feeling; there was nothing more evident about her than that she did not think of how she appeared or how she was observed.
"You are very good to have come." She spoke with a slight French accent, whether natural or acquired he could not tell. Then she left that subject, and began at once to tell the story of the plague upon the island—when it began, what efforts she and a few others had made to arrest it, the carelessness and obstinacy with which the greater part of the people had fostered it, its progress. This was the substance of what she said; but she did not speak of the best efforts as being her own, nor did she call the people stupid and obstinate. She only said:
"They would not have their houses properly cleaned out; they would not wash or burn garments that were infected; they would not use disinfectants, even when we could procure them; they will not yet. You may say that in this wind-swept country there can be nothing in nature to foster such a disease, nothing in the way the houses are built; but the disease came here on a ship, and it is in the houses of the people that it lingers. They will not isolate the sick; they will not——"
She stopped as if at a loss for a word. She hadbeen speaking in a voice whose music was the strain of compassion.
"In fact," said Caius, with some impatience, "they are a set of fools, and worse, for they won't take a telling. Your duty is surely done. They do not deserve that you should risk your life nursing them; they simply deserve to be left to suffer."
She looked at him for a minute, as if earnestly trying to master a view of the case new to her.
"Yes," speaking slowly. He saw that her hands, which were clasped in her lap, pressed themselves more closely together—"yes, that is what they deserve; but, you see, they are very ignorant. They do not see the importance of these precautions; they have not believed me; they will not believe you. They think quite honestly and truly that they will get on well enough in doing their own way."
"Pig-headed!" commented Caius. Then, perceiving that he had not quite carried her judgment along with his: "You yourself, madam, have admitted that they do not deserve that either you or I should sacrifice our lives to them."
"Ah, no," she replied, trouble of thought again in her eyes; "they do not deserve that. But what do we deserve—you and I?"
There was no studied effect in the question. She was like one trying to think more clearly by expressing her thought aloud.
"Madam," replied he, the smile of gallantry upon his lips, "I have no doubt that you deserve the richest blessings of earth and heaven. For myself——" He shrugged his shoulders, just about to say conventionally, flippantly, that he was a sad, worthless fellow, but insome way her sincerity made him sincere, and he finished: "I do not know that I have done anything to forfeit them."
He supposed, as soon as he had said the words, that she would have a theological objection to this view, and oppose it by rote; but there was nothing of disapproval in her mien; there was even a gleam of greater kindliness for him in her eye, and she said, not in answer, but as making a remark by the way:
"That is just as I supposed when I asked you to come. You are like the young ruler, who could not have been conceited because our Lord felt greatly attracted to him."
Before this Caius had had a pleasing consciousness, regarding himself as an interesting stranger talking to a handsome and interested woman. Now he had wit enough to perceive that her interest in him never dipped to the level of ordinary social relationships. He felt a sense of remoteness, and did not even blush, though knowing certainly that satire, although it was not in her mind, was sneering at him from behind the circumstance.
The lady went right on, almost without pause, taking up the thread of her argument: "But when the angels whisper to us that the best blessings of earth and heaven are humility and faith and the sort of love that does not seek its own, do we get up at once and spend our time learning these things? or do we just go on as before, and think our own way good enough? 'We are fools and worse, and will not take a telling.'" A smile broke upon her lip now for the first time as she looked at him. "'Pig-headed!'" she said.
Caius had seen that smile before. It passed instantly,and she sat before him with grave, unruffled demeanour; but all his thoughts and feelings seemed a-whirl. He could not collect his mind; he could not remember what she had said exactly; he could not think what to answer; indeed, he could not think at all. There had been a likeness to his phantastic lady-love of the sea; then it was gone again; but it left him with all his thoughts confounded. At length—because he felt that he must look like a fool indeed—he spoke, stammering the first thing that occurred to him:
"The patient that I have seen did not appear to be in a house that was ill-ventilated or—or—that is, he was isolated from the rest of the family."
He perceived that the lady had not the slightest knowledge of what it was that had really confused him. He knew that in her eyes, in the eyes of the maidens, it must appear that her home-thrust had gone to his heart, that he had changed the subject because too weak to be able to answer her. He was mortified at this, but he could not retrace his steps in the conversation, for she had already answered him.
The household he had already visited, she said, with a few others, had helped her by following sanitary rules; and then she went on talking about what those rules were, what could and could not be done in the circumstances of the families affected.
As she talked on, Caius knew that the thing he had thought must be false and foolish. This woman and that other maiden were not the same in thought, or character, or deed, or aspect. Furthermore, what experience he had made him feel certain that the woman who had known him in that relationship could not be so indifferent to his recognition, so indifferent to allthat was in him to which her beauty appealed, as this woman was, and of this woman's indifference he felt convinced.
The provision made for the board and lodging of the new doctor was explained to him. It was not considered safe for him to live with any of the families of the island. A very small wooden building, originally built as a stable, but never used, had been hastily remodelled into a house for him. It was some way further down the winding road, within sight of the house of Madame Le Maître.
Caius was taken to this new abode, and found that it contained two rooms, furnished with the necessities and many of the comforts of life. The stove was good; abundance of fuel was stacked near the house; simple cooking utensils hung in the outer room; adjoining it, or rather, in a bit of the same building set apart, was a small stable, in which a very good horse was standing. The horse was for his use. If he could be his own bed-maker, cook, and groom, it was evident that he would lack for nothing. A man whom Madame Le Maître sent showed Caius his quarters, and delivered to him the key; he also said that Madame Le Maître would be ready in an hour to ride over the island with him and introduce him to all the houses in which there was illness.
Caius was left for the hour to look over his establishment and make friends with his horse. It was all very surprising.
The bit of road that lay between Madame Le Maître's house and the house allotted to Caius led, winding down a hill, through a stunted fir-wood. The small firs held out gnarled and knotty branches towards the road; their needles were a dark rich green.
Down this road Caius saw the lady come riding. Her horse was a beautiful beast, hardly more than a colt, of light make and chestnut colour. She herself was not becomingly attired; she wore just the same loose black dress that she had worn in the house, and over the white cap a black hood and cloak were muffled. No doubt in ancient times, before carriages were in use, ladies rode in such feminine wrappings; but the taste of Caius had been formed upon other models. He mounted his own horse and joined her on the road without remark. He had found no saddle, only a blanket with girths, and upon this he supposed he looked quite as awkward as she did. The lady led, and they rode on across the island.
Caius knew that now it was the right time to tell Madame Le Maître what had occurred the night before, and the ill-usage he had suffered. As she appeared to be the most important person on the island, it was right that she should know of the mysterious band of banditsupon the beach—if, indeed, she did not already know; perhaps it was by power of these she reigned. He found himself able to conjecture almost anything.
When he had quickened his horse and come beside her for the purpose of relating his adventure, she began to speak to him at once. She told him what number of cases of illness were then on her list—six in all. She told him the number who had already died; and then they came past the cemetery upon the hillside, and she pointed out the new-made graves. It appeared that, although at that time there was an abatement in the number of cases, diphtheria had already made sad ravages among the little population; and as the winter would cause the people to shut up their houses more and more closely, it was certain to increase rather than to diminish. Then Madame Le Maître told him of one case, and of another, in which the family bereavement seemed particularly sad. The stories she told had great detail, but they were not tedious. Caius listened, and forgot that her voice was musical or that her hood and cloak were ugly; he only thought of the actors in the short sad idylls of the island that she put before him.
When they entered the first house, he discovered that she herself had been in the habit of visiting each of the sick every day as nurse, and, as far as her simple skill could go, as doctor too. In this house it was a little child that lay ill, and as soon as Caius saw it he ceased to hope for its recovery. They used the new remedies that he had brought with him, and when he looked round for someone who could continue to apply them, he found that the mother was already dead, and the father took no charge of the child—he was not there. A half-grown boy of about fifteen was its only nurse, and he was notdeft or wise, although love, or a rude sense of conscience, had kept him from deserting his post.
"When we have visited the others, I will come back and remain," said Madame Le Maître.
So they rode on down the hill and along the shingled beach that edged a lagoon. Here the sea lapped softly and they were sheltered from the wind. Here, too, they saw the other islands lying in the crescent they composed, and they saw the waves of the bay break on the sand-bank that was the other arm of the lagoon. Still Caius did not tell about his adventure of the night before. The lady looked preoccupied, as if she was thinking about the Angel of Death that was hovering over the cottage they had left.
The next house was a large one, and here two children were ill. They were well cared for, for two of the young girls whom he had seen in Madame Le Maître's house were there for the time to nurse them.
They took one of these damsels with them when they went on. She was willing to walk, but Caius set her upon his horse and led it; in this way they made quicker progress. Up a hill they went, and over fields, and in a small house upon a windy slope they found the mother of a family lying very ill. Here, after Caius had said all that there was to say, and Madame Le Maître, with skilful hands, had done all that she could do in a short time, they left the young girl.
At the next and last house of their round, where the day before one child had been ill, they now found three tossing and crying with pain and fever. When it was time for them to go, Caius saw his companion silently wring her hands at the thought of leaving them, for the mother, worn out and very ignorant, was the only nurse.It did not seem that it could be helped. Caius went out to his horse, and Madame Le Maître to hers, but he saw her stand beside it as if too absent in mind to spring to its back; her face was looking up into the blue above.
"You are greatly troubled," said Caius.
"Oh yes," her voice was low, but it came like the sound of a cry. "I do not know what to do. All these months I have begged and entreated the people to keep away from those houses where there was illness. It was their only hope. And now that they begin to understand that, I cannot bring the healthy to nurse the sick, even if they were willing to come. They will take no precautions as we do. It is not safe; I have tried it."
She did not look at Caius, she was looking at the blue that hung over the sea which lay beneath them, but the weariness of a long long effort was in her tone.
"Could we not manage to bring them all to one house that would serve as a hospital?"
"Now that you have come, perhaps we can," she said, "but at present——" She looked helplessly at the door of the house they had left.
"At present I will nurse these children," Caius said. "I do not need to see the others again until evening."
He tied his horse in a shed, and nursed the children until the moon was bright. Then, when he had left them as well as might be for the night, he set out to return on his former track by memory. The island was very peaceful; on field or hill or shore he met no one, except here and there a plodding fisherman, who gave him "Good-evening" without apparently knowing or caring who he was. The horse they knew, no doubt, that was enough.
He made the same round as before, beginning at the other end. At the house where the woman was ill the girl who was nursing her remained. At the next house the young girl, who was dressed for the road, ingenuously claimed his protection for her homeward way.
"I will go with you, monsieur, it will be more safe for me."
So he put her on his horse, but they did not talk to one another.
At the third house they found Madame Le Maître weeping passionately over a dead baby, and the lout of a boy weeping with her. It surprised Caius to feel suddenly that he could almost have wept, too, and yet he believed that the child was better dead.
Someone had been out into the winter fields and gathered the small white everlasting flowers that were still waving there, and twined them in the curls of the baby's hair, and strewed them upon the meagre gray sheet that covered it.
When they rode down to the village they were all quite silent. Caius felt as if he had lived a long time upon this island. His brain was full of plans for a hospital and for disinfecting the furniture of the houses.
He visited the good man in whose barn he had slept the preceding night. He went to his little house and fed himself and his horse. He discovered his portmanteaus that O'Shea had promised to deliver, and found that their contents had not been tampered with; but even this did not bring his mind back with great interest to the events of the former night. He was thinking of other things, and yet he hardly knew of what he was thinking.
The next morning, before Caius went out, he wrote a short statement of all that had occurred beside the quicksand. The motive that prompted him to do this was the feeling that it would be difficult for him to make the statement to Madame Le Maître verbally. He began to realize that it was not easy for him to choose the topics of conversation when they were together.
She did not ride with him next day, as now he knew the road, but in the course of the morning he saw her at the house where the three children were ill, and she came out into the keen air with him to ask some questions, and no doubt for the necessary refreshment of leaving the close house, for she walked a little way on the dry, frozen grass.
Heavy as was the material of her cloak and hood, the strong wind toyed with its outer parts as with muslin, but it could not lift the closely-tied folds that surrounded her face and heavily draped her figure. Caius stood with her on the frozen slope. Beneath them they could see the whole stretch of the shining sand-dune that led to the next island, the calm lagoon and the rough water in the bay beyond. It did not seem a likely place foroutlaws to hide in; the sun poured down on every hill and hollow of the sand.
Caius explained then that his portmanteaus, with the stores, had arrived safely; but that he had reason to think that the man O'Shea was not trusty, that, either out of malice or fear of the companions among whom he found himself, he had threatened his, Dr. Simpson's, life in the most unwarrantable manner. He then presented the statement which he had drawn up, and commended it to her attention.
Madame Le Maître had listened to his words without obvious interest; in fact, he doubted if she had got her mind off the sick children before she opened the paper. He would have liked to go away now, leaving the paper with her, but she did not give him that opportunity.
"Ah! this is——" Then, more understandingly, "This is an account you have written of your journey hither?"
Caius intimated that it was merely a complaint against O'Shea. Yet he felt sure, while she was reading it, that, if she had any liveliness of fancy, she must be interested in its contents, and if she had proper appreciation, she must know that he had expressed himself well. When she had finished, however, instead of coveting the possession of the document, she gently gave it back to him.
"I am sorry," she said sincerely, "that you were put to inconvenience. It was so kind of you to come, that I had hoped to make your journey as comfortable as possible; but the sands are very treacherous, not because the quicksands are large or deep, but because they shift in stormy weather, sometimes appearing inone place, and sometimes in another. It has been explained"—she was looking at him now, quite interested in what she was saying—"by men who have visited these islands, that this is to be accounted for by the beds of gypsum that lie under the sand, for under some conditions the gypsum will dissolve."
The explanation concerning the gypsum was certainly interesting, but the nature of the quicksand was not the point which Caius had brought forward.
"It is this fact, that one cannot tell where the sand will be soft, that makes it necessary to have a guide in travelling over the beach. The people here become accustomed to the appearance of the soft places, but it seems that O'Shea must have been deceived by the moonlight."
"I do not blame him for the accident," said Caius, "but for what happened afterwards."
Her slight French accent gave to each of her words a quaint, distinct form of its own. "O'Shea is—he is what you might callfunnyin his way of looking at things." She paused a moment, as if entirely conscious of the inadequacy of the explanation. "I do not think," she continued, as if in perplexity, "that I can explain this matter any more; but if you will talk to O'Shea——"
"Madam," burst out Caius, "can it be that there is a large band of lawless men who have their haunts so near this island, and you do not know of it? That," he added, with emphatic reproach, "is impossible."
"I never heard of any such band of men."
Madame Le Maître spoke gently, and the dignity of her gentleness was such that Caius was ashamed of his vehemence and his reproach. What he wondered at,what he chafed at, was, that she showed no wonder concerning an incident which her last statement made all the more remarkable. She began to turn to go towards the house, and the mind of Caius hit upon the one weak point in her own acknowledged view of the matter.
"You have said that it is not safe for a stranger to walk upon the sands without a guide; if you doubt my statement that these men threatened my life, it yet remains that I was left to finish my journey alone. I do not believe that there was danger myself. I do not believe that a man would sink over his head in these holes; but according to their belief and yours, madam——"
He stopped, for she had turned round with a distinct flash of disapproval in her eyes.
"I do not doubt your statement." She paused, and he knew that his accusation had been rude. "It would not occur to me"—there was still the slight quaintness of one unaccustomed to English—"that you could do anything unworthy of a gentleman." Another pause, and Caius knew that he was bound over to keep the peace. "I think O'Shea got himself into trouble, and that he did the best he could for you; but O'Shea lives not far from your own house. He is not my servant, except that he rents my husband's land." She paused again.
Caius would have urged that he had understood otherwise, or that hitherto he had not found O'Shea either civil or communicative; but it appeared that the lady had something more to say after her emphasis of pause, and when she said it Caius bid her good-day without making further excuse or justification. She said:
"I did not understand from O'Shea that he allowed you to walk on the sands without some one who would have warned you if there had been danger."
When Caius was riding on his way, he experienced something of that feeling of exaltation that he had felt in the presence of his inexplicable lady-love. Had he not proof at least now that she was no dream or phantasy, and more than that, that she inhabited the same small land with him? These people knew her; nay (his mind worked quickly), was it not evident that she had been the link of connection between them and himself? She knew him, then—his home, his circumstances, his address. (His horse was going now where and how it would; the man's mind was confounded by the questions that came upon it pell-mell, none waiting for an answer.) In that other time when she had lived in the sea, and he had seen her from the desolate bit of coast, who was she? Where had she really lived? In what way could she have gained her information concerning him? What could have tempted her to play the part of a fishy thing? He remembered the monstrous skin that had covered her; he remembered her motion in the water. Then he thought of her in the gray homespun dress, such as a maid might trip her garden in, as he had seen her travelling between the surf and the dune in the winter blast. Well, he lived in an enchanted land; he had to deal with men and women of no ordinary stuff and make, but they acknowledged their connection with her. He was sure that she must be near him. The explanation must come—of that, burning with curiosity as he was, he recked little. A meeting must come; all his pulses tingled with the thought. It was a thought of such ahigh sort of bliss to him that it seemed to wrap and enfold his other thoughts; and when he remembered again to guide his horse—all that day as he went about his work—he lived in it and worked in it.
He went that evening to visit O'Shea, who lived in a good-sized house half a mile or so from his own. From this interview, and from the clue which Madame Le Maître had given, he began strongly to suspect that, for some reason unknown, O'Shea's threatenings were to be remembered more in the light of a practical joke than as serious. As to where the men had come from who had played their part, as to where the boy had gone to, or whether the boy and the lady were one—on these heads he got no light. The farmer affected stupidity—affected not to understand his questions, or answered them with such whimsical information on the wrong point that little was revealed. Yet Caius did not quarrel with O'Shea. Was it not possible that he, rude, whimsical man that he was, might have influence with the sea-maid of the laughing face?
Next morning Caius received a formal message—the compliments of Madame Le Maître, and she would be glad if he would call upon her before he went elsewhere. He passed again between the growling mastiffs, and found the lady with her maidens engaged in the simple household tasks that were necessary before they went to their work of mercy. Madame Le Maître stood as she spoke to him:
"When I wrote to you I said that if you came to us you would have no chance of returning until the spring. I find that that is not true. Our winter has held off so long that another vessel from the mainland has called—you can see her lying in the bay. Shewill be returning to Picton to-morrow. I think it right to tell you this; not that we do not need you now as much as we did at first; not but that my hope and courage would falter if you went; but now that you have seen the need for yourself, how great or how little it is, just as you may think, you ought to reconsider, and decide whether you will stay or not."
Caius spoke hastily:
"I will stay."
"Think! it is for four months of snow and ice, and you will receive no letters, see no one that you could call a friend."
"I will stay."
"You have already taught me much; with the skill that you have imparted and the stores that you have brought, which I will pay for, we should be much better off than if you had not come. We should still feel only gratitude to you."
"I have no thought of leaving."
"Remember, you think now that you have come that it is only a handful of people that you can benefit, and they will not comprehend the sacrifice that you have made, or be very grateful."
"Yes, I think that," replied Caius, admitting her insight. "At the same time, I will remain."
She sighed, and her sigh was explained by her next words:
"Yet you do not remain for love of the work or the people."
Caius felt that his steady assertion that he would remain had perhaps appeared to vaunt a heroism that was not true. He supposed that she had seen his selfishness of motive, and that it was her time now to let himsee that she had not much admiration for him, so that he might make his choice without bias.
"It is true that I do not love the people, but I will pass the winter here."
If the lady had had the hard thought of him that he attributed to her, there was no further sign of it, for she thanked him now with a gratitude so great that silent tears trembled in her eyes.
It was impossible but that Caius should take a keen interest in his medical work. It was the first time that he had stood alone to fight disease, and the weight of the responsibility added zest to his care of each particular case. It was, however, natural to him to be more interested in the general weal than in the individual, more interested in a theoretical problem than in its practical working. His mind was concerned now as to where and how the contagion hid itself, reappearing as it had done, again and again in unlikely places; for there could be assuredly no home for it in air, or sea, or land. Nor could drains be at fault, for there were none. Next to this, the subject most constantly in his mind was the plan of the hospital.
Madame Le Maître had said to him: "I have tried to persuade the people to bring their sick to beds in my house, where we would nurse them, but they will not. It is because they are angry to think that the sick from different families would be put together and treated alike. They have great notions of the differences between themselves, and they cannot realize the danger, or believe that this plan would avert it; but now thatyou have come, no doubt you will be able to explain to them more clearly. Perhaps they will listen to you, because you are a man and a doctor. Also, what I have said will have had time to work. You may reap where I have sown."
She had looked upon him encouragingly, and Caius had felt encouraged; but when he began to talk to the people, both courage and patience quickly ebbed. He could not countenance the plan of bringing the sick into the house where Madame Le Maître and the young girls lived. He wanted the men who were idle in the winter time to build a temporary shed of pine-wood, which would have been easy enough, but the men laughed at him. The only reason that Caius did not give them back scorn for scorn and anger for their lazy indifference was the reason that formed his third and greatest interest in his work; this was his desire to please Madame Le Maître.
If he had never known and loved the lady of the sea, he thought that his desire to please Madame Le Maître would have been almost the same. She exercised over him an inexplicable influence, and he would have felt almost superstitious at being under this spell if he had not observed that everyone who came much in contact with her, and who was able to appreciate her, was ruled also, and that, not by any claim of authority she put forth, but just because it seemed to happen so. She was more unconscious of this influence than anyone. Those under her rule comprised one or two of the better men of the island, many of the poor women, the girls in her house, and O'Shea. With regard to himself, Caius knew that her influence, if not augmented, was supplemented, by his belief that in pleasing her he was making his best appeal to the favour of the woman he loved.
He never from the first day forgot his love in his work. His business was to do all that he could to serve Madame Le Maître, whose heart was in the healing of the people, but his business also was to find out the answer to the riddle in which his own heart was bound up. The first step in this, obviously, was to know more about Madame Le Maître and O'Shea. The lady he dared not question; the man he questioned with persistency and with what art he could command.
It was one night, not a week after his advent, that he had so far come to terms with O'Shea that he sat by the stove in the latter's house, and did what he could to keep up conversation with little aid from his host.
O'Shea sat on one wooden chair, with his stockinged feet crossed upon another, and his legs forming a bridge between. He was smoking, and in the lamplight his smooth, queer face looked like a brown apple that had begun to shrivel—just begun, for O'Shea was not old, and only a little wrinkled.
His wife came often into the room, and stood looking with interest at Caius. She was a fair woman, with a broad tranquil face and much light hair that was brushed smoothly.
Caius talked of the weather, for the snow was falling. Then, after awhile:
"By the way, O'Shea,whois Madame Le Maître?"
The other had not spoken for a long time; now he took his clay pipe out of his mouth, and answered promptly:
"An angel from heaven."
"Ah, yes; that, of course."
Caius stroked his moustache with the action habitual to drawing-room gallantry; then, instead of persisting, he formed his question a little differently:
"Who is Mr. Le Maître?"
"Sea-captain," said O'Shea.
"Oh! thenwhereis he?"
"Don't know."
"Isn't that rather strange, that his wife should be here, and that you should not know where the husband is?"
"I can't see the ships on the other side of the world."
"Where did he go to?"
"Well, when he last sailed"—deliberately—"he went to Newcastle. His ship is what they call a tramp; it don't belong to any loine. So at Newcastle she was hired to go to Africy. Like enough, there she got cargo for some place else."
"Oh! a very long voyage."
"She carries steam; the longest voyage comes to an end quick enough in these days."
"Has Madame Le Maître always lived on this island? Was she married here?"
"She came here a year this October past. She came from a place near the Pierced Rock, south of Gaspé Basin. I lived there myself. I came here because the skipper had good land here that she said I could farm."
Caius meditated on this.
"Then, you have known her ever since she was a child?"
"Saw her married."
"What does her husband look like?"
"Well"—a long pause of consideration—"like a man."
"What sort of a man?"
"Neither like you nor me."
"I never noticed that we were alike."
"You trim your beard, I haven't any; the skipper, he's hairy."
Caius conceived a great disgust for the captain. He felt pretty well convinced also that he was no favourite with O'Shea. He would have liked much to ask if Madame Le Maître liked her husband, but if his own refinement had not forbidden, he had a wholesome idea that O'Shea, if roused, would be a dangerous enemy.
"I don't understand why, if she is married, she wears the dress of a religious order."
"Never saw a nun dressed jist like her. Guess if you went about kissing and embracing these women ye would find it an advantage to be pretty well covered up; but"—here a long time of puffing at the pipe—"it's an advantage for more than women not to see too much of an angel."
"Has she any relations, anyone of her own family? Where do they live?"
There was no answer.
"I suppose you knew her people?"
O'Shea sprang up and opened the house door, and the snow drove in as he held it.
"I thought," he said, "I heard a body knocking."
"No one knocked," said Caius impatiently.
"I heard someone." He stood looking very suspiciously out, and so good was his acting, if it was acting, that Caius, who came and looked over his shoulder, had a superstitious feeling when he saw the blank, untrodden snow stretching wide and white into the glimmering night. He remembered that the one relative he believed the lady to have had appeared to him in strange places and vanished strangely.
"You didn't hear a knock; you were dreaming." Caius began to button on his coat.
"I wasn't even asleep." O'Shea gave a last suspicious look to the outside.
"O'Shea," said Caius, "has—has Madame Le Maître a daughter?"
The farmer turned round to him in astonishment. "Bless my heart alive, no!"
The snow was only two or three inches deep when Caius walked home; it was light as plucked swan's-down about his feet. Everywhere it was falling slowly in small dry flakes. There was little wind to make eddies in it. The waning moon had not yet risen, but the landscape, by reason of its whiteness, glimmered just visible to the sight.
The fishing-boats and small schooners were dragged high up on the beach. The ice formed upon the bay that lay in the midst of the islands. The carpet of snow grew more and more thick upon field and hill, and where the dwarf firwoods grew so close that it could not pass between their branches, it draped them, fold above fold, until one only saw the green here and there standing out from the white garment.
In these days a small wooden sleigh was given to Caius, to which he might harness his horse, and in which he might sit snug among oxskins if he preferred that sort of travelling to riding. Madame Le Maître still rode, and Caius discarded his sleigh and rode also. Missing the warmth of the skins, he was soon compelled by the cold to copy Robinson Crusoe and make himself breeches and leggings of the hides.
In these first weeks one hope was always before his eyes. In every new house which he entered, at every turn of the roads, which began to be familiar to him, he hoped to see the maiden who had followed him upon the beach. He dreamed of her by night; he not only hoped, he expected to see her each day. It was of course conceivable that she might have returned to someother island of the group; but Caius did not believe this, because he felt convinced she must be under the protection of his friends; and also, since he had arrived the weather had been such that it would have been an event known to all the fishermen if another party had made a journey along the sands. When the snow came the sands were impassable. As soon as the ice on the bay would bear, there would be coming and going, no doubt; but until then Caius had the restful security that she was near him, and that it could not be many days before he saw her. The only flaw in his conclusion was that the fact did not bear it out; he did not see her.
At length it became clear that the maiden was hiding herself. Caius ceased to hope that he would meet her by chance, because he knew he would already have done so if it were not willed otherwise. Then his mind grew restless again, and impatient; he could not even imagine where she could lie hidden, or what possible reason there could be for a life of uncomfortable concealment.
Caius had not allowed either O'Shea or Madame Le Maître to suspect that in his stumble he had involuntarily seen his companion on the midnight journey. He did not think that the sea-maid herself knew that he had seen her there. He might have been tempted now to believe that the vision was some bright illusion, if its reality had not been proved by the fact that Madame Le Maître knew that he had a companion, and that O'Shea had staked much that he should not take that long moonlight walk by her side.
Since the day on which he had become sure that the sea-maid had such close and real connection with humanbeings that he met every day, he had ceased to have those strange and uncomfortable ideas about her, which, in half his moods, relegated her into the region of freaks practised upon mortals by the denizens of the unseen, or, still farther, into the region of dreams that have no reality. However, now that she had retired again into hiding, this assurance of his was small comfort.
He would have resolutely inquired of Madame Le Maître who it was who had been sent to warn him of danger if need be upon the beach, but that the lady was not one to allow herself willingly to be questioned, and in exciting her displeasure he might lose the only chance of gaining what he sought. Then, too, with the thought of accosting the lady upon this subject there always arose in his mind the remembrance of the brief minute in which, to his own confounding, he had seen the face of the sea-maid in the lady's own face, and a phantom doubt came to him as to whether she were not herself the sea-maid, disfigured and made aged by the wrappings she wore. He did not, however, believe this. He had every reason to refuse the belief; and if he had had no other, this woman's character was enough, it appeared to him, to give the lie to the thought. A more intelligent view concerning that fleeting likeness was that the two women were nearly related to one another, the younger in charge of the elder; and that the younger, who had for some purpose or prank played about in the waters near his home, must have lived in some house there, must have means of communication with the place, and must have acquainted Madame Le Maître with his position when the need of a physician arose. What was so dissatisfying to him was that allthis was the merest conjecture, that the lady whom he loved was a person whom he had been obliged to invent in order to explain the appearances that had so charmed him. He had not a shadow of proof of her existence.
The ice became strong, and bridged over the bay that lay within the crescent of islands. All the islands, with their dunes, were covered with snow; the gales which had beaten up the surf lessened in force; and on the long snow-covered beaches there was only a fringe of white breakers upon the edge of a sea that was almost calm.
The first visitor of any importance who came across the bay was the English clergyman. Nearly all the people on Cloud Island were Protestants, in so far as they had any religion. They were not a pious people, but it seemed that this priest had been exceedingly faithful to them in their trouble, and when he had been obliged to close the church for fear of the contagion, had visited them regularly, except in those few weeks between the seasons when the road by the beach had been almost impassable.
Caius was first aware of the advent of this welcome visitor by a great thumping at his door one morning before he had started on his daily round. On opening it, he saw a hardy little man in a fur coat, who held out his hand to him in enthusiastic greeting.
"Well, now, this is what I call being a good boy—a very good boy—to come here to look after these poor folk."
Caius disclaimed the virtue which he did not feel.
"Motives! I don't care anything about motives. The point is to do the right thing. I'm a good boy to come and visit them; you're a good boy to come andcure them. They are not a very grateful lot, I'm sorry to say, but we have nothing to do with that; we're put here to look after them, and what we feel about it, or what they feel about it, is not the question."
He had come into Caius' room, stamping the snow off his big boots. He was a spare, elderly man, with gray hair and bright eyes. His horse and sleigh stood without the door, and the horse jingled its bells continually.
Here was a friend! Caius decided at once to question this man concerning Madame Le Maître, and—that other lady in whose existence he believed.
"The main thing that you want on these islands is nerve," said the clergyman. "It would be no good at all now"—argumentatively—"for the Bishop to send a man here who hadn't nerve. You never know where you'll meet a quicksand, or a hole in the ice. Chubby and I nearly went under this morning and never were seen again. Some of these fellows had been cutting a hole, and—well, we just saw it in time. It would have been the end of us, I can tell you; but then, you see, if you are being a good boy and doing what you're told, that does not matter so much."
It appeared that Chubby was the clergyman's pony. In a short time Caius had heard of various other adventures which she and her master had shared together. He was interested to know if any of them would throw any light upon the remarkable conduct of O'Shea and his friends; but they did not.
"The men about here," he said—"I can't make anything out of them—are they lawless?"
"You see"—in explanatory tone—"if you take a man and expose him to the sea and the wind for halfhis life, you'll find that he is pretty much asleep the other half. He may walk about with his eyes open, but his brain's pretty much asleep; he's just equal to lounging and smoking. There are just two things these men can do—fish, and gather the stuff from wrecks. They'll make from eight dollars a day at the fishing, and from sixteen to twenty when a wreck's in. They can afford to be idle the rest of the time, and they are gloriously idle."
"Do they ever gather in bands to rob wrecked ships, or for other unlawful purposes?"
"Oh no, not in the least! Oh no, nothing of the kind! They'll steal from a wreck, of course, if they get the chance; but on the sly, not by violence. Their worst sin is independence and self-righteousness. You can't teach the children anything in the schools, for instance, for the parents won't have them punished; they are quite sure that their children never do anything wrong. That comes of living so far out of the world, and getting their living so easily. I can tell you, Utopia has a bad effect on character."
Caius let the matter go for that time; he had the prospect of seeing the clergyman often.
Another week, when the clergyman had come to the island and Caius met him by chance, they had the opportunity of walking up a long snowy hill together, leading their horses. Caius asked him then about Madame Le Maître and O'Shea, and heard a plain consecutive tale of their lives and of their coming to the island, which denuded the subject of all unknown elements and appeared to rob it of special interest.
Captain Le Maître, it appeared, had a life-long lease of the property on Cloud Island, and also some propertyon the mainland south of Gaspé Basin; but the land was worth little except by tillage, and, being a seaman, he neglected it. His father had had the land before him. Pembroke, the clergyman, had seen his father. He had never happened to see the son, who would now be between forty and fifty years of age; but when Madame Le Maître had come to look after the farm on Cloud Island, she had made herself known to him as in charge of her husband's affairs. She found that she could not get the land worked by the islanders, and had induced O'Shea, who it seemed was an old farm hand of her own father's, to settle upon this farm, which was a richer one than the one he had had upon the mainland. The soil of the islands, Pembroke said, was in reality exceedingly rich, but in no case had it ever been properly worked, and he was in hopes that now Madame Le Maître might produce a model farm, which would be of vast good in showing the islanders how much they lost by their indifferent manner of treating their land.
"Why did she come to the islands?"
"Conscientiousness, I think. The land here was neglected; the people here certainly present a field white to harvest to anyone who has the missionary spirit."
"Is she—is she very devout?" asked Caius.
"Well, yes, in her own way she is—mind, I say in her own way. I couldn't tell you, now, whether she is Protestant or Papist; I don't believe she knows herself."
"He that sitteth between two stools——" suggested Caius, chiefly for want of something to say.
"Well, no, I wouldn't say that. Bless you! the truest hearts on God's earth don't trouble about religiousopinions; they have got the essential oil expressed out of them, and that's all they want."
To Caius this subject of the lady's religion appeared a matter in which he had no need to take interest, but the other went on:
"She was brought up in a convent, you know—a country convent somewhere on the Gaspé coast, and, from what she tells me, the nuns had the good policy to make her happy. She tells me that where the convent gardens abutted on the sea, she and her fellows used to be allowed to fish and row about. You see, her mother had been a Catholic, and the father, being an old miser, had money, so I suppose the sisters thought they could make a nun of her; and very likely they would have done, for she is just that sort, but the father stopped that little game by making her marry before he died."
"I always had an idea that the people on the coast up there were all poor and quite uneducated."
"Well, yes, for the most part they are pretty much what you would see on these islands; but our Bishop tells me that, here and there, there are excellent private houses, and the priests' houses and the convents are tolerably well off. But, to tell you the truth, I think this lady's father had some education, and his going to that part of the country may be accounted for by what she told me once about her mother. Her mother was a dancer, a ballet-dancer, a very estimable and pious woman, her daughter says, and I have no doubt it is true; but an educated man who makes that sort of marriage, you know, may prefer to live out of the world."
Caius was becoming interested.
"If she has inherited her mother's strength and lightness, that explains how she gets on her horse. ByJove! I never saw a woman jump on a horse without help as she does."
"Just so; she has marvellous strength and endurance, and the best proof of that, is the work she is doing nowadays. Why, with the exception of three days that she came to see my wife, and would have died if she hadn't, she has worked night and day among these sick people for the last six months. She came to see my wife pretty much half dead, but the drive on the sand and a short rest pretty well set her up again."
Pembroke drifted off here into discourse about the affairs of his parish, which comprised all the Protestant inhabitants of the island. His voice went on in the cheerful, jerky, matter-of-fact tone in which he always talked. Caius did not pay much heed, except that admiration for the sweet spirit of the man and for the pluck and hardihood with which he carried on his work, grew in him in spite of his heedlessness, for there was nothing that Pembroke suspected less than that he himself was a hero.
"Pretty tough work you have of it," said Caius at last; "if it was only christening and marrying and burying them all, you would have more than enough to do, with the distances so great."
"Oh, bless you! my boy, yes; it's the distance and the weather; but what are we here for but to do our work? Life isn't long, any way, but I'll tell you what it is—a man needs to know the place to know what he can do and what he can't. Now, the Bishop comes over for a week in summer—I don't know a finer man than our Bishop anywhere; he doesn't give himself much rest, and that's a fact; but they've sent him outfrom England, and what does he know about these islands? He said to me that he wanted me to have morning service every Sunday, as I have it at Harbour Island, and service every Sunday afternoon here on The Cloud."
"He might as well have suggested that you had morning service on the Magdalens, afternoon service in Newfoundland, and evening service in Labrador."
"Exactly, just as possible, my boy; but they had the diphtheria here, so I couldn't bring him over, even in fair weather, to see how he liked the journey."
All this time Caius was cudgelling his brains to know how to bring the talk back to Madame Le Maître, and he ended by breaking in with an abrupt inquiry as to how old she was.
A slight change came over Pembroke's demeanour. It seemed to Caius that his confidential tone lapsed into one of suspicious reserve.
"Not very old"—dryly.
Caius perceived that he was being suspected of taking an undue interest in the benefactress of the island. The idea, when it came from another, surprised him.
"Look here! I don't take much interest in Madame Le Maître, except that she seems a saint and I'd like to please her; but what I want to know is this—there is a girl who is a sister, or niece, or daughter, or some other relation of hers, who is on these islands. Who is she, and where is she?"
"Do you mean any of the girls she has in her house? She took them from families upon the island only for the sake of training them."
"I don't mean any of those girls!"—this with emphasis.
"I don't know who you mean."
Caius turned and faced him. Do what he would, he could not hide his excited interest.
"You surely must know. It is impossible that there should be a girl, young, beautiful and refined, living somewhere about here, and you not know."
"I should say so—quite impossible."
"Then, be kind enough to tell me who she is. I have an important reason for asking."
"My dear boy, I would tell you with all the pleasure in the world if I knew."
"I have seen her." Caius spoke in a solemn voice.
The priest looked at him with evident interest and curiosity. "Well, where was she, and who was she?"
"You must know: you are in Madame Le Maître's confidence; you travel from door to door, day in and day out; you know everybody and everything upon these islands."
"I assure you," said the priest, "that I never heard of such a person."