CHAPTER IX.NURSE.
Victoria is my nurse. There is no doubt of it: I am in her charge. She governs all my goings out, and my comings in, and is told off, I think, to see that I do not drown myself, or fall off the rocks. For a few days I see next to nothing of the others. They are gone out to work long before I get up, and I catch mere glimpses of them in our walks afield. They come up in the evening, to look at me through the windows, but Victoria heads them off, with a promise to produce me on Sunday. I am supposed to be convalescent in the meanwhile. I am quite content, and I sham.
The housewives, of course, see me, as I walk through the village. They have all kissed me, nobody objecting, I least of all. I am the best of friends with the children, andthese always call me ‘Lord.’ Victoria calls me by my Christian name.
She wakes me in the morning, feeds me as aforesaid, then takes me for an airing, perhaps to St. Paul’s Point, a thousand feet high, which affords a fine bird’s-eye view of infinitude. When the ascent becomes unusually steep, she grasps me by the arm, and pushes me up. It is useless to try to shake her off; I need her as much in that country as Gulliver needed Glumdalclitch elsewhere. The goats can hardly follow us sometimes. Her education has been neglected in the matter of nerves; she stands on perpendicular summits, and coils her hair; she drops on ledges of rock less than a yard wide, to rescue a stray kid, and walks to and fro on them with a certitude that precludes courage. Never have I felt so small. There is nothing to keep up the fiction of knightly service, not a fan to hold, a carriage door to open, a wrap to arrange. So I make no more pretence of homage to the sex than any other infant in charge. Fractiousness, on the contrary, is rather my cast of mind; if anything, I am a troublesome child.
In all things she is a model nurse, and especially in this, that she teaches me to tell the truth. I had no idea of what truthfulness might mean, till I came here. Victoria never says the thing that is not, and she sometimes misses the most tempting effects of humour, in consequence. Her yea is yea, her nay, nay. So, it seems, the primitive founder from Wapping understood his charge under the Writ. Whatever is she states as it is, and this mere habit often gives her talk the charm of classic prose. The Ancient, as we have seen, in his love-knot cases, supplies the want of a detective police by public confession. I praised her once for this virtue; she said I had strange ideas.
It kills coquetry, though. ‘I don’t think you care for me one bit, Victoria,’ I said one day. ‘Why should I care for you?’ I, of course, expected on her part, as the next move in the game. All the best treatises lay this down as the appropriate answer. But Victoria simply played the native gambit. ‘I am sure I do: I like you very much. How stupid of me never to think of telling you! So does father too.’ I threw a stone at agoat, by way of changing the subject, and Victoria redoubled her attentions all the way home. I could only throw more stones at the goats. Shooting, alas! was out of the question: all the live things were stock, and they had no stock to spare.
She tells me stories, like the best of nurses, stories of that unregenerate early time, when evil was killing itself out of the island, and the Devil stinging himself to death with the fork of his own tail. There is a story of an awful night, which I often ask for. All the native men had risen on all the English, and left but one of them alive, the future law-giver, and him half dead. Then, when darkness fell, the native women stole on the sleeping murderers, and finished them. This was the last massacre; the Devil was dead in Pitcairn. The scene is always with me, as the background of the picture of to-day. Here the sweet benignant maids and wives, the sunshine and the peace; there the dusky furies they sprang from, stealing forth in the night to the deed of blood. Love redeemed, if it did not justify; and ah, how these Southern women possess that finest of the arts! At Tahiti—it is another of Victoria’sstories—when the avenging war ship came out to fetch the mutineers home to be hanged, one of them was torn from the side of Peggy, his native wife, who held an infant at her breast. He lay heavily ironed on deck, when Peggy climbed the side, infant and all, from a canoe—as it was thought, only to say a discreet good-bye. But Peggy behaved without discretion, throwing herself on the poor manacled wretch, hugging his very fetters, to get a little nearer the father of her baby, and sobbing the most heart-breaking things to him in thepatoisof her isle. He turned, and begged she might be led away, as though he were already tasting something sharper than death. Led away she was, and sent back in her canoe, and she made such haste to die of a broken heart that she was at peace long before he went down in his irons in the storm that nearly destroyed the whole ship’s company, captives and all, on the homeward voyage.
Once, it might have been a ghost story. I am walking with Victoria at night, through a deep gorge, to show her the scene of my disaster in the landing. A high ridge boundsthe valley; and chancing to raise her eyes to it, the girl suddenly utters a cry of terror, and clings all trembling to me. ‘Tell me what it is—I cannot look at it.’ Then, as suddenly, she flings herself away from me, cowering, and will not be touched; and, with hands clasped, utters more cries of mystery, in which I am not concerned. ‘Oh!—if!—speak to me, only! come to me! I have not forgotten, I have not done wrong.’ There is certainly something stirring up there, in the green moonlight, but Victoria will in nowise let me obey her order to find out what it is, but draws me back into the shadow of the gorge, and insists on our hurrying home. Amiable and harmless ghost, the girl is mute about thee, and I am fain to be content with thy biography from the Ancient’s lips. The Ridge is haunted by the phantom of a murdered chief, another of the victims of that old wild time. The news of our adventure spreads through the settlement, and no one peeps in at the windows that night.
She takes me for walks, too, the cunningest. There is a wild cave at the western end, where one of the mutineers, ever hauntedby the dread of that avenging ship, used to entrench himself against possible attempts at capture that were never made. He would sit there whole summer days, his eye on a narrow rim of rock that led to his cavern, and that one man might, with ease, have kept inviolate against a hundred. He was provisioned and stored for a long siege, and a hard fight; and as he sat watching through the long hours, no doubt he had his thoughts. The eastern end has its cave too, another sanctuary, but of far-off aboriginal man, who carved sun, moon and stars on its walls, and then retired into eternal oblivion and the night of things. The vanished one’s modest avoidance of publicity could not fail to be remarked, in spite of him. He had found, or made, his cavern, in the face of a wall of rock that rose some six hundred feet sheer from the foaming sea. A few feet from the summit, there was a ledge just wide enough to support a man, and this was the pathway to his chapel of little ease.
At our first visit, Victoria dropped on the ledge with the mingled lightness and precision of fall of a weighted feather, forbidding meto follow, on pain of death. I did follow, in spite of the prohibition, whereupon she stood stock still on the ledge, till I could recover touch of her, and then burst into tears. The tears saved me, for I was beginning to look down the wall into the surf, and that way self-murder lay. They made me look up at Victoria, though I could not see her face. She recovered herself in a moment. ‘Now you will shut your eyes,’ she said, ‘lay both hands on my shoulders, and walk straight on after me.’ So we reached the cave, when she turned and faced me, and began to cry once more. ‘How am I to get you back? Why, not allourpeople can walk here—only the youngest! I will never take you out again,never; I mean,perhapsI never will.’ I examined the curiosities of the cave meanwhile, and assumed a silent, remorseful air. Then came the return journey. ‘Try to forget all about the scolding,’ said Victoria, ‘I take it back—for the present—and do just as you did before.’ It was done; and I declare the indefinable charm of companionship with her in peril was a sufficient antidote to fear. ‘Now,’ she said, when we reached the end of thepathway, ‘keep your eyes shut, and hold on to this till I come to you.’ And she guided my hand to a small projection, and scrambled, by what I afterwards found was an almost perpendicular facet, to the top of the rock. In a few seconds, something soft touched my face; it was a long woollen girdle, that Victoria sometimes wore, and she had lowered it to my aid. I, too, reached the level at last. ‘I shall not speak to you for some time,’ she said, resuming the quarrel, and she stalked on ahead, I meekly following without a word. She turned as we reached the path leading to the settlement. ‘Do you unfeignedly repent?’ When she was most serious she often talked the English of the Church Service, and without the faintest sense of incongruity. ‘Victoria, I can hardly find words—’ ‘Very well, then: I forgive you from my heart, though, you know, I am not obliged to forgive you till sundown. But it would be a pity to waste an afternoon.’
We finished the day in great amity, under the shade of a banyan tree, whither we retired for consultation on a matter that gave Victoria some perplexity of spirit. She had latelybought a Milton from a passing ship—with her own savings in potatoes—and had read it through so often that she knew long passages by heart. The work had left in her mind an impression of unfairness in the treatment of Satan, and she was most anxious to submit this difficulty to the judgment of a friend. I was at first disposed to make light of it, but I soon saw that Victoria took it very seriously indeed. They had but few books; each book went the round of the settlement; and it was taken in most edifying good faith, as a report from that visionary outer world, that unexplored planet, whose laws, customs, institutions, ways of being and doing were such a mystery to the worldlet of the rock. The hero of the latest volume to hand, novel, history or poem, no matter what its date, was always the personage of the day at Pitcairn. His difficulties were the living issues in politics, morals, and the art of life.
‘I am going to say something about it at the meeting to-morrow night; but I thought I should like to speak to you first. I do not think he was properly treated, though Mr. John Milton seems to have no pity for him,and he ought to know. Yet I cannot think it. I could hardly sleep at all, last night; it troubled me so.’
‘Well, Victoria, I suppose he staked his stake, and lost, and had to put up with the consequences; that is all I see.’
‘Yes, but perhaps if they had only been kinder to him, he might have repented. He was very proud, you know, and there was no one to soothe him. I think Gabriel was very haughty and hard with him, and Zephon quite disrespectful, considering his place. Do you always approve of Gabriel?’ she asked, with much earnestness, and looking me straight in the eyes, as though our friendship depended on the answer. ‘Surely,’ she said, with rising warmth, ‘you would never stand up for that speech at the end of the fourth book. Rulers should not be so high and distant, just clearing their throats, and giving their commands, as though all others were servants. Suppose father ruled like that—who would obey the laws? I know Satan felt it. It is a pity he had no good female angel to take care of him—only there is no marrying, nor giving in marriage there: so they say,’ and she sighed.‘People may meet again, though, without marrying,’ she said after a pause, and with her eyes fixed on the vacancy of sea and sky. ‘Thank God for that! But oh what meetings, if they have not been true!’ She seemed to have forgotten Satan for a moment, I thought, but I soon brought her back to the case before the court.
‘There was an attempt to bring feminine influence to bear on him, I believe, but it hardly turned out well.’
‘When? where? Mr. John Milton says nothing about it.’
‘No, that comes from another reporter, a Frenchman. It did not answer. A pitying angel left Paradise, to come and speak comfort to him, as he lay writhing on his hot bed. She was fearful, though compassionate, and she meant always to keep out of arm’s length. But her pity drew her too near, all the same, and he clutched her, and dragged her down. So runs the tale.’
‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ said Victoria firmly, ‘I think he never had a chance. I shall say so at the meeting; and you back me up.’