Major Vigoureux

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"I--I beg you will do nothing of the sort." The Commandant's voice
shook with apprehension.

Mr. Rogers, mistaking the tremor in the appeal, recoiled suddenly from
the extremely gay to the extremely grave. "My good fellow! Of course,
if it's serious!----"

"'Serious!'" The Commandant stared at him for a moment. "Oh, damn the
woman!" he broke out in sudden wrath, and went his way with long
strides, while the Inspecting Commander looked after him with a broad
grin.

The next battery, the Keg of Butter--so called from a barrel-shaped
rock which it overlooked--was built of sods, and had mounted a single
eighteen-pounder, on a traversing platform. Here, on the north-west
side of the hill, the fortifications broke off, or were continued only
by a low wall along the edge of the cliff; and here the path, or _via
militaris_, turned off at a sharp angle and led back towards the
Castle, under the walls of which the Commandant passed, as a rule, to
complete his inspection by visiting the three batteries on the northern
cliffs. But to-day he broke his custom, and returned to the Garrison
Garden.

As he opened the gate, five o'clock sounded from the garrison bell, and
at the first stroke of it he saw Sergeant Archelaus drive his spade
into the soil, draw the back of his wrist across his forehead, and walk
towards the veronica hedge for his tunic.

"Archelaus!"

"Sir!"

"I have been thinking over those trousers--" began the Commandant,
picking his way between the briers that threatened to choke the path.

"And so have I," said Sergeant Archelaus; "and the upshot is, Do you
spell 'em with a 'u' or a 'w'?"

"Now you mention it, I don't feel able to answer you off-hand; not
without writing it down," said the Commandant. "But what on earth does
it matter?"

"Nothin'--except that I was thinkin' to write him a letter, to thank
him."

"For Heaven's sake--" the Commandant began, and checked himself. "I
wouldn't do that, if I were you. In fact, I've been thinking the matter
over, and it occurs to me that I have an old pair of dress trousers
that might serve your turn; that is to say, if you could manage to
unpick the red stripe off your old ones and get someone to sew it on.
They are black, to be sure; but the difference between black and dark
blue is not so very noticeable. And the cut of them inclines to the
peg-top, that being the fashionable shape when I bought them--let me
see--in fifty-seven, I think it was."

"I know 'em," said Sergeant Archelaus. "They were sound enough two
months back, when I sprinkled 'em over with camphor, against the moth."

"I think they will do excellently."

"They'll do, fast enough," Sergeant Archelaus asserted; "though it
seems like deprivin' you."

"Not at all, Archelaus; not in the least. Why, I haven't put on evening
dress half a dozen times since I came to the Islands."

"And that's a long time, to be sure, sir. But one never knows. The Lord
Proprietor might take it into his head, one o' these days, to invite
you to dinner."

"Few things are less likely. And even if he did, and the worst came to
the worst, I might borrow Mr. Rogers', you know," added the
Commandant--and with a smile; for he stood six feet, and Mr. Rogers a
bare five feet five, in their respective socks.

"He might ask you both together. 'Twould be just of a piece with his
damned thoughtlessness."

"Hush, Archelaus!" his master commanded sternly, and reproached himself
afterwards for having felt not altogether ill-pleased.

"Well, sir, I thank you kindly; and I won't deny 'twill be a comfort to
go about with the lower half of me looking a bit less like a pen-wiper.
But what be I to do with the pesky things? Return 'em?"

"On no account. You might even thank him--by word of mouth--if you have
not already done so."

"I haven't. To tell the truth, the pattern took me so aback at first
going off.... But when you came in by the gate, there, I was turning it
over in my mind that the garrison oughtn't to be beholden to a
civilian----"

"Quite right, Archelaus."

"And, that bein' so, it might be dignified-like to return gift for
gift. Now, the Lord Proprietor's terrible fond of bulbs; 'tis a new
craze with him; and in spading over the border here I'd a-turned up a
dozen or so of those queer-looking Lent-lilies you set such store
by----" Sergeant Archelaus pointed towards a little heap of daffodil
bulbs carelessly strewn on the up-turned soil.

These bulbs had a history.

Close on thirty years before, a certain Dutch skipper--his name is
forgotten--happened to be sailing for Bordeaux with a general cargo,
which included some thousands of tulips, and a few almost priceless
ones, for a rich purchaser who wished to introduce tulip-culture into
the Gironde. The Dutchman's vessel was a flat-bottomed galliot, fitted
with lee-boards, but liable to fall away from the wind; and,
encountering a strong southerly gale as he attempted to round Ushant,
he was blown northward into the fogs, and, through the fogs, upon the
Islands.

Against what followed, the chances were at least a thousand to one. His
vessel, blind as to her whereabouts, and helpless among the tide-races,
missed rock after rock, blundered her way past every sunken peril--to
be sure, she was flat-bottomed, but the soundings varied so from moment
to moment that the crew, after running a dozen times to the boats in
the certainty of striking, fully believed themselves bewitched; until,
in St. Lide's Pool, as they made seven fathoms and hoped for open
water, the fog lifted suddenly, and they saw Garrison Hill right above
them.

This befell them a short hour before sunset. The skipper rounded up to
the wind, dropped anchor, got out a boat, and groped his way
shoreward--for the fog had descended again, even more speedily than it
had lifted.

Groping his way, and still attended by his amazing good luck, the
Dutchman, where he had expected rocks, came plump on a pier of hewn
masonry. At the pier-head, which loomed high above them, a man struck a
light and displayed a lantern; and, looking up, the crew were aware of
many people standing there and chattering in the dusk--chattering in
the low soft tone peculiar to the Islanders. The skipper hailed them in
Dutch, and again in French, these being the only languages he spoke.
The Islanders, helping him ashore, made signs that they could not
answer, but took him and his men up the hill to the Garrison, then
commanded by a Colonel Bartlemy.

Colonel Bartlemy could speak French after a fashion, and so could his
excellent wife. Between them they entertained the wanderers hospitably
for the space of five days, at the end of which the Dutchman went his
way before a clear north wind, and in charge of an Island pilot. But
before departing he presented his hosts--it was all that either he
could give or they would permit themselves to accept--with a quantity
of remarkably fine bulbs from his cargo.

Now, possibly, being a Dutchman, he took it for granted that anyone
could recognise these bulbs for what they were. But Mrs. Bartlemy did
not; for she had spent the most of her life in various garrisons, which
afford few opportunities for gardening. None the less, she was, for a
soldier's wife, a first-rate housekeeper; and, supposing these bulbs to
be onions of peculiar rarity, she forthwith issued invitations to the
_elite_ of the Island, and ordered over a leg of Welsh mutton from the
mainland. I will not attempt to tell of the dinner that ensued: for
Miss Gabriel made the story her own, and everyone who heard her relate
it after one of Garland Town's _petits soupers_--as she frequently did
by special request--declared it to be inimitable. Suffice it to say
that the tulips were boiled, but not eaten.

A few bulbs, of smaller size, escaped the pot, and Mrs. Bartlemy, in
her mortification, ordered the cook to throw them away, or (in the
language of the Islands) to "heave them to cliff." The cook cast them
out upon a bed of rubbish in a corner of the garrison garden, where
by-and-by they were covered with fresh rubbish, under which they
sprouted; and, next spring, lo! the midden heap had become a mound of
glorious trumpet daffodils!

So they were left to blossom, refreshing the eyes of successive
Commandants year after year as March came round and the March
nor'-westers set their yellow bells waving against the blue sea. Major
Vigoureux delighted in them--were they not his name-flower? But no one
took pains to cultivate them, as no one suspected their great destiny.
They bloomed year by year, and waited. Their hour was not yet.

"By all means, Archelaus, let us do it tactfully," agreed the
Commandant. "We must suppress those trousers of his at all costs. Yet I
would avoid anything in the nature of a rebuff, and if you think the
Lord Proprietor would be gratified, you are welcome to take him as many
of the bulbs as you please. Only leave me a few; for God knows our
garden has few ornaments to spare."

"I'll take 'em over to Inniscaw and thank him by word o' mouth," said
Sergeant Archelaus, hopefully. "It'll save me the trouble of spelling
'trousers,' anyway."

"It would be easier, as well as more accurate," said the Commandant,
pensively regarding the Sergeant's legs, "to call them trews. Not," he
went on inconsequently, "that I have anything to say against the
Highland Regiments. I was brigaded once for three months with the
Forth-Second, and capital fellows I found them."

With a mind relieved, the Commandant walked off towards the Barracks,
pausing on his way to pick up Miss Gabriel's antimacassar-waistcoat,
which he had taken the precaution to leave outside the gate.

Three-quarters of an hour later he emerged in clean shirt and
threadbare, but well-brushed, uniform, arrayed for Mr. and Mrs.
Fossell's whist-party. As he passed the Garrison gate, Mrs. Treacher,
who sometimes acted deputy for her husband, began to ring the six
o'clock bell. He halted and waited for her to finish.

"Mrs. Treacher," he said, "can you tell me the price of flannel?"

"Flannel," answered Mrs. Treacher, "is all prices, according to
quality."

"But I am talking of good ordinary flannel, fit to make up into a man's
shirt."

"Then you couldn't say less than one-three-farthings, or
one-and-a-ha'penny at the lowest."

"And how much would be required?"

"Good Lord!" said Mrs. Treacher. "As if that didn't all depend on the
man!"

"I was thinking, Mrs. Treacher, to present your husband with one: that
is to say, with the material, if you will not mind making it up."

Mrs. Treacher curtsied. "And I thank you kindly, sir, for 'tis not
before he needs one, which, being under average size and the width just
a yard, as you may reckon, he oughtn't to take more than
three-and-a-half yards at the outside."

"Three-and-a-half at one-three-farthings--that makes--Oh, confound
these fractions!" said the Commandant. "We'll make it four shillings,
and you had best step down to Tregaskis' shop to-morrow and choose the
stuff yourself." He counted out the money into Mrs. Treacher's hand,
and left her curtseying. As he went, he jingled the few coins remaining
in his breeches pocket. They amounted to two-and-seven-pence in
all--and almost a week stood between him and pay-day.

CHAPTER III

THE COMMANDANT FINESSES A KNAVE

"I remember the Bartlemys perfectly," said Miss Gabriel, addressing the
company as they sat around Mr. and Mrs. Fossell's dining-table and
trifled with a light collation of cordial waters and ratafia
biscuits--prelude to serious whist. "I carry them both in my mind's
eye, though I must have been but a tiny child when he succumbed to
apoplexy, and she left the Islands to reside with a married sister at
Scarborough. Very poorly-off he left her. Somehow, our Commanding
Officers have never contrived to save money--even in the old days, when
the post was worth having."

Miss Gabriel said it lightly but pointedly, with a glance at the
Commandant. The company stared at their plates and glasses. It was
well-known that (as Mr. Rogers put it) Miss Gabriel "had her knife
into" the patient man, and there were tongues that attributed her
spitefulness to disappointment. Fifteen years ago, when Major Narcisse
Vigoureux--no longer in his first youth, but still a man of handsome
presence--had first arrived in the Islands to take over his command,
Miss Gabriel was a not uncomely woman of thirty. _Partis_ in the
Islands are few, as you may suppose. He was a bachelor, she a spinster;
she had money, and he position. What wonder, then, if the Islanders
expected them to make a match of it?

For some reason, the match had never come off, and although she might
convince herself that the simplest reason--incompatibility--was the
true one, Miss Gabriel could hardly have been unaware that the women
looked upon her as one who had missed her chance, and even blamed her a
little--as women always will in such cases--in a conspiracy of sex
acknowledging its weakness. Perhaps this made her defiant.

She was handling the Commandant truculently to-night.

"Of course," she continued, "even in those days the post--don't they
say the same in England of a Deanery?--was looked upon as finishing a
man's career. I don't know, for my part, the principle upon which the
Horse Guards--it used to be the Horse Guards--sent Colonel Bartlemy
down to us."

"By selection, ma'am," said the Commandant, still patiently, as she
paused; "by selection among a number of applicants."

"I didn't want to be told that," snapped Miss Gabriel. "What I meant
was, the Commander-in-Chief probably knew something of the man--had
informed himself of something in his record--before sending him down to
this exile."

"And a jolly good exile, too!" put in Mr. Rogers, heartily.

"It used to be," said Miss Gabriel. "This Colonel Bartlemy, for
instance, was a coward. I've heard it told of him that once, during his
command, a sort of mutiny broke out in the Barracks. It happened at a
time when the newspapers were full of nonsense about France invading us
by a sudden descent; and the noise, reaching him in the quarters where
he lodged with his wife and one general maid-servant, put him in a
terrible fright. He had fenced off these quarters of his for privacy,
because Mrs. Bartlemy thought it would be a good deal better for the
maid-servant; and they communicated with the Barracks by a staircase
with a door of which he kept the key. On the first alarm he ran to this
door and called through the key-hole for his orderly; but the orderly,
who himself was taking part in the disturbance, did not hear. So the
Colonel called up his wife and the servant, and joined them at the head
of the stairs after he had slipped on his belt and sword. By this time
the noise below was deafening. The Colonel, putting a brave face on it,
managed to get the key into the lock and turn it. Then, as he flung the
door open, he turned with a bow to his wife and said very politely, in
French--for they were in the habit of talking French before the
girl--'_Passez devant, madame!_'"

"How did it end?" asked Mr. Rogers, after a guffaw.

"Oh, it turned out to be just a barrack brawl. The soldiers were always
the worst-behaved lot in the Islands, and perpetually grumbling--though
in those days," added Miss Gabriel, "I always understood that they were
fed and clothed sufficiently."

The Commandant whitened. Mrs. Fossell, a nervous body in a cap with
lilac ribbon, rose in some little fluster, and opined that it was
almost time to cut for partners.

A few minutes later the Commandant found himself seated opposite Mr.
Fossell, with Miss Gabriel and Mr. Rogers for opponents--Miss Gabriel
on his left. He prepared to enjoy himself, for whist meant silence, and
he could have chosen no better partner than Mr. Fossell, who played a
sound game, and with a perfectly inscrutable face.

"Dear me!" said Miss Gabriel, in the act of picking up her cards, "it
seems as if this had happened a great many times before! What do you
say, Mr. Fossell, to staking half-a-crown on the rubber, just to
enliven the game? You don't object on principle, I know, to playing for
money."

"No, indeed, ma'am," answered Mr. Fossell. "I am content if the others
are willing--not that for me the pleasure of playing against you needs
any such--er--adventitious stimulus."

Miss Gabriel appealed to Mr. Rogers.

Mr. Rogers thought it would be great fun. "Come along, Vigoureux," he
almost shouted, "you can't refuse a lady's challenge!"

What could the poor Commandant do? Almost before he knew he had nodded,
though with a set face, and by the nod committed himself. He felt his
few coins burning in his breeches' pocket against his thigh, as if they
warned him.

But, after all, Fossell was an excellent player. With the smallest
luck, he and Fossell ought to be more than a match for a pair of whom,
if one (Miss Gabriel) was wily, the other played a game not usually
distinguishable from bumble-puppy.

They won the first game easily.

They had almost won the second when a devastating seven trumps in Mr.
Rogers's hand (which he played atrociously) saw their opponents almost
level--the score eight-seven. In the next hand, Miss Gabriel--for this
was old-fashioned long whist--held all four honours, and took the game.

The Commandant looked at Mr. Fossell. But a financier is not disturbed
by the risk of half-a-crown.

Only half-a-crown!--but for the Commandant a week between this
half-a-crown and another.

He wondered what Fossell would say--Fossell, sitting there, so
imperturbable, with his shiny bald head--if he knew.

"Game _and_!" announced Mr. Rogers.

By this time the players at the second table, aware of the half-a-crown
at stake, were listening in a state of suppressed excitement--suppressed
because the Vicar, being deaf, had not overheard Miss Gabriel's
challenge, and the others feared that he might disapprove of playing
for money.

The Vicar, who played against Mr. and Mrs. Pope, with Mrs. Fossell for
partner, had a habit of soliloquising over his hand on any subject that
occurred to him. The rest of the table deferred to this habit, out of
respect or because by experience they knew it to be incurable, since
only by conscious effort could he hear any voice but his own.

By such an effort, holding his hand to his ear, he had listened to Miss
Gabriel's anecdote about Colonel Bartlemy; smiling the while because he
had heard it many times before and knew it to be a good one; innocently
unaware that it covered any caustic subintention. It had started him on
a train of reminiscence which he pursued at the card-table (good man)
for twenty-five minutes, recalling himself to the cards with a faint
shock of surprise whenever it became his turn to play, as one who would
protest--"What, again? And so soon?"

"Yes, indeed," the Vicar's voice struck in across the strained silence,
"there is an old story that Oliver Cromwell left behind him, in
garrison here, a company of the Bedfordshire Regiment, and that in time
they were completely forgotten. (Let me see. Spades are trumps, I
believe.... 'Clubs'? Your pardon Mrs. Fossell, but I remember it was a
black suit.) Yes, and seeing no prospect of recall they married in time
with our Island women, and that"--here the Vicar gathered up a trick
which belonged to his opponents--"is, by some, alleged to be the reason
why the Islanders use a purer English than is spoken on the mainland.
Ah, quite so; yes, I played the ten--then it was your ace, Mrs. Pope? I
congratulate you, ma'am."

The Commandant, overhearing, could not forbear a glance at Miss
Gabriel. It conveyed no resentment, scarcely even a reproach; it turned
rather, as by dumb instinct, upon the author of the wound, and asked
perplexedly:--"What have I done to you, that you treat me thus?" I have
no doubt that Miss Gabriel caught the glance. She did not answer it;
but her grey eyes glinted beneath their lids as she bent them upon the
cards Mr. Fossell was dealing in his usual deliberate way--glinted as
though with a spark of flint struck out by steel.

"The story may be apocryphal," pursued the Vicar, addressing deaf ears
around the other table; "though, for my part, I incline to think there
may be a substratum----"

Mr. Fossell turned up the queen of hearts. The Commandant held ace,
ten, and two small trumps, with a strong hand in diamonds, which Mr.
Rogers, by a blundering lead, enabled him to establish early. Actual
honours were "easy"; but by exhausting trumps at the first opportunity,
he scored three by tricks. The next hand gave their opponents three
points--two by honours, and the trick. Three all.

The Vicar was heard to observe that, on the whole, intermarriage among
the Islanders had not produced the disastrous effects usually predicted
of it; and that, therefore, an infusion of fresh blood, at some date
more or less remote, might reasonably be conjectured, even though
incapable of proof.

The Vicar, as he said this, looked across at Mrs. Fossell
interrogatively. He was really expecting her to lead trumps, but she
mistook him to be asking her assent to his theory. To keep the ball
rolling, she opined that what had happened once need not necessarily
happen again, especially in these days when locomotion was making such
strides. She hazarded this in the lowest key; but it happened in just
that momentary hush upon which the faintest remark falls resonantly.
The Commandant heard it across the room as he waited for Mr. Rogers to
cut the cards; and the Vicar, by a freak of hearing, picked it up at
once.

"My dear lady," he demanded, "are you talking of progenitiveness!"

"N-no," stammered Mrs. Fossell, in confusion. "Nothing of the sort. I
was referring to the garrison here being left out of mind--like the
regiment you spoke of----"

Miss Gabriel tapped the table impatiently. "Mr. Rogers," she said, "I
think we had better attend to the game. Major Vigoureux is waiting for
you to cut." She said it with her eyes upon the Commandant's hand,
which was trembling. He wondered, as he dealt, if she had observed that
it was trembling. If so, had she guessed the true reason?

The score mounted to nine-eight. The Commandant lifted a hand to his
brow as Mr. Fossell, whose turn it was, took up the cards and began to
deal methodically, without a trace of discomposure.

"Half a crown! and if he lost, one penny left to last him to next pay
day!" A terrible thought seized him. "And what if, when he presented
himself at Mr. Fossell's bank on pay-day, the money was not
forthcoming?" Nonsense! He was unhinged.... The money had always
arrived punctually ... but the whole world seemed to be in conspiracy
against him to-night, and his luck along with it.

Mr. Rogers, who had a trick of sorting out his suits between his
fingers, hesitated for a few moments, put his cards together, and with
an air of fierce determination, led a small heart.

Again the Commandant's right hand went up to his brow. The room was
very close and still. But the Vicar remained unaware of the general
excitement, and across the silence the Vicar was heard to say
confidentially:--

"Between you and me there was a time when I hoped our friend the
Commandant might make a match of it."

The poor Commandant!... With his gaze fixed on the cards, he felt that
every ear was listening, every eye turned upon him. He must do
something desperate to break the horrible spell, to turn the luck....
He held ace, king, knave of hearts, and knew well enough that, in sound
whist he ought to play the king. But why had Mr. Rogers led hearts? Mr.
Rogers did not often lead even from a strong suit unless it contained
at least one honour.

The Commandant risked it and finessed his knave. Miss Gabriel had been
waiting, watching him intently. Her mouth shut almost with a snap of
triumph as she put down the queen.

It was, as it happened, the one heart in her hand. She closed her
triumph, a few rounds later, by trumping the Commandant's ace and king.
Mr. Fossell looked at his partner, in sorrow rather than in anger. Mr.
Rogers laughed uproariously as he counted up the tricks.

"Double or quits, I suppose?" he suggested.

But the Commandant rose. "Your pardon, Miss Gabriel," he said, laying
his half-crown on the table, "if I play no more for money to-night.
Indeed, I was going to ask Mrs. Fossell to forgive me if I spoil one of
her quartettes by withdrawing. To tell the truth, I am not myself--a
slight dizziness----"

"A glass of hot brandy-and-water?" suggested Mr. Fossell. "Nay, then, a
thimbleful--I insist!"

The Commandant made his excuses as politely as he could, and found
himself in the street. The night was pitch-dark and the road full of
sea-fog--a fog so thick that it completely shut off the rays of the
many lighthouses twinkling around the Islands, and obscured the few
street lamps that illuminated Garland Town. A slight breeze blew up
from the west and damped his brow; for his dizziness had been something
more than a pretence, and he walked with his hat in his hand.

On such a night a stranger might well have lost his way; but the
Commandant steered for Garrison Hill without a mistake, and up the hill
towards the Barracks. Garland Town is early a-bed. He passed no one in
the streets. But in St. Hugh's, as he went by the closed door of a
cottage, half-way up the ascent, he recalled the night, years ago, of
his first arrival in the Islands. He had come a week before the
garrison expected him, and there had been no one to meet him on the
quay when he arrived in the dusk of an October evening. Darkness had
descended on the Islands before he started from the quay to climb to
his new home; and here--just here, at this doorway--he had paused to
ask his way. The door had stood open then, with a panel of warm
firelight lying across the roadway, and as he halted and peered into
the room--it was a kitchen, and the light from the open hearth glinted
on rows of china plates ranged along the dresser--he saw two girls
beside the fire; the one seated and reading from a book in her lap, the
other on the hearth-mat half reclined against her sister's knee, over
which she had flung an arm to prop her chin as she listened.... He
remembered the sand strewn on the slate floor, the fresh sea-smell in
this room so confidingly open to the night--the scene so intimate, so
homely, that the traveller standing in the doorway with the sea-spray
on his cloak could scarcely believe in the tide-races across which he
had been voyaging for hours. He stood, the hum of them in his ears, a
doubtful intruder; and while he stood, the girl in the chair had risen
and bade him good evening in purest English.

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