Major Vigoureux

A >> A. T. Quiller Couch >> Major Vigoureux

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20

The Commandant drew himself erect, but before he could answer, the Lord
Proprietor had gone his way, waving his torch and still shouting for
someone to man the bow thwart.

There was a slow pause.

"Can you get to our boat, Archelaus?" asked the Commandant. The two
sergeants heard his voice drag on the question. They could not see his
face.

"She's afloat, sir," answered Sergeant Archelaus.

"Find the frap then, and pull her in."

"Is it our boat you're meaning, sir?" asked Archelaus, hesitating.

"Certainly."

"There's a certain amount of sea running, sir, out beyond the point."

"I observed as much this evening."

"Very good, sir." Something in the Commandant's voice forbade further
argument.

They were afloat almost as soon as the coastguard, and a full five
minutes before the life-boat. Sergeant Archelaus pulled stroke, and
Sergeant Treacher bow. The Commandant steered, his lantern and pocket
compass beside him in the stern sheets.

The boat--she had once been a yacht's cutter--measured sixteen feet
over all. She was fitted with a small centre-plate, and carried a lug
sail (but this they left behind; it was in store, and would have been
worse than useless). They pulled out into a fog so thick that only by
intervals could the Commandant catch sight of Sergeant Treacher's face,
and Sergeant Treacher's eyebrows and sandy moustache glistering with
beads of mist.

They had left the pier but a short two hundred strokes behind them when
the little tug belonging to the Islands came panting out of the harbour
with the lifeboat in tow, and passed on, blowing her whistle, to
overtake and pick up the coastguard galley. So unexpectedly her lights
sprang upon them, and so close astern that Treacher, with a sharp cry
of warning--for the Commandant's gaze was fastened forward--had barely
time to jerk the boat's head round and avoid being cut down. Then,
dropping his paddle, he made a grab at the painter and flung it,
calling out to the lifeboat's crew to catch and make fast. But either
he was a moment too late in flinging, or the lifeboatmen, themselves
bawling instructions to the tug's crew, were preoccupied and did not
hear. The rope struck against something--the lifeboat's gunwale
doubtless--but no one caught it, and next moment the tug had slipped
away into darkness and into a silence which swallowed up the shouts and
the throb of her engines as though she had dropped into a pit.

"Darn your skin, Sam Treacher!" swore Sergeant Archelaus. "There goes a
couple of hours' pulling you might have saved us!"

"Then why couldn't you have given warning?" retorted Treacher. "Pretty
pair of eyes you keep in that old head of yours!"

"Be quiet, you two!" the Commandant ordered. "They'd have caught the
painter if they wanted us."

He fell silent, bending his head to study the compass in the lantern's
ray. "Not wanted"--"not wanted"--the paddles took up the burden and
beat it into a sort of tune to the creak of the thole-pins. As a young
officer he had started with high notions of duty; nor, looking back on
the wasted years could he tax himself that he had ever declined its
call; only the call which in youth had always carried a promise with
it, definitely clear and shining, of enterprise and reward, of
adventure, achievement, fame, had sunk by degrees to a dull repetition
calling him from sleep to perform the spiritless daily round. He did
not sigh that the definite vision had faded; it happened so, may be, to
most men, though not to all. To most men, it might be, their fate
played the crimp; they followed the marsh-fires out into just such a
blind waste as this through which he and his men were groping--darkness
above and below; darkness before, behind, to right, to left; darkness
of birth, of death, and only the palpable fog between. He did not sigh
for this. What irked him was the thought that while he had followed the
mill-round of duty, strength had been ebbing away and had left him
useless.

Yes, there lay the sting. Twenty years ago how like a schoolboy he
would have dashed into this fog, careless of consequence, eager only to
find where men needed his help! He might have found, or missed; but
twenty years ago men would have hailed his will to help. Now he was
useless, negligible. In an ordinary way these neighbours of his might
disguise their knowledge, through politeness or pity; but at a crisis
like this the truth came out. The Lord Proprietor had treated him as a
pantaloon, and these lifeboatmen--so little they valued him--could not
be at the pains of catching a rope.

He steered, as nearly as he could calculate, west-by-south, allowing at
a guess for the set of the tide. The wall of fog, which let pass no
true sound, itself seemed full of voices--hissing of spent waves,
sucking of water under weed-covered ledges, little puffs and moanings
of the wind. He had reckoned that he was bending around shore to the
south of the roadstead, heading gradually for St. Lide's Sound and
giving the rocks on his port hand a wide berth; when of a sudden
Archelaus called out, and he spied a grey line of breaking
water--luckily the sea was full of briming to-night--at the base of the
fog, quite close at hand. It scared them so that they headed off almost
at right angles. This adventure not only proved his reckoning to be
wrong, but complicated it hopelessly.

They were in open water again, still making--or at any rate the boat so
pointed--west-by-south. The short scare had shaken him out of his
brooding thoughts. He saw now, minute after minute, but the sea beyond
the edge of the boat's gunwale, heaving up and sliding astern as it
caught the shine of the lantern. The lantern shone also against the
knees of Archelaus, and lit up the check-board pattern of the
eleemosynary trousers. It was a provocative pattern, but the Commandant
heeded it not....

He looked up from Sergeant Archelaus' knees to Sergeant Archelaus'
face, and past it to the face of Sergeant Treacher, now a little more
distinct. The two men had been pulling for an hour, and the Commandant
saw that they were tired--tired and very old. He recognised it at first
with a touch of anger. He felt an instant's impulse to curse and bid
them row harder. But on the instant came gentle understanding, and
restrained him.

"Archelaus," he said, "you are the older; take the tiller here and give
me the oar for a spell."

Archelaus was not unwilling. Besides, was it not his commanding officer
who gave the order? He relinquished his paddle with a grunt of
exhaustion, and the Commandant stood up to take it, laying both hands
on it while Archelaus stumbled past to the stern-sheets.... And at that
moment a miracle befell.

The fog must have been thinning. The Commandant, standing with both
hands on the paddle and his face to the bows, saw or felt it part
suddenly, and through the parting lights shone and voices sounded, with
the heavy throb of a vessel's screw.

Clank! clank! and it was on them, almost before Sergeant Archelaus
could let out a cry--the stem, the grey-painted bows of a vast
steamship, ghostly, towering up into night. A bell rang. High on the
bridge--but the bridge soared into heaven--a pilot's voice called out
in the Island tongue. As the great bows glided by, missing the boat by
a few yards, the three men stared aloft until they had almost cricked
their necks; and aloft there, as Archelaus raised his lantern, the
Commandant read the vessel's name--"Milo"--glimmering in tall gilt
letters.

Faces looked down from her rail, faces from the shadow of the
hurricane' deck; a line of faces and all looking down upon the little
Island tug that had fallen alongside and drifted close under the
liner's flank, a short way abaft her red port-light. A murmur of talk
went with the faces, as it were a stream rippling by, and mingled with
the splash of water pouring over-side from the pumps. It sounded
cheerfully, and from the voices on board the tug and in the lifeboat
and galley towing astern our Commandant gathered that the danger was
over. Again Sergeant Treacher hailed and flung a rope; this time the
lifeboat's crew caught it and made fast.

"Reub Hicks is aboard," said a voice, naming one of the St. Ann's
pilots. "He picked her up not twenty furlongs from Hell-deeps after she
had missed the Little Meadows by the skin of her teeth."

"How in the name of good Providence she got near enough to miss it,
being where she was, is the marvel to me," said another.

"She did, anyway," said the coxswain; "for Reub himself called down the
news to me in so many words."

The Commandant gazed up at the gray shadow reaching aloft into
darkness. He knew those outer reefs of which the men spoke. A touch of
them would have split the plates of this tall fabric like a house of
cards. He and Archelaus had witnessed one such wreck, eight years ago;
had waited in broad daylight, helpless, resting on their oars, unable
to approach within a cable's length of the rocks, upon which in ten
minutes a steel-built five-master, of 1,200 tons, had melted to nothing
before their eyes--"the rivets," as Archelaus put it, "flying out of
her like shirt buttons." But that had happened on one of the outermost
reefs, beyond the Off Islands, far down by the Monk Light. How the
_Milo_, no matter from what quarter approaching, had threaded her way
by the Hell-deeps was to him a mystery of mysteries. She was groping it
yet, her engines working dead slow; but the fog during the past hour
had sensibly lightened and Reub Hicks held open water between him and
the Roads, though he still kept the lead going. At the entrance of the
Roads he sent the tug forward to help the steerage, and so brought her
in and rounded her up as accurately as though she had been a little
schooner of two hundred tons.

As the great anchor dropped, and amid the deafening rattle of its chain
in the hawse-pipe, the crew astern cast off and drew their boats
alongside, eager to swarm aboard and hear news of the miracle. From his
galley Mr. Rogers shouted up to the captain to lower his ladder. He and
his chief boatman mounted first, with a little man named Pengelly, a
custom's official, who happened to make one of the lifeboat's crew--for
the _Milo_ had come from foreign, and thus a show was made of complying
with the Queen's regulations. But the whole crowd trooped up close at
their heels, and with the crowd clambered Sergeant Archelaus and
Sergeant Treacher.

The Commandant had given them permission. He would remain below, he
said, and look after the boat, awaiting their report.

The crowd passed up and dispersed itself about the deck, congratulating
all comers, and excitedly plying them with questions. The Islanders are
a child-like race, and from his post at the foot of the deserted
accommodation ladder the Commandant could hear them laughing,
exclaiming, chattering with the passengers in high-pitched voices.

He stood with his boat-hook, holding on by the grating of the ladder's
lowest step, and stared at the gray wall-sides of the liner. Yes, the
ship was solid, and yet he could not believe but that she belonged to a
dream; so mysteriously, against all chances, was she here, out of the
deep and the night.

Someone had lashed a lantern at the head of the ladder. Lifting his
eyes to it in the foggy darkness, the Commandant saw a solitary figure
standing there in the gangway and looking down on him--a woman.

She lifted a hand as if to enjoin silence, and came swiftly down a step
or two in the shadow of the vessel's side.

"You are Major Vigoureux?" she asked in a quick whisper, leaning
forward over him.

"At your service, madam," he stammered, taken fairly aback.

"Ah! I am glad of that!" She ran down the remaining steps and set her
foot lightly on the boat's gunwale. "You will row me ashore?"

"If you wish it, madam." He was more puzzled than ever. He saw that she
wore a dark cloak of fur and was bare-headed. She spoke in a sort of
musical whisper. Her face he could not see. "In a minute or two my
men----"

"We will not wait for your men," she said, quietly, seating herself in
the stern sheets. "They can easily be put ashore--can they not?--in one
of the other boats."

From under her fur cloak she reached out an arm--a bare arm with two
jewelled bracelets--and took the tiller. "I can steer you to the quay,"
she said, and leaning forward in the light of Sergeant Archelaus'
lantern, she lifted her eyes to the Commandant.

The Commandant pushed off, shipped the paddles into the thole pins, and
began to row, as in a dream.

CHAPTER VI

HOW VASHTI CAME TO THE ISLANDS

"You do not remember me, Major Vigoureux?"

The Commandant looked at her, across the lantern's ray. Something in
her voice, vibrating like the rich, full note of a bell, touched his
memory ... but only to elude it.

The face that challenged him was not girlish; the face, rather, of a
beautiful woman of thirty; its shape a short oval, with a slight
squareness at the point of the jaw to balance the broad forehead over
which her hair (damp now, but rippled with a natural wave, defying the
fog) lay parted in two heavy bands--the brow of a goddess. Her eyes,
too, would have become a goddess, though just now they condescended to
be merry.

Tall she was, for certain, and commanding. Her cloak hid the lines of
her body, whether they were thin or ample; but, where the collar
opened, her throat showed like a pillar, carrying her chin upon a truly
noble poise. It was inconceivable (the Commandant said to himself) that
he had met this woman before and forgotten her.

He came back to her eyes. They challenged him fearlessly. He could not
have described their colour; but he saw amusement lurking deep in their
glooms while she waited.

"I am sorry. It is unpardonable in me, of course----"

"And I, on the contrary, am glad," she interrupted, with a laugh that
reminded him of the liquid chuckle in a thrush's song, or of water
swirling down a deep pool; "for it tells me I have grown out of
recognition, and that is just what I wanted."

This puzzled him, and he frowned a little.

"You know the Islands?" he asked. "This is not your first visit?"

"You shall judge if in this darkness I steer you straight for St.
Lide's Quay; and I take you to witness--look over your shoulder--there
is no lamp on the quay-head to guide me, or at least none visible." She
laughed again, but on the instant grew serious. "Yes," she added, "I
can find my way among the Islands, I thank God." And this puzzled him
yet more.

"You know the Islands; you are glad to return to them?"

She nodded.

"Yet you do not wish to be recognised?"

She nodded again. "I came, you see, sooner than I intended. The _Milo_
was clean out of her course."

"That goes without saying," said he, gravely.

"She was bound for Plymouth. So, you see, this little misadventure has
shortened my journey by days." She paused. "No; I ought not to speak of
it flippantly. I shall be very thankful in my prayers to-night ... all
those women and children...."

Again she paused.

"Is my hand trembling?" she asked, lifting it and laying it again on
the tiller, where it rested firm as a rock. Only the jewels quivered on
her rings and bracelets, and their beauty, arresting the Commandant's
gaze, held him silent.

"To be frank with you," she went on, "I left the ship in a hurry,
because I was afraid of being thanked. I don't like publicity--much;
and just now it would have spoiled everything." This explanation
enlightened the Commandant not at all. "Besides," she added with a
practical air, "I left a note with my maid, to be given to the captain;
so he won't imagine that I've tumbled overboard; and she can send my
boxes ashore to-morrow, if you will be kind enough to fetch them before
the _Milo_ weighs."

"But, meanwhile?" he hazarded.

"Oh, meanwhile, I must manage somehow for the night. I slipped a few
things into my hand-bag here." She drew her fur cloak a little aside,
and displayed it--a small satchel hanging from her waist by a silver
chain. The Commandant had a glimpse at the same moment of a skirt of
rose-coloured silk, brocaded in a pattern of silver.

"And when we land," he asked, "where am I to take you?"

"I am in your hands."

He stared at her, dismayed. "But you have friends?"

"None who would remember me; not a soul, at least, in St. Lide's."

"There is the Plume of Feathers Inn, to be sure----"

"If you recommend it," she said, demurely, as he hesitated.

He almost lost his temper. "Recommend it? Of course I don't."

"Well, from what I remember of the Plume of Feathers--unless it has
altered----"

"Wouldn't it be wiser to turn back?" he suggested, desperately, staring
into the fog, in which the lights of the _Milo_ had long since
disappeared.

"What? When we have this moment opened the quay-light? There!... didn't
I promise you that I knew my way among the Islands?"

In the basin of the harbour the fog lay thicker than in the roads, and
they had scarcely made sure that this was indeed the quay-light before
their boat grated against the landing-steps of the quay itself. The
Commandant, after he had shipped his oars and checked the way on her,
pressing both hands against the dripping wall, put up one of them and
passed the back of it slowly across his forehead. He was considering;
and, while he considered, his companion stepped lightly ashore.
"Forgive me," he pleaded, recollecting himself. "At least, I should
have offered you my hand."

"Thank you, I did not need it."

"But listen, please," he protested, scrambling out upon the steps,
painter in hand, and groping for a ring-bolt. "You cannot possibly stay
the night at the Plume of Feathers----"

He heard her laugh, as he stooped, having found the ring, to make fast
the rope.

"Commandant, have you ever travelled across Wyoming--in winter, in a
waggon? Very well, then; I have."

"Surely not in the clothes you are wearing?" The Commandant, as any one
in the Council of Twelve could tell you, was no debater; yet sometimes
he had been known to triumph even in debate, by sheer simplicity. "The
only course that I can see," he continued, "is to seek some private
house, and throw ourselves upon the--er--"

"Front door?" she suggested, mischievously.

"--hospitality--upon the hospitality of the inmates. To them, of
course, I can explain the situation----"

"Can you?"

The Commandant stood for a moment peering at her, and rubbing the back
of his head--a trick of his in perplexity. "Upon my word, now you come
to mention it," he confessed, "I don't know that I can."

"Whom shall we try first? Miss Gabriel?" ("Now, how in the world,"
wondered the Commandant, "does she know anything of Miss Gabriel?")
"Very well; we go together to Alma Cottage--she still lives at Alma
Cottage?--and knock. The hour is two in the morning, or thereabouts.
Miss Gabriel, overcoming her first fear of robbery or murder, will
parley with us from her bedroom window. To her you introduce me, by the
light of your lantern; a strange female in an evening frock; a female
grossly overladen with jewels (that, I think, would be Miss Gabriel's
way of putting it), but without a portmanteau."

"We might try the Popes, next door," suggested the Commandant
flinching. "Mr. Pope is a man of the world."

"Is he?" she asked, after a pause, in which he felt that she struggled
with some inward mirth. "But we cannot so describe Mrs. Pope, can we?
Also we cannot knock up Mr. and Mrs. Pope without disturbing Miss
Gabriel next door."

"Nor, for that matter, can we knock up Miss Gabriel without disturbing
Mr. and Mrs. Pope."

"Quite so; we may reckon that all three will be listening. Therefore,
when Mr. Pope or Miss Gabriel (as the case may be) begins by demanding
my name--which, by an oversight, you have forgotten to ask----"

"Pardon me," said the Commandant, simply, "I did not forget. I waited,
supposing that if you wished me to know it, you would tell me."

"Ah!" she drew close to him, with a happy exclamation. "Then I was not
mistaken: You are the man I have counted to find.... And you are a
brave man, too. But we will not push bravery too far and disturb Miss
Gabriel."

"If you can suggest a better plan----"

"A far better plan. I suggest that you offer me a room to-night at the
garrison."

"My dear madam!" the Commandant gasped.

"It will be far better in every way," she went on composedly; that is,
if you are willing. To begin with, you have rooms and to spare. Next,
there will be no bother in introducing me, except to Mrs. Treacher."

"Ah, to be sure, there is Mrs. Treacher!" the Commandant murmured.
"But, madam, all the rooms in the Castle are unfurnished, ruinous, and
have been ruinous for fifty years. The Treachers occupy the only two in
which it were possible to swing a cat."

"Then we must borrow Mrs. Treacher and take her along to the Barracks
for chaperon. You may leave it to me to persuade her."

Without waiting for his answer she ran lightly up the steps, the heels
of her rose-coloured satin shoes twinkling in the light of the
Commandant's lantern as he blundered after her.

The pavement of the quay had not been laid for satin shoes. Much
traffic had worn the surface into depressions, and these depressions
were fast collecting water from the drenched air. But although the fog
lay almost as thick here as at the foot of the steps, she picked her
way among these pitfalls, avoiding them as though by instinct. Beyond
the quay came a cobbled causeway; and beyond the causeway a narrow
street wound up towards the garrison gate. Past rains, pouring down the
hill, had worn a deep rut along this street, ploughing it here and
there to the native rock, zig-zagging from centre to side of the
roadway and back again obedient to the trend of the slope. But over the
causeway, and up the channelled street she found her footing with the
same confidence, steering far more cleverly than the Commandant, who
followed as in a dream, amazed, oppressed with forebodings. It was all
very well for her to talk lightly of persuading Mrs. Treacher. If she
could, why then she must be possessed of a secret as yet unrevealed to
Mrs. Treacher's husband after thirty-odd years of married life. The
Commandant, too, knew something of Mrs. Treacher ... an obstinate
woman, not to say pig-headed.

Was she a witch--this stranger in silk and jewels who walked in
darkness so confidently up the tortuous unpaved street?--this
apparition who, coming out of the seas and the dumb fog, talked of the
Islands and the Islanders as though she had known them all her life?

As if to prove she was a witch, she paused before the very cottage
which once already to-night had given pause to his steps and to his
thoughts. The fog had been thinning little by little as they mounted
the hill, and at a few paces' distance he recognized the closed door,
daubed over with that same staring paint which your true Islander uses
for choice upon his boat.

"You remember this door?" she asked, pointing to it as he overtook her.

Witch she might be, but why should he give away to her this innocent
small secret?

"Of course I remember it," he answered; "passing it as I do,
half-a-dozen times a day."

"Yes," she said, almost as if speaking to herself; but her voice, for
the first time since their meeting, seemed to be touched with a faint
shade of dejection. "Naturally you would not remember it for any other
reason."

He was silent.

"Yet," she went on, "you really ought to remember that door, Major
Vigoureux, if only for old sake's sake; for it was, I believe, the
first you entered when you came to the Islands. That was in the
year----"

"Never mind the year," interrupted the Commandant, hastily. "I remember
it well. I almost never pass the door without remembering it."

"Ah!" she cried, putting her jewelled hands together, and the
Commandant took it for an exclamation of triumph at her cleverness.
"But other tenants have the house. The man who was master of it is
dead."

"You know everything, it seems to me. Yes; he was a widower, and late
that evening at the fishing. It was an evening when he should not have
been late; for the door stood open for him, and his daughters--he had
two daughters--sat expecting him. It was the open door that drew me to
ask my way." Here he paused.

"Go on, please."

"One of the girls was to leave the Islands next morning for the
mainland, which she had never seen. She told me this. And she sat
reading aloud to her sister, there by the fire."

"Go on."

"That is all. Yes, that is all--except that the book was Shakespeare,
and the girl--" He paused again, staring at her between sudden
enlightenment and stark incredulity. "You--you don't mean to tell me
_you_ were that girl!"

She nodded; and as, forgetting politeness, he held the lantern close to
her face, he saw two large tears brim up, tremble, and hang for a
second before they fell.

"You?" he murmured.

She nodded again. "I am Vashti--Vazzy Cara, they called me, Philip
Cara's daughter. I daresay, though, you never heard my name? No, there
is no reason why you should. And my sister, Ruth----"

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20