Major Vigoureux

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"Ah!" said he, almost bitterly, "you have been living in great cities
and enlarging your mind."

"And in great cities, you imply, it is easy to despise, to forget?" She
laughed softly. "Brefar--Saaron--Inniscaw!" she murmured, addressing
the Islands by name, "here is one who tells me I forget you! Sir, we
will take a boat this very day, and I will sail you out to the Off
Islands and prove to you if I forget."

"There is no need, Miss Vashti"--he hesitated over the "Miss," but she
did not correct him, and he went on more boldly. "I had a talk this
morning with Captain Whitaker, of the _Milo_."

Vashti looked up with a quick smile. "He told you?... I am so glad!
Yes, yes: I did not in the least want to have all those passengers
crowding around me and paying me ridiculous compliments. But false
modesty is another thing altogether, and I don't mind telling you I am
quite inordinately proud of myself."

"You have a right to be."

"--as I don't mind confessing that I was horribly afraid at the time.
But I am glad again, that Captain Whitaker told you. It was pretty
good--eh?--after fifteen years."

She asked it frankly; not archly at all, but with a sudden earnest look
that seemed to hold some sadness; and before the Commandant could reply
this sadness grew and became so real that he wondered at his having
doubted it at first glance.

"Fifteen years!" she went on. "We all have a quarrel against time, we
men and women, but on grounds so different that a man scarcely
understands a woman's grievance nor a woman a man's. With you it all
rests in your work. Fifteen years knock holes in your fortifications,
tumble your guns into the sea, send along a new generation of men to
pull down what you have built, to rebuild in a flurry of haste, and see
their work in its turn criticised and condemned by yet a new company of
builders. At this we women only look on and marvel. Why all this fuss,
we ask, over what you do? Why all this hopeful, hopeless craving to
leave something permanent? The Islands, here, will outlast anything you
can build. I come back after fifteen years, and they are unchanged;
they would be unchanged were I to come back after a hundred. The same
rocks, the same bracken, the same hum of the tides; the same flowers;
the same blue here, below us, the same outline of a spear-head there,
beyond St. Ann's, where the tide forces through the slack water; the
same streak of yellow yonder on the south cliffs of Saaron.... Our
grievance is more personal, more real ... and so should yours be, if
you could only see it. It is to ourselves--to you and me, to any man
and woman--that time makes the difference. You worry over your
fortifications. Why? It is in ourselves that the tragedy lies. To lose
our looks, our voice--to grow old and mumble--" She broke off with a
shiver.

The Commandant smiled sadly. He had too much sense to pay an idle
compliment. "If that be the tragedy, Miss Vashti," said he, "then we
are wise in our folly, which bids us rest our hopes in our work though
its permanence be all an illusion. We cannot cheat ourselves with a
tale that we shall not grow old, but we are able to believe, however
vainly, that our work will live."

"Yes," she admitted, "you are wise in your vanity--or would be, were it
wisdom to shut one's eyes to fate. Let us grant that men are happier
than women--than childless women at any rate. You do not know what it
is to be a singer, for instance; to wake up each morning to a fear 'Has
my voice gone? One of these days it will certainly go, but--Lord, not
yet!' We must build on what we have. We must cling to our youth,
knowing that after our youth comes darkness. No, sir, I do not blame
men for setting up their rest upon what they do rather than upon
ourselves; but for setting it upon that part of their work which, being
the more visible, the more visibly decays."

The Commandant pondered while his eyes studied the grass-grown
platform. He shook his head. "You puzzle me, Miss Vashti," he
confessed.

"Why, sir, you have been mooning around these fortifications quite as
though they had made up your life and their ruins stood for your broken
purposes; whereas for fifteen years you have been Governor of the
Islands and my sister tells me you are a good man. Surely, then, your
real life has lain in the justice you have done, the wrongs you have
righted, the trust you have built up in the people's hearts, and not in
these decaying walls which no enemy ever threatened in your time nor
for a hundred years before you came."

But again the Commandant shook his head.

"I say nothing of the first few years," he answered slowly. "I liked
the people and I tried to do justice. But all that has passed out of my
control. The Lord Proprietor takes everything into his own hands."

"Still on the Council--" she urged.

"I am no longer a member of the Council."

"You resigned? Why?"

"Because I saw that Sir Caesar was bent on humiliating me; and he had
the power."

Vashti prised at a loose stone from the wall with the point of her
sunshade.

"I have read somewhere," she said, after a pause, "that no wise man
should avoid being a magistrate, because it is wrong to refuse help to
those who need it, and equally wrong to stand aside and let worse men
govern ill."

"The Lord Proprietor does not govern ill. He likes his own way; but he
is a just man--" The Commandant hesitated and paused.

"A just man until you happen to thwart him. Is that what you were going
to say?"

"No," he answered, smiling. "I was about to say that once or twice I
have found him something less than fair to me. To others--" But here he
paused again, remembering that morning's conversation on the hill.

"I do not much believe," persisted Vashti, "in men who act justly so
long as they are not thwarted.... But you would remind me no doubt
that, if questions are to be asked and answered this morning, it is I
who should be giving an account of myself. Well, then, I have come to
the Islands with a little plan of campaign in my mind, and last night
it occurred to me suddenly that you were the very person to help. I
am--you will excuse my telling you this, but it is necessary--a
passably rich woman; that is to say, I have more money than I want to
spend on myself, after putting by enough for a rainy day; and I can
earn more again if I want more. I have no 'encumbrances,' as foolish
people put it; no relatives in the world but my sister Ruth and her
children. No two sisters ever loved one another better than did Ruth
and I. We lost our mother early, when Ruth was just three years old,
and from then until she was a grown woman I had the mothering of her,
being by five years the elder. You have seen something like it, I dare
say, in other poor families where the mother has been taken; but I tell
you again that never were pair more absolutely wrapped up in one
another than were Ruth and I. We shared each other's thoughts by day,
we slept together and shared each other's dreams. Oh!"--Vashti clasped
her hands and looked up with brimming eyes--"I can see now how
beautiful it all was."

The Commandant bowed his head gravely. "I can believe it," he said; and
as if he had stepped back fifteen years he found himself standing again
on the hill and looking in upon the fire-lit room--only now the picture
and the two figures in it shone with divine meaning.

"I know what you would ask," she went on. "Why, then, you would ask,
did I ever leave the Islands?... But this had always been understood
between us. I cannot tell you how. For years we never talked about it,
yet we always talked as if, some day, it must happen. The fate was on
us to be separated; and the strange part of it was," continued Vashti,
throwing out her hands involuntarily, and with this action changing as
it were from a confident woman back to a child helpless before its
destiny, "we understood from the first that I, who loved the Islands,
must be the one to go, while Ruth would find a husband here and settle
down, nor perhaps ever wish to cross over to the mainland. You see, of
the two I was the reader; and sometimes when I read Shakespeare to
her--for we possessed but a few books, and some of these, like 'The
Pilgrim's Progress,' had no real scenery in them to take hold
of--sometimes when I read Shakespeare, or 'The Arabian Nights,' or
'Mungo Park's Travels,' and the real world would open to me, with
cities like London, or Venice, or Bagdad, and with woods like the
Forest of Arden, and ports with shipping and great empty deserts, then
Ruth would catch hold and cling to me, as if I was slipping away and
leaving her before the time.... Yet we both knew that the time must
come, in the end. Do you understand at all?" she broke off to ask.

"Yes," he answered. "I cannot tell how, but as you put it I seem to see
it all."

She glanced at him with a quick, grateful smile. "Well, that is just
how it happened, and if I were to explain and explain I couldn't make
it any clearer. You understand, too, there was never any question of my
leaving Ruth until she was grown a woman and could see with a woman's
eyes. Then I knew she was safe. She had more common-sense even than I.
She was born to marry--I never doubted that; but when I saw also that
she was a woman to choose for herself and choose wisely--why, then I
saw also, and all of a sudden, that the time had come and I was better
out of the way; better, because a teacher has to know when to stop and
trust the teaching to prove itself. Else by lingering on, he may easily
do dreadful mischief, and all with the best will in the world. Do you
understand this, too?"

Again the Commandant bent his head; for again, without knowing how or
why, he understood.

"Well, I left the Islands, and there is no need to trouble you with my
own story--though some day I will tell it if you care to hear. It
contains a great deal of hard work, much good fortune, some suffering,
too; and on the whole I am a very grateful woman, as I ought to be....
But we were talking of Ruth. She married, as she was born to marry, and
her husband is a good man. She has children, and her letters are full
of their sayings and doings, as a happy mother's should be. So, you
see, our instinct was wise, and I did well to depart."

The Commandant considered this for a moment before answering: for her
tone conveyed a question, almost a challenge.

"You were wise, perhaps, to go. But why in all these years have you
never come back?"

She looked at him earnestly, and nodded. "Yes," she said, "I was afraid
you would ask that; and yet I am glad, for it forces me to make
confession, and I shall feel better to get it over.... Ruth loves me
still, you see; but, of course, her husband comes first, and after her
husband--if not sometimes before him--her children. That is as it
should be, of course."

"Of course," the Commandant echoed.

"And of course I foresaw it. Remember, please, that I foresaw it before
ever there was a question of young Tregarthen; so that my jealousy, if
you are going to laugh at it, had nothing to do----"

"I am not in the least inclined to laugh."

"Thank you. We were not as ordinary sisters, you see, and ... and there
is another thing I must tell you," she went on with a brisk change of
tone. "Though Ruth and I have always written regularly, there is one
thing I have always kept hidden from her--I mean my success, as you
will call it. At first this wasn't deliberate at all.... A great chance
came to me, a chance so good that I could hardly believe--yes, so
incredible even to me, that I dared not talk of it, but walked humbly,
and taught myself to think of it as a dream from which I must awake,
and awake to find people laughing at my hopes. I hid it even from
Ruth.... Afterwards, when the dream had become a certainty, it seemed
yet harder to tell her. I had concealed so much, and to tell her now
seemed like triumphing over her--so full her letters were of simple
things and of her happiness in them. I was afraid my news would overawe
her, would change her in some way; that she would think me some grand
person, and not the sister to whom she had told all her mind--not, you
must understand, that Ruth could be envious if she tried. But have you
never seen how, when a man grows rich or powerful suddenly, his old
friends, the best of them, draw away from him, not in envy at all, but
just because they feel he has been taken from them?"

"Yes," said the Commandant, "I have seen such cases."

"And I wanted still to be Vazzy to her--even though I must come after
husband and children."

"She knows, then, as little about your--your success--or almost as
little, as I do?" asked the Commandant, quaintly.

Vashti broke into a gay little laugh. "But I am going to tell her now,"
she answered, rising--"and that is where I want you to help me. She has
no idea at all that I am here, and I want--that is my little plan--to
look in upon her before I make myself known. I want to see Ruth--my own
Ruth--moving about her house; to feed my eyes on her good face, and
learn if it has changed as I have tried to picture it changing; to know
her as she has been during these years, not as she will be when we have
kissed and I have told her.... I would steal upon her children, too,
and watch them.... It is wonderful to think of Ruth's children!"

She sprang on to the crumbling wall, and stood erect there, shading her
eyes, gazing towards Saaron Island, where the forenoon sun flashed upon
the beaches and upon the roof of one small farm, half hidden in a fold
of the hills. The Commandant put out a hand to steady her, for her
perch was rickety and almost overhung the sea.

"Ruth is there!... To think of her so happy there--to see her, almost!
Oh, sir--but if you could understand that the nearer I have travelled
back, the more foolish my jealousy has seemed to grow, with every fear,
every doubt!"

"Miss Vashti"--the Commandant spoke seriously, still with his arm
stretched out ready to grip her by the skirt if she should over-balance
herself or the treacherous wall give way--"I am glad, for your sister's
sake, you have come; but I must warn you that all is not right on
Saaron Island."

She turned slowly, and looked down upon him there from her altitude.

"What is not right?" she asked; and, while he hesitated, "You are not
telling me that her letters have hidden anything?"

"No."

"Is it illness, then? Has anything happened to the children?"

"No," he answered again, and without more ado he told her the news he
had heard from Mrs. Banfield.

"But"--she still looked down on him wondering--"but you told me just
now that the Lord Proprietor was a just man?"

"I have not looked at the rights and wrongs of the case," he said
hastily, conscious that he was incurring her scorn. "The Lord
Proprietor may have much to say on his side."

"You have not inquired, then?"

"The news came to me only this morning, quite by chance."

"By chance?" she caught him up, and, springing off the wall, stood on
the firm turf facing him. "But you are, or were, Governor of the
Islands."

Again he bent his head. "I have told you that I no longer serve the
Council even. The Lord Proprietor does not consult me."

Vashti gazed around her, on the broken roof of the ammunition shed, the
dismantled platform, the unkempt glacis below it. "For what work, then,
do they pay you?" she asked, bitterly.

"For none," he answered, but without resentment. "And--excuse me--" he
went on, fumbling in his pocket, and producing a sovereign, which he
tendered to her, "but your mention of pay reminds me to return you
this, which Mrs. Treacher has handed to me. It appears--I must
apologize for her--that she received it from you to give to the men who
carried up your box from the steamer; but that, being a little
frightened at the amount, she withheld it, thinking that possibly you
had made a mistake."

Vashti took the coin. Her face was yet flushed a little--as he read it,
with anger.

"It is true," said she pensively, "that I am fifteen years a stranger
here."

His face brightened. "Ah," said he, "if you will make allowance for
that, we may yet put everything right!"

CHAPTER XII

SAARON ISLAND

Saaron Island lies about due north of Brefar, which looks eastward upon
Inniscaw across the narrow gut of Cromwell's Sound. There was a time
(the tale goes) when these three Islands made one. At low-water springs
you may cross afoot between Saaron and Brefar, and from either of them,
with a little more danger, to Inniscaw, picking your way between the
pools and along the sandy flats that curve about the southern end of
the Sound and divide it from the great roadstead. Also there are
legends of stone walls and foundations of houses laid bare as the
waters have sunk after a gale, and by the next tides covered again with
sand.

But of the past history of Saaron next to nothing could be told, even
by Ruth's husband, young Farmer Tregarthen, who rented the Island and
the one habitable house upon it. He could not even have explained how
so bleak a spot as Saaron had come to possess this farmhouse, which was
one of the roomiest on the Islands. He only knew that it had been built
for one of his forefathers, and that this forgotten Tregarthen, or the
Lord Proprietor who had chosen him for tenant, must have held ambitious
views of the amount of farming possible on Saaron. So much might be
guessed from the size and extent of the out-buildings. The "chall" or
byre, for instance, had stalls for no less than twelve cows, whereas
to-day all the Island's hundred-and-twenty acres barely afforded
pasturage for two. Considering this, he was divided between two
opinions; the first, that his ancestors had pastured their cattle upon
Brefar, driving them to and fro across the flats at low water; the
second, that in the old days the soil had been fertile, and that either
the sand, which drove across it in the prevailing westerly winds,
devastating every green herb, had started its invasion within the last
hundred years or so, or that his forerunners had possessed and lost
some art of coping with it. He had trenched the sand in many places on
the southern and easterly slopes of the two hills into which the Island
was divided, and along the valley between them, and everywhere, at the
depth of two feet or less, the spade found a fine, strong clay, capable
of carrying any crop.

Young Farmer Tregarthen in his slow way pondered a deal over this and
similar problems. Indeed, you might say that in one sense the Island
was never out of his thoughts. He had been born on it. At the age of
sixteen he had succeeded to the farm (though it was nominally leased to
his mother), and to the fight which his father had begun--the warfare
which his enemy, the sand, never allowed him to relax. He could almost
remember his father resuming it and repairing the stone hedges which
enclosed the old fields. In those days Saaron had supported, or failed
to support, five families; but of these all but Tregarthen had lost
their clutch on the barren rock and drifted away to other islands. He
could remember their going. He passed their roofless cottages half a
dozen times a day.

They had subsisted mainly by kelp-making and piloting, helped out (it
is to be feared) by more than a little smuggling. There were
conclusions to be drawn from the cellars in the farmhouse, too ample
for the needs of a small farmer. Tregarthen had a shrewd notion that
most of the guineas which his mother had hoarded in a stocking had come
at one time or another from the contraband trade; also he had a notion
that his father's renewed activities in digging and hedging must have
coincided pretty accurately with the building of the coastguard station
upon St. Lide's and the arrival of a Divisional Officer. But if
smuggling flourished once, it had fallen on evil days, and its secrets
had been hidden from his childhood. Also about that time the pilotage
had decayed in competition with the licensed pilots on St. Ann's, and
but a few hovelling jobs in and about Cromwell's Sound fell to the
share of the men of Saaron. (He could recall discussions and injurious
words, half-understood at the time, faint echoes of that old quarrel
between the two islands.)

But the kelp-making had been in full swing; and the business had a
plenty of mystery and picturesqueness to bite it upon a child's memory.
All the summer through, day after day, at low water, the Islanders
would be out upon the beaches cutting the ore-weed and dragging it in
sledges up the foreshore, where they strewed it above high-water mark,
to dry in the sun. On sunny days they scattered and turned it, on wet
days they banked it into heaps almost as tall as arrish-mows. From
morning until evening they laboured, and towards midsummer, as the near
beaches became denuded, would tail away, in twos and threes, and whole
families, to camp among the Off Islands and raid them; until, when
August came and the kelping season drew to an end, boat after boat
would arrive at high-water and discharge its burden.

These operations filled the summer days; but it was towards nightfall
that the real fun began. For then the men, women, and children would
gather and build the kilns--pits scooped in the sand, measuring about
seven feet across and three feet deep in the centre. While the men
finished lining the sides of the kiln with stones, the women and girls
would leap into it with armfuls of furze; which they lighted and so,
strewing the dried ore-weed upon it, built little by little into a
blazing pile. The great sea-lights which ring the Islands now make a
brave show; but (say the older inhabitants) it will not compare with
the illuminations of bygone summer nights, when as many as forty kilns
would be burning together, and island signalling to island with
bonfire-lights that flickered across the roadsteads and danced on the
wild tide-races. From four to five hours the kilns would be kept
burning, and the critical moment came when the mass of kelp began to
liquefy, and word was given to "strike." Then a dozen or fourteen men
would leap down with pitchforks and heave the red molten mass from side
to side of the kiln, toiling like madmen, while the sweat ran shining
down their half-naked bodies; and sometimes--and always on Midsummer
Eve, which is Baal-fire night--while they laboured the women and girls
would join hands and dance round the pit. In ten minutes or so all this
excitement would die out, the dancers unlock their hands the men climb
out of the pit and throw themselves panting on the sand, leaving the
kelp to settle, cool, and vitrify. But while it lasted the boy knew of
no excitement comparable with it. Little wonder that he remembered
those fiery pits with the dark figures dancing around their brims! But
yet more unforgettable was the smell of the burning kelp had been more
than enough--that acrid, all-permeating, unforgettable odour. His
mother had never been able to endure it. When the wind drove the smoke
from the beach, she would shut every door and window, and build up
every crevice with a barricade of sandbags; all in vain. It crept into
the house, choking the besieged, causing their eyes to smart and their
heads to ache, and scenting clothes, linen, furniture. Even the food
tasted of it.

The kelp-making, however, was but a memory now, though a pungent one. A
night's work at the kiln produced from two to three hundred-weight, and
the price in the good seasons ranged from L4 to L5 a ton; so many
shared the labour that a family had much ado to earn L10 in a whole
season. Under such conditions, too, the work was roughly done. Too
often the sides of the kiln would fall in and the sand--always the
curse of Saaron--would mingle with the kelp and spoil it. And when some
wiser folk in Scotland learned to prepare it under cover, in ovens with
paved floors, the Islanders lost their market, almost in a single
season.

Tregarthen could recall the kelp-making, but neither the circumstances
of the collapse nor the sufferings that followed it. Children observe
the toil, but are usually quite blind to the troubles of their elders.
He only knew that the poorer families almost of a sudden drifted away
from Saaron, that he and his father and mother were left alone on the
island, that his father had begun to busy himself with farming and
required his help, and that in consequence he was released from
lessons. His mother, a farmer's daughter from Holy Vale in St.
Lide's--the one nook in the Islands where you lost sight and almost
sound of the sea, and could look out of window upon green trees--was a
better-most person and something of a scholar. (The Tregarthens had
always gone to the main island for their wives.) She taught the boy to
read, to write a little, and even to cipher up sums in addition and
subtraction. Also she took him over to Brefar to church on every fine
Sunday and taught him his catechism, on the chance (often rumoured)
that the Bishop would come across from the mainland to hold a
Confirmation. But the Bishop of those days had a weak stomach, and, on
the advice of his doctor, kept postponing the voyage.

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