"Me either," agreed Archelaus again, shuffling a little on his feet, as the dreadful truth began to dawn on him, that the Lord Proprietor meant to present him with yet another pair of trousers.

Sir Caesar, however, chose to play for a minute with his benevolent design.

"There is no more delicate study," he went on, "than that of acclimatisation. None which requires a nicer union of artistic daring with artistic judgment, patience, with decision.... I propose to go in for it pretty extensively on Inniscaw."

"Yes, sir?"

"The ostriches have been a great encouragement."

"I suppose, now, when you get accustomed to 'em——"

"Though I have yet to prove that they will breed here. Yet, why not? The Gulf Stream, I am assured, has a stimulating influence upon all forms of organic life, animal as well as vegetable. It may be compared with that inward volcanic heat which, in and around the Bay of Naples, clothes the shore with verdure, and is not without responsibility for the passions of the inhabitants.... But, as I was saying, a man must use judgment. A plant may thrive when transferred across a thousand miles of ocean, may propagate itself even more freely than in its native habitat, and yet, to the artistic eye, be never truly at home. Its colour, of flower or foliage, refuses to blend with our landscape, to adapt itself to our Atlantic skies. It is my hobby, Sergeant, to discover not only what imported plants will flourish with our soil and climate, but what particular one is worthiest of cultivation; and, having discovered that, I propose to bend all my best energies upon it.... Eh? But where did you get those remarkably fine bulbs?"

Archelaus held out three in the palm of his hand.

"From the garrison garden, sir; with the Governor's compliments, and understanding you to take an interest in bulbs."

"Daffodils? Some species of narcissus, at any rate."

The Lord Proprietor took one of the bulbs and examined it, turning it over. "I had no idea that Major Vigoureux—er—went in for this sort of thing, or I'd have done myself the pleasure of visiting his garden."

"You wouldn't find much in it, sir," said Archelaus, hastily, remembering yesterday's adventure. "At least not much to interest you. To tell the truth, the Governor sets very little store by these, though they look pretty enough in March month. But wanting to show his feelings in the matter of those trousers——"

"You shall have another pair!"

"Oh!" said Archelaus, in spite of himself, and though he had miserably foreseen the offer for ten minutes past.

"And you may take back my thanks to the Commandant, and tell him that I hope, within the next few days, to pay him a call."

Archelaus touched his forelock, bringing up his palm at the right military salute—in those days a complicated operation. To himself he breathed a thanksgiving that the Fair Lady (as he and the Treachers called Vashti) had taken her departure from Garrison Hill overnight. Ever since breakfast he had been feeling sadly dejected about it and so (if appearances might be trusted) had his master. There is a fearful joy, after all, in living on a volcano.

But, alas, for Sergeant Archelaus! He was at this moment standing on the crust of a volcano, and that crust was momentarily wearing thinner.

The shore beneath the great house of Inniscaw has two landing quays, of which the eastern (Archelaus had used the western) lies hidden from view of the terrace, and can be approached by a boat keeping close under St. Lide's shore. Engrossed in his lecture upon acclimatisation, the Lord Proprietor had missed to perceive a boat making for this eastern quay; and so had Archelaus, for the simpler reason that he stood with his back to the view.

"Step into the house with me, and you shall make your choice between half-a-dozen pairs," the Lord Proprietor invited him.

"If you are sure it's not troubling you," said Archelaus.

"My good man—" began the Lord Proprietor, leading the way; and with that he turned about, surprised that Archelaus was not following. "Eh? What's the matter?"

But Archelaus, speechless, was staring along the terrace to its eastern end, where, at the head of a flight of steps leading down among the shrubberies, a head had suddenly uprisen into view—a head in a gray bonnet with trimmings of subdued violet—the head of Miss Gabriel.

"H'm!" said Miss Gabriel, and turned to Mr. and Mrs. Pope, who were mounting the stairway at her heels.



CHAPTER XVII

THE LORD PROPRIETOR RECEIVES A DOUBLE SHOCK

"H'm!" said Miss Gabriel again, as she once more surveyed the shrinking Archelaus. "So you allowed you'd steal a march on me?"

"I had no such thought, ma'am," stammered Archelaus.

"You'll get no good out of it, anyway; and of that I warn you. Good morning, sir!"—this with a curtsey to the Lord Proprietor.

"Good morning, ma'am! How d'ye do, Pope?—and your good lady is well, I hope? But to what do I owe this unexpected—er—honour?"

"Him," said Miss Gabriel, nodding, and with scarcely a change of tone.

"To Sergeant Archelaus, ma'am? Why, what has he been doing?"

"You might better ask—" Miss Gabriel answered slowly, emphatically, with her eye on the culprit—"what he has not."

"Whichever you please, ma'am. Come!"

"I find a difficulty in putting a name to it," pursued Miss Gabriel, still in the same level tone. "But Mr. Pope will bear me out. If he doesn't, I shall still allow no false delicacy to stand between me and my duty."

"Miss Gabriel means, sir," explained Mr. Pope, "that the articles in question——"

"What articles, man?" asked the Lord Proprietor, as Mr. Pope, in his turn, hesitated.

"Trousers," said Miss Gabriel, setting her face. "No, Charlotte"—she turned upon Mrs. Pope—"this is no time for mincing language. They were on a scarecrow, sir, in the very middle of the garrison garden, along with my waistcoat——"

"Your waistcoat, ma'am!"

"That is to say, with my antimacassar, which I had converted into a waistcoat and presented, in the innocence of my heart, to Treacher; the clothing of these men being nothing short of a scandal. But for scandal, sir, their clothes won't compare with their doings. Not to mention——"

"My dear lady, I implore you, let us take one thing at a time! You wish to make some statement about a scarecrow—in the garrison garden—adorned (am I right?) with a waistcoat you were once kind enough to present to Sergeant Treacher, and (I gather) with a pair of trousers about which you are less explicit." The Lord Proprietor paused. His eyes grew round with sudden, terrible suspicion. "You don't mean to tell me—" he asked slowly.

Miss Gabriel nodded, and wagged an accusing forefinger at Archelaus.

"That's just what I do mean. And if you want a picture of guilt, look at that man!"

The Lord Proprietor turned and stared at him, gasping.

"My trousers? Mine?" But here speech failed him, and he stood opening and shutting his mouth like a newly-landed fish.

Archelaus flung a wild glance about him, vainly seeking escape.

"You're looking at it in the wrong light, all of you," he mumbled, feebly.

"And on the Sabbath, too!" put in Mrs. Pope.

"This man"—the Lord Proprietor held up a hand as though calling Heaven to witness—"On what pretence do you suppose that he came here this morning? Why, to thank me! To thank me for those very—er—articles of which you tell me he makes a public mock! Look at the bag in his hand—what do you suppose that it contains?"

"Adders," suggested Mrs. Pope. "I shouldn't be surprised."

"You may well say so, ma'am. It might well be adders. Indeed, I'm not sure it isn't worse."

"Oh!" Mrs. Pope, already backing before the horrors of her own imagination, caught at the balustrade for support.

"Daffodils, ma'am! A present of daffodil bulbs, with the Commandant's compliments, and in acknowledgment of my gift! Could hypocrisy go farther?"

"Major Vigoureux," said Miss Gabriel, "was never a friend of mine. Let those who thought better of him defend him now, when he shows himself in his true colours."

But here Archelaus pulled himself together.

"The Governor," he answered sullenly, "had nothing to do with it. The Governor was in church at the time, as is well known to all of you."

"Yes, yes," interposed Mrs. Pope. "Let us be just. The Commandant was certainly in church at the time. On our homeward way we met him returning from church; and I would add, sir—if you will forgive me—that he is a gentleman quite incapable of suggesting or conniving at so vulgar a trick."

"H'm!" The Lord Proprietor accepted this with a snort, for he could not help being aware of its truth. But his wrath still needed a vent, and he turned upon Archelaus again.

"The Governor?" he echoed. "Are you ignorant that Major Vigoureux is not Governor of these Islands, nor has he been for three years?—even if he had ever a right to the title."

"He's my Governor, anyway," answered Archelaus, turning more and more dogged; "and he's Treacher's; and I reckon you'll find, if you try any games, that he's Treacher's missus' Governor, too."

"Insolent!"—This from Miss Gabriel.

"I ain't denyin' it, ma'am. Insolent I be, and a little freedom o' speech about it is no more than your rights. Insolent I've behaved, and if you'll take and ask the Governor to punish me for it, 'tisn't more than I deserve. He'll do it, be sure. As Mister Pope told you just now, the Governor's a gentleman; he wouldn't play such a trick, not if you was to offer him the world and the kingdoms thereof; and he'll be teasy as fire when he hears about it. But I warn you, ladies and gentlemen, all, don't you take the law into your own hands over this distressin' case, but go to him meek-like an' say you want Arch'laus punished. That's all. Leastways, that's all, unless you ask my honest opinion on the breeches in question, which is, that I wouldn't put 'em astride a clothes-horse and call him a son o' mine."

The Lord Proprietor stepped back, purple in the face.

But Miss Gabriel flew at game higher than Archelaus.

"That is all very well," she interposed, in her coldest, most incisive tone. "But to whom does the credit of this insult belong if not to Major Vigoureux? You may talk till doomsday, my man, before I'll believe that you and Treacher thought of it." She stood for a second or two, eyeing him. "A-ah!" she said, a little above her breath. "I thought as much!... There was a woman, Charlotte, and that woman is at the bottom of the whole business. I ask you, if you doubt it, to look at his face."

"She'd nothin' to do with it," affirmed Archelaus, stolidly, drawing the back of his hand across his brow.

"She?" mocked Miss Gabriel. "And pray who is 'she'?"

Archelaus made a bold effort to recover himself. "Why, Treacher's missus ... unless you mean the Ghost."

"That Treacher's missus (as you call her) bore her hand in the sport I have the evidence of my own eyes; and if by 'the Ghost' you allude to a painted hussy that Mrs. Pope and I surprised, the other night, in your master's quarters, I advise you to keep that for the Marines. Sir,"—Miss Gabriel turned to the Lord Proprietor—"this petty insult of the scarecrow is the smallest part of our complaint against Major Vigoureux. We have reason to believe—we have ocular proof—that the Major is at this moment and by stealth entertaining a most undesirable guest at the Barracks."

"My dear Elizabeth, we cannot be altogether sure!" objected Mrs. Pope.

"Speak for yourself, Charlotte." Miss Gabriel folded her hands and bent on Archelaus a gaze under which he felt himself withering. "I am quite sure."

"Undesirable, ma'am?" asked the Lord Proprietor, thoroughly mystified. "In what sense undesirable?"

"—Unless," answered Miss Gabriel, tapping her foot, and with the air of one who curbs a virtuous impatience, "unless you can suggest a term more appropriate to a Jezebel; in which case I shall stand corrected."

"Jezebel? Jezebel? But, my dear Miss Gabriel, consider before you bring such a charge: here especially in the presence of Major Vigoureux's servant, who will doubtless report it to his master. Reflect how serious it is. Reflect——"

"Why, bless the man!" Miss Gabriel cut him short disdainfully. "As if I hadn't been reflecting for three days on end! Let him sue me for slander if he dare. I'll stick to my guns, if I kiss the book upon it; and what's more, so will Charlotte Pope."

"I never said so, Elizabeth," pleaded Mrs. Pope.

"And very wisely, ma'am." Sir Caesar nodded approval. "For, as I was about to say, reflect upon the extreme improbability—nay, the utter impossibility—that—er—such a person could visit the Islands unnoticed and actually spend three days on Garrison Hill undetected by any save yourself. Nay, if we grant the miracle of her arrival, who is to assure us that she has not by this time as mysteriously vanished? In that case, what have we to show for our suspicions? How, setting aside the Major's indignation, shall we find ourselves less than a laughing stock for the whole population of the Islands?"

"And sarve ye right!" added Archelaus, who began to perceive that this thundercloud had its silver lining. But if he counted on daunting Miss Gabriel, he was mistaken.

"Turn you round, my man," snapped that indomitable lady. "Turn you round, and give me a look at those coat-tails of yours. Ha!" she exclaimed, as Archelaus, by habit obedient to the word of command, faced about towards the balustrade. "There was a coat-tail missing yesterday, if I remember, when you crept out from the bushes like a whipped urchin, and now there's two: and you'll be telling me that these fine stitches were put in by Jane Treacher, who is like most soldier's wives, and sews like a cow!"

"The Lord have mercy upon us!" said Archelaus, in a hushed voice.

It took them two or three seconds to understand that the words were not an answer to Miss Gabriel; that he had spoken them to himself, staring—as he still stared—down the steps, down the green alley leading to the terrace.

Then, perceiving that something was amiss with the man, they too stepped to the balustrade and looked down—as up the leafy path came the very woman of their speculations—Vashti, faultlessly arrayed, trailing a neat parasol and humming a song as she drew near.

"The same!" gasped Miss Gabriel. "I call you to witness, Charlotte!"

"But, you'll excuse me," Mr. Pope objected, "she don't appear to answer precisely to a Jezebel."

"You men think of nothing but outward show," snapped Miss Gabriel.

"Well, and that's something," Archelaus put in with affability, his spirits rising as the danger drew nearer. "Talk about Garrison Hill! She seems to be pretty well at home on Inniscaw, too." For Vashti, halting in the chequered sunlight beneath a trellised arch, had reached up the hooked handle of her sunshade to draw down the spray of a late autumnal rose, and stood for a moment inhaling its odour.

It may be that just then she caught sight of the watchers upon the terrace. If so, not a movement betrayed her. As though reluctantly, she released the branch and, as it sprang upward, resumed her way up the path, disappearing for a moment under a massed canopy of Virgin's Bower. A few seconds, and she would emerge into view again, almost at the foot of the terrace stairs.

They waited.

"But whatever has become of the woman?" asked Miss Gabriel.

"It's confoundedly odd!" growled the Lord Proprietor.

"She may have turned down a by-path."

"There's no by-path within fifty yards of her. More likely she's stopping to take a smell of the clematis.... We might step down and see." The Lord Proprietor suited the action to the words and led the way.

"In my opinion, if you want it," said Archelaus, "you won't find her there. Because why? She's a ghost."

"A ghost?" quavered Mrs. Pope.

"Nonsense, my dear!" Her husband offered his arm to assist her down the steps. "Such a beautiful young person!"

"The first time I saw her she didn't frighten me at all," agreed Mrs. Pope; "but if she's going to bob in and out of sight in this way, I shan't sleep in my bed to-night."

A cry from the Lord Proprietor startled them. He had plunged down the path beneath the overarching clematis. They ran to overtake him, and found him staring at vacancy. Vashti had vanished, apparently into thin air.

"Oh, but this is midsummer moonshine!" declared Sir Caesar. "The woman must be hiding somewhere near. Miss Gabriel, if you will kindly attend to Mrs. Pope, her husband and I will search the thickets hereabouts."

They searched in the thickets and along the garden paths, but without recovering a trace of the unknown. Not so much as a glimpse of her skirt rewarded them.

Sergeant Archelaus abandoned the search early, dodged into the plantations on the left, and went his way chuckling, back to his boat.

"A terrible trying morning," he allowed, as he cast loose; "but the end was worth it."



CHAPTER XVIII

VASHTI PLEADS FOR SAARON

For twenty minutes Sir Caesar and Mr. Pope beat the shrubberies, and even carried their search down to the great walled garden which was one of the wonders of Inniscaw. Tradition said that the old monks had built it, of bricks baked upon the mainland; and that it had been their favourite pleasance, because its walls shut out all view of the sea. Certainly if the old monks had built this garden, they had built it well. The Priory itself, of Caen stone, had lain in ruins for at least two hundred years before the Lord Proprietor came to clear the site and build his new great house on the old foundations; but these brick walls defied the tooth of time.

Magnificent walls they were, four feet in thickness, heavily buttressed; the bricks set in mortar tougher than themselves. They enclosed two acres of rich black soil at the mouth of Inniscaw's one valley, where it widens into a marsh beside the shore. Between them and the water's edge stood the Lord Proprietor's new schoolhouse, above a small landing quay; and within the schoolhouse a class was singing as Sir Caesar and Mr. Pope entered the old garden. The children's voices came floating prettily over the old wall—so prettily that Abe Jenkins, the septuagenarian gardener, ceased working to comment upon it, leaning on his hoe and addressing Eli Tregarthen, who lounged by the gateway leading to the shore.

"Always fond of children, I was," said Abe Jenkins, "though I never picked up courage to marry. 'Twas the women that always daunted me. And now I've a-come to a time o' life that I'm glad of it. A married man throws his roots too deep, an' when Death come along, 'tis always too soon for 'en. He wants to bide and see his youngest da'rter's child, or he wants to linger and mend a thatch on the linhay—his married son can't be brought to see the importance o't.... What with one thing and another, I never knowed a married man yet 'was fit to die; whereas your cheerful bachelor comes up clean as a carrot. What brings you across from Saaron to-day, Tregarthen? I'll wage 'tis to fetch your children back from school."

"Partly," assented Eli.

"Iss; partly, that, an' to listen here to their voices soundin' so pretty across the wall. And partly, I reckon, 'tis on the chance to get speech with the Lord Proprietor and persuade 'em to let you bide on Saaron. But that you'll never do. Mind, I'm not sayin' a word against th' old curmudgeon. He's my employer, to start with, besides being what God made 'em. But, reason? You might as well try reason on the hind leg of a jackass. Go thy ways home, Tregarthen: go thy ways home an' teach yourself that all this world and the kingdoms thereof be but what the mind o' man makes 'em, and Saaron itself but a warren for rabbits."

Tregarthen shook his head.

"A barren rock.... Come now, bring your mind to it!" Abe suggested, coaxing.

"'Tis no good, Abe."

"A cottage in a vineyard—what says holy Isaiah? A lodge in a garden of cucumbers—a besieged city——"

"Abe Jenkins!"—It was the Lord Proprietor's voice calling from the upper gate.

"Y'r honour!" Abe snatched his hoe and wheeled about sharply as the great man came down the path with Mr. Pope at his heels.

"How long have you been working here?" demanded Sir Caesar. "Perhaps I had better have said 'idling,'" he added, with a frown and a curt nod at Tregarthen in the gateway. Sir Caesar's gray eyebrows had a trick of bristling up, like a cat's, at the first hint of unpleasantness, even at sight of anyone who crossed his will; and they bristled now.

"'Been workin' here the best part of the morning," answered Abe, with an old man's freedom of tone and a complacent look backward at the patch of turned soil. "And 'might have been workin' yet but the children singin' their hymn yonder"—with a jerk of his thumb towards the wall that hid the school building—"warned me 'twas time to knock off for dinner."

Now, the Lord Proprietor had meant his question for preface to another. "Had Abe, while at work, caught sight of a strange lady anywhere in the garden?" The question, if put just then, and in Tregarthen's hearing, might have changed the whole current of this small history; for Tregarthen was a poor hand at dissimulation—or, rather, was incapable of it. But the sight of his back, as he turned away, caused Sir Caesar's eyebrows to bristle up yet more pugnaciously.

"Hi, sir?"

Tregarthen turned slowly.

"You are waiting here to fetch your children from school, I suppose?"

"Yes," said Tregarthen.

"And isn't that an instance, man, of what I tried to make you understand two days ago? Cannot you see what time and trouble you'll be saving yourself—let alone the children—when you're comfortably settled on Brefar and within half-a-mile of a handy school?"

"Yes," said Tregarthen again. His eyes met the Lord Proprietor's without servility as without disrespect, but with a kind of patient wonder.

"Well, then"—Sir Caesar turned to Mr. Pope for confirmation—"here is a man who—to give him his due, eh?—works as hard as any on the Islands; harder, I daresay, than his own hired labourer——"

Mr. Pope nodded.

"—A man," continued Sir Caesar, "who never gives himself a holiday; a man whose nature it is to grudge every hour of the day that isn't employed in wringing money out of a desert. Come now!"—warmed by his own eloquence to a geniality equally hearty and false, Sir Caesar swung around again upon Mr. Pope—"I daresay we may call him, to his face, about the best of my farmers!"

Mr. Pope inclined, with the half of an embarrassed smile. As an agent, he felt any such appreciation of a tenant to be, if not dangerous, at least uncalled for, liable to be misinterpreted. He contented himself with answering—in a murmur—that Mr. Tregarthen had given the estate in the past every satisfaction; that it would surprise him indeed if (at this time of day) Mr. Tregarthen were (of all men) to raise trouble.

But the Lord Proprietor, as a master of men, brushed this hesitancy aside, and with jovial tact. "A first-rate fellow," he insisted. "One of our best! Only pig-headed, as the best always are. And so, when I offer him a choice of two farms, each better than his present one, he must needs take it into his head that I'm doing him an injury. Such a man"—here Sir Caesar wagged a forefinger at the accused—"needs to be protected against himself. Such a man needs to be told—and pretty straight—that he is injuring others besides himself, and that, as I have authority in these Islands, so I owe it to my conscience to forbid his letting his children grow into little savages."

Eli Tregarthen looked up as though a stone had struck him. The colour on his face darkened. Hitherto (though suffering from it) he had not argued, even in his own mind, against Sir Caesar's evicting him from Saaron. He had resented it, as one resents mere brute force; but he had not argued with that which had never presented itself as resting upon argument.... Though he knew himself to be a slow-witted man, Eli had a clear sense of his wife's wisdom, and that wisdom irradiated for him any argument which came—as this accusation of neglecting the children surely came—within range of Ruth.

"If you dare to say that again," said Eli, "I'll knock your head off."

All three of them heard it—the Lord Proprietor, Mr. Pope, and old Abe—though neither could believe his ears. For Eli had spoken quite quietly and distinctly. Mr. Pope was the first to recover; but before he could get in a word, Eli was following up the attack—still not hastily, still with a slow pause on every word.

"You? What do you know of children, that never had a child? And what do you know of Saaron or any other island, that never took your life here nor made your living? You fill your pockets in a London shop; you go off to an auction, and there you bid for these Islands, that you've never seen. But what did you buy, you little man, over and above the power to make yourself a nuisance in your day? Was it understanding of the Islands? Or a birthright in 'em? Or a child to leave it to?... There, I do wrong to be angered with 'ee—you've got so little by your bargain! But you put a strain upon a man, you do—talkin' of children in that way. Children?" The man paused with something like a groan. An instant before it had been in his mind to tell Sir Caesar passionately that, so far from grudging the time spent in fetching Annet, Linnet and Matthew Henry from school, he looked forward to it as the one bright break in a day that began before sunrise and lasted till after sunset. It had been on the tip of his tongue, too, to say, with equal passion, that any man who spoke of them as savages insulted his wife's care of them. But eloquence had come to him, now for the first time in his life, as an inspiration. At the first check he stammered, and broke down; and so, with a hunch of his shoulders, turned his back on his audience and walked off heavily down the lane.

Mr. Pope, with great tact, laid a hand lightly on the Lord Proprietor's arm and conducted him back to the gate by which they had entered. There, yet gasping for speech, the great man lifted his eyes, and was aware of Mrs. Pope and Miss Gabriel distractedly advancing along the path.

With a gulp he pulled himself together, and walked forward to inform them that the chase had been unsuccessful; that not a glimpse of the fugitive had been discovered. Resuming a hold upon his gallantry, he hoped that his visitors would remain for luncheon. "After which," he added, with a creditable smile, "we may, if we will, resume the search in more philosophical mood."

But here again Mr. Pope was tactful. He divined that his patron was suffering; that the wound needed, for the moment, solitude and silence to ease its smart. He was sorry to deprive the ladies of such a pleasure; but, for his part, business called him back to Garland Town. He had, he regretted to say, an engagement at two o'clock sharp. To be sure, if the ladies chose to stay, he could send back the boat for them.... But this he said knowing that his wife was thoroughly frightened, and that (as she herself put it later) wild horses would not induce her to remain, lacking his protection.

The Lord Proprietor escorted his visitors down to the landing quay and there helped the ladies to embark. The search for the fair fugitive (he promised them) should be vigorously prosecuted. She was not likely to elude it for long, and he would at once report success. The leave-takings over, he stood by the shore until the small boat had made her offing, and so, with a farewell lift of the hat, turned and walked moodily towards the house.

He was relieved to be alone after the morning's very painful experiences. Twice since breakfast he had been wounded in his dignity, and nowhere does a man of his nature suffer more acutely. Nor could the wounds be covered over and hidden, for he had taken them openly, almost publicly. His anger swung helplessly forward and back between the two outrages, both to him inexplicable. To be sure he had not reckoned on any gratitude for the gift of the breeches. But what had he done that they should be flaunted on a scarecrow?... Oh, it was monstrous!

As little could he understand Tregarthen or Tregarthen's language. Some gadfly must have stung the man. A few acres of the barrenest land in the whole archipelago—and the fellow talked as though he were being dispossessed of an Eden! Yes, and as though that were not enough, he had used the flattest disrespect. The Lord Proprietor was not accustomed to disrespect. From the first his Islanders had treated him with the deference due to a king. Save and except the Commandant, no man had ever crossed his will or disputed his authority.

His rage swung back again upon the Commandant. It was all very well to plead that the Commandant had been in church at the time; but, after all, an officer must be held responsible for his men's doings. Let Major Vigoureux beware! More than once the Lord Proprietor had been minded to memorialise the War Office and inquire why the taxpayers' money should be wasted to maintain three superannuated soldiers at full pay in a deserted barracks.

"Upon my word," said the Lord Proprietor to himself, "I've a mind to run over to Garrison Hill and ask Vigoureux what the devil he means by it. Either he knows of this, or he doesn't: I'll soon learn which. In either case I'll have an apology; and, what's more, I'll teach him who's master here, once for all."

He had reached the terrace, and paused there for a moment to draw breath after his climb, at the same time throwing a glance across the blue waters of the roadstead towards Garrison Hill and the white buildings upon it slumbrous in the autumn haze. The glance threatened mischief to that unconscious fortress and a sharp nod of the head confirmed the threat.

"Yes, yes, this very afternoon! The sooner the better!"

He swung about and stepped across the terrace to a French window that stood open to the air and sunshine. It was the window of the morning room, where he usually took his luncheon, and he passed in briskly, meaning to ring the bell and give orders to have the meal served at once. But, as he stepped across the low sill somebody rose in the room's cool shadow and confronted him, and he fell back catching at the jamb for support and staring.

It was the stranger herself: the woman for whom they had all been vainly searching!

"Good morning!" said Vashti, with a self-possessed little bow. "Oh, but I fear I have startled you?"

"Ah—er—" the Lord Proprietor pulled himself together with an effort—"Well, to tell the truth? you did take me by surprise; the more so that——"

"It was dreadfully uncivil of me—not to say impudent—to walk in here unannounced. But the fact is I could find no door along the terrace; nothing but windows. Forgive me."

"Certainly, madam, certainly.... The front door is, so to speak, at the rear of the building.... But I was going to say that you took me the more by surprise because, as a matter of fact, I had just given up hunting for you."

Vashti laughed. She looked adorably cool and provoking; and still, as he stared at her, the Lord Proprietor wondered more and more whence in the world she came. He knew little of female beauty (the late Lady Hutchins had been plain-featured) and less of clothes; but three or four times in his life, at public functions, he had mixed with the great ones of the land, and here patently was one of them. Her speech, dress, bearing, all proclaimed it; her easy self-possession, too, and air of authority. Out of what Olympus had she descended upon these remote Atlantic isles?

"I saw that you had company," she answered, "and I ran away. To tell you the truth I was a little afraid of them—that is to say, of some of them. But what was Archelaus doing here?"

The Lord Proprietor frowned.

"Did he come to apologise? Oh, but that is just one of the reasons that brought me here! You must not be angry with Archelaus; no, really, it was not his fault, at all, but mine."

"I think, ma'am," said the Lord Proprietor, "we are talking at cross-purposes."

"No, no, we are not," she corrected him briskly with a little laugh. "We are talking about that unhappy scarecrow." She paused, as though checked by irrepressible mirth, and he flushed hotly. "And no, again!" she went on, perceiving this; "I was laughing at Archelaus—poor fellow!—overtaken here by his accusers. Did they make it very painful for him?"

"Even supposing him capable of shame—which I doubt—I certainly do not think he suffered more than he deserved."

"You are very much annoyed?" asked Vashti, suddenly serious. "Well, then, I am sorry. It was all my suggestion—though it never entered my head that anyone would be walking that way and catch sight of—of the thing. I meant it to be a little surprise for the Commandant when he came home from church; though when he returned and heard what had happened, he scolded me terribly."

"You will excuse me"—the Lord Proprietor drew himself up stiffly—"if I fail to see either where the humour comes in, or why you—a stranger, unknown to me even by name——"

"Ah, to be sure! My name is Cara."

"Then, as I was saying, Miss Cara, I fail to see——"

"And you are quite right of course," Vashti made haste to agree. "I ought not to have done it. But weren't you, too, a little bit to blame? It wasn't very nice of you, you know."

"I beg your pardon? What wasn't very nice of me?"

"Why, to hurt their feelings; and especially the Commandant's. He is a poor man; poor, and sensitive, and easily hurt."

"You are talking to me in riddles, Miss Cara. I have done nothing at all to hurt the Commandant's feelings."

"Not intentionally, of course. I told him—and I told the sergeant too—that I was sure you never meant to wound them. It would have been too cruel."

"But," protested the Lord Proprietor, "I have done nothing, I tell you; nothing beyond presenting Sergeant Archelaus with—with an article of attire of which he stood badly in need. Miss Gabriel, some weeks ago, drew my attention to the state of the poor fellow's—er—wardrobe, and suggested that something might be done."

"I thought so," Vashti nodded. "I dare say now," she went on, after seeming to muse for a moment, "you are one of those strong-minded men who find it hard to understand how sensible people can worry over what they put on their backs!"

"That happens to be a constant source of wonder with me," he confessed; "though for the life of me I can't tell how you came to guess it."

"Never mind how I guessed it," said Vashti, smiling. "The point is, that you take this lofty and very scornful view of clothes, and yet you must have noticed that many men of your acquaintance—men otherwise sensible—take quite another; that in the city, for instance, a hard felt hat is not usually worn with a frock coat."

"Granted," said the Lord Proprietor; "though I could never understand why."

"And you have noticed that soldiers are even more particular; and the reason with them is perhaps a little more easily grasped. Their uniform is a symbol, so to speak. It stands for the service to which a good soldier should be devoted."

"If you had seen that man's small-clothes!"

"Yes, I grant that Archelaus neglects his regimentals. But to neglect them, and to be willing to mix them up with civilian clothes, are two very different things. Perhaps you did not think of this?"

"Really, now," answered Sir Caesar, "I should not have supposed that it mattered what these men wore, in such an out-of-the-world spot."

Vashti's eyes rested on him for a second or two, in a kind of wondering despair at his obtuseness. But she controlled herself to reply quite patiently:

"At any rate, it was wrong of me to encourage the men's resentment, and I came here this morning to beg your pardon."

He acknowledged this with a bow, but stood silent for a moment, eyeing her.

"You are a relative of Major Vigoureux?" he asked, after a pause.

"No."

"You are staying with him, I understand?"

"No." Vashti shook her head, with a smile. "But I very much want you to forgive me," she went on; "for I have another favour to ask you."

Again he bowed slightly. "You give my curiosity no rest, Miss Cara, and I perceive you mean to satisfy it only in your own way. As for the—er—incident we have been discussing, pray consider that—so far as you are concerned—I dismiss it." He did so with a slight wave of the hand. "You wish to ask me a favour?"

"I do. I came to plead with you; to say a word on behalf of Eli Tregarthen, your tenant on Saaron Island."

The Lord Proprietor started. "Are you at the bottom of that also?" he asked, angrily.

Vashti's eyes opened wide in astonishment.

"I beg your pardon?" she murmured. "I do not understand."

"It seems to me," he caught her up, "that for a total stranger, you are losing remarkably little time."

"In what, sir?" she demanded, facing him fairly, with a lift of her handsome chin.

"In subverting my authority, ma'am; or, rather, in prompting others to subvert it.... Though, to be sure," he went on, in sarcastic wrath, "it may again be an accident that I happened on Eli Tregarthen less than an hour ago, and that he used very insolent language to me in the presence of my agent."

"It was not only an accident," said Vashti, slowly, and with patent sincerity; "it was one that, since I came here to urge his suit, I would have given a great deal to prevent." She paused, and for a moment seemed to be musing. "Must I understand, then, that you refuse to hear a word in his favour?"

"The man is a fool!" Sir Caesar clasped his hands behind him under his coat-tails, and paced the room. "His insolence to me apart, he is a complete fool! I offer him the choice of two farms—either one of them acre for acre, worth twice the rental of Saaron.... I simply cannot understand!"

"No," said Vashti, with a little sigh, "you cannot understand."

He had reached the fireplace, and wheeled round on her, his back to the hearth and his legs a-straddle.

"What can I not understand?" he demanded.

"Many things." Vashti met his eyes for a moment, then turned her own to the window and the blue waterways beyond the terrace, beyond the massed tree-tops of the pleasure grounds. "Many things, and the Islands in particular. You did not understand just now that a soldier, though condemned to stand sentry in a forgotten outpost, can still be sensitive for the honour of his service, because the root of his life lies there. You cannot understand that the root of Eli Tregarthen's life goes down into the soil he has tilled from childhood as his parents tilled it. To you Garrison Hill is a tumble-down fort, and Saaron Island a barren rock; yet you call them yours, because you have purchased them. And, nevertheless—to do you justice—you are not one who rates everything by its price in money. If you were, I could beg you to take a higher rent for Saaron and leave Eli Tregarthen undisturbed."

He shook his head. "The man pays me a fair rent; as much as I can conscientiously ask. I have a conscience, Miss Cara, and a sense of responsibility. It is not good that Tregarthen lets his children run wild there, so far from school."

"And if, sir," she went on, "you are doing this for the children's sake, I could promise you that there are means to educate them better than any children on the Islands. But the difficulty does not lie with the children. It lies in your sense of possession, which makes Saaron Farm there"—she waved a hand—"an eyesore in the view from this window, and simply because Eli Tregarthen has crossed your will. You defend an instinct of selfishness that takes about five minutes to pass into a principle with any man who buys land. You maintain the landlord's right to ordain the lives on your estate, and command them to be as you think best; nor does it seem to you to affect your claim for power that we understood and drew our nature from the Islands for years before ever you came to hear of them."

"Radicalism, ma'am!"

"Yes, sir. It is for the roots I plead, against your claim that the surface gives all."

He thrust his hands under his coat-tails again, and took a turn up and down the room.

"I do not affect to agree with you, Miss Cara," said he, not looking towards her when she stood by the French window, but stretching out his hand to the bell. "Yet, as owner of these Islands, I desire to be just. I desire also to understand these Islanders, of whom, it appears, you know so much more than I. And if you do me the honour to take luncheon with me—" Here he broke off, to ring at the bell-pull. "But I warn you I am tenacious as well as curious, and shall demand to know a little more of my lecturer."

He turned and stood blinking. Vashti had disappeared. The room was empty.

He took a step to the open window, sprang out upon the terrace, and glanced to right and left.

The terrace, too, was empty. He hurried to the stairway leading down through the shrubberies. Not so much as the glimpse of a flying skirt rewarded him.



CHAPTER XIX

THE COMMANDANT'S CONSCIENCE

"The Lord Proprietor to see you, sir!"

Archelaus, presenting himself at the door of the Commandant's office, with a slightly flushed but inscrutable face, drew aside and flattened himself against the door-jamb to let Sir Caesar enter.

The Commandant closed the book in which he had been adding up accounts which never came right, and stood up in something of a flurry. He was dressed with more than ordinary care. The lapels and collar of his uniform-coat had been treated to a vigorous brushing. In fact, he was arrayed for action: to step down the hill in an hour's time, to call upon Mr. Fossell at the Bank and draw his pay, if any should be forthcoming.

"Good morning, Major!"

"Good morning, Sir Caesar." The Commandant nodded towards a chair.

"I thank you." Sir Caesar set down his hat upon the edge of the writing-table, drew off his gloves, tossed them into his hat, and seated himself. "I—er—called in the first place to speak about an unfortunate—er—incident that happened on Garrison Hill here last Sunday."

"Ah," said the Commandant, "so you have heard about it? I am sorry."

"Sorry for what, sir?"

"Sorry that anyone should have thought it worth while to carry tales to you; but also sorry for the incident itself."

"It appears to me, Major Vigoureux, that the incident demands some apology."

"I have made it."

Sir Caesar crossed his legs and coughed to clear his throat. "I think, my dear sir," said he, in a tone at once slightly pompous and slightly nervous, "I really think it's time that you and I came to an understanding; that we—er—recognised, so to speak, the situation, and played with the cards on the table. Do you agree with me?"

"I might," answered the Commandant, guardedly; "that is to say, if I understood."

"I acquit you, of course, of any active share in the incident, and I am assured that Archelaus and Treacher were no worse than accomplices. It appears that the real culprit was a totally different person, and," he went on, after a glance at the Commandant's face, which betrayed nothing, "it may save time if I tell you that she has confessed to me."

"Excuse me, I was not proposing to make any remark."

"But who in the world is the young person?"

The Commandant's eyebrows arched themselves slightly. "She is a lady," he answered, in a dry voice. "If she omitted to tell you her name, the omission was no doubt intentional, and she has carried her confession just so far as she intended it to go."

"She called herself Cara; but the name tells me nothing. Who is she? I agree with you as to her address and appearance: she is in every respect—er—presentable. A relative, may I inquire?"

"No."

"A friend, then? You will pardon me? A delicate question to put, of course."

Again the Commandant's eyebrows went up slightly. "She was my guest for a day or two," he answered.

"Was? Then where in the world is she staying now?"

"If she did not tell you—" began the Commandant, but Sir Caesar interrupted him impatiently.

"Tell me? Devil a bit of it, and that's partly why I'm here. Vanished like a witch, begad, while I was turning to ring the bell! And where she went or where she came from are mysteries alike to me."

"Why, then," the Commandant pursued, in a steady musing voice, "it seems to follow that, even if I knew, I have not her permission to tell."

The Lord Proprietor uncrossed and recrossed his legs irritably. "Come, come, Vigoureux, this will hardly do. Will it, now? I put it to you as a man of the world. No doubt it's all innocent enough, but folks will talk. And, after all, I'm responsible for any—er—scandal affecting the Islands. Hey?"

The Commandant rose with a sudden flush on his face.

"Scandal, Sir Caesar? Oh, to be sure, I cannot understand you."

"Tut-tut!" The Lord Proprietor smiled. "Of course, we know there's nothing in it. A young lady—youngish, at least—and you old enough to be her father. But, all the same, tongues will wag."

"And they have been wagging?" The Commandant, after a short turn across the room and back, stood over him, his hands crossed under his coat tails. "But yours, sir, is the only one that has dared to wag in my presence."

"Sir!" The Lord Proprietor jumped to his feet.

"You have put many humiliations upon me, Sir Caesar; and because they affected me only, I have endured them. But in this you go too far."

The Lord Proprietor, on the verge of an angry retort, checked himself, with a short laugh.

"I refuse to lose my temper with you," said he. "You are unreasonable. You misconceive me as imputing scandal when, as a matter of fact, I was trying to assure you that I rejected the imputation. For me, the disparity in age alone——"

The Commandant, with a wave of his hand to the door, turned away wearily.

"I merely thought it right to warn you," pursued Sir Caesar, taking heart of grace as his opponent appeared to weaken, "that others may be less charitable. And they look to me. I think—I really think—you might consider the delicacy of my position; that I am—er—ultimately responsible for the good name of these Islands."

But here he paused with a start; for the Commandant had wheeled about suddenly, and stood over him, and the Commandant's eyes were dangerous.

"Sir Caesar"—the Commandant controlled his voice with an effort, for it shook a little—"in the last few minutes some things have been made plain to me which were hitherto obscure. I have wondered sometimes, here in these forsaken barracks, at actions of yours which seemed deliberately calculated to annoy one who—Heaven knows—started with every wish to be friendly. Saving my own small personal dignity, of which from indolence I have been too careless, I have reserved nothing of my old importance in these Islands which, before you purchased them, I had governed. Men, even the least assuming, do not forfeit all power, all consideration, without a wrench; and I am but human. I relinquished them, and without the help of a single kind word from you, by which the sacrifice might at least have been mitigated. I wondered. Later, when you heaped one small humiliation upon another, I concluded that I must have had the misfortune to incur your personal dislike, and told myself, after searching for the cause and finding none, that personal dislikes are usually inexplicable. But now I see that I have been doing you an injustice; that your affronts were not considered; that you have all along, likely enough, been entirely unconscious of offence; that, in short, you are as Heaven made you, and I cannot hold a quarrel with any man's mere defects, whether congenital or of breeding. I shall not waste time by inquiring to which of the two classes your obtuseness should justly be assigned. It is enough that I recognise the mistake and apologise for it. I see now that you are obtuse—that and nothing more. But since your obtuseness wounds more than you can possibly divine; and since in this instance it injures a lady, I shall ask you to pay my poor quarters the last respect you owe them, and quit them without further discussion."

He stepped to his writing-table and struck on a small hand-bell. Promptly on the summons Sergeant Archelaus appeared in the doorway; so promptly, indeed, that he might have found it hard, under cross-examination, to rebut the charge of having stood listening outside.

The Lord Proprietor, however, was in no condition to put a searching question. He arose, gasping, his eyes rolling from the Commandant to Archelaus and back. He felt for his hat like a man groping in the dark, clutched it, and set it on his head with an experimental air, as though it would not have entirely surprised him to find his feet in the place of his head.

"I suppose," he stammered, "it has occurred to you that you may pay for this?"

"It occurred to me," answered the Commandant, coolly and amiably, "that you might threaten it."

"You shall, by God!"

The Commandant bowed.

"You shall certainly repent this, sir." The Lord Proprietor crammed his hat on his head.

"May I ask you to observe that my servant is standing in the doorway?"

Sir Caesar turned, shot a glance at Archelaus, and for an instant appeared to be on the point of including master and man in one denunciation. But either he thought better of it or his rage choked him. With a final tap on the crown of his hat, to settle it firmly on his brows, he strode past the rigid figure by the threshold and out into the open air.

He had never been so outraged! For fifty or a hundred yards, as he descended the hill, his fury almost blinded him. His face was congested; the back of his neck swollen and purple, as though apoplexy threatened. His ears showed red as a turkey's wattles. He stumbled on the ill-paved path. What! To be lectured thus by a man whose continued residence on the Islands was a public scandal—a fellow who, past all usefulness, lived on in lazy desuetude, content to take the taxpayers' money while doing nothing in return! And the worst—the gall, the wormwood of it—was that this despised foe had silenced him—nay, had silenced him almost contemptuously. "But wait a bit, my fine fellow!" swore the Lord Proprietor, blundering down the hill. "Wait until we hear what the War Office has to say about your precious garrison; or until, failing satisfaction there, I get a question asked in Parliament about you!"

Could the Lord Proprietor have looked back at this moment into the room where sat the victorious enemy, he might have been in some measure consoled.

The Commandant, having dismissed Archelaus with a wave of the hand, waited while the door closed, and dropping into the chair before his writing-table, bowed his head upon his hands.... Oh, it is easy to talk lightly of riches, and of the power that riches give! But in this world it is not so easy for a man with just one penny in his pocket to stand up against an enemy solidly backed by a banking account. He feels that though his cause be right and his conscience clear, his position is precarious: that the world, if it knew the truth, would regard him almost as an imposter. The feeling may be unreasonable, the fear cowardly; but there it is, and it had cost the Commandant all his pluck to face the encounter out. Moreover, his conscience was not clear.

Sir Caesar, too, had (all unwittingly) planted an arrow and left it to rankle. "Old enough to be her father!" The Commandant shut his lips hard upon the pain. He could not expel it: he knew it would awake again in the watches of the night: but for the present he must ignore it. He had a second ordeal to face.

As he sat there for a minute or two, his face resting on his hands, his spirit abandoned to weakness, he heard the steady ticking of the clock on the chimney-piece behind him. He counted the strokes, and all of a sudden they recalled him to the present. He pulled himself together, stood up, and, reaching down a clothes-brush from its hook beside the door, walked over to the chimney-piece and to a small mirror that stood behind the clock.

"Old enough to be her father." Again, as he caught sight of his face in the glass the smart revived; but again he expressed it, and fell to brushing his worn tunic with extreme care. It had always been his practice to dress punctiliously before going into action, even on dark nights in front of Sevastopol, where all niceties of dress were lost at once in the slush of the trenches. His forage-cap received almost as careful a brushing as his tunic: and from his cap he turned his attention to the knees of his trousers and to his boots, one of which was cracked, albeit not noticeably. He had half a mind to black its edges over with pen and ink, but refrained. Somehow it suggested imposture, and to-day he winced sensitively away from the first hint of imposture. He must walk down-hill delicately, like Agag. To-morrow Harvey, the Garland Town cobbler, would repair the damage with a couple of stitches, at the cost of one penny: and the Commandant reflected with a melancholy smile that he possessed precisely that sum.

His toilet complete, he took a last look in the mirror to assure himself that his face betrayed none of the anxiety eating at his heart. It was paler than ordinary, but calm. He drew a long breath, and walked out to the front door. At his feet the chimneys of the small town sent up their mid-day smoke; beyond, the Atlantic twinkled with its innumerable smile. The hour was come. As he stepped out upon the road he cast a glance to right and left along his deserted batteries, and answered the smile of Ocean whimsically, ruefully. If only, as an artilleryman, he could have summoned Mr. Fossell's Bank by a dropping shot! This business of hand-to-hand assault belonged by rights to another branch of the service.

Mr. Fossell stood behind the counter in conference with a junior clerk, and the sunshine pouring through the windows—the only plate-glass windows in Garland Town—gilded the dome of Mr. Fossell's bald head. As the Commandant entered, Mr. Fossell looked up and nodded pleasantly, in a neighbourly way, albeit with a touch of ironical interrogation. He had heard gossip from his friend Pope of the doings on Garrison Hill, and, so far as he allowed himself to be jocose, he meant his glance to be interpreted. "Well, you are a pretty fellow! And pray what account are you going to give of yourself?" But very different thoughts preoccupied the Commandant, and his fears took alarm.

"Good morning," said the Commandant, and forced a smile. "You have been expecting me, I hope?"

"Dear, dear!" Mr. Fossell affected surprise. "You don't tell me that pay-day has come round again already?" This again, was a form of pleasantry which he repeated month after month; but to-day he slightly over-acted it.

"The—the money is here?" stammered the Commandant.

"My dear Major, I hope so—I sincerely hope so," Mr. Fossell answered, with a humorous look around him. "I do most sincerely trust we may be able to meet your demand for—let me see, fifteen-eighteen-six, is it not?—without being forced to put up the shutters." Mr. Fossell chuckled quietly.

The Commandant drew a long breath.

"Always supposing," resumed Mr. Fossell, "that the draft is in order, as usual; on which point, to tell you the truth, I have been too busy to satisfy myself. But the paper arrived two days ago, and is in my office—if you will excuse me for a moment."

He stepped towards a door at the back, panelled with frosted glass, opened it, and disappeared into his office. The Commandant waited. Three minutes passed.

"Very fine weather, sir, for the time of the year," said the clerk, blotting an entry and looking up from his ledger.

"Eh? Oh, certainly ... yes, very fine indeed." The Commandant recalled himself with a painful effort.

"And the glass steady as a rock." The clerk closed a smaller book at his elbow and replaced it in a line of similar volumes on a shelf above the desk behind him. "I saw you out, sir, in your boat, the day before yesterday, to the west of Saaron—fishing for bass, or so I took the liberty of guessing."

"For bass?... Yes, oh, most decidedly."

"Knowing fish, the bass!" hazarded the young man, combing his side-locks with his pen and carefully bestowing it behind his ear. "You found the water a bit too clear, sir, I expect?"

"So far as I remember—" began the Commandant, and paused. (What on earth was delaying Fossell?)

"You will excuse me, sir, but might I ask what bait you employ as a rule?"

The Commandant answered that for preference he used sand-eels. The clerk replied that sand-eels took some getting; and that, if the remark wouldn't be taken amiss, it was all very well to talk of sand-eels when you were in a position to employ a couple of men to spend half a day in netting them for you; but that for a young chap in his position, sand-eels were out of the question.

"There's the bank-hours, to begin with," he wound up, lucidly; "and, besides, when you've caught 'em they're the most perishable bait going."

The Commandant incoherently promised to reserve a portion of his next catch, and to send Archelaus with a creelful; all this with his eyes wandering in desperation to the glass door. The young man was profuse in thanks.

"You will excuse my discussing sport with you, sir? Sport, they say, puts all men on a level—though, of course, I should not dream of claiming——"

But at this point the glass door opened, and Mr. Fossell emerged, briskly, holding what appeared to be a fair-sized stone.

"How will you take it?" he asked, depositing this upon the counter.

"I beg your pardon?" the Commandant stammered, his eyes riveted on the stone.

"Notes or gold?" Mr. Fossel picked the specimen up, and rubbed it gently with his sleeve. "Now, that's a queer thing, eh? My brother-in-law sent it to me last week, and I've been using it for a paper-weight, not being a scientific man. But just you look into it. He tells me there are hundreds lying about where he lives—Ogwell, the place is, in Devonshire, just behind Newton Abbot—and that they're called madrepores. He's a humorous fellow, too, is my brother-in-law. You see the joke, of course?"

"I can't say that I do, exactly," the Commandant confessed.

"Good gracious! Fossil—Fossell: this is a fossil, you see, and I'm called Fossell: and so he sends it to me. He has made a good deal of fun out of my name before now, in his humorous way. Not that I mind, of course."

"I dare say not. Did you say that the papers were all right?"

"The papers?... Yes, of course, the papers are all right. Will you take it in notes or gold?" "In gold, if you please." The Commandant caught at the edge of the counter, while his heart leapt, and the bank premises seemed to whirl around him.

"Fifteen-eighteen-six ... be so good as to verify it, if you please," said Mr. Fossell, counting out the coins—the blessed coins! "But I want you just to take a look into the thing. Looks like a piece of coral, eh? See the delicate lines of it? And my brother-in-law tells me it was once alive—a kind of fish—and got itself embedded in this piece of limestone because it was too lazy to move. A lesson in that"—Mr. Fossell wagged his head sagely—"if we choose to take it! To be sure, it happened thousands of years ago; but there it is—and here are we. For my part, I don't look at things humorously like my brother-in-law. I like to find a serious moral where I can."

The Commandant counted the coins and dropped them into his pocket. Their weight seemed to make a man of him again. He bent and affected to examine the madrepore.

Mr. Fossell bent also. He was on the point of asking—in a low voice, that the clerk might not overhear—for an explanation of Miss Gabriel's gossip. But at this juncture a client entered, and the Commandant escaped. He went up the hill with a new centre of gravity: so different is a load in the pocket from a load on the heart.



CHAPTER XX

THE GUITAR AND THE CASEMENT

"A parcel for you, sir!"

Sergeant Archelaus had spied the Commandant coming up the hill, and met him on the barrack doorstep with the news.

"A parcel?" The Commandant had walked straight from the bank to Mr. Tregaskis' shop, and there paid his account; but he had made no purchases. "There must be some mistake, Archelaus; I have ordered nothing in the town."

"From the mainland, sir."

"God bless my soul!"

"Yes, sir, and marked 'Fragile'; a good-sized box, but uncommon light to handle. The steamer brought it across this morning, and I've carried it into the office and placed hammer and chisel handy."

"Now what in the world can this mean?" asked the Commandant, a minute later, after studying the box and its label. He turned to Archelaus, who had followed him into the office in a state of suppressed excitement. "It is certainly addressed to me; and yet—It must be half-a-dozen years, Archelaus, since anyone sent me a parcel from the mainland."

"There's but one way to discover," said Archelaus, picking up the chisel. "Shall I open it, sir?"

"No; give it to me." The Commandant took the tools from him and easily pried open the lid, for the scantling was light, almost flimsy. Within lay an object in an oilskin case, by the shape of it, apparently a violin; and yet somewhat larger than a violin.

Yes, certainly it was a musical instrument; and the Commandant had no sooner made sure of this than with his hand on the string that tied the wrapper, he paused.

"It is evident, Archelaus"—his tone betrayed some disappointment—"that this parcel belongs to Miss Cara. Having no address of her own that could be given with safety, she has ordered it to be sent to me."

"Ben't you even going to open and take a look at it?" asked Archelaus, as his master slowly replaced it in the box.

"I think not.... Miss Cara will call for it, no doubt, since no doubt she has been watching for the steamer's arrival."

Archelaus withdrew, reluctantly, not without a sense of expectation cheated. Nor, as it proved, was his grievance altogether groundless. The Commandant stood for a minute or so in a brown study, eyeing the box. Then, his curiosity overmastering him, he reached out and drew the parcel forth again; turned it over in his hands, and very slowly undid the strings, which were of green ribbon.

The wrapper fell apart, disclosing a guitar.

The instrument was clearly an old one, and, as clearly of considerable value, being inlaid with tortoise-shell and mother-of-pearl in delicate arabesques that must have cost its unknown maker many months, if not whole years, of patient labour. Its varnish, smooth and transparent as finest glass, belonged to the same date, and had been laid on, if not by the same hand, by one no less careful. Something more than a craftsman's pride had surely inspired the exquisite workmanship, the deft and joyous pattern that chased itself in and out as though smiling at its own intricacy. A gift for the artist's mistress, perhaps? Or a toy for some dead and gone princess?... Yet it had been played upon, and recently. One or two of its relaxed strings showed evidences of fraying; and the sender had tied a small packet of new strings around the neck.

The Commandant, after peering into its pattern for a while, held the guitar out at arm's length; and, holding it so, broke into a short laugh—at the thought that this thing had been sent to him.

Yet, here it was. Undoubtedly it belonged to Vashti, and his heart leapt at the thought that she would be coming to fetch it. For three days he had been missing her. It seemed that she had chosen to pass out of his life as suddenly, as waywardly, as she had invaded it; that, crossing the threshold of Saaron Farm, she had closed its door upon him and upon a brief episode to be remembered by him henceforth as a dream only—a too happy dream.

"Ah, had we never met—or, having met, Had I been wiser or thy heart less wild!"

He had pulled home that Sunday night, to brood alone over a half-dead fire; and, brooding there, had surmised what the morrow made certain—that she had taken with her yet more than she had even brought; that even what colour, what small interest, had formerly cheered the daily round on Garrison Hill and made it tolerable, was now gone out of it forever.

Well, for good or ill, this, at all events, would need to be endured but a little while longer. His discharge was in sight. He had posted his letter.

He did not tell himself that but for Vashti it had never been written. Or, if this crossed his mind, it suggested no more than gratitude. Quite unwittingly she had helped him play the man. He had done the right thing, let follow what might.

He could not force his mind upon possible consequences, to face them or to fret over them. Between this present hour and then, one thought, like a bright angel, stood in the way. Vashti was coming!

Ah, but when? Would she come openly, by day, as she had invaded Inniscaw?... He spent the afternoon in his office, sorting out useless correspondence, clearing desks, drawers, pigeon-holes of the accumulations of years, unconsciously preparing for the day of his discharge. It kept his thoughts employed, and he worked hard—reading through the dusty papers, tearing them up, consigning some to the waste-paper basket others to the fire, which by-and-by grew sullen under its task. Twilight fell.... She would come, then, after dusk, and secretly—mooring her boat in the hiding-place under the Keg of Butter Battery, away from inquisitive eyes. At half-past five Archelaus brought him his tea. At six, having washed and refreshed himself, the Commandant fell to work again more doggedly. Only now and again he broke off for a few moments to listen. But Vashti did not come.

He worked until half-past nine. He heard the clock strike the half-hour from the chimney-piece, and looked up almost in dismay. It was certain now that she would not come. Of a sudden, as though to hide from him the full measure of his disappointment, as he had been hiding from himself the full eagerness of his hopes, a loathing took him—a savage scorn of his useless labour. He stared at his grimed hands with a shiver of disgust, and, rising impatiently, swept together the fragments of paper strewn about the floor, tossed them upon the dying fire, and went off to his room for another wash.

She would not come; and there remained yet an hour between him and his usual bed-time. Returning to his office, he met Archelaus on the stairs.

"Going to bed, eh?" asked the Commandant.

"Ay, sir," Archelaus answered, and paused for that remark on the weather which, in the Islands, always goes with "Good morning" or "Good night." "Glass don't vary very much, and wind don't vary, though seemin' to me it's risin' a little. Still in the nor'west it is; and here ends another day."

The Commandant looked at him sharply, but passed downstairs with no more than a "Good night." So Archelaus, too, was feeling life to be empty?... Archelaus had bewailed the past before now, and the vanished glories of the garrison, but never the tedium of his present lot.

The Commandant, on re-entering his office, did a very unusual thing. It has been said that he could no longer afford himself tobacco. But an old briar pipe lay on the chimney-piece among a litter of notes and memoranda that had escaped the afternoon's holocaust. He took it up wistfully, and, searching in a jar, at the end of the shelf, found a few crumbs of tobacco. Scraped together with care, they all but filled the bowl. He lit the dry stuff from a spill—the last scrap of paper to be sacrificed—and sank, puffing, into his worn arm-chair.

It was in his mind to map out his domestic expenditure for the coming month; for the settlement with Mr. Tregaskis had made a desperate inroad upon his funds in hand, and he gravely doubted that even with the severest pinching he would be able to remit the usual allowance to his sister-in-law. The question had to be faced ... he was not afraid of it ... and yet his thoughts shirked it and wandered away, despite all effort to rally them. "Old enough to be her father...." He had foreseen that these words would awake to torment him; but he was not prepared for the insistency with which the pain stirred, now when long toil should have deadened it—now when, as the clock told him that his hopes for to-day were vain, he realised how fondly all the while he had been building on them.

"Old enough to be her father."—For distraction from the maddening refrain he rose up, drew the guitar again from its box, unwrapped it, and took it back to his chair for another examination. He noticed the wrapper as he laid it aside. It was new; the material new, the stitching new. She had sent for the instrument with a purpose, and the oilskin case had been made with a purpose.... How went the old song?—

"Were I but young for thee, as I haz been, We should have been gallopin' down in your green. And linkin' it owre the lily-white lea; And ah, gin I were but young for thee!"

Of a sudden he sat up stiffly, at the sound of a tap-tap on the window-pane behind him.

Yes, decidedly the sound came from the window. The wind—as Archelaus had said—was rising; but this was no wind. Someone stood outside there in the darkness. He sprang up, stepped to the casement and threw it open. For a moment his eyes distinguished nothing. He peered again and drew back a little as a figure stepped close to the sill, out of the night.

"You!"

"Who else?" answered Vashti, with a little laugh. "Give me your hand, please." He stretched it out obediently, and she took it and clambered in over the sill.

"It is cold outside," she announced, looking around her with something between a shiver and a deliberate shake of her cloak. It was the same furred cloak in which she had come ashore from the Milo. Spray clung to it; and there was spray, too, on her hair. It shone in the lamplight.

"The wind has been getting up ever since sundown," she announced. "I have had a pretty stiff crossing; but the boat is all right, under the Keg of Butter." Then, as he still stared at her, "You don't keep too warm a fire, my friend."

"I had given you up, and was getting ready for bed."

"Then you expected me? The guitar has come?"

Before he could answer she had caught sight of it, and picking it up from the arm-chair where the Commandant had dropped it, settled herself and laid the instrument across her lap.

"Also," she went on, throwing back her cloak, while she examined and tightened the strings, "I will confess that your guest is hungry." She looked up with a laugh. "In fact I came not only to fetch my guitar, but to sup with you and tell you of my doings."

The Commandant turned to the door. His face had suddenly grown gray and desperate.

"Ah, yes—supper, to be sure!" he said, and strode from the room.

As the latch fell behind him, Vashti glanced over her shoulder, put the guitar aside, and arose to stir the fire. The poker plunged into a heap of flaked ashes. "Paper? But the whole grate is choked with it. And, what is more, the whole room smells of burnt paper."

She turned about, and, with her back to the hearth, surveyed the room suspiciously. Her gaze fell upon the waste-paper basket, heaped high and brimming over with torn documents. This puzzled her again, and her brow contracted in a frown. But just then she caught the sound of the Commandant's footsteps returning along the flagged passage, and bent anew over the fire.

The Commandant appeared in the doorway with a plate of ship's biscuit in his hand, and on his face a flush of extreme embarrassment.

"Do you know, I really am ashamed of myself," he began with a stammer, holding out the plate. "But Archelaus has gone to bed, and—and this is all I can find."

"Capital!" she answered gaily. "Let us break into the back premises and forage. After my burglarious entry that will just suit my mood."

"I'm afraid—" he began, and hesitated. "I am very much afraid—" There was unmistakable trouble in his voice, and again he came to a halt.

Vashti straightened herself up. Her eyes were on him as he set the plate down on the table, but he avoided them, attempting a small forced laugh. The laugh was a dead failure. Silence followed it, and in the silence he felt horribly aware that she was grasping the truth—the humiliating truth; that moment by moment the scales were falling from her eyes that still persistently sought his.

The silence was broken by the noise of a poker falling against the fender. He started, met her gaze for a moment, and again averted his.

"You don't mean to say——"

Her voice trailed off, in pitiful surmise. Silence again; and in the silence he heard her sink back into the arm chair—and knew no more until, at the sound of one strangling sob, terrible to hear, he found himself standing at the arm of her chair and bending over her.

"My dear!" He used the familiar Island speech. "My dear, you must not—please!"

"And I have been living on you, ruining you!"

"My dear ... it is all paid for. It was paid for to-day. If ever a man was glad of his guest, I am he."

But she bent her head over the arm of the chair, sobbing silently. He saw the heave of her shoulders, and it afflicted him beyond words. But, though he longed, he dared not put out a hand to comfort her.

"You mistake—yes, you mistake.... It has been nothing.... I was only too glad," he kept stammering weakly.

She pulled herself together and sat upright. A moment her tear-stained eyes met his, then turned to the fire, which had begun to dance again on its small heap of coals.

"Now I see," said she, resting an elbow on the arm of the chair and so supporting her chin, while she stared resolutely into the blaze. She had resumed command of her voice. "Ah, pardon me, now I understand many things that puzzled me at first.... I—I am not a fool in money matters." She hesitated.

"I know you are not," he assured her gently. "And that, if you will understand, increased the small difficulty."

"Yes, I understand. But somehow—it was a long time since I had been acquainted with—with——"

"Want," he suggested. "Since you know the worst, do not hurt me more than you are obliged."

"God knows," she said, after an interval of musing, "I would hurt you last of all living men. Will you be kind to me, and trust me?"

"On conditions."

"Yes?" She glanced up with a strange eagerness in her eyes. "What conditions?"

"That you do not pity me at all; that you believe I have suffered nothing, or only such pain as has edged the joy of serving you."

She looked away and into the fire. "You make me very proud," she said. "Yes. I can easily grant your conditions. I could not pity a man who practised so noble a courtesy."

The Commandant shook his head with a whimsical smile. "My dear," he answered, "it's undeniably pleasant to stand well in your opinion, but I am not used to compliments, and you run some risk of making me a vain fellow. You asked me to trust you. With what?"

"With the reason why you are poor."

"That," said he, "can be very simply told," and, briefly, in the simplest possible style, he told her of his brother's death, and how his sister-in-law and her family had been left in destitution. "You see," he wound up, "it's just an ordinary sad little tale. Cases of that kind happen daily, all the world over. One must be thankful when they happen within reach of help."

"Is your sister-in-law thankful?" asked Vashti, sharply. "But there!" she added, as he stared at her obviously at a loss to find the question relevant. "You are quite right. It really does not matter two pins whether she is thankful or not." She turned her eyes to the fire again and sat musing. "But I am glad to have heard the story," she went on after a while. "It explains—oh, many things! I have been blind, inconsiderate; but I am seeing light at last. Do you know, my friend, that at first I found a great change in you?"

"Why—bless me!—you had only seen me once before in your life, and then for two minutes!"

"Listen, please, and don't interrupt. I found a great change in you, and the reason of it seemed to lie all on the surface. You had brought ambitions to the Islands, but you had forgotten them. You kept your kindness, your good nature, but you had forgotten all purpose in life. In all, except a few personal habits, you were neglecting yourself; and this neglect came of your being content to live purposeless in this forgotten hole, and draw your pay without asking questions. Forgive me, but I seemed to see all this, and it drove me half wild."

He bowed his head. "I know it did," he answered very slowly, "and that is how you came to save me."

"Is—is this another story?" she asked, after eyeing him a moment or two in bewilderment.

"If you will listen to it." He drew his writing chair over to the fireside, and then, facing her across the hearth he told her the second story as simply as he had told the first, but more nervously, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, now and again spreading out his hands to the fire on which he kept his eyes bent during most of the recital. Vashti, too, leaned forward, intent on his face. One hand gripped the arm of her chair—so tightly that its pressure drove the blood from the finger tips, while the wonder in her eyes changed to something like awe. "And so," the commandant concluded, "the letter has gone. I posted it to-day."

"What will happen?"

"I really cannot tell." Without lifting his gaze from the fire he shook his head dubiously. "But at the worst, the girls are grown into women now. They have been excellently well educated—their mother saw to that and made a great point of it from the first—and by this time they should be able to help, if not support her entirely."

"Man! Man! Will you drive me mad?"

Vashti sprang from the chair.

"I have been unjust. I have been worse than a fool!" She flung back her cloak, and, clasping her hands behind her, man-fashion, fell to pacing the room to and fro. The Commandant stood and stared. Something in her voice puzzled him completely. In its tone, though she accused herself, there vibrated a low note of triumph. She was genuinely remorseful—why, he could not guess. Yet, when she halted before him, he saw that her eyes were glad as well as dim. She held out a hand.

"Forgive me, my friend!"

"Do you know," stammered the Commandant, as he took it, "I should esteem it a favour to be told whether I am standing on my head or my heels!"

How long he held her hand he was never afterwards able to tell; for at its electric touch the room began to swim around him. But this could not have lasted for long; because, as he looked into her eyes, still seeking an explanation, she broke off the half-hysterical laugh that answered him, and pulled her hand away sharply at a sound behind them.

Someone was throwing gravel against the window.

"Commandant!" a voice hailed from the darkness without.

For an instant the two stood as if petrified. Then with a second glance at the window, to make sure that the curtain was drawn, Vashti tip-toed swiftly to the door, catching up the guitar on her way.

"Hi! Commandant! Are you waking or sleeping in there?"

The Commandant stepped to the curtain. Vashti opened the door and slipped out into the passage. The door closed upon her as he pulled the curtain aside for a second time that night and opened the casement.

"Who's there?"

"So you are awake?" answered the voice of Mr. Rogers. "May I come in?" And, silence being apparently taken for consent, a foot and leg followed the voice across the window-sill.



CHAPTER XXI

SUSPICIONS

The foot and leg were followed by Mr. Rogers' entire person, and Mr. Rogers, having thus made good his entrance, stood blinking, with an apologetic laugh. "You'll excuse me—but I took it for granted the door was barred, and seeing a glimmer of light in the window here——"

"Anything wrong?" asked the Commandant.

"Nothing's wrong, I hope"—Mr. Rogers stepped over to the warm fire. "But something's queer." He fished out a pipe from the pocket of his thick pilot coat, filled it, lit up, and sank puffing into the arm-chair from which, a minute ago, Vashti had snatched up her guitar. "Hullo!" he exclaimed, as his eyes fell upon the empty packing-case. "You don't mean to tell me that you've been smuggling?"

The Commandant shook his head and laughed, albeit with some confusion. "The steamer brought it this morning. I assure you it held nothing contraband.... But I hope that little game is not starting afresh in the Islands? It gave us a deal of trouble in the old days; and there was quite an outbreak of it, as I remember, some three or four years before you came to us. Old Penkivel"—this was Mr. Rogers' predecessor—"used to declare that it turned his hair gray."

"He told me something beside, on the morning he sailed for the mainland; which was that but for the help you gave him as Governor he could never have grappled with it. Maybe this was sticking in my head just now when I started to walk up here and consult you."

"Well, and what is the matter?"

"Oh, a trifle.... Do you happen to know Tregarthen, the fellow that farms Saaron Island?"

The Commandant started.

"Eli Tregarthen? Yes, certainly ... that is to say, as I know pretty well everybody in the Islands."

"What sort of a fellow?"

"Quiet; steady; works on his farm like a horse, week in and week out; never speaks out of his turn, and says little enough when his turn comes."

"That sort is often the deepest," observed Mr. Rogers sententiously, and puffed. "And Saaron Island there, close by the Roads, lies very handy for a little illicit work."

"You are right, so far," the Commandant admitted; "and history bears you out. In the old kelp-making days, when half-a-dozen families lived on it, Saaron gave more trouble than any two islands of its size."

"It's none the less handy for being deserted." Mr. Rogers drew out a penknife and meditatively loosened the tobacco in his pipe.