The Light of Scarthey Part 11

That night, even when sheer fatigue had subdued the currents of blood and thought that surged in his head, Sir Adrian was too restless to avail himself of the emergency couch providently prepared by Rene in a corner. But, ceasing his fretful pacing to and fro, he sat down in the arm-chair by the hearth where she had sat--the waif of the sea--wrapped round him the cloak that had enfolded the young body, hugging himself in the salt moisture the fur still retained, to spend the long hours in half-waking, firelight dreams.

And every burst of tempest rage, every lash of rain at the window, every thud of hurricane breaking itself on impa.s.sable ramparts, and shriek of baffled winds searching the roofless halls around, found a strangely glad echo in his brain--made a sort of burden to his thoughts:

Heap up the waters round this happy island, most welcome winds--heap them up high and boiling, and retain her long captive in these lonely ruins!

And ever the image in his mind's eye was, as before, Cecile--Cecile who had come back to him, for all sober reason knew it was but the child.

The child----! Why had he never thought of the children these weary years? They, all that remained of Cecile, were living and might have been sought. Strange that he had not remembered him of the children!

Twenty years since he had last set eyes upon the little living creature in her mother's arms. And the picture that the memory evoked was, after all, Cecile again, only Cecile--not the queer little black-eyed puppet, even then a.s.sociated with sea-foam and salty breeze. Twenty years during which she was growing and waxing in beauty, and unawares, maturing towards this wonderful meeting--and he had never given a thought to her existence.

In what sheltered ways had this fair duplicate of his love been growing from a child to womanhood during that s.p.a.ce of life, so long to look back upon--or so short and transient, according to the mood of the thinker?

And, lazily, in his happier and tender present mood he tried to measure once again the cycles of past discontent, this time in terms of the girl's own lifetime.

It is bitter in misery to recall past misery--almost as bitter, for all Dante's cry, as to dwell on past happiness. But, be the past really dead, and a new and better life begun, the scanning back of a sombre existence done with for ever, may bring with it a kind of secret complacency.

Truly, mused Sir Adrian, for one who ever cherished ideal aspirations, for the student, the "man of books" (as his father had been banteringly wont to term him), wors.h.i.+pper of the muses, intellectual Epicurean, and would-be optimist philosopher, it must be admitted he had strangely dealt, and been dealt with, since he first beheld that face, now returned to light his solitude! Ah, G.o.d bless the child!

Pulwick at least nursed it warmly, whilst unhappy Adrian, ragged and degraded into a mere fighting beast, roamed through the Marais with Chouan bands, hunted down by the merciless revolutionists, like vermin; falling, as months of that existence pa.s.sed over him, from his high estate to the level of vermin indeed; outlawed, predatory, cunning, slinking, filthy--trapped at last, the fit end of vermin!

Scarcely better the long months of confinement in the hulks of Roch.e.l.le. How often he had regretted it, then, not to have been one of the chosen few who, the day after capture, stood in front of six levelled muskets, and were sped to rest in some unknown charnel!

Then!--not now. No, it was worth having lived to this hour, to know of that fair face, in living sleep upon his pillow, under the safeguard of his roof.

Good it was, that he had escaped at last, though with the blood of one of his jailors red upon his hands; the blood of a perhaps innocent man, upon his soul. It was the only time he had taken a life other than in fair fight, and the thought of it had been wont to fill him with a sort of nausea; but to-night, he found he could face it, not only without remorse, but without regret. He was glad he had listened to Rene's insidious whispers--Rene, who could not endure the captivity to which his master might, in time, have fallen a pa.s.sive, hopeless slave, and yet who would have faced a thousand years of it rather than escape alone--the faithful heart!

Yes, it was good, and he was glad of it, or time would not have come when she (stay, how old was the child then?--almost three years, and still sheltered and cherished by the house of Landale)--when she would return, and gladden his eyes with a living sight of Cecile, while Rene watched in his tower above; ay, and old Margery herself lay once more near the child she had nursed.

Marvellous turn of the wheel of fate!

But, who had come for the children, and where had they been taken? To their motherland, perhaps; even it might have been before he himself had left it; or yet to Ireland, where still dwelt kinsfolk of their blood? Probably it was at the breaking up of the family, caused by the death of Sir Thomas, that these poor little birds had been removed from the nest, that had held them so safe and close.

That was in '97, in the yellow autumn of which year Adrian Landale, then French fisherman, parted from his brother Rene L'Apotre upon the sea off Belle Isle; parted one grizzly dawn after embracing, as brothers should. Oh, the stealthy cold of that blank, cheerless daybreak, how it crept into the marrow of his bones, and chilled the little energy and spirits he had left! For a whole year they had fruitlessly sought some English vessel, to convey this English gentleman back to his native land. He could remember how, at the moment of separation, from the one friend who had loved both him and her, his heart sank within him--remember how he clambered from aboard the poor little smack, up the forbidding sides of the English brig; how Rene's broken words had bidden G.o.d bless him, and restore him safely home (home!); remember how swiftly the crafts had moved apart, the mist, the greyness and desolateness; the lapping of the waters, the hoa.r.s.e cries of the seamen, all so full of heart-piercing a.s.sociations to him, and the last vision of Rene's simple face, with tears pouring down it, and his open mouth spasmodically trying to give out a hearty cheer, despite the sobs that came heaving up to it. How little the simple fellow dreamed of what bitterness the future was yet holding for his brother and master, to end in these reunions at last!

The vessel which had taken Adrian Landale on board, in answer to the frantic signals of the fis.h.i.+ng-smack, that had sailed from Belle Isle obviously to meet her, proved to be a privateer, bound for the West Indies, but cruising somewhat out of her way, in the hope of outgoing prizes from Nantes.

The captain, who had been led to expect something of importance from the smack's behaviour, in high dudgeon at finding that so much bustle and waste of time was only to burden him with a mere castaway seeking a pa.s.sage home--one who, albeit a countryman, was too ragged and disreputable in looks to be trusted in his a.s.surances of reward--granted him indeed the hospitality of his s.h.i.+p, but on the condition of his becoming a hand in the company during the forthcoming expedition.

There was a rough measure of equity in the arrangement, and Adrian accepted it. The only alternative, moreover, would have been a jump overboard. And so began a hard spell of life, but a few shades removed from his existence among the Chouan guerillas; a predatory cruise lasting over a year, during which the only changes rung in the gamut of its purpose were the swooping down, as a vulture might, upon unprotected s.h.i.+ps; flying with superior speed from obviously stronger crafts; engaging, with hawk-like bravery, everything afloat that displayed inimical colours, if it offered an equal chance of fight.

And this for more than a year, until the privateer, much battered, but safe, despite her vicissitudes made Halifax for refitting. Here, at the first suitable port she had touched, Adrian claimed and obtained his release from obligations which made his life almost unendurable.

Then ensued a period of the most absolute penury; unpopular with most of his messmates for his melancholy taciturnity, despised by the more brutal as one who had as little stomach for a carouse as for a b.l.o.o.d.y fight, he left the s.h.i.+p without receiving, or even thinking of his share of prize-money. And he had to support existence with such mean mechanical employment as came in his way, till an opportunity was offered of engaging himself as seaman, again from sheer necessity, on a homeward-bound merchantman--an opportunity which he seized, if not eagerly, for there was no eagerness left in him, yet under the pressure of purpose.

Next the long, slowly plodding, toilsome, seemingly eternal course across the ocean.

But even a convoy, restricted to the speed of its slowest member, if it escape capture or natural destruction, must meet the opposite sh.o.r.e at length, and the last year of the century had lapsed in the even race of time when, after many dreary weeks, on the first of January 1801, the long low lines of sandhills on the Lancastrian coast loomed in sight. The escort drew away, swiftly southwards, as if in joyful relief from the tedious task, leaving the convoy to enter the Mersey, safe and sound.

That evening Adrian, the rough-looking and taciturn sailor, set foot, for a short while, on his native land, after six years of an exile which had made of him at five and twenty a prematurely aged and hopelessly disillusioned man.

And Sir Adrian, as he mused, wrapped in the honoured fur cloak, with eyes half closed, by his sympathetic fire, recalled how little of joy this return had had for him. It was the goal he had striven to reach, and he had reached it, that was all; nay, he recalled how, when at hand, he had almost dreaded the actual arrival home, dreaded, with the infinite heart-sickness of sorrow, the emotions of the family welcome to one restored from such perils by flood and field--if not indeed already mourned for and forgotten--little wotting how far that return to Pulwick, that seemed near and certain, was still away in the dim future of life.

Yet, but for the fit of hypochondriacal humour which had fallen black upon him that day of deliverance and made him yearn, with an intensity increasing every moment, to separate himself from his repugnant a.s.sociates and haste the moment of solitude and silence, he might have been rescued, then and for ever, from the quagmire in which perverse circ.u.mstances had enslaved him.

"Look'ee here, matey," said one of his fellow-workers to him, in a transient fit of good-fellows.h.i.+p which the prospect of approaching sprees had engendered in him even towards one whom all on board had felt vaguely to be of a different order, and disliked accordingly, "you don't seem to like a jolly merchantman--but, maybe, you wouldn't take more kindly to a man-o'-war. Do you see that there s.h.i.+p?--a frigate she is; and, whenever there's a King's s.h.i.+p in the Mersey that means that it's more wholesome for the likes of us to lie low. You take a hint, matey, and don't be about Liverpool to-night, or until she's gone. Now, I know a crib that's pretty safe, Birkenhead way; Mother Redcap's, we call it--no one's ever been nabbed at Mother Redcap's, and if you'll come along o' me--why then if you won't, go your way and be d.a.m.ned to you for a----"

This was the parting of Adrian Landale from his fellow-workers. The idea of spending even one night more in that atmosphere of rum and filth, in the intimate hearing of blasphemous and obscene language, was too repulsive to be entertained, and he had turned away from the offer with a gesture of horror.

With half a dozen others, in whose souls the attractions of the town at night proved stronger than the fear of the press party, he disembarked on the Lancas.h.i.+re side, and separating from his companions, for ever, as he thought, ascended the miserable lanes leading from the river to the upper town.

His purpose was to sleep in one of the more decent hotels, to call the next day for help at the banking-house with which the Landales had dealt for ages past, and thence to take coach for Pulwick. But he had planned without taking reck of his circ.u.mstances. No hotel of repute would entertain this weather-beaten common sailor in the meanest of work-stained clothes. After failing at various places even to obtain a hearing, being threatened with forcible ejectment, derisively referred to suitable cribs in Love Lane or Tower Street, he gave up the attempt; and, in his usual dejection of spirit, intensified by unavowed and unreasonable anger, wandered through the dark streets, brooding. Thus aimlessly wandering, the remembrance of his young Utopian imaginings came back to him to mock him. Dreams of universal brotherhood, of equality, of harmony. He had already seen the apostles of equality and brotherhood at work--on the banks of the Vilaine. And realising how he himself, now reduced to the lowest level in the social scale, hunted with insult from every haunt above that level, yet loathed and abhorred the very thought of a.s.sociating again with his recent brothers in degradation, he laughed a laugh of bitter self-contempt.

But the night was piercing cold; and, in time, the question arose whether the stench and closeness of a riverside eating-house would not be more endurable than the cutting wind, the sleet, and the sharper pangs of hunger.

His roaming had brought him once more to that quarter of the town "best suited to the likes of him," according to the innkeeper's opinion, and he found himself actually seeking a house of entertainment in the slimy, ill-lighted narrow street, when, from out the dimness, running towards him, with bare feet paddling in the sludge, came a slatternly girl, with unkempt wisps of red hair hanging over her face under the tartan shawl.

"Run, run, Jack," she cried, hoa.r.s.ely, as she pa.s.sed by breathless, "t' gang's comin' up...."

A sudden loathly fear seized Adrian by the heart. He too, took to his heels by the side of the s.l.u.t with all the swiftness his tired frame could muster.

"I'm going to warn my Jo," she gasped, as, jostling each other, they darted through a maze of nameless alleys.

And then as, spent with running, they emerged at last into a broader street, it was to find themselves in the very midst of another party of man-of-war's men, whose bra.s.s belt-buckles glinted under the flickering light of the oil-lamp swinging across the way.

Adrian stopped dead short and looked at the girl in mute reproach.

"May G.o.d strike me dead," she screamed, clapping her hands together, "if I knew the b.l.o.o.d.y thieves were there! Oh, my bonny lad, I meant to save ye!" And as her words rang in the air two sailors had Adrian by the collar and a facetious bluejacket seized her round the waist with hideous bantering.

A very young officer, wrapped up in a cloak, stood a few paces apart calmly looking on. To him Adrian called out in fierce, yet anguished, expostulation:

"I am a free and independent subject, sir, an English gentleman. I demand that you order your men to release me. For heaven's sake," he added, pleadingly, "give me but a moment's private hearing!"

A loud guffaw rang through the group. In truth, if appearances make the gentleman, Adrian was then but a sorry specimen.

The officer smiled--the insufferable smile of a conceited boy raised to authority.

"I can have no possible doubt of your gentility, sir," he said, with mocking politeness, and measuring, under the glimmering light, first the prisoner, from head to foot, and then the girl who, scratching and blaspheming, vainly tried to make her escape; "but, sir, as a free-born English gentleman, it will be your duty to help his Majesty to fight his French enemies. Take the English gentleman along, my lads!"

A roar of approbation at the officer's facetiousness ran through the party.

"An' his mother's milk not dry upon his lips," cried the girl, with a crow of derisive fury, planting as she spoke a sounding smack on a broad tanned face bent towards her. The little officer grew pink.

"Come, my men, do your duty," he thundered, in his deepest ba.s.s.

A rage such as he never had felt in his life suddenly filled Adrian's whole being. He was a bigger man than any of the party, and the rough life that fate had imposed on him, had fostered a strength of limb beyond the common. A thrust of his knee prostrated one of his captors, a blow in the eye from his elbow staggered the other; the next instant he had s.n.a.t.c.hed away the cutla.s.s which a third was drawing, and with it he cleared, for a moment, a s.p.a.ce around him.

But as he would have bounded into freedom, a felling blow descended on his head from behind, a sheet of flame spread before his eyes, and behind this blaze disappeared the last that Adrian Landale was to see of England for another spell of years.

When he came back to his senses he was once more on board s.h.i.+p--a slave, legally kidnapped; degraded by full and proper warrant from his legitimate status for no crime that could even be invented against him; a slave to be retained for work or war at his master's pleasure, liable like a slave to be flogged to death for daring to a.s.sert his light of independence.