Maid of the Mist Part 27

"I hope he will find me some shoes,--and some needles and thread. Then I shall feel much happier.... And you really think we shall never get away from here?" she asked, quite cheerfully.

"If we could prevail on Macro to think of building a boat, instead of ama.s.sing treasure-trove, we might at all events try it. Nova Scotia is but a hundred miles away, he says,----"

"So close?"

"But he seems to think it a risky voyage, and so far we have come across no tools with which to build. You see, they are not things likely to come ash.o.r.e."

"For myself, I believe I could be quite content to live here," she said again.

"For ever?--Never to get back to the larger life of the world as long as you lived?"

"Ah--that! ... I do not know.... It is a very hollow life after all, that larger life of the world."

"To grow old here," he said thoughtfully, emphasising his points with slowly nodding head. "To be the last one left alive perhaps.... To be all alone, sick, starving, dying slowly in the dark, unable to lift a finger...."

"I would drown myself if it came to that. It sounds horrible....

Perhaps, after all, we had better build the boat and get away."

"But I don't know that we can. I know nothing about boat-building even if I had the tools, and Macro won't turn to it till he has raked through the wreckage, and that will take him about a hundred years. It grows with every storm, you see."

"We must make him."

"And the tools?"

"We must find them."

"Two difficult jobs, perhaps impossible ones. You might perhaps prevail on Macro, but even he can do nothing without tools.... But, if I may venture to say so--it is surely early days for you to have discovered the hollowness of life, and to feel ready to spend the rest of it on a sandbank. Life should hold more in it than that for you."

She looked meditatively across at him for a moment, then seemed to make up her mind. "It is natural you should wish to know.... I will tell you.... It is a somewhat sorry story, but I think you will understand.... My name told you nothing?"

"Nothing--except that it was a very pretty name."

"I feared it would. It is natural, I suppose, to imagine that the whole world knows of one's misfortunes. Have you ever heard of the Countess d'Ormont?"

"The name is familiar to me in some way," he said, staring at her in surprise at the trend this was taxing.

"But I cannot recall----"

"And the Comte d'Artois----"

"Of course!" he nodded. "Now I remember----"

"The Countess d'Ormont was Margaret Drummond, my mother. My father is Charles Philippe, Comte d'Artois, brother of the poor King, Louis, whose head they cut off; and I hate and detest him for his treatment of her.... She is dead, my poor dear one! ... She believed at first that she was properly married to him, and I have no doubt she was--in London. He is a poor thing, but he was very fond of her, for a time.... I was born at Chantilly. It was before his quarrel with the Duc de Bourbon, and we lived in Paris and elsewhere according to his caprice. When my mother learned all the truth, and that in Paris she was not legally his wife, it broke her heart, I think. I never remembered her but as sad and troubled. Except on my account she was not sorry to die, I know. I was in Paris all through the Red times, and saw--oh, mon Dieu,--the horrors of it all!--things I could never forget if I lived to be a thousand.... In London we were all very badly off.... But he liked to have me with him, and poor Mme de Polastron was very good to me, but she was a strange, strange woman....

Her death was a great blow to him ... and a great loss to me. He was really very badly off there, and I did not like the people he had about him,--de Vaudreuil, de Roll, du Theil, and the rest, and I made up my mind to seek my own life elsewhere. And that is about all."

"And you have friends in America--relatives perhaps?"

"My mother's people, in Virginia. They have prospered there.... The new life out there, where all men are equal, appeals to me. Now you understand why I would not have cared very much if Mr Macro had not brought me ash.o.r.e and if you had not rubbed me back to life. I seem to have no place in the world. I hate the aristocrats for what my mother suffered at their hands, and I hate the others for the terrible scenes I pa.s.sed through as a child. These things are stamped into my heart and brain for ever. And that is why this lonely island, far away from it all, seems better to me than any place I know."

"You would grow tired of it."

"I could never grow as sick of it as I did of what I have left. It is not perhaps a very full life, but neither is it hollow and heartless.

You I can trust, and Mr Macro also. It is lonely, but it is sweet and peaceful----"

"Wait till you see it in a storm."

"Storms are nothing when you have seen Paris drunk with blood.

Ach!--the horror of it!" and she flung out her hands in a gesture full-charged with terrible memories, and then pressed them over her eyes as though to blot it all out.

"Well, we will do all in our power to make things comfortable for you, for as long as we have to stop here.... For your sake I hope it will not be long. Life should hold more for you than this," said Wulfrey, and mused much on the beautiful stranger and her strange history, and wondered what the future held for them all.

The mate came back when it was growing dark, very tired and in none too good a humour at the poverty of his finds. The results of a hard day's work, so far as he disclosed them, were a number of rusty sail-maker's needles which he had found in a chest, and half a dozen pairs of shoes, sodden almost out of semblance to leather.

Miss Drummond, however, was delighted and thanked him heartily.

"You will lend me a knife, and out of some of your beautiful silks I will make a new dress. I shall like that better than wearing any of those ancient ones which belonged to the dead."

"You're very welcome, miss. I broke into more'n a score of chests and boxes and not a blessed stocking among the lot. And them shoes are pretty bad, but they were best I could find."

"I will rub them with fat and they will return all right, and the needles will come bright with sand. I shall do very well now. Thread I can get from a piece of your linen. I thank you very much. Now you will eat some of my cakes."

"Best cakes ever I tasted," he said with a full mouth. "Takes a woman to cook properly. And best day's work I done since I got here, fis.h.i.+ng you out the water."

"Perhaps--I am not yet sure, but I thank you all the same. When will you begin to build a boat for us to get away in?"

"Ah! ... Building a boat needs tools. What for do you want to get away so quick? You're but just got here."

"At present I am content. But--for always? I am not sure."

"Doctor, there, is always wanting to get away. But he knows we can't build a boat without tools. An' I put it to him--has he so much as set eyes on a tool out yonder since we come ash.o.r.e?"

"I can't say I have, but then I haven't seen as much of the wreckage as you have. There may be any amount of----"

"Oh, ay, there mebbe! But so far we haven't struck 'em, an' it's no good talking o' boats till we got the tools."

"We will look for them," said The Girl confidently.

"Oh, ay, ye can look for 'em, and mebbe sometime a boat'll come ash.o.r.e ready-made, or one that we can make s.h.i.+ft to patch up. Meantime we've got all we want here and there's plenty more for the getting out yonder. So be content, say I, miss, for by rights the Doctor and me ought to be two clean-picked white skeletons out there on the pile, an'

you ought to be a little white corp tumbling about on yon spar for the birds to peck at."

"Are there skeletons out there?" she asked with a s.h.i.+ver.

"Heaps."

"I think I will not go. I have seen so much of Death. I would forget it for a time."

"Ye'll meet him sure if ye try to get across from here in any boat we could build," growled the mate, and filled his pipe and his pannikin.