Major Vigoureux Part 28

"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 a.s.sist 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 moons.h.i.+ne!" 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 b.u.t.tressed; 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 sh.o.r.e. Between them and the water's edge stood the Lord Proprietor's new schoolhouse, above a small landing quay; and within the schoolhouse a cla.s.s 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 sh.o.r.e.

"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," a.s.sented 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 G.o.d made 'em. But, reason? You might as well try reason on the hind leg of a jacka.s.s. 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 cuc.u.mbers--a besieged city----"

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

"Y'r honour!" Abe s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 embarra.s.sed 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 pa.s.sionately 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 pa.s.sion, 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 sh.o.r.e 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 grat.i.tude for the gift of the breeches. But what had he done that they should be flaunted on a scarecrow?... Oh, it was monstrous!