Major Vigoureux Part 31

"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 a.s.sure 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 a.s.suming, 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 cla.s.ses your obtuseness should justly be a.s.signed. 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 G.o.d!"

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 gla.s.s the smart revived; but again he expressed it, and fell to brus.h.i.+ng 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 brus.h.i.+ng 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 st.i.tches, 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 a.s.sure 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 a.s.sault belonged by rights to another branch of the service.

Mr. Fossell stood behind the counter in conference with a junior clerk, and the suns.h.i.+ne pouring through the windows--the only plate-gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s, opened it, and disappeared into his office. The Commandant waited.

Three minutes pa.s.sed.

"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 gla.s.s 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--fis.h.i.+ng for ba.s.s, or so I took the liberty of guessing."

"For ba.s.s?... Yes, oh, most decidedly."

"Knowing fish, the ba.s.s!" 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s door opened, and Mr. Fossell emerged, briskly, holding what appeared to be a fair-sized stone.