Major Vigoureux Part 39

CHAPTER XXIV

LINNET SEES A MERMAID

Annet, Linnet, and Matthew Henry sat together in a niche of the cliff to the west of Piper's Hole, and panted after their climb.

They had raced up the hill in the gathering twilight for this (their Aunt Vazzy had a.s.sured them) was the time, if ever, to hear the mermaids singing in Piper's Hole, and perhaps to catch a glimpse of them; this, and the hour of moonrise--which for them would be out of the question.

For some days they had been discussing the adventure--not, it scarcely needs to be said, in their parents' hearing. But they had once or twice consulted with Aunt Vazzy, who understood children, and had a sense (denied to most grown-ups) of what was really interesting; and to-day, at dinner-time, Aunt Vazzy had allowed that no time could well be more propitious than this evening, when the hours of twilight and of low water almost exactly coincided. But in private she warned Annet very earnestly to look well after the two younger ones, and see to it that they did not risk their necks--a caution seldom given to Island children, who grow up sure-footed as young goats.

Annet had promised. The main difficulty would be to give the slip to Jan, who usually pulled across from Saaron in good time to fetch them home, and smoked a pipe by the sh.o.r.e while waiting for school to be dismissed. It would take them a good forty minutes to reach Piper's Hole and return. If they gave Jan the slip and delayed him so long, he would undoubtedly lose his temper, and probably report them. After discussing this, they decided to take Jan into the plot. "Maybe," said Annet, "he'll come along, too. I almost think he will if we put it to him all of a sudden, for he's mighty curious about mermaids; but if we give him time to think it over he'll feel ashamed, and say it's all children's whiddles, and back out--I know Jan. So we must wait till school is over and then coax him to come."

Annet did not know that her father, having an appointment with the Lord Proprietor at North Inniscaw Farm, designed himself to call at the school on his way back, and row the children home. Had she guessed this it would have prevented the adventure, which, in fact, it furthered; for, coming out of school and hurrying down to the sh.o.r.e to catch Jan and wheedle him, she found the boat moored there empty. Jan, no doubt, had taken a stroll up to the Lord Proprietor's garden, to have a chat with Old Abe. They had caught him napping; and now, if they kept him waiting, he could not grumble.

So off the three children set for Piper's Hole; Annet and Linnet with long strides, Matthew Henry trotting to keep up with them. Arrived at the cliff's edge, they deployed with great caution--that no noise might scare the mermaids from coming forth--and searched for a nook where, themselves hidden, they could command a view of the cove at their feet.

Linnet, searching to the westward, found just such a spot; a rocky ledge, well gra.s.sed, close under the topmost cornice of the cliff, and quite easy of access. To be sure, a rock on their right cut off their view of the cove's inmost recess, where the funnel-shaped slope broke sheer over the mouth of the Hole. But the ledge looked full upon the Mermaid's Rock and the heave of black water surging past it to gurgitate between the narrowing walls of rock.

Even the matter-of-fact Linnet could not repress a s.h.i.+ver as, after panting a while, she raised herself on one elbow and looked down into the awesome pit. For not only was the water black, but the whole shadowed base of the cliff wall; black as though stained by the inky wave. Black, too, showed the hither side of the Mermaid's Rock against a gray sea, from which the last tint of sunset had faded. Now and then, between the sobbing of Piper's Hole, the children caught the murmur of the tide race, half-a-mile off sh.o.r.e, slackening its note as it neared the time of high-water and its turning point. Out there the sea was agitated; within the line of the race, sharply defined on the gray, it heaved and sank on an oily swell.

"My!" said Matthew Henry, gazing; and Annet turned on her sister and said, "There, now!" The words may seem inadequate, but Linnet understood them, and that they conveyed a question which she felt to be a poser. How could she doubt the existence of mermaids in such a spot as this? If a mermaid were to swim up to the surface under their very eyes, would she be more wonderful than the actual scene--the black rocks, the sobbing water?

"Folks," said Annet, incisively, "that laugh at stories about Piper's Hole, ought to come and see the place for themselves."

"Yes," Matthew Henry agreed; "and after that they can begin to talk."

"I didn't laugh," protested Linnet, flung upon her defence. "Besides,"

she went on weakly, "I don't see why it must be mermaids. If anything lives down there, why shouldn't it be a dragon---or a giant, perhaps----"

"Linnet's improving," put in Matthew Henry, with fine sarcasm.

"Well, it sounds to me more like the noise a dragon would make," Linnet persisted, finding as she went on that her argument was carrying her through very creditably; "or a giant snoring, as they always do after meals."

Annet scanned the black water pensively. "I've heard tell," she said, "of great cuttles that sit and squat under the water; and sometimes, when they are hungry, they fling up their suckers and pull you down off the rocks and eat you."

Matthew Henry drew back from the brink, visibly daunted.

"Look here," he began, "I don't mind mermaids. Mermaids, so far as they go----"

But here he came to a halt as a tinkling sound--the sound of a stringed instrument, gently thrummed, rose from out of the abyss.

It fell on their ears in a pause of the surging water. It came from the Mermaid's Rock, and thither all three children turned their eyes, to see, over the crest of it, from its hidden seaward side, a woman's head and shoulders emerge into view!

In the gathering dusk, even had she lifted her face to them, they could not have discerned her features. But as she climbed into view her loosened hair fell all about her; on the summit of the rock she turned and seated herself fronting the sea; and while the three children drew together, cowering, at her gaze, she began to sing.

And she sang marvellously. If her song had words, they were foreign words; but whether articulate or not it was beautiful beyond all human compa.s.s--or so at least it seemed to the children, whose experience rested, to be sure, on the congregational efforts of Brefar Church.

It rose and sank upon the swell of the tide. It held such sweetness in its mystery that, frightened though they were, the wonder of it drew tears to their eyes. It seemed to open pathways into that world of their desire, on the boundaries of which they were forever treading; yet forever vainly, because they had not the pa.s.swords, and in their ignorance could only guess that miracles lay beyond, sealed, unimaginable.

The children huddled together, lost their fear in wonder, as the voice of the mermaid, growing more and more confident, pierced new roads for them--roads upon which the twilight closed at once; rays into a glory they felt, and trembled to feel, but could not apprehend, because the vision was of mere beauty, and music divorced from words is the last of arts to convey form and meaning.

Yet though wholly indefinite, almost wholly meaningless, it spoke to something to which the children felt all their blood thrilling, responding. Listening, they forgot their fear altogether....

The singer laid down her instrument. The grey of the twilight ran over her bare shoulders as, with a turn of the arm, she swept her tresses back, and--still singing--drew out mirror and comb....

They craned to watch.

Suddenly from the height of the cliff, close on their right, rang out the report of a gun. The song ceased abruptly, lost in the echoes that beat from cliff to cliff, and amid these echoes the children heard a noise of falling stones, followed by a heavy splash.

Annet had sprung to her feet. Linnet and Matthew Henry, too, had picked themselves up, though more slowly.... A wisp of smoke drifted by the rock to their right. When they turned their eyes upon the Mermaid's Rock the singer had vanished.

Annet caught Matthew Henry by one hand; Matthew Henry stretched out another to Linnet. The three scrambled up to the cliff-top, and thence raced homeward, panic-stricken, across the darkening fields.

CHAPTER XXV

MISSING!

_"Sir,--I am directed by the Secretary of State for War to acknowledge receipt of your letter of the 19th ultimo, the contents of which shall receive his attention._

_"I am, sir,_

_"Your obedient servant,_

"J. FLEETWOOD CUNNINGHAM."

The Commandant, from long disuse, had forgotten the formalities of official correspondence. His hand shook as he tore open the long envelope, expecting to read his fate, and in the revulsion, as his eyes fell on the few lines of acknowledgment, he caught at the table's edge and sank into his chair with a sudden feeling of faintness.

For a few hours, then--possibly for a few days--he was respited. He put the letter aside and walked out, to take his afternoon stroll around the fortifications and steady his nerves.

By the Keg of b.u.t.ter Battery he halted for a long look across the Sound and towards Saaron. Unconsciously for a week past, he had fallen into a habit of halting just here and letting his eyes travel towards Saaron.

It was just here that Vashti had seated herself the first morning, and had asked him the fatal question, "For what, then, do they pay you?" He remembered the words, the inflection of scorn in her tone. Here at his feet on a cus.h.i.+on of wild thyme lay the stone she had prised out absently, while she spoke, with the point of her sunshade. Just here, too, she had taken leave of him on the night of her escapade, the night when (it was bliss to remember) she had recanted her scorn, had asked his forgiveness.

For a whole week he had not seen her. Was she careless, then, of the answer?--of what resulted from the train she had fired?... But, after all (the Commandant told himself), she had no need to concern herself about it. She had but set him in the way of doing his duty; for the rest, a man must accept his own responsibility, stand by his own actions, abide his own fate.

Yet he would have given a great deal, just now, for speech with her, to tell her that, unimportant though it was, some word from the War Office had reached him.

Throughout his stroll his mind kept harking back to this letter, seeking behind the few and formal words for meanings they did not cover; and again that evening, after his frugal supper, he drew the envelope from its pigeon-hole, spread the paper on the table before him, and sat studying it.

He lifted his head, at a sound in the pa.s.sage. The outer door had been burst open violently, as though by a gust of wind, and a moment later Archelaus came running in with a face of panic.

"The Lord behear us!" gasped Archelaus. "Oh, sir, here's awful, awful news! The Lord Proprietor's been murdered, and his body flung over the cliff, and Sam Leggo and Abe the gardener be running through the streets wi' the news of it!"