_ CHAPTER XV. BREFAR CHURCH
"It was all my fault," confessed Vashti.
"I was thinking so," said the Commandant, drily. "It had not occurred to me that Archelaus and the Treachers were acting on their own initiative."
Vashti laughed, and her laugh rippled over the waves to meet the sunset gold. They had taken boat beneath the Keg of Butter Battery, and were sailing for Saaron with a light breeze on their quarter. Evening and Sabbath calm held the sky from its pale yellow verges up to the zenith across which a few stray gulls were homing. From Garland Town, from St. Ann's, from Brefar ahead of them, came wafted the sound of bells, far and faint, ringing to church, and the murmuring water in the boat's wake seemed to take up Vashti's laugh and echo it reproachfully, as she checked herself with a glance at her companion's face, which also was reproachful and sternly set, but with a slight twitch at the corners of the mouth to betray it.
"Forgive me!" she pleaded, but her voice, too, betrayed her.
"You are not penitent in the least."
"As you are only pretending to be angry. Remember that I belong to the 'profession,' and no amateur acting can impose on me."
"You will admit that you have behaved abominably." The Commandant conceded a smile.
"Oh, abominably!"
"And perhaps you will be good enough to indicate how I am to restore my credit with--with those people. When I met them coming down the hill and pulled up to salute, Miss Gabriel froze me with a stare, Mrs. Pope looked the other way, and her husband could only muster up a furtive sort of grin. 'Excuse me,' it seemed to say; 'things may right themselves by and by, but for the present I cannot know you.' The three between them knocked me all of a heap. Of course I could not guess what had happened, but I made sure they had seen you."
"It was the closest miss that they did not. When they hove in sight I was actually standing in front of our masterpiece, with my back to the road; calling orders to Archelaus and Treacher, who were at work stuffing _them_ (so to speak) with straw. I fancy they have forgotten, on Garrison Hill, to guard against surprises. At any rate, we should have been taken in a highly unsoldier-like fashion if Mrs. Treacher hadn't kept her eye lifting. She gave the alarm, and we scuttled into the bushes like rabbits, and watched while she held the gate. What is more, I believe she would have fended off the danger if Sergeant Archelaus hadn't sneezed; and then--oh, then!--" Vashti paused, her eyes brimful of laughter.
"He broke cover?"
"I snatched at the tail of his tunic--hastily, I will admit--but until he had stepped past me I had no idea he meant to be so foolish. It came away in my hand. They heard the noise it made in ripping."
"But they did not see you?"
"No; for seeing that the mischief was done Sergeant Treacher stepped out too. You should have heard them explaining to Miss Gabriel! But they were quite brave and determined. They told me afterwards that rather than allow one of the visitors to enter and catch sight of me they would have picked up all three and carried them outside the garrison gate."
"The Lord Proprietor will certainly hear of this," said the Commandant, musing.
Vashti, who had bent to pin the sheet closer, lifted her head and regarded him with a puzzled frown; then, averting her eyes, let them travel under the foot of the sail towards the sunset.
"Decidedly the Lord Proprietor will hear of it," she said, after an interval during which he almost forgot that he had spoken. "Indeed, if it will help to get you, or Archelaus, or anyone out of a scrape, I propose to call on him to-morrow and confess all. Do you think he will be lenient?"
There was a shade of contempt in the question, and it called a flush to the Commandant's cheek. He was about to answer, but checked himself and sat silent, looking down at the foam that ran by the boat's gunwale.
"He must be worth visiting, too; that is, if one may reconstruct him from--from them."
The Commandant smiled. "My dear lady, you have already made one attempt to reconstruct him from them."
Vashti pondered awhile, her chin resting on her hand and her eyes yet fixed upon the sunset.
"I give you fair warning that I am here on a holiday," she murmured.
"I don't know what you consider a fair warning; but I had guessed so much."
"The first for fifteen years," she pursued; "and I won't promise that I shall not behave worse--considerably worse. Are you very angry with me?"
"My dear," answered the Commandant ("My dear," it should be explained, is the commonest form of address in the Islands, and one that even a prisoner will use to the magistrate trying him), "if you really wish to know, I am enjoying myself recklessly; and it would be idle to call my garrison to put you under restraint, since you have already suborned them. I started, you see, with the imprudence of showing you my defences, and now you have us all at your mercy."
"You have been more than good to me," said Vashti, after a pause; "but the fortress is already vacated." She nodded towards a valise which rested under the thwart by the foot of the mast. "Mrs. Treacher packed it for me," she explained, "and her husband carried it down to the boat. If Ruth needs me--as she almost certainly does--and if her husband will tolerate me, I shall sleep on Saaron to-night."
"But you will come back?" he asked, dismayed.
"Certainly not, unless the Lord Proprietor drives me to seek refuge."
The Commandant did not answer. He had known that this happy time must be short; he had known it from the first, and that the end would come unexpectedly.
The wind had fallen slightly, and the boat crept up to the entrance of Cromwell's Sound with sail that alternately tautened its sheet and let it fall slack. The single bell of Brefar Church yet rung to service; but the sun had sunk beneath the horizon, and the sea-lights were flashing around the horizon before Saaron loomed close on the port hand; and as they crept towards the East Porth under the loom of the Island, a row-boat shot out from the beach there, and headed up the Sound towards Brefar.
"Hush!" commanded Vashti, and peered forward.
But a boat putting out from Saaron at this hour could only belong to Saaron's only inhabitants, and could be bound but on one errand. And Ruth was in her, for, presently, as the children's voices travelled back across the still water, Vashti heard Matthew Henry's pitched to a shrill interrogative and calling his mother by name.
"They are rowing to church, the whole family," said Vashti. "We can follow as slowly as we choose."
She listened a moment, but the oars in the boat ahead continued their regular plash. It may be that Tregarthen had failed to discern the small sail astern of him in the gloom of the land. She lowered it quietly, stowed it, found and inserted the thole-pins, and shipped the paddles. Yet it seemed that she was in no hurry to row. She but dipped a blade twice to check the boat from swinging broadside-on to the tide, and so rested silent for minute after minute, gazing through the gloom towards the bright sea-lights.
And it seemed to the Commandant, seated and watching her, that he could read some of the thoughts behind her gaze. His own went back again to the night of his first coming to the Islands, when, as at sunset he supposed himself to have discovered them, all of a sudden they discovered him--reef after reef opening a great shining eye upon him; and some of the eyes were steady, but most of them intermittent, and all sent long gleaming rays along the floor of the sea; a dozen sea-lights and eleven of them yellow, but the twelfth (that upon North Island) a deep glowing crimson. Since then and for fifteen years they had been his friends. Nightly he watched them for minutes from his window before undressing for bed; and in fanciful moments they seemed to draw a circle of witchcraft around the Islands.
If they meant so much to him what must they mean to her who had left home, dear ones, and all memories of youth?--and who, returned from exile, stood with her hand upon the latch of the old cupboard!
"Ruth will have changed," said Vashti, speaking aloud, but to herself. "It is impossible that she has not changed."
She dipped her paddles and began to pull, gently at first and almost languidly; but by and by strength came into her arms and the boat began to move at a pace that astonished the Commandant.
* * * * *
Brefar Church stands on a green knoll close by the water's edge and only a few yards above a shingly beach where the Islanders bring their boats to shore. Its bell had ceased ringing long before its windows came into view with the warm lamp light shining within; and the beach lay dark under the shadow of the tamarisks topping the graveyard wall. Vashti, not in the least distressed by her exertions, sprang ashore and sought about for a good mooring-stone. She had found one almost before the Commandant, following, could offer to help her in her search. Together they hauled the boat a few yards up from the water.
"Are we to go inside?" the Commandant asked, looking up at the lighted building.
Before Vashti could answer a reedy harmonium sounded within and the congregation broke into the "Old Hundredth" hymn--
"All people that on earth do dwell,
Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice----"
The incongruity of it, sung by a handful of fisherfolk here on an islet of the Atlantic--the real congruity (if indeed the Church be, as the Bidding Prayer defines it, "the whole body of Christian people dispersed throughout the world")--was probably less perceptible to the Commandant after fifteen years' sojourn on the Islands than to Vashti, newly returned from great continents and crowded cities. But if she smiled the darkness did not betray her. The Commandant saw her lift a hand beckoning him to follow, and followed her up the knoll to a whitewashed gate glimmering between the dark masses of the tamarisks.
She opened it and disappeared into the churchyard. He followed, stumbling along the narrow path, and overtook her at the angle of the south porch. She was in the act of mounting upon a flat tombstone which lay close in the wall's shadow. A panel of light streamed from the window directly above, and fell on Vashti's face as she drew herself erect upon the slab and leaned forward, her fingers resting on the granite mullions; but a light not derived from this shone in her eyes a moment later. With a little sob of joy she pressed her forehead close against the leaded panes.
The Commandant heard the sound, and guessed the cause of it. The light in her eyes he could not see. He stood among the dark nettles, looking up at her, waiting for the hymn to conclude.
The "Amen" came at last. He heard the shuffling of feet as the congregation knelt to pray ... and, with that, Vashti turned and bent to whisper to him.
"She is there--almost abreast of us, standing by the pillar. She is kneeling now--my own Ruth--and her face is hidden."
He supposed that she bent to step down from the slab, and he put up a hand to help her. A tear fell on the back of his fingers, as it were a single raindrop out of the night.... But she turned impulsively, and pressed her face again to the glass.
"She is praying. She will not look up again.... She would not turn her eyes just now, though her own sister stood so close! They were lifted to the lights in the chancel and to the dark window." Then, as it seemed, with sudden inconsequence, she added: "Forgive me, sir! You have been kind to me, and it is so many years--so many years----"
"My dear," said the Commandant, gravely, as he handed her down, "you honour me more than I can tell. All my life I shall remember that you have so honoured me."
But it did not appear that she heard him. Letting go his hand, she seated herself on the edge of the tombstone, and looked up at him with eyes that, barely touched by the light from the window, seemed to him strangely, almost pitifully childish--eyes of a child that had lost its mother young.
"Her face was not changed, or a very little; far less than I feared. She is beautiful, my own Ruth--beautiful as she is good."
"And happy?" he found himself asking.
"Happy and unhappy. Happy in her good man, in her children?--oh, yes. But unhappy, just now, because they are unhappy and in trouble. There was a gloom upon Eli Tregarthen's face, a look of pain----"
"Of anger, too, and of wonder mixed with it, I daresay. He has been hit by a blow he does not understand."
"But we will help them."
The Commandant stared into the darkness. There was gloom, too, on his face, had there been light enough to reveal it.
"The Lord Proprietor is a very obstinate man."
"Yes, yes; but I mean that we will help them to-night. I cannot bear to think of Ruth carrying her trouble home and lying awake with it."
"Perhaps she will not." The Commandant remembered how he himself had carried a burden to church that morning and left it there.
"Ah!" exclaimed Vashti, swiftly, guessing his thought, though not the occasion of it. "That may do for you and me. For my part, I am not a religious woman--I mean, not religious as I ought to be. Yet I understand. Often and often when worried or out of temper I go to church and sit there alone until peace of mind comes back to me. But I have no husband, and you no wife; whereas with Ruth all her soul's comfort is bound up in those she loves. While Eli Tregarthen wears that look on his face, she can never go home happy."
"But have we power to lift it?"
"We will try, and to-night."
She stood up, cast one look behind her at the lighted window, and led the way back along the path, through the gate, and down the knoll to the beach. While she cast off the rope from its mooring-stone he eased the boat off and launched her.
"Shall I take the paddles?" he asked.
No; Vashti would pull back as she had come; and as she pulled she talked of Ruth, out of her full heart. He listened, between joy and pain--joy to be sitting here, honoured with her confidences, though he had none but a listener's share in them--here, in the still, scented evening, caressed by her marvellous voice; and pain, not because her talk charged life full of new meanings, every one of which he felt to be vitally true and as certainly missed by his own starved experience, but because it took him for granted as a kindly stranger, an outsider admitted to these mysteries, and warned him that his time on this holy ground was short; nay, that it was drawing swiftly to a close. And how could he go back to the old monotony, the old routine?
He remembered that, to whatever he went back, it would not be to these--at any rate, not for long. The future might hold degradation, poverty of the sharpest, hard work for a pittance of daily bread; but at least his dismissal would send him back to a life in which lay somewhere these meanings that trembled like visions of light in the heart of Vashti's talk. They gave him glimpses of the heaven which, by their remembered rays, he must seek for himself. How many years had he wasted--how many years!
They moored the boat close under the cliff's shadow, and, climbing the rocks, between the cove and the East Porth, sat down to wait. Vashti sat in reverie, plucking and smelling at small tufts of the thyme; then, rousing herself with a happy laugh, she challenged the Commandant to name her all the islets, rock by rock, lying out yonder in the darkness. He tried, and she corrected omission after omission, mocking him. What did he care? It was enough to be seated here, close with her in the starry, odorous night.
Presently she tired of the contest, and clasping her knees began, without warning given, to croon a little song--
"Over the rim of the moor,
And under a starry sky,
Two men came to my door
And rested them wearily.
Beneath the bough and the star
In a whispering foreign tongue,
They talked of a land afar,
And the merry days so young."
She sang it as though to herself, or as though answering the murmur of the tide on the rocks at their feet; but at the third verse her voice lifted:
"Beneath the dawn and the bough
I heard them arise and go--
But my heart, it is aching--aching now,
For the more it will never know."
The song died away in a low wistful minor, as though it breathed its last upon a question. "The merry days--the merry days, so young," she echoed, after a pause, and lifted her head suddenly.
"Hark!"
The sound--it was the plash of oar--grew upon the darkness. A light shot out beyond the last point of Brefar, and its ray fell waving on the black water. It came from a lantern in the bows of the Tregarthen's boat, and as it drew nearer the two listeners could distinguish the children's voices.
They shrank back there in the shadow above the ledge, as the boat took ground and Eli Tregarthen, stepping ashore in his sea-boots, set the lantern on the stones of the beach, lifted out the children, and lent a hand to Ruth. The little ones scampered up the path; but Ruth waited by her husband while he heaved the boat high and dry with his easy, careless strength, and saw to her moorings. When all was done, and as he stooped to pick up the lantern, she came to him, and put a hand on his arm. So, and without speech, they went up the path together.
The rays of the lantern danced on the furze-bushes to right and left of the path.... Vashti leapt to her feet; her hands went up to her lips and hollowed themselves to a low call.
"Lul--lul--loo--ee!"
From the brake above came a little cry, a little gasping cry; and gruffly upon it Eli Tregarthen's voice challenged--
"Who goes there?"
"Caa-ra! caa-ra!... Oh, Ruth--my sister!"
The Commandant saw Tregarthen's lantern lifted above the gorse, and by the light of it Ruth came down to the narrow pathway--came with the face of a ghost, as Vashti sprang up the slope towards her.
"Vassy! Not Vassy!-----"
But Vashti's arms were about her for proof. The Commandant, standing below in the shadow of the brake, heard the younger sister's sobs.
"Vassy! And to-night!"
"To-night, and for many nights-----"
"Thank God! Thank God!"
The Commandant, by the light of the lantern which Eli Tregarthen held stupidly, saw them go up the path, their arms holding each other's waist. They disappeared, but their questions and eager, broken answers, as they climbed towards Saaron, came down to him where he stood alone, forgotten.
He stood there for half an hour almost. Then, as he felt the chill of the night he recalled himself to action with a shiver, and shouldered Vashti's valise. Slowly he climbed the hill with it, to Saaron Farm, and rapped on the door.
Tregarthen opened to him, staring.
"I have brought your sister-in-law's luggage."
"Is it the Governor?... But won't you step inside, sir?"
"I thank you; no. It is late," answered the Commandant, curtly, and turned on his heel.
As he went by the window he saw--he could not help seeing--Ruth in her chair, with Vashti on the hearth beside her, clasping her knees. The children looked on in a wondering semi-circle.
He stumbled down the hill, and as he went he heard the door softly close behind him. _