_ CHAPTER XXIX. CONCLUSION
Three years and a few months have passed. The date is Easter Monday (Easter falls early this year), and from the Keg of Butter Battery the Commandant, as he stands looking seaward, hears the school-bell ringing in the town at the foot of Garrison Hill, though the school has been closed a week since for the Easter holidays.
He hears it, but for a while pays no attention to it, though it keeps ding-dinging insistently. His eyes are bent on the sea; yet not in the direction of Saaron, where, if they sought carefully, they might detect a trace of smoke coiling up from the fold of the hills which hides Eli Tregarthen's farm; but westward, towards the main, whence the steamer will arrive before nightfall. She is not due for hours, yet the Commandant's gaze searches the horizon.
The Keg of Butter Battery mounts no guns as yet It is no longer the ruined platform above which Vashti sat on the crumbling wall and poked at the wild thyme with her sunshade. The Government contractor has transformed it: the wall has disappeared, and a smooth glacis slopes from the Commandant's feet over hidden chambers, constructed to house those quick-firing guns. The chambers are ready: the guns will arrive within a week. It is not for them, however, that the Commandant scans the horizon so intently.
Although it is holiday-time, the bells in the town below are ringing to the school-house; but the school-house is filled with flowers. Two years ago the Lord Proprietor called his Islanders together, and explained how he hoped to bring back prosperity to the Islands by means of daffodil culture. For an experiment, he offered to present a thousand Dutch bulbs to every cottager who would give them soil and cultivation, and to-day the Islanders celebrate their first daffodil show.
In years to come, as the trade increases, the market will keep them too happily busy to waste time on exhibitions. We see them, and we part with them, on the eve of prosperity. So much, at any rate, has grown of the few bulbs carried by Archelaus for a peace-offering.
* * * * *
The Commandant takes out his watch, discovers that it is close upon time for the opening ceremony, and descends the hill in a hurry. At the school-house door he meets the Lord Proprietor, and they shake hands as they enter the building together. But after going the round of the stalls, the Lord Proprietor looks up.
"She is coming this afternoon, is she not?"
"She is coming," says the Commandant, and looks forth from the open window over the sea.
[THE END]
Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch's fiction/novel: Major Vigoureux
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