Poison Island Part 17

"I was about to suggest, ma'am, that--travel-stained as I am--a wash and a shave would be even more refres.h.i.+ng."

"H'm! You're one of those people--eh?--that study appearances?"

(In the art of disconcerting by simple interrogation I newer knew Miss Belcher's peer, whether for swiftness, range, or variety.) "Brought a razor with you?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Take him to the house, Harry; but first show me where the hens have been laying."

Half an hour later, as Captain Branscome, washed, brushed, and freshly shaven, descended to the breakfast-parlour, Miss Belcher entered the house by the back door, with her hat full of new-laid eggs.

"Nothing like a raw egg to start the day upon," she announced.

"I suck 'em, for my part; but some prefer 'em beaten up in a dish of tea."

She suited the action to the word, and beat up one in the Captain's teacup while Plinny carved him a slice of ham.

"Ladies," he protested, "I am ashamed. I do not deserve this hospitality. If you would allow me first to tell my story!"

"_You're_ all right," said Miss Belcher. "Couldn't hurt a fly, if you wanted to. There! Eat up your breakfast, and then you can tell us all about it."

The two ladies had, each in her way, a knack of making her meaning clear without subservience to the strict forms of speech.

"It will be a weight off one's mind," declared Plinny, "even if it should prove to be the last straw."

"There's one thing to be thankful for," chimed in Miss Belcher, "and that is, Jack Rogers has gone to St. Mawes. When there's serious business to be discussed I always thank a Providence that clears the men out of the way."

I glanced at Captain Branscome. a.s.suredly he had come with no intention at all of unbosoming himself before a couple of ladies.

He desired--desired desperately, I felt sure--to confide in me alone.

But Miss Belcher's off-handish air of authority completely nonplussed him; he sat helplessly fidgeting with his breakfast-plate.

"To tell you the truth, ladies," he began, "I had not expected this-- this audience. It finds me, in a manner of speaking, unprepared."

He ran a finger around the edge of his saucer after the manner of one performing on the musical gla.s.ses, and threw a hunted glance at the window, as though for a way of escape. "My name, ladies, is Branscome. I was once well-to-do, and commanded a packet in the service of his Majesty's Postmasters-General. But times have altered with me, and I am now an usher in a school, and a very poor man."

He paused; looked up at Miss Belcher, who had squared her elbows on the table in very unladylike fas.h.i.+on; and cleared his throat before proceeding--

"You will excuse me for mentioning this, but it is an essential part of my story."

"The Stimcoes," suggested Miss Belcher, "didn't pay up--eh?"

"Mr. Stimcoe--though a scholar, ma'am--has suffered from time to time from pecuniary embarra.s.sment."

"--Traceable to drink," interpolated Miss Belcher, with a nod towards Plinny. "No, sir; you need not look at Harry: _he_ has told us nothing. I formed my own conclusions."

"Mrs. Stimcoe, ma'am--for I should tell you she keeps the purse--is too often unable to make two ends meet, as the saying is. I believe she paid when she could, but somehow my salary has always been in arrear. I have used remonstrance with her, before now, to a degree which it shames me to remember; yet, in spite of it, I have sometimes found myself on a Sat.u.r.day, after a week's work, without a loaf of bread in the cupboard. I doubt, ma'am, if any one who has not experienced it can wholly understand the power of mere hunger to degrade a man; to what lengths he can be urged, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, as it were, by the instinct to satisfy it. There were Sabbaths, ma'am, when to attend divine wors.h.i.+p seemed a mockery; the craving drove me away from all congregations of Christian men and out into the fields, where--I tell it with shame, ma'am--I have stolen turnips and eaten them raw, loathing the deed even worse than I loathed the vegetable, for the taste of which--I may say--I have a singular aversion.

Well, among my pupils was Harry here, whom I discovered to be the son of an old friend of mine. I dare to call the late Major James Brooks a friend in spite of the difference between our stations in life--a difference he himself was good enough to forget. Our acquaintance began on the _Londonderry_ transport, which I commanded, and in which I brought him home from Corunna to Plymouth in the January of 1809.

It ended with the conclusion of that short and anxious pa.s.sage.

But I had always remembered Major Brooks as one who approached, if ever man did, the ideal of an officer and a gentleman. Now at first, ladies, the discovery suggested no thought to me beyond the pleasure of knowing that my old friend was alive and hale, and the hope of seeing Harry grow up to be as good a man as his father.

But by-and-by I found a thought waking and growing, and awake again and itching after I had done my best to kill it, that the Major might be moved by the story of an old s.h.i.+pmate brought so low. G.o.d forgive me, ladies!" Captain Branscome put up a hand to cover his brow.

"The very telling of it degrades me over again; but I came here to make a clean breast, and there is no other way. I had cross-examined Harry about the Major and his habits--not always allowing to myself why I asked him many trivial questions. And then suddenly the temptation came to a head. Certain Englishmen discharged from the French war-prisons were landed at Plymouth. The town turned out to welcome the poor fellows home, and the Mayor entertained them at a banquet, to which also he invited some two hundred townsmen.

Among the guests he was good enough to include me; for it has been a consolation to me, ladies, and a source of pride, that my friends in Falmouth have not withdrawn in adversity the respect which in old days my uniform commanded."

"Captain Branscome is not telling you the half of it," I broke in eagerly. "Every one in Falmouth knows him to be a hero. Why, he has a sword of honour at home, given him for one of the bravest battles ever fought!"

"Gently, boy--gently!" Captain Branscome corrected me, with a smile, albeit a sad one. "Youth is generous, ladies; it sees these things through a haze which colours and magnifies them, and--and it's a very poor kind of hero you'll consider me before I have done. Where was I? Ah, yes, to be sure--the banquet. His Wors.h.i.+p can little have guessed what his invitation meant to me, or that, while others thanked him for a compliment, to me it offered a satisfying meal such as I had not eaten for months. Mr. Stimcoe had given the school a holiday. In short, I attended.

"I fear, ladies, that the food and the generous wine together must have turned my head--there is no other explanation; for when the meal was over and I sat listening to the speeches, but fumbling with a gla.s.s of port before me, scarcely with the half-crown in my pocket which must carry me over another week's house-keeping, all of a sudden the man inside me rose in revolt. I felt such poverty as mine to be unendurable, and that I was a slave, a spiritless fool, to put up with it. There must be hundreds of good, Christian folk in the world who had only to know to stretch out a hand of help and gladly, as I would have helped such a case in the days of my own prosperity.

Remember, I am not putting this forward as a sober plea. I know it now to be false, self-cheating, the apology that every beggar makes for himself, the specious argument that every poor man must resist who would hold fast by his manhood. But there, with the wine in me and the juices of good meat, the temptation took me at unawares and mastered me as I had never allowed it to master me while I hungered.

I saw the world in a sudden rosy light; I felt that my past sufferings had been unnecessary. I thought of Major Brooks--"

"Bless the man!" interjected Miss Belcher. "He's coming to the point at last."

"Your pardon, ma'am. I will be briefer. I thought of Major Brooks.

I took a resolve there and then to extend my holiday; to walk hither to Minden Cottage, and lay my case before him. The banquet had no sooner broken up than I started. I reached Truro at nightfall, and hired a bed there for sixpence. Early next morning I set forward again. By this time the impulse had died out of me, but I still walked forward, playing with my intention, always telling myself that I could relinquish it and turn back to Falmouth, cheating--yes, I fear deliberately cheating--myself with the a.s.surance until more than half the journey lay behind me, and to turn back would be worse than pusillanimous. At St. Austell a carrier offered me a lift, and brought me to Liskeard. Thence I walked forward again, and in the late afternoon came in sight of Minden Cottage.

"I recognized it at once from Harry's description, and at first I was minded to walk up and knock boldly at the front door.

But remembering also the lad's account of the garden and how the Major would spend the best part of his day there--and partly, I fancy, being nervous and uncertain with what form of words to present myself--I pulled up at the angle of the house, where the lane comes up alongside the garden wall to join the road, and halted, to collect myself and study my bearings.

"The time was about twenty minutes after five, and the light pretty good. But the lane is pretty well overgrown, as you know. I looked down and along it, and it appeared to end in a tangle or brambles.

I turned my attention to the house, and was studying it through my gla.s.ses, taking stock of its windows and chimneys, and generally (as you might say) reckoning it up, along with the extent of its garden, when, happening to take another glance down the lane, to run a measure of the garden wall--or perhaps a movement caught my eye-- I saw a man step across the path between the brambles, out of the garden, as you might say, and into the plantation opposite. The path being so narrow, I glimpsed him for half a second only. But the glimpse of him gave me a start, for, if to suppose it had been anywise possible, I could have sworn the man was one I had known in Falmouth and left behind there."

"Captain Coffin!" I exclaimed.

"Ay, lad, Captain Coffin--Captain Danny Coffin. But what should he be doing at Minden Cottage?"

"The quicker you proceed, sir," said Miss Belcher, rapping the table, "the sooner we are likely to discover."

[1] Russell's waggons--"Russell and Co., Falmouth to London"--were huge vehicles that plied along the Great West Road under an escort of soldiers, and conveyed the bullion and other treasure landed at Falmouth by the Post Office packets. They were drawn, always at a foot-pace, by teams of six stout horses. The waggoner rode beside on a pony, and inside sat a man armed with pistols and blunderbuss.

Poor travellers used these waggons, walking by day, and sleeping by night beneath the tilt.

CHAPTER XVI.

CAPTAIN BRANSCOME'S CONFESSION--THE FLAG AND THE CASHBOX.

"Well, ma'am," resumed Captain Branscome, "so strong was the likeness to old Coffin, and yet so incredible was it he should be in these parts, that, almost without stopping to consider, I turned down the lane on the chance of another glimpse of the man. This brought me, of course, to the stile leading into the plantation; but the path there, as you know, takes a turn among the trees almost as soon as it starts, and runs, moreover, through a pretty thick undergrowth.

The fellow, whoever he was, had disappeared.

"I can't say but what I was still puzzled, though the likeliest explanation--indeed, the only likely one--seemed to be that my eyes had played me a trick. I had pretty well made up my mind to this when I turned away from the stile to have a look at the garden gate on the other side of the lane; and over it, across the little stretch of turf, I caught sight of the summer-house and of Major Brooks standing there in the doorway with a bundle between his hands-a bundle of something red, which he seemed to be wrapping round with a piece of cord.

"Here, then, was the very man I had come to see; and here was a chance of getting speech with him and without the awkwardness of asking it through a servant, perhaps of having to invent an excuse for my visit. Without more ado, therefore, I made bold to lift the latch of the gate and step into the garden.

"At the sound of the latch--I can see him now--Major Brooks lifted his head with a curious start, and tucked the bundle under his arm.

The movement was like that of a man taken at unawares, and straightening himself up to meet an attack. I cannot describe it precisely, but that was just the impression it made on me, and it took me aback for a moment, so that I paused as the gate fell-to and latched itself behind me.

"'Halt there!' the Major commanded, facing me full across the turf.

'Halt, and tell me, please, why you have come back!'