Major Vigoureux Part 17

They pa.s.sed the Commandant and saluted. On a sudden it struck him that these men would expect a small monetary acknowledgment for their trouble; and hastily nodding good-morning to Mrs. Banfield and Mrs.

Medlin, he ran staggering up the slope to the gateway.

"Mrs. Treacher!" he panted, dumping down his burden, "I--er--it so happens that I have no small change about me."

"Me either," said Mrs. Treacher, idiomatically, and bent over the basket. "What's this?"

"You will forgive my mentioning it, Mrs. Treacher; but these good fellows very likely expected a sixpence or so for their trouble. If you wouldn't mind lending me back--for a short time only, a couple of s.h.i.+llings out of the four that--that I----"

"Very sorry, sir," said Mrs. Treacher, "but I spent 'em."

"What! Already?"

"Which I didn't like," pursued Mrs. Treacher, stonily, "to insult the lady's stomach with the kind of eatables I found in the larder. So while you was away, sir, I took the liberty to slip down to Tregaskisses and lay out three s.h.i.+llings. Which, finding no one in charge but that half-baked boy of his, I got good value for the money; and a sight better bacon than this, I don't mind saying--for all you have been so lavish."

She peered into the basket and looked up sharply. It was a cross-examining look, and seemed to ask where he had found the money for all this extravagance. The Commandant, evading it, turned and stared down the road, where already the two seamen had pa.s.sed out of sight.

"You needn't mind them, sir," said Mrs. Treacher, rea.s.suringly. "It's light come and light go with sailors."

Nevertheless, when the Commandant turned to accept the a.s.surance, half eagerly and yet less than half convinced, she would not meet his eye; but picked up the basket and staggered along with it to the Barrack door. "There's a saying," said Mrs. Treacher, eagerly, halting there, "that sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. I've found it comforting before now. But it don't seem to allow for three meals per diem; and how to make bacon and eggs for dinner look different from bacon and eggs for breakfast is a question that'll take thought. You didn't happen to think upon cheese, now?"

"I did," said the Commandant, triumphantly. "There's half a pound of cheese--the very best Cheddar--or, so Tregaskis a.s.sured me."

"Tregaskis!" Mrs. Treacher put down her nose and sniffed the basket.

"Tregaskis never sold better than third-cla.s.s American in all his life."

"She comes from America," the Commandant hazarded.

"I shouldn't advise you to build on that," said Mrs. Treacher, dubiously; "but we'll hope for the best; and with beer in the place of tea it mayn't look altogether like breakfast over again."

He was stepping into the pa.s.sage when she touched his sleeve in sudden contrition.

"I didn't mention it before, sir; but hearing as the sailors had brought up her boxes, she outs with this and asks me to give it to them for their trouble."

Mrs. Treacher held out a golden sovereign. The Commandant stared at it.

"You kept it back?" he gasped.

"I had to, sir. A couple of ignorant seamen--that didn't want it, either!"

"Give it to me!"

"There's one blessing--you can't possibly overtake 'em," said Mrs.

Treacher, as the Commandant s.n.a.t.c.hed the coin.

He gazed down the hill, and decided that to this extent she was right.

With one hand gripping the sovereign, and the other lifted to his distraught brow, the Commandant strode to the room where Vashti sat at breakfast. She looked up and welcomed him with a gay smile.

CHAPTER XI

PLAN OF CAMPAIGN

Vashti sat on the low stone wall beyond the Keg of b.u.t.ter Battery and gazed out over the twinkling Sound and the Islands. The wall ran along the edge of the cliff and moreover was ruinous, as the Commandant had cautioned her when she chose her perch.

For a while she did not appear to have heard him, but sat with lips half-parted as though they drank in their native air, and with eyes half-closed--but whether in mere delight or because through the present they were looking into the past, the Commandant could not determine.

She had invited him after breakfast to conduct her round the old fortifications, and he had done so in some dread of her questions and comments. But she had asked scarcely a question and made no comment at all. She was thinking less of the change in his batteries and defences than of the change in him, as with a deeper knowledge of women he might have divined. In the inanimate work of man's hands woman takes no real interest, whatever she may feign, but of man himself she is insatiably curious and critical. So while the Commandant, moving with her from one battery to another, had halted and stared down on the gra.s.s-grown platforms, ashamed and half-afraid lest by lifting his eyes he should challenge her pity, he missed to perceive and missed altogether to guess that hers were occupied in taking note of him, of his thread-bare coat, of the stoop of his shoulders, of the whitened hair brushed back from his temples.

They had made the round of the batteries in almost complete silence; and coming to the wall above the Keg of b.u.t.ter she had perched herself there and bent her eyes seaward.

She may or may not have been aware that this gave him opportunity to take stock of her in his turn, and that he was using it very deliberately, letting his gaze travel over her profile, or so much of it as she presented to him, and so from point to point of her attire down to her well-made walking shoes--all with a kind of grave wonder.

Once only he glanced up and to the northward, where low on the horizon a faint line of smoke lingered in the wake of the _Milo_, already hull-down on her way; and his glance seemed to ask for a.s.surance that he was not dreaming, that the steams.h.i.+p had really come and gone and left him this unaccountable guest.

It was just at this moment that she answered him.

"Yes, I can easily understand that you feel it," she said in a musing tone.

"Eh?" The Commandant had almost forgotten his warning about the ruinous state of the wall. His eyes had wandered back from the horizon to the close coils of hair above her neck and to the lobe of her small ear which (as he found himself noting) had never been pierced to admit an earring. She turned, and as she caught his gaze he blushed in no little confusion.

With the point of her sunshade she indicated the deserted battery on his left.

"Though I suppose," she went on, still musing, "all these fortifications were really out of date for years before Government dismantled them."

"If that were true," he replied, "it would date my uselessness further back than ever."

"Your uselessness?" she echoed, and now it was her eyes that expressed a grave wonder. "But you were Governor of the Islands; and you are Governor still, are you not?"

"These batteries," he went on hastily, "though antiquated, were never out of date, never useless; and there will be reason enough to regret them if ever an enemy's squadron makes a pounce on the Islands."

"Poor little Islands!" Vashti looked across the Sound with a smile. "It seems almost comic somehow that anyone should dream of attacking them!"

"Ah!" said he, almost bitterly, "you have been living in great cities and enlarging your mind."

"And in great cities, you imply, it is easy to despise, to forget?" She laughed softly. "Brefar--Saaron--Inniscaw!" she murmured, addressing the Islands by name, "here is one who tells me I forget you! Sir, we will take a boat this very day, and I will sail you out to the Off Islands and prove to you if I forget."

"There is no need, Miss Vashti"--he hesitated over the "Miss," but she did not correct him, and he went on more boldly. "I had a talk this morning with Captain Whitaker, of the _Milo_."

Vashti looked up with a quick smile. "He told you?... I am so glad!

Yes, yes: I did not in the least want to have all those pa.s.sengers crowding around me and paying me ridiculous compliments. But false modesty is another thing altogether, and I don't mind telling you I am quite inordinately proud of myself."

"You have a right to be."

"--as I don't mind confessing that I was horribly afraid at the time.

But I am glad again, that Captain Whitaker told you. It was pretty good--eh?--after fifteen years."

She asked it frankly; not archly at all, but with a sudden earnest look that seemed to hold some sadness; and before the Commandant could reply this sadness grew and became so real that he wondered at his having doubted it at first glance.