Major Vigoureux Part 36

"I will bring them to Saaron to-morrow."

She turned away and leaned over the low parapet to the left. Some way below a footfall sounded, on the track leading to the watch-house---the footfall of Beesley. A stone, dislodged by his tread, trickled and fell over the cliff into night.

"Curious!" remarked Mr. Rogers, confidentially, to the Commandant, twenty minutes later, as they stood and peered into the darkness after Vashti's boat. "Here I am, stuck on these Islands (so to speak) with a telescope held to my eye. Of the folk upon 'em I see next to nothing.

Now, I don't know if you took note of it, but that's a remarkable looking woman; a remarkably handsome woman; and I've spent these years here without guessing that such a woman existed hereabouts. Eh?" Mr.

Rogers relapsed into mild facetiousness. "If you were a younger man, Commandant, I could hatch up a pretty story out of to-night's doings--and if I didn't mind a laugh against myself."

CHAPTER XXII

PIPER'S HOLE

Annet, Linnet, and Matthew Henry sat side by side on the granite roller by the gate and watched their friend Jan eat his mid-morning snack--or "mungey," as it is called in the Islands. It consisted, as a rule, of a crust of bread, but Jan had supplemented it to-day with a turnip, which he cut into slices with his pocket-knife. He had been pulling turnips since six o'clock. "And I reckon this'll be the last time of askin',"

he commented, letting his eyes wander over the field as he seated himself on a shaft of the cart, which had been brought to await the loading.

The children knew that they would soon be quitting Saaron, and that the prospect distressed their father and mother. They had discussed it, and agreed together that it was a great shame to be turned out of their home, and that the Lord Proprietor must be a hard-hearted tyrant; but secretly they looked forward to the change with a good deal of excitement, not being of an age to fathom the troubles of grown-up folk. After all, Brefar lay close at hand and was familiar. Brefar was populous, and across there they would find many playmates. Brefar, too, held out great promise of adventure after sea-birds' eggs and expeditions of discovery; and if ever the home-sickness came upon them they would cross the sands at low-water and revisit the old haunts and the deserted house. All these consolations, however, they kept to themselves. It would never do to abandon the family grievance merely because it presented a bright side. They felt, as older folks have been known to feel, that a sense of injury carries with it a sense of importance.

"I wonder," said Linnet, severely, "that you can have the heart to talk about it, Jan."

"Jan has no feelings about leaving Saaron," said Annet, more in sorrow than in anger. "Why should he--coming from the mainland?"

"But Jan was born on the Islands," Matthew Henry objected; "and that will be a long time ago."

"Silly! As if you could belong to the Islands by being born here! Why, to belong to them, your father and mother must have been Islanders, and your grandfathers and grandmothers, and right back into the greats and great-greats. And then you never want to go away or live anywhere else in the world."

Matthew Henry pursed up his small mouth dubiously. He himself had sometimes wished to live in the wilds of America, or on a South Sea Island; even to visit Australia and have a try at walking upside down.

There must be a flaw in Annet's argument somewhere.

"But if Jan comes from the mainland--" he began.

"Cornwall," said Jan, tranquilly, his mouth full of raw turnip.

"Then you ought to want to go back to it."

"I mean to, one of these fine days."

"I shouldn't put it off too long, if I were you," advised Linnet, candidly. "You're getting up in years, and the next thing you'll be dead."

"But didn't your father ever want to go back?" asked Matthew Henry, sticking to his point.

"No fear."

"Why?"

"Because, if he'd showed his face back in Cornwall, they'd have hanged him; that's all."

"Oh!" exclaimed the three, almost simultaneously, and sat for a moment or two gazing on Jan in awed silence.

"But why should they want to hang your father?" asked Annet.

Jan sliced his bread with an air of n.o.ble indifference. "Eh? Why, indeed? He used to say 'twas for being too frolicsome. He never done no wrong--not what you might call wrong: or so he maintained, an' 'twasn't for me to disbelieve 'en. Was it, now?"

"You'll tell us about it, Jan dear?" coaxed Annet.

"There's no particular story in it." (The children put this aside; it was Jan's formula for starting a tale.) "My father, in his young days, lived at a place in Cornwall called Luxulyan, and arned his wages as a tinner at a stream-work----"

"What is a stream-work?" asked Matthew Henry.

"A stream-work is a moor beside a river, where the mud is full of ore, washed down from the country above--sometimes from the old mines. The streamers dig this mud up and wash it through sieves, and so they get the tin. There was enough of it, my father said, in Luxulyan Couse to keep a captain and twelve men in good wages and pay for a feast once a year at the Rising Sun Public House. The supper took place some time in the week before Christmas, and they called it Pie-crust Night, though I can't tell you why. Well, one Pie-crust Night, after this yearly supper--the most enjoyable he had ever known--my father left the Rising Sun towards midnight, and started to walk to his home in Luxulyan Churchtown. He had a fair dollop of beer inside of him, but nothing (as he ever maintained), to excuse what followed, and he got so far as Tregarden Down without accident. Now, this Tregarden Down, as he always described it to me, is a lonesome place given over to brackenfern and strewn about with great granite boulders, and on one of these boulders my father sat down, because the night was clear and a fancy had come into his head to count the stars. He sat there staring up and counting till he reached twenty score, and with that he felt he was getting a crick in the back of his neck, and brought his eyes down to earth again. It seemed to him that, even in the dark, a change had come over the down since he'd been sittin' there, and the whole lie of the ground had a furrin look. Hows'ever, he hadn't much time to puzzle about this, for lo and behold! as he stared about him, what should he see under the lew of the next rock but a party of little people, none of 'em more than a thumb high, dancing in a ring upon the turf! They broke off and laughed as soon as my father caught sight of 'em; and, says one little whipper-snapper, stepping forward and pulling off his cap with a bow, 'Good evening, my man!' 'Sir to you!' says my father. 'There's a good liquor at the Rising Sun,' says the little man. 'None better,' says my father. 'I know by a deal better,' says the little man. 'Would you like to taste it?' 'Would I not?' says my father. 'Well, then,' says the little man, 'there's a s.h.i.+pfull of wine gone ash.o.r.e early this night on Par Sands, and maybe the Par folk haven't had time yet to clear the cargo. What d'ee say to _Ho! and away for Par Beach!_ Eh?' 'With all the pleasure in life,' says my father, thinkin' it a joke; so '_Ho! and away for Par Beach!_' he calls out, mimicking the little man. The words weren't scarcely out of his mouth before a wind seemed to catch him up, though gently, from his seat on the boulder, and in two twinklings he was standin' on Par Sands. There was a strong sea running, and out beyond the edge of the tide my father spied a s.h.i.+p breaking up. But if she broke up fast, her cargo was meltin' faster, for a whole crowd of folk had gathered on the sands, and were rolling the casks of wine up from the water and carting them away for dear life. My father and the little people couldn't much as ever lay hands on a solitary one, and, what was worse they hadn't but fairly broached it before a cry went up that the Preventive men were coming. Sure enough, my father, p.r.i.c.king up his ears, could hear horses gallopin' down along the road above the sands. 'Dear, dear!' says the little man, 'this is a most annoyin'

thing to happen! But luckily I know a place where there's better liquor still, and no risk of bein' interrupted. So _Ho! and away for Squire Tremayne's cellar!_'

"'_Ho! and away for Squire Tremayne's cellar!_' called out my father; and the next thing he knew he found himself in the cellar of Squire Tremayne's great house at Heligan, knocking around with the small people among casks of wine and barrels of beer galore. To do him justice, he never pretended he didn't make use of the occasion. In fact, he fuddled himself so that when the little gentleman called out '_Ho! and away!_ for the next randivoo' (whatever that might ha' been), he missed to take up the catchword, bein' asleep belike. So there the piskies left him asleep, with his head in a waste saucer and his mouth under the drip of a spigot; and there the butler found him the next morning, knocking his s.h.i.+ns among the b.u.t.ts and barrels in the darkness, and calling out to know what the d.i.c.kens had taken Tregarden Down and the rocks o't, that they grew so pesky close together. The butler haled him upstairs to the Squire, and the Squire heard his story, and not only said he didn't believe a word o't, but (bein' a magistrate) packed him off to Bodmin Jail for burglary. I don't blame the man altogether," said Jan, reflectively; "for, come to think of it, my father's account of himself lay a bit off the ordinary run, and belike he wasn't in any condition to put it clearly.

"At any rate, to jail he went, and from jail he was delivered up to the Judges at a.s.size, and the Judges sentenced my poor father to death, which was the punishment for burglary in those times, and, for all I know, it may be the same on the mainland to this day.

"The morning came when he was to be put out of the world; and, as I needn't tell you, it gathered a great crowd together, to have a look at the last of a man that had so little sense of wickedness as to take liberties with a gentleman's wine and spirits. There my poor father stood under the gallows-tree with none to befriend 'en, when all of a sudden he heard a shouting up the street, and down along it, through the crowd, came a strange little lady, holding up her hand and a paper in it. The folk opened way respectful-like, seein' by the better-most air of her that she belonged to one of the gentry, and along she came to the scaffold. 'Good mornin', ma'am, and what can I do for you?' says the Sheriff, steppin' forward, with a lift of his hat. He held out a hand for the paper; but the little lady turns to my father, and pipes out in a little voice, very clear and sweet, '_Ho! and away for the Islands!_' Glad enough was my father to hear the sound of it. '_Ho! and away for the Islands!_' he answers, pat; and in two twinks he and the little lady were off in the sky like a puff of smoke, and the crowd left miles below. The next thing he knew he was sittin' on a rock, over yonder in Inniscaw, by the mouth of Piper's Hole, and starin' at the sea. So he picks himself together and walks up to North Inniscaw Farm (as 'twas called in those days), and there he took service and married and lived steady ever after. Leastways----"

"Leastways," said a voice at the gate, "he gave over drinking except when his master ran a cargo of brandy, and he never gave his wife trouble but once, when he took home a mermaid and made the good soul jealous."

"Aunt Vazzy!" cried the children. "Why, how long have you been standin'

there?"

"Long enough to hear the end of the story, and how Jan's father came to the Islands through Piper's Hole."

"But," Linnet objected, "Jan didn't say that his father came through Piper's Hole; only that he found himself on the rocks in front of it.

They came through the air, he and the little lady, didn't they, Jan?"

Jan shook his head. "They started to come through the air," he answered cautiously.

"Everybody knows that the fairies always pa.s.s to and fro through Piper's Hole," said Annet, in a positive voice. "The mermaids, too. The cave there goes right through Inniscaw and under the sea, and comes up again in the mainland. n.o.body living has ever gone that way; but Farmer Santo had an uncle once that owned a sheep-dog that wandered into Piper's Hole and was lost, and a month later it turned up on the mainland with all its hair off."

"It do go in a terrible long way, to be sure," Jan admitted; "for I made a trial of it myself, one time, at low water. First of all you come to a pool, and, then, about fifty yards further, to another pool, and into that I went plump, coming upon it sudden, in the darkness. I swallowed a bellyful of it, too, and the water--if you'll believe me--was quite fresh. I didn't try no further, because, in the first place, the tide was rising, and because, when I pulled myself out, I heard a sound on t'other side of the pool like as if some creature was breathin' hard there in the darkness. It properly raised my hair, and I turned tail."

"Fie, Jan! Ran away from a mermaid!" said Vashti, laughing. "You should have brought her home and married her."

"I don't want to marry no woman with a tail like a fish, nor no woman that makes thikky noise with her breathin'," maintained Jan. "That's to say, if merrymaid it were, which I doubts. But you're wrong about my father, Miss Vazzy. He see'd a merrymaid sure 'nough; but he never took her home. No, he was too much of a gentleman, besides bein' afeard o'

my mother. If you want the story, he was down in Piper's Hole one day warping ash.o.r.e some few kegs of brandy that had been sunk thereabouts by a Rosco trader. Mr. Pope's father, that was agent to th' old Duke, used to employ my father regular on this business, knowing him for a silent man, and one to be trusted; and my father had made a very pretty catchet some way back-along in the cave, big enough to hold two score of kegs, and well above reach of the sea-water. But, o' course, while he was at this kind of work, Mr. Pope had to wink an eye now and then if one o' the kegs leaked a bit. Well, my father had finished his job that day in a sweatin' hurry, the tide bein' nearabouts on the top of the flood, and at the end, all the kegs bein' stowed, he spiled one 'for the good of the house,' as he put it, and drew off a tot in a tin panikin he kept handy. With this and his pipe he settled himself down 'pon a dry ledge and waited for the tide to run back.

"Out beyond the mouth of the hole he could see a patch of blue sky, and the little waves under it glancin' in the suns.h.i.+ne; and belike the dazzle of it, or else the tot of brandy, made him feel drowsy-like.

Anyhow, he woke up to see that the tide had run out a bravish lot, leavin' the sands high and dry. But, as you know, there's a pool o'

water close inside the entrance, and what should my father see in the pool but a woman's head and shoulders!

"She had raised herself out of the water with her hands restin' on a slab of rock, and over the rock she stared at my father, like as if she wanted help, and again like as if she felt too timid to ask. And when I called her a woman I said wrong; for she was more like a child, and a frightened one, with terrible pretty eyes, and her long hair shed down over her shoulders, drippin' wet, and in colour between gold and sea-green. 'Hullo!' said my father, 'and who might you be, makin' so bold?' At the sound of his speech she gave a little scritch at first, and bobbed down face-under, so that her hair lay afloat and spread itself all over the water like sea-weed. My father walked up closer.