Major Vigoureux Part 38

"Indeed, sir? Then you've brought Eli Tregarthen to his senses?--if I may make so bold."

The Lord Proprietor flushed, remembering that Abe had witnessed the interview in the walled garden. "I fancy the man has begun to see the red light," he answered, carelessly. "At any rate, he has consented to meet me and take a look over North Inniscaw."

"Well," said Abe, "you'll find him a good farmer; none better."

"And he'll find me a landlord, willing to let bygones be bygones. By the way," added Sir Caesar, yet more carelessly, "I am curious to know if I met that sister-in-law of his the other day?--a decidedly handsome woman, and strikingly well dressed. In fact, I should say she bought her clothes in Paris."

Abe stared, as though his master had suddenly taken leave of his senses.

"I never been to Paris," he said, slowly. "When I seen her last she was nettin' sand-eels, with her legs bare to the knee."

Sir Caesar walked indoors to fetch his hat and his gun. Though he rarely used it, he invariably carried a gun under his arm in his walks about the Islands. It helped his sense of being monarch of all he surveyed.

That sense was strong in him as he took the path which led across the middle of the Island to North Inniscaw Farm. St. Lide's lay directly behind him, to the south, and thus no Garrison Hill obtruded upon his view to remind him of annoyances. The sea shone, the air was pure, the whole seascape flashed white upon blue--white gulls wheeling aloft, white b.r.e.a.s.t.s of puffins congregated on the smaller islets, white caps of tiny waves where the breeze met the tide-race, on North Island the white shaft of a lighthouse fronting the almost level sun. With a touch of imagination the scene had become a prospect of the Cyclades, the lighthouse a column to Aphrodite or the twin brothers of Helen. But the Lord Proprietor was a Briton. He halted on the hill-side to inhale the vigorous breeze, and his heart rejoiced that all he saw belonged to him.

The path descended a stony hillside, crossed a marshy green hollow, and mounted a second stony hill. Over the summit of it the low roofs of a line of farm-buildings hove into sight. This was North Inniscaw; and the Lord Proprietor, arriving punctually at three-thirty, found Eli Tregarthen at the gate in converse with Sam Leggo, the hind in temporary charge of the farm.

If Eli had begun to see reason, his face held out no promise of it. It was dark and gloomy; a trifle weary, too, as though he kept this appointment rather through politeness than with any care for its outcome. He saluted the Lord Proprietor respectfully, but at once bent his eyes to the ground.

"Good afternoon! Good afternoon, Tregarthen!" Sir Caesar began, in his heartiest voice, to show that he bore no malice. "I like punctuality, and those who practise it. Punctuality, if I may say so, is not a wide-spread virtue in these Islands. Shall we go round and take stock?"

"If it will give you satisfaction, sir," a.s.sented Eli.

Sir Caesar led the way, pausing at every gate to discuss the soil, the crop, the present price of oats, barley, roots of beef and mutton; drainage and top-dressing; aspect and shelter; a hundred odds and ends.

He talked uncommonly good sense, too, as Eli confessed to himself. The Lord Proprietor had taken up with agriculture late in life, but he brought to it a trained and thoroughly practical mind. Once or twice he submitted a point to Sam Leggo, who had worked all his life on this very farm, and Eli was forced to admire the pertinence of his questions and cross-questions.

He talked with great good humour, too, although Eli gave it small encouragement. The shadow of leaving Saaron had hung over Eli's mind for more than two months; heavy, oppressive, but until this morning intangible as a cloud. Vashti had remarked that the days deadened him while they should have been nerving him to action; and Vashti, this very morning, had forced his eyes open by asking, in a business-like way, if he had ever thought of emigrating to the mainland. Were it not wiser, since the wrench must come, to make it complete?--to go where regret would not be kept aching by the daily sight of Saaron? The children would find better schools on the mainland, and it was high time to be thinking of Matthew Henry, who deserved a better education than the Islands could afford.

In arguing thus, Vashti was not entirely serious. She knew that Eli would never cut himself loose from the Islands; but she hoped, by forcing him to face the alternative, to shake him out of his torpor. In this she had partly succeeded. For the first time the man opened his eyes and saw hard facts--facts that in a few weeks' time he must grapple with, since neither grieving nor grumbling would remove them.

But for the moment the discovery, instead of nerving him, inflamed his wrath.

A strong man, finding himself helpless, suffers horribly. Especially he suffers when, with a dim sense that in the last resort all power depends on strength, he finds himself tripped up and laid on his back by a man physically his inferior. Had the Lord Proprietor inherited the Islands from a line of ancestors--had his tyranny rested on any feudal tradition--Eli was Briton enough to have acquiesced or submitted. But this whipper-snapper had bought the Islands: money--dirty money alone--gave him power over men who were Islanders by birth and by long generations of breeding. While the Lord Proprietor talked, Eli felt an impulse almost uncontrollable to lay hands on him and wring his neck.

The three men had reached Coppa Parc, an enclosure of twelve acres bounded along the north by the cliffs' edge, and deriving its name from a ma.s.s of granite rock--Carn Coppa--that, rising in ledges from near the middle of the field, ran northward until it broke away precipitously, overhanging the sea. The slopes around the base of the Carn showed here and there an outcrop of granite, but with pockets of deep soil in which (or so the Lord Proprietor maintained) barley could be grown at a profit. He appealed to Eli.

"Come, what does Mr. Tregarthen say to it? A piece of ground like this--hey?--oughtn't to beat a man that has grown barley on Saaron?"

He said it intending no offence, but in a bluff, hearty way, which he meant to be genial. After a second or two, Eli not answering, he turned and saw to his amazement that the man was trembling from head to foot with wrath.

"What right have you? What right----" Eli stammered fiercely, and came to a full stop, clenching his fists.

The Lord Proprietor stared at him. "My good fellow, I hadn't the smallest wish to hurt your feelings. What ails you? An innocent remark, surely!"

"What ails me?" echoed Eli, and stopped again, panting. "Man, have done with this, and let me go--else I'll not promise to keep my hands off you!"

For a moment he stood threatening, his eyes--like the eyes of a dumb animal at bay--travelling from the Lord Proprietor to Sam Leggo. The blood ebbed from his face, and left it unnaturally white. But of a sudden he appeared to collect himself; thrust both hands in his pockets, and, turning his back, walked away resolutely down the slope.

"Well!" said Sam Leggo, after a pause. "Well!"

"The man has never been thwarted before," said the Lord Proprietor, as they gazed after him together. "That's what comes of living alone in a place like Saaron; and I'll take care his children don't learn the same folly. Feels the curb, as you might say. Have you ever seen a horse broken late in life?"

"You take it very quiet, sir, I must say," protested Sam, admiringly.

"So disrespectful as he was, too--and to the likes of you! Well! I've known Eli Tregarthen forty year, and if any man had come and told me----"

"The worst is, we have wasted an afternoon," said Sir Caesar, easily.

"But since we are here, with half-an-hour to spare before sunset, what do you say to showing me the adit?"

"The adit, sir?"

"There's an old adit hereabouts--eh?--that leads down to a cave....

Come, come, my good man, you don't deceive me by putting on that stupid face! We don't allow smuggling on the Islands in these days, and I like to know the secrets of my own property. The cave is called Ogo Vean, or something like it; and if I must explain more precisely, it is where you and your father used to go hunting seals."

"Yes, yes, to be sure," Sam admitted; "an adit there is, or used to be.

But," he went on more cheerfully, "you'll find it nothing to look at. I han't set foot inside it for years, and I doubt but the entrance is choked."

"Take me to it," said Sir Caesar.

Sam, without further remonstrance, led the way. They scrambled out to the edge of the Carn, and there, where the last great boulder thrust itself forward over the sea, Sam scrambled off to the left, and lowered himself down upon a turfy ledge. Warning his master to leave his gun behind and beware of the slippery gra.s.s, he sidled out alongside the jutting slab, and suddenly ducked under it. The Lord Proprietor, following, crawled under the stone, and found himself staring into the mouth of the adit--a dark hole less than four feet in height, and overgrown with ivy. Sam had spoken the truth. The pa.s.sage, whithersoever it led, had been disused for years.

"Cur'ous old place!" said Sam, reflectively, plucking at the ivy. "I've a mind to try the inside of it again, one of these days."

"I've a mind to explore it now," said the Lord Proprietor.

Sam stared at him. "You couldn't, sir; not without a lantern. You'd be breakin' your neck, to a certainty."

"Then fetch a lantern. Look sharp, man! Run back to the farm and fetch a lantern. I'll wait for you--no, not here: a few minutes on this ledge would turn my head giddy--but on the Carn above."

Without further words, he worked his body around carefully, and led the way back to the summit.

"You'd best hurry," he advised Sam, who showed no eagerness for the job. "In another twenty minutes the dusk will be closing down fast."

Sam slouched off at a fair pace across the field. Sir Caesar watched his retreating figure until it reached the gate, and then, picking up his gun, disposed himself to wait.

Seals? They ought to give good sport--better sport, he should imagine, than deerstalking. A pity, too, to let it die out ... if seals still frequented the Islands.... He must consult Sam about it, and pick up a few wrinkles. He peered over the edge of the Carn, scanning the water, a hundred feet below him, for the rock which Abe had described. He could see no such rock. Maybe, though, it would be covered by the tide, now close upon high-water.

Then he bethought him that the rock must lie a little to the west, towards Piper's Hole--that is to say, in the next small indentation of the sh.o.r.e. He strolled in that direction, following the cliff's edge, still with eyes upon the sea.

Of a sudden he stopped and straightened himself up with a gasp.

What sound was that?... Surely a voice--a woman's voice--singing up to him from the depth!

Was he awake or dreaming?... Beyond all doubt someone was singing, down there: a mournful, wordless song. He was no judge of music, but it seemed to him that, let alone the mystery of the singer, he had never heard a voice so wonderful. It rose and fell with the surge of the tide.

The Lord Proprietor laid down his gun. He had come to a shelving slope that descended like a funnel or the half of a broken crater, narrowing to a dark pit, in which the sea heaved gently, but with a sound as of a monster sobbing; but still above this sound rose the voice of the singer.

He flung himself on the verge beside his gun and craned forward....

Yes, there was the rock; yes, and there on the rock sat a figure--a woman--and combed her long hair while she sang.