SIEGE IS LAID TO RUBY.
The sun was higher by some hours--high enough to be streaming brightly
over the wall into the courtlage at Sheba--when Ruby awoke from a
dreamless sleep. As she lifted her head from the pillow and felt the
fatigue of last night yet in her limbs, she was aware also of a rich
tenor voice uplifted beneath her window. Air and words were strange to
her, and the voice had little in common with the world as she knew it.
Its exile on that coast was almost pathetic, and it dwelt on the notes
with a feeling of a warmer land.
"O south be north--
O sun be shady--
Until my lady
Shall issue forth:
Till her own mouth
Bid sun uncertain
To draw his curtain,
Bid south be south."
She stole out of bed and went on tiptoe to the window, where she drew
the blind an inch aside. The stranger's footstep had ceased to crunch
the gravel, and he stood now just beneath her, before the monthly-rose
bush. Throughout the winter a blossom or two lingered in that sheltered
corner; and he had drawn the nearest down to smell at it.
"O heart, her rose,
I cannot ease thee
Till she release thee
And bid unclose.
So, till day come
And she be risen,
Rest, rose, in prison
And heart be dumb!"
He snapped the stem and passed on, whistling the air of his ditty, and
twirling the rose between finger and thumb.
"Men are all ninnies," Ruby decided as she dropped the blind; "and I
thank the fates that framed me female and priced me high. Heigho! but
it's a difficult world for women. Either a man thinks you an angel, and
then you know him for a fool, or he sees through you and won't marry you
for worlds. If _we_ behaved like that, men would fare badly, I reckon.
Zeb loved me till the very moment I began to respect him: then he left
off. If this one . . . I like his cool way of plucking my roses,
though. Zeb would have waited and wanted, till the flower dropped."
She spent longer than usual over her dressing: so that when she appeared
in the parlour the two men were already seated at breakfast. The room
still bore traces of last night's frolic. The uncarpeted boards gleamed
as the guests' feet had polished them; and upon the very spot where the
stranger had danced now stood the breakfast-table, piled with broken
meats. This alone of all the heavier pieces of furniture had been
restored to its place. As Ruby entered, the stranger broke off an
earnest conversation he was holding with the farmer, and stood up to
greet her. The rose lay on her plate.
"Who has robbed my rose-bush?" she asked.
"I am guilty," he answered: "I stole it to give it back; and, not being
mine, 'twas the harder to part with."
"To my mind," broke in Farmer Tresidder, with his mouth full of ham,
"the best part o' the feast be the over-plush. Squab pie, muggetty pie,
conger pie, sweet giblet pie--such a whack of pies do try a man, to be
sure. Likewise junkets an' heavy cake be a responsibility, for if not
eaten quick, they perish. But let it be mine to pass my days with a
cheek o' pork like the present instance. Ruby, my dear, the young man
here wants to lave us."
"Leave us?" echoed Ruby, pricking her finger deep in the act of pinning
the stranger's rose in her bosom.
"You hear, young man. That's the tone o' speech signifyin' 'damn it
all!' among women. And so say I, wi' all these vittles cryin' out to be
ate."
"These brisk days," began the stranger quietly, "are not to be let slip.
I have no wife, no kin, no friends, no fortune--or only the pound or two
sewn in my belt. The rest has been lost to me these three days and lies
with the _Sentinel_, five fathoms deep in your cove below. It is time
for me to begin the world anew."
"But how about that notion o' mine?"
"We beat about the bush, I think," answered the other, pushing back his
chair a bit and turning towards Ruby. "My dear young lady, your father
has been begging me to stay--chiefly, no doubt, out of goodwill, but
partly also that I may set him in the way to work this newly found
wealth of his. I am sorry, but I must refuse."
"Why?" murmured the girl, taking courage to look at him.
"You oblige me to be brutal." His look was bent on her. He sat facing
the window, and the light, as he leant sidewise, struck into the iris of
his eyes and turned them blood-red in their depths. She had seen the
same in dogs' eyes, but never before in a man's: and it sent a small
shiver through her.
"Briefly," he went on, "I can stay on one condition only--that I marry
you."
She rose from her seat and stood, grasping the back rail of the chair.
"Don't be alarmed. I merely state the condition, but of course it's
awkward: you're already bound. Your father (who, I must say, honours me
with considerable trust, seeing that he knows nothing about me) was good
enough to suggest that your affection for this young fish-jowter was a
transient fancy--"
"Father--" began the girl, rather for the sake of hearing her own voice
than because she knew what to say.
Farmer Tresidder groaned. "Young man, where's your gumption? You'm
makin' a mess o't--an' I thought 'ee so very clever."
"Really," pursued the stranger imperturbably, without lifting his eyes
from Ruby, "I don't know which to admire most, your father's head or his
heart; his head, I think, on the whole. So much hospitality, paternal
solicitude, and commercial prudence was surely never packed into one
scheme."
He broke off for a minute and, still looking at her, began to drum with
his finger-tips on the cloth. His mouth was pursed up as if silently
whistling an air. Ruby could neither move nor speak. The spell upon
her was much like that which had lain on Young Zeb, the night before,
during the hornpipe. She felt weak as a child in the presence of this
man, or rather as one recovering from a long illness. He seemed to fill
the room, speaking words as if they were living things, as if he were
taking the world to bits and re-arranging it before her eyes.
She divined the passion behind these words, and she longed to get a
sight of it, to catch an echo of the voice that had sung beneath her
window, an hour before. But when he resumed, it was in the same
bloodless and contemptuous tone.
"Your father was very anxious that I should supplant this young
jowter--"
"O Lord! I never said it."
"Allow me," said the stranger, without deigning to look round,
"to carry on this courtship in my own way. Your father, young woman,
desired--it was none of my suggestion--that I should insinuate myself
into your good graces. I will not conceal from you my plain opinion of
your father's judgment in these matters. I think him a fool."
"Name o' thunder!"
"Farmer, if you interrupt again I must ask you to get out. Young woman,
kindly listen while I make you a formal proposition of marriage.
My name, I have told you, is Zebedee Minards. I was born by London
Docks, but have neither home nor people. I have travelled by land and
sea; slept on silk and straw; drunk wine and the salt water; fought,
gambled, made love, begged my bread; in all, lost much and found much,
in many countries. I am tossed on this coast, where I find you, and
find also a man in my name having hold over you. I think I want to
marry you. Will you give up this other man?"
He pursed up his lips again. With that sense of trifles which is
sharpest when the world suddenly becomes too big for a human being, Ruby
had a curiosity to know what he was whistling. And this worried her
even while, after a minute's silence, she stammered out--
"I--I gave him up--last night."
"Very good. Now listen again. In an hour's time I walk to Porthlooe.
There I shall take the van to catch the Plymouth coach. In any case, I
must spend till Saturday in Plymouth. It depends on you whether I come
back at the end of that time. You are going to cry: keep the tears back
till you have answered me. Will you marry me?"
She put out a hand to steady herself, and opened her lips. She felt the
room spinning, and wanted to cry out for mercy. But her mouth made no
sound.
"Will you marry me?"
"Ye--e--yes!"
As the word came, she sank down in a chair, bent her head on the table,
and burst into a storm of tears.
"The devil's in it!" shouted her father, and bounced out of the room.
No sooner had the door slammed behind him than the stranger's face
became transfigured.
He stood up and laid a hand softly on the girl's head.
"Ruby!"
She did not look up. Her shoulders were shaken by one great sob after
another.
"Ruby!"
He took the two hands gently from her face, and forced her to look at
him. His eyes were alight with the most beautiful smile.
"For pity's sake," she cried out, "don't look at me like that.
You've looked me through and through--you understand me. Don't lie with
your eyes, as you're lying now."
"My dear girl, yes--I understand you. But you're wrong. I lied to get
you: I'm not lying now."
"I think you must be Satan himself."
The stranger laughed. "Surely _he_ needn't to have taken so much
trouble. Smile back at me, Ruby, for I played a risky stroke to get
you, and shall play a risky game for many days yet."
He balanced himself on the arm of her chair and drew her head towards
him.
"Tell me," he said, speaking low in her ear, "if you doubt I love you.
Do you know of any other man who, knowing you exactly as you are, would
wish to marry you?"
She shook her head. It was impossible to lie to this man.
"Or of another who would put himself completely into your power, as I am
about to do? Listen; there is no lead mine at all on Sheba farm."
Ruby drew back her face and stared at him. "I assure you it's a fact."
"But the ore you uncovered--"
"--Was a hoax. I lied about it."
"The stuff you melted in this very fire, last night--wasn't that lead?"
"Of course it was. I stole it myself from the top of the church tower."
"Why?"
"To gain a footing here."
"Again, why?"
"For love of you."
During the silence that followed, the pair looked at each other.
"I am waiting for you to go and tell your father," said the stranger at
length.
Ruby shivered.
"I seem to have grown very old and wise," she murmured.
He kissed her lightly.
"That's the natural result of being found out. I've felt it myself.
Are you going?"
"You know that I cannot."
"You shall have twenty minutes to choose. At the end of that time I
shall pass out at the gate and look up at your window. If the blind
remain up, I go to the vicarage to put up our banns before I set off for
Plymouth. If it be drawn down, I leave this house for ever, taking
nothing from it but a suit of old clothes, a few worthless specimens
(that I shall turn out of my pockets by the first hedge), and the memory
of your face."
It happened, as he unlatched the gate, twenty minutes later, that the
blind remained up. Ruby's face was not at the window, but he kissed his
hand for all that, and smiled, and went his way singing. The air was
the very same he had whistled dumbly that morning, the air that Ruby had
speculated upon. And the words were--
"'Soldier, soldier, will you marry me,
With the bagginet, fife and drum?'
'Oh, no, pretty miss, I cannot marry you,
For I've got no coat to put on.'
"So away she ran to the tailor's shop,
As fast as she could run,
And she bought him a coat of the very very best,
And the soldier clapped it on.
"'Soldier, soldier, will you marry me--'"
His voice died away down the lane.