Tardif walked on before me to a low, thatched cottage, standing at the
back of a small farm-yard. There was no other dwelling in sight, and
even the sea was not visible from it. It was sheltered by the steep
slope of a hill rising behind it, and looked upon another slope covered
with gorse-bushes; a very deep and narrow ravine ran down from it to the
hand-breadth of shingle which I had seen from the boat. A more solitary
place I could not have imagined; no sign of human life, or its
neighborhood, betrayed itself; overhead was a vast dome of sky, with a
few white-winged sea-gulls flitting across it, and uttering their low,
wailing cry. The roof of sky and the two round outlines of the little
hills, and the deep, dark ravine, the end of which was unseen, formed
the whole of the view before me.
I felt chilled a little as I followed Tardif down into the dell. He
glanced back, with grave, searching eyes, scanning my face carefully. I
tried to smile, with a very faint, wan smile, I suppose, for the
lightness had fled from my spirits, and my heart was heavy enough, God
knows.
"Will it not do, mam'zelle?" he asked, anxiously, and with his slow,
solemn utterance; "it is not a place that will do for a young lady like
you, is it? I should have counselled you to go on to Jersey, where there
is more life and gayety; it is my home, but for you it will be nothing
but a dull prison."
"No, no!" I answered, as the recollection of the prison I had fled from
flashed across me; "it is a very pretty place and very safe; by-and-by I
shall like it as much as you do, Tardif."
The house was a low, picturesque building, with thick walls of stone and
a thatched roof, which had two little dormer-windows in it; but at the
most sheltered end, farthest from the ravine that led down to the sea,
there had been built a small, square room of brick-work. As we entered
the fold-yard, Tardif pointed this room out to me as mine.
"I built it," he said, softly, "for my poor little wife; I brought the
bricks over from Guernsey in my own boat, and laid nearly every one of
them with my own hands; she died in it, mam'zelle. Please God, you will
be both happy and safe there!"
We stepped directly from the stone causeway of the yard into the
farm-house kitchen--the only sitting-room in the house except my own. It
was exquisitely clean, with that spotless and scrupulous cleanliness
which appears impossible in houses where there are carpets and curtains,
and papered walls. An old woman, very little and bent, and dressed in an
odd and ugly costume, met us at the door, dropping a courtesy to me, and
looking at me with dim, watery eyes. I was about to speak to her, when
Tardif bent down his head, and put his mouth to her ear, shouting to her
with a loud voice, but in their peculiar jargon, of which I could not
make out a single word.
"My poor mother is deaf," he said to me, "very deaf; neither can she
speak English. Most of the young people in Sark can talk in English a
little, but she is old and too deaf to learn. She has only once been
off the island."
I looked at her, wondering for a moment what she could have to think of,
but, with an intelligible gesture of welcome, she beckoned me into my
own room. The aspect of it was somewhat dreary; the walls were of bare
plaster, but dazzlingly white, with one little black _silhouette_ of a
woman's head hanging in a common black frame over the low, open hearth,
on which a fire of seaweed was smouldering, with a quantity of gray
ashes round the small centre of smoking embers. There was a little round
table, uncovered, but as white as snow, and two chairs, one of them an
arm-chair, and furnished with cushions. A four-post bedstead, with
curtains of blue and white check, occupied the larger portion of the
floor.
It was not a luxurious apartment; and for an instant I could hardly
realize the fact that it was to be my home for an indefinite period.
Some efforts had evidently been made to give it a look of welcome,
homely as it was. A pretty china tea cup and saucer, with a plate or two
to match, were set out on the deal table, and the cushioned arm-chair
had been drawn forward to the hearth. I sat down in it, and buried my
face in my hands, thinking, till Tardif knocked at the door, and carried
in my trunk.
"Will it do, mam'zelle?" he asked, "will it do?"
"It will do very nicely, Tardif," I answered; "but how ever am I to talk
to your mother if she does not know English?"
"Mam'zelle," he said, as he uncorded my trunk, "you must order me as you
would a servant. Through the winter I shall always be at hand; and you
will soon be used to us and our ways, and we shall be used to you and
your ways. I will do my best for you, mam'zelle; trust me, I will study
to do my best, and make you very happy here. I will be ready to take you
away whenever you desire to go. Look upon me as your hired servant."
He waited upon me all the evening, but with a quick attention to my
wants, which I had never met with in any hired servant. It was not
unfamiliar to me, for in my own country I had often been served only by
men; and especially during my girlhood, when I had lived far away in the
country, upon my father's sheep-walk. I knew it was Tardif who fried the
fish which came in with my tea; and, when the night closed in, it was he
who trimmed the oil-lamp and brought it in, and drew the check curtains
across the low casement, as if there were prying eyes to see me on the
opposite bank. Then a deep, deep stillness crept over the solitary
place--a stillness strangely deeper than that even of the daytime. The
wail of the sea-gulls died away, and the few busy cries of the farm-yard
ceased; the only sound that broke the silence was a muffled, hollow boom
which came up the ravine from the sea.
Before nine o'clock Tardif and his mother had gone up-stairs to their
rooms in the thatch; and I lay wearied but sleepless in my bed,
listening to these dull, faint, ceaseless murmurs, as a child listens to
the sound of the sea in a shell. Was it possible that it was I, myself,
the Olivia who had been so loved and cherished in her girlhood, and so
hated and tortured in later years, who was come to live under a
fisherman's roof, in an island, the name of which I barely knew four
days ago?
I fell asleep at last, yet I awoke early; but not so early that the
other inmates of the cottage were not up, and about their day's work. It
was my wish to wait upon myself, and so diminish the cost of living with
these secluded people; but I found it was not to be so; Tardif waited
upon me assiduously, as well as his deaf mother. The old woman would not
suffer me to do any work in my own room, but put me quietly upon one
side when I began to make my bed. Fortunately I had plenty of sewing to
employ myself in; for I had taken care not to waste my money by buying
ready-made clothes. The equinoctial gales came on again fiercely the day
after I had reached Sark; and I stitched away from morning till night,
trying to fix my thoughts upon my mechanical work.
When the first week was over, Tardif's mother came to me at a time when
her son was away out-of-doors, with a purse in her fingers, and by very
plain signs made me understand that it was time I paid the first
instalment of my debt to her for board and lodgings. I was anxious about
my money. No agreement had been made between us as to what I was to pay.
I laid a sovereign down upon the table, and the old woman looked at it
carefully, and with a pleased expression; but she put it in her purse,
and walked away with it, giving me no change. Not that I altogether
expected any change; they provided me with every thing I needed, and
waited upon me with very careful service; yet now I could calculate
exactly how long I should be safe in this refuge, and the calculation
gave me great uneasiness. In a few months I should find myself still in
need of refuge, but without the means of paying for it. What would
become of me then?
Very slowly the winter wore on. How shall I describe the peaceful
monotony, the dull, lonely safety of those dark days and long nights? I
had been violently tossed from a life of extreme trouble and peril into
a profound, unbroken, sleepy security. At first the sudden change
stupefied me; but after a while there came over me an uneasy
restlessness, a longing to get away from the silence and solitude, even
if it were into insecurity and danger. I began to wonder how the world
beyond the little island was going on. No news reached us from without.
Sometimes for weeks together it was impossible for an open boat to cross
over to Guernsey; even when a cutter accomplished its voyage out and in,
no letters could arrive for me. The season was so far advanced when I
went to Sark, that those visitors who had been spending a portion of the
summer there had already taken their departure, leaving the islanders to
themselves. They were sufficient for themselves; they and their own
affairs formed the world. Tardif would bring home almost daily little
scraps of news about the other families scattered about Sark; but of the
greater affairs of life in other countries he could tell me nothing.
Yet why should I call these greater affairs? Each to himself is the
centre of the world. It was a more important thing to me that I was
safe, than that the freedom of England itself should be secure.