PLAN OF CAMPAIGN
Vashti sat on the low stone wall beyond the Keg of Butter 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 grass-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 Butter 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 assurance that
he was not dreaming, that the steamship 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 passengers
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.
"Fifteen years!" she went on. "We all have a quarrel against time, we
men and women, but on grounds so different that a man scarcely
understands a woman's grievance nor a woman a man's. With you it all
rests in your work. Fifteen years knock holes in your fortifications,
tumble your guns into the sea, send along a new generation of men to
pull down what you have built, to rebuild in a flurry of haste, and see
their work in its turn criticised and condemned by yet a new company of
builders. At this we women only look on and marvel. Why all this fuss,
we ask, over what you do? Why all this hopeful, hopeless craving to
leave something permanent? The Islands, here, will outlast anything you
can build. I come back after fifteen years, and they are unchanged;
they would be unchanged were I to come back after a hundred. The same
rocks, the same bracken, the same hum of the tides; the same flowers;
the same blue here, below us, the same outline of a spear-head there,
beyond St. Ann's, where the tide forces through the slack water; the
same streak of yellow yonder on the south cliffs of Saaron.... Our
grievance is more personal, more real ... and so should yours be, if
you could only see it. It is to ourselves--to you and me, to any man
and woman--that time makes the difference. You worry over your
fortifications. Why? It is in ourselves that the tragedy lies. To lose
our looks, our voice--to grow old and mumble--" She broke off with a
shiver.
The Commandant smiled sadly. He had too much sense to pay an idle
compliment. "If that be the tragedy, Miss Vashti," said he, "then we
are wise in our folly, which bids us rest our hopes in our work though
its permanence be all an illusion. We cannot cheat ourselves with a
tale that we shall not grow old, but we are able to believe, however
vainly, that our work will live."
"Yes," she admitted, "you are wise in your vanity--or would be, were it
wisdom to shut one's eyes to fate. Let us grant that men are happier
than women--than childless women at any rate. You do not know what it
is to be a singer, for instance; to wake up each morning to a fear 'Has
my voice gone? One of these days it will certainly go, but--Lord, not
yet!' We must build on what we have. We must cling to our youth,
knowing that after our youth comes darkness. No, sir, I do not blame
men for setting up their rest upon what they do rather than upon
ourselves; but for setting it upon that part of their work which, being
the more visible, the more visibly decays."
The Commandant pondered while his eyes studied the grass-grown
platform. He shook his head. "You puzzle me, Miss Vashti," he
confessed.
"Why, sir, you have been mooning around these fortifications quite as
though they had made up your life and their ruins stood for your broken
purposes; whereas for fifteen years you have been Governor of the
Islands and my sister tells me you are a good man. Surely, then, your
real life has lain in the justice you have done, the wrongs you have
righted, the trust you have built up in the people's hearts, and not in
these decaying walls which no enemy ever threatened in your time nor
for a hundred years before you came."
But again the Commandant shook his head.
"I say nothing of the first few years," he answered slowly. "I liked
the people and I tried to do justice. But all that has passed out of my
control. The Lord Proprietor takes everything into his own hands."
"Still on the Council--" she urged.
"I am no longer a member of the Council."
"You resigned? Why?"
"Because I saw that Sir Cæsar was bent on humiliating me; and he had
the power."
Vashti prised at a loose stone from the wall with the point of her
sunshade.
"I have read somewhere," she said, after a pause, "that no wise man
should avoid being a magistrate, because it is wrong to refuse help to
those who need it, and equally wrong to stand aside and let worse men
govern ill."
"The Lord Proprietor does not govern ill. He likes his own way; but he
is a just man--" The Commandant hesitated and paused.
"A just man until you happen to thwart him. Is that what you were going
to say?"
"No," he answered, smiling. "I was about to say that once or twice I
have found him something less than fair to me. To others--" But here he
paused again, remembering that morning's conversation on the hill.
"I do not much believe," persisted Vashti, "in men who act justly so
long as they are not thwarted.... But you would remind me no doubt
that, if questions are to be asked and answered this morning, it is I
who should be giving an account of myself. Well, then, I have come to
the Islands with a little plan of campaign in my mind, and last night
it occurred to me suddenly that you were the very person to help. I
am--you will excuse my telling you this, but it is necessary--a
passably rich woman; that is to say, I have more money than I want to
spend on myself, after putting by enough for a rainy day; and I can
earn more again if I want more. I have no 'encumbrances,' as foolish
people put it; no relatives in the world but my sister Ruth and her
children. No two sisters ever loved one another better than did Ruth
and I. We lost our mother early, when Ruth was just three years old,
and from then until she was a grown woman I had the mothering of her,
being by five years the elder. You have seen something like it, I dare
say, in other poor families where the mother has been taken; but I tell
you again that never were pair more absolutely wrapped up in one
another than were Ruth and I. We shared each other's thoughts by day,
we slept together and shared each other's dreams. Oh!"--Vashti clasped
her hands and looked up with brimming eyes--"I can see now how
beautiful it all was."
The Commandant bowed his head gravely. "I can believe it," he said; and
as if he had stepped back fifteen years he found himself standing again
on the hill and looking in upon the fire-lit room--only now the picture
and the two figures in it shone with divine meaning.
"I know what you would ask," she went on. "Why, then, you would ask,
did I ever leave the Islands?... But this had always been understood
between us. I cannot tell you how. For years we never talked about it,
yet we always talked as if, some day, it must happen. The fate was on
us to be separated; and the strange part of it was," continued Vashti,
throwing out her hands involuntarily, and with this action changing as
it were from a confident woman back to a child helpless before its
destiny, "we understood from the first that I, who loved the Islands,
must be the one to go, while Ruth would find a husband here and settle
down, nor perhaps ever wish to cross over to the mainland. You see, of
the two I was the reader; and sometimes when I read Shakespeare to
her--for we possessed but a few books, and some of these, like 'The
Pilgrim's Progress,' had no real scenery in them to take hold
of--sometimes when I read Shakespeare, or 'The Arabian Nights,' or
'Mungo Park's Travels,' and the real world would open to me, with
cities like London, or Venice, or Bagdad, and with woods like the
Forest of Arden, and ports with shipping and great empty deserts, then
Ruth would catch hold and cling to me, as if I was slipping away and
leaving her before the time.... Yet we both knew that the time must
come, in the end. Do you understand at all?" she broke off to ask.
"Yes," he answered. "I cannot tell how, but as you put it I seem to see
it all."
She glanced at him with a quick, grateful smile. "Well, that is just
how it happened, and if I were to explain and explain I couldn't make
it any clearer. You understand, too, there was never any question of my
leaving Ruth until she was grown a woman and could see with a woman's
eyes. Then I knew she was safe. She had more common-sense even than I.
She was born to marry--I never doubted that; but when I saw also that
she was a woman to choose for herself and choose wisely--why, then I
saw also, and all of a sudden, that the time had come and I was better
out of the way; better, because a teacher has to know when to stop and
trust the teaching to prove itself. Else by lingering on, he may easily
do dreadful mischief, and all with the best will in the world. Do you
understand this, too?"
Again the Commandant bent his head; for again, without knowing how or
why, he understood.
"Well, I left the Islands, and there is no need to trouble you with my
own story--though some day I will tell it if you care to hear. It
contains a great deal of hard work, much good fortune, some suffering,
too; and on the whole I am a very grateful woman, as I ought to be....
But we were talking of Ruth. She married, as she was born to marry, and
her husband is a good man. She has children, and her letters are full
of their sayings and doings, as a happy mother's should be. So, you
see, our instinct was wise, and I did well to depart."
The Commandant considered this for a moment before answering: for her
tone conveyed a question, almost a challenge.
"You were wise, perhaps, to go. But why in all these years have you
never come back?"
She looked at him earnestly, and nodded. "Yes," she said, "I was afraid
you would ask that; and yet I am glad, for it forces me to make
confession, and I shall feel better to get it over.... Ruth loves me
still, you see; but, of course, her husband comes first, and after her
husband--if not sometimes before him--her children. That is as it
should be, of course."
"Of course," the Commandant echoed.
"And of course I foresaw it. Remember, please, that I foresaw it before
ever there was a question of young Tregarthen; so that my jealousy, if
you are going to laugh at it, had nothing to do----"
"I am not in the least inclined to laugh."
"Thank you. We were not as ordinary sisters, you see, and ... and there
is another thing I must tell you," she went on with a brisk change of
tone. "Though Ruth and I have always written regularly, there is one
thing I have always kept hidden from her--I mean my success, as you
will call it. At first this wasn't deliberate at all.... A great chance
came to me, a chance so good that I could hardly believe--yes, so
incredible even to me, that I dared not talk of it, but walked humbly,
and taught myself to think of it as a dream from which I must awake,
and awake to find people laughing at my hopes. I hid it even from
Ruth.... Afterwards, when the dream had become a certainty, it seemed
yet harder to tell her. I had concealed so much, and to tell her now
seemed like triumphing over her--so full her letters were of simple
things and of her happiness in them. I was afraid my news would overawe
her, would change her in some way; that she would think me some grand
person, and not the sister to whom she had told all her mind--not, you
must understand, that Ruth could be envious if she tried. But have you
never seen how, when a man grows rich or powerful suddenly, his old
friends, the best of them, draw away from him, not in envy at all, but
just because they feel he has been taken from them?"
"Yes," said the Commandant, "I have seen such cases."
"And I wanted still to be Vazzy to her--even though I must come after
husband and children."
"She knows, then, as little about your--your success--or almost as
little, as I do?" asked the Commandant, quaintly.
Vashti broke into a gay little laugh. "But I am going to tell her now,"
she answered, rising--"and that is where I want you to help me. She has
no idea at all that I am here, and I want--that is my little plan--to
look in upon her before I make myself known. I want to see Ruth--my own
Ruth--moving about her house; to feed my eyes on her good face, and
learn if it has changed as I have tried to picture it changing; to know
her as she has been during these years, not as she will be when we have
kissed and I have told her.... I would steal upon her children, too,
and watch them.... It is wonderful to think of Ruth's children!"
She sprang on to the crumbling wall, and stood erect there, shading her
eyes, gazing towards Saaron Island, where the forenoon sun flashed upon
the beaches and upon the roof of one small farm, half hidden in a fold
of the hills. The Commandant put out a hand to steady her, for her
perch was rickety and almost overhung the sea.
"Ruth is there!... To think of her so happy there--to see her, almost!
Oh, sir--but if you could understand that the nearer I have travelled
back, the more foolish my jealousy has seemed to grow, with every fear,
every doubt!"
"Miss Vashti"--the Commandant spoke seriously, still with his arm
stretched out ready to grip her by the skirt if she should over-balance
herself or the treacherous wall give way--"I am glad, for your sister's
sake, you have come; but I must warn you that all is not right on
Saaron Island."
She turned slowly, and looked down upon him there from her altitude.
"What is not right?" she asked; and, while he hesitated, "You are not
telling me that her letters have hidden anything?"
"No."
"Is it illness, then? Has anything happened to the children?"
"No," he answered again, and without more ado he told her the news he
had heard from Mrs. Banfield.
"But"--she still looked down on him wondering--"but you told me just
now that the Lord Proprietor was a just man?"
"I have not looked at the rights and wrongs of the case," he said
hastily, conscious that he was incurring her scorn. "The Lord
Proprietor may have much to say on his side."
"You have not inquired, then?"
"The news came to me only this morning, quite by chance."
"By chance?" she caught him up, and, springing off the wall, stood on
the firm turf facing him. "But you are, or were, Governor of the
Islands."
Again he bent his head. "I have told you that I no longer serve the
Council even. The Lord Proprietor does not consult me."
Vashti gazed around her, on the broken roof of the ammunition shed, the
dismantled platform, the unkempt glacis below it. "For what work, then,
do they pay you?" she asked, bitterly.
"For none," he answered, but without resentment. "And--excuse me--" he
went on, fumbling in his pocket, and producing a sovereign, which he
tendered to her, "but your mention of pay reminds me to return you
this, which Mrs. Treacher has handed to me. It appears--I must
apologize for her--that she received it from you to give to the men who
carried up your box from the steamer; but that, being a little
frightened at the amount, she withheld it, thinking that possibly you
had made a mistake."
Vashti took the coin. Her face was yet flushed a little--as he read it,
with anger.
"It is true," said she pensively, "that I am fifteen years a stranger
here."
His face brightened. "Ah," said he, "if you will make allowance for
that, we may yet put everything right!"