THE COMMANDANT'S CONSCIENCE
"The Lord Proprietor to see you, sir!"
Archelaus, presenting himself at the door of the Commandant's office,
with a slightly flushed but inscrutable face, drew aside and flattened
himself against the door-jamb to let Sir Cæsar enter.
The Commandant closed the book in which he had been adding up accounts
which never came right, and stood up in something of a flurry. He was
dressed with more than ordinary care. The lapels and collar of his
uniform-coat had been treated to a vigorous brushing. In fact, he was
arrayed for action: to step down the hill in an hour's time, to call
upon Mr. Fossell at the Bank and draw his pay, if any should be
forthcoming.
"Good morning, Major!"
"Good morning, Sir Cæsar." The Commandant nodded towards a chair.
"I thank you." Sir Cæsar set down his hat upon the edge of the
writing-table, drew off his gloves, tossed them into his hat, and
seated himself. "I--er--called in the first place to speak about an
unfortunate--er--incident that happened on Garrison Hill here last
Sunday."
"Ah," said the Commandant, "so you have heard about it? I am sorry."
"Sorry for what, sir?"
"Sorry that anyone should have thought it worth while to carry tales to
you; but also sorry for the incident itself."
"It appears to me, Major Vigoureux, that the incident demands some
apology."
"I have made it."
Sir Cæsar crossed his legs and coughed to clear his throat. "I think,
my dear sir," said he, in a tone at once slightly pompous and slightly
nervous, "I really think it's time that you and I came to an
understanding; that we--er--recognised, so to speak, the situation, and
played with the cards on the table. Do you agree with me?"
"I might," answered the Commandant, guardedly; "that is to say, if I
understood."
"I acquit you, of course, of any active share in the incident, and I am
assured that Archelaus and Treacher were no worse than accomplices. It
appears that the real culprit was a totally different person, and," he
went on, after a glance at the Commandant's face, which betrayed
nothing, "it may save time if I tell you that she has confessed to me."
"Excuse me, I was not proposing to make any remark."
"But who in the world is the young person?"
The Commandant's eyebrows arched themselves slightly. "She is a lady,"
he answered, in a dry voice. "If she omitted to tell you her name, the
omission was no doubt intentional, and she has carried her confession
just so far as she intended it to go."
"She called herself Cara; but the name tells me nothing. Who is she? I
agree with you as to her address and appearance: she is in every
respect--er--presentable. A relative, may I inquire?"
"No."
"A friend, then? You will pardon me? A delicate question to put, of
course."
Again the Commandant's eyebrows went up slightly. "She was my guest for
a day or two," he answered.
"_Was?_ Then where in the world is she staying now?"
"If she did not tell you--" began the Commandant, but Sir Cæsar
interrupted him impatiently.
"Tell me? Devil a bit of it, and that's partly why I'm here. Vanished
like a witch, begad, while I was turning to ring the bell! And where
she went or where she came from are mysteries alike to me."
"Why, then," the Commandant pursued, in a steady musing voice, "it
seems to follow that, even if I knew, I have not her permission to
tell."
The Lord Proprietor uncrossed and recrossed his legs irritably. "Come,
come, Vigoureux, this will hardly do. Will it, now? I put it to you as
a man of the world. No doubt it's all innocent enough, but folks will
talk. And, after all, I'm responsible for any--er--scandal affecting
the Islands. Hey?"
The Commandant rose with a sudden flush on his face.
"Scandal, Sir Cæsar? Oh, to be sure, I cannot understand you."
"Tut-tut!" The Lord Proprietor smiled. "Of course, we know there's
nothing in it. A young lady--youngish, at least--and you old enough to
be her father. But, all the same, tongues will wag."
"And they have been wagging?" The Commandant, after a short turn across
the room and back, stood over him, his hands crossed under his coat
tails. "But yours, sir, is the only one that has dared to wag in my
presence."
"Sir!" The Lord Proprietor jumped to his feet.
"You have put many humiliations upon me, Sir Cæsar; and because they
affected me only, I have endured them. But in this you go too far."
The Lord Proprietor, on the verge of an angry retort, checked himself,
with a short laugh.
"I refuse to lose my temper with you," said he. "You are unreasonable.
You misconceive me as imputing scandal when, as a matter of fact, I was
trying to assure you that I rejected the imputation. For me, the
disparity in age alone----"
The Commandant, with a wave of his hand to the door, turned away
wearily.
"I merely thought it right to warn you," pursued Sir Cæsar, taking
heart of grace as his opponent appeared to weaken, "that others may be
less charitable. And they look to me. I think--I really think--you
might consider the delicacy of my position; that I am--er--ultimately
responsible for the good name of these Islands."
But here he paused with a start; for the Commandant had wheeled about
suddenly, and stood over him, and the Commandant's eyes were dangerous.
"Sir Cæsar"--the Commandant controlled his voice with an effort, for it
shook a little--"in the last few minutes some things have been made
plain to me which were hitherto obscure. I have wondered sometimes,
here in these forsaken barracks, at actions of yours which seemed
deliberately calculated to annoy one who--Heaven knows--started with
every wish to be friendly. Saving my own small personal dignity, of
which from indolence I have been too careless, I have reserved nothing
of my old importance in these Islands which, before you purchased them,
I had governed. Men, even the least assuming, do not forfeit all power,
all consideration, without a wrench; and I am but human. I relinquished
them, and without the help of a single kind word from you, by which the
sacrifice might at least have been mitigated. I wondered. Later, when
you heaped one small humiliation upon another, I concluded that I must
have had the misfortune to incur your personal dislike, and told
myself, after searching for the cause and finding none, that personal
dislikes are usually inexplicable. But now I see that I have been doing
you an injustice; that your affronts were not considered; that you have
all along, likely enough, been entirely unconscious of offence; that,
in short, you are as Heaven made you, and I cannot hold a quarrel with
any man's mere defects, whether congenital or of breeding. I shall not
waste time by inquiring to which of the two classes your obtuseness
should justly be assigned. It is enough that I recognise the mistake
and apologise for it. I see now that you are obtuse--that and nothing
more. But since your obtuseness wounds more than you can possibly
divine; and since in this instance it injures a lady, I shall ask you
to pay my poor quarters the last respect you owe them, and quit them
without further discussion."
He stepped to his writing-table and struck on a small hand-bell.
Promptly on the summons Sergeant Archelaus appeared in the doorway; so
promptly, indeed, that he might have found it hard, under
cross-examination, to rebut the charge of having stood listening
outside.
The Lord Proprietor, however, was in no condition to put a searching
question. He arose, gasping, his eyes rolling from the Commandant to
Archelaus and back. He felt for his hat like a man groping in the dark,
clutched it, and set it on his head with an experimental air, as though
it would not have entirely surprised him to find his feet in the place
of his head.
"I suppose," he stammered, "it has occurred to you that you may pay for
this?"
"It occurred to me," answered the Commandant, coolly and amiably, "that
you might threaten it."
"You shall, by God!"
The Commandant bowed.
"You shall certainly repent this, sir." The Lord Proprietor crammed his
hat on his head.
"May I ask you to observe that my servant is standing in the doorway?"
Sir Cæsar turned, shot a glance at Archelaus, and for an instant
appeared to be on the point of including master and man in one
denunciation. But either he thought better of it or his rage choked
him. With a final tap on the crown of his hat, to settle it firmly on
his brows, he strode past the rigid figure by the threshold and out
into the open air.
He had never been so outraged! For fifty or a hundred yards, as he
descended the hill, his fury almost blinded him. His face was
congested; the back of his neck swollen and purple, as though apoplexy
threatened. His ears showed red as a turkey's wattles. He stumbled on
the ill-paved path. What! To be lectured thus by a man whose continued
residence on the Islands was a public scandal--a fellow who, past all
usefulness, lived on in lazy desuetude, content to take the taxpayers'
money while doing nothing in return! And the worst--the gall, the
wormwood of it--was that this despised foe had silenced him--nay, had
silenced him almost contemptuously. "But wait a bit, my fine fellow!"
swore the Lord Proprietor, blundering down the hill. "Wait until we
hear what the War Office has to say about your precious garrison; or
until, failing satisfaction there, I get a question asked in Parliament
about you!"
Could the Lord Proprietor have looked back at this moment into the room
where sat the victorious enemy, he might have been in some measure
consoled.
The Commandant, having dismissed Archelaus with a wave of the hand,
waited while the door closed, and dropping into the chair before his
writing-table, bowed his head upon his hands.... Oh, it is easy to talk
lightly of riches, and of the power that riches give! But in this world
it is not so easy for a man with just one penny in his pocket to stand
up against an enemy solidly backed by a banking account. He feels that
though his cause be right and his conscience clear, his position is
precarious: that the world, if it knew the truth, would regard him
almost as an imposter. The feeling may be unreasonable, the fear
cowardly; but there it is, and it had cost the Commandant all his pluck
to face the encounter out. Moreover, his conscience was not clear.
Sir Cæsar, too, had (all unwittingly) planted an arrow and left it to
rankle. "Old enough to be her father!" The Commandant shut his lips
hard upon the pain. He could not expel it: he knew it would awake again
in the watches of the night: but for the present he must ignore it. He
had a second ordeal to face.
As he sat there for a minute or two, his face resting on his hands, his
spirit abandoned to weakness, he heard the steady ticking of the clock
on the chimney-piece behind him. He counted the strokes, and all of a
sudden they recalled him to the present. He pulled himself together,
stood up, and, reaching down a clothes-brush from its hook beside the
door, walked over to the chimney-piece and to a small mirror that stood
behind the clock.
"Old enough to be her father." Again, as he caught sight of his face in
the glass the smart revived; but again he expressed it, and fell to
brushing his worn tunic with extreme care. It had always been his
practice to dress punctiliously before going into action, even on dark
nights in front of Sevastopol, where all niceties of dress were lost at
once in the slush of the trenches. His forage-cap received almost as
careful a brushing as his tunic: and from his cap he turned his
attention to the knees of his trousers and to his boots, one of which
was cracked, albeit not noticeably. He had half a mind to black its
edges over with pen and ink, but refrained. Somehow it suggested
imposture, and to-day he winced sensitively away from the first hint of
imposture. He must walk down-hill delicately, like Agag. To-morrow
Harvey, the Garland Town cobbler, would repair the damage with a couple
of stitches, at the cost of one penny: and the Commandant reflected
with a melancholy smile that he possessed precisely that sum.
His toilet complete, he took a last look in the mirror to assure
himself that his face betrayed none of the anxiety eating at his heart.
It was paler than ordinary, but calm. He drew a long breath, and walked
out to the front door. At his feet the chimneys of the small town sent
up their mid-day smoke; beyond, the Atlantic twinkled with its
innumerable smile. The hour was come. As he stepped out upon the road
he cast a glance to right and left along his deserted batteries, and
answered the smile of Ocean whimsically, ruefully. If only, as an
artilleryman, he could have summoned Mr. Fossell's Bank by a dropping
shot! This business of hand-to-hand assault belonged by rights to
another branch of the service.
Mr. Fossell stood behind the counter in conference with a junior clerk,
and the sunshine pouring through the windows--the only plate-glass
windows in Garland Town--gilded the dome of Mr. Fossell's bald head. As
the Commandant entered, Mr. Fossell looked up and nodded pleasantly, in
a neighbourly way, albeit with a touch of ironical interrogation. He
had heard gossip from his friend Pope of the doings on Garrison Hill,
and, so far as he allowed himself to be jocose, he meant his glance to
be interpreted. "Well, you are a pretty fellow! And pray what account
are you going to give of yourself?" But very different thoughts
preoccupied the Commandant, and his fears took alarm.
"Good morning," said the Commandant, and forced a smile. "You have been
expecting me, I hope?"
"Dear, dear!" Mr. Fossell affected surprise. "You don't tell me that
pay-day has come round again already?" This again, was a form of
pleasantry which he repeated month after month; but to-day he slightly
over-acted it.
"The--the money is here?" stammered the Commandant.
"My dear Major, I hope so--I sincerely hope so," Mr. Fossell answered,
with a humorous look around him. "I do most sincerely trust we may be
able to meet your demand for--let me see, fifteen-eighteen-six, is it
not?--without being forced to put up the shutters." Mr. Fossell
chuckled quietly.
The Commandant drew a long breath.
"Always supposing," resumed Mr. Fossell, "that the draft is in order,
as usual; on which point, to tell you the truth, I have been too busy
to satisfy myself. But the paper arrived two days ago, and is in my
office--if you will excuse me for a moment."
He stepped towards a door at the back, panelled with frosted glass,
opened it, and disappeared into his office. The Commandant waited.
Three minutes passed.
"Very fine weather, sir, for the time of the year," said the clerk,
blotting an entry and looking up from his ledger.
"Eh? Oh, certainly ... yes, very fine indeed." The Commandant recalled
himself with a painful effort.
"And the glass steady as a rock." The clerk closed a smaller book at
his elbow and replaced it in a line of similar volumes on a shelf above
the desk behind him. "I saw you out, sir, in your boat, the day before
yesterday, to the west of Saaron--fishing for bass, or so I took the
liberty of guessing."
"For bass?... Yes, oh, most decidedly."
"Knowing fish, the bass!" hazarded the young man, combing his
side-locks with his pen and carefully bestowing it behind his ear. "You
found the water a bit too clear, sir, I expect?"
"So far as I remember--" began the Commandant, and paused. (What on
earth was delaying Fossell?)
"You will excuse me, sir, but might I ask what bait you employ as a
rule?"
The Commandant answered that for preference he used sand-eels. The
clerk replied that sand-eels took some getting; and that, if the remark
wouldn't be taken amiss, it was all very well to talk of sand-eels when
you were in a position to employ a couple of men to spend half a day in
netting them for you; but that for a young chap in his position,
sand-eels were out of the question.
"There's the bank-hours, to begin with," he wound up, lucidly; "and,
besides, when you've caught 'em they're the most perishable bait
going."
The Commandant incoherently promised to reserve a portion of his next
catch, and to send Archelaus with a creelful; all this with his eyes
wandering in desperation to the glass door. The young man was profuse
in thanks.
"You will excuse my discussing sport with you, sir? Sport, they say,
puts all men on a level--though, of course, I should not dream of
claiming----"
But at this point the glass door opened, and Mr. Fossell emerged,
briskly, holding what appeared to be a fair-sized stone.
"How will you take it?" he asked, depositing this upon the counter.
"I beg your pardon?" the Commandant stammered, his eyes riveted on the
stone.
"Notes or gold?" Mr. Fossel picked the specimen up, and rubbed it
gently with his sleeve. "Now, that's a queer thing, eh? My
brother-in-law sent it to me last week, and I've been using it for a
paper-weight, not being a scientific man. But just you look into it. He
tells me there are hundreds lying about where he lives--Ogwell, the
place is, in Devonshire, just behind Newton Abbot--and that they're
called madrepores. He's a humorous fellow, too, is my brother-in-law.
You see the joke, of course?"
"I can't say that I do, exactly," the Commandant confessed.
"Good gracious! Fossil--Fossell: this is a fossil, you see, and I'm
called Fossell: and so he sends it to me. He has made a good deal of
fun out of my name before now, in his humorous way. Not that I mind, of
course."
"I dare say not. Did you say that the papers were all right?"
"The papers?... Yes, of course, the papers are all right. Will you take
it in notes or gold?" "In gold, if you please." The Commandant caught
at the edge of the counter, while his heart leapt, and the bank
premises seemed to whirl around him.
"Fifteen-eighteen-six ... be so good as to verify it, if you please,"
said Mr. Fossell, counting out the coins--the blessed coins! "But I
want you just to take a look into the thing. Looks like a piece of
coral, eh? See the delicate lines of it? And my brother-in-law tells me
it was once alive--a kind of fish--and got itself embedded in this
piece of limestone because it was too lazy to move. A lesson in
that"--Mr. Fossell wagged his head sagely--"if we choose to take it! To
be sure, it happened thousands of years ago; but there it is--and here
are we. For my part, I don't look at things humorously like my
brother-in-law. I like to find a serious moral where I can."
The Commandant counted the coins and dropped them into his pocket.
Their weight seemed to make a man of him again. He bent and affected to
examine the madrepore.
Mr. Fossell bent also. He was on the point of asking--in a low voice,
that the clerk might not overhear--for an explanation of Miss Gabriel's
gossip. But at this juncture a client entered, and the Commandant
escaped. He went up the hill with a new centre of gravity: so different
is a load in the pocket from a load on the heart.