HOW THEY LIVED ON THE CLOUD.
When the chinks of moonlight had been replaced by brighter chinks of
sunlight, the new doctor who had come so gallantly to the aid of the
sufferers on Cloud Island opened his eyes upon his first day there.
He heard some slight sounds, and looked over the edge of his bed to see
a little table set forth in the broad passage between the two stores of
hay. A slip of a girl, of about fourteen years of age, was arranging
dishes upon it. When Caius scrambled down, she informed him, with
childish timidity of mien, that Madame Le Maître had said that he was to
have his breakfast there before he went in to see "father." The child
spoke French, but Caius spoke English because it relieved his mind to do
so.
"Upon my word!" he said, "Madame Le Maître keeps everything running in
very good order, and takes prodigious care of us all."
"Oh, oui, monsieur," replied the child sagely, judging from his look of
amusement and the name he had repeated that this was the proper answer.
The breakfast, which was already there, consisted of fish, delicately
baked, and coffee. The young doctor felt exceedingly odd, sitting in the
cart-track of a barn and devouring these viands from a breakfast-table
that was tolerably well set out with the usual number of dishes and
condiments. The big double door was closed to keep out the cold wind,
but plenty of air and numerous sunbeams managed to come in. The sunbeams
were golden bars of dust, crossing and interlacing in the twilight of
the windowless walls. The slip of a girl in her short frock remained,
perhaps from curiosity, perhaps because she had been bidden to do so,
but she made herself as little obvious as possible, standing up against
one corner near the door and shyly twisting some bits of hay in her
hands. Caius, who was enjoying himself, discovered a new source of
amusement in pretending to forget her presence and then looking at her
quickly, for he always found the glance of her big gray eyes was being
withdrawn from his own face, and child-like confusion ensued.
When he had eaten enough, he set to his proper work with haste and
diligence. He made the girl tell him how many children there were, and
find them all for him, so that in a trice he had them standing in a row
in the sunlight outside the barn, with their little tongues all out,
that the state of their health might be properly inspected. Then he went
in to his patient of the night before.
The disease was diphtheria. It was a severe case; but the man had been
healthy, and Caius approved the arrangements that Madame Le Maître had
made to give him plenty of air and nourishment.
The wife was alone with her husband this morning, and when Caius had
done all that was necessary, and given her directions for the proper
protection of herself and the children, she told him that her eldest
girl would go with him to the house of Madame Le Maître. That lady,
said she simply, would tell him where he was to go next, and all he was
to do upon the island.
"Upon my word!" said Caius again to himself, "it seems I am to be taken
care of and instructed, truly."
He had a sense of being patronized; but his spirits were high--nothing
depressed him; and, remembering the alarming incident of the night
before, he felt that the lady's protection might not be unnecessary.
When he got to the front of the house, for the first time in the morning
light, he saw that the establishment was of ample size, but kept with no
care for a tasteful appearance. There was no path of any sort leading
from the gate in the light paling to the door; all was a thick carpet of
grass, covering the unlevelled ground. The grass was waving madly in the
wind, which coursed freely over undulating fields that here displayed no
shrubs or trees of any sort. Caius wondered if the wind always blew on
these islands; it was blowing now with the same zest as the day before;
the sun poured down with brilliancy upon everything, and the sea, seen
in glimpses, was blue and tempestuous. Truly, it seemed a land which the
sun and the moon and the wind had elected to bless with lavish
self-giving.
When Caius opened the gate of the whitewashed paling, the girl who was
to be his guide came round from the back of the house after him, and on
her track came a sudden rush of all the other children, who, with curls
and garments flying in the wind and delightful bursts of sudden
laughter, came to stand in a row again with their tongues outstretched
at Caius' retreating form.
The girl could only talk French, and she talked very little of that,
giving him "yes" or "no" demurely, as they went up the road which ran
inland through the island hills, keeping about midway between sea and
sea. Caius saw that the houses and small farms on either side resembled
those which he had seen on the other island. Small and rough many of
them were; but their whitewashed walls, the strong sunshine, and the
large space of grass or pine shrubs that was about each, gave them an
appearance of cleanliness. There was no sign of the want or squalor that
he had expected; indeed, so prosperous did many of the houses look, that
he himself began to have an injured feeling, thinking that he had been
brought to befriend people who might very well have befriended
themselves.
It was when they came out at a dip in the hills near the outer sea again
that the girl stopped, and pointing Caius to a house within sight, went
back. This house in the main resembled the other larger houses of the
island; but pine and birch trees were beginning to grow high about it,
and on entering its enclosure Caius trod upon a gravel path, and noticed
banks of earth that in the summer time had held flowers. In front of the
white veranda two powerful mastiffs were lying in the sun. These lions
were not chained; they were looking for him before he appeared, but did
not take the trouble to rise at the sight of him; only a low and ominous
rumble, as of thunder beneath the earth, greeted his approach, and gave
Caius the strong impression that, if need was, they would arise to some
purpose.
A young girl opened the door. She was fresh and pretty-looking, but of
plebeian figure and countenance. Her dress was again gray homespun,
hanging full and short about her ankles. Her manner was different from
that of those people he had been lately meeting, for it had that gentle
reserve and formality that bespeaks training. She ushered him into a
good-sized room, where three other girls like herself were engaged in
sewing. Sitting at a table with a book, from which she had apparently
been reading to them, was the woman in the nun-like dress whom he had
met before. The walls of the room were of unpainted pinewood, planed to
a satin finish, and adorned with festoons of gray moss such as hangs
from forest boughs. This was tied with knots of red bittersweet berries;
the feathers of sea-birds were also displayed on the walls, and chains
of their delicate-coloured eggs were hanging there. Caius had not
stepped across the threshold before he began to suspect that he had
passed from the region of the real into the ideal.
"She is a romantic-minded woman," he said to himself. "I wonder if she
has much sense, after all?"
Then the woman whom he was thus inwardly criticising rose and came
across the room to meet him. Her perfect gravity, her dignity of
bearing, and her gracious greeting, impressed him in spite of himself.
Pictures that one finds in history and fiction of lady abbesses rose
before his mind; it was thus that he classified her. His opinion as to
the conscious romance of her life altered, for the woman before him was
very real, and he knew in a moment that she had seen and suffered much.
Her eyes were full of suffering and of solicitude; but it did not seem
to him that the suffering and solicitude were in any way connected with
a personal need, for there was also peace upon her face.
The room did not contain much furniture. When Caius sat down, and the
lady had resumed her seat, he found, as is apt to be the way in empty
rooms, that the chairs were near the wall, and that he, sitting facing
her, had left nearly the room's width between them. The sewing maidens
looked at them with large eyes, and listened to everything that was
said; and although they were silent, except for the sound of their
stitching, it was so evident that their thoughts must form a running
commentary that it gave Caius an odd feeling of acting in company with a
dramatic chorus. The lady in front of him had no such feeling; there was
nothing more evident about her than that she did not think of how she
appeared or how she was observed.
"You are very good to have come." She spoke with a slight French accent,
whether natural or acquired he could not tell. Then she left that
subject, and began at once to tell the story of the plague upon the
island--when it began, what efforts she and a few others had made to
arrest it, the carelessness and obstinacy with which the greater part of
the people had fostered it, its progress. This was the substance of what
she said; but she did not speak of the best efforts as being her own,
nor did she call the people stupid and obstinate. She only said:
"They would not have their houses properly cleaned out; they would not
wash or burn garments that were infected; they would not use
disinfectants, even when we could procure them; they will not yet. You
may say that in this wind-swept country there can be nothing in nature
to foster such a disease, nothing in the way the houses are built; but
the disease came here on a ship, and it is in the houses of the people
that it lingers. They will not isolate the sick; they will not----"
She stopped as if at a loss for a word. She had been speaking in a
voice whose music was the strain of compassion.
"In fact," said Caius, with some impatience, "they are a set of fools,
and worse, for they won't take a telling. Your duty is surely done. They
do not deserve that you should risk your life nursing them; they simply
deserve to be left to suffer."
She looked at him for a minute, as if earnestly trying to master a view
of the case new to her.
"Yes," speaking slowly. He saw that her hands, which were clasped in her
lap, pressed themselves more closely together--"yes, that is what they
deserve; but, you see, they are very ignorant. They do not see the
importance of these precautions; they have not believed me; they will
not believe you. They think quite honestly and truly that they will get
on well enough in doing their own way."
"Pig-headed!" commented Caius. Then, perceiving that he had not quite
carried her judgment along with his: "You yourself, madam, have admitted
that they do not deserve that either you or I should sacrifice our lives
to them."
"Ah, no," she replied, trouble of thought again in her eyes; "they do
not deserve that. But what do we deserve--you and I?"
There was no studied effect in the question. She was like one trying to
think more clearly by expressing her thought aloud.
"Madam," replied he, the smile of gallantry upon his lips, "I have no
doubt that you deserve the richest blessings of earth and heaven. For
myself----" He shrugged his shoulders, just about to say conventionally,
flippantly, that he was a sad, worthless fellow, but in some way her
sincerity made him sincere, and he finished: "I do not know that I have
done anything to forfeit them."
He supposed, as soon as he had said the words, that she would have a
theological objection to this view, and oppose it by rote; but there was
nothing of disapproval in her mien; there was even a gleam of greater
kindliness for him in her eye, and she said, not in answer, but as
making a remark by the way:
"That is just as I supposed when I asked you to come. You are like the
young ruler, who could not have been conceited because our Lord felt
greatly attracted to him."
Before this Caius had had a pleasing consciousness, regarding himself as
an interesting stranger talking to a handsome and interested woman. Now
he had wit enough to perceive that her interest in him never dipped to
the level of ordinary social relationships. He felt a sense of
remoteness, and did not even blush, though knowing certainly that
satire, although it was not in her mind, was sneering at him from behind
the circumstance.
The lady went right on, almost without pause, taking up the thread of
her argument: "But when the angels whisper to us that the best blessings
of earth and heaven are humility and faith and the sort of love that
does not seek its own, do we get up at once and spend our time learning
these things? or do we just go on as before, and think our own way good
enough? 'We are fools and worse, and will not take a telling.'" A smile
broke upon her lip now for the first time as she looked at him.
"'Pig-headed!'" she said.
Caius had seen that smile before. It passed instantly, and she sat
before him with grave, unruffled demeanour; but all his thoughts and
feelings seemed a-whirl. He could not collect his mind; he could not
remember what she had said exactly; he could not think what to answer;
indeed, he could not think at all. There had been a likeness to his
phantastic lady-love of the sea; then it was gone again; but it left him
with all his thoughts confounded. At length--because he felt that he
must look like a fool indeed--he spoke, stammering the first thing that
occurred to him:
"The patient that I have seen did not appear to be in a house that was
ill-ventilated or--or--that is, he was isolated from the rest of the
family."
He perceived that the lady had not the slightest knowledge of what it
was that had really confused him. He knew that in her eyes, in the eyes
of the maidens, it must appear that her home-thrust had gone to his
heart, that he had changed the subject because too weak to be able to
answer her. He was mortified at this, but he could not retrace his steps
in the conversation, for she had already answered him.
The household he had already visited, she said, with a few others, had
helped her by following sanitary rules; and then she went on talking
about what those rules were, what could and could not be done in the
circumstances of the families affected.
As she talked on, Caius knew that the thing he had thought must be false
and foolish. This woman and that other maiden were not the same in
thought, or character, or deed, or aspect. Furthermore, what experience
he had made him feel certain that the woman who had known him in that
relationship could not be so indifferent to his recognition, so
indifferent to all that was in him to which her beauty appealed, as
this woman was, and of this woman's indifference he felt convinced.
The provision made for the board and lodging of the new doctor was
explained to him. It was not considered safe for him to live with any of
the families of the island. A very small wooden building, originally
built as a stable, but never used, had been hastily remodelled into a
house for him. It was some way further down the winding road, within
sight of the house of Madame Le Maître.
Caius was taken to this new abode, and found that it contained two
rooms, furnished with the necessities and many of the comforts of life.
The stove was good; abundance of fuel was stacked near the house; simple
cooking utensils hung in the outer room; adjoining it, or rather, in a
bit of the same building set apart, was a small stable, in which a very
good horse was standing. The horse was for his use. If he could be his
own bed-maker, cook, and groom, it was evident that he would lack for
nothing. A man whom Madame Le Maître sent showed Caius his quarters, and
delivered to him the key; he also said that Madame Le Maître would be
ready in an hour to ride over the island with him and introduce him to
all the houses in which there was illness.
Caius was left for the hour to look over his establishment and make
friends with his horse. It was all very surprising.