Chapter 26. The Rescue

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_ CHAPTER XXVI. THE RESCUE

"O, who lives on the Island,
Betwix' the sea an' the sky?
--I think it must be a lady, a lady,
I think it must be a genuwine lady,
She carries her head so high."

---OLD BALLAD.

In the moonlit garden of the Casino at Monte Carlo Miles Chandon smoked a cigar pensively, leaning against the low wall that overlooks the pigeon-shooters' enclosure, the railway station and the foreshore. He was alone, as always. That a man who, since the great folly of his life, had obstinately cultivated solitude should make holiday in Monte Carlo, of all places, is paradoxical enough; but in truth the crowd around the tables, the diners at the hotel, the pigeon-shooters, the whole cosmopolitan gathering of idle rich and predatory poor, were a Spectacle to him and no more. If once or twice a day he staked a few napoleons on black or red in the inner room of the Casino, it was as a man, finding himself at Homburg or Marienbad, might take a drink of the waters from curiosity and to fill up the time. He made no friends in the throng. He found no pleasure in it. But when he grew weary at home in his laboratory, or when his doctor advised that confinement and too much poring over chemicals were telling on his health, he packed up and made for Monte Carlo, or some other expensive place popularly supposed to be a "pleasure-resort." As a matter of fact, he did not understand pleasure, or what it means.

Finding him in this pensive attitude in the moonlit garden by the sea, you might guess that he was sentimentalising over his past. He was doing nothing of the sort. He was watching a small greyish-white object the moon revealed on the roof of the railway station below, just within the parapet. He knew it to be a pigeon that had escaped, wounded, from the sportsmen in the enclosure. Late that afternoon he had seen the poor creature fluttering. He wondered that the officials (at Monte Carlo they clean up everything) had not seen it before and removed it. He watched it, curious to know if it were still alive. He had a fancy at the back of his head--that if the small body fluttered again he would go back to his rooms, fetch a revolver, and give the _coup de grace_. And he smiled as he played with the fancy, foreseeing the rush of agitated officials that a revolver-shot in the gardens would instantly bring upon him. It would be great fun, explaining; but the offence no doubt would be punishable. By what? Banishment, probably.

He turned for a moment at the sound of a footstep, and was aware of his man Louis.

"A telegram, sir."

"Eh? Now who in the world--Matters hasn't burnt down Meriton, I hope?"

He opened the telegram and walked with it to the nearest of the electric lamps; read it, and stood pondering.

"Louis, when does the new night-express leave for Paris?"

"In twenty-five minutes, sir."

"Then I've a mind to catch it. Put up a travelling-suit in my bag. I can get out of these clothes in the train. You had better pack the rest, pay the bill, and follow to-morrow."

"If you wish it, sir. But if I may suggest--"

"Yes?"

"In twenty minutes I can do all that easily, and book the sleeping-berths too. I suggest, sir, you will find it more comfortable, having me on the train."

"Admirable man--hurry up, then!"

The admirable man saluted respectfully and retired "hurt," as they say in the cricket reports. He never hurried; it was part of the secret by which he was always punctual. At the station he even found time to suggest that his master might wish to send a telegram, and to dispatch it.

This was on Sunday. They reached London late on Monday evening, and there--Louis having telegraphed from Paris--Sir Miles found his favourite room ready for him at Claridge's. Next morning, as his hansom drew up a few minutes after eleven o'clock by the entrance to Paddington Station, he observed that the porter who stepped forward from the rank to attend on him, did so with a preoccupied air. The man was grinning, and kept glancing along the pavement to his right.

"Luggage on the cab just behind," said Sir Miles, alighting. "Never mind me; my man will take the tickets and get me a seat. But what's the excitement here?"

"Lady along there, sir--offering to fight her cabby. Says he can't drive for nuts--"

"Hullo!"

Sir Miles looked, recognised Miss Sally, and walked briskly towards her. She caught sight of him and nodded.

"Thought you would come. Excuse me a moment."

She lifted her voice and addressed the cabby again--

"Oh, you can talk. They taught you that at the Board School, no doubt. But drive you cannot; and talk you would not, if you knew the respect due to a mouth--your own or your horse's."

With this parting shot she turned to Sir Miles again, and held out her hand.

"Tell your man he needn't trouble about a seat for you. I've engaged a compartment where we can talk."

"Well?" he asked, ten minutes later, lowering his newspaper as the train drew out of the station.

"Well, in the first place, it's very good of you to come."

"Oh, as for that . . . You know that if I can ever do you any service--"

"But you can't. It was for your own sake I telegraphed."

"Mine? Is Meriton really burnt to the ground, then? But even that news wouldn't gravely afflict me."

"It isn't--and it would. At any rate, it might now, I hope," said Miss Sally enigmatically.

He waited for her to continue.

"Your wife's dead!" she said.

She heard him draw a quick breath.

"Indeed?" he asked indifferently.

"But your son isn't--at least, I hope not."

He looked up and met her eyes.

"But I had word," he said slowly, "word from her, and in her own handwriting. A boy was born, and died six or seven weeks later--as I remember, the letter said within a week after his christening."

Miss Sally nodded.

"That settles it," she said; "being untrue, as I happen to know. The child was alive and hearty a year after the christening, when they left Cawsand and moved to the East coast. The fact is, my friend, you had run up--if not in your wife, then in the coastguardsman Ned Commins--against a pride as stubborn as your own. They wrote you a lie--that's certain; and I'm as hard as most upon liars; but, considering all, I don't blame 'em. They weren't mercenary, anyway. They only wanted to have no more truck with you."

"Have you seen the boy?"

Again Miss Sally nodded.

"Yes, and there's no doubting the parentage. I never saw that cross-hatched under-lip in any but a Chandon, though you _do_ hide it with a beard: let alone that he carries the four lozenges tattooed on his shoulder. Ned Commins did that. There was a moment, belike, when they weakened--either he or the woman. But you had best hear the story, and then you can judge the evidence for yourself."

She told it. He listened with set face, interposing here and there to ask a question, or to weigh one detail of her narrative against another.

"If the children should be lost--which God forbid!" she wound up, "--and if I never did another good day's work in my life, I'll remember that they started me to clear that infernal Orphanage. It's by the interposition of Heaven that you didn't find me on Paddington platform with three-and-twenty children under my wing. 'Interposition of Heaven,' did I say? You may call it, if you will, the constant and consistent foolishness of my brother Elphinstone. In every tight corner of my life I've learnt to trust in Elphinstone for a fool, and he has never betrayed me yet. There I was in the hotel with these twenty-three derelicts, all underfed, and all more or less mentally defective through Glasson's ill-treatment. Two or three were actually crying, in a feeble way, to be 'taken home,' as they called it. They were afraid--afraid of their kind, afraid of strange faces, afraid of everything but to be starved and whipped. I was forced to send out and buy new clothes for some, there and then; and their backs, when I stripped 'em, were criss-crossed with weals--not quite fresh, you understand, for Glasson had been kept busy of late, and the woman Huggins hadn't his arm. Well, there I was, stranded, with these creatures on my hands, all of 'em, as you may say, looking up at me in a dumb way, and wanting to know why I couldn't have let 'em alone--and if ever I smash up another Orphanage you may call me a Turk, and put me in a harem--when all of a sudden it occurred to me to look up the names of the benevolent parties backing the institution. The woman had given me a copy of the prospectus, intending to impress me. I promised myself I'd rattle these philanthropists as they 'd never been rattled before in their lives. And then--why had I ever doubted him?--half-way down the list I lit on Elphinstone's name. . . . His place is at Henley-in-Arden, you see, and not far from Bursfield. . . . So I rattled the others (I spent three-quarters of an hour in the telegraph office, and before eleven last night I had thirty-two answers. They are all in my bag, and you shall look 'em over by and by, if you want to be tickled), but I sent Elphinstone what the girl Tilda would call a cough-drop. It ran to five sheets or thereabouts, and cost four-and-eightpence; and I wound up by telling him I meant every word I'd said. He's in Bursfield at this moment, you may bet, carting those orphans around into temporary quarters. And Elphinstone is a kind-hearted man, but orphans are not exactly his line--not what he'd call congenial to him."

"But these two? You seem to me pretty sure about finding them on Holmness: too sure, I suggest. Either you've forgotten to say why you're certain, or I may have missed--"

"You are getting keen, I see. No, I have no right to be sure, except that I rely on the girl--and on Hucks. (You ought to know Hucks, by the way; he is a warrior.) But I _am_ sure: so sure that I have wired for a steam-launch to be ready by Clatworthy pier. . . . Will you come?"

"I propose to see this affair through," he said deliberately.

Miss Sally gave him a sharp look, and once again nodded approval.

"And, moreover, so sure," she went on, "that I have not wired to send Chichester in search. That's worrying me, I confess; for although Hucks is positive the girl would not start for Holmness without provisions-- and on my reading of her, he's right--this is Tuesday, and they have been missing ever since Saturday night, or Sunday morning at latest."

"If that is worrying you," said Chandon, "it may ease your mind to know that there is food and drink on the Island. I built a cottage there two years ago, with a laboratory; I spent six weeks in it this summer; and-- well, ships have been wrecked On Holmness, and, as an old naval officer, I've provided for that sort of thing."

Miss Sally slapped her knee. (Her gestures were always unconventional.)

"We shall find 'em there!" she announced. "I'm willing to lay you five to one in what you like."

They changed at Taunton for Fair Anchor. At Fair Anchor Station Sir Miles's motor awaited them. It had been ordered by Parson Chichester, instructed by telegram from Taunton.

The parson himself stood on the platform, but he could give no news of the missing ones.

"We'll have 'em before nightfall," promised Miss Sally. "Come with us, if you will."

So all three climbed into the motor, and were whirled across the moor, and down the steep descent into Clatworthy village, and by Clatworthy pier a launch lay ready for them with a full head of steam.

During the passage few words were said; and indeed the eager throb of the launch's engine discouraged conversation. Chandon steered, with his eyes fixed on the Island. Miss Sally, too, gazed ahead for the most part; but from time to time she contrived a glance at his weary face-- grey even in the sunset towards which they were speeding.

Sunset lay broad and level across the Severn Sea, lighting its milky flood with splashes of purple, of lilac, of gold. The sun itself, as they approached the Island, dropped behind its crags, silhouetting them against a sky of palest blue.

They drove into its chill shadow, and landed on the very beach from which the children had watched the stag swim out to meet his death. They climbed up by a pathway winding between thorn and gorse, and on the ridge met the flaming sunlight again.

Miss Sally shielded her eyes.

"They will be here, if anywhere," said Sir Miles, and led the way down the long saddle-back to the entrance of the gully.

"Hullo!" exclaimed he, coming to a halt as the chimneys of the bungalow rose into view above the gorse bushes. From one of them a steady stream of smoke was curling.

"It's a hundred to one!" gasped Miss Sally triumphantly.

They hurried down--to use her own expression--like a pack in full cry. It was Parson Chichester who claimed afterwards that he won by a short length, and lifting the latch, pushed the door open. And this was the scene he opened on, so far as it has since been reconstructed:--

Tilda stood with her back to the doorway and a couple of paces from it, surveying a table laid--so far as Sir Miles's stock of glass and cutlery allowed--for a dinner-party of eight. She was draped from the waist down in a crimson window-curtain, which spread behind her in a full-flowing train. In her hand she held her recovered book--the _Lady's Vade-Mecum_; and she read from it, addressing Arthur Miles, who stood and enacted butler by the side-table, in a posture of studied subservience--

"Dinner bein' announced, the 'ostess will dismiss
all care, or at least appear to do so: and, 'avin'
marshalled 'er guests in order of precedence (see
page 67 supra) will take the arm of the gentleman
favoured to conduct 'er. Some light and playful
remark will 'ere be not out of place, such as--"

"Well, I'm d--d, if you'll excuse me," ejaculated Miss Sally.

Late that night, in his smoking-room at Meriton, Sir Miles Chandon knocked out the ashes of his pipe against the bars of the grate, rose, stretched himself, and looked about him. Matters had left a bedroom candle ready to hand on a side-table, as his custom was. But Sir Miles took up the lamp instead.

Lamp in hand, he went up the great staircase, and along the unlit fifty yards of corridor to the room where his son lay. In all the great house he could hear no sound, scarcely even the tread of his own foot on the thick carpeting.

He opened the door almost noiselessly and stood by the bed, holding the lamp high.

But noiselessly though Sir Miles had come, the boy was awake. Nor was it in his nature, being awake, to feign sleep. He looked up, blinking a little, but with no fear in his gentle eyes.

His father had not counted on this. He felt an absurd bashfulness tying his tongue. At length he struggled to say--

"'Thought I'd make sure you were comfortable. That's all."

"Oh, yes--thank you. Comfortable and--and--only just thinking a bit."

"We'll have a long talk to-morrow. That girl--she's a good sort, eh?"

"Tilda? . . . Why, of course, she did it _all_. She's the best in the world!"

EPILOGUE

The time is seven years later--seven years and a half, rather; the season, spring; the hour, eight in the morning; and the place, a corner of Culvercoombe, where Miss Sally's terraced garden slopes to meet the wild woodland through an old orchard billowy overhead with pink and white blossom and sheeted underfoot with blue-bells. At the foot of the orchard, and on the very edge of the woodland, lies a small enclosure, where from the head of the slope you catch sight, between the apple trees, of a number of white stones glimmering; but your eyes rest rather on the figure of a girl who has just left the enclosure, and is mounting the slope with a spade on her shoulder.

You watch her, yourself invisible, while she approaches. You might gaze until she has passed, and yet not recognise her for Tilda. She wears a coat and skirt of grey homespun, fashioned for country wear yet faultless in cut, the skirt short enough to reveal a pair of trim ankles cased in shooting-gaiters. Beneath her grey shooting-cap, also of homespun, her hair falls in two broad bands over the brows, and is gathered up at the back of the head in a plain Grecian knot. By the brows, if you had remarked them in days gone by, when neither you nor she gave a second thought to her looks, you might know her again; or perhaps by the poise of the chin, and a touch of decision in the eyes. In all else the child has vanished, and given place to this good-looking girl, with a spring in her gait and a glow on her cheek that tell of clean country nurture.

At the head of the path above the orchard grows an old ash tree, and so leans that its boughs, now bursting into leaf, droop pendent almost as a weeping willow. Between them you catch a glimpse of the Bristol Channel, blue-grey beyond a notch of the distant hills. She pauses here for a look. The moors that stretch for miles on all sides of Culvercoombe are very silent this sunny morning. It is the season when the sportsman pauses and takes breath for a while, and neither gun nor horn is abroad. The birds are nesting; the stag more than a month since has "hung his old head on the pale," and hides while his new antlers are growing amid the young green bracken that would seem to imitate them in its manner of growth; the hinds have dropped their calves, and fare with them unmolested. It is the moors' halcyon time, and the weather to-day well befits it.

Tilda's face is grave, however, as she stands there in the morning sunshine. She is looking back upon the enclosure where the white stones overtop the bluebells. They are headstones, and mark the cemetery where Miss Sally, not ordinarily given to sentiment, has a fancy for interring her favourite dogs.

You guess now why Tilda carries a spade, and what has happened, but may care to know how it happened.

Sir Elphinstone is paying a visit just now to Culvercoombe. He regards Tilda with mixed feelings, and Tilda knows it. The knowledge nettles her a little and amuses her a good deal. Just now Miss Sally and he are improving their appetites for breakfast by an early canter over the moor, and no doubt are discussing her by the way.

Last night, with the express purpose of teasing him, Miss Sally had asked Tilda to take up a book and read to her for a while. The three were seated in the drawing-room after dinner, and Sir Elphinstone beginning to grow impatient for his game of piquet. On the hearth-rug before the fire were stretched Godolphus and three of Miss Sally's prize setters; but Godolphus had the warmest corner, and dozed there stertorously.

The book chanced to be Gautier's _Emaux et Camees_, and Tilda to open it at the _Carnaval de Venise_--

"Il est un vieil air populaire
Par tous les violons racle,
Aux abois de chiens en colere
Par tous les orgues nasille."

She read the first verse with a pure clear accent and paused, with a glance first at the hearth-rug, then at Sir Elphinstone in his chair. Perhaps the sight of him stirred a small flame of defiance. At any rate she closed the book, went straight to the piano, and recklessly rattled out the old tune, at once so silly and haunting. Had she not heard it a thousand times in the old circus days?

Her eyes were on the keyboard. Hardly daring to lift them, she followed up the air with a wild variation and dropped back upon it again--not upon the air pure and simple, but upon the air as it might be rendered by a two-thirds-intoxicated coachful of circus bandsmen. The first half-a-dozen bars tickled Miss Sally in the midriff, so that she laughed aloud. But the laugh ended upon a sharp exclamation, and Tilda, still jangling, looked up as Sir Elphinstone chimed in with a "What the devil!" and started from his chair.

'Dolph was the cause of it. 'Dolph at the first notes had lifted his head, unobserved. Then slowly raising himself on his rheumatic fore-legs, the old dog heaved erect and waddled towards the piano. Even so no one paid any heed to him until, halting a foot or so from the hem of Tilda's skirt, he abased his head to the carpet while his hind-legs strained in a grotesque effort to pitch his body over in a somersault.

It was at this that Sir Elphinstone had exclaimed. Tilda, glancing down sideways across her shoulder, saw and checked a laugh. She understood. She let her fingers rest on a crashing chord, and rose from the music-stool as the dog rolled over on his flank.

"'Dolph! My poor old darling!"

She knelt to him, stretching out her arms. The candlelight fell on them, and on the sheen of her evening frock, and on the small dark curls clustering on the nape of her bowed neck; and by the same light 'Dolph lifted his head and gazed up at her. That look endured for five seconds, perhaps; but in it shone more than she could remember, and more than she could ever forget--a life's devotion compressed into one last leap of the flame, to expire only with life itself. As her hands went swiftly down to him, his tongue strove to lick them; but his head fell back, and his spirit went out into whatever darkness the spirits of dead dogs possess.

You know now why Tilda is not riding this morning, why she carries a spade on her shoulder, and why her face on this sunny morning wears a pensive shadow as she gazes back through the orchard trees. But 'Dolph, the circus mongrel, sleeps among hounds of nobler breed, and shall have a stone as honourable as any.

Now, if you were to look more closely, you might perceive a small stain of green on the front of the homespun skirt otherwise so trim, and might jump to the erroneous conclusion that before leaving the enclosure she had knelt to say a prayer over the snapping of this last tie with her old disreputable life. It is not precisely Christian, perhaps, to pray over a dog's grave; but I am pretty sure that Parson Chichester, who has made some tentative openings towards preparing Tilda for Confirmation, would overlook the irregularity, and even welcome it as a foreshadowing of grace. But Parson Chichester is a discerning man, as well as an honest; and for some reason, although Tilda has long passed the normal age to be prepared for that rite, he has forborne to press her as yet even to be baptised. It will all come in time, he hopes; but he has a queer soul to deal with.

--A queer soul, and (as he perceives) a self-respecting one. If she come to it, she will come in her own time. So let it be confessed, as a secret she would be extremely annoyed to hear revealed, that she did indeed kneel five minutes since, but with no thought of religion; to try rather, over 'Dolph's grave, if she could bend her body back in the old acrobatic trick.

She could not, of course. She had known that she could not even as-- with a glance around her to make sure she was unobserved--she had made the effort. Time had taken away the old Tilda with the old 'Dolph. She was a girl grown, a girl with limbs firmed by outdoor sports and country living. And she had learnt much--so much, that to have learnt it she had necessarily forgotten much. You or I, meeting her this morning for the first time, had made no doubt of her being a young lady of rather exceptional breeding.

She looked back to the spot where 'Dolph rested among dogs of loftiest race. She knew that Sir Elphinstone and Miss Sally were discussing her while they rode, and she could hear two words Sir Elphinstone let fall. She repeated them to herself--"Nobody's child."

She did not remember that she had once thanked her gods for it.

The rural postman carried a brass cowhorn, and made a practice of sounding it as he mounted the road leading to Culvercoombe. Its note, sounding through the clear morning air, aroused Tilda from her brown study, and she ran lightly up the slope to catch him on the upper terrace.

He handed her the day's mail--a dozen letters or more, and among them one addressed to her. In the whole world was but one handwriting that ever came for her; recognisable always, though with each post it grew firmer in character.

The envelope bore an Italian stamp and a Neapolitan postmark. Arthur Miles was a midshipman now, soon to be a second-lieutenant; his ship, the _Indomitable_, attached to the Mediterranean fleet. She broke the seal. . . . The letter was a boyish one, full of naval slang, impersonal, the sort of letter growing boys write to their mothers. But Arthur Miles had no mother; and if he wrote to his father, Tilda knew that he wrote more formally.

"We were sent up here," the letter said, "on getting word that Vesuvius meant to erupt badly, and that we might be useful. But the show seems to be hanging fire, and we may be ordered back to Malta at any moment. Half a dozen of us made up a picnic yesterday, to have a look at the crater at close quarters. We cooked some eggs on it, to show our unconcern, and while we were cooking them up came an American, who had pitched camp in the foolhardiest spot. Guess why--to paint it! Guess who he was--why, Jessup! Do you remember Jessup? He introduced himself, and I knew him at once; but he did not know me, and I did not enlighten him. He said that the Art of the Future must depend on the development of wireless telegraphy, and that in the meanwhile he was just marking time with earthquakes."

Tilda, having read thus far, looks up at the sound of horses' hoofs. Miss Sally and Sir Elphinstone are returning from their ride.

"And, after all, why not?" Miss Sally is saying.

"The very mistake his father made!"

"Homoeopathy is one of my fads, remember."

"A nobody's child!"

"True; and so would _he_ have been, but for her."

 

[THE END]
[Arthur Quiller-Couch's Novel: True Tilda] _


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