"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 gra.s.s-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 pa.s.sed 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 Caesar 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 pa.s.sably 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 "enc.u.mbrances," 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 br.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 alt.i.tude.
"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."