V.
ON THE MAIL BOAT.
A procession came down the long slope at the head of the bay. Each vehicle but one rumbled behind a pair of leisurely horses. That one, a car with a pa.s.senger and his luggage, hooted from tail to head of the procession, and vanished in the dust towards the pier. The sea stretched like a sheet of brilliant gla.s.s right out across the bay and the firth beyond to the great blue island hills, calm as far as the eye could search it; on the green treeless sh.o.r.es, with their dusty roads and their d.y.k.es of flagstones set on edge, there was scarcely enough breeze to stir the gra.s.ses. "We shall have a fine crossing," said the pa.s.sengers in the coaches to one another.
They bent round the corner of the bay and pa.s.sed the little row of houses, pressed close beneath the high gra.s.sy bank, and rumbled on to the pier. The sentries and the naval guard eyed the pa.s.sengers with professional suspicion as they gathered in a cue to show their pa.s.sports, and then gradually straggled towards the mail boat. But there was one pa.s.senger who was particularly eyed; though if all the glances toward her were prompted by suspicion, it was well concealed.
She was a girl of anything from twenty-two to twenty-five, lithe, dressed to a miracle, dark-haired, and more than merely pretty. Her dark eyebrows nearly meeting, her bright and singularly intelligent eyes, her firm mouth and resolute chin, the mixture of thoughtfulness in her expression and decision in her movements, were not the usual ingredients of prettiness. Yet her features were so fine and her complexion so clear, and there was so much charm as well as thought in her expression, that the whole effect of her was delightful.
Undoubtedly she was beautiful.
She was clearly travelling alone, and evidently a stranger to those parts. No one on the pier or steamer touched a hat or greeted her, and from her quick looks of interest it was plain that everything was fresh to her. The string of pa.s.sengers was blocked for a moment on the narrow deck, and just where she paused stood a tall man who had come aboard a minute or two before. He took his eyes discreetly off her face, and they fell upon her bag. There on the label he could plainly read, "Miss Eileen Holland." Then she pa.s.sed on, and the tall man kept looking after her.
Having piled her lighter luggage on a seat in a very brisk and business-like fashion, Miss Holland strolled across the deck and leaned with her back against the railings and her hands in the pockets of her loose tweed coat, studying with a shrewd glance her fellow-pa.s.sengers.
They included a number of soldiers in khaki, on leave apparently; several nondescript and uninteresting people, mostly female; and the tall man. At him she glanced several times. He was very obviously a clergyman of some sort, in the conventional black felt hat and a long dark overcoat; and yet though his face was not at all unclerical, it seemed to her that he was not exactly the usual type. Then she saw his eyes turn on her again, and she gazed for some minutes at the pier just above their heads.
The cable was cast off and the little steamer backed through the foam of her own wake, and wheeling, set forth for the Isles. For a while Miss Holland watched the green semicircle slowly receding astern and the shining waters opening ahead, and then turned to a more practical matter. Other pa.s.sengers were eyeing the laden deck-seat.
"I"m afraid my things are in your way," she said, and crossing the deck took up a bag and looked round where to put it.
The clergyman was beside her in a stride.
"Allow me. I"ll stow it away for you," he said.
He spoke with a smile, but with an air of complete decision and quiet command, and with a murmur of thanks she yielded the bag almost automatically. As he moved off with it, it struck her that here was a clergyman apparently accustomed to very prompt obedience from his flock.
They had been standing just aft of the deck-house, and with the bag in his hand he pa.s.sed by this to where a pile of lighter luggage had been arranged on the deck. As he went he looked at the bag curiously, and then before putting it down he glanced over his shoulder. The lady was not in sight, and very swiftly but keenly he studied it more closely.
It was a suit-case made of an unusual brown, light material. Turning one end up quickly he read on a little plate this a.s.surance by the makers, "Garantirt echt Vulcanfibre." And then slowly, and apparently rather thoughtfully, he strolled back.
"You"ll find it among the other luggage, just beyond the deck-house,"
he said, and then with an air of sudden thought added, "Perhaps I ought to have put it with your other things, wherever they are."
"I have practically nothing else," said she, "except a trunk in the hold."
"You are travelling very light," he remarked. "That wasn"t a very substantial suit-case."
For a moment she seemed to be a little doubtful whether to consider him a somewhat forward stranger. Then she said with a frank smile--
"No; it was made in Germany."
As she spoke he glanced at her with a curious sudden intensity, that might have been an ordinary trick of manner.
"Oh," he said with a smile. "Before the war, I presume?"
"Yes," she answered briefly, and looked round her as though wondering whether she should move.
But the clergyman seemed oblivious to the hint.
"Do you know Germany well?" he asked.
"Yes," she said. "Do you?"
He nodded.
"Yes, pretty well--as it was before the war, of course. I had some good friends there at one time."
"So had I," she said.
"All in the past tense now," said he.
"I suppose so," she answered; "yet I sometimes find it hard to believe that they are all as poisoned against England and as ignorant and callous as people think. I can"t picture some of my friends like that!"
She seemed to have got over her first touch of resentment. There was certainly an air of good-breeding and even of distinction about the man, and after all, his extreme a.s.surance sat very naturally on him.
It had an unpremeditated matter-of-course quality that made it difficult to remain offended.
"It is hard to picture a good many things," he said thoughtfully.
"Were you long in Germany?"
She told him two years, and then questioned him in return; but he seemed to have a gift for conveying exceedingly little information with an air of remarkable finality--as though he had given a complete report and there was an end of it. On the other hand, he had an equal gift for putting questions in a way that made it impossible not to answer without churlishness. For his manner never lacked courtesy, and he showed a flattering interest in each word of her replies. She felt that she had never met a man who had put her more on her mettle and made her instinctively wish more to show herself to advantage.
Yet she seemed fully capable of holding her own, for after half an hour"s conversation it would have been remarkably difficult to essay a biographical sketch of Miss Eileen Holland. She had spent a number of years abroad, and confessed to being a fair linguist; she was going to the Islands "to stay with some people"; and she had previously done "a little" war work--so little, apparently, that she had been advised to seek a change of air, as her companion observed with a smile.
"Anyhow, I have not done enough," she said with a sudden intensity of suppressed feeling in her voice.
The keen-faced clergyman glanced at her quickly, but said nothing. A minute or two later he announced that he had some correspondence to look over, and thereupon he left her with the same air of decision instantly acted on with which he had first addressed her. He pa.s.sed through the door of the deck-house, and she got a glimpse of his head going down the companion. Her face remained quite composed, but in her eyes there seemed to be the trace of a suggestion that she was unused to see gentlemen quit her side quite so promptly.
A few minutes later she went down herself to the ladies" cabin. Coming out, the foot of the companion was immediately opposite, and beyond stretched the saloon. At the far end of this sat the clergyman, and at the sight of him Miss Holland paused for a moment at the foot of the ladder and looked at him with a face that seemed to show both a little amus.e.m.e.nt and a little wonder. He sat quite by himself, with a bundle of papers on the table at his elbow. One of these was in his hand, and he was reading it with an air of extraordinary concentration. He had carelessly pushed back his black felt hat, and what arrested her was the odd impression this produced. With his hat thus rakishly tilted, all traces of his clerical profession seemed mysteriously to have vanished. The white dog-collar was there all right, but unaided it seemed singularly incapable of making him into a conventional minister.
Miss Holland went up on deck rather thoughtfully. The little mail boat was now far out in the midst of a waste of waters. The ill-omened tideway was on its best behaviour; but even so, there was a constant gentle roll as the oily swell swung in from the Atlantic. Ahead, on the starboard bow, loomed the vast island precipices; astern the long Scottish coast faded into haze. One other vessel alone was to be seen--a long, low, black ship with a single spike of a mast and several squat funnels behind it. An eccentric vessel this seemed; for she first meandered towards the mail boat and then meandered away again, with no visible business on the waters.
The girl moved along the deck till she came to the place where her suit-case had been stowed. Close beside it were two leather kit-bags, and as she paused there it was on these that her eyes fell. She looked at them, in fact, very attentively. On each were the initials "A.B.", and on their labels the legend, "The Rev. Alex. Burnett." She came a step nearer and studied them still more closely. A few old luggage-labels were still affixed, and one at least of these bore the word "Berwick." Miss Holland seemed curiously interested by her observations.
A little later the clergyman reappeared, and approached her like an old acquaintance. By this time they were running close under the cliffs, and they gazed together up to the dizzy heights a thousand feet above their heads, where dots of sea-birds circled hardly to be distinguished by the eye, and then down to the green swell and bursting foam at the foot of that stupendous wall. In the afternoon sun it glowed like a wall of copper. For a few minutes both were instinctively silent.
There was nothing to be said of such a spectacle.
Then Miss Holland suddenly asked--
"Do you live near the sea?"
"Not very," he answered with his air of finality.
But this time she persisted.
"What is your part of the country?"
"Berwickshire," he said briefly.
"Do you happen to know a minister there--a Mr Burnett?" she inquired.
"That is my own name," he said quietly.
"Mr Alexander Burnett?"