Part 14 (2/2)
Killigrew leapt to intercept Annie and fetch her the big cider jug from the dinner-waggon, and giggling like a girl she took it from him and filled the gla.s.ses. Some faint return of gaiety, the sense of it being Ishmael's evening, returned, and he sat as they raised gla.s.ses to him, in a sudden brightening. As she was tilting hers to her lips, Annie gave a sudden cry, so sharp everyone stopped, gla.s.s in hand. A shadow had fallen across the window, barring the flow of the westering light, and towards it Annie was staring. The others followed her gaze.
Bearded, brown, roughly clad in a big coat hunched about his ears, Archelaus stood looking in. He continued to stand, motionless, after he had been seen. Annie cried out again and, almost dropping her tumbler on to the table, rushed from the room, knocking against the door-frame in her blundering way as she went. The others stood bewildered a moment, not taking it in, not recognising the bearded figure that stayed motionless, itself giving no sign of recognition. It was Ishmael, who had not seen his brother since he himself was very little, who yet knew him the first, warned by some instinct. He got up and went out, followed by the others, who all talked at once though he stayed silent.
In the yard Annie was clinging around Archelaus, and the big man suffered it with a better grace than in the old days, though with a careless good-nature. Tom, smiling, stood a little behind the two of them. Not to Archelaus's primitive if cunning mind belonged that scheme for returning the evening of Ishmael's party; it was Tom who for two days had held him in reluctant seclusion at Penzance so as to spring the surprise at the least convenient moment. It was characteristic of Tom to scheme, even when there was nothing to gain by it but a little malicious gratification, as in this case.
Not for nothing, however, had Ishmael been trained as he had, and his voice, so unmistakably that of a gentleman as to strike them with a sense of something alien, came quietly if a little tremulously for the first few words.
”Hullo, Archelaus!” he said, shaking hands before the other's slower wits had decided whether to proffer the salute or no. ”Come along in!
You're just in time for my supper-party....” No speech could have robbed the conspirators of their little triumph more completely--it offered a welcome as from one who had the best of rights to invite a guest in, and at the same time accepted the place as the home of both. Archelaus stood glowering, thought of nothing to say in reply, and found himself following his young brother into the house.
After that the evening ceased to be Ishmael's and became a background for Archelaus. He had dug for gold in Australia, and if he had not had the luck of many others who had struck richer claims, he yet brought home money to fling round upon his fancies. For years he had wandered over the far places of the earth, so that his skin was tanned darker than his bleached hair, and his limited vocabulary had enriched itself with strange and coloured words. He was indeed a man. Even Ishmael felt that, as he sat in the dim kitchen where they had all gone to see Archelaus eat a vast meal and listen to his talk. Annie was entranced; the rare colour burnt on her cheekbones, her fingers rolled and unrolled her ap.r.o.n ceaselessly; she had relapsed into kitchen ways in a flash and, swathed in sacking, waited on her big son herself. Va.s.sie tilted a superior nose and in the intervals tried to impress Archelaus by the remarkable progress of his family during his absence; but Phoebe, who had planned for Ishmael, fluttered all spontaneously for Archelaus. It seemed to her that he was like a demi-G.o.d as he sat there, thrusting the food into his mouth, golden beard dripping with golden cider, careless limbs outflung. Va.s.sie only saw the inelegance, for he was her brother, but to Phoebe his very scorn of dainty ways made him more G.o.d-like because more man-like.
When darkness crept over the kitchen so that the hero could no longer be seen properly, Annie went into the parlour and returned carrying the elegant lamp, with its globe of frosted gla.s.s, that Va.s.sie, when it was lit, proceeded to cover with a sort of little cape of quilled pink paper edged with flowers made of the same material. The room being thus too dimmed for Annie's fancy, she tilted the shade to one side so that a white fan of light threw itself upon Archelaus, making his tangled beard and crisp hair gleam and showing the warm colour br.i.m.m.i.n.g in his face up to the line of white across his untanned brow. So Ishmael saw him as he rose and went out to cool his own heated cheeks upon the cliff, and so he saw him as he lay in bed that night, flaring out in a swimming round of light against the darkness.
CHAPTER V
LULL BEFORE STORM
There was a place upon the cliff which Ishmael had made peculiarly his, where he went whenever he wished to be alone, which was not seldom. No other place since that hollow where the favoured boys had been wont to meet Hilaria had meant so much to him, and this one had the supreme advantage that it belonged to him only. The rest of his family did not indulge in cliff-climbing. Generally he was accompanied there by Wanda, his big farm-dog, a jolly, rollicking, idiotically adoring creature who spent her days wriggling and curvetting at his feet, her silly pink tongue dabbing at him, her moist eyes beaming through her tangled fringe. She was not very clever, being one of those amiable fool dogs whose quality of heart is their chief recommendation, but she had a certain wisdom of her own nevertheless.
Nowhere on all the coast was it possible to see a wider stretch of sky than from this plateau half-way down the sloping turf-clad cliff. On either side was ranked headland after headland, growing dimmer with the soft bruised hue of distance, while the plateau itself was set in an inward-curving stretch of cliff from which the whole line of the horizon made a vast convexity. Sometimes Ishmael would lie upon his back and, blotting the green protruding edge of the plateau from his mind, watch only the sky and sea, where, such was their expanse, it was often possible to glimpse three different weathers in one sweeping glance.
Away to the left, where, far out to sea, the Longs.h.i.+ps stuck a white finger out of the foam, a sudden squall might come up, obliterating lighthouse, headlands, all the sea to the cliff's foot, with its purple smother. Directly in front of him, below a piled ma.s.s of c.u.muli that hung darkly from zenith to horizon, a line of livid whiteness would show the sea's rim, while nearer him, half-way across the watery floor, great shafts of light, flanked by others of varying brightness, poured down from a gap in the cloud-roof and split themselves in patches of molten silver upon the leaden greyness. And at his furthest right a sky of pure pale blue might arch to where layers of filmy cirrus were blurred by a faint burnished hue that was neither brown nor rose but a mingling of the delicate exhaust of both.
Killigrew was not long in discovering this place, which he declared presented an unrivalled stage for the setting of vast dream-dramas he watched trailing their cloudy way across it, and Ishmael was not loth to share his plateau with him. The incursion of Va.s.sie was another matter, but by this time--nearly a month after that momentous birthday--Ishmael felt helplessly drifting. He was enjoying himself, while Killigrew showed no signs of wis.h.i.+ng to return to Paris and Va.s.sie was blooming as never before. She sat to him for sketches that never were finished, and that to her eyes, though she did not say so, looked just the same even when Killigrew declared a stroke more would wreck their perfection.
Ishmael was neglecting his personal supervision of the farm these days--he had developed a new theory that it was time he tested how far things could go well without him. He had heard a hint or two dropped to the effect that the friend from foreign parts was only amusing himself with proud Va.s.sie, but he paid no heed. What could be more absurd, he reflected, than the idea that she could want a boy a couple of years her junior and a mere student to fall in love with her? Thus Ishmael, while Killigrew laughed at him and with Va.s.sie all day long, and she glowed and answered him and seemed as light-hearted, as either of them.
On a sunlit day, one of those March days which, in Cornwall, can hold a sudden warmth borrowed from the months to come, they all three sat upon the gra.s.s of the plateau, accompanied by Boase, who had taken them on an expedition to an ancient British village, where, with many little screams, Va.s.sie's wide skirts had had to be squeezed and pulled through the dark underground ”rooms” of a dead people. Now, as the day drew to a burnished close, they all sat upon the soft turf, and Killigrew and Ishmael watched with half-closed eyes the play of the sea-birds below them. The wheatears flirted their black and white persons over the rocks, the gulls dipped and wheeled, planed past them on level wings, uttering their harsh cries, or for a flas.h.i.+ng moment rested so close that the blot of blood-red above their curved yellow beaks showed vividly; out to sea a gannet hung a sheer two hundred feet in air, then dropped, beak downwards.... He hit the sea like a stone with his plumage-padded breast, a column of water shot up from his meteoric fall, and he reappeared almost before it subsided with his prey already down his shaken throat. Killigrew clapped his hands in approbation and Va.s.sie feigned interest.
”What a life!” exclaimed Killigrew; ”if we do have to live again in the form of animals, I hope I shall be a bird, a sea-bird for choice. Just imagine being a gull or a gannet.... I wish one could paint the pattern they make in the air as they fly--a vast invisible web of curves, all of them pure beauty.”
”Don't wish to be a bird in this part of the world, then,” advised the Parson drily.
”Why not? Don't they have a good time?”
”If you had watched as long as I have ... seen all the mutilated birds with trailing legs and broken wings that pick up a miserable living as long as the warm weather lasts.... There's not a boy in the countryside, save a few in whom I've managed to instil the fear of the Lord, that doesn't think he's a perfect right to throw stones at them, and, worse, to catch them on devilish little hooks and as likely as not throw them aside to die when caught. Grown men do it--it's quite a trade. I know one who, if he catches on his hooks a bird he does not want, wrenches its beak open and, tearing the hook out, flings the bird away to die.
This just mutilates the bird sufficiently to prevent it getting caught and giving him all the trouble over again. And the Almighty does not strike this man with his lightning from heaven.... I sometimes marvel at the patience of G.o.d, and in my short-sighted ignorance even deplore it....”
”Don't tell me,” said Killigrew swiftly. ”I don't want to know. I'd rather think they were all safe and happy. It isn't as though one could do anything.”
”One can do very little. Lack of imagination, which is doubtless the sin against the Holy Ghost, is at the root of it, and to that the tongues of men and of angels plead in vain. But something can be done with the children, if one gets them young enough, or so one hopes. Sometimes I reproach myself because when one of the people who practise these abominations is in pain and grief, I look on and feel very little pity when I remember all. 'It is not here the pain of the world is swelled,'
I say to myself; 'it is out on the rocks, in the fields, where the little maimed things are creeping and wondering why, and the rabbits are crying all night in the traps....' It could all be so easily avoided; that's what makes it worse. Deliberately to augment the sum of suffering in the world, where there must be so much--it's inconceivable.”
”Like adding to the sum of ugliness. These people do that too,” said Killigrew, thinking of the hideous houses and chapels run up day by day; ”and it's all so beautiful and looks so happy if one only lets it alone....”
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