Part 4 (1/2)

Fiona managed to walk, by repeating to herself all the time under her breath, ”You mustn't run, you mustn't run.” But once in the boat she did not rebuke the Urchin for standing up and taking the other oar; and the pair paddled out, with many b.u.mpings and sc.r.a.pings, in a more speedy and less scientific manner than that in which they had entered.

Once out in the sunlight they felt better. They started automatically to fish home, and presently were talking again. But neither of them referred to the thing that was uppermost in each mind, though each was wondering if the other knew. For as they had sat on the wall of rock, each had heard clearly, in the utter darkness of the unvisited cave, the sound of heavy footsteps.

CHAPTER IV

THE URCHIN VANISHES

To most people there is some corner of the earth which means more than all others; and there are two or three in the world whose holy place is the old house on the sea-loch which the Student's humbler neighbors called the ”big house.” An old square building of gray stone, that matches the gray sky and the gray sea, it has small claims to beauty; it was built in the days of blank windows, and every wind in the island meets and screams round the battered iron bal.u.s.trade which leads up its steps to the door, and strives to tear down the tendrils of ivy that cling to the east front. To the south front, lashed by the full Atlantic gales, not even ivy can cling; only a few twisted elders and stunted planes grow there, and take the first force of the winter wind; but the old lawn to the north bursts in summer into a cloud of white marguerites, whose ethereal beauty at sunset is like the ghosts of the dreams that haunt the place. For to some of us the old house is full of dreams, that cling to the dark pa.s.sages and the uneven floors, and play in and out of the little windows that are still propped open with wood, as they were a hundred years ago; dreams of the bright lights and the bright voices that greeted us, coming in out of the blinding rain; dreams of the dance and the song, songs of old lost causes from which all bitterness has died away, leaving to-day nothing but beauty behind them; dreams of faded joys and forgotten sorrows, of loves that have pa.s.sed elsewhere and of memories that abide; dreams of faces that are seen no more. Some day it will change owners.h.i.+p; it will be sold to someone from whom understanding of these things has been withheld, and who will see only the darkness of the old corridors, the shabbiness of the old doorway; and he will build new doors, and porticoes and a wide verandah, and make it fair within and without, levelling the floors and tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the lawns; and he will have destroyed the old house and the fragrance of it, and it will never return. But to-day it still stands as it has stood for many a long year, clothed in the memories that never leave it and rich in all that the past has built into it; and to some who may never dwell there again it is yet ever present as the home of their hearts' desire, a true house of faery.

The Student had let the old house to the Urchin's father. He was a tall, thin man with a hooked nose, and he knew more about one particular family of Coleoptera than anyone living. He had taken the place, not because he wanted it for its shooting, but because one of the beetles of his family was reputed to be plentiful in the neighborhood. He was never there long; he was never anywhere long. For thirty years he had pursued his beetles over five continents; his measurements of their wing cases alone filled nine enormous MS.

volumes. His great work on the variation of the length of the wing case in beetles kept in captivity had become a cla.s.sic. Scientific men had nothing but praise for the book; several even read it. The majority believed that he had re-founded Neo-Mendelism past any overthrowing; a small but persistent minority argued that, on the contrary, he had utterly overthrown the Neo-Mendelians. All, however, agreed that the book was epoch-making, even though they differed utterly as to the sort of epoch which it made. The author himself was a shy and modest person, who never lost his temper except when people sent him unpaid parcels from Timbuctoo or Khamchatka containing beetles of other families in which he took no interest. On the rare occasions when he could be induced to go into society, kind-hearted hostesses, who saw no reason why one crawling thing should not do as well as another had been known to try to please him by starting a conversation about ladybirds or earwigs; and it was said to be worth foregoing one's cigar to hear him explain, with a chuckle, that though earwigs or ladybirds were no doubt meritorious creatures in their several spheres, and possibly legitimate objects of study to others, they were not his subject; his subject was a particular family of Coleoptera. He and the Student had become great friends, and when he was in the island he would often drop in to see the Student's bookroom after dinner and there the two would sit, one on either side of the fire, each smoking at a tremendous pace and talking hard on his own subject. Neither ever expected an answer from the other; neither ever got one. But they had silently established an unwritten law that when one had talked for three minutes by the clock on the mantelpiece he was to stop and let the other have a turn; and when at last they said good night, each felt that they had both had a thoroughly enjoyable evening. And so they had.

Unlike to unlike. The Urchin's father had married the daughter of a stockbroker, who, on her death, had left him two legacies; one was the Urchin, and the other was an occasional visitation from her brother Jeconiah. Mr. Jeconiah P. Johnson, the well-known promoter of companies, was a short, stout man with a red face and a s.h.i.+fty blue eye, always immaculately dressed in broadcloth with a huge expanse of white waistcoat, over which sprawled his double watch chain and his triple chin. There were possibly some good points even about Jeconiah, if anything so rotund could be said to have points; but there were certainly not many. He was supposed by some to possess what is called ”a high standard of business morality”; it would be truer to say that his code was prehistoric. He had so far kept himself right with the law, because he had mastered the sordid maxim which proclaims that honesty is the best policy; no other reason was likely to occur to him. With some effort he had succeeded in formulating a rule of conduct of which he was rather proud: Do good to yourself and your friends and evil to those who stand in your way. If anyone had told him that the philosophy of ethics took its rise, some twenty-two centuries ago, in a reaction against a similar rule, he would have remarked jocosely that he never studied back numbers. Of anything more exalted than ”policy,” anything not to be reckoned in terms of .s.d., he was as ignorant as a hippopotamus.

He was never very fond of his right hand's knowing what his left hand did; for while the right hand promoted companies, the left hand, by means of a manager and a registered alias, carried on a very useful little money-lender's business. He was never averse to putting the screw on, if there was anything to be got by it; and sometimes he got rather funny things. Recently he had had a broken debtor on his hands, and had taken what he could get; among other things, an old bureau full of papers. Jeconiah, being a methodical soul, had turned a clerk on to sort the papers; and the clerk had presently brought him the long lost map of the Scargill cave, and a sheet of paper containing somebody's rough explanation of what it was supposed to be. Jeconiah, who had heard the story, scented possibilities, and, it being a slack time in the City, promptly invited himself to his brother-in-law's house to recover from an attack of influenza. That is how Jeconiah comes into this story. It could not be helped, for he had the map. The finner had said he was too fat to count; but that is where the finner was wrong.

Jeconiah forthwith gave his mind, such as it was, to the subject of caves. Diffidence was not his failing, and he cross-examined every person he could find, concealing, of course, his real object. He collected a splendid amount of rubbish; but he was acute enough where his pocket was concerned, and out of the rubbish he presently dragged forth the fact of the haunted cave which no one would enter. Whereon Jeconiah went over to Scargill to fish, and had a look at the lie of the island; settled with himself that it seemed a good enough place for a wreck, and told the keeper to row him into the west cave. But the keeper, who had no particular liking for Jeconiah, refused point-blank, and told him he would not find a man in the island who would do it; and Jeconiah, who had suddenly lost interest in the fis.h.i.+ng, went home in a bad temper. This happened the day after the two children were in the cave; and the day after that the Urchin's father received an excited cablegram from Brazil on the subject of his beloved beetles. He rushed down at once to see the Student.

”I am going to Brazil, I don't know for how long,” he said. ”And my boy can't go back to school for a month or more, as they have scarlet fever in the village there. And I don't like to leave him with the housekeeper, and I start in two hours. Will you take him?”

”Delighted,” said the Student. ”Fiona will look after him.”

So the Urchin came, and with him came to Fiona a sense of responsibility for him. She couldn't help it.

But Jeconiah showed no intention of moving. On the contrary, the after-effects of influenza were still troubling him sorely, it seemed.

At last the Urchin's father had to tell him to stay a week or two longer, if he wanted to; the servants would be there anyhow. And Jeconiah thanked him and settled down to stay, as he had meant to do all along. But as soon as his brother-in-law was gone he took the car and went off for the day. The chauffeur said that he went to a lot of places and talked to a lot of people; and a couple of days later two strange men in a boat entered the bay and proceeded to camp out on a part of the sh.o.r.e which was not the Student's property. Jeconiah had, in fact, hired the boat, and found a couple of ne'er-do-wells from the mainland who knew nothing of him and were ready to row him anywhere in pursuit of his business, which was understood to be photographing wild birds for an ill.u.s.trated paper.

Jeconiah had, however, made one great mistake. He was aware that you must not neglect little things, and he had neglected quite a big little thing--the Urchin. He had never spoken to him about caves, or taken the least notice of the boy's movements. And the Urchin on his side had been hard at work. He had confessed to Fiona on the subject of the footsteps, and she to him; and they had agreed, under the broad healthy light of day, that probably they had been mistaken and afraid of the dark, and that with lanterns it would be all right. They agreed, however, that it was necessary to have a really good light, and the difficulty was to find one. It was the Urchin who came forward as the saviour of society by proposing to win over Jones, the chauffeur, and get the loan of one of the big acetylene head-lamps from the car. Jones, a newcomer, had not yet heard about the cave, and, being English, he had not yet found his feet among his fellows and was glad of any sort of diversion. The Urchin wound up a triumphant half hour of diplomacy by making Jones promise to lend him one of the headlights and show him how to work it. Then the Urchin fell, as many greater men have fallen; he was lifted up with pride, and told Jones that Fiona and he were going treasure-hunting. Jones grinned; but that evening he talked; and in due course Jeconiah heard.

Fiona was digging in her garden, or rather in the Urchin's, for she had a.s.signed him one bit of it, which she had to cultivate for him; otherwise it would have run waste, for all the work the Urchin put into it. Her garden was one corner of the old walled garden of the Student's house, which was not very well kept now. Once it had been gay with flowers and rich with fruit; but now few flowers grew there save such as could look after themselves, and the fruit had come down to two gnarled old apple trees, in which Fiona had made her earliest experiments in climbing. Most of the ground, so far as it was in use, was now given over to cabbages and potatoes; but in June the borders were sweet with double white narcissus, and now in September there was a revel of unpruned roses, their blooms growing smaller year by year, and a ma.s.s of the dark-red blossoms of the little west coast fuchsia, which knows how to live through the winter. One deserted corner was gay with Turk's turban, which still had strength to push up through the ever-thickening tangle of weeds; and groups of winter crocus were coming up in the borders, and among them a few s.h.i.+rley poppies which Fiona had sown herself. Fiona had had thoughts of taking the garden in hand, but the s.p.a.ce enclosed by the old walls was far too large for her to manage unaided; and as there was no money to pay a proper gardener, she had had to content herself with clearing one corner.

Here she had achieved a riot of color. She had made a little rockery of oak-leaf and beech ferns brought down from the hill, sentinelled by tall pink foxgloves; the worn-out plum trees against the wall behind were threaded and festooned with thick trailers of yellow and scarlet nasturtium; and in front of the rockery, her especial pride, was a great bed of velvet pansies, rich with every hue of the rainbow. They were flanked by simple annuals, filmy pink poppies, orange escholtzias and sweet-scented mignonette; and in a bed by themselves were the gold and crimson snapdragons which the Urchin had begged for her from the gardener at the big house.

She must needs dig up a centipede, one of the small yellow ones. They were her special dislike. The centipede did not like being dug up either, and writhed himself into seven different sets of tangles at once, as is the way of the smaller centipedes.

”You horrid little yellow beast,” she said, forgetting that he could understand, and made a dab at him with her spade, which, to her relief, missed him. She felt she had done her duty by hitting at him, but did not hide from herself that she had really missed him on purpose.

”Little's all right,” said the centipede, ”and yellow's all right; and though I'm not really a beast, we will let it go at that. But I'm not a bit horrid.”

”But I don't like you,” said Fiona, ”and you wriggle so.”

”In the circles in which I move,” said the centipede, ”my wriggling is much admired. And the mere fact that you do not like me--which, I may remind you, is only a subjective impression and has neither objective validity nor permanent value--does not ent.i.tle you to call me names.

You ought to have learnt better, with that bangle of yours. For all you know, I may be a model of the more unselfish virtues.”

”But you eat the roots of my flowers,” said Fiona.

”That is the first I have heard of it,” said the centipede. ”But one lives and learns. It need not be the same one, though, who does both.