IN WHICH JASPER BEGG MAKES UP HIS MIND WHAT TO DO

Now, she was sitting in the garden, in a kind of arbour built of leaves, and near by her was her relative, the rats’-tailed old lady we used to call Aunt Rachel. The pair didn’t see me as I passed in, but a Chinese servant gave “Good-day” to the yellow man we’d picked up coming down; and, at that, Miss Ruth for so I call her, not being able to get Mme. Czerny into my head Miss Ruth, I say, stood up, and, the colour tumbling into her cheeks like the tide into an empty pool, she stood for all the world as though she were struck dumb and unable to say a word to any man. I, meanwhile, fingered my hat and looked foolish; for it was an odd kind of job to have come twelve thousand miles upon, and what to say to her with the hulking seaman at my elbow, the Lord forgive me if I knew.

“Miss Ruth,” says I at last, “I’m here according to orders, and the ship’s here, and we’re waiting for you to go aboard ”

Well, she seemed to hear me like one who did not catch the meaning of it. I saw her put her hand to her throat as though something were choking her, and the old lady, the one we called Aunt Rachel, cried, “God bless me,” two or three times together. But the yellow man was the next to speak, and he crossed right over to our Miss Ruth’s side, and talked in her ear in a voice you could have heard up at the hills.

“You’ll not be going aboard to-day, lady. Why, what would the master have to say, he coming home from foreign parts and you not ashore to meet him? You didn’t say nothing about any ship, not as I can remember, and mighty pleased the guv’nor will be when he knows about it. Shall I tell this party he’d better be getting aboard again, eh, ma’am? Don’t you think as he’d better be getting aboard again?”

He shouted this out for all the world like a man hailing from one ship to another.I don’t know what put it into my head, but I knew from that moment that my mistress was afraid, aye, deadly afraid, as it is given few to fear in this life. Not that she spoke of it, or showed it by any sign a stranger might have understood; but there was a look in her eyes which was clear to me; “and by my last word,” said I to myself, “I’ll know the truth this day, though there be one or a hundred yellow boys!” None the less, I held my tongue as a wise man should, and what I said was spoken to the party with the beard.

“You’ve a nice soft voice for a nightingale, that you have,” says I; “if you’d let yourself out for a fog-horn to the Scilly Isles, you’d go near to make your fortune!Is the young lady deaf that you want to bawl like a harbour-master? Easy, my man,” says I, “you’ll hurt your beautiful throat.”

Well, he turned round savage enough, but my mistress, who had stood all the while like a statue, spoke now for the first time, and holding out both her hands to me, she cried:

“Oh, Captain Begg, Captain Begg, is it you at last, to walk right here like this?I can’t believe it,” she said; “I really can’t believe it!”

“Why, that’s so,” said I, catching her American accent, which was the prettiest thing you ever heard; “I’m on the way to ’Frisco, and I put in here according to my promise. My ship’s out yonder, Miss Ruth, and there’s some aboard that knows you Peter Bligh and Mister Jacob; and this one, this is little Dolly Venn,” said I, presenting him, “though he’ll grow bigger by-and-bye.”

With this I pushed the boy forward, and he, all silly and blushing as sailors will be when they see a pretty woman above their station he took her hand and heaved it like a pump-handle; while old Aunt Rachel, the funny old woman in the glasses, she began to talk a lot of nonsense about seamen, as she always did, and for a minute or two we might have been a party of friends met at a street corner.

“I’m glad to find you well, Captain Begg,” said she. “Such a dangerous life, too, the mariner’s. I always pity you poor fellows when you climb the rattlesnakes on winter’s nights.”

“Ratlins, you mean, ma’am,” said I, “though for that matter, a syllable or two don’t count either way. And I hope you’re not poorly, ma’am, on this queer shore.”

“I like the island,” says she, solemn and stiff-like; “my dear nephew is an eccentric, but we must take our bread as we find it on this earth, Mister Begg, and thankful for it too. Poor Ruth, now, she is dreadfully distressed and unhappy; but I tell her it will all come right in the end. Let her be patient a little while and she will have her own way. She wants for nothing here she has every comfort.If her husband chooses such a home for her, she must submit. It is our duty to submit to our husbands, captain, as the catechism teaches us.”

“Aye, when you’ve got ’em,” thought I, but I nodded my head to the old lady, and turned to my mistress, who was now speaking to me.

“You’ll lunch here; why, yes, captain you mustn’t find us inhospitable, even if you leave us at once. Mr. Denton, will you please to tell them that Captain Begg lunches with me as soon as possible?”

She turned to the yellow man to give him the order; but there was no mistaking the look which passed between them, saying on her side:“Allow me to do this,” on his, “You will suffer for it afterwards.” But he went up to the veranda of the house right enough, and while he was bawling to the cook, I spoke the first plain word to Mme. Czerny.

“Mistress,” I said, “the ship’s there shall we go or stay?”

I had meant it to be the plain truth between us; on her part the confession whether she needed me or did not; on mine the will to serve her whatever might happen to me. To my dying day, I shall never forget her answer.

“Go,” she said, so low that it was little more than a whisper, “but, oh, for God’s sake, Jasper Begg, come back to me again.”

I nodded my head and turned the talk.The man Denton, the one with the yellow beard (rated as Kess Denton on the island), was back at my side almost before she had finished. The old lady began to talk about “curling-spikes” and “blue Saint Peters,” and how much the anchor weighed, and all that sort of blarney which she thought ship-shape and suited to a poor sailor-man’s understanding.I told her a story of a shark that swallowed a missionary and his hymn-book, and always swam round our ship at service times afterwards and that kept her thinking a bit. As for little Dolly Venn, he couldn’t keep his eyes off Miss Ruth and I didn’t wonder, for mine went that way pretty often. Aye, she had changed, too, in those twelve months that had passed since last I saw her, the prettiest bride that ever held out a finger for a ring in the big church at Nice. Her cheeks were all fallen away and flushed with a colour which was cruelly unhealthy to see. The big blue eyes, which I used to see full of laughter and a young girl’s life, were ringed round with black, and pitiful when they looked at you. The hair parted above the forehead, as it always was, and brought down in curls above her little ears, didn’t seem to me so full of golden threads as it used to be. But it was good to hear her plucky talk, there at the dinner-table, when she chattered away like some sweet-singing bird, and Dolly couldn’t turn away his eyes, and the yellow boy stood, sour and savage, behind her chair, and threw out hints for me to sheer off which might have moved the Bass Rock. Not that he need have troubled himself, for I had made up my mind already what to do; and no sooner was the food stowed away than I up and spoke about the need of getting on again, and such like. And with that I said “Good-bye” to Mistress Ruth and “Good-bye” to the old woman, and had a shot left in my locker for the yellow boy, which I don’t doubt pleased him mightily.

“Good luck to you,” says I; “if you’d a wisp of your hair, I’d put it in my locket and think of you sometimes.When you want anything from London you just shout across the sea and we’ll be hearing you.Deadman’s Horn is nothing to you,” said I; “you’d scare a ship out of the sea, if you wasn’t gentle to her.”

Mind you, I said all this as much to put him off as anything else, for I’d been careful enough to blab no word about the Southern Cross being Miss Ruth’s very own ship, nor about her orders that we should call at Ken’s Island; and I knew that when a man’s angry at what you say to him he doesn’t think much of two and two making four, but as often as not makes them eight or ten. May-be, said I, he’ll make it out that I’m on a tramp bound for ’Frisco and have touched here on the way and certainly he won’t look for my coming back again once he sees our smoke on the sky-line. Nor was I wrong.My mistress was to tell me that much before twelve hours had passed.

And so it was that I said “Good-bye” to her, she standing at the garden-gate with a brave smile upon her pretty face, and the yellow man behind her like a savage dog that is afraid to bite, but has all the mind to. At the valley’s head I turned about, and she was still there, looking up wistfully to the hills we trod. Thrice I waved my hand to her, and thrice she answered, and then together, the lad and I, we entered the dark wood and saw her no more.

“Your best leg forward, lad,” said I to him, “and mum’s the word.There’s work to do on the ship, and work ashore for a woman’s sake. Are you game for that, Dolly are you game, my boy?”

Well, he didn’t answer me.Some one up in the black gorge above fired a rifle just as I spoke; and the bullet came singing down like a bird on the wing. Not a soul could I see, not a sound could I hear when the rolling echoes had passed away. It was just the silence of the thicket and of the great precipices which headed it a silence which might freeze a man’s heart because the danger which threatened him was hidden.

“Crouch low to the rocks, lad, and go easy,” cried I, when my wits came back again; “that’s a tongue it doesn’t do to quarrel with. The dirty skunks to fire on unarmed men! But we’ll return it, Dolly; as I live I’ll fire a dozen for every one they send us.”

“Return it, sir,” says he; “but aren’t you going aboard?”

“Aye,” says I, “and coming back again like drift on an open sea. Now let me see you skip across that bridge, and no mistake about it.”

He darted across the chasm’s bridge like a chamois. I followed him quick and clumsy. If my heart was in my mouth well, let that pass. Not for my own sake did I fear mortal man that day, but for the sake of a woman whose very life I believed to be in danger.