Miranda of the Balcony Part 1

Miranda of the Balcony.

by A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley) Mason.

CHAPTER I

IN WHICH A SHORT-SIGHTED TAXIDERMIST FROM TANGIER MAKES A DISCOVERY UPON ROSEVEAR

The discovery made a great stir amongst the islands, and particularly at St. Mary's. In the square s.p.a.ce before the Customs' House, on the little stone jetty, among the paths through the gorse of the Garrison, it became the staple subject of gossip, until another ship came ash.o.r.e and other lives were lost. For quite apart from its odd circ.u.mstances, a certain mystery lent importance to Ralph Warriner. It transpired that nearly two years before, when on service at Gibraltar, Captain Warriner of the Artillery had slipped out of harbour one dark night in his yacht, and had straightway disappeared; it was proved that subsequently he had been dismissed from the service; and the coroner of St. Mary's in a moment of indiscretion let slip the information that the Home Office had requested him to furnish it with a detailed history of the facts. The facts occurred in this sequence.

At seven o'clock of a morning in the last week of July, the St. Agnes lugger which carries the relief men to and fro between the Trinity House barracks upon St. Mary's and the Bishop Lighthouse in the Atlantic, ran alongside of St. Mary's pier. There were waiting upon the steps, the two lighthouse men, and a third, a small rotund Belgian of a dark, shiny countenance which seemed always on the point of perspiring. He was swathed in a borrowed suit of oilskins much too large for him, and would have cut a comical figure had he not on that raw morning looked supremely unhappy and pathetic. M. Claude Fournier was a taxidermist by profession and resided at Tangier; he was never backward in declaring that the evidences of his skill decorated many entrance-halls throughout Europe; and some three weeks before he had come holiday-making alone to the islands of Scilly.

He now stood upon the steps of the pier nervously polishing his gla.s.ses as the lugger swung upwards and downwards on the swell. He watched the relief men choose their time and spring on board, and just as Zebedee Isaacs, the master of the boat, was about to push off with his boat-hook, he nerved himself to speak.

"I go with you to the Bishop, is it not?"

Isaacs looked up in surprise. He had been wondering what had brought the little man out in this dress and on this morning.

"There'll be a head-wind all the way," he said discouragingly, "and wi' that and a heavy ground sea we'll be brave an' wet before we reach the Bishop, brave an' wet."

"I do not mind," replied M. Fournier. "For the sea, I am _devot_;" but his voice was tremulous and belied him.

Isaacs shook his head.

"It's not only the sea. Look!" And he stretched out his arm. A variable fog rolled and tumbled upon a tumbling wilderness of sea.

"I'ld sooner have two gales lashed together than sail amongst these islands in a fog. I'ld never go to-day at all, but the boat's more'n three weeks overdue."

Indeed, as M. Fournier looked seawards, there was no glimpse of land visible. A fortnight of heavy weather had been followed by a week of fog which enveloped the islands like a drenched blanket. Only to-day had it shown any signs of breaking, and the St. Agnes lugger was the first boat, so far as was known, to run the hazard of the sea. It is true that two days before one man had run in to the bar of Tregarthen's Hotel and told how he had stood upon the top of the Garrison and had looked suddenly down a lane between two perpendicular walls of mist, and had seen the water breaking white upon Great Smith Rock, and in the near distance an open boat under a mizzen and a jib, beating out through the heavy swell towards the west. But his story was in no wise believed.

To all of Isaacs's objections M. Fournier was impervious, and he was at last allowed to embark.

"Now!" cried Zebedee Isaacs, as the lugger rose. M. Fournier gave a pathetic look backwards to the land, shut his eyes and jumped. Isaacs caught and set him upon the floor of the boat, where he stood clutching the runners. He saw the landing-steps dizzily rush past him up to the sky like a Jacob's ladder, and then as dizzily shut downwards below him like a telescope.

The boat was pushed off. It rounded the pier-head and beat out on its first tack, across the Road. M. Fournier crouched down under the shelter of the weather bulwark.

"As for the sea I am _devot_," he murmured, with a watery smile.

In a little the boat was put about. From Sour Milk Ledge it was sailed on the port tack towards Great Minalto, and felt the wind and felt the sea. It climbed up waves till the red lug-sail swung over M.

Fournier's head like a canopy; and on the downward slope the heavy bows took the water with a thud. M. Fournier knelt up and clung to the stays. At all costs he must see. He stared into the shifting fog at the rollers which came hopping and leaping towards him; and he was very silent and very still, as though the fascination of terror enchained him.

On the third tack, however, he began to resume his courage. He even smiled over his shoulder towards Zebedee Isaacs at the tiller.

"As for the sea," he began to say, "I am--" But the statement, which he was not to verify on this day, ended in a shriek. For at that moment a great green wave hopped exultingly over the bows, and thenceforward all the way to the Bishop the lugger shipped much water.

M. Fournier's behaviour became deplorable. As Isaacs bluntly and angrily summarised it, "he lay upon the thwarts and screeched like a rook;" and in his appeals to his mother he was quite conventionally French.

He made no attempt to land upon the Lighthouse. The relief men were hoisted up in the sling, the head-keeper and one of his a.s.sistants were lowered, and the lugger started upon its homeward run before the wind. The fog thickened and lightened about them as they threaded the intricate channels of the western islands. Now it was a thin grey mist, parting here and there in long corridors, driven this way and that, twirling in spires of smoke, shepherded by the winds; now again it hung close about them an impenetrable umber, while the crew in short quick tones and gestures of the arms mapped out the rocks and pa.s.sages. About them they could hear the roar of the breaking waves and the rush of water up slabs and over ledges, and then the "glumph glumph" as the wave sucked away. At times, too, the fog lifted from the surface and hung very low, ma.s.sed above their heads, so that the black hillocks of the islets stood out in the sinister light like headstones of a cemetery of the sea, and at the feet of them the water was white like a flash of hungry teeth.

It was at one such moment, when the boat had just pa.s.sed through Crebawethan Neck, that M. Fournier, who had been staring persistently over the starboard bulwark, suddenly startled the crew.

"There's a ship on sh.o.r.e. _Tenez_--look!" he cried. "There, there!"

And as he spoke the mist drove between his eyes and what he declared that he saw.

Zebedee Isaacs looked in the direction.

"On Jacky's Rock?" he asked, nodding towards a menacing column of black rock which was faintly visible.

"No, no--beyond!--There!" And M. Fournier excitedly gesticulated. He seemed at that moment to have lost all his terror of the sea.

"On Rosevear, then," said the keeper of the lighthouse, and he strained towards Rosevear.

"I see nothing," he said, "and--"

"There's nothing to see," replied Isaacs, who did not alter his course.

"But it's true," exclaimed the little Belgian. "I see it no more myself. But I have seen it, I tell you. I have seen the mast above the island--"

"You!" interrupted Isaacs, with a blunt contempt; "you are blind!" And M. Fournier, before anyone could guess his intention, flung himself upon Isaacs and jammed the tiller hard over to port. The boat came broadside to the wind, heeled over, and in a second the water was pouring in over the gunwale. Zebedee wrenched the main sheet off the pin, and let the big sail fly; another loosed the jib. The prompt.i.tude of these two men saved the boat. It ran its head up into the wind, righted itself upon its keel, and lay with flapping sails and shivered.

Isaacs without a word caught hold of M. Fournier and shook him like a rat; and every man of the crew in violent tones expounded to the Belgian the enormity of his crime. Fournier was himself well-nigh frantic with excitement. He was undaunted by any threats of violence; neither the boat, nor the sea, nor the crew had any terrors for him.

"There is a ship!" he screamed. "The fog was vanished--just for a second it was vanished, and I have seen it. There may be men alive on that rock--starving, perishing, men of the sea like you. You will not leave them. But you shall not!" And clinging to the mast he stamped his feet. "But you shall not!"

"And by the Lord he's right," said the lighthouse-keeper, gravely--so gravely that complete silence at once fell upon the crew. One man stood up in the bows, a second knelt upon the thwarts, a third craned his body out beyond the stern, and all with one accord stared towards Rosevear. The screen of haze was drawn aside, and quite clear to the view over a low rock, rose the mast and tangled cordage of a wreck.

The sheets were made fast without a word. Without a word, Zebedee Isaacs put the boat about and steered it into the Neck between Rosevear and Rosevean. As they pa.s.sed along that narrow channel, no noise was heard but the bustle of the tide. For at the western end they saw the bows of a ship unsteadily poised upon a ledge. There was a breach amidships, the stern was under water, only the foremast stood; and nowhere was there any sign of life.

Isaacs brought the boat to in a tiny creek, some distance from the wreck.

"We can land here," he said, and the lighthouse-keeper and Fournier stepped ash.o.r.e.

On the instant that quiet, silent islet whirred into life and noise.

So startling was the change that M. Fournier jumped backwards while his heart jerked within him.

"What's that?" he cried, and then laughed as he understood. For a cloud of puffins, gulls, kittiwakes and shearwaters whirled upwards from that nursery of sea-birds and circled above his head, their cries sounding with infinite melancholy, their wings flickering like silver in that grey and desolate light.

"It's so like your Robinson Crusoe," said M. Fournier.

"It is more like our islands of Scilly," said the lighthouse-keeper, as he looked towards the wreck.

They climbed over the low rocks and walked along the crown of the island towards the wreck. There was no tree or shrub upon the barren soil, only here a stretch of sandy gra.s.s, there a patch of mallows--mallows of a rusty green and whitened with salt of the sea.

In the midst of one such patch they came upon the body of a man. He was dressed in a pilot coat, sea boots and thick stockings drawn over his trousers to the hips, and he lay face downwards with his head resting upon his arms in a natural posture of sleep.

Fournier stood still. The lighthouse-keeper walked forward and tapped the sleeper upon the shoulder. But the sleeper did not wake. The lighthouse man knelt down and gently turned the man over upon his back; as he did so, or rather just before he did so, Fournier turned sharply away with a shudder. When the sailor was lying upon his back, the keeper of the lighthouse started with something of a shudder too.

For the sailor had no face.

The lighthouse man drew his handkerchief from his pocket and gently covered the head. It seemed almost as if Fournier had been waiting, had been watching, for this action. For he turned about immediately and stood by the lighthouse-keeper's side. Above the lonely islet the sea-birds circled and called; on the sea the mist was now no more than a gauze, and through it the glow of the sun was faintly diffused.