Chapter 6

"Of course it is. That's what we came for, isn't it? You'll feel it yourself before you're two days older, my child. You're looking better than I've seen you for a month past."

"It's so delightful to feel free," said Miss Chum.

III

Thoroughly tired out, and with a guardian angel on the mat at his bedside, in the shape of a long brown body which sought fresh ease in an occasional sprawl, and flopped a responsive tail each time he dropped a friendly pat on to its head in the dark--Graeme looked confidently for a sound night's rest.

He fell asleep indeed at once, but woke with a start sometime in the night, with the impression of a sound in his ears. Had he really heard something? Or was it only the tail-end of a dream? Wood-lined houses talk in the night. Was it only the pitch pine whispering of the old free days in the scented woods? He could not be sure, so he lay still and listened.

And as he waited, it came again--a low, wailing cry, long-drawn and somewhat curdling to the blood.

Outside or inside? He could not be sure.

Cats? Cats can do wonders in the way of uncanny noises, but somehow this did not sound like cats. There was something human, or inhuman, in it, and his door suddenly shook as though something tried to get in.

He bethought him to feel for Punch. But his hand fell on space, and as he struck a match to see the time and what had become of his companion, the church bell tolled one dismal stroke, and he saw Punch standing like a bronze statue at the door, with his nose down at the crack, his tail on the droop, and every hair apparently on the bristle.

At the glow of the match the drooping tail gave one slow swing, but he did not look round.

Graeme struck another match, and lit his candle, and jumped into his shoes.

"What is it, old fellow?" And Punch scraped furiously at the door again, and so explained that part of the matter.

There came a sudden scuffling fall against the door. Punch rasped at it with his front feet in strenuous silence. If he had been able to give voice it would have been a relief to both of them. His mute anxiety added to the weirdness of the proceedings, and Graeme experienced a novel creeping about the nape of the neck.

Ghosts or no ghosts, however, it had to be looked into. He picked up a heavy boot, turned the key, and flung open the door. Punch went down the stairs in two long bounds, and a rush of cold air put out the candle. He laid it down and followed cautiously, ready to launch the boot at the first sign of uncanniness.

The rush of night air came through a small pantry opening off the hall. The window in it was wide open, and there was no sign of Punch. He and the ghost had evidently gone through that way. Graeme and the boot followed.

It was a dark night between moons. The velvet-black vault was brilliant with stars, but the earth was full of shadows. The fleshy leaves of the eucalyptus trees showed pale against the darkness. The night wind set them rustling eerily. From somewhere beyond them, past the dark hedge, there came a sound of subdued strife. Graeme clutched his boot and sped towards it, drenched with dew from every disturbed branch.

The sounds led him into the potato patch in the lower garden, and in the dimness he became aware that Punch was standing on something that struggled to get up and was held down by the great brown paws and body.

No ghost, evidently. Graeme dropped his boot and stooped and laid hold of the struggler, and knew in a moment, in spite of his own disturbance of mind, that this ghost at all events had materialised into the bodily form of Master Johnnie Vautrin, and he wondered how many more might have done the same if they had been followed up as closely.

He lifted the squirming small boy who had not spoken a word.

"So this is what Sark ghosts are made of, is it, Master Johnnie?" he asked, giving him a shake. "You little scamp! For once you shall have what you jolly well deserve," and he carried him, kicking and wriggling, back to the house, shoved him through the window, and held him with one hand while he got through himself. Punch followed with an easy bound, and they all went upstairs. Graeme found his candle, and lit it and looked at his prisoner.

Johnnie was covered with mould from the potato patch, but his black eyes gleamed through it as brightly as ever, and, as far as Graeme could distinguish through its masking, his face showed no sign of confusion.

"Do you know what we do with naughty little ghosts in England, Johnnie?"

Johnnie's eyes glittered like a snake's.

"We spank 'em, Johnnie. I'm going to spank you--hard."

Then Johnnie spoke.

"I'll put tha evil eye on you."

"Two if you like, my son,--or twenty if you've got 'em handy. Evil eyes rather tickle me. We'll see which makes most impression--my hand or your eye," and he laid the black-magic man across his knee, and gave him such a genuine motherly quilting as he had never experienced in his life before. Hot blows he was accustomed to, but this cool, relentless, tingling flagellation, all on the one spot, and continued till every particle of blood in his body seemed to leap to meet each stroke, was new to him, and it made a great and lasting impression.

He did not cry, but tried to bite and scratch the operator, and Punch stood looking on with a grave smile on his face and a slowly swinging tail expressive of the greatest satisfaction.

Discipline over, Graeme handed him out through the pantry window, bade him to go home to bed, and fastened the window behind him. The night passed without further disturbance, and Graeme awoke as the dawn glimmered golden on his wide-open window.

In ten minutes he was racing bareheaded past Colinette and La Forge towards Les Lâches, a towel round his neck and Punch bounding silently by his side. They had stolen out the back way through the top of the post-office fields, and had left Scamp still prisoner in the woodhouse, lest the hysterical joy of his release should disturb the ladies.

And presently they were racing back home, all aglow with the tingling kisses of the waves, and rough of hair with the salt and the wind.

The sun was up but not yet stripped for the long day's race to the west. The eastern skies still gleamed through a faery haze with the soft iridescence of a young ormer shell, the tender pinks and greens and golds of the new day's birth-chamber mellowing upwards into the glorious blue of a day of days.

'The year's at the spring, The day's at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hillside's dew-pearled: The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn; God's in his heaven-- All's right with the world!'

The lilt of the joyous words had often been with him as he sped through the sleeping fields to his morning plunge.

This day of days, as though his soul forecasted what was coming, they sang in his heart and on his lips. His cure was surely near completion. The salt was regaining its savour. Life was worth living again.

And it was then, when he had come through the valley and was ready to climb again, that the glory came to him.

As the two friends sprang lightly over the turf wall into the garden of the Red House, they saw a sight which one of them will not forget as long as he lives.

In the gap of the tall hedge, where the path led down to the cottage,--ringed in its darkness like a lovely picture in a sombre frame, with a pale eucalyptus rising stately on either side; and behind it all, and gleaming softly through and round it all, the tender glories of the new day,--stood a girl in a dove-coloured dress, bareheaded, holding the dew-pearled branches apart with her two hands, and gazing at him with wide eyes, and parted lips, and startled face.

And the girl was Margaret Brandt.

IV

Graeme's first thought was that he was dreaming. He blinked his eyes to make sure they were not playing him false.

If she had disappeared at that moment, he would have sworn to hallucinations and the visibility of spirits to the day of his death.

But she did not disappear, and Punch proved her no spirit by stalking gravely up to give her welcome. Without taking her startled eyes off Graeme, she dropped one white hand on to the great brown head and the diamonds sprinkled her dove-coloured dress.

"Mr. Graeme!" she said, in a voice which very fully expressed her own doubts as to his reality also.

"Mar--Miss Brandt? ... Is it possible?"

They had both drawn nearer, he along the broad gravel walk, she along the narrow path between the eucalyptus trees.

"Are you quite sure you are real?" he asked breathlessly, and for answer she laughed and stretched a friendly hand towards him.

He took it with shining eyes, and then bent suddenly and kissed it gently, and his eyes were shining still more brightly as she drew it hastily away.

"But whatever brings you here?" she asked abruptly.

"We're just out of the sea,"--and the joy of the sea and the morning, and this greatest thing of all, was in his face.

"But _why_ are you here? What are you doing here?"

"Doing? We're living here."

"Did you know I was here? How----?" she began, with a puzzled wrinkle of the fair white brow, and stopped.

"I did not know. I wish I had."

"If you did not know, how--why----?"

"If I had known perhaps I should not have dared to follow you. On the whole I'm glad I did not know."

"I don't understand.... How long have you been here?"

"Just four weeks," he said, with a smile at thought of the blackness of those four weeks now that he stood in the sunshine.

"Four weeks! Then you mean--you mean that I--that we--followed----"

"In the mere matter of time, yes!--and of place too," he laughed." For you turned me out of my rooms."

"Do you mean to say you are the Bogey-Man?"

"Well,--no one ever called me so to my face before, but I'm bound to say I've felt uncommonly like one for the past four or five weeks."

"Come with me," she said hastily. "I must put this right at once, or Hennie----" and she turned and went through the gap in the hedge.

"Put what right?" he asked, as he followed.

"Oh--you," she said hastily.

"I'm all right--now. And who is Hennie?"

"My friend Miss Penny--"

"I beg your pardon. I thought you said Hennie."

"Henrietta Penny. She was at school with me. We are taking care of one another."

They had come to the forecourt of the cottage.

"Hen!" cried Margaret. The window was wide open, but the blind was discreetly down.

"Hello, Chum!" came back in muffled tones. "What's up now? Been and got yourself lost again?"

"Come out, dear. I want you."

"Half a jiff, old girl. Give a fellow a chance with his back hair. You had first tub this morning, remember." At which Graeme's eyes twinkled in unison with Margaret's.

"There's a gentleman waiting to see you, dear," said Margaret, to prevent any further revelations.

"A _what_?"--and there followed a clatter of falling implements as though a sudden start had sent them flying. "Wretch!--to upset one like that! It's that big brown dog, I suppose. I know you, my child!"

Then the blind whirled up and a merry face, in a cloud of dishevelled hair, looked out, a pair of horrified eyes rested momentarily on Graeme, and the blind rattled down again with something that sounded like a muffled feminine objurgation.

And presently the inner door opened and Miss Penny came forth demurely, and bowed distantly in the direction of Margaret and Graeme.

She was of average height but inclined to plumpness, and so looked smaller than Margaret; and she had no great pretensions to beauty, Graeme thought--but then he was biassed for life and incapable of free and impartial judgment--save such as might be found in a very frank face given to much laughter, a rather wide mouth and nice white teeth, abundant dark hair and a pair of challenging brown eyes which now, getting over their first confusion--and finding herself at all events fully dressed, wherein she had the advantage of him--rested with much appreciation on the young man in front of her.

The salt water was still in his hair, and the discrepancies in his hasty attire were but partly hidden by the damp towel round his neck. Nevertheless he was very good to look upon. His moustache showed crisp against the healthy brown of his face; his hair, short as it was, had a natural ripple which sea-water could not reduce; and his eyes were brimming with the new joy of life and repressed laughter. Miss Penny liked the looks of him.

"Margaret Brandt, I will never forgive you as long as I live," said she emphatically.

"All right, dear! This is Mr. Bogey-man whose rooms we have appropriated. He wished to be introduced to the other malefactor. Miss Henrietta Penny--Mr. John Graeme! Mr. Graeme and I have met before."

If Mr. John Graeme had had more experience of women, the flash that shot across from the brown eyes to the dark blue ones might have told him stories--for instance, that his name and would-have-been standing towards her friend were not entirely unknown to Miss Penny; that, for a brief half second, she wondered--doubted--and instantly chid herself for such a thought in connection with Margaret Brandt.

But Margaret herself, being a woman, caught the momentary challenge and repelled it steadily.

"I am very pleased to meet you, Miss Penny--in such a place, and in such company. I have heard of you from Miss Brandt," said Graeme.

"Never till five minutes ago," laughed Margaret.

"Yes, if you will pardon me--once before, at Lady Elspeth Gordon's. Unless I am mistaken, Miss Penny had just been across to Dublin to take a degree which Cambridge ungallantly declined to confer upon her."

"Quite right!" said Miss Penny. "M.A. They're misogynists at Cambridge."

"Will you oblige me by informing Miss Penny, Mr. Graeme, that this meeting is purely accidental? I caught a spark in her eye and I know what it means. Had you the very slightest idea that we were coming to Sark?"

"Not the remotest. When I saw you standing in the hedge there, with the morning glories all about you, I first doubted my eyes, then I thought you a vision--"

"And do you think it possible that I knew of you being here?"

"I am certain you did not. Nobody knows. I left no address, and I told no one where I was going. I have not had a letter since I left London. I have been buried alive in this heavenly little place."

"There now, Mademoiselle," said Margaret, with a bow. "Are you satisfied now?"

"I was satisfied before you opened your mouth, my dear. The possibility inevitably suggested itself, but it was stillborn. Has not our friendship passed its seventh birthday?"

"Thank you, dear. But the coincidence of our coming to bury ourselves in Sark, and Mr. Graeme's coming to bury himself in Sark, was almost unbelievable."

"Not at all," said Miss Penny. "If you could both trace back you would probably find the same original spring of action--a chance word from some common friend, or some article you have both read. Then, when circumstances loosed the spring, you both shot in the same direction. What was it loosed your spring, Mr. Graeme?"

"Well,--I wanted to get away out of things. I'm busy on a book, you see, and I'd heard of Sark--"

"Same here!" said Miss Penny--"less the book. We wanted to get away out of things--and people, and we'd heard of Sark, and here we are. Was it you suggested Sark, or I, Meg?"

"I'm sure I don't know, dear. You, I should think."

"I will take all the credit of it."

Just then Mrs. Carré, who had been down to John Philip's for bread, turned in out of the road with a loaf under each arm. At sight of all her guests fraternising, her face lit up with a broad smile, and Scamp, who had whirled in after her, twisted himself into hieroglyphics of delight and rent the air with his expression of it, and then launched himself at Punch and taxed him with perfidy in going off to bathe without him.

"Ah, you have med friends with the leddies," she said to Graeme. "Scamp! Bad beast, be qui-et! A couche!"

"I'm doing my best, Mrs. Carré."

"That iss very nice."

"Very nice, indeed!" And Miss Penny asserted afterwards that he was looking at Margaret all the time.

"I told them you were a nice quiet gentleman and wouldn't disturb them at all," said Mrs. Carré.

"I'll do my very best not to. So far the disturbance has been all on their side, but I'm standing it very well, you see. You'll let me show you the sights, won't you?" he said to Miss Brandt. "I've been here a month, you see, and I know it all like a book. I've done nothing but moon about since I came--"

"I thought you were busy on a book," said Miss Penny.

"Er--well, you see, you have to do a lot of thinking before you start writing. I've been thinking," and perhaps more than one of them had a fairly shrewd suspicion as to the line his thoughts had taken.

"Now, if I don't cut away and dress, and get my breakfast and clear out, I shall be in the way of the ladies, and Mrs. Carré will never forgive me," he said. "I do hope you will include me in your plans for the day."

His bow included them both, and he sped off up the path through the high hedge, with the two dogs racing alongside.

"Meg, my child, we will go for a little walk," said Miss Penny.

V

The salt Sark air is uplifting at all times. The sea-water has a crisp effervescence of its own which tones and braces mind and body alike. Add to these the wonder of Margaret's unexpected presence there and, if the gift of large imagination be yours, you may possibly arrive--within a hundred miles or so--of the state of John Graeme's feelings as he raced up that path and bounded up the stairs of the Red House four at a time.

He looked out of the wide-open window across the fields, while the dogs, as usual, took the opportunity of appeasing their thirst at his water-jug,--for water lies at the bottom of deep cool wells in Sark, and sensible dogs take their chances when they offer.

Was this the room he had left an hour ago in the fresh of the dawn--a man whose gray future was just beginning to lift its bruised head out of the shadows?

Were those gleaming emerald fields the dim wastes he had sped across with his dumb companion, feeling as friendly towards him as towards anything on earth?

Were those trees over there, with the glow of spring-gold in their tender green leaves, the gloomy guardians of the churchyard where ghosts walked of a night?

Was that streak of blue away beyond the uplands, with the purple film along its rim, only the sea and a hint of Jersey, or was it a glimpse of heaven?

Was he, in very truth, that John Graeme who, for thirty days past, had been striving with all his might to root the thought of Margaret Brandt out of his life--and succeeding not at all?

It was the face of a stranger--a stranger with new joy of life in his sparkling eyes--that looked back at him out of the glass, as he plied his brushes, and tied his neck-tie with a careful assiduity to which the John Graeme of the past thirty days had been a stranger indeed.

It was amazing. It was almost past belief. Yet this was himself, and there was the gap in the dark hedge--never dark again to him so long as one twig of it lived--the gap where he had come upon her standing like a goddess of the morning with the glories of the dawn all about her. And somewhere not far away, under this same heavenly blue sky, was Margaret. And there was no sign or hint of Jeremiah Pixley in her atmosphere--nor of Charles Svendt.

What could it possibly all mean?

Miss Penny--Hennie Penny! What a delightfully ludicrous name! And what a delightful creature she was!--Miss Penny, unless he had been dreaming, had said they had come to get away from things--and people! Now what did she mean by that--if she really had said it and he had not been dreaming?

Was it possible Margaret had come to get away from Jeremiah Pixley and Charles Svendt? On the face of it, it seemed not impossible, for Graeme's only wonder was that she could ever have borne with them so long.

His brain was in a whirl. The eyes of his understanding were as the eyes of one immured for thirty days in a dark cell and then dragged suddenly into the full blaze of the sun. If he had just drunk a magnum of champagne he could not have felt more elevated, and he would certainly have felt very different. For his eye was clear as a jewel, and his hand was steady as a rock, though his heart had not yet settled to its beat and the red blood danced in his veins like fire.

"Jock, my lad," he said to himself, as he got the knot of his tie to his liking at last,--"keep a grip of yourself and go steady. Such a thing is enough to throw any man a bit off the rails. Ca' canny, my lad, ca' canny!"

VI

"Meg, I rather like young men with rippled hair," said Miss Hennie Penny, as they passed the Carrefour and strolled between the dewy hedges towards La Tour, with larks by the dozen bursting their hearts in the freshness of the morning above them.

"Do you, dear? I thought you scorned young men?"

"As a class, yes!--Especially the Cambridge variety. But not in particular. I make an exception in this case."

"So good of you!" murmured Margaret in her best company manner.

"Why did you never tell me how nice he was?"

"Tell you how nice he was? I don't remember ever discussing him with you in any shape or form whatever."

"Not to say discussed exactly, but you can't deny that you've mentioned him occasionally."

"So I have William Shakespeare and Alfred Tennyson--"

"And Charles Pixley!"

"That's quite different--"

"You're right, my dear. This is a horse of quite another colour. An awfully decent colour too. I'm glad you appreciate it. He's as brown as a gipsy and not an ounce of flab about him. Charles Pixley is mostly flab--"

"Don't be rude, Hen. You don't know Charles. And do drop your school slang--"

"Can't, my child. It's part of my holiday, so none of your pi-jaw! If you want me to enjoy myself you must let me have my head. You can't imagine how awfully good it tastes when you've been doing your best to choke girls off it for a year or two. It's one of the outward and visible signs of emancipation. This is another!" and she sprang up the high turf bank of the orchard of La Tour and danced a breakdown on it, and then jumped back into the road with ballooning skirts, to the intense amazement of old Mrs. Hamon of Le Fort, who had just come round the corner to draw sweet water from the La Tour well.

"People will think you're crazy," remonstrated Margaret.

"So I am, and you're my keeper, though it's supposed to be the other way about. The air of Sark has got into my head. What a quaint bonnet that old lady has! I wonder what colour it was in its infancy. Good-morning, ma'am! Isn't this a glorious day?" And old Madame Hamon murmured a word and passed hastily on lest worse should befall.

"Hennie, be sensible for a minute or two. I want you to consider something seriously."

"Sensible, if you like, Chummie, for 'tis my nature to. Serious?--Never! How could one, with those larks bursting themselves in a sky like that? And did you ever see hedges like these in all your life? What's it all about?--Ripply-Hair?"

"Yes. Don't you see how awkward the whole matter is--"

"Awkward for Charles Pixley maybe. I don't see that anybody else need worry themselves thin about it."

"I'm not thinking of Mr. Pixley. It's--"

"Ripply-Hair? Well, that's all right! Jolly sight nicer to think about him. I like his eyes too. There's something in them that seems to invite one's confidence. Perhaps you haven't noticed it? If I had a father-confessor--which, thank's-be, I haven't, and a jolly good thing for him!--I should stipulate for him having eyes just like that. Ripply hair too, I think. Yes. I should insist on his having hair just like Mr. Graeme's."

They had strolled along past Le Fort till the road lost itself in a field above Banquette, and there they came to an involuntary stand and stood gazing.