On the same boat was Mrs. Ryven, a young widow with a child six months old. She had lost her husband in New Zealand and was returning to England by way of America because her only brother had settled in California and she wished to spend some weeks with him. The ship encountered a terrific hurricane and was carried out of her course. At a moment when she appeared to be sinking the passengers took to the boats.
“Edward said he thought he would drown peacefully with the ship, so he didn’t get into a boat though they wanted him to. And the boats all upset and everyone was drowned—only someone had asked him to hold me whilst they got my mother into a boat—he said she had fainted—so he did. And a great wave came and broke the boat to bits; and he doesn’t know why he wasn’t carried away—but he wasn’t. And he crawled inside the companion and waited for us both to be drowned—and we weren’t. Edward said when he found there was no one else left on the ship, but only him and me, he was very sorry we hadn’t been drowned too. He said he didn’t think we could be saved and it seemed to be taking such a long time. He said the wind kept carrying the ship along and banging it about, and he thought every minute it was going to go down—only it didn’t. Everything was broken and flung down, and he had to crawl about and find something to feed me with, because I was hungry and screamed all the time. Edward hadn’t ever had anything to do with a baby before. It was dreadful for him—wasn’t it?”
Austin agreed. He was not imaginative; but a deserted ship, a hurricane, a baby, and an Oxford don struck him as making a pretty appalling combination.
“He found milk in tins, and afterwards he found there was a goat. And then we came to the island—I think it was three days after—Edward didn’t like talking about it very much. The ship stuck on the island, on the little beach I told you about. It jammed there, tight. There wasn’t anything on the island then—not anything to eat, except some sea-birds’ eggs. I am glad we didn’t have to live on sea-birds’ eggs, because they taste like bad fish. There were lots of things on the ship. Edward got them all off. And he planted the cocoanuts, and they grew. He said he couldn’t attempt to describe what he felt like when he saw the first little cocoanutshoot.”
“Where does the water come from?” asked Austin.
“It’s a very deep spring. There’s a hot one and a cold one. You can boil eggs in the hot one—Oh! Is that your ship?”
They had reached the edge of the cliff. The yacht lay beneath them, motionless on the unmoving water. Valentine gazed with all her eyes, standing so near the dizzy edge that Austin instinctively put out a hand to steady her. At his touch the wild thing showed again; her sideways leap literally brought his heart into his mouth. One moment she was there with his hand just brushing her arm; the next she was a couple of yards away on the brink, leaning seawards, her eyes darkly startled and her colour high.
“Look out!” he said, and in a flash she had gone farther still.
“Don’t touch me! You mustn’t!”
Austin found himself furious, partly because she had really frightened him.
“I don’t want to touch you. I was afraid you’d fall.”
She laughed then for the first time, a pretty laugh full of young scorn.
“Fall!” she said. “How silly!”
“It would be quite easy. You’d better be careful.”
He saw her face change, whiten, her eyes cloud fearfully.
She said, “Edward fell,” in a small whispering voice.
Austin said, “Oh—”
“There’s a place we fish from. You have to climb down to it. He fell—into the sea.”
“For heaven’s sake come away from that edge!” said Austin, and saw her take a long breath.
“I shan’t fall,” she said.
She looked again at the yacht, bending forwards.
“I’ve never seen a ship. It looks so small! I thought they were bigger. Edward said—”
“This isn’t a ship—it’s a yacht. She belongs to a man called Barclay. I’m his secretary.”
He looked down as he spoke, and could see Barclay’s deck chair with Barclay’s bulk spreading in it. It came to him that Barclay would certainly chaff his head off when he came back with his story. He had decided to suppress the hen; but he couldn’t very well suppress Miss Valentine Ryven.
“Is he nice? Tell me about him.”
“He weighs fifteen stone, and he’s worth a lot of money. I wouldn’t mind having half of it.”
“Why doesn’t he give you some?” said Valentine.
“He does—he gives me two hundred a year to write his letters and put up with his manners.”
“What a nice lot! Isn’t it?”
He laughed angrily.
“Didn’t Edward tell you about money?”
“Of course he did. I can do pounds, shillings and pence, and francs, and marks, and dollars. Two hundred pounds is”—she screwed up her eyes and agonized in calculation—“is five thousand francs!” Her eyes opened triumphantly. “There!” she said. Then, a little more doubtfully, “That’s right, isn’t it?”
With an overpowering shock, it came home to Austin that there stood a benighted young savage for whom the Great War had never been. She lived in an Edwardian world where twenty-five francs went to the pound and the map of Europe was what it had been in Queen Victoria’s days. Doubtless Edward had wasted much valuable time in drawing obsolete frontiers in the sand—a highly appropriate medium.
He opened his mouth and gaped, taking in the implications slowly. Nineteen hundred and eight—nineteen hundred and eight—the Wrights made their first flight in 1908. She wouldn’t know what an aeroplane was. She wouldn’t know about wireless. The war—wireless—aeroplanes—a hundred and twenty-five francs to the pound—the blessings of Bolshevism—cross-word puzzles—and jazz. He gaped, and recalled her phrase—no, not hers—Edward’s phrase, parroted: “There wouldn’t be any place for me in a modern civilization.”
He shut his mouth with a jerk, then opened it and said with abrupt irrelevance:
“I’ll go down to the yacht and tell Barclay.”
CHAPTER III
“Well—well—well!” said Barclay. He gave his funny deep chuckle and rolled forward in his chair.
They were sitting round the table in the saloon, he and Austin and the girl. On the table stood a dispatch-box in a leather cover. The initials M.R. were stamped on the battered lid, which was open. There were letters in the box—letters and papers. In front of Barclay lay a book in a very old binding.
When Barclay chuckled, Valentine looked at him, and having looked, kept her eyes fixed upon him with the serious, interested gaze of a child. This was the third man that she had seen; and they were so different. Hens were not as different as this. She could tell Semiramis from Jessica, and Jessica from Evangeline; but they were the same size and shape and colour. It had not occurred to her that people would be so different from one another. She knew of course that there were black, brown, yellow, and white races. She had not thought that one white man would be so unlike another; she had thought of men as so many variants of Edward, differing from Edward in the same slight degree that Evangeline and Jessica differed from Semiramis.
Edward was thin, not much taller than herself, spare of frame, grey-haired, and colourless. Austin Muir was much larger, much redder, with brown hair and rather bright, cold eyes like steel. Barclay—Barclay interested her tremendously; there was such a lot of him, and he was so ugly. There was a picture of a walrus in one of the books that had come from the ship. Barclay was just like the walrus, only fatter, and he had black hair and his chin and half his cheeks looked blue, and the top half of his cheeks were red, and when he laughed, the red and the blue seemed to get mixed up and a purple colour ran right up on to his forehead as far as the roots of his sleek black hair.
He laughed now, with that chuckle in his laughter.
“Well,” he said. “Well. Here we are, my dear! And what do you think of us? Good-looking couple, aren’t we, Austin and I?
Handsome young fellows—eh, Miss Robinson Crusoe? Don’t you think you’re in luck? Come now, my dear, what do you think of us—eh?”
She continued to gaze at him seriously. She was aware of Austin chafing on her right.
He said, “Hang it all, Barclay!” and Barclay laughed again.
“By gum, it’s romantic! Tell you what, Austin, I don’t mind doubling your salary on the strength of it! There, my dear—you’ve done him a good turn already! What’s the betting you’ll bring him luck? Now look here! Perhaps you don’t know what a romantic occasion this is—in fact you don’t—you can’t! I’m the only one that knows. So you sit right up and take notice of me!”
He opened the worn leather book in front of him and began to flick over the pages. They were covered with fine brown writing, close, cramped, and illegible.
“Now, my dear—this island of yours, which isn’t on any map, was discovered in 1651 by my several times great-great-grandfather, old Nick Barclay, who went to sea as a gentleman adventurer with Captain Joshua Talbot. Well, they lost their ship and took to the boats, and he and Talbot were cast on this island of yours and lived on it for three weeks, at the end of which time, as they’d nothing to eat, they put desperately to sea and were picked up a week later more dead than alive.”
He struck the table with his hand. “And from that day to this, nobody—nobody, my dear—has believed in his island. Here’s his diary, and here’s what he says at the end: ‘So they all, having with one mind and as it were one pen, writ me down a liar, I am most throughly resolved to say no more of the matter, but to leave it to posterity.’ See—posterity! That’s me! When I read that, I said to myself, ‘Well, that’s me,’ and I made up my mind I’d find that island if it was anywhere above water.”
He began to turn the leaves of the book again, running backwards.
“Now, look here! Austin, you’re witness to this. I’ve never let you handle the book, and you don’t know what’s in it—I’m going to prove that the old boy did discover the island, and I’m going to prove it right away. See those shells she’s got in her hair? Where in thunder d’you think she’s got ’em from? It don’t look a very suitable island for shell gathering—does it? Now, my dear, don’t you go saying anything—because I don’t want you to speak; I want you to listen to what old Nick wrote down in the tail end of the year 1651.”
He fixed on a page, turned it to get the light from a port-hole, and read in a triumphant, rolling voice: “The island hath a wealth of water, both hot springs and cold. There is a hot spring in a cavern into which we did descend with some terror because the noise made by the water was like the growling of wild beasts. At the one end of the cavern the said spring doth rise up into a basin of rock, but at the other end the sea washes in upon a beach of sand, very fair and clean, bringing with it, on some current doubtless, a drift of shells, very curious and pretty, such as would be priced by women for their adornment, being of a rosy colour and very delicate.”
He shut the book with a snap.
“There! What about it now—eh? We’re posterity, we three here—aren’t we? What does posterity say—eh, Miss Valentine Ryven? Did old Nick discover the island, or didn’t he?”
Valentine clapped her hands together.
“Yes, he did—he did! He found the cave where I got my shells! And Edward said—”
“There then!” said Barclay. “That’s that! And I hope the old boy knows, because he seems to have taken it a good bit to heart being called a liar. Serious-minded you know.” He chuckled again and pushed the book away. “Well, that clears the ground. I just wanted to get that done with. And now—about those papers of yours. What have you got?”
Valentine stood up and took a paper out of the open dispatch-box.
“Edward said this was very important. It’s my birth certificate.”
She gave it to him, and he unfolded the paper and read: “Maurice Ryven—Marion his wife—Valentine Helena Ryven. Hm—” He frowned and tapped on the table. “Helena Ryven—Helena. Hm—that’s queer! Well, my dear, anything else?”
“Edward said—”
“Never you mind what Edward said! You trot out what you’ve got!”
He reached out, but, with one of those swift movements, Valentine had a handful of papers clutched to her breast and was standing back against the cabin wall, her blue eyes fixed and angry.
“Edward said not to let—people—touch.”
Barclay laughed till the purple rose to his hair.
“You may look, but you mustn’t touch—eh? That’s it, is it? Oh, gosh! It’s too hot to laugh like this! Come along, my dear! We won’t lay a finger on your papers. But you don’t want to kill me with curiosity, do you? Or if you want to kill me, you don’t want to kill Austin? He’s too young to die, and he wants to know what’s in those papers every bit as badly as I do.”
“I don’t want to know anything you don’t want to tell us,” said Austin stiffly.
“Don’t you believe him! He’s not such a prig as he sounds.”
“Look here, Barclay—”
“Dry up!” said Barclay with a rasp in his voice.
Valentine looked from one to the other warily. Then she came up to the table and put down the papers that she was holding.
“I’ll show you—some of them,” she said.
“That’s right,” said Barclay. “You just play I’m the family lawyer and get along with it.”
Valentine spread out the papers, picked out a letter, unfolded it, and stood there hesitating.
“This one—Edward said she must be my father’s sister-in-law—her name is Helena Ryven. My father went to New Zealand and married my mother. And then he died, and my mother was coming home—to England, you know—and this letter is from my Aunt Helena to say she is so glad we are coming. It begins ‘My dearest Marion.’ You can read it if you like.”
Barclay took the letter.
She watched him as he read it. She herself knew it by heart. It said, “My dearest Marion”; and it said, “Your dear little baby”—that was her, Valentine; and it said, “warmest, warmest welcomes for dear Maurice’s wife and child.” She wondered if Barclay had got to that; and then she wondered whether he had got to the other bit where Aunt Helena said, “you mustn’t feel that you’re a stranger coming to a strange land. We have always been a united family, and you must feel that you are coming to your own place in that family.”
Barclay was frowning. She wondered why. It felt so strange, this place. She felt as if she were looking at Barclay from a long way off; she felt as if she were a long way off from everyone in the world; she felt farther away than when she was all alone on the island. She was very pale as she put out her hand and took the letter again.
“You see—I’ve got—people,” she said. “They want me.”
Barclay looked at her, not unkindly.
“Well, my dear, they wanted you twenty years ago,” he said.
Valentine cried out in a panic:
“Do you think they’re dead? They couldn’t all be dead!”
“Oh, they’re not dead,” said Barclay. “But twenty years is a long time, you know.”
“You’re sure they’re not dead?”
“Well, Mrs. Ryven was above ground all right three months ago. I’ve got a sister who thinks a lot of her—works on committees with her and—”
“Oh!” said Valentine, “oh! Oh, you know her!”
“Well, I wouldn’t say that—I don’t sit on committees myself, you see. My sister knows her.”
“Oh!” said Valentine again. She dived into the dispatch-box and produced a photograph. “Edward thought this might be her. Is it? Is it?”
It was a snapshot of a tall, handsome woman in the full, long, spreading skirt and trimmed bodice of twenty years ago. Barclay looked at it and made a face.
“It might be. I only saw her once. She don’t dress like that now—not on your life, by gum, she don’t! Skirts to the knee and shingled hair. By gum, it’s a bit of chang
e—isn’t it? They all look seventeen till you see ’em close to—and then you get a nervous shock. Why, the only time I saw her, she and her son came into my sister’s room together, and I’m blessed if he didn’t look the older of the two till the lights went on.”
“Her son!—Oh—she had a little boy—it’s in one of the letters—a little boy older than me! His name is Eustace. He’s my cousin.”
“Well, he’s not a little boy now, my dear—so don’t you go building on something sweet in knickerbockers.”
“He’s thirty,” said Valentine. “He’s ten years older than I am. It’s very old. Does he look very old? Does he look as old as you?”
Barclay roared with laughter.
“I’d lie down and die if I ever got to feel anywhere near as old as that young man! It’s the committee habit—and he’s got it bad. He don’t talk to you—he addresses you. You may take it from me that your Cousin Eustace isn’t what you’d call a human sunbeam.”
The colour rose to Valentine’s cheeks.
“You don’t like him.”
“Well, I don’t lie awake at night wondering when I’m going to see him again.”
“Perhaps he doesn’t like you,” said Valentine with a darting glance.
“Kamerad!” said Barclay.
CHAPTER IV
“Funny thing my saying that!” said Barclay meditatively.
“Funny thing your saying what?”
“What I said.” Barclay’s tone was very lazy. He had a long drink at his elbow and a cigar in the corner of his mouth; he sprawled at length in a deck chair.
Austin Muir, leaning on the rail, looked over his shoulder.
“What did you say?”
“Said perhaps she’d do you a good turn.”
“What d’you mean?”
“You’ve got a nasty, sulky disposition, Austin—comes of being Scotch. Now if I wasn’t the best-natured man in the world, I wouldn’t give you the tip I’m going to give you.”
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