An Island Princess. A story of six weeks-and afterwards

Front matter

A STORY OF SIX WEEKS— AND AFTERWARDS BY THEO GIFT, AUTHOR OF '"tretty miss bellew," "dishonoured," " lil lorimer," "victims," ktc, etc. LONDON LAWRENCE AND BULLEN, 1 6, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C. 1393 [Ait rights reserved.] Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London & Bung ay. CONTENTS. LHA1-'. **AGE I. A PAIR OK BLACK EVES... ... ... I II. JEAN TO THE RESCUE ... ... ... 26 111. NOT FOR TEETOTALERS ... ... ... 49 IV. A SPOILT CHILD AND HER FELLOW ... 76 V. " TRUST HER NOT, SHE IS FOOLING THEE " 97 VI. A RESCUE AND A RECONCILIATION ... Il6 VII. WIDOW wanklyn says "leave it to me" 136 vin. "gored to death by a bull!" ... 15S IX. LADY HELENA AT HOME ... ... 184 X. INSULTED ... ... ... ... 207 XI. "I WILL BE TRUE TO YOU " ... ... 224 XII. AFTERWARDS ... ... ... ... 244 XIII. " I THANK THEE, O GOD, FOR MY GOOD SON" ... ... ... ... ...

Chapter I

A PAIR OF BLACK EYES. An English island in the Atlantic Ocean, many thousand miles away. A mere barren rock, thinly covered with coarse, yellow grass, and poor, scanty soil ; a rock swept over and ravaged by blustering winds from every quarter of the compass ; buffeted in winter by the mighty sea-green walls of icebergs, driven northwards from the womb of the Antarctic ; split and broken by long ex tinct volcanoes ; tunnelled by caves, into which the waves rush and tumble with a ceaseless boom, and roar, and bellow ; and B girdled round with a living belt of seaweed, strong, and brown, and tall, and fleshy, whose myriad strands, wreathed and twisted with one another like the arms of some vegetable octopus, have power to drag down and strangle the strongest swimmer who ever managed to get entangled in their treacherous meshes.

An island up whose pebbly beach, strewn with the wrecks of many a noble ship, huge sea-lions paddle with heavy, flipper-like feet, shaking the salt foam from their dripping manes. An island where no tree ever grew, no insect ever buzzed ; but where the wild cattle hold possession of the narrow valleys, and the vulture and the eagle soar, with mighty stretching wings, from lofty mountain peaks. An island red with fern, grey with rock, and black with miles of treacherous, quaking bog, basking just now in the rare sunshine of a December noon — a midsummer's day at the Antipodes. A young woman was basking in it at the same time. Perched upon a little shelf of rock, to which she had climbed by aid of a tiny ledge here and an outjutting fang there, leaning back with her face turned slightly upwards, so as to get the full benefit of the yellow noonday sun shine, and sheltered from the wind by the mighty wall of granite, seamed, and grey, and lichen-crusted, which towered up behind her, Jean Coniston had abandoned herself to the luxury of warmth and stillness with a com pleteness of content which only dwellers in such inhospitable climates can thoroughly realize.

She had a book in her lap, a small copy of Barnaby Pudge, worn almost to rags by fre quent reading, and with the fly-leaves liberally embellished by imaginary portraits of the different personages in the story ; but she was neither reading nor drawing at the present moment — only resting after a long ride, and thinking to herself, with a slight smile on her full, pretty lips — " How fortunate I am to have got away from the town before any of them had landed, and be out of the noise and bother of it all. And oh ! how cross Mrs. Powell will be when she calls round to ' talk things over,' as she calls it, and doesn't find me." A dash of mischief in the smile now, and Jean lowered her face a little, and looked straight ahead to where, in the distance, she could see something which she knew well enough was at that moment the one centre of interest and excitement for the whole colony — i. e. a ship of noble size, lying in a sheltered harbour, and with an admiral's pennon flying from the masthead.

Below her was a deep bed of fern and brush wood, sheltered on one side by the wall of rock already mentioned, beyond which again towered hills and mountains of fantastic shapes and craggy summits ; but these Jean could not see as she sat looking across the bed of ruddy fern beneath her, among which glittered the tiny bronzed leaves and crimson berries of a heather like plant familiarly known as " diddledee." A steep bank, crested with rocks, rose at the opposite side of this miniature valley ; and beyond, the ground broke sharply away, and stretched downwards in successive slopes of barren, boggy land, covered with coarse white grass, to a broad expanse of marsh, dotted over with bronze-plumed teal and slender-legged snipe, at the end of a long narrow harbour. Perched up in her lofty eyrie, Jean could see this " loch," as our Scotch cousins would call it, lying like a grey-blue ribbon, ruffled by the breeze and flashing in the sunlight, between the high hills which shut it in on almost all sides ; could see the white houses of a tiny settlement dotted about on the farther shore ; the miniature dockyard, with its one gun for the defence of the town ; the Governor's residence ; the church-tower ; and the tall flagstaff on the hill, with the Union Jack flying bravely from it.

The girl knew it all by heart — the only town, the only bit of civilization she had ever seen in all the eighteen summers ot her life ; knew the name of every house, and every person in every house, high or low ; knew that the gallant three-decker then lying at anchor in the centre of a little herd of fishing boats and schooners was an English man-of war, come down for her annual visit from the South American coast to this most out-of-the world of all her Majesty's colonies ; and that every man in the Settlement had on his best coat, and every lady her smartest gown ; and that wines were flowing, and houses thrown open, and crimps chuckling, and every soul in the place on the tiptoe of excitement to greet the long-looked-for guests. Hadn't she mounted Brown Jenny, her pretty mare, and ridden over here on purpose to be out of the way of it all ?

She was so tired of it already. It was the one event of the year — for it was very seldom that a second man-of-war looked in during the twelve months, and other visitors they had none — and the good ladies of the colony divided their life into two parts : six months' discussion of the ship last gone, and six months' prognos tications and preparations regarding the ship next coming. " Now, my dear Jean, be sure you make three cakes the day before they come in — a plum, and a seed, and a pound — or perhaps some sweet biscuits would do instead of one," Mrs. Powell, the chaplain's wife, had said at least half-adozen times during the last week ; " for officers always eat such a lot of cake, you know. And make your papa have up a dozen of his best port and sherry when they first arrive. If one gets a name for good wine at the beginning, it doesn't so much matter what one gives them later on ; and, indeed, you should always keep a bottle of marsala open for the middies.

It does well enough for them ; and they don't know it from sherry, poor boys ! " " Sure, and if they did it's little the bhoys 'd care," said Mrs. Wanklyn, a lady who occupied a somewhat dubious position in the capital of Las Malvinas, having entered it in the first instance as the red-cheeked, black-eyed, and four teen-year-old daughter of a sergeant of Marines, to be promoted, barely two years later, to wedlock and gentility by a union with the colonial surgeon, a gentleman whose addiction to strong drink had not only ruined what might otherwise have been a brilliant medical career at home, but had already brought his first wife to the grave with sorrow and disappointment. Him however the black eyes, red cheeks, and too precocious comeliness of Miss Molly O'Brien met and conquered ; and, from that day forth, Dr. Beresford's professional visits to the double line of whitewashed wooden huts tenanted by the company of Marines, who for the time being represented her Majesty's military power in the islands of Las Malvinas, became so ardent and unremitting as to attract the attention of the rest of the community.

Scandal, it is needless to say, followed promptly. The Governor's wife "dropped a word" to the captain of the Marines ; and the chaplain's wife " spoke her mind " to the sergeant himself. The chaplain's wife's mind was one that could clearly behold hell and all its terrors gaping redly for all motherless girls, bold and flighty enough to set traps to attract their betters when they ought to be at the wash-tub, or darning their fathers' socks. The captain of Marines was a grim-tongued old bachelor, with a real interest in his sergeant, and the lowest possible opinion of the mind, morals, and manners of the fair sex in general. Sergeant O'Brien fell in with the one just as he came hot from the jobations of the other ; and when he reached his home, and shut himself up with the black-eyed Molly, he was hotter still.

That he swore, and swore long and vigorously, at that too comely damsel was common property. If you live in a house built of clap-boards, and lined with nothing more solid than the pages of the Illustrated London News, what you say and do in it is apt to be audible to your neighbours. Some IO AN ISLAND PRINCESS. of these latter declared that he thrashed her as well, and that when he sallied forth again and repaired to the doctor's house, it was with a view to administering a similar chastisement to the gentleman whose attentions to his daughter had got the girl talked about. Fortunately, however, for the peace and decorum of the Settlement, Dr. Beresford was not at home. Indeed he was at that moment within the barrack lines engaged in assisting the introduction of a fresh infant, or, to speak more correctly, a fresh pair of infant Marines into a hut already well filled with juvenile specimens of the article ; and when he returned to his own abode it was to find, not the sergeant, but the sergeant's daughter, her black eyes streaming with tears, and her pretty Irish voice melting into sobs as she poured out the story of her wrongs.

The upshot was startling, not to say, so far as the society of Las Malvinas was con cerned, appalling ; for two days later, being the Sunday following, and the entire community gathered in church, — with the unfortunate exception of three-fourths of the Marines, who, being Irish and Papists, were marched off under their corporal to a service of their own in the school-house adjoining, — they listened with feelings that can be better imagined than described to the reading of the banns of marriage between John Beresford, widower, and Margaret O'Brien, spinster, both of Palmerston, in the Malvinas Islands. A fortnight later the}' were married, and sixteen-year-old Molly left her father's hut to queen it in a silk gown, as the wife of a Government official. Of course the wives of the other Government officials cut her dead.

They would have liked to have cut the doctor too, but unfortunately they couldn't. If you live in a colony where there is only one medical man, and where four-fifths of the matrons are in the perennial condition of having just had, or just being about to have, a baby, quarrelling with that medical man is a thing that can't be done. They might deplore his marriage as they did his drinking, declare that one was as great an insult as the other was a danger to the community in general, and urge vehemently (on one another) that " some one " should write home to the Secretary for the Colonies, and insist on Dr. Beresford being superseded in favour of some more satisfactory practitioner ; but to the culprit himself they were at first simply cold, then reproachful but pitying, and finally pitying but kind ; and the doctor took their coldness and reproaches, pity and kindness with equal sang-froid ; and seemed not only perfectly satisfied with himself and his choice, but for a while, at any rate, a steadier and soberer man than he had been before.

Time, of course, brought about its usual revenges. The Marines went home, and were replaced by a company from a West Indian regiment, whose commanding officer's wife was a dashing military dame, to whom all " civilian " ladies were too much of a muchness, or, to speak more correctly, too small of a smallness for any slight difference of caste to weigh materially in their appraisement. (Poor thing, she learnt to be grateful for small mercies before her term was up, and to feel that a fellow woman, even to quarrel with, makes penal servitude better than solitary confinement ; but this is a digression !) Then in due time the Governor went home, and the new Governor's wife, a lady of too high rank for her opinions in matters of social etiquette not to be accepted as e.v cathedra, turned out to be a confirmed invalid, who, except to go to church in her bath-chair, never left the grounds of Govern ment House from the day she entered them.

Her health, she said at once, would not allow her to call on anybody ; but she should be delighted to see every one who was kind enough to call on her ; and thus when Dr. and Mrs. Beresford called, " bold as brass " (to quote Mrs. Briggs, the magistrate's wife), they were received with the same gracious courtesy as had just been extended to the latter lady, and were included in the first Government House dinner-party, with a quiet, matter-of courseness which made the suggestion even of any other proceeding simply impossible. That settled the matter. Ladies who for the last five years had been passing Mrs. Dr. Beresford with a stiffly truncated nod, or no nod at all, found the transition to shaking hands, or even to gliding in from the doctor's consulting-room to his wife's tea-table, won derfully easy, and Molly Beresford, who was not one to bear malice, accepted the change with perfect bonhomie.

"The ghentlemen always came," she said. " Sure an' if the wives like to do the same they're welcome ; an' if they don't, they can stop away ! " Yet I have never felt sure whether the altered attitude of the other ladies was productive of any real good to the Irish sergeant's daughter. She didn't care about them ; and she certainly flirted more with the sex she did care for, after the removal of the social ban which had hitherto precluded her from sharing in the hospitalities and social enterprises of the rest of the Settle ment. After that dance, indeed, on board H.M.S. Spanker, when the captain not only waltzed three times running with her, but so far lost his head as to give her the place of honour in his own gig going home, there was always a smouldering fire of scandal about her path ; and when, a year or so later, Dr. Beresford died suddenly in a fit, by his friends called apoplexy, and by his foes delirium tremens, it was a moot point, and one hotly argued by his male and female patients, whether the drinking habits into which he had again fallen of late days had been occasioned by or were the occasion of his wife's levity.

"At any rate we shall have a new doctor now, and she will have to go home ! " the ladies of Las Malvinas said to one another. They were wrong. A new doctor came, a staid, rosy little man with a wife and young (very young) family ; but Mrs. Beresford did not go home. The house in which the doctor had lived was his own, and was left her with all he possessed, enough to maintain her in decent comfort ; while, considering that her only other home was among the half-starved peasantry of a remote Irish village, there could be no denying that her position in Las Malvinas was already far better than it could be elsewhere, and might (who knew !) be made better still. Who knew indeed ! A creature like that, once free, was audacious enough to set her cap at any one, from Mr. Coniston, the grey-haired Surveyor-General, a widower of already ten years' standing, and Jean's father, to the new Colonial Secretary fresh from Downing Street, and with an air of languid superiority, and a haw-haw drawl which might have inspired even a Palmerston sealer with awe and admiration.

Once again Mrs. Beresford took society by surprise. For a whole year she remained a widow, flirting (filially) with the Surveyor- General and (maternally ?) with the Colonial Secretary ; and at the end of it she married the grizzled and illiterate captain of a Yankee whaler who had called in at Las Malvinas six months previously to coal and refit for the homeward voyage, and had started on it without leaving even a suspicion behind him of the good use to which he had put his time. But Mistress Beresford had not done as badly for herself as might be imagined. The old man adored what the doctor had simply tolerated ; and almost before her lady friends had finished their first pæan of rejoicing at being now compelled to drop a person who had satis factorily proved the lowness of her tastes by returning to the sphere from which she originally sprang, it transpired that Captain Wanklyn was not only commander but owner of the vessel which he sailed ; and that when he returned to the Settlement to claim his wife, it C was with the added dignity of American consul to Las Malvinas, and the avowed determination of putting his mate in command of the whaler, and settling down himself in Dr. Beresford's old house in order to devote himself to the furthering of American trade interests.

The next news was that, in furtherance of those same interests, the Captain had bought a plot of ground, and was erecting on it a building which, in connection with a younger brother of his own and a cargo of American dry goods and " notions," was intended to be set up as a fashionable and fascinating rival to the two homely and unassuming stores, one belonging to the Malvinas Islands Company, and the other to a worthy old gentleman of the appropriate name of Chandler, which at that time represented all that the colony possessed in the way of a shop ; and in which everything that the heart of a colonist could reasonably desire, from a barrel of sugar to a yard of bonnet ribbon, was supposed to be obtainable. The cargo of Yankee novelties and the brother in charge thereof arrived in due time ; but Captain Wanklyn never lived to see the result of his enterprise.

In coming over the side of the vessel, after a jubilation supper in honour of the arrival, his foot somehow slipped, he fell, and the old man who had weathered so many a gale, and escaped so many dangers and perils in the course of his whaler's career, was crushed to death in an instant between the vessel's side and the shore boat that was awaiting him. It was only eleven months since Mrs. Wanklyn had become a wife for the second time, and for the second time she was a widow ! Yet now, two years later, she was a widow still, gay and blooming as ever, keeping house for her brother-in-law, with whom she was on the most affectionately sisterly terms, and not seeming to care one whit whether the ladies who had been friendly with her as their doctor's wife, chose in her widowhood for the Yankee whaling captain, either to drop her altogether or to extend to her a dubious and patronizing acquaintanceship.

During the last year, however, she had decidedly gone out of her way to strike up a friendship with Jean Coniston, making much of the girl, and constantly running across the road to invite her in to tea or dinner ; a circumstance by no means pleasing to the other matrons, who, united on no other subject, were one and all honourably unanimous in their interest and affection for the motherless young girl who had grown up like a flower in their midst. It was all very well, they said, for the Surveyor- General to be on intimate terms with the Widow Wanklyn. He had been left a widower while she was still a slip of a lass running about with ragged boots and dishevelled locks among the soldiers' lines. He was Dr. Beresford's boon companion and greatest friend ; and for his friend's sake he had taken the girl's part and espoused her cause warmly from the first ; but Jean was only a baby thing of seven at the time of the marriage, and Mrs. Beresford was too young herself to care much for children, so the little one had small part in the intercourse between the two houses ; and though she rather liked their good-humoured neighbour, who had ahvays a smile or jest for her, she saw less of her than of many ofthe other ladies.

Now, however, it was different. Jean was eighteen, a beauty, and a sweet, loving, loveable girl, the avowed pet and pupil of the Governor's aristocratic wife, the "island princess" in fact; and good enough for any one's wife, as Mrs. Briggs and Mrs. Magee cordially declared ; and what impudence it was of that Wanklyn woman to put her arm round the girl's slim waist as they came out of church, and be always calling to "Jean darlin'" across the garden fence, and boasting of the beautiful things that George Wanklyn had got straight from the States to lay at the young lady's feet. Was it possible that Mr. Coniston, who, plain and rough-tongued as he was, had good blood in him, could stand by and see a match made up between his innocent lady daughter and a Yankee store-keeper ? " But it's no use saying anything to him" Mrs. Briggs frankly confessed.

" I did just drop him a hint at the time of my own girl's marriage, that now Jean was growing up it wasn't ad visable to let Mrs. Wanklyn make herself into the girl's intimate friend ; and what do you think he did ? He swore ! . . . Oh, not at me, of course. Even he wouldn't quite do that ; but there, my dear, you know how thick he has always been with the Wanklyn woman ; and whatever may be the upshot, I've made up my mind to one thing, I shall never mention her name to him again; And so the friendship went on unchecked ; and though in her secret soul Jean didn't like Mrs. Wanklyn quite so much as she had done when she was a child, and wished sometimes that the widow would not say or do things which made one, without knowing why, seel hot and uncomfortable, she was too trustful by nature and too loyal to her father's old friend, and the relict of her dear old doctor, to be anything but most bright and cordial with her, or to receive her counsels as to cake-making and naval entertainment less good-humourcdly than those of her other monitors.

All the same, they bored her a little, and she did not always attend to them. Indeed there was a saucy sparkle in her eyes to-day as she reflected on the daring way in which she had hitherto omitted to carry out any of these injunctions, and had broken through evencanon of colonial propriety by fairly running away from the crowning fuss and glory of the arrival. " But if papa doesn't scold me — and he never does, poor dear — why should I mind any one else ? " thought the young lady, with a slight toss of her pretty head. " Besides, I will certainly open a bottle of our best port for the middies, poor boys ! whether they appreciate it or not. Ah, my dear old ' Barnaby,' " with a loving squeeze of the oft-read volume on her knee, " how much I prefer you to the whole lot of them ! " In her desire to get as far as possible, how ever, from the " lot " aforesaid, Jean had ridden six miles in the breezy sunshine, and was just sufficiently tired to find something pleasantly soporific in the warm rays now reflected from her young face.

" Barnaby " might be very dear, but " Barnaby " had been conned so often that she could have repeated him off by heart had she been so minded ; and then, sheltered as she was (as much sheltered as it was possible to be in any corner of such a " cave of the winds " as this island home), little stray gusts of air would come stealing about her, ruffling the pages, and tangling loose locks of hair about the corners of her eyes. It was pleasanter to lean back looking out straight before her into the sunshine, and thinking of the grand dinner at Government House on the following day, and all the gaieties which were sure to follow. There was the stillness of the grey old hills all around. The long grass rustled softly under the breeze. Now and then a water bird rose with a booming cry from the marsh below.

The big ship lay like a tiny black toy in the centre of a streak of silver-gray dazzle, with a little string of black spots going to and fro between her and the shore, and more black dots, mere specks, indeed, frecking the long white road which ran along the top of the beach. " Quite a crowd of people ! " Jean said wonder ingly ; and, indeed, there must have been twenty visible at one time. " What an excitement there must be, and how much pleasanter it is here — so warm, and — so sunny — and " and there Jean's eyes, which had been half-closing for some minutes, shut up altogether, her head drooped a little to one side, the fingers clasped round her knee parted, and fell loosely asunder ; the girl was fast asleep in the sunshine. And Brown Jenny went on cropping the short young grass among the bushes a little way below.

Chapter II. Jean To The Rescue

It must have been about two hours later when a man entered the valley from its lower end. A young man, rather tall, very fair and pale — one of those absolutely blonde men who are not as beautiful as blonde women at any time, and if heated or sunburnt become posi tively plain ; but though tired, he was not heated, and certainly not sunburnt, at the present moment ; and seeing that he was blessed with tolerably well-cut features, and had the un mistakable air of a gentleman, he could hardly be called plain at any time. That he had come to grief now, however, was evident. He was on foot, but had a whip in his hand, and his feet and legs were black with liquid mud above the knees. Also his head was bare, and the wind was blowing his hair wildly about, and his face had a tired, anxious expression, as he came up under the wall of rocks, looking sharply from side to side.

The man was evidently a stranger to the place, and had been thrown from his horse and bogged. He had lost his way into the bargain, and the question with him now was what he should do to find it again. It was at this moment that his eyes fell on Brown Jenny, and the expression of his face brightened very decidedly. For the mare was not loose, but tethered to a tough-looking shrub about a dozen yards from him, and she had on a side-saddle ! It was not a very elegant one certainly. One pommel had been broken off altogether, and the other was patched with hide, and the seat was worn and padded with a cushion of common green baize, after a fashion more efficacious than artistic ; but still it was palpably meant for a woman, and therefore was suggestive of a woman (and consequently her male companions) being somewhere in the vicinity.

Further, upon a flat stone close to the horse there stood a little basket containing a modest lunch of bread and cheese, whereon three small greenfinches were perched, chirping pleasantly, the while they pecked, at the kindness which had provided them this refection. They flew away with some indignation when the stranger came near ; but the mare merely lifted her head a moment, and then went on feeding ; and nothing else, neither man, woman, nor child, was visible from one end of the narrow gully to the other. The young man was fairly puzzled. " They must be somewhere within hearing," was the thought in his mind ; and he had just lifted his head to shout, when his eyes, travel ling higher than they had yet done, rested on something so unexpected that it almost took away his breath in the first surprise — a girl, and a very pretty girl, perched on a ledge in the wall of rock high above him, and sound asleep !