Fern Seed

Front matter

FERN SEED

By Henry Milner Rideout

Man and Beast Waded Together Along the Shallows, Their Figures in Sharp Relief Against Rippling Sunshine

Part I

AFTERNOON sun beat down on the quays of Alexandria, making the air boil and dance along stonework, above dock water, among masts and funnels. A crowd waiting under the sun found it hot. Leonard Corsant, after some years in the Far East, cared little for this heat of Egypt. He had known worse, but now he felt impatient to go aboard, get out into good sea breeze once more, and continue his journey. He was going home to America.

Through her window in the little sentry-box office, a girl passed him his papers, and smiled. She was dark, pretty, and much more his friend than the occasion demanded.

"Again, sir! Ah, we always lose you!" she mourned in excellent French.

Leonard returned her smile, as he took her pen. He had a good-humored face, sunburned, careless, with a hawk nose of rather determined cut and easy bright-blue eyes. Lifting his hat, he bared a crop head of close fair curls. He was no ladies' man, to speak of—they did not bother him often; and while he read her printed slip he thought this one must be of those who reveal tenderness when a ship casts off or a train rolls out. They were not in his line of life.

"Yes, thank you—but see here, mademoiselle," he objected, "I can't sign."

There was plague in Alexandria. The officers of public health were anxious. Their paper which the girl had given him, said, in French: "I declare upon my honor as a gentleman that I have no soiled linen in my baggages."

She looked at him coyly through the grating.

"Oh, it is a form, sir."

"Yes, but I can't sign your form," said Leonard. "I have some in my baggages—a shirt and so on. Pardon, but this holy document raises a point of honor."

The girl laughed, snatched it from his hand, snatched the pen also, and wrote.

"There! I have signed," she cried. "On my head be all the perjury!"

Leonard seldom forgot a face, and hers was too pretty to be forgotten. He had never seen her before, yet the name she wrote, blotted, and held up gaily for approval, was correct—"L. Corsant."

The signature might almost have been his own; and beneath it she had drawn a paraph that no one could have guessed—a flourish which as a little boy he had copied from his father's writing. A pothook run through a bull's head, his father called it—a family joke, meaningless. He stared at this copy, then at her.

"How on earth did you know?"

She laughed again.

"Oh, monsieur, how should I forget? You are not in the vein of compliment this afternoon. But me, I will say you look much better and more brown. Now go, please. I am busy. You pretend I forget you, when you always block the way standing on your punctilio."

The dark young minx waved him farewell, and rolled her eyes with a look of the sort called ravishing. Leonard passed on. The queue of sweating Europeans behind him—Holy Land tourists, who wore mosquito veils draped voluptuously round ferocious helmets—began in fact to grumble, push, and use unholy outlandish words.

"Well, at last!" he thought, following his porters up the Rubattino gangway. "There's an Egyptian mystery for you—black magic. It's come too late, of course."

He soon forgot this riddle. A very fat Italian woman, dressed magnificently, helped him to forget, by waving her farewells to someone on board, and falling between quay and ship. Blue-gowned Arabs calmly hauled her out with ropes—one yelling mass of rage and terror, crowned with muddy cascades from what had been her Paris bonnet. The poor lady became a source of artless glee. Crew and longshoremen cast off merrily. Veiled pilgrims from the Holy Land were still enjoying the memory of her misfortune, and chuckling, long after Pharos and Pharallon had sunk in the horizon.

Leonard found the voyage a disappointment. After the hot, dreamy azure of the Red Sea, Mediterranean water seemed dark, bleak, and chilly. Across this old route of the Roman grain ships came biting winds, like those loosed on the Trojan fleet—his former schoolbook enemies, Eurus, Notus, Africus all together—more fresh air than he had bargained for. Aquilo or something worse blew from the Adriatic mouth, when all hands took to the smoking room and shivered. Below in the doctor's cabin he enjoyed the company of a third-class passenger, an old Nestorian monk, whom he treated to Gragnano and Flor de Dindigul, and who treated him to many hours of profitable talk.

Naples drew near from the sea one morning early as a cold amphitheater of whited villas. Its welcome took the form of a printed order, distributed with care by men in uniform, commanding every stranger to report himself daily for ten days.

"I haven't any plague," said Corsant. "Be hanged if they keep me down here to freeze!"

His friend the monk smiled.

"Your blood has grown thin in the tropics. Not so thin as mine. Hélas, beaux jours perdus! Go then, my boy, in God's name—but do not leave them your next address."

Leonard took this good counsel, carried the old man off for forty-eight hours of happy mooning through Pompeii, shook hands, parted, and climbed into a north-bound train. He was now quite alone in the world, with time to waste and nothing to do. During some years of hard work, he had cherished the dream of another Italian holiday; but now that it came true, he found the thing less free and glorious than what his fancy had painted. Moving from one set of obscure lodgings to another—to make his money go as far as possible—he learned that bed was the only warm place for him in Italy. But then, fleas loved this haven also. Thanks to a Chinese boy in Hong Kong, Leonard's only greatcoat was traveling round by sea to London. He made light of such trifles, and persevered; yet even his long walks by day, pilgrimages on foot to the most lovely sights, became little by little overcast and saddened. He had too much of his own company, was always cold.

One evening in Santa Maria Novella he sat as long as he could sit with a dark, hushed, humped little crowd, looking out from mysterious gloom to where the altar floated in a haze of candlelight and of young voices singing. The contrast moved him, touched him within like an allegory of our poor humankind. He would have stayed there, but the mortal chill of the church had crept into his bones and drove him away. As he went quietly out through the vast empty rear of the darkness, a man, a shadow leaning on a pillar, turned to look at him. Leonard caught only a passing impression that the movement was quick and stiff. He thought no more of it.

"Well? To bed with the fleas again?" he asked himself, outdoors. "No, by gum! This is bad!"

His body shook, his teeth chattered. Slapping himself like a teamster, he crossed the piazza by starlight, and hurried down a narrow street, to find some refuge, osteria, trattoria, wine shop or eating den—whatever might first appear. For some time he found nothing. The way was empty, dark, a rift among medieval shadows. When at last a pair of windows gave light ahead, their panes all steamy with warmth inside, he turned toward them, opened the door between, and entered.

It was a dingy little old restaurant, a narrow room which in those days before the war ran through from Sword Street to Sun Street. A dingy little old waiter leaned against the wall as though put there and abandoned like a worn-out umbrella. If alive, he was the only living creature to be seen. Leonard had chosen a table nearest the source of heat—a cavern mouth that breathed out greasy kitchen odors—and had settled himself on a bench, before the old solitary moved or so much as blinked.

"Good evening," said Leonard. "Something hot, if you please."

The waiter slowly detached his back from the wall, and came forward mumbling excuses:

"The cook has gone home in rage, sir. A maledicted cook, who made asseverations2" Then, as he became aware that his guest sat shuddering his aged eyes grew bright, shrewd, kindly. He stopped his apology to cry one compassionate word—"Freddo!"

With that he darted into the kitchen, made a great clatter, and quickly burst again from the darkness, running with a tumbler, a black bottle, and a copper kettle that steamed.

"Prompt and intelligent cuss," quoth Leonard. In more polite phrases, he begged the man to get another tumbler and share his toddy.

"Oh, sir, you are too kind," was the reply. "I could not think of doing so."

The poor old chap was both surprised and frightened. Leonard had an easy way with him, however, and soon the pair were hobnobbing over Gorgonzola verde and a good round loaf of bread. Chills vanished; likewise formality. The talk passed from weather and hard times to politics, then to warfare and memories; for this dried little ancient with his nutcracker face and beady eyes, had tramped as a boy soldier of Garibaldi's, and plainly a good one. With all the shop to themselves, they took their ease, found each other excellent company, and held a humble revel.

"You like that story, sir?"

"I do, I do!" cried Corsant, leaning back and wiping his eyes. "But it hurts to laugh so."

"Then, sir, I will tell you a yet more comical. At Orte were three sisters2"

Just then the Sword Street door quietly opened. A man came in. The laughing veteran sprang up, drew away and, as though by a trick on the stage, faded, shriveling back into a sad old waiter.

He who caused this transformation paid it no heed, but stepped down into the room and looked about scornfully. He was a lusty blond young man, handsome after a fashion which, thought Leonard, was too professionally male. His English clothes fitted him too well, tighter than need be, and set off a muscular body powerful enough for an athlete's, but not loose enough.

"Good evening to you," he said in English.

Leonard returned the wish.

The stranger paused by Leonard's table. He was smiling, but his eyes remained too pale and cold.

"We always meet in odd places, don't we?" He spoke affably. His bass voice came from the throat and seemed to roughen it. "I shouldn't quite think you'd care for this, though. There are plenty of good beer halls."

Corsant, when ruffled, had a sleepy way of looking at you. When angry—as a friend of his expressed it—his face died. Now he looked no more than sleepy.

"It does well enough, thanks," he said. "I can't recall any other places where we had the pleasure?"

"0h, just as you like!" The stranger laughed. Then, having turned to see that the servant was beyond earshot, he laughed again, and bent across the table. "I do not scrape friendship. But we're off duty, eh? One good turn deserves another, and I thought you might like to know that they are after you."

Leonard had forgotten all plagues of Egypt and all quarantine documents. Now he remembered. This warning seemed freely enough given, and probably true; still he did not like the giver, or the accompanying sneer of condescension.

"Oh! Much obliged," said he. "Let 'em come."

The light-colored eyes flashed down at him balefully.

"Good. We are even. I leave you to—your friend."

Removing his hat stiffly, the man swung round, marched rather than walked past the waiter—whom he ignored as from a height—and so went out by the other door into the darkness of Sun Street.

"Who was he, Gino?"

The waiter thawed, became human again, and flung off a most inimitable farewell with his hands.

"Ah, that brute! Ah, that white-eyed vassal! I never saw him before, sir."

"Nor I," said Leonard.

He was not so sure. That stiff wheel and turn of the back all in a piece reminded him how someone had watched him go out of church.

"For all his garments and his altitude," said Gino, grinning, "he behaved as one in a hurry. No repose. Why fluster so grandly? Why should one hurry, sir? The man cannot consume the time; no, the time consumes the man."

Corsant agreed.

"You speak like Horatius Flaccus. Have we any more hot water? If so—the evening is young—come, sit down, and let us finish that yarn of the three sisters."

II

BEING a young man who took things as they happened and, like John Silver, kept company very easy, Leonard soon forgot these adventures in travel. Nothing came of them, except a long illness after his chill. He spent some weeks abed in France—dreary weeks, exceeding lonesome—and reached England later as a pale, thin convalescent, hollow about the eyes and tottery on the legs.

To get well, he made straight for the country. More than once in childhood his father had told him if ever he should visit England, he must go search out a little old village near the sea.

"Our people came from there, or close by," his father had said. "We'll have to see the Devil's Nose together, and pass through it for luck, my boy. We need to freshen ours. A couple of centuries gone, I daresay, since one of us did it. Some day we'll go there on pilgrimage."

These dark sayings took a child's fancy at the moment, lay in the same storeroom with other memories, bits of old tales, fairy books, things imagined, or facts mysterious because half understood, and so to the young man had sometimes a trace of their faded color and fragrance. Leonard had made of his father a legendary hero, powerful, gentle, with dark blue twinkling eyes—a form surrounded by the bright mist of early adoration. They two had never gone on any pilgrimage. But as a grown man, without living kindred, he had once or twice vaguely meant to do some day what his father proposed, if only as a pagan rite, the pleasing of a shade. Always before in England he had been kept too busy.

"A sick man," he thought, "has no right to bother his friends. So now's a good time. The little old place, whatever it's like—the duller the better—will do for 'loungin' round and sufferin'.' The inn is called Merle's, I see. Wire for a room, and ask to be met. We'll go down; as father said, for luck."

He went, therefore, alone. The month was May, the journey an afternoon dream of green fields gliding past, lovely to a sick man's eyes, and to his mind one drowsy comfort that promised the return of health. Towards evening, at a tiny station under a hawthorn hedge, he stepped from his compartment into a brisk yet mild air smelling of green grass and the sea, and a light that spread as from vast distances unconfined yet softly tempered and brooding.

An old man peered at his face, nodded without a word, and taking his kitbag, led him behind the hedge, where stood a shaggy moorlandish pony in a cart. Leonard climbed slowly to a seat, the old man hopped up nimbly, the pony jumped and started off trotting with wild and fitful ardor.

Uphill, downhill, by roads or lanes always deep-sunken between hedge-banks, they jogged, rattling. Now and again, sidelong through the gate of a field or forward from some height, Corsant caught brief glimpses of the landscape; rolling hills all patchworked in great squares, rich green, pale green, bright red, and where young wheat had but started, faint rose and green as changeable as taffeta. But chiefly the way wound along in secret, hidden by wildflower banks and hedges, a dusky tunnel under the trees. In one of its darkest hollows, the driver halted his pony. He said nothing, but sat and waited. Corsant did the same. A minute or two passed thus.

On their right hand the tangle of thorns and beech was broken. Two stone pillars with chains hanging between them stood in a gap, through which Leonard saw garden borders, shrubs, and deeper within, half hidden, the windows of a dark stone house. The place seemed empty and neglected. Red valerian ran wild there.

"Well?" said he at last.

Turning, he caught the driver's eye for the first time, and only for an instant. There was an odd look in it, something like respect, sympathy even, mixed with shrewd understanding.

"Why, sir," replied the old man. "The chains are locked, sir."

"Oh? Is this the inn?"

A quick sidelong glance, that began to be a stare, was the driver's answer. Then he corrected himself, and sat as before, watching the pony's ears.

"You wish to go to the inn first then, sir?"

"Yes, of course."

"Beg pardon, sir." The man gathered his reins, and drove on. "I misunderstood, sir."

They jogged in silence down a hill and up another, turned left at a crossroad, turned right where many lanes met, and so went twisting through a green labyrinth where twilight fell. At last, about lamp-lighting time, they descended a short curving street lined with thatched cottages, in the lower end of which their pony halted without command. Here the driver hopped out, unloaded Corsant's bag, and guided him through the gate of a small garden to a lighted doorway. Inside the house, a stout old woman carrying a lamp greeted him kindly.

"Good evening, sir."

Her voice was pleasant, her florid face all a broad smile of welcome. While she added some speech about dinner and bed, an aged white bull terrier coasted round her skirts, approached in purblind fashion, and sniffed the stranger's legs. Afterward, at table, she stood beaming covertly on him as he ate.

"I'm sorry my husband made that blunder, sir," she said. "It was a pity to take you out of your way; but he thought you might wish to"—she stopped, then changing and picking her words carefully, concluded—"might care to look about you a bit."

Being drowsy and tired, Corsant answered at random.

"Oh, it's all right, Mrs. Merle." He stifled a yawn. "An excellent dinner. I foresee this house of yours is the place for a man to get well in."

"I hope so indeed, for you, sir," she replied heartily. "I do indeed, I assure you."

They were very friendly persons, he thought. Going upstairs early, he found his groom of the pony was now groom of the chamber, for by pleasant candle and hearth light, old Merle, with a brass warming pan, stood caressing the sheets in a vast Pickwickian bed. This ancient seemed as wiry and nimble, but silent, indoors as out. To a mild question if the room needed so much stoking, he listened firmly, replied in brief: "The night air was poison, sir"; and so took his leave, with respectful wishes.

"'The love that follows us sometime is our trouble,'" thought Leonard, but he waited till the old man went downstairs before hauling the fire apart and opening his windows. For a while he lay watching the stars through a frame of dark leaves and vines; then, to the hushing voice of the sea behind some hill, and the squeak of a churn-owl weaving nocturnal spells round and round the house, he fell asleep greatly contented and at home.

The weeks that followed made his content all the deeper. When rain lashed the windows and the elms tossed, and hidden seas rumbled in the distance he lounged by the little parlor fire, reading, smoking, dozing like the Fat Boy of Dingley Dell; while the old white bull terrier snored on the hearth, a coffin of a clock ticked solemnly, blinking its brazen eye at him, and a bullfinch in the kitchen piped a few notes, forlornly sweet, during the pauses of the wind. He was the one guest there, alone like a single passenger at sea. Mrs. Merle and her husband he seldom encountered, for they not only took care that no one else disturbed him, but kept themselves remarkably out of the way. In fine weather—it soon turned fine—he went outdoors so early and returned so late that of the village people he saw, as it happened, little or nothing but a face here and there at a window. His first walks led him toward the sea, along high cliffs, to lie sheltered by the dark spines and gold of gorse, and from a green precipice edge to look down on sparkling water, headlands that slanted away each to its parson-and-clerk pair of outermost crags, and far-curved surf, white streaks that seemed motionless in the distance. Mild air soothed and healed, the sun tanned him like an Indian.

A fortnight of this life saw him well. He began to scour the country, taking walks that grew longer and longer, setting out at sunrise, returning at dusk with a stride that never tired any more, a giant appetite for Mrs. Merle's gooseberries and clotted cream.

One noonday, being far afield, both hungry and thirsty, he entered a quiet little town which sweltered at the bottom of a valley. Its thoroughfare was empty and hot. From glaring cobblestones he stepped into the darkness of an old coaching inn, the White Hart. Here a dismal waiter brought him cold veal pie, strong beer, sweating cheese, and angrily green gherkins.

"Haven't you any—lighter trifle?" asked Leonard.

The man struggled with his grief awhile.

"I'll ascertain, sir," he replied without hope. "It's not likely, but cook might have made trifle."

"Good Lord, no!" said Corsant in haste. "These will do very well."

In that close heat, they were formidable. He made the best of it, however, and attacked them with care. The room was cool, though moldy. He ate alone, but through a glazed partition could look into the aged coffee room, where two persons sat talking. One was a tall, black-haired man with a bass voice; the other, hidden by his broad shoulders, a girl.

"No, miss, that colt was a chestnut. You're thinking of the brown filly. No, another trace altogether. At Newbury in the eighties, before you were born2"

"Why, George, what are you saying?" came the girl's voice. "It's not often one catches you in the wrong."

"Not on that point, thank you, miss," replied the bass, quietly stubborn. "Now, go back as far as Ormonde's year2"

The girl interrupted again. Leonard caught only a few of their words, but knew that they were discussing horses, and gathered that the girl upheld her end of the argument. Some wild country tomboy, he thought; a type which he had seen before, and disliked; loafing in a dingy bar, smoking with men, talking slang, airing her worldliness.

Presently the man laughed at something, and leaned back. Over his shoulder, the girl's face appeared, smiling. It was not at all the face of a tomboy; mischievous indeed and young, but even in that shadowy den alight with intelligence. Her eyes, large and black, were looking straight in through the dusty window pane.

"Why! There2"

She sprang up from her chair, and stood for an instant leaning forward, her face wonderfully brightened, her lips—Corsant had time to mark what a clear red they were—parted in surprise. Next moment she had sat down, hidden again behind her companion.

"That was extraordinary! For half a second, you know, I thought2"

The rest Corsant did not hear. But the man, who had neither turned nor moved, presently replied to her:

"No, he won't be here for another week, miss. I'll try to have everything ready as you'd like it."

"It is now, George. You're quite splendid," said the girl's voice. "I was and am delighted."

Soon afterward, through the glass, Leonard saw them rise and go, the tall man following her with unstudied though evident respect. She herself was fairly tall. Both were slender, and in their easy, outdoor way of moving they seemed vaguely alike. When they had vanished, a clack of hoofs and rattle of wheels on cobbles passed down the street and left it sleeping. Leonard continued to stun his appetite with the cold, leaden, pasty and discolored cheese.

"Wonder who she thought I was?" He mused at the dingy window panes, as if behind them something of her brightness lingered. "Shouldn't mind being the right chap."

That afternoon he walked some fifteen miles more, homeward roundabout. He went slowly, for the green sunken lanes held much heat and little stir of air; but their hedgerow banks imprisoned the sight only to enrich it. Wild flowers—campion, violets, snitchwort, herb Robert—filled the grass and lined both sides of the road higher than a man's head. On a hilltop he paused to catch the draft of soft sea breeze and hear a pair of skylarks.

"She was mighty pretty," he thought; and becoming aware that he thought so, was surprised at his own irrelevance. "What? Running in my head, is she? What for?"

He went on downhill. These walks began to be tiresome.

In the Pickwickian bedroom at Mrs. Merle's that evening, he found his wash had come home again. Once before the wrapping had been written on—"For Lieutenant Corsant." Now the inscription ran, "For Captain Corsant," and under the twine someone had stuck a nosegay of wallflowers. "Going up in the world," thought Leonard. "If promotion keeps on, they'll have me the 'very pattern of a modern major general.'"

He put the wallflowers in a glass of water.

"Mighty pretty," said he. "As good in profile as she was full front."

III

CURVED gables of tawny-gray thatch across the street, tree tops behind them where rooks fluttered and cawed, shut off all view of the river. To see it, the nearest way led through a lane past the blacksmith's. A small tidal stream, curving between two broad, low hills, it ran deep with the ebb and bent round a crag into the hidden sea; with the flood, it crept up shallow, pale, spreading inland among green-wooded points and fields whitened by daisies.

Young flood had set in, grown toward half tide, as Corsant went down the lane.

"Good morning, sir," called Peacock the blacksmith from his cavern. A big, swart man, he grinned, and saluted with his hammer between blows. "Fine day!"

In the darkness an old white pony stood half asleep, with a tool box under his heels. Perched on the edge of the water tub, a long-legged man sat and played with a rasp, brooded, or thoughtfully gossiped, while Peacock bent a horseshoe, the soft red iron muffling the ring of his anvil.

"A very fine day," said Leonard.

The bitter smell of burnt hoofs drifted after him, in the sunlight and hawthorn shade. A wall crossed the foot of the lane; a stile mounted the wall; and beyond these a path descended green fields to the river. Near the stream Leonard turned and looked back as though someone called. No one had made a sound; but far uphill by the blacksmith's door two small figures stood watching him—the aproned Peacock and his taller gossip. Though distant, they had somehow the air of men watching long and sharply. It was not Peacock, but the other, who raised one arm overhead and waved a genial flourish.

"Strangers in these parts," thought Leonard, "must be a rare sight."

He answered the flourish, turned and struck into another footpath which rambled along the river bank. Passing behind a screen of branches, he caught his last glimpse of village and lane. The two little figures remained there still, watching him go out of sight.

"This is a good time," he reflected lazily, "to try father's project. We'll walk through the thirls, and freshen our family luck."

But the sea, when he climbed round its barrier crag at the river mouth, did not favor this plan. The lonely curve of yellow sand was narrowed as if drawn taut by incoming tide; a great azure pool, fordable, yet holding infinitely deep reflections of summer cloud, poured smooth across it into the river; and though everywhere alongshore the water line lapped nearer in tiny waves that glittered and sank almost foamless, whitecaps were bursting round the rocks beyond. A hundred yards out, black, ugly, pierced by two fantastic arches, towered the Devil's Nose.

"No walking through that for a while."

The dark surf-worn pinnacle stood ringed with spray, which gleamed as it came surging through the two holes, veiled their shadows halfway up, fell, and spouted landward into sunlight again. The rock sneered at this peaceful shore, thought Leonard, like a reminder of evil fury hidden and disguised.

"You might swim through it." Basking on warm sand, he dallied with the notion. "Why not? Rather fun."

No breath of air stirred, but the waves in the thirls maintained a hissing roar, continuous, like winds tearing through a forest. The longer he heard, the less he liked it.

"Well, by George!" He sat up, angry. "Where's your nerve gone? Turning invalidical, eh? We'll see about that!"

The beach was then, as on all his former visits, deserted. He pulled off his clothes, and ran down naked into the sea.

"Here goes for luck!"

After his first plunge, the water seemed glorious. He shot forth into a region of fresh life, with body and mind rejoicing, the world growing young to eyesight cleared by sea magic. A good swimmer, Corsant put his power into a few strokes, found it all there again ready at call, and then went romping forward, burying his face for mere wantonness, and staring down through the cool green void where sunshine faded into quivering mist and network shadows. A cold streak suddenly checked this play. He roused, and glanced ahead. It was not a streak. He had left the tempered surface water behind, and now swam in a chill ocean current, near the rock. Green hollows round him began to seethe white.