‘I advise you,’ he continued, but need not have bothered: she had slipped from him, and was lying stretched on the parlour carpet.
So the chaplain at least was freed, and went, mopping his forehead, his eyes, his hectic cheeks, in search of ladies who might take charge of the hysterical female who had frightened him not only at his prayers, but also almost out of his wits.
It was Miss Scrimshaw who informed Mrs Roxburgh a while later that she had gone off in a faint. The latter lay on her bed looking up at the white ceiling. Miss Scrimshaw herself was white-lipped within her brown complexion, for the scene she had recently witnessed had been a most distressing one: sobbing children, flustered servants, her friend Mrs Roxburgh stretched out cold in her rucked-up muslin. In calmer circumstances the picture might have appealed to the spinster’s cool eye and æsthetic sense as a somewhat unorthodox Dormition. Now the chaplain alone, twitching inside his shabby tunic, prevented her appreciating what she saw.
Miss Scrimshaw could not care for this small cleric of an evangelical persuasion. She admired large men, handsome officers in His Majesty’s Services, and those other officers of the cloth, if large too, and destined for the purple. She had exchanged vows as a girl, it was known, with a naval lieutenant who died of a fever at Antigua, and remained more or less faithful to his memory, though she might have accepted a certain bereaved bishop had he proposed.
All this passed through Miss Scrimshaw’s mind as she supervised the gathering up of Mrs Roxburgh from the carpet, and afterwards, as she stood bathing her friend’s temples, a sibyl as it were, broody with the fumes of eau de Cologne.
But that which Miss Scrimshaw did not care to recall as she pursued her ministrations was the screaming of the man they had strung up to the triangle in the gateway of the prisoners’ barracks. She must banish it from her memory, along with anything else too naked or too cutting, which her upbringing and undefined social position had taught her to ignore. She only hoped her friend Mrs Roxburgh would not make it too difficult for her.
But Mrs Roxburgh, again in possession of her mind, appeared to have chosen Reason as her mentor. ‘Don’t you find him a tiresome little man?’
‘Whom?’ asked Miss Scrimshaw, as always careful of her grammar.
‘Mr Cottle.’
‘Yes indeed!’ Miss Scrimshaw agreed with such heartiness her rather yellow teeth were exposed.
‘But well-meaning.’
‘If well-meaning is ever enough.’ On second thoughts Miss Scrimshaw added magnanimously, ‘We should be thankful, I suppose, for minor virtues when vice is so often in the grand manner’ while hoping she had not regressed too far in the direction of the incident which had been the cause of Mrs Roxburgh’s collapse.
But the latter spent a fairly cheerful evening, helping little Kate with a watercolour, and accepting to take a hand at whist with the Commandant, Mrs Lovell, and Miss Scrimshaw herself, after the tea-table had been cleared.
Early morning, once the source of innocent joy, had become for her a breeding ground of dread. The children no longer came to her since the fright they got on finding her lying, as they thought, dead, a deception which could not be soon or easily forgiven. But she continued to waken as the first tinge of grey was filtered through the darkness surrounding her, the hour when she felt most isolated, and consequently, induced to explore the labyrinth of conscience. As the light grew more substantial she appeared abandoned even by her shadow, and however ecstatic the choir of birds, silences were inevitably appended, through which she would find herself tramping rather than walking in bush featureless and listless enough to have been a reflection of her hopes.
On such a morning, thrusting her way through scrub grown denser, the going rougher, still within sight of the brown, sluggish river, though well beyond the confines of the settlement, she was arrested by a glimpse of something which at first suggested floating, flickering light rather than any solid form: it was such a refractive white, and her thoughts had withdrawn far from her surroundings into the obscure recesses of her mind.
Then she saw that here among the dusty casuarinas she had come upon a small rustic building in crudely quarried, but whitewashed stone, and realized that this must be Pilcher’s folly, the unconsecrated chapel the ordained minister had mentioned. Her heart was beating uncomfortably, her breathing strained, as she trod carefully, lifting her skirt to avoid stumbling over rocks and breaking sticks in her cautious approach to the open doorway. What she feared was that Pilcher himself might be inside and catch her in the act of trespassing, for trespass it could only be, from her experience of the architect’s mind — not unlike certain pockets in her own.
So that to set foot upon the whitewashed threshold was in some sense for Mrs Roxburgh a regrettable action. Ellurnnnn, she heard her name tolled, not by one, but several voices. Yet nobody barred her entry into the primitive chapel. The interior was bare, except for a log bench and a rough attempt at what in an orthodox church would have been the communion table, on it none of the conventional ornaments or trappings, but an empty bird’s-nest which may or may not have reached there by accident. Above the altar a sky-blue riband painted on the wall provided a background to the legend GOD IS LOVE, in the wretchedest lettering, in dribbled ochre. Nothing more, but the doorless doorway through which she had entered, and two narrow, unglazed windows piercing the side walls of the chapel.
Mrs Roxburgh felt so weak at the knees she plumped down on the uneven bench, so helpless in herself that the tears were running down her cheeks, her own name again mumbled, or rather, tolled, through her numbed ears.
All this by bright sunlight in the white chapel. Birds flew, first one, then a second, in at a window and out the opposite. There was little to obstruct, whether flight, thought, or vision. If she could have stayed her tears, but over those she had no control, as she sat re-living the betrayal of her earthly loves, while the Roxburghs’ LORD GOD OF HOSTS continued charging in apparent triumph, trampling the words she was contemplating.
At last she must have cried herself out: she could not have seen more clearly, down to the cracks in the wooden bench, the bird-droppings on the rudimentary altar. She did not attempt to interpret a peace of mind which had descended on her (she would not have been able to attribute it to prayer or reason) but let the silence enclose her like a beatitude. Then, when she had blown her nose, and re-arranged her veil, she went outside, to return to the settlement in which it seemed at times she might remain permanently imprisoned.
She looked back once in the direction of the chapel in spite of a warning by her better judgment against wilfully revoking perfection. There she saw a figure which became that of the lapsed seaman and dedicated architect. Although she restrained herself from acknowledging his presence, he started scrambling up the slope, causing saplings in his path to shudder, dislodging minor rocks, one of which bounded to within inches of the intruder’s feet.
She hastened away, and upon reaching the settlement, sensed at once that something out of the ordinary had happened to dispel apathy and relieve tension.
One of the assigned servants ran out of the house and announced from the edge of the veranda, ‘Oh, ma’am, the cutter is in the river. They’ve sighted ’er from up the mill.’ The woman was so elated by an occurrence which could not ease her own lot, but which she regarded none the less as an event, that Mrs Roxburgh experienced a pang of remorse.
‘And when will they sail?’ she dared inquire.
‘Who knows?’ the woman answered. ‘’Tisn’t for me to decide, is it?’ and was brought down to reality and the leaden soles of her boots.