Carette of Sark. John Oxenham
good fourteen miles there and back, for the purpose of meeting his friend, and looked on it as a high privilege.
When, at times, he took me with him, I, too, looked on it as a mighty privilege; for Peter Port, even on a Sabbath morning, was, to a boy whose life was spent within the shadow of the Autelets, so to speak, a great and bustling city, full of people and houses and mysteries, and of course of wickedness, all of which excited my liveliest imaginings.
In the evening we would pull back, or run before the west wind if it served, and my grandfather would thoughtfully con over the gains of the day as another might tell the profits of his trading. Master Claude Gray was a man of parts, well read, an Englishman, and it was doubtless from him that my grandfather drew some of that love of books which distinguished him above any man I ever knew on Sercq, not excepting even the Seigneur, or the Sénéchal, or the Schoolmaster, or the Parson.
His library consisted of five books which he valued beyond anything he possessed, chiefly on account of what was in them and what he got out of them; to some extent also, in the case of three of them, for what they represented to him.
The first was a very large Bible bound in massive leather-covered boards, a present from Master Claude Gray to his friend, and brother in Christ, Philip Carré, and so stated in a very fine round-hand on the front page. It contained a number of large pictures drawn on wood which, under strict injunctions as to carefulness and clean hands and no wet fingers, I was occasionally allowed to look at on a winter's Sabbath evening, and which always sent me to bed in a melancholy frame of mind, yet drew me to their inspection with a most curious fascination when the next chance offered.
Another was Mr. John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, also with woodcuts of a somewhat terrifying aspect, yet not devoid of lively fillips to the imagination.
Then there was a truly awful volume, Foxe's Book of Martyrs, with pictures which wrought so upon me that I used to wake up in the night shrieking with terror, and my mother forbade any further study of it; though Krok, when he came to be able to read, would hang over it by the hour, spelling out all the dreadful stories with his big forefinger and noting every smallest detail of the pictured tortures.
These two my grandfather had bought in Peter Port at a sale, together with a copy of Jean de la Fontaine's Fables Choisies in French, with delightful pictures of all the talking beasts.
And—crowning glory from the purely literary point of view—a massive volume of Plays by William Shakespeare, and to this was attached a history and an inscription of which my grandfather, in his quiet way, was not a little proud.
When the Valentine, East Indiaman, went ashore on Brecqhou in the great autumn gale, the year before I was born—that was before the Le Marchants set themselves down there—my grandfather was among the first to put out to the rescue of the crew and passengers. He got across to Brecqhou at risk of his life, and, from his knowledge of that ragged coast and its currents, managed to float a line down to the sinking ship by means of which every man got safe ashore. There was among them a rich merchant of London, a Mr. Peter Mulholland, and he would have done much for the man who had saved all their lives.
"I have done naught more than my duty," said my grandfather, and would accept nothing.
But Mr. Mulholland stopped with him for some days, while such of the cargo as had floated was being gathered from the shores—and, truth to tell, from the houses—of Sercq, that is to say some portion of it, for some went down with the ship, and in some of the houses there are silken hangings to this day. And the rich Englishman came to know what manner of man my grandfather was and his tastes, and some time after he had gone there came one day a great parcel by the Guernsey cutter, addressed to my grandfather, and in it was that splendid book of Shakespeare's Plays which, after his Bible, became his greatest delight. An inscription, too, which he read religiously every time he opened the book, though he must have known every curl of every letter by heart.
It was a wonderful book, even to look at. When I grew learned enough to read it aloud to him and my mother and Krok of a winter's night, I came by degrees, though not by any means at first, to understand what a very wonderful book it was.
When one's reading is limited to four books it is well that they should be good books. Every one of those books I read through aloud from beginning to end, not once, but many times, except indeed the long lists of names in the Bible, which my grandfather said were of no profit to us, and some other portions which he said were beyond me, and which I therefore made a point of reading to myself, but got little benefit from.
But to these books, and to the habit of reading them aloud, which impressed them greatly on my memory, and to my own observation of men and things and places through the eyes which these books helped to open, and to the wise words of my grandfather, and the quiet faithful teaching of my mother, and to all that old Krok taught me without ever speaking one word—I know that I owe everything, and that is why it was necessary to tell you so much about them.
If the telling has wearied you, I am sorry. For myself, I like to think back upon it all, and to trace the beginnings of some things of which I have seen the endings, and of some which are not ended yet, thank God!—and to find, in all that lies between, the signs of a Power that is beyond any power of man's, and is, indeed, and rightly I think, beyond even the power of any man's full understanding.
CHAPTER VI
HOW CARETTE CAME BY HER GOLDEN BRIDGE
And Carette—
I recall her in those days in a thousand different circumstances, and always like the sunlight or the lightning, gleaming, sparkling, flashing. For she could be as steadily radiant as the one and as unexpectedly fickle as the other, and I do not know that I liked her any the less on that account, though truly it made her none too easy to deal with at times. Her quick changes and childish vagaries kept one, at all events, very much alive and in a state of constant expectation. And whenever I think of her I thank God for Jeanne Falla, and all that that wisest and sharpest and tenderest of women was able to do for her.
For, you see, Carette was peculiarly circumstanced, and might have gone to waste but for her aunt Jeanne.
Her mother died when she was six years old, after four years' life on Brecqhou, and Carette was left to be utterly spoiled by her father and six big brothers, wild and reckless men all of them, but all, I am sure, with tender spots in their hearts for the lovely child who seemed so out of place among them, though for anyone outside they had little thought or care.
My own thoughts delight to linger back among these earlier scenes before the more trying times came. If you will let me, I will try to picture Carette to you as I see her in my mind's eye, and I can see her as she was then as clearly as though it were yesterday.
I see a girl of ten, of slight, graceful figure, and of so active a nature that if you found her quite still you feared at once that something was wrong with her.
Her face was very charming, browned richly with the kiss of sun and wind, and without a freckle, yet not so brown as to hide the rich colour of her feelings, which swept across her face as quickly as the cloud-shadows across the sparkling face of the sea.
Her eyes were large and dark—all alight with the joy of life; sparkling with fun and mischief; blazing forked lightnings at some offence, fancied as often as not; big with entreaty that none could refuse; more rarely—in those days—deep with sober thought; but always—shining, sparkling, blazing, entreating—the most wonderful and fascinating eyes in the world to the boy at her side, on whom they shone and sparkled and blazed and entreated, and moulded always to her imperious little will.
A sturdy boy of twelve, short if anything for his age at that time, though later he grew