A Fringe of Leaves (50 page)

Mrs Roxburgh confessed, ‘I was never able to live up to all that others expected of me.’

‘Humility has its peculiar rewards, as you will realize if you join us. It will rejoice your heart only to hear the men doing justice to the hymns.’

‘Have you a church at the settlement? I’ve not noticed one on my walks.’

‘No,’ he told her, ‘we haven’t, as yet. Our services are held in a hall at the prisoners’ barracks.’

‘I could hardly worship under the eyes of prisoners, some of them condemned for life.’

‘You would not see them, Mrs Roxburgh. You would sit at the front of the congregation, with the Commandant and Mrs Lovell and the officers of the garrison. The prisoners are ushered in after the arrival of the official party, and are seated at the rear of the hall, where the guards keep a close watch on them. You will have nothing to fear, I assure you.’

‘Only my conscience, and that can be more terrifying than any unseen criminal.’

The chaplain’s lips moved wordlessly until he managed, ‘In case you might find it more to your liking, I ought to mention a small unconsecrated chapel built by an unfortunate individual with whom you are already acquainted—Pilcher of
Bristol Maid
, now employed at the Commissariat. Soon after his arrival here, he started working, in his own time and with his own hands, to build this chapel, which some might call a folly. It is not commendable as architecture, but I do not doubt the sincerity of the builder’s intention. It might appeal to you, Mrs Roxburgh.’ His eye grew hectic as he thought he might have penetrated this Cornishwoman’s opacity and reached the quietist inside.

But Mrs Roxburgh said, ‘I would not care to break in upon Mr Pilcher’s prayers.’

‘It can be arranged, if you wish. He’ll be flattered to feel you take an interest in him and his creation.’

Mrs Roxburgh smiled, but her expression had more of sadness in it. For a moment, but only a moment, Mr Cottle feared he might have floundered out of his depth. Then his faith flung him a lifeline, and he sprang to, and stationed himself in the centre of the carpet, determined to effect the rescue of a fellow being bent on spiritual immolation.

‘Mrs Roxburgh,’ he announced, ‘I am going to ask you to join me in a short prayer. Let me but guide you, and like many others, you will find that Jesus is expecting you.’

Mrs Roxburgh sat looking petrified. ‘I’ve forgotten the language!’ her stone lips eventually ejected.

Now that the spirit was working in him the evangalist was not to be discouraged. He had got down upon his knees, from where his military boots, the best fit the Commissariat could provide, looked more noticeably roomy, his fluttered eyelids whiter and more exposed in their closure.

Still seated, her hands on her sash, Mrs Roxburgh could feel herself looking desperately brutish.

But the chaplain had begun to pray, ‘Our Lord and Maker—you who have shown mercy to one whose life was most grievously threatened, lighten I pray you, a heavy heart, and spare the soul its torments real or imagined …’

Suddenly it was the chaplain who found himself most grievously threatened: the other side of his devout eyelids the Cornishwoman had started to scream.

‘What—yes, it is! Don’t let them, for God’s sake! They’ll flay the skin off ’is back. They’ll beat the soul out of ’n—and that’s worse, a thousand times, than killing a man!’

Still on his knees, Mr Cottle had opened his eyes, to see the woman who was also Mrs Roxburgh screeching like a peacock in Mrs Lovell’s lesser parlour; while out of the distance, from across the creek, through the humid ranks of lemons, shaddocks, citrons and guavas, the voice of a human being answered or appealed in such unearthly tones the chaplain might not have realized had his intended convert not drawn his attention to them.

‘Go!’ she screamed. ‘Do! Do! We can—surely? Oh, we must!’

The chaplain could feel her nails eating into the wrist she had torn from its prayerful attitude. Her insistence allowed him little dignity as he tottered to his feet in his wretched boots.

‘Dear Mrs Roxburgh,’ his voice trembled from arriving at the upright in double time, ‘this is a penal settlement for hardened criminals. Captain Lovell is humane by comparison with his predecessor. But punishment must be administered, in certain cases, when it is due.’

He could feel the blood trickling down his wrist where she had siezed him.

‘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.

Mrs Roxburgh would have liked to restore the woman’s spirits, but in the absence of inspiration, could but murmur, ‘Thank you, Mary,’ and bow her head, and go inside.

The morning was full of coming and going, slammed doors, voices raised but never enough, laughing and scuttling through the passages (lessons were evidently waived). Mrs Roxburgh’s cell seemed the only corner of the house to remain untouched by the cutter’s arrival.

Of course she should have gone out and joined in the excited confusion. If she hesitated to celebrate her longed-for release becoming actual fact, it was because she could not ignore a future fraught with undefined contingencies. Had the walls but opened at a certain moment, she might even have turned and run back into the bush, choosing the known perils, and nakedness rather than an alternative of shame disguised.

It was close on dinner-time when Miss Scrimshaw burst into the room in a state of high importance. ‘You will have heard the news,’ she began somewhat breathily, ‘but perhaps not every detail of it, because I myself have been kept in the dark until almost the last moment. Mrs Lovell is so fatigued the Commandant, in the kindness of his heart, is sending her to Sydney for a change of air. The children, who are most of them too small to be left behind, will accompany her. And I shall go to enforce a little necessary discipline!’ The governess actually performed a stately step or two. ‘We shall sail the day after tomorrow depending on a favourable wind.’

Then Miss Scrimshaw, remembering, turned a deep maroon, which mounted by way of her scrawny neck into her brown, downy cheeks. ‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘how I run on, when it is you who have most cause for rejoicing at the cutter’s arrival!’

‘I hardly know,’ Mrs Roxburgh blurted back. ‘Yes, I am glad, of course, but shall be the happier for your company—for my return to the world. I have been so long out of it, I may not easily learn to adapt myself to its ways.’