CHAPTER V
THE LEGEND
It is no easy matter to organise a successful up-river picnic. You require fine weather, you require catering experience, and you require tact—especially tact. The problem of the fox and the goose and the bundle of hay—by the way, do geese eat hay?—is child’s play compared with the task that confronts a hostess called upon to divide a punt, a Canadian canoe, and a motor-launch among a party of assorted ages and sexes.
However, by steadfastly bearing in mind:
(1) That Mrs. Bagby would decline to trust herself to anything but the motor-launch;
(2) That Denny’s last afternoon at home would be entirely wrecked unless he got Gwen to himself in the canoe either going or returning;
(3) That Lionel the Terrible must be segregated from all persons of refined or fastidious disposition;
(4) That if Lionel and his father were placed in the same boat there would certainly be a riot, and probably a shipwreck—Mildred finally sent her party forth as follows:
In the motor-launch were Mr. and Mrs. Bagby, Sir Anthony and Joan. Mildred went in the punt herself, accompanied by Molly and Lionel the Terrible. This left the canoe free for Denny and Gwen.
Thus manned, the flotilla set off up Ripleigh Reach, headed by the motor-launch, which naturally landed at the landing point comparatively quickly, to the undisguised relief of Joan who, with Sir Anthony, had found the bickerings of Mr. and Mrs. Bagby more than a little trying. The punt came next, not unskilfully piloted by Little Leo, surprisingly docile under the calm, compelling providence that lurked behind Mildred Cradock’s smiling face. Denny and Gwen arrived a bad third, Denny dumbly worshipping, the young lady frankly bored.
Presently the feast was spread, and after Little Leo had been frustrated in an attempt to plant the butter where his male parent would indubitably have sat upon it, the revels commenced. The guests of honour were Denny and Leo, for the latter was going to school too. The episode of the beetles had given Mr. Bagby the chance of a lifetime; and before Mrs. Bagby had revived sufficiently from nervous prostration to resume her normal attitude of sentimental obstructiveness to all schemes for her son’s reformation, that indignant youth had been telegraphically offered to and telephonically accepted by the authorities of Eaglescliffe School, who found themselves with an unexpected vacancy in Mr. Keeley’s house at the last moment. However, he did not allow the approaching severance of home ties to affect his appetite. Indeed, it is probable that he enjoyed the picnic more than any one else.
Truth to tell, it was not a particularly hilarious function. Mrs. Bagby, as became her, was in the depth of woe at the thought of her coming bereavement. Mr. Bagby, whose heart was like a singing-bird at the same idea, deemed it wiser to assume a demeanour of Spartan resignation. Miss Gwendoline Bagby, who was approaching the age at which the attendance of one or more presentable adult youths would have been welcome, maintained the pose of a society queen compelled to patronise a school-treat.
So much for the Bagbys. As for the Cradocks, Joan was taciturn but observant, Molly was inclined to be a little tearful over Denny, while Denny was sentimentally engrossed with Gwen. Uncle Tony, whom long experience had trained to take life as he found it, sat upon a folded newspaper smoking a cigar, and hoping for nothing worse on the morrow than a slight stiffness of the joints. Mildred Cradock alone seemed to be enjoying herself. But then she always did: everybody knew that.
‘A pleasant, fluffy, feminine creature without any knowledge or appreciation of the deeper issues of life, but well-meaning and hospitable, in a fussy sort of way,’ was the verdict of the parish, as expressed by the parish oracle, Miss Laura Meakin, Mildred’s nearest neighbour. The picnic, by the way, had narrowly escaped the honour of that lady’s attendance. Not that she had been invited, but the omission would have been pardoned and the invitation taken for granted in any case. That is the sort of person Laura was. However, to-day she was absent, an emergency meeting of the committee of some society for the curtailment of other people’s personal liberty—an enterprise in which she was perennially interested—having called her to an adjacent parish.
Still, tea in itself is always a pleasant function, and up-river picnics are not the penitential feasts that they once were.
‘The invention of the Thermos flask,’ observed Uncle Tony, ‘has lightened the labours and brightened the life of many an arthritic fuel-gatherer; and the tea itself no longer tastes like a decoction of dead leaves and tepid pond water. May I pass my cup up again, Mildred?’
‘The midges are very bad,’ complained Mrs. Bagby. ‘Leo, darling, don’t scratch the place. It will only irritate your skin.’
‘I like scratching,’ replied the Terror simply; and continued to do so.
‘Leo, sir, obey your mother at once!’ thundered Mr. Bagby.
‘Oh, shut up, Bingo!’ retorted the amiable child.
‘Supposing,’ interposed Mildred, ‘when we have cleared the tea-things, we get into the boats again and drift home. We needn’t hurry, of course, but there will be fewer midges on the water. Let me see now. How shall we distribute ourselves this time?’ She cast a guileless but calculating eye upon the motley assemblage before her.
‘I wonder what time it is,’ said Mrs. Bagby.
‘Twenty-five to seven,’ replied Denny, with a careless glance at his new wrist-watch.
‘Oh dear, I didn’t know it was so late! I must get home at once. I like to give myself a full hour to dress in the evening.’
‘I am so sorry,’ said Mildred. ‘I would have warned you sooner if I had known. Suppose you take your own launch, and leave my little band to follow in the boats. We are in no hurry: we are only going back to a cold supper.’
‘We,’ announced Little Leo with simple dignity, ‘are going back to a hot dinner. We have one every night. Let’s start now. Come on, Bingo; get a move on!’
An hour later the punt and the canoe, relieved of the ostentatious companionship of the motor-launch, were drifting amicably down Ripleigh Reach, within easy conversational distance of one another, in the gloaming of a September evening. Uncle Tony and Joan shared the canoe, while Mildred, with Molly’s head in her lap, reclined restfully in the punt, whose course her son, seated in the stern, was lazily directing with a paddle.
Molly’s gruff little voice was heard uplifted in affectionate entreaty.
‘She’s asking Mother to tell her a story,’ Joan announced to her grand-uncle. ‘And I bet I know which one it is.’
‘Is your mother’s repertoire so limited?’
‘Oh, no; only Molly always wants the same old stale things. I expect to-night it will be the one about—Hallo!’
Mrs. Cradock was speaking.
‘Shall I tell you a new one, for once—since Denny is going away?’
‘All right,’ agreed Molly, a little reluctantly.
‘I have always meant to tell it to you sometime. It isn’t very long.’ Mildred turned to her son. ‘But it’s for you to choose to-night, Denny. Would you rather listen to a story, or shall we just drift, and chat?’
‘I think I’d rather listen to a story,’ replied Denny, in an unusually subdued voice.
‘Very well, then. Once upon a time’—Mildred Cradock’s steady voice came drifting across the water to the canoe with surprising clearness—‘a great ship was sailing along at night, not far from the West Coast of Africa. She was homeward bound—’
‘Where from?’ inquired Molly, greedy for detail, as usual.
‘From South Africa, where a war was just over.’
‘Ah!’ remarked Uncle Tony to himself. Joan looked up.
‘South Africa was where I was born,’ she observed. ‘Mother has a lot of stories about it.’
‘The ship,’ continued Mildred, ‘was full of soldiers, going home to their wives and babies. Some of them had their wives and babies with them, because the War had been over for nearly a year. Well, the babies were all fast asleep in their cots, and their mothers were getting ready to go to theirs too, when suddenly there came a cry and a crash in the darkness. People came running up on deck—’
‘Was it a rock,’ inquired Molly breathlessly, ‘or a submarine?’
‘It wasn’t either. Submarines weren’t invented in those days—were they, Denny?’
‘No, mother, I don’t think so.’
‘There was a thick fog, and the lookout men could scarcely see, though they peered and peered through the fog and darkness. There was a great commotion, and presently it was known what had happened. They had run into a little steamboat—’
‘How big was she?’
‘Well, she was a boat that carried coals.’
‘A collier?’ suggested Denny learnedly.
‘Yes, that is just what she was. She was sinking fast, and so was the big ship, for there was a great big hole in the bow where she had struck the other. However, the sea was not too rough, and everybody was very brave. The soldiers took their places on the deck, standing in straight lines and waiting for their officers to tell them what to do. The order was given to lower the boats and put the passengers into them. There were—other passengers besides the soldiers.’
‘Women and children first, of course,’ said Denny.
‘Yes, certainly; then the others; the soldiers last.’
‘Did everybody get off?’ asked Molly, still rushing her fences.
‘Yes.’
‘All the soldiers as well?’
Mildred appeared to hesitate for a moment, then she answered:
‘Yes—nearly all, I think. But the story isn’t really about the big ship, because she went down almost immediately, poor thing. It’s just about one of the boats—a boat so crowded with women and children that they had to pass some of them into another boat which was not so full. There was a little girl in the crowded boat, Molly—rather like you.’
‘I suppose it wasn’t me?’ inquired Molly hoping against hope.
‘Oh, dear, no. You weren’t born in those days.’
‘Scored off!’ remarked Joan, sotto voce, to her grand-uncle.
‘She was just a little girl in a white frock—the littlest of all the ship’s company. She had become separated from her mother, so they tried to pass her over into the boat where her mother was. They had almost done it when a great wave surged up between the boats and swept them apart.’
‘But what happened to the little girl?’
‘She dropped between the boats and went under, out of sight.’
‘O-o-oh!’ Molly’s deep groan of dismay was a sterling tribute to her mother’s powers of narration. However, Mildred continued quickly:
‘Directly after that the boats swung together again in the trough of a wave. But just before they closed, a man in one of them sprang up and dived over the side, into the gap between?’
‘Did he save her? Did he?’
‘Yes. Next time the boats swung apart, there he was, with the little girl in his arms. He held her up, and they lifted her on board and gave her back to her mother.’
‘Oo-oo-ooh!’ exclaimed Molly. There is a world of difference between the expressions ‘Ooh!’ and ‘Oh!’
‘But just as they were reaching out hands to help him, he slipped down under the boat out of sight; and when the boat was moved over he was gone. They—they didn’t see him again.’ Mildred’s voice shook a little. ‘They thought perhaps he must have struck his head against something.’
‘A bit of wreckage, perhaps,’ said Denny.
‘Yes—driftwood. All he had strength for was to hold up the child for a moment. He could save others, but not himself.’
It was quite dark now. There came a long pause, while the punt, under Denny’s silent guidance, drifted downstream another hundred yards or so. Not far away Uncle Tony’s glowing cigar indicated the proximity of the canoe; but even Joan was silent. It was Molly who broke the spell at last.
‘Mother, you don’t often tell us sad stories.’
‘No, dear.’
‘But I know why you told us this one.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you knew the man!’
Mildred bent over her small daughter’s upturned face.
‘Did I, dear?’
‘Yes. I don’t know who he was; but you knew him, and you wanted us to know about him.’
‘I believe she’s right, for once,’ commented Joan.
‘Who was he, mother?’ asked Denny, leaning forward.
Mildred Cradock drew a deep breath.
‘He was your father,’ she said.