Gard's first waking thoughts next morning were of Nance entirely.
He would see her at dinner-time. How would he find her? Last night the disturbance of her feelings had shaken her out of herself somewhat, and shown her to him in new and delightful lights.
If, this morning, she should be to some extent withdrawn again into her natural modest shell, he would not be surprised; and he made up his mind, then and there, to be in no wise disappointed. Last night was a fact, a delightful fact, on which to build the rosy future.
It was a long time to wait till dinner-time to see her. What if he went round that way, before going to work, just to inquire if Tom got home all right.
And then the feeling of discomfort in his eye and nose, as though the one had shrunk to the size of a pin-point and the other had grown to the bulk of a turnip—brought back the whole matter, and on further consideration he decided not to go to the farm till the proper time. If he came across Tom, the fray would inevitably be resumed at once, and his right eye, at the moment, showed a decided disinclination to open to its usual extent, or to perform any of the functions properly demanded of a right eye contemplating battle.
He must get up at once and bathe it and bring it to reason.
Raw beef, he believed, was the correct treatment under the circumstances. But raw beef was almost as obtainable as raw moon, and even raw mutton he did not know where he could procure, nor whether it would answer the purpose.
So he bathed his bruises with much water, and reduced their excesses to some extent, but not enough to escape the eye of his hostess when he appeared at breakfast.
"Bin fighting?" she queried dispassionately.
"A one-sided fight. Tom Hamon was drunk last night and hit me in the face, but he was not in a condition to fight or I'd have taught him better manners."
"He's a rough piece," with a disparaging shake of the head. "It'd take a lot to knock him into shape. Try this," and she delved among her stores, and found him an ointment of her own compounding which took some of the soreness out of his bruises.
But black eyes and swollen noses are impertinently obtrusive and disdainful of disguise, and the captain's battle-flags provoked no little jocosity among his men that morning.
"Run up against su'then, cap'n?" asked John Hamon the engineer, who was one of the few who sided with him.
"Yes, against a drunken fist in the dark. When it's sober I'm going to give it a lesson in manners."
"Drunken fisses is hard to teach. You'll have your hands full, cap'n."
It seemed an unusually long morning, but dinner-time came at last and he hastened across to the farm, eager for the first sight of the sweet shy face hiding in the big sun-bonnet.
Quite contrary to his expectations Nance came hurrying to meet him. She had evidently been on the watch for him. Still more to his surprise, her face, instead of that look of shy reserve which he had been prepared for, was full of anxious questioning. The large dark eyes were full of something he had never seen in them before.
"Why—Nance—dear! What is the matter?" he asked quickly.
"Did you meet Tom again last night? Oh," at nearer sight of his bruised face, "you did, you did!"
"Yes, dear, I did. Or rather he met me—as you see."
"Did you fight with him?" she panted.
"He was too drunk to fight. He ran at me and gave me this, and my first inclination was to give him a sound thrashing. Then I saw it would be no good, in the condition he was in, so I just kept him at arm's length till he tired of it. He went off at last, and I was so afraid he might tumble off the Coupée that I followed him, and he hurled rocks at me whenever he came to a stand. But he got across all right, and I went back and went to bed. Now, what's all the trouble about?"
"He never came home," she jerked, with a catch in her voice which thought only of Tom had never put there.
"Never came home?"
"And they're all out looking for him."
"I wonder if he went back to Peter Mauger's.... If he tried to cross that Coupée again—in the condition he was in—"
"He didn't go back to Peter's. Julie went there first of all to ask."
"Good Lord, what can have become of him?"
The answer came unexpectedly round the corner of the house—Julie Hamon, in a state of utmost dishevelment and agitation, which turned instantly to venomous fury at the sight of Gard and Nance.
Her black hair seemed all a-bristle. Her black eyes flamed. Her dark face worked like a quicksand. Her skirts were wet to the waist. Her jacket was open at the top, as though she had wrenched at it in a fit of choking. Her strong bare throat throbbed convulsively. Her hands, half closed at her side, looked as though they wanted something to claw.
"Did you do it?" she cried hoarsely, stalking up to Gard.
"Do what?"
"Kill him."
"Tom?... You don't mean to say—"
"You ought to know. He's there in the school-house, broken to a jelly and his head staved in. And they say it's you he fought with last night. The marks of it are on your face"—her voice rose to a scream—"Murderer! Murderer! Murderer!"
"You wicked—thing!" cried Nance, pale to the lips.
"You—you—you!" foamed Julie. "You're as bad as he is. Because my man tried to save you from that—murderer—"
"Oh, you—wicked!—You're crazy," cried Nance, rushing at her as though to make an end of her.
And Julie, mad with the strain of the night's anxieties and their abrupt and terrible ending, uncurled her claws and struck at her with a snarl—tore off her sun-bonnet, and would have ripped up her face, if Gard had not flung his arms round her from the back and dragged her screaming and kicking towards her own door.
Mrs. Hamon had come running out at sound of the fray. Gard whirled the mad woman into her own house and Mrs. Hamon followed her and closed the door.
Gard turned to look for Nance.
She was nervously trying to tie on her sun-bonnet by one string.
"Nance, dear," he said, "you don't believe I had anything to do with this?"
"Oh no, no! I'm sure you hadn't. But—"
"But?" he asked, looking down into the pale face and bright anxious eyes.
"Oh, they may say you did it. They will think it. They are sure to think it, and they are so—"
"Don't trouble about it, dear. I know no more about it than you do, and they cannot get beyond that. Promise me you won't let it trouble you."
"Oh, I will try. But—"
"Have no fears on my account, Nance. I will go at once and tell them all I know about it."
He pressed her hands reassuringly, and she went into the house with downcast head and a face full of forebodings, and he set off at once for Sark.
Mrs. Tom had had a troubled night. Anxiety at her husband's continued absence had in due time given way to anger, and anger in its turn to anxiety again.
In a state of mind compounded of these wearing emotions, she had set out in the early morning to find out what had become of him; if he was sleeping off a drunken debauch at Peter Mauger's, to give them both a vigorous piece of her mind; if he was not there, to find out where he was; in any case to vent on some one the pent-up feelings of the night.
Vigorous hammering on Peter Mauger's door produced first his old housekeeper, and presently himself, heavy-eyed, dull-witted, and in flagrant dishabille, since Mrs. Guille had but a moment ago shaken him out of the sleep of those who drink not wisely over-night, with the information that a crazy woman wanted him at the door.
"Where's Tom?" demanded Julie, ready to empty the vials of her wrath on the delinquent as soon as he was produced.
But Peter's manner at once dissipated that expectation.
"Tom?" he said vaguely, and gazed at her with a bovine stupidity that jarred her strained nerves like a blow.
"Yes, Tom—my husband, fool! Where is he?" she asked sharply.
"Where is he?" scratching his tousled head to quicken his wits. "I d'n know."
"You don't know? What did you do with him last night, you drunken fool?"—by this time the neighbours had come out to learn the news.
Peter gaped at her in astonishment, his muddled wits and aching head beginning dimly to realize that something was wrong.
"Tom left here ... last night ... t'go home," he nodded emphatically.
"Well, he never got home," snapped Julie. "And you'd best get your clothes on and help me find him. You were both as drunk as pigs, I suppose. If he's lying dead in a ditch it's you that'll have the blame."
"Aw now, Julie!"
"Don't Julie me, you fool! Get dressed and do something."
"I'll come. You wait," and he went inside, and put his head into a basin of water, and threw on his clothes, and came out presently looking anxious and disturbed now that his sluggish brain had begun to work.
"Where you been looking?" he asked.
"Nowhere. I expected to find him here."
"We had a glass or two and then he started off home. He could walk all right.... Did you.... You didn't see anything wrong ... anything ... at the Coupée?" he asked, with a quick anxious look at her.
"No, I didn't. What do you mean? Oh, mon Dieu!" and she started down the road at a run, with Peter lumbering after her and the neighbours in a buzzing tail behind.
The cold douche had cooled Peter's hot head, the running quickened his blood and his thoughts, a sudden grim fear braced his brain to quite unusual activity.
As he ran he recalled the events of the night before; their meeting with Gard and Nance; Tom's scurrilous insults.
If Tom and Gard had met again—Gard would be sure to see Nance home. Had he met Tom on his way back? And if so—if so—and ill had come to Tom—why, Gard might get the blame. And—and—in short, though by zig-zag jerks as he ran—if Gard were out of the way for good and all, Nance's thoughts might turn to one nearer home. He would be sorry if ill had come to Tom, of course. But if Gard could be got rid of he would be most uncommonly glad.
And as he panted after Julie, head down with the burden of much thinking, just before he reached the sunk way to the Coupée, his eye lighted on something in the road that caused him to stop and bend—a button with a scrap of blue cloth attached. He picked it up hastily and put it in his pocket. On a white stone just by it there were some red-brown spots. He pushed it with his foot to the side of the road and was down into the cutting before the heavy-footed neighbours came up.
Julie was ranging up and down the narrow pathway, searching the depths with a face like a hawk, hanging on to the rough sides of the pinnacles, and bending over in a way that elicited warning cries from the others as they came streaming down.
But keenest search of the western slope revealed nothing amid its tangle of gorse and blackberry bushes, and the eastern cliff fell so sheer, and had so many projecting lumps and underfalls, that it was impossible to see close in to the foot.
And then one, nimbler witted than the rest, climbed out along the common above the northern cliff, whereby, when he had come to the great slope, he took the Coupée cliff in flank, and could spy along its base.
And suddenly he stopped, and stiffened like a pointer sighting his bird, peered intently for a moment, and gave tongue.
The chase was ended. That they had sought, and feared to find, was found.
They came hurrying up, and clustered like cormorants on the slope, Julie among them, her face grim and livid in its black setting, her eyes blazing fiercely.
The finder pointed it out. They all saw it—a huddled black heap close in under the cliff.
Elevated by his discovery, the finder maintained his reputation by doing the only thing that could be done. He left them talking and sped away across the downs, across the fields, towards Creux harbour.
He might, if he had known it, have found a boat nearer at hand, Rouge Terrier way or in Brenière Bay. But he was a Sark man, and a farmer at that, and knew little and cared less, of the habits of Little Sark.
And the rest, falling to his idea, streamed after him, for that which lay under the cliff could only be gotten out by boat.
So to the Creux, panting the news as he went. And there, willing hands dragged a boat rasping down the shingle, and lusty arms, four men rowing and one astern sculling and steering at the same time, sent her bounding over the water as though it were life she sought, not death. For, though no man among them had any smallest hope of finding life in that which lay under the cliff, yet must they strain every muscle, till the labouring boat seemed to share their anxiety to get there and learn the worst.
So, out past the Lâches, with the tide boiling round the point; past Derrible, with its yawning black mouths; past Dixcart with its patch of sand; under the grim bastions of the Cagnon; the clean grey cliffs and green downs above, all smiling in the morning sun; the clear green water creaming among the black boulders, hissing among their girdles of tawny sea-weeds, cascading merrily down their rifted sides; round the Convanche corner, so deftly close that the beauty of the water cave is bared to them, if they had eye or thought for anything but that which lies under the cliff in Coupée Bay. And not a word said all the way—not one word. Jokes and laughter go with the boat as a rule, and high-pitched nasal patois talk; but here—not a word.
The prow runs grating up the shingle, the heavy feet grind through it all in a line, for none of them has any desire to be first. Together they bend over that which had been Tom Hamon, and their faces are grim and hard as the rocks about them. Not that they are indifferent, but that any show of feeling would be looked upon as a sign of weakness.
Under such circumstances men at times give vent to jocularities which sound coarse and shocking. But they are not meant so—simply the protest of the rough spirit at being thought capable of such unmanly weakness as feeling.
But these men were elementally silent. One look had shown them there was nothing to be done but that which they had come to do—to carry what they had found back to the waiting crowd at the Creux.
They had none of them cared much for this man. He was not a man to make close friends. But death had given him a new dignity among them, and the rough hands lifted him, and bore him to the boat as tenderly as though a jar or a stumble might add to his pains.
And so, but with slower strokes now, as though that slight additional burden, that single passenger, weighed them to the water's edge, they crawl slowly back the way they came, logged, not with water, but with the presence of death.
The narrow beach between the tawny headlands is black with people. Up above, on the edge of the cliff, another crowd peers curiously down.
The Sénéchal is there at the water's edge, Philip Guille of La Ville, and the Greffier, William Robert, who is also the schoolmaster, and Thomas Le Masurier the Prévôt, and Elie Guille the Constable, and Dr. Stradling from Dixcart, and the dark-faced, fierce-eyed woman who cannot keep still, but ranges to and fro in the lip of the tide, and whom they all know now as the wife—the Frenchwoman, though some of them have never seen her before.
A buzz runs round as the boat comes slowly past the point of the Lâches. The woman stops her caged-beast walk and stands gazing fiercely at it, as if she would tear its secret out of it before it touched the shore.
The watchers on the cliff have the advantage. Something like a thrill runs through them, something between a sigh and a groan breaks from them.
The woman wades out to meet the boat. She sees and screams, and chokes. The wives on the beach groan in sympathy.
The body is lifted carefully out and laid on the cool grey stones, and the woman stands looking at it as a tiger may look at her slaughtered mate.
"Stand back! Stand back!" cries the Sénéchal to the thronging crowd; and to the Constable, "Keep them back, you, Elie Guille!" to which Elie Guille growls, "Par madé, but that's not easy, see you!"
The Doctor straightens up from his brief examination, and says a word to the Sénéchal, and to the men about him.
A rough stretcher is made out of a couple of oars and a sail, and the sombre procession passes through the gloomy old tunnel into the Creux Road, and wends its way up to the school-house for proper inquiry to be made as to how Tom Hamon came by his death.
And close behind the stretcher walks the dark-faced woman, with her eyes like coals of fire, and her dress dragged open as though to stop her from choking.
"Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!" she says in perpetual iteration, through her clenched teeth. But to look at her face and eyes you might think it was rather the devil she was calling on.
For, ungracious as their lives had been in many respects, yet this violent breaking of the yoke has left the survivor sore and wounded, and furious to vent her rage on whom at present she knows not.
She is not allowed inside the school-house—hastily cleared of its usual occupants, who dodge about among the crowd outside, enjoying the unlooked-for holiday with gusto in spite of its gruesome origin—and so she prowls about outside, and the neighbours talk and she hears this, that, and the other, and presently, with bitter, black face and rage in her heart, she goes off home to find out Stephen Gard if she can, and accuse him to his face of the murder of her husband.
Peter Mauger had kept himself carefully beyond the range of Julie's wild black eyes. In the state she was in there was no knowing what she might do or say. And the words even of a mad woman sometimes stick like burrs. He began to breathe more freely when she whirled away home.
The Sénéchal and Constable came out of the school-house at last with very grave faces.
"The Doctor says his head was staved in with the blows of some round blunt thing like a mallet," said the Sénéchal to the gaping crowd, "and we must hold a proper inquiry. Any of you who saw Tom Hamon last night will be here at two o'clock to tell us all you know. Tell any others who know anything about it that they must be here too," and he went back into the school-house, and the buzzing crowd dispersed, with plenty to buzz about now in truth.
Peter Mauger went thoughtfully home. He had had no breakfast, and was feeling the need of it, and he had something in his mind that he wanted to think out.
And as he ate he thought, slowly and ruminatingly, and with many pauses, when his jaws stopped working to give his mind freer play, but still very much to the purpose, and as soon as he had done he set out to put his project into execution.
Just beyond the Coupée he met Gard hurrying towards Sark, and the state of Gard's nose and eye, and his torn coat, caught his eye at once.
"What's this about Tom Hamon?" asked Gard hastily.
"He's dead."
"His wife has just told me so. But how did it happen?"
"They're going to find out at school-house at two o'clock. Any that saw him last night are to be there. You'd better be there."
"I'm going now."
"All right," said Peter, and went on his way into Little Sark.
His way took him to La Closerie. But he was not anxious to meet Mrs. Tom, so he hung about behind the hedges till Nance happened to come out of the house, and then he whistled softly and beckoned to her to come to him.
Her face was very pale and troubled, and he saw she had been crying.
"I want to speak to you," he said.
"What is it?"
"Come round here. It's important."
"What is it?" she asked wearily again, when she had joined him behind the green dyke.
"It's this, Nance. You—you know I want you. I've always wanted you—"
"Oh—don't!" she cried, with protesting hand. "This is no time. Peter Mauger, for—"
"Wait a bit! Here's how it is. Doctor says Tom was killed by some one beating his head in with a hammer or something of the kind. Now who beat his head in? Who would be most likely to beat his head in? Not me, for we were mates. Some one that hated him. Some one that he was always quarrelling with—" Her face had grown so white that there was no colour even in the trembling lips. She stared at him with terrified eyes.
"You know who I mean," he said. "If it wasn't him that did it I don't know who it was."
"It wasn't," she jerked vehemently.
"You'd wish so, of course. But—Look here!—I'm pretty sure they met again last night after—"
"Yes, they met, and Tom tried to fight him—"
"Ah—then!"
"And he's gone up at once, as soon as he heard that Tom was found, to tell them all about it."
"Aw!"—decidedly crestfallen at the wind being taken out of his sails in this fashion. "I—I thought—maybe I could help him—"
"Oh you did, did you?"—plucking up heart at sight of his discomfiture. "And how were you going to help him?"
"If he's gone to make a clean breast of it it's all up, of course. If he'd kept it to himself—"
"He might have run away, you mean?"
"Safest for him, maybe. Up above Coupée there's a stone with blood on it. And I picked up this beside it," and he hauled out the button and the bit of blue cloth he had found. "I thought, maybe if he knew about these he might think it safest to go."
"Then every one would have the right to say he'd done it, and he didn't. He knew no more about it than you did."
"I didn't know anything about it."
"Well, neither did he, and he's not the kind to run away."
"Aw, well—I done my best. You'll remember that, Nance. You know what the Sark men are. He'd be safest away. You tell him I say so," and he pouched his discounted piece of evidence and turned and went, leaving Nance with a heavy heart.
For, as Peter said, she knew what the Sark men were—a law unto themselves, and slow to move out of the deep-cut grooves of the past, but, once stirred to boiling point, capable of going to any lengths without consideration of consequences.
And therein lay Gard's peril.
Every soul in the Island that could by any means get there, was in or outside the school-house, mostly outside, long before the clock struck two. Never in their lives had they hurried thither like that before.
A barricade of forms had been made across the room. Within it, at the school-master's table, sat the Sénéchal, Philip Guille, and the Doctor, and old Mr. Cachemaille, the Vicar, ageing rapidly since the tragic death of his good friend, the late Seigneur; beside them stood the Prévôt and the Greffier, behind them lay the body of Tom Hamon covered with a sheet.
It was a perfect day, with a cloudless blue sky and blazing sun, and all the windows were opened wide. Those inside dripped with perspiration, but felt cold chills below their blue guernseys each time they looked at that stark figure with the upturned feet beneath the cold white sheet.
Outside the barricade stood Elie Guille, the Constable, and his understudy Abraham Baker, the Vingténier, to keep order and call the witnesses.
The Seigneur, Mr. Le Pelley, was away or he would undoubtedly have been there too. In his absence the Sénéchal conducted the proceedings.
In the front row of school-desks, scored with the deep-cut initials of generations of Sark boys, sat the dead man's widow, tense and quivering, her eyes consuming fires in deep black wells, her face livid, her hands clenched still as though waiting for something to rend.
More than one of the men who sat beside her at the desk found, with a grim smile, his own name looking up at him out of the maltreated board. And one nudged his neighbour and pointed to the name of Tom Hamon, cut deeper than any of the others and with the N upside down.
Very briefly the Sénéchal stated that they were there to find out, if they could, how Tom Hamon came by his death, and added very gravely, in a deep silence, that after a most careful examination of the body the Doctor was of opinion that death had been caused, not by the fall from the Coupée, which accounted for the dreadful bruises, but by violent blows on the head with a hammer or some sueh thing prior to the fall. They wanted to find out all about it.
The Doctor stood up and confirmed what the Sénéchal had said, went somewhat more into detail to substantiate his opinion, and ended by saying, "The head, as it happens, is less bruised than any other part of the body, except on the crown, and that is practically beaten in, and not, I am prepared to swear, by a fall. These wounds were the immediate cause of death, and they were made before he fell down the rocks. Besides, he went down feet first. The abrasions on the legs and thighs prove that beyond a doubt. Then again, the base of the skull is not fractured, as it most certainly would have been if he had fallen on his head. Death was undoubtedly the result of those wounds in the head. It is impossible for me to say for certain with what kind of weapon they were made, but it was probably something round and blunt."
"Now," said the Sénéchal, when the Doctor had finished, and the hum and the growl which followed had died down again, "will any of you who know anything about this matter come forward and tell us all you know?"
Stephen Gard stood up at once and all eyes settled on him. Then Peter Mauger was pushed along from the back, with friendly thumps and growling injunctions to speak up. But the looks bestowed on Gard were of quite a different quality from those given to Peter, and the men at the table could not but notice it.
"We will take Peter Mauger first. Let him be sworn," said the Sénéchal, and Gard sat down.
The Greffier swore Peter in the old Island fashion—"Vous jurez par la foi que vous devez à Dieu que vous direz la vérité, et rien que la vérité, et tous ce que vous connaissez dans cette cause, et que Dieu vous soit en aide! (You swear by the faith which you owe to God that you will tell the truth, and only the truth, and all that you know concerning this case, and so help you God!)"
Peter put up his right hand and swore so to do.
"Now tell us all you know," said the Sénéchal.
And Peter ramblingly told how he and Tom had been drinking together the night before, and how Tom had started off home and he had gone to bed.
"Were you both drunk?"
"Well—"
"Very well, you were. Did you think it right to let your friend go off in that condition when he had to cross the Coupée?"
"I've seen him worse, many times, and no harm come to him."
"Well, get on!"
He told how Mrs. Tom woke him up in the morning, and how they had all gone in search of the missing man.
"Was it you that found him?"
"No, it was Charles Guille of Clos Bourel. But I found something too."
"What was it?"
"This"—and from under his coat he drew out carefully the white stone with its red-brown spots, and from his pocket the button and the scrap of blue cloth. And those at the back stood up, with much noise, to see.
The men at the table looked at these scraps of possible evidence with interest, as they were placed before them.
"Where did you find these things?"
"Between Plaisance and the Coupée."
"What do you make of them?"
"Seemed to me those red spots might be blood. The other's a button torn off some one's coat."
"Have you any idea whose blood and whose coat?"
"The blood I don't know. The button, I believe, is off Mr. Gard's coat,"—at which another growl and hum went round.
"And you know nothing more about the matter?"
"That's all I know."
"Very well. Sit down. Mr. Gard!" and Gard pushed his way among unyielding legs and shoulders, and stood before the grave-faced men at the table.
They all knew him and had all come to esteem what they knew of him. They knew also of his difficulties with his men, and that there was a certain feeling against him in some quarters. Not one of them thought it likely he had done this dreadful thing. But—there was no knowing to what lengths even a decent man might go in anger. All their brows pinched a little at sight of his torn coat and missing button.
He was duly sworn, and the Sénéchal bade him tell all he knew of the matter.
"That button is mine," he said quietly, holding out the lapel of his coat for all to see. "If there is blood on that stone it is mine also"—at which a growling laugh of derision went round the spectators.
Gard flushed at this unmistakable sign of hostility. The Sénéchal threatened to turn them all out if anything of the kind happened again, and Gard proceeded to recount in minutest detail the happenings of the previous night—so far as they concerned himself and Tom Hamon.
"What were you doing down at the Coupée at that time of night?" asked the Sénéchal.
"I had been having a smoke and was just about to turn in when I met Miss Hamon hurrying to the Doctor's for some medicine. I asked her permission to accompany her, and then took her home to Little Sark. It was when I was coming back that I met Tom Hamon."
"Yes, little Nance came to me about half-past ten," said the Doctor, "I remember I asked her if she was not afraid to go all that way home alone, and she said she had a friend with her."
"Was there any specially bad feeling between you and Tom Hamon?"
"There had always been bad feeling, but any one who knows anything about it knows that it was not of my making."
"Will you explain it to us?"
"If you say I must. One does not like to say ill things of the dead."
"We want to get to the bottom of this matter, Mr. Gard. Tell us all you know that will help us."
"Very well, sir, but I am sorry to have to go into that. It all began through Tom's bad treatment of his stepmother and step-sister and brother when I lived at La Closerie. I took sides with them and tried to bring him to better manners. We rarely met without his flinging some insult after me. They were generally in the patois, but I knew them to be insults by his manner and by the way they were greeted by those who did understand."
"Had you met last night before you met near the Coupée?"
"We passed Tom by La Vauroque as we came from the Doctor's. He shouted something after us, but I did not understand it."
"You don't know what it was that he said?" an unfortunate question on the part of the Sénéchal, and quite unintentionally so on his part. It necessitated the introduction of matters Gard would fain have kept out of the enquiry.
"Well," he said, with visible reluctance, "I learned afterwards, and by accident, something of what he said or meant."
"How was that, and what was it?"
"Is it necessary to go into that? Won't it do if I say it was a very gross insult?"
The three at the table conferred for a moment. Then the Sénéchal said very kindly, "I perceive we are getting on to somewhat delicate ground, Mr. Gard, but, for your own sake. I would suggest that no occasion should be given to any to say that you are hiding anything from the court."
"Very well, sir, I have nothing whatever to hide, and I have still less to be ashamed of. I found Miss Hamon was weeping bitterly at what her brother had said, and I tried to get her to tell me what it was, but she would not. I said I knew it was something against me, but I hoped by this time she had learned to know and trust me. I told her her sobs cut me to the heart and that I would give my life to save her from trouble. In a word, I told her I loved her, and in the excitement of the moment she dropped a word or two that gave me an inkling of what Tom had said. It was casting dirt at both her and myself. Then, as I came home, I met Tom as I have told you."
The Sénéchal considered the matter for a moment. He did not for one moment believe that Gard had had any hand in the killing of Tom Hamon. But he could not but perceive the hostile feeling that was abroad, and his desire was, if possible, to allay it.
"It is, I should think," he said gravely, "past any man's believing that, after asking Tom's sister to marry you, you should go straight away and kill Tom, even in the hottest of hot blood, though men at such times do not always know what they are doing. But you, from what I have seen and heard of you, are not such a man. I am going to ask you one question in the hope that your answer may have the effect of setting you right with all who hear it. Before God—had you any hand in the death of this man?—have you any further knowledge of the matter whatever?"
"Before God," said Gard solemnly, his uplifted right hand as steady as a rock, "I had no hand in his death. I know nothing more whatever about the matter."
"I believe you," said the Sénéchal.
"And I," said the Doctor.
"And I," said the Vicar gravely, and with much emotion.
But from the spectators there rose a dissentient murmur which caused the Vicar to survey his unruly flock with mild amazement and disapproval—much as the shepherd might if his sheep had suddenly shed their fleeces and become wolves.
And Julie Hamon sprang to her feet with blazing eyes, pointed a shaking hand at Gard, and screamed:
"Murderer! Murderer! Murderer!"
Stephen Gard walked slowly down the road towards Plaisance in the lowest of spirits.
This strange people amongst whom he had fallen, possessed, in pre-eminent degree, what in these later times is known as the defects of its qualities.
Black sheep there were, of course, as there are in every community, who seemed all defects and possessed of no redeeming qualities whatever. But, taken as a whole, the men of Sark were simple, honest according to their lights, brave and hardy, very tenacious of their own ideas and their island rights, somewhat stubborn and easier to lead than to drive, and withal red-blooded, as the result of their ancestry, and given to a large despite of foreigners, in which category were included all unfortunates born outside the rugged walls of Sark.
He had done his best among them, both for their own interests and those of the mines, but no striving would ever make him other than a foreigner; and in the depression of spirit consequent on the trying experiences of the day, he gloomily pondered the idea of giving up his post and finding a more congenial atmosphere elsewhere.
Still, he was a Cornishman, and dour to beat. And, if he had incurred unreasonable dislike, he had also lighted on the virgin lode of Nance's love and trust, and that, he said to himself with a glow of gratitude, outweighed all else.
He had left the school-house at once when he had given his evidence, and had heard no more of what had taken place there. The bystanders had let him pass without any open opposition, but their faces had been hard and unsympathetic, and he recognized that life among them would be anything but a sunny road for some time to come.
If the people at Plaisance had told him to clear out and find another lodging he would not have been in the least surprised. But they had no such thought. In common with all who really got to know him, they had come to esteem and like him, and they had no reason to believe that he had had anything to do with Tom Hamon's death.
He had pondered these matters wearily till bed-time, and he turned in at last sick of himself, and Sark, and things generally. But his brain would not sleep, and the longer he lay and the more he tossed and turned, the wearier he grew.
Sleep seemed so impossible that he was half inclined to get up and dress and go out. The cool night air and the freshness of the dawn would be better than this sleepless unresting. Suddenly there came a sharp little tap on his window.
A bird, he thought, or a bat.
The tap came again—sharp and imperative.
He got up quietly and went to the window. The night was still dark. As he peered into it a hand came up again and tapped once more and he opened the window.
"Mr. Gard!"—in a sharp whisper.
"Nance! What is it, dear? Anything wrong?"
"I want you—quick."
"One minute!" and he hastily threw on his things and joined her outside.
"What is it, Nance?" he asked anxiously, wondering what new complication had arisen.
"I'll tell you as we go. Come!" and they were speeding noiselessly down the road to the Coupée.
There she took his hand, as once before, to lead him safely across, and her hand, he perceived, was trembling violently.
They were half way along the narrow path when the hollow way in front leading up into Little Sark resounded suddenly with the tramp of heavy feet.
"Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!" panted Nance, and he could feel her turn and look round like a hunted animal.
"Quick!" she whispered. "Behind here! and oh, grip tight!" and she knelt and crawled on hands and knees round the base of the nearest pinnacle.
In those days the pinnacles which buttress the Coupée were considerably higher and bulkier than they are now, and along their rugged flanks the adventurous or sorely-pressed might find precarious footing. But it was a nerve-racking experience even in the day-time when the eye could guide the foot. Now, in the ebon-black night, it was past thinking of.
Dazed by the suddenness and strangeness of the whole matter, and without an inkling of what it all meant, Gard clung like a fly to the bare rock and tried his hardest not to think of the sheer three hundred feet that lay between him and the black beach below.
In grim and menacing silence, save for the crunch of their heavy feet on the crumbling pathway, the men went past, a dozen or more, as it seemed to Gard. When the sound of them had died in the hollow on the Sark side, Nance whispered, "Quick now! quick!"
They crawled back into the roadway, and she took his hand in hers again which shook more than ever, and they sped away into Little Sark.
"Now tell me, Nance. What is it all about?" he panted, as she nipped through an opening in a green bank and led the way towards the eastern cliffs over by the Pot.
"Oh—it's you they want," she gasped, and he stopped instantly and stood, as though he would turn and go back.
"It is no use," she jerked emphatically, between breaths, and dragged impatiently at his arm. "You don't know our Sark men.... They do things first and are sorry after.... Bernel heard them planning it all.... The men from Sark were to meet these ones, and then—"
"But," he said angrily, "running away looks like—"
"No, no! Not here.... And it is only for a time. The truth will come out, but it would be too late if they had got you."
"What would they have done with me?"
"Oh—terrible things. They are madmen when they are angry."
He had yielded to her will, and they were speeding swiftly along the downs. The path was quite invisible to him. He tripped and stumbled at times on tangled roots of gorse and bracken, but she kept on swiftly and unerringly, as though the night were light about her.
"Where are you taking me?" he asked, as they crept past the miners' cottages on the cliff above Rouge Terrier.
"To Brenière.... To L'Etat.... Bernel went on to find a boat."
And presently they were out on the bald cliff-head, and slipping and sliding down it till they came to the ledge, below which Brenière spreads out on the water like a giant's hand.
Between her panting breaths Nance whistled a low soft note like the pipe of a sea-bird. A like sound came softly up from below, and slipping and stumbling again, they were on the beach among mighty boulders girt with dripping sea-weed.
Another low pipe out of the darkness, and they had found the boat and tumbled into it, wet and bruised, and breathless.
"Dieu merci!" said Bernel, and pulled lustily out to sea.
The swirl of the tide caught them as they cleared Brenière Point, and Gard crawled forward to take an oar. Nance did the same, and so set Bernel free to scull and steer, the arrangement which dire experience has taught the Sark men as best adapted to their rock-strewn waters and racing currents.
Gard's mind was in a tumult of revolt, but he sensibly drove his feelings through his muscles to the blade of his oar, and said nothing. Nance and Bernel were not likely to have gone to these lengths without what seemed to them sufficient reason.
And he remembered Nance's trembling arm on the Coupée, and her agonies of fear on his account, and so came by degrees to a certain acceptance of their view of matters, and therewith a feeling of gratitude for their labours and risks on his behalf. For he did not doubt that, should the self-appointed administrators of justice learn who had baulked them of their prey, they would wreak upon them some of the vengeance they had intended for himself.
He saw that it was no light matter these two had undertaken, and as he thought it over, and told the black welter under his oar what he thought of these wild and hot-headed Sark men, his gratitude grew.
The thin orange sickle of a moon rose at last, high by reason of the mists banked thick along the horizon, and afforded them a welcome glimmer of light—barely a glimmer indeed, rather a mere thinning of the clinging darkness, but enough for Bernel's tutored eye.
He took them in a cautious circuit outside the Quette d'Amont, the eastern sentinel of L'Etat, and so, with shipped oars, by means of his single scull astern, brought them deftly to the riven black ledges round the corner on the south side.
It is a precarious landing at best, and the after scramble up the crumbling slope calls for caution even in the light of day. In that misleading darkness, clinging with his hands and climbing on the sides of his feet, and starting at startled feathered things that squawked and fluttered from under his groping hands and feet, Gard found it no easy matter to follow Nance, though she carried a great bundle and waited for him every now and again. When he looked down next day upon the way they had come he marvelled that they had ever reached the top in safety.
"Wait here!" she said at last, when they had attained a somewhat level place, and before he had breath for a word she was away down again.
She was back presently with another bundle, and he started when she thrust into his hands a long gun, and bade him pick up the first bundle and follow her. The feel of the gun brought home to him, as nothing else could have done, her and Bernel's views of possible contingencies.
He followed her stumblingly along the rough crown of the ridge, till she dipped down a rather smoother slope and came to a stand before what seemed to him a heap of huge stones.
"There is shelter in here," she said. "And these things are for your comfort. We will bring you more to eat in a day or two—"
"Nance, dear," he said, dropping the gun and the bundle, and laying his hand on her slim shoulder. "I have become a sore burden to you—"
"Oh no, no!" she said hastily. "You would have done as much for me, and it is because—"
"For you, dear? I would give my life for you, Nance, and here it is you who are doing everything, and running all these risks for me."
"It is because I know they are in the wrong. It may be only a day or two, and they will thank me when they find out their mistake."
"Well, I thank you and Bernel with my whole heart. Please God I may some time be able to repay you!"
"If you are safe, that is all we want. Now I must go. We must get back before they miss us."
"God keep you, dear!" and he bent and kissed her, and as before she kissed him back with the frankness of a child.
He was about to follow her when she turned to go, but she said imperatively, "Stop here, or you may lose yourself in the dark. And in the day-time do not walk on the ridge or they may see you—"
"And the gun? What is that for?"
"If they should come here after you, you will keep them off with it," she said, with a spurt of the true Island spirit. "It is your life they seek, and they are in the wrong. But no one ever comes here, and you will not need it. Now, good-bye! And God have you in His keeping!"
"And you, dearest—and all yours!"—and she was gone like a flitting shadow.
And while he still stood peering into the darkness into which she had merged, she suddenly materialized again and was by his side.
"I forgot. Bernel told me to tell you it throws a little high. But I hope you won't need it. And there is fresh water among the rocks at the south end there."
He caught her to him again, and kissed her ardently, and then she was gone.
He strained his ears, fearful of hearing her slip or fall in the darkness, but she went without displacing a stone, and he was alone with the sickly moon, and the sombre sky, and the voices of the rising tide along the grim black ledges of his sanctuary.
It all seemed monstrous strange to him, now that he had time to think of the actual fact apart from the difficulties of its accomplishment.
An hour ago he was lying in his bed at Plaisance, in low enough spirits, indeed, at the outlook before him, but his gloomiest thought had never plumbed depths such as this.
He wondered briefly if so extreme a step had been really necessary.
And then he heard again the purposeful tramp of those heavy feet on the Coupée, and fathomed again the menace of them.
And he felt Nance's guiding hand trembling violently in his once more, and he said to himself that she and Bernel knew better than he how the land lay, and that he could not have done other than he had done.
Then he became aware that the dew was drenching him, and so he bent and groped in the dark for the shelter Nance had spoken of.
The strip of moon had paled as it rose, the huge white stones glimmered faintly in it, and a darker patch below showed him where the entrance must be. He crept into the darker patch on his hands and knees, bumping his head violently, but once inside found room to sit upright. Snaking out again, he laid hold of the two bundles and the gun, and dragged them into shelter.
What the bundles contained he could not tell in the dark, but one felt like a thick woollen cloak, and the other like a blanket, and among their contents he felt a loaf of bread, and a bottle and a powder-flask. So he rolled himself up in the blanket and the cloak, and lay wondering at the strange case in which he found himself, and so at last fell asleep.
He woke into a dapple of light and shade which filled his wandering wits with wonder, till, with a start, he came to himself and remembered.
The place he was in was something like a stone bee-hive, about eight feet across from side to side, with a rounded sloping roof rising at its highest some four feet from the ground, and the great blocks of which it was built fitted so ill in places that the sun shot the darkness through and through with innumerable little white arrows of light. The dark opening of the night was now a glowing invitation to the day. He shook off his wraps and crawled out into the open.
And what an open!
He drew deep breaths of delight at the magnificence of his outlook—its vastness, its spaciousness, its wholesome amplitude and loneliness. He felt like a new man born solitary into a new world.
The sky, without a cloud, was like a mighty hollowed sapphire, in which blazed the clear white sun; and the vast plain of the sea, sweeping away into infinity, was a still deeper blue, with here and there long swathes of green, and here and there swift-speeding ruffles purple-black.
A brisk easterly breeze set all the face of it a-ripple, and where the dancing wavelets caught the sun it glanced and gleamed like sheets of molten silver.
"A silver sea! A silver sea!" he cried aloud, and into his mind there flashed an incongruous comparison of the bountifulness of Nature's silver with the pitiful grains they hacked out of her rocks with such toil and hardship.
Away to the south across the silver sea the Jersey cliffs shone clear in the sunshine, and on the dimpling plain between, the black Paternosters looked so like the sails of boats heading for Sark that he remembered suddenly that he was in hiding, and dropped to cover alongside the great stones of his shelter.
But careful observation of the square black objects showed him that they did not move, and anyway they were much too far away to see him. So he took courage again, and, full of curiosity concerning his hiding-place, he crept up the southern slope till he reached the ridge of the roof, so to speak, and lay there looking over, entranced with the beauty of the scene before him.
The whole east coast of Sark right up to the Burons, off the Creux, lay basking in the morning light. Dixcart and Derrible held no secrets from him; he looked straight up their shining beaches. Their bold headlands were like giant-fists reaching out along the water towards him. Brenière, the nearest point to his rock, was another mighty grasping hand, but between it and him swept a furious race of tossing, white-capped waves, with here and there black fangs of rock which stuck up through the green waters as though hungering for prey.
He could just see the upper part of the miners' cottages on the cliff above Rouge Terrier, but, beyond these and the ruined mill on Hog's Back, not another sign of man and his toilsome, troublesome little works. But for these, Sark, in its utter loneliness, might have been a new-found island, and he its first discoverer.
Ranging on, his eye rested on the shattered fragments of Little Sark, scattered broadcast over the sea about its most southerly point—bare black pinnacles, ragged ledges, islets, rocklets, reefs, and fangs, every one of which seemed to stir the placid sea to wildest wrath. Elsewhere it danced and dimpled in the sunshine, with only the long slow heave in it to tell of the sleeping giant below, but round each rock, and up the sides of his own huge pyramid, it swept in great green combers shot with bubbling white, and went tumbling back upon itself in rings of boiling foam.
Beyond, he saw the rounded back of Jethou, and just behind it the long line of houses in Guernsey.
He lay long enjoying it all, with the warm sun on his back, and the brisk wind toning his blood, but no view, however wonderful, will satisfy a man's stomach. He had fed the day before mostly on most unsatisfying emotions, and now he began to feel the need of something more solid. So he crept back along the slope to find out what there was for breakfast.
His stores lay about the floor of his resting-place, just as he had turned them out in the night; a couple of long loaves, a good-sized piece of raw bacon, and another of boiled pork which he thought he recognized, some butter in a cloth, a bottle which looked as if it might contain spirits, the powder-flask, and a small linen bag containing bullets, snail-shot, and percussion caps. These, with Bernel's gun and the blanket, and the old woollen cloak, which he recognized as Mr. Hamon's roquelaure, and his pipe, and the tobacco he happened to have in his pouch, constituted, for the time being, his worldly possessions.
He spread his cloak and blanket in the sun to dry and air, and, doubtful whether his rock would supply any further provision or when more might reach him from Sark, he proceeded to make a somewhat restricted meal of bread and cold pork.
The raw bacon suggested something of a problem. To cook it he must have a fire. To have a fire he must have fuel; his tinder-box he always carried, of course, for the new matches had not yet penetrated to Sark. Moreover, to light a fire might be dangerous as liable to attract attention, unless he could do it under cover where no stray gleams could get out.
He pondered these matters as he ate, spinning out his exiguous meal to its uttermost crumb to make it as satisfying as possible.
He saw his way at once to perfecting his cover. All about him where he sat, the grey rock pushed through a thin friable soil like the bones of an ill-buried skeleton. And everywhere in the scanty soil grew thick little rounded cushions, half grass, half moss, varying in size from an apple to a foot-stool, which came out whole at a pluck or a kick. After breakfast he would plug up every hole in his shelter, and pile half-a-dozen sizeable pieces outside with which to close the front door. Then, if he could find anything in the shape of fuel, he saw his way to a dinner of fried bacon, but it would have to be after dark when the smoke would be invisible.
But first he must find out about his water supply.
Down at the south end, Nance had said. That must be over there, on that almost-detached stack of rocks, where the waves seemed to break loudest.
So, after another crawl up to the ridge to make certain that no boats were about—for he had frequently seen them fishing in the neighbourhood of L'Etat—he crept down the flank of his pyramid almost to sea-level to get across to the outer pile.
He had to pick his way with caution across a valley of black rocks, rifted and chasmed by the fury of the waves. He could imagine—or thought he could, but came far short of it—how the great green rollers would thunder through that black gully in the winter storms.
There were great wells lined all round with rich brown sea-weeds, and narrow chasms in whose hidden depths the waters swooked and gurgled like unseen monsters, and whose broken edges, on which he had to step, were like the rough teeth of gigantic saws set up on end alongside one another.
He crawled across these rough serrations and scaled the rifted black wall in front, and came at once on a number of shallow pools of rain-water lying in the hollows of a mighty slab.
But the moment his head rose above the level of the steep black wall his ears were filled with a deafening roaring and rushing, supplemented by most tremendous dull thuddings which shook the stack like the blows of a mighty flail.
From behind a further wall there rose a boiling mist, through which lashed up white jets of spray which slanted over the rocks beyond in a continuous torrent.
He crawled to the further wall and looked over into a deep black gully, some fifteen feet wide and perhaps thirty feet deep, into which, out of a perfectly calm sea, most monstrous waves came roaring and leaping, till the whole chasm was foaming and spuming like an over-boiling milk-pan. In the middle of the chasm, for the further torment of the waters, was jammed a huge black rock, against which the incoming green avalanche dashed itself to fragments and went rocketing into the air. The solid granite at the further end was cleft from summit to base by a tiny rift a foot wide through which the boiling spume poured out to the sea beyond.
But the marvel was where those gigantic waves came from. Save for the dancing wind-ripples and its long, slow internal pulsations, the sea was as smooth as a pond to within twenty yards of the rocks. Then it suddenly seemed to draw itself together, to draw itself down into itself indeed, like a tiger compressing its springs for a leap, and then, with a rush and a roar, it launched itself at the rocks with the weight of the ocean behind it, and hurtled blindly into the chasm where the black rock lay.
It was a most wonderful sight, and Gard sat long watching it, then and later, fascinated always and puzzled by that extraordinary self-compression and sudden upleap of the waters out of an otherwise placid sea.
It was but one more odd expression of Nature's fantastic humour, and the nearest he could come to an explanation of it was that, in the sea bed just there, was some great fault, some huge chasm into which the waters fell and then came leaping out to further torment on the rocks.
It was as he was returning to his own quarters by a somewhat different route across the valley of rocks, that he lighted on another find which contented him greatly.
In one of the saw-toothed chasms he saw a piece of wood sticking up, and climbed along to get it as first contribution to his fire. And when he got to it, down below in the gully, he found jammed the whole side of a boat, flung up there by some high spring tide and trapped before it could escape. Excellent wood for his firing, well tarred and fairly dry. He hauled and pulled till he had it all safely up, and then he carried it, load after load, to his house, and laid it out in the sun to dry still more.
He worked hard all day, keeping a wary outlook for any stray fishermen.
First he culled a great heap of the thin wiry grass which seemed the chief product of his rock, and spread it also to dry for a couch. There was no bracken for bedding, no gorse for firing. The grass would supply the place of the one, the broken boat the other.
Then he made good all the holes in his walls and roof, except one in the latter for the escape of the smoke, and built a solid wall of the tufted cushions round the seaward side of his doorway, as a screen against his light being seen, and as a protection from the south-west wind if it should blow up strong in the night.
He found it very strange to be toiling on these elemental matters, with never a soul to speak to. He felt like a castaway on a desert island, with the additional oddness of knowing himself to be within reach of his kind, yet debarred from any communication with them on pain, possibly, of death.
At times he felt like a condemned criminal, yet knew that he had done no wrong, and that it was only the mistaken justice of a simple people that wanted blood for blood, and was not over-heedful as to whose blood so long as its own sense of justice was satisfied.
But, he kept saying to himself, things might have been worse with him, very much worse, but for Nance and Bernel. And before long, any day, the matter might be cleared up and himself reinstated in the opinion of the Sark men.
Even that would leave much to be desired, but possibly, he thought, if they found they had sorely misjudged him in this matter, they might realize that they had done so in other matters also, and that he had only been striving to do his duty as he saw it.
And then, wherever else his thoughts led him, there was always Nance, and the thought of Nance always set his heart aglow and braced him to patient endurance and hope.
He retraced, again and again, all the ways they had travelled together in these later days, recalled her every word and look, felt again the trembling of her hand—for him—on the Coupée, heard again the tremors of her voice as she urged him to safety. And those sweet ingenuous kisses she had given him! Yes, indeed, he had much to be grateful for, if some things to cavil at, in fortune's dealings.
But, behind all his fair white thought of Nance, was always the black background of the whole circumstances of the case, and the grim fact of Tom Hamon's death, and he pondered this last with knitted brows from every point of view, and strove in vain for a gleam of light on the darkness.
Could the Doctor be mistaken, and was Tom's death the simple result of his fall over the Coupée? The Doctor's pronouncement, however, seemed to leave no loophole of hope there.
If not, then who had killed Tom, and why?
He could think of no one. He could imagine no reason for it.
Tom had been a bully at home, but outside he was on jovial terms with his fellows—except only himself. He had to acknowledge to himself the seeming justice of the popular feeling. If any man in Sark might, with some show of reason, have been suspected of the killing of Tom Hamon, it was himself.
Once, by reason of overmuch groping in the dark, an awful doubt came upon him—was it possible that, in some horrible wandering of the mind, of which he remembered nothing, he had actually done this thing? Done it unconsciously, in some over-boiling of hot blood into the brain, which in its explosion had blotted out every memory of what had passed?
It was a hideous idea, born of over-strain and overmuch groping after non-existent threads in a blind alley.
He tried to get outside himself, and follow Stephen Gard that night and see if that terrible thing could have been possible to him.
But he followed himself from point to point, and from moment to moment, and accounted for himself to himself without any lapse whatever; unless, indeed, his brain had played him false and he had gone out of the house again after going into it, and followed Tom and struck him down.
With what? The Doctor said with some blunt instrument like a hammer. Where could he have obtained it? What had he done with it?
The idea, while it lasted, was horrible. But he shook it off at last and called himself a fool for his pains. He had never harboured thought of murder in his life. He had detested Tom, but he had never gone the length of wishing him dead. The whole idea was absurd.
All these things he thought over as, his first essential labours completed, he lay under the screen of the ridge and watched the sun dropping towards Guernsey in a miracle of eventide glories.
Below him, the long slow seas rocketted along the ragged black base of his rock with mighty roarings and tumultuous bursts of foam, and on the ledges the gulls and cormorants squabbled and shrieked, and took long circling flights without fluttering a wing, to show what gulls could do, or skimmed darkly just above the waves and into them, to show that cormorants were never satisfied. And now and again wild flights of red-billed puffins swept up from the water and settled out of his sight at the eastern end of the rock, and he promised himself to look them up some other day if opportunity offered.
From the constant tumult of the seas about his rock, except just at low water, he saw little fear of being taken by surprise, even if his presence there became known. Twice only in the twenty-four hours did it seem possible for any one to effect a landing there, and at those times he promised himself to be on the alert.
He lay there till the sun had gone, and the pale green and amber, and the crimson and gold of his going had slowly passed from sea and sky, and left them grey and cold; till a single light shone out on Sark, which he knew must be in one of the miners' cottages, and many lights twinkled in Guernsey; till beneath him he could no longer see the sea, but only the white foam fury as it boiled along the rocks. Then he crept away to his burrow, rejoicing in the thought of the companionship of a fire and hot food.