It took Gard some time to get his fire started, and when it did blaze up, with fine spurts of gas from the tar, and vivid blue and green and red flames from the salted wood, the little stone bee-hive glowed like an oven and presently grew as hot as one. The smoke escaped but slowly through the single hole in the roof, and at last he could stand it no longer, and crept out into the night until his fire should have burned down to a core of red ashes over which he could grill his dinner.
And what a night! He had seen the stars from many parts of the earth and sea, but never, it seemed to him, had he seen such stars as these, so close, so large, so wonderfully clean and bright. And, indeed, glory of the heavens so supreme as that is possible only far away from man, and all the works and habitations of man, and all his feeble efforts at the mitigation of the darkness. Nay, for fullest perception, it may be that it is necessary for a man to be not only alone in the profundity of Nature's night, but to be lifted somewhat out of himself and his natural darkness by extremity of joy, or still more of need.
The milky way was as white as though a mighty brush dipped in glittering star-dust had been drawn across the velvet dome. The larger stars, many of which were old acquaintances and known to him by name, seemed to swing so clear and close that they took on quite a new aspect of friendliness and cheer. The smaller—I write as he thought—a mighty host, an innumerable company quite beyond his ken, still spoke to him in a language that he had never forgotten.
Long ago, when he was quite a little boy, he had come upon a great globe of the heavens, a much-prized curiosity of his old schoolmaster. Upon it appeared all the principal stars linked up into their constellations, the shadowy linking lines forming the figures of the Imaginary Ones associated with them in the minds of the ancients. There, on the varnished round of the globe, ranged the Great and Little Bears, and the Dogs, and the Archer, and the Flying Horse, the Lion, and the Crab, and the Whale, and the Twins, and Perseus and Andromeda, and Cassiopeia. And up there, on the dark inner side of the mighty dome, he seemed to see them all again, and time swung back with him for a moment, and he was a boy once more.
And, gazing up at them all, their steady shine and many-coloured twinklings led him to wonder as to the how and the why of them. From the stars to their Maker was but a natural step, and so he came, simply and naturally, to thought of the greatness of Him who swung these innumerable worlds in their courses, and, from that, to His goodness and justice.
Memories of his mother came surging back upon him, and of all her goodness and all she had taught him. She had had a mighty, simple trust in the goodness of God, and had passed it on to her boy, though his rough contact with the world had overworn it all to some extent.
Still, it was all there, and now it all came back to him through the hopeful twinkling eyes of those innumerable stars.
"Have courage and hope!" they sang; and though all his little world, save those two or three who knew him best, was against him, he stood there with his face turned up to the stars, and believed in his heart that all would yet be well.
And when at last he turned back to things of earth, he found the stars still twinkling in the sea, as though they would not let him go even though he gave up looking at them. They gleamed and glanced in the smooth-rolling waves till the deep seemed sown with phosphorescence, as on that night in Grand Grève; the night Nance came upon him so suddenly in the dark and he went on with her to get Grannie's medicine.
Was it possible that that blessed night, that terrible night, was barely forty-eight hours old? So much had happened since then, such incredible things! It seemed weeks ago. It seemed like a dream; horrid, fantastic, wonderfully sweet.
Within that tiny span of hours he had come to the knowledge of Nance's love for him. Oh those sweet, frank kisses! If he had died last night; if the hot heads in their madness had killed him to balance Tom Hamon's account—still he would have lived: for Nance had kissed him.
And within the half of that short span he had been judged a murderer, had had to flee for his life, and would, without a doubt, have lost it but for Nance.
She had undertaken a mighty risk for him—for him! And she had shown him that she loved him, for she had kissed him with her heart in her lips.
And, grateful as he was for all the rest, it was still the recollection of those sweet kisses that he thought of most.
So "Hope! Hope!" sang the stars, and his heart was high because his conscience was clean and Nance had kissed him.
When at last he crawled into his burrow, his fire was only white ashes, and he would not trouble to relight it.
He broke off a piece of bread, and ate it slowly, and thought of Nance, and promised himself the larger breakfast. Then he rolled himself in his cloak, and slept more soundly than an alderman after a civic feast.
Next morning, when he crawled out of his burrow, Gard found everything swathed in dense white mist. Upon which he promptly lit his fire, and in due course enjoyed a more satisfying meal than he had eaten since he landed on the rock.
Then he decided to take advantage of the screening mist to explore such parts of his prison-house as were not available to him at other times. So he walked along the ridge, secure from observation since he could not himself see down to the water from it, though the rushings and roarings along the black ledges below never ceased.
Every nook and ledge of the out-cropping rock on the south side of the ridge was occupied by lady gulls in all stages of their maternal duties. From the surprise they expressed at his intrusion, and the way they stuck to their nests, they were evidently quite unused to man and his ways, and it was all he could do to avoid stepping on them and their squawking families as he picked his way along.
He clambered down the eastern slope nearest Sark, and found the ground there covered with a fairly deep soil, and green growths that were strange to him. The soil was perforated with holes which at first he ascribed to rabbits, but when he inserted his hand into one he got such a nip from an unusually strong beak that he changed his mind to puffins, and, standing quite still for a time, he presently saw the members of the colony come creeping out behind their great red bills and scurry off across the water in search of breakfast.
Then the great semi-detached pinnacle below attracted him, and he scrambled down amid the complaints of a great colony of gulls and cormorants but found the tide still too full for him to cross the intervening chasm. Those wonderful great green waves out of a smooth sea came roaring along the sides of the island and met full tilt in the chasm below him, as they leaped exultant from their conflict with the rocks. They hurled themselves against one another in wildest fury, and the foam of their meeting boiled white along the ledges, and dappled all the sea.
As he crawled through the lank wet grass and soft spongy soil, he found himself suddenly confronted with a great barrier of fallen rocks; as though, at some period of its existence, the north end of the island had tapered to a gigantic peak which, in the fulness of its time, had come down with a crash, and now lay like a titanic wall from summit to sea-board. Huge and forbidding, of all shapes and sizes, the mighty fragments barred his course like a menace, and he attacked them warily, drawing himself with infinite caution from one to another; over this one, under this, deftly between these two, lest an unwary weighting should start them on the movement that might grind him to powder.
The fog increased their forbidding aspect tenfold. He could not see a foot before him, and could only worm his way among them, testing each before he trusted it, and finding at times monsters become but mediocre when his hand was on them. More than once he had to rest his hands on cautiously-tried ledges and swing his legs forward and grope with his feet for foothold, and whether the space below was trifling, or whether it ran to incredible depth, he could not tell.
It was a mighty relief to him to come out at last on the other side of the wall, and to find himself on the great north slope which faced Sark, and so was closed to him in clear weather.
The long thin grass grew rankly here, and was beaded with moisture, but he pushed along with an eerie feeling at the wildness of it all.
The mist clung close about him, but had suddenly become luminous. He felt as though he were packed loosely all round with cotton wool on which a strong light was shining. It gave him a feeling of light-headedness. Everything was light about him, and yet he could not see more than a couple of feet before his face. The waves roared hoarsely below him, and once he had unknowingly got so low down that a monstrous white arm, reaching suddenly up out of the depths, seemed about to lay hold on him and drag him back with it into the turmoil.
He was panting and full of mist when at last he climbed the second great rock barrier and rounded the corner towards the south.
And as he sat resting there, the whiff of a westerly breeze tore a long lane in the white shroud, and for a moment he saw, as through a telescope, the houses of Guernsey gleaming in bright sunshine. Then it closed again, and presently began to drift past him in strange whorls and spirals, like hurrying ghosts wrapped hastily in filmy garments, which loosed at times and trailed slowly over the rocks and caught and clung to their sharp projections. Then the sun completed the rout, and the mist-ghosts swept away towards France, harried by the west wind like a flock of sheep before the shepherd's dog.
In the afternoon the heat grew so intense that he was driven to the wells in the valley of rocks for a bathe, for there was no shelter available, and his bee-hive was like an oven.
None of the pools was large enough for a swim, and it was more than a man's life was worth to venture among the boiling surges of the outer rocks. But he could at all events get under water, if it was only to sit there and cool off.
So he stripped, and was just about slipping into a deep still bath, emerald green, with a fringe of amber weeds all round its almost perpendicular sides, when, glancing down to make sure of an ultimate footing, his eye lighted with a shock of surprise on a pair of huge eyes looking straight up at him out of the water. They were violet in colour, protuberant, and malevolent beyond words.
He sat down suddenly on the baking black rock, with a cold shiver running down his back in spite of the scorch of the sun. The utter cold malignity of those great violet eyes, and the thought of what would have happened if he had stepped into that pool, made him momentarily sick.
He had seen small devil-fish in the pools in Sark, but never one approaching this in size. He crept away at last, leaving it in possession, and found a pool clear of boulders or caving hollows, and sat in it with no great enjoyment, wondering if the great unwholesome beast in the other would be likely to climb the cliff and come upon him in the night. He thought it unlikely, but still the idea clung to him and caused him no little discomfort. He blocked his door that night with great green cushions, though he felt doubtful if they would be effective against the wiles and strength of a devil-fish, if half that he had heard of them was true.
In the middle of the night—for he went to bed early, having nothing else to do, except to watch the stars—he woke with a cold start, feeling certain that hideous creature had crawled up the slope and was feeling all round his house for an entrance.
Certainly something was moving about outside, and feeling over the stones in an uncertain, searching kind of a way. And when you have been wakened up from a nightmare in which staring devil-eyes played a prominent part, something may be anything, and as like as not the owner of the eyes.
But even devil-fishes in their most advanced stages have not yet attained the power of human speech. If they speak to one another what a horrible sound it must be!
It was with a sigh of relief, and a sudden unstringing of the bow, that he heard outside—
"Mr. Gard!" and with a lusty kick, which expressed some of his feeling, he sent his doorway flying and crawled out after it.
The myriad winking stars lifted the roof of the world and the darkness somewhat, sufficient at all events for him to make out that it was not Nance.
"You, Bernel?" he queried, as the only possible alternative.
"Yes, Mr. Gard. I've brought you some more things to eat."
"Good lad! I'm a great trouble to you. Where is Nance? In the boat?"
"No, she couldn't come. That Julie's watching her like a cat. It was she and Peter stirred up the men against you. All day yesterday the whole Island was out looking for you, dead or alive, and very much puzzled as to what had become of you. And Julie's got a suspicion that we know. They searched the house for you in spite of mother and Grannie, but they won't forget Grannie in a hurry, and I don't think they'll come back," and he laughed at the recollection of it.
"What did Grannie do?"
"She just looked at them from under that big black sun-bonnet, and muttered things no one heard. But her eyes were like points of burning sticks, and they all crept out one after another, afraid of they didn't know what. But Julie's been on the watch all day, and would hardly let us out of her sight. But she couldn't watch us both when we were not together. So Nance got a bundle of things ready for you, and then went out with another bundle and Julie followed her, and I slipped off here."
"Bernel, I don't know how to thank you all! What should I have done without you?"
"You'd have been dead, most likely. It's not that they cared much for Tom, you know, but they don't like the idea of a Sark man being killed by a foreigner and no one paying for it."
"But I'm not a foreigner—"
"Yes you are, to them. Of course you're not a Frenchman, but all the same you're not a Sark man. Good thing for you you'd lived with us and we'd got to know you and like you."
"Yes, that was a good thing indeed. I'm only sorry to have brought you trouble and to be such a trouble to you."
"If we thought you'd done it of course we wouldn't trouble. But we know you couldn't have."
"Nothing fresh has turned up?"
"Nothing yet. But Nance says it will, sure. Truth must out, she says."
"It's a weary while of coming out sometimes, Bernel. And I can't spend the rest of my life here, you know."
"She said you were to keep your heart up. You never know what may happen."
"Tell her I can stand it because of all her goodness to me. If I hadn't her to think of I might go mad in time."
"I've brought you a rabbit I snared. Nance cooked it."
"That was good of her. Can you eat puffins' eggs?"
"They want a bit of getting used to," laughed the boy. "But they're better cooked than raw."
"I can cook them. I found part of an old boat, and I've plugged up all the holes in the shelter, and I only light a fire at night. Could I fish here?"
"Too big a sea close in. I've got some in the boat. I put out a line as I came across. I'll leave you some."
"And have you a bottle—or a bailing-tin? Anything I could bring home some water from the pools in? I have to go over there every time I need a drink, and in the dark it's not possible."
"You can have the bailer. It's a new one and sound."
"Now tell me, Bernel, if they find out I'm here what will they do?"
"They might come across and try and take you, unless they cool down; and that won't be so long as that Julie and Peter talk as they do. She makes him do everything she tells him. He's a sheep."
"And if they come across, what do you and Nance expect me to do?"
"You've got my gun," said the boy simply.
"Yes, I've got your gun. But do you expect me to kill some of them?"
"They'd kill you," said Bernel, conclusively. On second thoughts, however, he added, "But you needn't kill them. Wing one or two, and the rest will let you be. With a gun I could keep all Sark from landing on L'Etat."
"Suppose they come in the night? How many landing-places are there?"
"There's another at the end nighest Guernsey, but it's not easy. And it's only low tide and half-ebb that lets you ashore here at all."
"How about your boat?"
"She's riding to a line. Tide's running up that way, but I'd better be off."
They stumbled through the darkness and the sleeping gulls, which woke in fright, and volubly accused one another of nightmares and riotous behaviour—and Bernel hauled in his boat, and handed Gard the tin dipper and three good-sized bream.
"If you can't eat them all at once, split them open and dry them in the sun," he said. "They'll keep for a week that way."
"Tell Nance I think of her every hour of the day, and I pray God the truth may come out soon."
"I'll tell her. It'll come out. She says so," and he pulled out into the darkness and was gone.
And the Solitary went back to his shelter, secure in the knowledge that the tide was on the rise, and half-ebb would not be till well on into next day. And he thought of Nance, and of Bernel, and of all the whole matter again; white thoughts and black thoughts, but chiefly white because of Nance, and Nance was a fact, while the black thoughts were shadows confusing as the mist.
He could only devoutly hope and pray that a clean wind might come and put the shadows to flight and let the sun of truth shine through.
Living thus face to face with Nature, and drawn through lack of other occupation into unusually intimate association with her, Gard found his lonely rock a centre of strange and novel experience.
Situated as he was, even small things forced themselves largely upon his observation and wrought themselves into his memory. He found it good to lose himself for a time in these visible and tangible actualities, rather than in useless efforts after an understanding of the mystery of which he was the victim and centre.
He had given over much time to pondering the subject of Tom Hamon's death, but had come no nearer any reasonable solution of it. That hideous doubt as to himself in the matter recurred at times, but he always hastened to dissipate it by some other interest more practical and palpable, lest it should bring him to ultimate belief in its possibility, and so to madness.
And so he spent hours watching that wonderful roaring cauldron on the south stack where his water pools were. Other hours in study of the social and domestic economies of gulls and cormorants. He saw families of awkward little fawn-coloured squawkers force their way out of their shells under his very eves, while indignant mothers told him what they thought of him from a safe distance.
He bathed regularly in the heat of the day, but always after careful inspection of his chosen pool, and one day fled in haste up the black rocks at sight of the tip of a long, quivering, flesh-coloured tentacle coming curling round a rock in the close neighbourhood of the pool in which he was basking.
That monster under the rock gave him many a bad dream. It seemed to him the incarnation of evil, and those horrible, bulging, merciless eyes stuck like burrs in his memory.
One day, when he had been watching the cauldron, and filling his tin dipper at the freshwater pools, as he came to descend the black wall leading to the valley of rocks, he witnessed a little tragedy.
Down below, on the edge of the pool where the octopus dwelt, a silly young cormorant was standing gazing into the water, so fascinated with something it saw there that it forgot even to jerk its head in search of understanding.
Gard stood and watched. He saw a tiny pale worm-like thing come creeping up the black rock on which the cormorant squatted. The cormorant saw it too, and he was hungry, as all cormorants always are, even after a full meal. So presently he made a jab at it with his curved beak, and in a moment the pale worm had twisted itself tightly round his silly neck, and dragged him screaming and fluttering under the water.
Another day, when he was coming down by the break in the cliff, where some great winter wave had bitten out such a slice that the top had come tumbling down, he saw the monster sunning itself on the flat rock by the side of its pool, like a huge nightmare spider.
The moment he appeared its great eyes settled on his as though it had been waiting only for him. And when he stopped, with a feeling of shuddering discomfort at its hugeness—for its body seemed considerably over a foot in width, while its arms lounging over the rocks were each at least six feet long, and looked horribly muscular—he could have sworn that one of the great devil-eyes winked familiarly at him, as though the beast would say, "Come on, come on! Nice day for a bathe! Just waiting for you!"
He could see the loathsome body move as it breathed, swinging comfortably in the support of its arms.
In a fury of repulsion he stooped to pick up a rock, but when he hurled it the last tentacle was just sliding into the pool, and it seemed to him that it waved an ironical farewell before it disappeared.
More than once fishing-boats hovered about his rock, but kept a safe distance from the boiling underfalls, and he always lay in hiding till they had gone.
But he saw more gracious and beautiful things than these.
As he lay one morning, looking over the ridge at the Sark headlands shining in the sun—with a strong west wind driving the waves so briskly that, Sark-like, they tossed their white crests into the air in angry expostulation long before they met the rocks, and went roaring up them in dazzling spouts of foam—his eye lighted on a gleam of unusual colour on the racing green plain. It came again and again, and presently, as the merry dance waxed wilder still, every white-cap as it tossed into the air became a tiny rainbow, and the whole green plain was alive with magical flutterings, of colours so dazzling that it seemed bestrewn with dancing diamonds. A sight so wonderful that he found himself holding in his! breath lest a puff should drive it all away.
That same evening, too, was a glory of colour such as he had never dreamed of. The setting sun was ruby; red, and the cloud-bank into which he sank was all rimmed with red fire that seemed to corruscate in its burning brilliancy.
To Gard indeed, in the somewhat peculiar state of mind induced by his sudden cutting-off from his kind and flinging back upon himself, it seemed as though the blood-red sun had fallen into a vast consuming fire behind that dark, fire-rimmed cloud, and that that was the end of it, and it would never rise again.
The sky, right away into the farthest east, was flaming red with a hint of underlying smoke below the glow. The sea was a weltering bath of blood, and the cliffs of Sark, save for the gleam of white foam at their feet, shone as red as though they had just been bodily dipped in it.
His lonely rock, when he looked round at it in wonder, was all unfamiliarly red. There was a red fantastic glow in the very air, and he himself was as red as though he had in very fact killed Tom Hamon, and drenched himself with his blood.
So startling and unnatural was it all, that he found himself wondering fearfully if these outside things were really all blood-red, or whether something had gone wrong with his brain and eyes, and only caused them to look so to him alone, or whether it was indeed the end of all things shaping itself slowly under his very eyes. And in that thought and fear he was not by any means alone.
But the wonderful red, which in its universality and intensity had become overpowering and fearsome, faded at last, and he hailed its going with a sigh of relief. His eyes and his brain were all right, he had not killed Tom Hamon, and this was not the earth's last sunset.
And again that night, as he sat on the ridge on sentinel duty till the rising tide should lock the doors of his castle, the sea all round him shone with phosphorescence; every breaking wave along the black plain was a lambent gleam of lightning, and where they tore up the sides of his rock they were like flames out of a fiery sea, so that he sat there looking down upon a weltering band of nickering green and blue fires, which clung to the black ledges and dripped slowly back into the seething gleam below.
It was all very strange and very awesome, and he wondered what it might portend in the way of further marvels.
And he had not long to wait.
Far away in the Atlantic a cyclone had been raging, and carrying havoc in its skirts. Now it was whirling towards Europe, and the puffins crept deep into their holes, and the gulls circled with disconsolate cries, and the cormorants crouched gloomily in lee of their snuggest ledges, and all nature seemed waiting for the blow.
Gard was awakened in the morning by the gale tearing at the massive stones of his shelter as though it would carry them bodily into the sea.
And when he crawled out, flat like a worm, the wind caught him even so, and he had to grimp to earth and anchor himself by projecting pieces of rock.
Such seas as these he had never imagined round Sark; forgetting that behind Guernsey lay thousands of miles of waters tortured past endurance and racing now to escape the fury of the storm.
A white lash of spray came over him as he lay, and soaked him to the skin, and, turning his face to the storm, he saw through the chinks of his eyes a great wavering white curtain between him and the sky line. The south-west portion of his island, where his freshwater pools were, and the valley of rocks, were all awash, the mighty waves roaring clean over the south stack, and rushing up into the black sky in rockets of flying spray. The tide had still some time to run, and he feared what it might be like at its fullest. It seemed to him by no means impossible that it might sweep the whole rock bare.
It was a fortunate thing for Gard that the storm—the great storm from which, for many a year afterwards, local events in Sark dated—came when it did; two days after Bernel's visit and the replenishment of his larder. For if he had been caught bare he must have starved.
Eight whole days it lasted, with only two slight abatements which, while they raised his hopes only to dash them, still served him mightily.
During the first days he spent much of his time crouched in the lee of his bee-hive, watching the terrific play of the waves on his own rock and on the Sark headlands.
He wondered if any other man had seen such a storm under such conditions. For he was practically at sea on a rock; in the midst of the turmoil, yet absolutely unaffected by it.
On shipboard, thought of one's ship and possible consequences had always interfered with fullest enjoyment of Nature's paroxysms. It was impossible to detach one's thoughts completely and view matters entirely from the outside. But here—he was sure his rock had suffered many an equal torment—there was nothing to come between him and the elemental frenzy. Nothing but—as the days of it ran on—a growing solicitude as to what he was going to live on if it continued much longer.
Never was Sark rabbit so completely demolished as was that one that Nance had cooked and sent him. Before he had done with it he cracked the very bones he had thrown away, for the sake of what was in them, and finally chewed the softer parts of the bones themselves to cheat himself into the belief that he was eating.
That was after he had devoured every crumb of his bread, and finished his three fishes to the extreme points of their tails.
He was, I said, in the very midst of the turmoil yet unaffected by it. But that was not so in some respects.
Bodily, as we have seen, the storm bore hardly upon him, since rabbit-bones and fish-tails can hardly be looked upon as a nutritious or inviting dietary.
But mentally and spiritually the mighty elemental upheaval was wholly crushing and uplifting.
As he cowered, with humming head, under the fierce unremitting rush of the gale, and felt the great stones of his shelter tremble in it, and watched the huge green hills of water, with their roaring white crests, go sweeping past to crash in thunder on the cliffs of Sark, he felt smaller than he had ever felt before—and that, as a rule, and if it come not of self-abnegation through a man's own sin or folly, is entirely to his good; possibly in the other case also.
To feel infinitely small and helpless in the hands of an Infinitely Great is a spiritual education to any man, and it was so to this man.
He felt himself, in that universal chaos, no more than a speck of helpless dust amid the whirling wheels of Nature's inexplicable machinery, and clung the tighter to the simple fundamental facts of which his heart was sure—behind and above all this was God, who held all these things in His hand. And over there in Sark was Nance, the very thought of whom was like a coal of fire in his heart, which all the gales that ever blew, and all the soddened soaking of ceaseless rain from above and ceaseless spray from below, could not even dim.
For long-continued and relentless buffeting such as this tells upon any man, no matter what his strength of mind or body to begin with; and a perpetually soaked body is apt in time to sodden the soul, unless it have something superhuman to cling to, as this man had in his simple trust in God and the girl he loved.
In all those stressful days, so far as he could see, the tides—which in those parts rise and fall some forty feet, as you may see by the scoured bases of the towering cliffs—seemed always at the full, the westerly gale driving in the waters remorselessly and piling them up against the land without cessation, and as though bent on its destruction.
Great gouts of clotted foam flew over his head in clouds, and plastered his rock with shivering sponges. The sheets of spray from his south-west rocks lashed him incessantly. His shelter was as wet inside as out, as he was himself.
He felt empty and hungry at times, but never thirsty; his skin absorbed moisture enough and to spare. But, chilled and clammed and starving, on the fifth day when he had crawled into his wet burrow for such small relief as it might offer from the ceaseless flailing without, he broached his bottle of cognac and drank a little, and found himself the better of it.
On the evening of the third day his hopes had risen with a slight slackening of the turmoil. He was not sure if the gale had really abated, or if it was only that he was growing accustomed to it. But under that belief, and the compulsion of a growling stomach, he crawled precariously round to the eastern end of the rock where the puffins had their holes, lying flat when the great gusts snatched at him as though they were bent on hurling him into the water, and gliding on again in the intervals. And there, with a piece of his firewood he managed to extort half-a-dozen eggs from fiercely expostulating parents. The end of his stick was bitten to fragments, but he got his eggs, and was amazed at the size of them compared with that of their producers.
The sight of the great wall of tumbled rocks on his right, and the sudden remembrance of his previous passage over it, set him wondering if it might not be possible to find better shelter in some of those fissures across which he had had to swing himself by the hands on the previous occasion. For this was the leeward side of the island, and the huge bulk of it rose like a protecting shoulder between him and the gale, whereas his bee-hive, on the exposed flank of the rock, got the full force of it. So he scooped a hole in the friable black soil and deposited his eggs in it and crawled along to the wall.
The tumbled fragments looked much less fearsome than they had done in the fog. He found no difficulty in clambering among them now, when he could see clearly what he was about, and he wormed his way in and out, and up and down, but could not light on any of those tricky spaces which had seemed to him so dangerous before.
And then, as he crawled under one huge slab, a black void lay before him, of no great width but evidently deep. It took many minutes' peering into the depths to accustom his eyes to the dimness.
Then it seemed to him that the rough out jutting fragments below would afford a holding, and he swung his feet cautiously down and felt round for foothold.
Carefully testing everything he touched, he let himself down, inch by inch, assured that if he could go down he could certainly get up again.
At first the gale still whistled through the crevices among the boulders, but presently he found himself in a silence that was so mighty a change from the ceaseless roar to which he was becoming accustomed, that he felt as though stricken with deafness. Up above him the light filtered down, tempered by the slab under which he had come, and enabled him still to find precarious hand and foot hold.
But presently his downward progress was barred by a rough flooring of splintered fragments, and he stood panting and looked about him.
His well was about twenty feet deep, he reckoned, and there were gaping slits here and there which might lead in towards the rock or out towards the sea. He had turned and twisted so much in his descent that it took him some time to decide in which direction the sea might lie and in which the rock. And, having settled that, he wriggled through a crevice and wormed slowly on.
He was almost in the dark now, and could only feel his way. But he was used to groping in narrow places, and a spirit of investigation urged him on.
Half an hour's strenuous and cautious worming, and a thin trickle of light glimmered ahead. He turned and worked his way back at once.
There was no slit opposite the one he had tried, but presently, half-way up the well, he made out an opening like the mouth of a small adit. His back had been to it as he came down, and so he had missed it.
He climbed up and in, and felt convinced in his own mind that this was no simple work of nature. Nature had no doubt begun, but man had certainly finished it. For the floor level was comparatively free from harshness, and the outjutting projections of the sides and roof had been tempered, and progress was not difficult.
It was very narrow, however, and very low, and quite dark. He could only drag himself along on his stomach like a worm. But he pushed on with all the ardour of a discoverer.
Was it silver? Was it smugglers? Or what? Wholly accidental formation he was sure it was not, though he thought it likely that man's handiwork had only turned Nature's to account.
The fissure had probably been there from the beginning of time, or it might be the result of numberless years of the slow wearing away of a softer vein of rock, but some man at some time had lighted on it, and followed it up, and with much labour had smoothed its natural asperities and used it for his own purposes. And he was keen to learn what those purposes were.
To any ordinary man, accustomed to the ordinary amplitudes of life, and freedom to stretch his arms and legs and raise his head and fill his lungs with fresh air, a passage such as this would have been impossible. Here and there, indeed, the walls widened somewhat through some fault in the rook, bur for the most part his elbows grazed the sides each time he moved them.
Even he, used as he was to such conditions, began at last to feel them oppressive. The whole mighty bulk of L'Etat seemed above and about him, malignantly intent on crushing him out of existence.
He knew that was only fancy. He had experienced it many times before. But the nightmare feeling was there, and it needed all his will at times to keep him from a panic attempt at retreat, when the insensate rock-walls seemed absolutely settling down on him, and breathing was none too easy.
But going back meant literally going backwards, crawling out toes foremost; for his elbows scraped the walls and his head the roof, and turning was out of the question. The men who had made and used that narrow way had undoubtedly gone with a purpose, and not for pleasure. And he was bound to learn what that purpose was.
So he set his teeth, and wormed himself slowly along, with pinched face and tight-shut mouth, and nostrils opened wide to take in all the air they could and let out as little as possible. And, even at that, he had to lie still at times, pressed flat against the floor, to let some fresher air trickle in above him.
But at last he came to what he sought, though no whit of it could he see when he got there. By the sudden cessation of the pressure on his sides and head, he was aware of entrance into a larger space, and, with forethought quickened by the exigences of his passage, he lay for a moment to pant more freely and to think.
His body was in the passage. He knew where the passage led out to. What lay ahead he could not tell.
If it was a chamber, as he expected, there might quite possibly be other passages leading out of it. And so it would be well to make sure of recognizing this one again before he loosed his hold on it. So he pulled off one boot, and feeling carefully round the opening, placed it just inside as a landmark.
Then he groped on along the right-hand wall to learn the size of the chamber, and was immediately thankful that his own passage was safely marked, for he came on another opening, and another, and another, and labelled them carefully in his mind, "One, two, three."
It was truly eerie work, groping there in that dense darkness and utter silence, and trying to the nerves even of one who had never known himself guilty of such things. But, being there, he was determined to learn all he could.
He clung to his right-hand wall as to a life-rope. If he once got mazed in a place like that he might never taste daylight and upper air again.
Of the size of the chamber he could so far form no opinion. He would have given much for a light. His flint and steel were indeed in his pocket, but he was sodden through and through, and had no means whatever of catching a spark if he struck one.
Then, as he groped cautiously along past the third opening, his progress was stayed, and not by rock.
He was on his knees, his hands feeling blindly, but with infinite enquiry, along the rough rock wall, when he stumbled suddenly over something that lay along the ground. Dropping his hands to save himself from falling, they lighted on that which lay below, and he started back with an exclamation and a shudder. For what he had felt was like the hair and face of a man.
He crouched back against the wall, his heart thumping like a ship's pump, and the blood belling in his ears, and sat so for very many minutes; sat on, until, in that silent blackness, he could hear the dull, far-away thud of the waves on the outer walls of the island.
Then, by degrees, he pulled himself together. If it was indeed a man, he was undoubtedly dead, and therefore harmless; and having learned this much he would know more.
So presently he groped forward, felt again the round head and soft hair, and below it and beyond it a heap of what felt like small oblong packages done up in wrappings of cloth and tied round with cord.
He picked one up and handled it inquisitively, with a shrewd idea of what might be, or might have been, inside. The cord was very loose, as though the contents had shrunk since it was tied. As he fumbled with it in the dark, it came open and left him no possible room for doubt as to what those contents were. He sneezed till the top of his head seemed like to lift, and the tears ran down his cheeks in an unceasing stream. What had once been tobacco had powdered into snuff, and his rough handling of the package had scattered it broadcast.
He turned at last, and lay with his head in his arms against the wall until the air should have time to clear, and meanwhile the sneezing had quickened his wits.
Here was possible tinder, and by means of those dried-up wrappings he might procure a light. If it lasted but five minutes it might enable him to solve the problem on which he had stumbled.
He groped again for the opened package, and found it on the dead man's face. The wrapper was of tarred cloth, almost perished with age, dry and friable. Shaking out the rest of the snuff at arm's length, he picked the stuff to pieces and shredded it into tinder. Then he felt about for half-a-dozen more packages, carefully slipped their cords and emptied out their contents, and getting out his flint and steel, flaked sparks into the tinder till it caught and flared, and the interior of the cavern leaped at him out of its darkness.
He rolled up one of the empty wrappers like a torch, and lit it, and looked about him.
His first hasty glance fell on the dead man, and he got another shock from the fact that his feet were lashed together with stout rope, and probably his hands also, for they were behind his back, and he lay face upward. His coat and short-clothes and buckled shoes spoke of long by-gone days, and the skin of his face was brown and shrivelled, so that the bones beneath showed grim and gaunt.
Beyond him was a great heap of the same small packages of tobacco, and alongside them a pile of small kegs. Gard lit another of his torches, and stepped gingerly over to them. He sounded one or two, but found them empty. Time had shrunk their stout timbers and tapped their contents.
Then he held up his flickering light and looked quickly round this prison-house which had turned into a tomb, and shivered, as a dim idea of what it all meant came over him.
It was a large, low, natural rock chamber, and all round the walls were black slits which might mean it passages leading on into the bowels of the island. To investigate them all would mean the work of many days.
The dead man, the perished packages, the empty kegs—there was nothing else, except his own boot lying in the mouth of the largest of the black slits, as though anxious on its own account to be gone.
The still air was already becoming heavy with the pungent smoke of his torches. He stepped cautiously across to the body again, and picked a couple of buttons from the coat. They came off in his hand, and when he touched the buckles on the shoes they did the same. Then he turned and made for his waiting shoe just as his last torch went out.
The smell of the fresh salt air, when he wriggled out into the well, was almost as good as a feast to him. He climbed hastily to the surface, and, as he crept out from under the topmost slab, took careful note of its position, and then scored with a piece of rock each stone which led up to it. For, if ever he should need an inner sanctuary, here was one to his hand, and evidently quite unknown to the present generation of Sark men.
He recovered his eggs, and crept round the shoulder of the rock. The gale pounced on him like a tiger on its half-escaped prey. It beat him flat, worried him, did its best to tear him off and fling him into the sea. But—Heavens!—how sweet it was after the musty quiet of the death-chamber below!
Inch by inch, he worked his way back in the teeth of it, and crawled spent into his bee-hive. Then, ravenous with his exertions, he broke one of his eggs into his tin dipper, and forthwith emptied it outside, and the gale swept away the awful smell of it.
The next was as bad, and his hopes sank to nothing.
The third, however, was all right. He mixed it with some cognac and whipped it up with a stick, and the growlers inside fought over it contentedly.
He was almost afraid to try another. However, he could get more to-morrow. So he broke the fourth, and found it also good, so whipped it up with more cognac, and felt happier than he had done since he nibbled his rabbit-bones.
As he lay that night, and the gale howled about him more furiously than ever, his thoughts ran constantly on the dead man lying in the silent darkness down below.
It was very quiet down there, and dry; but this roaring turmoil, with its thunderous crashings and hurtling spray, was infinitely more to his taste, wet though he was to the bone, and almost deafened with the ceaseless uproar. For this, terrible though it was in its majestic fury, was life, and that black stillness below was death.
To the tune of the tumult without, he worked out the dead man's story in his mind.
It was long ago in the old smuggling days. Some bold free-trader of Sark or Guernsey had lighted on that cave and used it as a storehouse. Some too energetic revenue officer had disappeared one day and never been heard of again. He had been surprised—by the free-traders—perhaps in the very act of surprising them—brought over to L'Etat in a boat, been dragged through the tunnel, or made to crawl through, perhaps, with vicious knife-digs in the rear, and had been left bound in the darkness till he should be otherwise disposed of. His captors had been captured in turn, or maybe killed, and he had lain there alone and in the dark, waiting, waiting for them to return, shouting now and again into the muffling darkness, struggling with his bonds, growing weaker and weaker, faint with hunger, mad with thirst, until at last he died.
It was horrible to think of, and desperate as his own state was, he thanked God heartily that he was not as that other.
Morning brought no slackening of the gale. It seemed to him, if anything, to be waxing still more furious.
He had only two eggs left, and they might both be bad ones, but he would not have ventured round the headland that day for all the eggs in existence.
He broke one presently, in answer to a clamour inside him that would brook no denial, and found it good, and lived on it that day, and mused between times on the strange fact that a man could feel so mightily grateful for the difference between a bad egg and a good one.
His sixth egg turned out a good one also, and the next day there came another hopeful lull, which permitted him to harry the puffins once more, and gave him a dozen chances against contingencies.
On the eighth day the storm blew itself out, and he looked hopefully across at the lonely and weather-beaten cliffs of Sark for the relief which he was certain they had been aching to send him.
The waves, however, still ran high, and, though he did not know it till later, there was not a boat left afloat round the whole Island. The forethoughtful and weather-wise had run them round to the Creux and carried them through the tunnel into the roadway behind. All the rest had been smashed and sunk and swallowed by the storm.
The sun blazed hot next day, and he spread himself out in it to warm, and all his soaked things in it to dry, and blessed it for its wholesome vigour.
Nance or Bernel would be sure to come as soon as the tide served at night, and he would net be sorry for a change of diet; meanwhile, he could get along all right with the unwilling assistance of the puffins.
The birds had all crept out of their hiding-places, and were wheeling and diving and making up for lost time and busily discussing late events at the tops of their voices whenever their bills were not otherwise occupied. Where they had all hidden themselves during the storm, he could not imagine, but there seemed to be as many of them as ever, and they were all quite happy and quarrelsome, except the cormorants, who were so ravenous that they could not spare a moment from their diving and gobbling, even to quarrel with their neighbours.
He levied on the puffins again, and, after a meal, prowled curiously about his rock to see what damage the storm had done, but to his surprise found almost none.
It seemed incredible that all should be the same after the deadly onslaught of the gale. But it was only in the valley of rocks that he found any consequences.
There the huge boulders had been hurled about like marbles: some had been tossed overboard, and some, in their fantastic up-piling, spoke eloquently of all they had suffered.
But one grim—though to him wholly gracious—deed the storm had wrought there. For, out of the pool where the devil-fish dwelt, its monstrous limbs streamed up and lay over the sloping rocks, and he dared not venture near. But, in the afternoon when he came again to look at it, and found it still in the same attitude, something about it struck him as odd and unusual.
The great tentacles had never moved, so far as he could see, and there was surely something wrong with a devil-fish that did not move.
He hurled a stone, picked out of the landslip at the corner, and hit a tentacle full and fair with a dull thud like leather. But the beast never moved.
He was suspicious of the wily one, however. The devil, he knew, was sometimes busiest when he made least show of business. And it was not till next morning, when he found the monster still as before, that he ventured down to the pool and looked into it, and saw what had happened.
The waves had hurled a huge boulder into it—and there you may see it to this day—and it had fallen on the devil-fish and ground him flat, and purged the rock of a horror.
Gard examined the hideous tentacles with the curiosity of intensest repulsion; yet could not but stand amazed at the wonderful delicacy and finish displayed in the tiny powerful suckers with which each limb was furnished on the under side, and the flexible muscularity of the monstrous limbs themselves, thick as his biceps where they came out of the pool, and tapering to a worm-like point, capable, it seemed to him, of picking up a pin.
He was mightily glad the beast was dead, however. It had been a blot on Nature's handiwork, and the very thought of it a horror.
The strenuous interlude of the storm, which, to the lonely one exposed to its fullest fury, had seemed interminable—every shivering day the length of many, and the black howling nights longer still—had had the effect of relaxing somewhat his own oversight over himself and his precautions against being seen.
L'Etat in a furious sou'-wester is a sight worth seeing. Possibly some telescope had been brought to bear on the foam-swept rock when he, secure in the general bouleversement and cramped with hunger, had turned the forbidden corner with no thought in his mind but eggs.
Possibly again, it was sheer carelessness on his part, born once more of the security of the storm and the recent non-necessity for concealment.
However it came about, what happened was that, as he stood in the valley of rocks examining his dead monster, he became suddenly aware that a fishing-boat had crept round the open end of the valley, and that it seemed to him much closer in than he had ever seen one before.
He dropped prone among the boulders at once, but whether he had been seen he could not tell—could only vituperate his own carelessness, and hope that nothing worse might come of it.
He lay there a very long time, and when at last he ventured to crawl to the rocks at the seaward opening, the boat was away on the usual fishing-grounds busy with its own concerns, and he persuaded himself that its somewhat unusual course had been accidental. The incident, however, braced him to his former caution, and he went no more abroad without first carefully inspecting the surrounding waters from the ridge.
They would be certain to come that night, he felt sure, either Nance or Bernel, perhaps both. Yes, he thought most likely they would both come. They would, without doubt, be wondering how he had fared during the storm, and would be making provision for him.
Perhaps Nance was cooking for him at that very moment, and thinking of him as he was of her.
In the certain expectation of their coming, he decided he would not go to sleep at all that night, but would crawl down to the landing-place to welcome them.
He wondered if that mad woman Julie had given up watching them, and, if not, if they would be able to circumvent her again. In any case, he hoped that if only one of them came it might be Nance. He fairly ached for the sight and sound of her—and the feel of her little hand, and a warm frank kiss from the lips that knew no guile.
The sufferings of the storm became as nothing to him in this large hope and expectation of her coming.
The intervening hours dragged slowly. It would be half-ebb soon after dark, he thought; and he crept up to the ridge and gazed anxiously over at the Race between him and Brenière, to see if it showed any unusual symptoms after the storm.
It ran furiously enough, but, he said to himself, it would slacken on the ebb, and they were so familiar with it that it would take more than that to stop them coming.
Before dark the great seas were rolling past, a little quicker than usual, he thought, but in long, smooth undulations, which slipped, unbroken and soundless, even along the black ledges of his rock. And when the stars came out—brighter than ever with the burnishing of the gale—the long black backs of the waves, and the darker hollows between, were sown so thick with trailing gleams that he could not be certain whether it was only star-shine or phosphorescence.
It was all very peaceful and beautiful, however, and very welcome to eyes that had not looked upon sun, moon, or star for eight whole nights and days, and whose ears had grown hardened to the ceaseless clamour of the gale. Nature, indeed, seemed preternaturally quiet, as though exhausted with her previous violence or desirous of wiping out the remembrance of it; just as small humanity after an outbreak endeavours at times to purge the memory of its offence by display of unusual amiability and sweetness.
Eager to welcome his confidently expected visitors, Gard crept along the ridge as soon as it was dark, and posted himself on the point which, in the daylight, commanded the passage from Brenière.
And he sat there so long—so long after his hopes and wishes had flown over to Sark and hurried Bernel and Nance into a boat and landed them on L'Etat—that the night seemed running out, and he began to fear they were not coming, after all.
In the troubled darkness of the Race, he caught gleams at times which might be oar-blades or might be only the upfling from the perils below. The tide was ebbing, and soon the black fangs with which it was strewn would be showing.
At times he convinced himself that the brief gleams moved; but when, to ease his eyes of the intolerable strain, he looked up at the stars, it seemed to him that they moved also, and so he could not be sure.
But surely there was a gleam that seemed to move and come fitfully towards him—or was it only star-shine dancing on the waves of the Race which always ran against the tide?
He stood to watch, then lost the gleam, and crouched again disappointed.
The boat must come round Quette d'Amont, the great pile of rock that lay off the eastern corner, and the first glimpse he could hope to get of it in the darkness would be there.
Then, suddenly, in that curious way in which one sometimes sees more out of the tail of one's eye than out of the front of it, he got an impression—and with it a start—of something moving noiselessly among the tumbled rocks below on his left.
It was a dark night, but the glory of the stars lifted it out of the ebony-ruler category. It was a wide, thin, lofty darkness, but still black enough along the sides of his rock, and down there it seemed to him that something moved, something dim and shadowy and silent.
He thought of the dead man in his chamber down below. Could he be in the habit of walking of a night? He thought of ghosts, of which, if popular belief was anything to go by, Sark was full; and there was nothing to hinder them coming across to L'Etat for their Sabbat. And he thought of monster devil-fish climbing, loathsome and soundless, about the dark rocks.
He longed for a pair of Sark eyes, and shrank down into a hollow under the ridge to watch this thing, with something of a creepy chill between his shoulder-blades.
There was certainly something lighter than the surrounding darkness down below, and it moved. It turned the corner and flitted along the slope, slowly but surely, in the direction of his shelter. Its mode of progression, from the little he could make out in the darkness, was just such as he would have looked for in a huge octopus hauling itself along by its tentacles over the out-cropping rock-bones.
He could not rest there. He must see. He crawled along the ridge as quietly as he could manage it, and would have felt happier, whatever it was, spirit or monster, if he had had his gun. Now and again it stopped, and when it stopped he lay flat to the ground and held his breath, lest it should discover him. When it went on, he went on.
When he came to the end of the ridge he saw that the nebulous something had apparently stopped just where his house must be.
And then, every sense on the strain, he heard his own name called softly, and he laughed to himself for very joy of it, and lay still to hear it again, and laughed once more to think that in her simplicity she still thought of him as "Mr. Gard." He would teach her to call him "Steen," as his mother used to do.
Then he got up quickly and cried, as softly as herself, but with joy and laughter in his voice—
"Why, Nance! My dear, I was not sure whether you were a ghost or a devil-fish;" and he sprang down towards her.
And then, to his amazement, he saw that she was clad only in the clinging white garment in which he had seen her swim.
Her next words confounded him.
"Is Bernel here?"
"Bernel, Nance? No, dear, he is not here. Why—"
"Did he not get here last night?" she jerked sharply.
"No. No one. I was hoping—"
But she had sunk down against the great stones of the shelter, with her hands before her face.
"Mon Gyu, mon Gyu! Then he is dead! Oh, my poor one! My dear one!"
"Nance! Nance! What is it all, dearest? Did Bernel try to come across last night—"
"Yes, yes! He would come. He said you must be starving. We were all anxious about you—"
"And he tried to swim across?"
"Yes, yes! And he is drowned! Oh, my poor, poor boy!"
She was shaking with the sudden chill of dreadful loss. He stooped, and felt inside the shelter with a long arm for the old woollen cloak and wrapped her carefully in it. He raked out the blanket and made her sit with it tucked about her feet. And she was passive in his hands, with thought as yet for nothing but her loss.
She was shaken with broken sobs, and in the face of grief such as this he could find no words. What could he say? All the words in the world could not bring back the dead.
And it was through him this great sorrow had come upon her. He seemed fated to bring misfortune on their house.
He wondered if she would hate him for it, though she must know he had had no more to do with the matter than with Tom's death.
He put a protecting arm round the old cloak, tentatively, and in some fear lest she might resent it, but knew no other way to convey to her what was in his heart.
But she did not resent it, and nothing was further from her mind than imputing any share in this loss to him.
Some women's hearts are so wonderfully constituted that the greater the demands upon them the more they are prepared to give. At times they give and give beyond the bounds of reason, and yet amazingly retain their faith and hope in the recipients of their gifts.
But that has nothing to do with our story. Except this—that these various demands on Nance's fortitude, incurred by her love for Stephen Gard, far from weakening her love only made it the stronger. As that love came more and more between her and her old surroundings, and exacted from her sacrifice after sacrifice, the more she clung to it, and looked to it, and let the past go. The partial ostracism brought upon her by Gard's outspoken declaration of their mutual feeling—even this final offering of her dearly-loved brother—these only bound her heart to him the tighter.
"Nance dear!" he said at last, when she had got control of herself again. "Is it not possible to hope? He was so good a swimmer. Maybe he found the Race too strong and was carried away by it. He may have been picked up, and will come back as soon as he is able."
"No," she said, with gloomy decision. "He is dead. I feared for him, for I had been to look at the Race just before sundown, and it looked terribly strong. But he would go—"
"Why didn't he get a boat?"
"Ah, mon Gyu!" and she started up wildly. "I was forgetting. I was thinking only of myself and Bernel. There isn't a boat left alive outside the Creux, and he couldn't get one there without them knowing. But"—in quick excitement now, to make up for lost time—"they have seen you here, and they may come to-night—Achochre that I am! They may be here! Come quickly! Your gun!" and she was all on the quiver to be gone.
Gard stooped and pulled out the gun from its hiding-place inside the shelter.
"Is it loaded?" she asked sharply.
"Yes. I cleaned it to-day."
"Take your charges with you, and do you hasten back to the place we landed the first night. You know?"
"I know. And you?"
"I will go to the other landing-place. But they are not likely to come there."
"And if they do?"
"I will manage them," and she slipped into the darkness with the big cloak about her.
Gard crept along the slope, and found a roost above the landing-place.
His brain was in a whirl. Bernel had tried to cross to him and was drowned. Nance had swum across. Brave girl! Wonderful girl! For him!—and for news of Bernel. It was terrible to think of Bernel, dead on his account—terrible! It would not be surprising if Nance hated him. Yet, what had he done?—what could he do? He had done nothing. He could do nothing; and his teeth ground savagely at the craziness of these wild Sark men who had brought it all about, and at his own utter impotence.
But Nance did not hate him. And she had swum that dreadful Race to warn him. Brave girl! Wonderful girl!
And then—surely the grinding of an oar, as it wrought upon the gunwale against an ill-fitted thole-pin—out there by the Quette d'Amont!
His eyes and ears strained into the darkness till they felt like cracking.
And the muffled growl of voices!
His heart thumped so, they might have heard it.
He must wait till he was sure they meant to come in. But they must not come too close.
It was an ill landing in the dark, and there were various opinions on it. But there was no doubt as to their intentions. They were coming in.
"Sheer off there!" cried Gard.
Dead silence below. They had come in some doubt, but their doubts were solved now, and there was no longer need for curbed tongues, though, indeed, his hollow voice made some of them wonder if it was not a spirit that spoke to them.
"It's him!" "The man himself!" "We have him!" "In now and get him!"—was the burden of their growls, as they hung on their oars.
"See here, men!" said Gard, invisible even to Sark eyes, against the solid darkness of the slope. "There has been trouble and loss enough over this matter already, and none of it my making. Do you hear? I say again—none of it my making. If you attempt to come ashore there will be more trouble, and this time it will be of my making. Keep back!"—as an impulsive one gave a tug at his oar. "If you force me to fire, your blood be on your own heads. I give you fair warning."
Growls from the boat carried up to him an impression of mixed doubt and discomfort—ultimate disbelief in his possession of arms, an energetic oath or two, and another creak of the oar.
"Very well! Here's to show you I am armed." The report of his gun made Nance jump, at the other side of the island, and set all the birds on L'Etat—except the puffins, deep in their holes—circling and screaming.
The small shot tore up the water within a couple of yards of the boat, which backed off hastily—much to his satisfaction, for he had feared they might rush him before he had time to reload.
He had dropped flat after firing and recharged his gun as he lay. He was sure they must have come armed, and feared a volley as soon as his own discharge indicated his whereabouts.
As a matter of fact, they had come divided as to the truth of the report that there was a man on L'Etat—even then as to him being the man they sought. In any case, they had expected to take him unawares, and never dreamt of his being armed and on the watch for them.
Thanks to Nance, he had turned the tables on them. It was they who were taken unawares.
But if he spoke again, he said to himself, they would be ready for him, and their answers would probably take the rude form of bullets. So he lay still and waited.
There was a growling disputation in the boat. Then one spoke—
"See then, you, Gard! We will haff you yet, now we know where you are. If it takes effery man and effery boat in Sark, we will haff you, now we know where you are. You do not kill a Sark man like that and go free. Noh—pardie!"
"I have killed no man—" A gun rang out in the boat, and the shot spatted on the rocks not a yard from him.
Coming in, they knew, meant certain death for one among them, and, keen as they were to lay hands on him, no man had any wish to be that one.
The oars creaked away into the darkness, and he climbed to the ridge to make sure they made no attempt on the other side.
But discretion had prevailed. One man could not hold L'Etat from invasion at half-a-dozen points at once. They could bide their time, and take him by force of numbers.
He heard them go creaking off towards the Creux, and turned and went back along the ridge to find Nance.