Nance had crouched all the morning, in the bracken above Brenière, on the knife-edge of expectancy. And behind her, at a safe distance, crouched Julie Hamon, watching Nance and L'Etat at the same time, as a cat in the shade watches a sparrow playing in the sunshine.
"What will be the end? What will be the end?" sighed Nance. They had all gone down out of sight, across there, and it was terrible to sit here waiting, waiting, waiting for what she feared.
If they had indeed run Gard to his hiding-place, as Philip Vaudin had said, there could be but one possible end to it; and she sat, sad-eyed and wistful, waiting for them to come up again.
It seemed as if they would never come, and she never took her eyes off the rock wall on L'Etat.
And then at last she sprang to her feet. One of them had come up again. She could not see which. Then the others appeared, and they seemed to stand talking. Then one went off round the slope and another ran after him, and the other two went back into the rock wall.
What could they be at? She stood gazing intently.
The two came up again, and—yes—they carried something, or one of them did, and they two went off round the corner also. And presently she saw the boat coming round, and saw by its head that it was for the Creux. She turned and sped across by the same way as yesterday, and Julie followed her at a safe distance. And it seemed to Nance, as she hurried through the familiar hedge-gaps and lanes and across the headlands, that the world had lost its brightness, and that life was desperately hard and trying.
On Derrible Head there might be a chance of seeing. She ran up to the highest point by the old cannon, just as the boat was coming in under La Conchée.
And—oh, mon Dieu! mon Dieu! yes—there, in the bows, lay the body of a man!—and the tears she had kept back all day broke out now in a fury of weeping. She could hardly see, but she ran on, falling at times and bruising herself, staggering to her feet again, stumbling blindly through a mist of tears.
The boat was drawn up by the time she got there, and a curious crowd surrounded it. She pushed through. She must see.
And then the weight fell off her heart, and it was all she could do to keep from screaming. For this poor thing, whatever it was, was not Stephen Gard and never had been.
She wanted to sing and dance and scream her joy aloud. They had not found him.
"What is this, John Drillot?" asked Julie, alongside her, black with anger, as she pointed to the body.
"Ma fé—a ghost, they say. John Trevna shot him, but he had been dead a long time before that, though he was alive last night, for Peter had hold of his leg as he ran."
"And where is the other—the one you went for?"
"He's not on L'Etat, anyway, ma fille," and they lifted the body on to a piece of sailcloth, and carried it off through the tunnel for the Sénéchal to look into.
So Stephen Gard's hiding-place had proved effective, and they had not found him. But, of a certainty, he must be starving, and so away home sped Nance, to prepare a parcel of food to take across to him. And Julie, her black brows pinched together and her face set in a frown of venomous intention, never once let her out of her sight.
It was after midnight when Nance stole across the fields, carrying her little parcel and her swimming-bladders, and made her way to Brenière point.
It was a still night, with a sky full of stars, and her heart was high for the moment, though when her thoughts ran on, in spite of her, it fell again. For things could not go on this way for ever, and she saw no way out.
She dropped her outer things by a bush, and let herself quietly down the rocks and into the water, and the black-faced woman who presently stood by that bush snarled curses after her and was filled with unholy exultation. For Nance could have only one reason for going across there, and on the morrow the men should hear of it, and she would give them no rest till Gard was made an end of.
What that thing was that they had brought home, she did not know, but they were fools to be satisfied with that when the man they had gone after was undoubtedly still on the rock.
So she sat down by Nance's gown and cloak, and revolved schemes for her discomfiture and the undoing of Stephen Gard.
Nance found the passage of the Race more trying then ever before. The strain of these latter days had been very great, and the thought of Bernel tended to unnerve her.
On the other hand, the knowledge that Gard had outwitted the whole strength of the Island cheered and braced her, and she struggled valiantly through the broken waters till at last she hung panting on the black ledge where she was in the habit of landing.
She scrambled up among the boulders and made straight for the great wall. She had decided in her own mind that he would probably be somewhere in there, possibly afraid to come out, as he would not know if the Sark men were still on the rock.
As nearly as she could, she climbed to the place she had seen the men go in, and then she cried softly, "Steve! Mr. Gard!" and went on calling, as she moved up and down along the base of the wall.
And at last her heart jumped wildly as she heard her name faintly from inside the wall, and presently Gard himself came crawling from under the big slab and jumped down to her side.
"Nance! You are a good angel to me," and he flung his arms round her and kissed her again and again.
"But oh, my dear, I would not have you risk your life for me like this."
"It is nothing. I am all right," said Nance, forgetting the weariness and dangers of the passage in her joy at finding him alive and well. "I have brought you food," and she pushed her little parcel into his hands.
"I hardly dare to eat it when I think what it has cost you."
"That would be foolish, and you must be starving."
"Truly, I am hungry—"
"Eat, then!" and she seized the package and began to tear it open. "It will make me still more glad to see you eat."
"Well, then—" and Nance was gladder than ever that she had come.
"Have they all gone back?" he asked anxiously, as he munched.
"They came back this morning, bringing a strange dead man."
"I know. I put him there—"
"Who is he?"
"I found him in a cave inside the rock. He had been left there very many years ago with his hands and feet tied. I think he must have been a Customs officer of long ago."
Nance shivered, and he felt it.
"You are cold, Nance dear, and I am thinking only of myself;" and he took off his jacket and put it over her slim wet shoulders, in spite of herself.
"If they have all gone back we could go to the shelter. They may have left some of the things there;" and they went along and found the cloak and blanket, and he wrapped them about her.
"I found a still larger cave out of the other one, and I was in there when they came after me. I had put the dead man in the tunnel, and when I came back he was gone; but I did not dare to come out, for I was afraid they might be on the watch still."
"The dead man frightened them. I do not think they will come back. They are afraid of ghosts."
"I hoped he would scare them. But what is to be the end of it all, Nance dear? Things cannot go on this way. Would it be possible to get me a boat and let me get over to Guernsey?"
"If you will wait a little time, that is what we must do, if the truth does not come out."
"And meanwhile you may be drowned in trying to keep me from starving."
"I shall not be drowned and you shall not starve," she said resolutely.
"I would sooner live on puffins' eggs than have you swim across that place. My heart goes right down into my feet when I think of it."
"There is no need. I am all right."
"The Sénéchal and the Seigneur could not stop them?"
"Mr. Le Pelley is in Guernsey still. The Sénéchal they would not listen to. But the truth will come out if only you will wait."
"If I get away, will you come to me, Nance? And all my life I will give to making you happy."
"Yes, I will come. But it will be sore leaving Sark. To a Sark-born there is no other place in the world like Sark."
"All my life I will give to making up for it."
"We will see. Now I must go, or it will be daylight before I get back."
"I shall be in misery till I know you are safe."
"It will be nearly light. I will wave to you from Brenière;" and they went slowly round to the ledges, and parted with kisses; and in the grey morning light he could, for a time, follow the little white figure as it slipped bravely through the bristling black waves of the Race.
But presently he could see her no more, and could but wait, full of anxiety and many prayers, for the signal that should tell of her safety.
But it did not come, and he grew desperate and full of fears.
Nance found the return journey still more trying to her strength, but she struggled through, and was devoutly thankful when the slack water under Brenière was reached.
She waded ashore almost too weary to stand, and had to cling to the rough rocks till she recovered her breath. Then, slowly and heavily, she dragged herself up the lower ledges to the little plateau where her clothes were.
Julie had sat revolving grim schemes in that black head of hers.
She hated the girl. She hated Gard. She hated Sark and every one in it. Why had she ever come into these outer wilds? She would have done with it all and get away back to the life that was more to her taste.
But first—yes, mon Dieu, she would leave them something to remember her by.
She had not a doubt that Gard was still on L'Etat. Nothing else would take this girl across there. The shameless hussy!—to go swimming across to see her man with nothing but a white shift on!
She could wound Gard through Nance. She could wound Nance through Gard.
She could wait for the girl as she came up the side of the Head, and push her down again or crush her with a lump of rock.
But that might mean reprisals on the part of the Islanders. She had had experience of the way in which they resented any ill done to one of their number by an outsider. She had no wish to join Gard on his rock.
It would be better to hold the girl up to the scorn and contempt of the neighbours; that would punish her. And by setting the men on Gard's track again, that would punish him and her too.
And so she restrained the natural violence of her temper, which would have run to rocks and bodily injury, and waited in the bracken till Nance came stumbling along in the half-light. Then up she sprang, with an unexpectedness that for the moment took Nance's breath and set her heart pounding with dreadful certainties of ghosts.
"So this is how you go to visit your fancy monsieur on the rock, is it, little Nance? And with nothing on but that! Oh shame! What will the neighbours say when they hear how you swim across to him, and you will not dare deny it?"
But Nance, relieved in her mind on the score of ghosts, and regaining her composure with her breath, simply turned her back on her and proceeded as if she were not there.
"And he is there still!" screamed Julie, dancing round with rage to keep face to face with her. "I was sure of it, though those fools could not find him. I'll see that he's found or starved out, b'en sûr! Yes, if I have to go myself and see to it. As for you—shameless one!—it's the last time you'll swim across there, yes indeed!"—and she raved on and on, as only an angry woman with a grievance can.
Nance slipped her dress over her head and, under cover of it, dropped off her wet undergarment, coolly wrung it out, put on her cloak and walked away, Julie raging alongside with wild words that tumbled over one another in their haste.
Nance walked to the highest point behind Brenière, and waved her white garment a dozen times to let Gard know she was safe, and then turned and set off home through the waist-high bracken and the great cushions of gorse. And close alongside her went Julie, raging and raving the worse for her silence; for there is nothing so galling to an angry soul as to find its most venomous shafts fall harmless from the triple mail of quiet self-possession.
So they came through the other cottages to La Closerie, but the neighbours were all asleep, and those who woke at the sound of her violence, turned over and said, "It's only that mad Frenchwoman in one of her tantrums. Why, in Heaven's name, can't she go to sleep, like other folks?"
Nance went into her own house and quietly closed the door. Julie hammered on it with her fists, as she would dearly have liked to hammer on Nance's face, and then cursed herself off into her own place, slamming the door with such violence as to waken all the fowls and set all the pigs grunting in their sleep.
Gard's eyes, straining into the dimness of the coming dawn through what seemed to him a most terrible long time, so packed was it with anxious fears, caught at last the white flicker of Nance's signal, and he dropped down just where he stood, among the rough stones of the ridge, with a grateful sigh.
The strain was telling on him. He felt physically weak and worn. Nance's devoted love and courage made his heart beat high, indeed, but his fears on her account strung his laxed cords to breaking point, and then left them looser than before.
He must get away somehow, if only to prevent this constant and terrible risking of her life on his behalf.
He hardly dared to hope that his strategy with the dead man would be of any permanent benefit to him, though there was no knowing. Examination of the body would show that it had been dead for very many years, but his knowledge of the Island superstitions made him doubt if any Sark man would willingly spend a night on L'Etat for a very long time to come.
On the other hand, if the result of their discussions confirmed them in the belief that he was still there, and if, as he constantly feared, they should learn of Nance's comings, and visit upon her the venom they harboured for him, they might so invest the rock that escape would be impossible.
Meagre living, starvation even, he would suffer rather than live more amply at risk of Nance's life, but if the hope of ultimate escape was taken from him then he might as well give in at once and have done with it.
So he lay there, in the broken rocks of the ridge, and looked grimly on life. And the sun rose in a red ball over France, and cleft a shining track across the grey face of the waters, and drew up the mists and thinned away the clouds, till the great plain of the sea and the great dome above were all deep flawless blue, and he saw a thin white curl of smoke rise from the miners' cottages on Sark.
He lay there listless, nerveless, careless of life almost, an Ishmael with every man's hand against him—worse off than Ishmael, he thought, since Ishmael had a desert in which to wander, and he was tied to this bare rock.
But there was Nance! There was always Nance. And at thought of her, his bruised soul found somewhat of comfort and courage once more.
He felt her quivering in his arms again as he pressed her close. He felt again the willing surrender of her sweet wet face. And the thought of it thrilled his cold blood and set it coursing through his veins like new life. Yes, truly, while there was Nance there was hope.
Perhaps the Sénéchal and the Vicar would prevail upon them. Perhaps they would give it up and leave him alone, and then Nance would find him a boat and they would get across to Guernsey. Perhaps, as she kept insisting, something would happen to discover the truth.
So he lay, while the sun mounted high and baked him on the bare stones, but he did not find it hot.
And then, of a sudden, he stiffened and lay watching anxiously. For there, from out the Creux had come a boat—and another, and another, and another—four boat-loads of them again!
So they were coming, after all, and his hopes died sudden death.
Well—let them come and take him and have their will. He was not the first who had paid the price for what he had not done, and human nature must fall to pieces if hung too long on tenterhooks.
He watched them listlessly. He could crawl into his innermost cavern, of course, and could hold it against them all till the end of time, which in this case would be but a trifling span, for a man must eat to live. But what was the use? As well die quick as slow, since there could be but one end to it. And then, to his very great surprise, the boats crept slowly out of sight round the corner of Coupée Bay, and he lay wondering.
What could be the meaning of that? Why had they put in there? Why couldn't they come on and finish the matter?
The sea was all deserted again. If he had not just happened to catch sight of them stealing across there, he would have felt sure they were not coming to-day.
Perhaps they were going to wait there till night, though why on earth they should wait there instead of at the Creux, was past his comprehension.
And then, after a time, to his amazement, he saw them all go crawling back the way they had come. One, two, three, four—yes, they were all there, and they crept slowly round Lâches point and disappeared, and left him gaping.
It was past believing. It was altogether beyond him. He lay, with his eyes glued to the point round which they had gone, stupid with the wonder of it.
They had actually given it up—for to-day, at least, and gone back! He cudgelled his brains for the meaning of it all, till they grew dull and weary with futile thinking.
Perhaps Nance and the Vicar and the Sénéchal had prevailed after all! Perhaps something had turned up at last to prove to the Sark men their misjudgment! Perhaps—well, any way, it was good to be left alone.
He lay there, laxed with the over-strain of all this upsetting, but rejoicing placidly in this one more day of life.
He felt like one granted a day's respite as he stands on the scaffold with the rope round his neck.
Never had the sun shone so brightly. Never had the silver sea danced so merrily. It might be the last he would see of them.
And the sun wheeled on towards Guernsey, and made his deliberate preparations for a setting beyond the ordinary; for the sun, you must know, takes a very special pride in showing the great cliffs of Sark what he can do in the way of transformation scenes and most transcendent colouring.
And Stephen Gard lay there under the ridge on L'Etat, with the wonder and beauty of it all in his face and in his heart, and said to himself that it was probably the last sunset he would ever see, and he was glad to have seen it at its best.
He had a vague idea that heaven would be something like that—tenderly soft and beautiful, and glowing with radiances of unearthly splendour, which whispered to weary hearts of the peace and joy that lay beyond, and gently called them home to rest.
His theology was, without doubt, of the most elemental and objective, and would not have carried him any great lengths in these days; but, for the time being, at all events, it lifted its possessor to a plane of thought above his usual, and tended to quietness and peace of mind.
The sky right away into the east was glowing softly with the wonders of the sunset, and there the delicate tones changed almost momentarily. As his eye followed the tender grace of their transformations, with a delight which he could neither have expressed nor explained, it once more lighted suddenly upon that which he had been looking for so anxiously all day long, and brought him to earth like a broken bird.
Once more a boat had come round the point of Les Lâches, and this time it was speeding towards him as fast as a sail that was as flat almost as a board, and looked to him no more than a thin white cone, could bring it.
So they were coming, after all, and this wonderful sunset might be his last indeed;—and all the tender beauty of the fleecy clouds thinned and paled, and the glory faded as though it had all been but a glorious bubble, and that sharp point of white, speeding across the darkening sea, had pricked it.
But why on earth were they coming now? They had missed the ebb, and it was hours yet to next half-ebb, and they could not hope to land. The white waves were boiling all along the ledges, and the sea for twenty feet out was a surging dapple of foam laced with seething white bubbles. It would be more than any man's life was worth to try and get ashore on L'Etat for many an hour yet.
And there was only one boat! What had become of all the others—of the threatened invasion in force? He sat and watched it in gloomy wonder.
The boat came racing on. As she cleared Brenière her white sail turned to red gold, and the sea below grew purple. There was something white in her bows. He got up heavily, doggedly, forced to it against his will, and walked along the ridge to the eastern point which commanded the landing-place on that side.
There was, without doubt, something white in the bows of the boat, and as he stood gazing at it, it took, to his dazed imagination, the strange form of Nance waving joyful hands to him.
He drew his hands across his eyes. The storm had been sore on them.
The bristling waves of the Race burst in sheets of spray under the glancing bows, but the white spray and the white figure and the pointed white sail were all ablaze in the last rays of the sun, and they all swam before him as if his head was going round.
She came round Quette d'Amont with a fine sweep, like one bound on business of which she had no reason to be ashamed, and dropped her sail and lay in the shelter of the rock.
And the white figure in the bows was truly Nance, and she was standing and waving and calling to him. And the grey-headed man aft was surely Philip Guille, the Sénéchal, and the faces of the rest were all friendly.
He stumbled hastily down to the lower ledges, but the rush and the roar there drowned their voices.
What were they trying to tell him? What could they want of him?
The Sénéchal was standing, hands to mouth, waiting his chance. The restless waters below drew back for a moment to gather for a leap, and the big voice came booming across the tumult—
"Jump! We'll pick you up! All is well!"
And Gard, without a moment's hesitation, sprang out into the marbled foam, and struck out for the boat.
They were all friendly hands that gripped him and hauled him over the side, and patted him on the back to get the water out of him—all friendly faces that were turned to him; and the dearest face of all, lighted with a heavenly gladness, was to him as the face of an angel.
"Tell me!" he gasped, still all astream, wits and clothes alike. And it was the Sénéchal who told him.
"Peter Mauger was killed last night, at the same place as Tom Hamon, and in the same way. So these hot-blooded thickheads are convinced at last that it wasn't your work."
"Peter Mauger!" he said, gazing vaguely at them all. "But who—"
"We haven't found out yet. But even the thickest of the thickheads can't put it down to you"—and the thickheads present grinned in friendly fashion, and they ran up the sail with a will, and turned her nose, and went racing back to the Creux quicker than they had come.
And Gard sat still with his hand in Nance's two, feeling very weak and shaky, and looked vaguely back at L'Etat as it faded and dwindled into a dim black triangle of rock.
This is what had happened.
Since Tom Hamon's death, his friend Peter and his widow Julie had, as we know, found themselves drawn together by a common detestation of Stephen Gard and a common desire for his extinction.
For Peter considered he had been supplanted in Nance's regards, though Nance had never regarded him as anything but a nuisance and a boor. And Julie considered herself scorned and slighted, though Gard had never considered her save as Tom Hamon's wife.
It was they who had stirred up the Sark men against Gard, and they missed no opportunity of keeping their ill brew on the boil.
Their offensive alliance brought them much together. Peter was often at La Closerie. He was like wax in the hands of the fiery Frenchwoman, and she moulded him to her will. The neighbours might have begun to talk, but that it was obvious to all that the only bond between them at present was their ill-will towards Gard, and in that feeling many shared and found nothing strange in Tom's wife and Tom's chief friend joining hands to make some one pay for his death.
In time, if it had gone on, the neighbours would doubtless have had plenty to say on the subject, for old wives' tongues rattled fast of a winter's evening, when they all gathered in this house or that, and sat on the sides of the green bed with their feet in the dry fern inside, and the oil crasset hanging down in the midst, and plied their needles and their tongues and wits all at once, and wrought scandalously good guernseys and stockings in spite of it all.
But these were summer evenings yet, and the veilles had not begun, and reputations were out at grass till the time came round for their inspection and judgment.
And so, when Peter Mauger never reached home the night before this day of which we are telling, his old housekeeper, whatever she thought about it at the time, only said afterwards that she supposed he had stopped somewhere and would turn up all right in the morning, though she admitted that he was not in the habit of staying out of a night. Anyway, she was an old woman and all alone, and she was not going out to look for him at that time of night.
The morning surprised her by his continued absence. Never in his life, so far as she knew, had he behaved like this before. Vituperation of him gave place to anxiety about him.
She questioned the neighbours. All they knew was that he had been seen going down to Little Sark soon after sunset.
"That black Frenchwoman of Tom Hamon's twists him round her finger," said one.
"You tie him up, Mrs. Guille," chuckled another, "or sure as beans she'll steal him from you and leave you in the cold."
And then, who should they see coming striding along the road but Madame Julie herself, and evidently in a hurry;—in a state of red-hot excitement, too, as she drew near. And they waited, hands on hips, to hear what she was up to now.
"Where's Peter?" she demanded, a long way in advance. "Tell him I want him. That man Gard is still on L'Etat, though those fools who went across for him couldn't find him. Cré nom! What are you all staring at, then?"
"Where's our Peter?" demanded Mrs. Guille shrilly, with the strident note of fear in her voice, as she becked and bobbed towards the Frenchwoman like an aged cormorant.
"Peter? I'm asking you. I want him. Where is he?"
"He went to Little Sark last night, and he's never come home."
"Never come home? Why, what's taken him? If he'd been with me last night he'd have seen something! That Nance Hamon swam across to the rock with nothing on but her shift to take food to Gard, and I caught her at it—the shameless hussy!"
"Maybe Peter's heard of it an' gone across with 'em again," suggested one. "He was terrible hot against Gard."
"And reason he had to be hot against him," cried Julie. "Who'll find out for me where he's got to, and when they're going out after Gard? I would go too and see the end of him."
A couple of burly husbands came rolling round the corner towards their breakfasts and caught her words.
"Doubt you'll have to go alone, mistress," said one, phlegmatically. "There's ghosts on L'Etat, they do say, though sure the one John Drillot brought across was dead enough."
"If he's there," said the other, plumbing Julie's feelings, "he's safe as a pig in a pen."
"Where's our Peter?" demanded Mrs. Guille.
"Peter? I d'n know. What's come of him?" and they stared blankly at her.
"He went to Little Sark last night to see her"—with a beck of distaste towards Julie—"and he's never come home."
The men looked from the speaker to Julie, as though the next word necessarily lay with her.
"I never set eyes on him. I was out after that girl. I came here to tell him about Gard. Has he been to the harbour?"
"No, he hasn't. We are from there now."
"He's maybe with some of them arranging about going to L'Etat," said Julie. "I'll go and find out;" and she set off along the road past the windmill.
The morning passed in fruitless enquiries. She asked this one and that, every one she could think of, if they had seen Peter, and was met everywhere with meaning grins and point-blank denials. Apparently no one had set eyes on Peter, and every one seemed to imply that she ought io know more about him than any one else.
It was past mid-day before she was back at Vauroque, but Mrs. Guilie was still standing in the doorway of Peter's empty house as if she had been looking out for news of him ever since.
"Eh b'en? Have you found him?" she cried.
"Not a finger of him!" snapped Julie savagely, tired out with her fruitless labours.
"Then he's come to some ill, bà sú. And if he has—ma fé, it's you!—it's you!" The old lady's scream of denunciation choked itself with its own excess, and the neighbours came running out to learn the news.
Stolid minds travel in grooves, and old Mrs. Guille's had been groping along possibilities of all kinds, clinging at the same time to the hope that Peter would still turn up all right.
Now that her hope was shattered her mind dropped naturally into a grim groove, along which it had taken a tentative trip during the morning and had recoiled from with a shudder.
The last time Mrs. Tom Hamon had come seeking a man who was missing, that man had been found under the Coupée, and so old Mrs. Guille set oft for the Coupée as fast as her old legs and her want of breath and general agitation would let her.
"Nom de Dieu! What—?" began Julie, with twisted black brows, and then drifted on with the rest in Mrs. Guille's wake—all except one or two housewives whose men were due for dinner, and knew they must be fed whatever had come to Peter Mauger.
"Gaderabotin!" said one of these as he came up, and stood scratching his head and gazing down the road after them. "What's taken them all?"
"Think because they found Tom Hamon there, they'll find Peter too," guffawed another, and they rolled on into their homes, chuckling at the simplicity of women and children.
Arrived at the Coupée, the little mob of sensation-seekers peered fearfully about. One small boy, cleverer or more groovy-minded than the rest, struck off along the headland to the left. It was from there Charles Guille had seen Tom Hamon. Perhaps from there he would see something, too.
And no sooner was he there, where he could see to the foot of the cliffs in Coupée Bay, than he commenced to dance and wave his arms like a mad thing, because the words he wanted to shout choked him tight so that he could hardly breathe.
They streamed out along the cliff and huddled there, struck chill with fright in spite of the blazing sun.
For there, under the cliff, in the same spot as they found Tom Hamon, lay another dark, huddled figure, and they knew it must be Peter.
The finding of Tom had filled them with anger against Gard. The finding of Peter filled them with fear.
Gard had sufficed as explanation and scapegoat for Tom's death, and as vent for their feelings. But what of Peter's?
It had not been Gard, then? And if not Gard, who?
For, whoever it was, he was still at large, and any of them might be the next.
There were new terrors in the eyes that gazed so wildly on the narrow white path and the towering pinnacles of the Coupée. They had been familiar with it all, all their lives, but suddenly it had become strange to them.
If grisly Death, all bones and scythe, had come stalking along it before their eyes at that moment, they would have shrieked, no doubt, and fallen flat, but he would have no more than answered to their feelings and fulfilled their expectations.
As it was, when the Seigneur's big white stallion stuck his head over the green dyke behind them, and gave a shrill neigh at the unexpected sight of so many people in a field which was usually occupied only by Charles Guille's two mild-eyed cows and their calves, the women screamed and the children lied.
"Man doux! but I thought it was the devil himself," said old Mrs. Guille. "Oui-gia!" and shook an angry fist at him.
But the discoverer of the body was already away along the road to Vauroque, covering the ground like a little incarnation of ill-news.
The exertion of running cleared away the choking, if it took his breath. He shouted as he drew near the houses.
"Ah, bah!" growled one of the diners inside. "What's to do now, then?"
"He's there ... Peter ... under Coupée ... Where Tom Hamon...." panted the news-bearer as he tore past to his own home. And the rest of Vauroque emptied itself into the road and stood looking along it, as the stragglers came up, white-faced and wild-eyed.
"He's there," confirmed one woman, twisting up her loosened hair. "And just same place where Tom Hamon lay."
"'Tweren't Gard killed him, then," said one of the diners, chewing over that thought with his last mouthful.
"Nor Tom neither, then, maybe," said another.
"We've bin on wrong tack, then;" and they went off round the corner at a speed their build would hardly have credited them with.
One to the Sénéchal and one to the Doctor, and then to the Creux, both telling the news as they went. So that when the officials came hurrying through the tunnel the greater part of the Island was waiting for them on the shingle, except those who preferred the wider view from the cliff above.
Some of the men had been for pulling across at once, but they were overborne.
"Doctor said he'd like to have seen him afore he was moved last time," said old John de Carteret weightily, and would not let a boat go out till the Doctor and the Sénéchal came.
It was all waiting for them the moment they arrived, however, and they stepped in and swung away round Les Lâches, and three other boats followed them so closely that it looked almost like a gruesome race who should get there first.
There was little talking in any of the boats, but there was some solid hard thinking, in a mazed kind of way.
Until they knew more of the facts, indeed, they scarce knew what to think yet. But more than one of them remembered disturbedly how they had gone in force two days before to fetch Gard off his lonely rock, or to make an end of him there; and here they were going in force on a very different errand—an errand which, they could not help seeing, would bring him off his rock in a very different way, if this present matter was what it looked as if it might be.
And the Doctor was not long in giving them the facts, when they had run up on to the shingle, and then crunched through it to the place where Peter's body lay under the steep black cliff—in the exact spot where Tom Hamon's had lain just eighteen days before.
But that it was undoubtedly Peter's face and body, those who had come after Tom the last time might have thought they were going through their previous experience over again. It was all so like.
They all stood round in a dark, silent group while the Doctor carefully examined the body, and the Sénéchal looked on with stern and troubled face.
"It is most extraordinary," said the Doctor, straightening up from his task at last, and his face, too, was knitted with perplexity, but had something else in it besides. "This man has been done to death in exactly the same way as Hamon"—a rustle of surprise shook the group of silent onlookers. "The head has been beaten in just as Hamon's was—with some blunt rounded tool, I should say. These other wounds and contusions are the results of his fall down the cliff. He has been dead at least eight hours. Lift him carefully, men. We can do nothing more here—unless by chance the one who did it flung his weapon after him, and we could find it."
They scattered, and searched the whole dark bay minutely, but found nothing. Then with rough gentleness they bore the body to the boat and laid it under the thwarts.
"Men!" said the Sénéchal weightily, as they were just about to climb back into their boats. "This matter brings another matter home to all our hearts. You have been persecuting another man under the belief that he killed Tom Hamon. From what some of us knew of Mr. Gard, we were certain he could have had no hand in it. This, I take it, proves it?" He looked at the Doctor.
"Undoubtedly!" nodded the Doctor. "The man who killed this one killed the other, and that man could not be Stephen Gard, for he is on L'Etat."
"It's God's mercy that you haven't Mr. Gard's blood on your heads. Some of you, I know, have done your best that way. Suppose you had killed him that other night—what would you have felt as you stood here to-day? Take that thought home with you, and may God keep you from like misjudgment in the future!"
And they had not a word to say for themselves, but crawled silently aboard, and in silence pulled back to Creux Harbour.
Once only old John de Carteret spoke to the Sénéchal, soon after they had started.
"One of them"—nodding over at the boats behind—"could go to the rock and bring him off," he suggested.
"I thought of that, but there's one I want to go with me. She'll be down at the Creux, I expect, and we'll go as soon as we've disposed of this."
There was a very different feeling visible in the silent crowd that awaited them at the harbour this time from that manifested on the last occasion, Then, it was a sympathetic anger that united them all in a common feeling against the perpetrator of the deed. Now—even before the whisper had run round that Peter Mauger had been done to death in the same way as Tom Hamon—fear was among them, and doubt. Fear of they knew not exactly what, and doubt of they knew not whom.
But here were two men done to death in their midst, and the man on whom all their suspicions had settled in the first case could not possibly have had anything to do with the second, and so had most likely had nothing to do with either—in which case the man who had was still at large among them, and no man's life was safe, much less any woman's or child's.
Their thoughts did not run, perhaps, quite so clearly as that, but that was the result of it all, and their faces showed it. Furthermore, every man and woman there began at once to cast about in his and her mind for the possible murderer, and men looked at the neighbours whom they had known all their lives, with lurking suspicions in their eyes and the consideration of strange possibilities in their minds.
Tom Hamon's death had bound them closer together; Peter Mauger's set them all apart. The strange dead man up in the school-house added to their discomfort.
It was not until the hastily-constructed litter with its gruesome burden had been sent off to the Boys' School, in charge of the constables and the Doctor, that the Sénéchal caught sight of Nance's eager white face and anxious eyes, in the crowd that lingered still in answer to another whisper that had flown round.
If they were at once pig-headed and hot-blooded and suspicious, they were also warm-hearted and willing to atone for a mistake—once they were sure of it.
No crowd followed Peter on his last journey but one, though the whole Island had swarmed after Tom Hamon.
They wanted to see the man who would have been killed for killing Tom, though he didn't do it, but for—circumstances, and his own pluck and endurance.
And when the Sénéchal beckoned to one of the circumstances, and put his hand on her slim shoulder, and said—
"We are going for him. I thought you would like to come too," her face went rosy with gratitude, and the brave little hands clasped up on to her breast, as she murmured—
"Oh, M. le Sénéchal!" and choked at anything more.
Those nearest gave her rough words of encouragement.
"Cheer up, Nance! You'll soon have him back!"
"That's a brave garche! Don't cry about it now!"
"We'll make it up to him, lass. We'll all come and dance at the wedding"—and so on.
But the Sénéchal patted her on the shoulder and asked—
"And where is your brother? He should come, too. I hear you have both been in this matter."
"Ah, monsieur!" she said, with brimming eyes and a pathetic little lift and fall of the hand, which expressed far more than she could put into words. "We fear ... we fear he is drowned. He swam out to the rock taking food, and ... and ... we have not seen him since;" and her hand was over her face and the tears streaming through.
"Mon Dieu! Another!" said the Sénéchal, aghast. "When, child? When was this?"
"The night after the storm, monsieur."
"Perhaps he is there, on the rock."
"No, monsieur. I was over there myself last night. He never got there, and we fear he must be drowned."
"You were over there, child? Why, how did you get across?"
"I swam, monsieur;" and he stared at her in amazement.
"Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! You make up for some of the others," he said bluntly. "Come then, and we will make sure of this one, anyhow;" and he led the way to John de Carteret's boat, and all the people gave them a cheer as they pulled out of the harbour to catch the breeze off the Lâches.
Then the crowd waited for their return, and talked by snatches of all these strange happenings, and discussed and discounted the chances of Bernel's being still alive.
"For, see you, the Race! And that was the first night after the storm, and it would be running like the deuce, bidemme!" "It's best not to know how to swim if it leads you to do things like that, oui-gia!" "When a man's time comes, he cuts his cleft in the water, whether he can swim or not, crais b'en!" "And that slip of a Nance had been over there last night—par madé, some folks have the courage!" "All the same, it was madness—"
But behind all the broken chatter, in every mind was the grim question, "Who is it, then, that is doing these things amongst us?" And there was a feeling of mighty discomfort abroad.
All the same, they cheered vigorously as the boat came speeding back, and they saw Gard sitting between Nance and the Sénéchal, and crowded round as it ran up the shingle, and would have lifted him out and carried him shoulder-high through the tunnel and up the road, if he would have had it.
They saw how his imprisonment on the rock—"Ma fé, think of it!—all through that storm, too!"—had told upon him. His cheeks were hollow, and his eyes sunken, and he looked very weary—"and, man doux, no wonder, after eighteen days on L'Etat!"—though their friendly shouts had put a touch of colour in his face and a spark in his eyes for the moment.
"Now, away home, all of you!" ordered the Sénéchal. "We've all had enough to think about for one day. To-morrow we will see what is to be done."
"Too much!" croaked one old crone, who had something of a reputation among her neighbours. "What I want to know is—who killed Peter Mauger?"
And that was the question that occupied most minds in Sark that night.
The Doctor insisted on taking care of Gard. He took him into his own house at Dixcart, and began at once a course of treatment based on common-sense and the then most scientific attainment, and calculated to repair the waste of the Rock and build him up anew in the shortest time compatible with an efficient and permanent cure.
Even when Gard felt quite himself again and would have returned to his work, the genial autocrat would not hear of it.
"Just you stop here, my boy," he ordered. "An experience such as you have had needs some getting over. You can stand a good rest and some fattening up, and those —— mines must wait."
Meanwhile, the Island was in a smoulder of suspicion and superstition.
No one had yet ventured openly to point the finger at any reasonably possible doer of deeds so dark. Behind carefully closed doors of a night, indeed, here and there a whisper suggested that the Frenchwoman might be at the bottom of it all. But the mistake that had already been made, and the consequences that came so terribly near to completing it beyond repair, made them all cautious of open speech or action.
Gard's story explained the mystery of the dead stranger and relieved the public mind to that extent.
The Sénéchal was disposed to agree with his views on the matter.
"I never heard of those caves on L'Etat," he said musingly, as they sat over their pipes one night; "and I'm sure no one else knew of them. But there was much free-trading round here in the old times, and I've no doubt many a Customs man disappeared and was never heard of again, just like this one. All the Islands felt very sore about the new regulations, and our people stick at nothing when their blood is up."
"They do not," said Gard feelingly.
"I'd like to get into that inner cave," said the Doctor longingly.
"You couldn't," said Gard, looking at his size and girth. "It's a mighty tight squeeze under the slab, and that tunnel would beat you. Unless you've been brought up to that kind of thing, you couldn't stand it. It would give you nightmares for the rest of your life."
"That's a rare lass, that little Nance," said the Sénéchal. "There's some good in Sark after all, Mr. Gard."
"She was an angel to me," said Gard with feeling. "If it had not been for her, I could never have held out. Not for what she brought me, but the fact that she came. But it was terrible to me to think of her coming through that Race. I begged her not to, but she would have her way. Three times she risked her life for me—"
"Three times!" said the Sénéchal. "Ma fé, but she's a garche to be proud of!"
"Ay, and to be more than proud of," said Gard. "She has given me my life, and I will give it all to making her happy."
"I wouldn't swim across to L'Etat for any woman in the world," said the Doctor. "Because, in the first place, I couldn't. She must have nerves of steel, to say nothing of muscles. In the dark, too! And you wouldn't think it to look at her."
"It needed more than nerves or muscles," said Gard quietly.
Not a man among the Islanders—much less a woman—would go anywhere near the Coupée after dark. Even Nance confessed to a preference for daylight passages. And Gard, when he went down into Little Sark for a walk, as part of his cure, could not repress a cold shiver whenever he passed the fatal spot where two men had gone over to their deaths.
All the old wives' tales were dug up and passed along, growing as they went. Little eyes and mouths grew permanently rounded with horrors, and the ground was thoroughly well spaded and planted with sturdy shoots warranted to yield a noisome harvest of superstition for generations to come.
The occupants of Clos Bourel and Plaisance carefully locked their doors of a night now.
Old Mrs. Carré at Plaisance vowed she had heard the White Horses go past, on the nights before Tom Hamon and Peter were found. And every one knew that when the ghostly horses were heard, some one was going to die. But as she had said nothing about it before, her contribution to the general uneasiness was received with respect before her face but with open doubt behind her back.
Old Nikki Never-mind-his-name—lest his descendants, if he had any, take umbrage at the matter—swore that he had not only seen the ghostly steed pass Vauroque in the dead of night, but that it bore a rider whose head was carried carefully in his right hand. Unfortunately, the headless one passed so quickly that Nikki said he could not distinguish his features—having looked for them first in the wrong place—and so he could not say for certain who the next to die would be; but from the knowing wag of his head the neighbours were of opinion that he knew more than he chose to tell, and he gained quite a reputation thereby.
But, even here again, doubts were cast upon the matter by some, especially those who were acquainted with the old gentleman's proclivities towards raw spirits of the material kind that paid the lightest of duties in Guernsey.
All these and very many similar matters were discussed by the Doctor—who disturbed their minds with horrific accounts of homicidal mania taking possession of apparently innocent souls—and the Sénéchal and the Vicar and Stephen Gard, as they sat over their pipes of an evening in the Doctor's house. But chiefly the great and troublesome question of "Who?"
They were all of one mind that the matter must be looked into. The feeling that a danger was loose in the Island, and might at any moment fall upon any man, woman, or child, was past endurance. The suspicion that It might be any one of those they met every day was insufferable.
The only difficulty was to decide how to look into it—what to do, and how.
Each day they feared to hear of some new outrage. But until the perpetrator was discovered they could do nothing towards his suppression. And, on the other hand, it looked as though they could do nothing towards his discovery until he perpetrated some new outrage.
It was Gard who suggested they should watch the Coupée every night, armed, and unknown to any but themselves.
And, after much discussion, following out his idea, he and the Sénéchal and the Doctor, who could bowl over a rabbit as well as any of them, lay in the heather, on the common above the cutting on the Little Sark side, for many nights, guns in hand, and eyes and ears on the strain, but saw and heard nothing.
One night, indeed, when there was a high wind, the Doctor's marrow crawled in his backbone at the sound of groanings and moanings and most dolorous cries for help, coming up out of black Coupée Bay, where they had picked up Tom Hamon's and Peter Mauger's dead bodies.
He sweated cold terrors, for he was on the east headland right above the bay, till the Sénéchal crawled over to him and whispered—
"Hear 'em?"
"Y-y-yes. What the d-d-deuce and all—"
"Knew you'd wonder what it was—"
"W-w-wonder?" chittered the Doctor.
"It's only the wind in the cave at the corner below here—"
"Ah! Thought it must be something of that kind," said the Doctor through his teeth, clenched hard to keep them in order. "Don't wonder folks fight shy of the Coupée. Sounded uncommonly like spirits. Might give some folks the jumps."
On another dark and windy night it was the Sénéchal's turn to get something of a fright.
As he lay in the heather, gun in hand, and well wrapped up in his big cloak, with all his faculties concentrated on the wavering pathway below, it seemed to him that he heard slow heavy footsteps approaching.
His nerves were strung tight. He craned his head to look down into the cutting, when suddenly there came a wild snuffle at the back of his neck, and as he jumped up with a startled yelp, one part anger and nine parts fright, a horse that had grazed down upon him in the darkness, leaped back with a snort and a squeal and disappeared into the night.
"Ga'rabotin! but I thought it was the devil himself," said the Sénéchal, as the others came hurrying up. "Why the deuce can't people tie up their horses as they do their cows? I'll bring it up at the next Chef Plaids"—which consideration restored his shaken equanimity somewhat, and made him feel himself again.
Nothing more came of all their watching, and over a jorum of something hot one night, after they had returned to the Doctor's house, it was himself who said—
"After all, it stands to reason. Some evil-possessed soul seeks victims, and has fixed on the Coupée as the place best fitted for his work. No one now goes near the Coupée at night—ergo, no victims; ergo, no—er—no manifestations."
"H'm! Very clever!" said the Sénéchal, through his pipe. "Where does that leave us, then?"
"We must have a decoy, of course."
"H'm! You'll not get any Sark man to act as decoy to the devil. Besides, they would talk, and that would upset the whole thing."
"What about one of your men, Gard?"
"It's a dangerous game for any man to play, Doctor.... I don't quite see how one could ask it of them,"—and after a pause of concentrated thought and many slow smoke-puffs—"What would you say to me?" and all their eyes settled on him—the Doctor's professionally.
"Surely you have suffered enough in this matter, Mr. Gard," suggested the Vicar.
"I would give a good deal, and do a good deal, to get to the bottom of it all. Things will never settle down properly till this matter is disposed of."
That, of course, was obvious to them all, but all had the same feeling that he had already suffered enough in the matter.
But consideration of the Doctor's suggestion in all its aspects only served to convince them that, if any such scheme was to be carried out, it could only be done among themselves, and its dangers were obvious.
It was not a matter to be lightly undertaken by any man. For whoever undertook the rôle of decoy, undoubtedly took his life in his hands; and they spent many evenings over it.
The Vicar was absolutely against the idea, but had no alternative to suggest.
"It is simply playing with death," said he, "and no man has a right to do that."
"It means a good deal for the Island if we can clear it up," said the Sénéchal.
But, by degrees, they got to discussion of how it might be done, and from that to the actual doing was only a heroic step.
The decoy's head must be well padded, of course, for the heads of both victims had been the points of attack.
He must be well armed also, and being forewarned and more, he ought to be able to give a certain account of himself.
And then the Doctor and the Sénéchal would be close at hand and on the keen look-out for emergencies.
The Doctor undertook to pad his head with something in the nature of a turban under his hat, which, he vowed, would resist the impact of iron blows better than metal itself.
"Leave my ears loose, anyway," said Gard. "I'd like at all events to be able to hear it coming."
The Sénéchal had a weapon, part pistol and the rest blunderbuss, which had belonged to his father, who had always referred to it affectionately as his "dunderbush." It had seen strange doings in its time, but had been so long retired from the active list, that he undertook to load and fire it himself before he said any more about it.
And he did it next day, with a full charge, in his meadow, with the assistance of a gate-post and a long cord, and reported it at night as in excellent order, and calculated to blow into smithereens anything blowable that stood up before it within the short limit of its range.
At this stage in its proceedings the Vicar reluctantly retired from the Committee of Public Safety. He acknowledged the sore need of ending the suspicious and superstitious fears which were beginning to affect the life of the community in various ways. But he could not see his way to any participation in means so dangerous to the life of one of their number as those suggested.
He did his best to dissuade Gard from it. He even reminded him of the duty he owed to Nance. She had undoubtedly saved his life, and she had a premier claim upon his consideration—and so on.
To all of which Gard fully assented.
"But," he said gravely, "we are at a deadlock in this other matter, and it is just barely possible that this plan may clear it all up. I can't say I'm very sanguine that it will. On the other hand, I really don't see that any great harm can come to me. The others probably suffered because they were taken unawares. I shall go in the hope of meeting it, and shall be ready for it. Unless, Vicar, you really think it is the devil or something of that sort?"
"I don't know what to think," said the Vicar solemnly. "I cannot bring myself to believe any of our Sark men would do such dreadful things. I look at each man I meet and say to myself, 'Now, can it be possible it is you?—or you?—or you?'—and it does not seem possible; and yet—"
"And yet some one did it, Vicar," said the Doctor, brusquely, "and that's just the trouble. Until we find out who did it, any man may have done it, and we all look at everybody else, just as you do, and say to ourselves, 'Is it you?—or you?—or you?' Though I'm bound to say I've not got the length yet of doubting either you or the Sénéchal, or Gard, and I don't think it's myself. It might quite conceivably be any one of us, however, prowling about in our sleep and utterly unconscious afterwards of evil-doing."
"A most awful possibility," said the Vicar. "God grant it may turn out differently from that."
"You never know what this inexplicable machine may do," said the Doctor, tapping his head. "However, we'll hope for the best, and I think the Sénéchal and I ought to be able to see Gard through without any very disastrous results. If we succeed, he will deserve better of this Island than any man I know—and a sight more than this Island deserves of him. I quite understand," he said, as Gard looked quickly up. "And it does you credit, my boy; but there are not very many men would do it."
"Well, I'm afraid I must leave you to it," said the Vicar, and did so.