A Maid of the Silver Sea Part 22

"I'll come. You wait," and he went inside, and put his head into a basin of water, and threw on his clothes, and came out presently looking anxious and disturbed now that his sluggish brain had begun to work.

"Where you been looking?" he asked.

"Nowhere. I expected to find him here."

"We had a gla.s.s or two and then he started off home. He could walk all right.... Did you.... You didn't see anything wrong ... anything ... at the Coupee?" he asked, with a quick anxious look at her.

"No, I didn't. What do you mean? Oh, mon Dieu!" and she started down the road at a run, with Peter lumbering after her and the neighbours in a buzzing tail behind.

The cold douche had cooled Peter's hot head, the running quickened his blood and his thoughts, a sudden grim fear braced his brain to quite unusual activity.

As he ran he recalled the events of the night before; their meeting with Gard and Nance; Tom's scurrilous insults.

If Tom and Gard had met again--Gard would be sure to see Nance home. Had he met Tom on his way back? And if so--if so--and ill had come to Tom--why, Gard might get the blame. And--and--in short, though by zig-zag jerks as he ran--if Gard were out of the way for good and all, Nance's thoughts might turn to one nearer home. He would be sorry if ill had come to Tom, of course. But if Gard could be got rid of he would be most uncommonly glad.

And as he panted after Julie, head down with the burden of much thinking, just before he reached the sunk way to the Coupee, his eye lighted on something in the road that caused him to stop and bend--a b.u.t.ton with a sc.r.a.p of blue cloth attached. He picked it up hastily and put it in his pocket. On a white stone just by it there were some red-brown spots. He pushed it with his foot to the side of the road and was down into the cutting before the heavy-footed neighbours came up.

Julie was ranging up and down the narrow pathway, searching the depths with a face like a hawk, hanging on to the rough sides of the pinnacles, and bending over in a way that elicited warning cries from the others as they came streaming down.

But keenest search of the western slope revealed nothing amid its tangle of gorse and blackberry bushes, and the eastern cliff fell so sheer, and had so many projecting lumps and underfalls, that it was impossible to see close in to the foot.

And then one, nimbler witted than the rest, climbed out along the common above the northern cliff, whereby, when he had come to the great slope, he took the Coupee cliff in flank, and could spy along its base.

And suddenly he stopped, and stiffened like a pointer sighting his bird, peered intently for a moment, and gave tongue.

The chase was ended. That they had sought, and feared to find, was found.

They came hurrying up, and cl.u.s.tered like cormorants on the slope, Julie among them, her face grim and livid in its black setting, her eyes blazing fiercely.

The finder pointed it out. They all saw it--a huddled black heap close in under the cliff.

Elevated by his discovery, the finder maintained his reputation by doing the only thing that could be done. He left them talking and sped away across the downs, across the fields, towards Creux harbour.

He might, if he had known it, have found a boat nearer at hand, Rouge Terrier way or in Breniere Bay. But he was a Sark man, and a farmer at that, and knew little and cared less, of the habits of Little Sark.

And the rest, falling to his idea, streamed after him, for that which lay under the cliff could only be gotten out by boat.

So to the Creux, panting the news as he went. And there, willing hands dragged a boat rasping down the shingle, and l.u.s.ty arms, four men rowing and one astern sculling and steering at the same time, sent her bounding over the water as though it were life she sought, not death. For, though no man among them had any smallest hope of finding life in that which lay under the cliff, yet must they strain every muscle, till the labouring boat seemed to share their anxiety to get there and learn the worst.

So, out past the Laches, with the tide boiling round the point; past Derrible, with its yawning black mouths; past Dixcart with its patch of sand; under the grim bastions of the Cagnon; the clean grey cliffs and green downs above, all smiling in the morning sun; the clear green water creaming among the black boulders, hissing among their girdles of tawny sea-weeds, cascading merrily down their rifted sides; round the Convanche corner, so deftly close that the beauty of the water cave is bared to them, if they had eye or thought for anything but that which lies under the cliff in Coupee Bay. And not a word said all the way--not one word. Jokes and laughter go with the boat as a rule, and high-pitched nasal patois talk; but here--not a word.

The prow runs grating up the shingle, the heavy feet grind through it all in a line, for none of them has any desire to be first. Together they bend over that which had been Tom Hamon, and their faces are grim and hard as the rocks about them. Not that they are indifferent, but that any show of feeling would be looked upon as a sign of weakness.

Under such circ.u.mstances men at times give vent to jocularities which sound coa.r.s.e and shocking. But they are not meant so--simply the protest of the rough spirit at being thought capable of such unmanly weakness as feeling.

But these men were elementally silent. One look had shown them there was nothing to be done but that which they had come to do--to carry what they had found back to the waiting crowd at the Creux.

They had none of them cared much for this man. He was not a man to make close friends. But death had given him a new dignity among them, and the rough hands lifted him, and bore him to the boat as tenderly as though a jar or a stumble might add to his pains.

And so, but with slower strokes now, as though that slight additional burden, that single pa.s.senger, weighed them to the water's edge, they crawl slowly back the way they came, logged, not with water, but with the presence of death.

The narrow beach between the tawny headlands is black with people. Up above, on the edge of the cliff, another crowd peers curiously down.

The Senechal is there at the water's edge, Philip Guille of La Ville, and the Greffier, William Robert, who is also the schoolmaster, and Thomas Le Masurier the Prevot, and Elie Guille the Constable, and Dr.

Stradling from Dixcart, and the dark-faced, fierce-eyed woman who cannot keep still, but ranges to and fro in the lip of the tide, and whom they all know now as the wife--the Frenchwoman, though some of them have never seen her before.

A buzz runs round as the boat comes slowly past the point of the Laches.

The woman stops her caged-beast walk and stands gazing fiercely at it, as if she would tear its secret out of it before it touched the sh.o.r.e.

The watchers on the cliff have the advantage. Something like a thrill runs through them, something between a sigh and a groan breaks from them.

The woman wades out to meet the boat. She sees and screams, and chokes.

The wives on the beach groan in sympathy.

The body is lifted carefully out and laid on the cool grey stones, and the woman stands looking at it as a tiger may look at her slaughtered mate.

"Stand back! Stand back!" cries the Senechal to the thronging crowd; and to the Constable, "Keep them back, you, Elie Guille!" to which Elie Guille growls, "Par made, but that's not easy, see you!"

The Doctor straightens up from his brief examination, and says a word to the Senechal, and to the men about him.

A rough stretcher is made out of a couple of oars and a sail, and the sombre procession pa.s.ses through the gloomy old tunnel into the Creux Road, and wends its way up to the school-house for proper inquiry to be made as to how Tom Hamon came by his death.

And close behind the stretcher walks the dark-faced woman, with her eyes like coals of fire, and her dress dragged open as though to stop her from choking.

"Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!" she says in perpetual iteration, through her clenched teeth. But to look at her face and eyes you might think it was rather the devil she was calling on.

For, ungracious as their lives had been in many respects, yet this violent breaking of the yoke has left the survivor sore and wounded, and furious to vent her rage on whom at present she knows not.

She is not allowed inside the school-house--hastily cleared of its usual occupants, who dodge about among the crowd outside, enjoying the unlooked-for holiday with gusto in spite of its gruesome origin--and so she prowls about outside, and the neighbours talk and she hears this, that, and the other, and presently, with bitter, black face and rage in her heart, she goes off home to find out Stephen Gard if she can, and accuse him to his face of the murder of her husband.

CHAPTER XVIII

HOW PETER'S DIPLOMACY CAME TO NOUGHT

Peter Mauger had kept himself carefully beyond the range of Julie's wild black eyes. In the state she was in there was no knowing what she might do or say. And the words even of a mad woman sometimes stick like burrs.

He began to breathe more freely when she whirled away home.

The Senechal and Constable came out of the school-house at last with very grave faces.

"The Doctor says his head was staved in with the blows of some round blunt thing like a mallet," said the Senechal to the gaping crowd, "and we must hold a proper inquiry. Any of you who saw Tom Hamon last night will be here at two o'clock to tell us all you know. Tell any others who know anything about it that they must be here too," and he went back into the school-house, and the buzzing crowd dispersed, with plenty to buzz about now in truth.

Peter Mauger went thoughtfully home. He had had no breakfast, and was feeling the need of it, and he had something in his mind that he wanted to think out.

And as he ate he thought, slowly and ruminatingly, and with many pauses, when his jaws stopped working to give his mind freer play, but still very much to the purpose, and as soon as he had done he set out to put his project into execution.