A Maid of the Silver Sea Part 26

Another low pipe out of the darkness, and they had found the boat and tumbled into it, wet and bruised, and breathless.

"Dieu merci!" said Bernel, and pulled l.u.s.tily out to sea.

The swirl of the tide caught them as they cleared Breniere Point, and Gard crawled forward to take an oar. Nance did the same, and so set Bernel free to scull and steer, the arrangement which dire experience has taught the Sark men as best adapted to their rock-strewn waters and racing currents.

Gard's mind was in a tumult of revolt, but he sensibly drove his feelings through his muscles to the blade of his oar, and said nothing.

Nance and Bernel were not likely to have gone to these lengths without what seemed to them sufficient reason.

And he remembered Nance's trembling arm on the Coupee, and her agonies of fear on his account, and so came by degrees to a certain acceptance of their view of matters, and therewith a feeling of grat.i.tude for their labours and risks on his behalf. For he did not doubt that, should the self-appointed administrators of justice learn who had baulked them of their prey, they would wreak upon them some of the vengeance they had intended for himself.

He saw that it was no light matter these two had undertaken, and as he thought it over, and told the black welter under his oar what he thought of these wild and hot-headed Sark men, his grat.i.tude grew.

The thin orange sickle of a moon rose at last, high by reason of the mists banked thick along the horizon, and afforded them a welcome glimmer of light--barely a glimmer indeed, rather a mere thinning of the clinging darkness, but enough for Bernel's tutored eye.

He took them in a cautious circuit outside the Quette d'Amont, the eastern sentinel of L'Etat, and so, with shipped oars, by means of his single scull astern, brought them deftly to the riven black ledges round the corner on the south side.

It is a precarious landing at best, and the after scramble up the crumbling slope calls for caution even in the light of day. In that misleading darkness, clinging with his hands and climbing on the sides of his feet, and starting at startled feathered things that squawked and fluttered from under his groping hands and feet, Gard found it no easy matter to follow Nance, though she carried a great bundle and waited for him every now and again. When he looked down next day upon the way they had come he marvelled that they had ever reached the top in safety.

"Wait here!" she said at last, when they had attained a somewhat level place, and before he had breath for a word she was away down again.

She was back presently with another bundle, and he started when she thrust into his hands a long gun, and bade him pick up the first bundle and follow her. The feel of the gun brought home to him, as nothing else could have done, her and Bernel's views of possible contingencies.

He followed her stumblingly along the rough crown of the ridge, till she dipped down a rather smoother slope and came to a stand before what seemed to him a heap of huge stones.

"There is shelter in here," she said. "And these things are for your comfort. We will bring you more to eat in a day or two--"

"Nance, dear," he said, dropping the gun and the bundle, and laying his hand on her slim shoulder. "I have become a sore burden to you--"

"Oh no, no!" she said hastily. "You would have done as much for me, and it is because--"

"For you, dear? I would give my life for you, Nance, and here it is you who are doing everything, and running all these risks for me."

"It is because I know they are in the wrong. It may be only a day or two, and they will thank me when they find out their mistake."

"Well, I thank you and Bernel with my whole heart. Please G.o.d I may some time be able to repay you!"

"If you are safe, that is all we want. Now I must go. We must get back before they miss us."

"G.o.d keep you, dear!" and he bent and kissed her, and as before she kissed him back with the frankness of a child.

He was about to follow her when she turned to go, but she said imperatively, "Stop here, or you may lose yourself in the dark. And in the day-time do not walk on the ridge or they may see you--"

"And the gun? What is that for?"

"If they should come here after you, you will keep them off with it,"

she said, with a spurt of the true Island spirit. "It is your life they seek, and they are in the wrong. But no one ever comes here, and you will not need it. Now, good-bye! And G.o.d have you in His keeping!"

"And you, dearest--and all yours!"--and she was gone like a flitting shadow.

And while he still stood peering into the darkness into which she had merged, she suddenly materialized again and was by his side.

"I forgot. Bernel told me to tell you it throws a little high. But I hope you won't need it. And there is fresh water among the rocks at the south end there."

He caught her to him again, and kissed her ardently, and then she was gone.

He strained his ears, fearful of hearing her slip or fall in the darkness, but she went without displacing a stone, and he was alone with the sickly moon, and the sombre sky, and the voices of the rising tide along the grim black ledges of his sanctuary.

CHAPTER XXI

HOW LOVE TOOK LOVE TO SANCTUARY

It all seemed monstrous strange to him, now that he had time to think of the actual fact apart from the difficulties of its accomplishment.

An hour ago he was lying in his bed at Plaisance, in low enough spirits, indeed, at the outlook before him, but his gloomiest thought had never plumbed depths such as this.

He wondered briefly if so extreme a step had been really necessary.

And then he heard again the purposeful tramp of those heavy feet on the Coupee, and fathomed again the menace of them.

And he felt Nance's guiding hand trembling violently in his once more, and he said to himself that she and Bernel knew better than he how the land lay, and that he could not have done other than he had done.

Then he became aware that the dew was drenching him, and so he bent and groped in the dark for the shelter Nance had spoken of.

The strip of moon had paled as it rose, the huge white stones glimmered faintly in it, and a darker patch below showed him where the entrance must be. He crept into the darker patch on his hands and knees, b.u.mping his head violently, but once inside found room to sit upright. Snaking out again, he laid hold of the two bundles and the gun, and dragged them into shelter.

What the bundles contained he could not tell in the dark, but one felt like a thick woollen cloak, and the other like a blanket, and among their contents he felt a loaf of bread, and a bottle and a powder-flask.

So he rolled himself up in the blanket and the cloak, and lay wondering at the strange case in which he found himself, and so at last fell asleep.

He woke into a dapple of light and shade which filled his wandering wits with wonder, till, with a start, he came to himself and remembered.

The place he was in was something like a stone bee-hive, about eight feet across from side to side, with a rounded sloping roof rising at its highest some four feet from the ground, and the great blocks of which it was built fitted so ill in places that the sun shot the darkness through and through with innumerable little white arrows of light. The dark opening of the night was now a glowing invitation to the day. He shook off his wraps and crawled out into the open.

And what an open!

He drew deep breaths of delight at the magnificence of his outlook--its vastness, its s.p.a.ciousness, its wholesome amplitude and loneliness. He felt like a new man born solitary into a new world.

The sky, without a cloud, was like a mighty hollowed sapphire, in which blazed the clear white sun; and the vast plain of the sea, sweeping away into infinity, was a still deeper blue, with here and there long swathes of green, and here and there swift-speeding ruffles purple-black.

A brisk easterly breeze set all the face of it a-ripple, and where the dancing wavelets caught the sun it glanced and gleamed like sheets of molten silver.

"A silver sea! A silver sea!" he cried aloud, and into his mind there flashed an incongruous comparison of the bountifulness of Nature's silver with the pitiful grains they hacked out of her rocks with such toil and hardship.