A Maid of the Silver Sea Part 27

Away to the south across the silver sea the Jersey cliffs shone clear in the sunshine, and on the dimpling plain between, the black Paternosters looked so like the sails of boats heading for Sark that he remembered suddenly that he was in hiding, and dropped to cover alongside the great stones of his shelter.

But careful observation of the square black objects showed him that they did not move, and anyway they were much too far away to see him. So he took courage again, and, full of curiosity concerning his hiding-place, he crept up the southern slope till he reached the ridge of the roof, so to speak, and lay there looking over, entranced with the beauty of the scene before him.

The whole east coast of Sark right up to the Burons, off the Creux, lay basking in the morning light. Dixcart and Derrible held no secrets from him; he looked straight up their shining beaches. Their bold headlands were like giant-fists reaching out along the water towards him.

Breniere, the nearest point to his rock, was another mighty grasping hand, but between it and him swept a furious race of tossing, white-capped waves, with here and there black fangs of rock which stuck up through the green waters as though hungering for prey.

He could just see the upper part of the miners' cottages on the cliff above Rouge Terrier, but, beyond these and the ruined mill on Hog's Back, not another sign of man and his toilsome, troublesome little works. But for these, Sark, in its utter loneliness, might have been a new-found island, and he its first discoverer.

Ranging on, his eye rested on the shattered fragments of Little Sark, scattered broadcast over the sea about its most southerly point--bare black pinnacles, ragged ledges, islets, rocklets, reefs, and fangs, every one of which seemed to stir the placid sea to wildest wrath.

Elsewhere it danced and dimpled in the sunshine, with only the long slow heave in it to tell of the sleeping giant below, but round each rock, and up the sides of his own huge pyramid, it swept in great green combers shot with bubbling white, and went tumbling back upon itself in rings of boiling foam.

Beyond, he saw the rounded back of Jethou, and just behind it the long line of houses in Guernsey.

He lay long enjoying it all, with the warm sun on his back, and the brisk wind toning his blood, but no view, however wonderful, will satisfy a man's stomach. He had fed the day before mostly on most unsatisfying emotions, and now he began to feel the need of something more solid. So he crept back along the slope to find out what there was for breakfast.

His stores lay about the floor of his resting-place, just as he had turned them out in the night; a couple of long loaves, a good-sized piece of raw bacon, and another of boiled pork which he thought he recognized, some b.u.t.ter in a cloth, a bottle which looked as if it might contain spirits, the powder-flask, and a small linen bag containing bullets, snail-shot, and percussion caps. These, with Bernel's gun and the blanket, and the old woollen cloak, which he recognized as Mr.

Hamon's roquelaure, and his pipe, and the tobacco he happened to have in his pouch, const.i.tuted, for the time being, his worldly possessions.

He spread his cloak and blanket in the sun to dry and air, and, doubtful whether his rock would supply any further provision or when more might reach him from Sark, he proceeded to make a somewhat restricted meal of bread and cold pork.

The raw bacon suggested something of a problem. To cook it he must have a fire. To have a fire he must have fuel; his tinder-box he always carried, of course, for the new matches had not yet penetrated to Sark.

Moreover, to light a fire might be dangerous as liable to attract attention, unless he could do it under cover where no stray gleams could get out.

He pondered these matters as he ate, spinning out his exiguous meal to its uttermost crumb to make it as satisfying as possible.

He saw his way at once to perfecting his cover. All about him where he sat, the grey rock pushed through a thin friable soil like the bones of an ill-buried skeleton. And everywhere in the scanty soil grew thick little rounded cushions, half gra.s.s, half moss, varying in size from an apple to a foot-stool, which came out whole at a pluck or a kick. After breakfast he would plug up every hole in his shelter, and pile half-a-dozen sizeable pieces outside with which to close the front door.

Then, if he could find anything in the shape of fuel, he saw his way to a dinner of fried bacon, but it would have to be after dark when the smoke would be invisible.

But first he must find out about his water supply.

Down at the south end, Nance had said. That must be over there, on that almost-detached stack of rocks, where the waves seemed to break loudest.

So, after another crawl up to the ridge to make certain that no boats were about--for he had frequently seen them fishing in the neighbourhood of L'Etat--he crept down the flank of his pyramid almost to sea-level to get across to the outer pile.

He had to pick his way with caution across a valley of black rocks, rifted and chasmed by the fury of the waves. He could imagine--or thought he could, but came far short of it--how the great green rollers would thunder through that black gully in the winter storms.

There were great wells lined all round with rich brown sea-weeds, and narrow chasms in whose hidden depths the waters swooked and gurgled like unseen monsters, and whose broken edges, on which he had to step, were like the rough teeth of gigantic saws set up on end alongside one another.

He crawled across these rough serrations and scaled the rifted black wall in front, and came at once on a number of shallow pools of rain-water lying in the hollows of a mighty slab.

But the moment his head rose above the level of the steep black wall his ears were filled with a deafening roaring and rushing, supplemented by most tremendous dull thuddings which shook the stack like the blows of a mighty flail.

From behind a further wall there rose a boiling mist, through which lashed up white jets of spray which slanted over the rocks beyond in a continuous torrent.

He crawled to the further wall and looked over into a deep black gully, some fifteen feet wide and perhaps thirty feet deep, into which, out of a perfectly calm sea, most monstrous waves came roaring and leaping, till the whole chasm was foaming and spuming like an over-boiling milk-pan. In the middle of the chasm, for the further torment of the waters, was jammed a huge black rock, against which the incoming green avalanche dashed itself to fragments and went rocketing into the air.

The solid granite at the further end was cleft from summit to base by a tiny rift a foot wide through which the boiling spume poured out to the sea beyond.

But the marvel was where those gigantic waves came from. Save for the dancing wind-ripples and its long, slow internal pulsations, the sea was as smooth as a pond to within twenty yards of the rocks. Then it suddenly seemed to draw itself together, to draw itself down into itself indeed, like a tiger compressing its springs for a leap, and then, with a rush and a roar, it launched itself at the rocks with the weight of the ocean behind it, and hurtled blindly into the chasm where the black rock lay.

It was a most wonderful sight, and Gard sat long watching it, then and later, fascinated always and puzzled by that extraordinary self-compression and sudden upleap of the waters out of an otherwise placid sea.

It was but one more odd expression of Nature's fantastic humour, and the nearest he could come to an explanation of it was that, in the sea bed just there, was some great fault, some huge chasm into which the waters fell and then came leaping out to further torment on the rocks.

It was as he was returning to his own quarters by a somewhat different route across the valley of rocks, that he lighted on another find which contented him greatly.

In one of the saw-toothed chasms he saw a piece of wood sticking up, and climbed along to get it as first contribution to his fire. And when he got to it, down below in the gully, he found jammed the whole side of a boat, flung up there by some high spring tide and trapped before it could escape. Excellent wood for his firing, well tarred and fairly dry.

He hauled and pulled till he had it all safely up, and then he carried it, load after load, to his house, and laid it out in the sun to dry still more.

He worked hard all day, keeping a wary outlook for any stray fishermen.

First he culled a great heap of the thin wiry gra.s.s which seemed the chief product of his rock, and spread it also to dry for a couch. There was no bracken for bedding, no gorse for firing. The gra.s.s would supply the place of the one, the broken boat the other.

Then he made good all the holes in his walls and roof, except one in the latter for the escape of the smoke, and built a solid wall of the tufted cushions round the seaward side of his doorway, as a screen against his light being seen, and as a protection from the south-west wind if it should blow up strong in the night.

He found it very strange to be toiling on these elemental matters, with never a soul to speak to. He felt like a castaway on a desert island, with the additional oddness of knowing himself to be within reach of his kind, yet debarred from any communication with them on pain, possibly, of death.

At times he felt like a condemned criminal, yet knew that he had done no wrong, and that it was only the mistaken justice of a simple people that wanted blood for blood, and was not over-heedful as to whose blood so long as its own sense of justice was satisfied.

But, he kept saying to himself, things might have been worse with him, very much worse, but for Nance and Bernel. And before long, any day, the matter might be cleared up and himself reinstated in the opinion of the Sark men.

Even that would leave much to be desired, but possibly, he thought, if they found they had sorely misjudged him in this matter, they might realize that they had done so in other matters also, and that he had only been striving to do his duty as he saw it.

And then, wherever else his thoughts led him, there was always Nance, and the thought of Nance always set his heart aglow and braced him to patient endurance and hope.

He retraced, again and again, all the ways they had travelled together in these later days, recalled her every word and look, felt again the trembling of her hand--for him--on the Coupee, heard again the tremors of her voice as she urged him to safety. And those sweet ingenuous kisses she had given him! Yes, indeed, he had much to be grateful for, if some things to cavil at, in fortune's dealings.

But, behind all his fair white thought of Nance, was always the black background of the whole circ.u.mstances of the case, and the grim fact of Tom Hamon's death, and he pondered this last with knitted brows from every point of view, and strove in vain for a gleam of light on the darkness.

Could the Doctor be mistaken, and was Tom's death the simple result of his fall over the Coupee? The Doctor's p.r.o.nouncement, however, seemed to leave no loophole of hope there.

If not, then who had killed Tom, and why?

He could think of no one. He could imagine no reason for it.

Tom had been a bully at home, but outside he was on jovial terms with his fellows--except only himself. He had to acknowledge to himself the seeming justice of the popular feeling. If any man in Sark might, with some show of reason, have been suspected of the killing of Tom Hamon, it was himself.

Once, by reason of overmuch groping in the dark, an awful doubt came upon him--was it possible that, in some horrible wandering of the mind, of which he remembered nothing, he had actually done this thing? Done it unconsciously, in some over-boiling of hot blood into the brain, which in its explosion had blotted out every memory of what had pa.s.sed?

It was a hideous idea, born of over-strain and overmuch groping after non-existent threads in a blind alley.

He tried to get outside himself, and follow Stephen Gard that night and see if that terrible thing could have been possible to him.

But he followed himself from point to point, and from moment to moment, and accounted for himself to himself without any lapse whatever; unless, indeed, his brain had played him false and he had gone out of the house again after going into it, and followed Tom and struck him down.

With what? The Doctor said with some blunt instrument like a hammer.

Where could he have obtained it? What had he done with it?

The idea, while it lasted, was horrible. But he shook it off at last and called himself a fool for his pains. He had never harboured thought of murder in his life. He had detested Tom, but he had never gone the length of wishing him dead. The whole idea was absurd.