A Maid of the Silver Sea Part 38

Gard had swept down both his coat and his cloth full of eggs in his sudden entrance. He stood at the bottom of the well to see if they would follow, while Peter's long legs kicked about for foothold. He heard them decide to wait for daylight, and then he noiselessly picked up his coat and his soppy bundle of broken eggs, pushed them into the tunnel, and crawled in after them.

He was trapped, indeed, but he doubted very much if any fisherman on Sark would venture down that tunnel. They were brawny men, used to leg and elbow room, and, as a rule, heartily detested anything in the shape of underground adventure. They might, of course, get over some miners to explore for them. Or they might content themselves with sitting down on top of his hole until he was starved out. In any case, his rope was nearly run; but yet he was not disposed to shorten it by so much as an inch.

As he wormed his way along the tunnel, the recollection of those other openings off the dead man's cave came back to him. He would try them. He pushed on with a spurt of hope.

The tunnel was not nearly so long now that he knew where he was going; in fact, now that nothing but it stood between him and capture, it seemed woefully inadequate.

When his head and elbows no longer grazed rock he dropped his coat and crawled into the chamber. He felt his way round to the dried packages, and cautiously emptied half-a-dozen and prepared them for his use.

This set him sneezing so violently that it seemed impossible that the watchers outside should not hear him. It also gave him an idea.

He struck a light and kindled one of his torches, and the dead man leaped out of the darkness at him as before. That gave him another idea.

Propping up his light on the floor, he emptied package after package of the powdered tobacco into the tunnel, and wafted it down towards the entrance with his jacket. Then with his knife he cut the lashings from the dead man's hands and feet, and carried him across--he was very light, for all his substance had long since withered out of him--and laid him in the tunnel as though he was making his way out.

If he knew anything of Sark men and miners, he felt fairly secure for some time to come, so he sat himself down, as far as possible from the snuff, and made such a meal as was possible off puffins' eggs, mixed good and bad and unredeemed by any palliating odour and flavour. They were not appetising, but they stayed his stomach for the time being.

It was only then that he remembered that he had left his gun and powder-flask behind him. He had placed them on a ledge just inside the mouth of the tunnel, and in his haste had forgotten to pick them up. He had no intention of using them, however, and he would not go back for them.

When his scanty meal was done, he cautiously emptied a number of the packages and rolled them into torches, and deliberated as to which of the black openings he should attempt first.

That one opposite, out of which the dead man's legs sprawled grotesquely, was the one by which he had entered. This one, then, near which he sat, must run on towards the centre of the island--if it ran on at all; and, since all were equally unknown and hopeful, he would try this first.

His tarred paper torches, though they burned with a clear flame, gave forth a somewhat pungent odour, so he kicked one of the small barrels to pieces, and with three of the staves and a piece of string made a holder which would carry the torch upright, and also permit him to lay it on the ground or push it in front of him, if need be.

The first tunnel ran in about thirty feet, and then the slant of the roof met the floor at so sharp an angle that further pa.s.sage was impossible.

The second, third, and fourth the same; and he began to fear they were all blind alleys leading nowhere.

The openings near his own entrance tunnel he had left till the last, since they obviously led outwards.

Two of them shut down in the same way as all the others, and it was only the dogged determination to leave no chance untried that drove him, with a fresh supply of torches, down the last one of all, the one alongside that out of which the dead man's legs projected.

It took a turn to the left within a dozen feet of the entrance, and, like the rest, it presently narrowed down through a slope in the roof; but just at its narrowest, when he feared he had come to the end, there came a dip in the flooring corresponding to the slope up above, and he found he could wriggle through. Once through, the pa.s.sage widened and continued to widen, and the going became very rough and broken, with piles of ragged rock and deep black pitfalls in between.

Then, of a sudden, he saw the walls and roof of his pa.s.sage fall away, and his light flickered feebly in the darkness of a vast place, and he crouched on the rock up which he had climbed, and sat in wonder.

Somewhere below him he could hear the slow rise and fall of water, dull and heavy and without any splash, like the dumb breathing of a captive monster.

And every now and again there came, from somewhere beyond, a low dull thud, like the blow of a padded hammer, and a distant subdued rustle along the outside of the darkness. He knew it was not inside the place he was in, for he could hear the soft rise and fall of the water quite clearly, but these other sounds came to him from a distance, muted as though his ears had suddenly gone deaf.

"Those dull blows," he said to himself, "are the waves on the outside of L'Etat. That low rustling is the rush of them along the lower rocks. The water inside here probably comes in through some openings below tide-level. I am quite safe here, even if they get past the dead man's cave--quite safe until I starve. Unless there are fish to be had"--and he felt a spark of hope. "And maybe there are devil-fish"--and he shivered and glanced below and about him fearfully.

His homely torch did no more than faintly illumine the rock he sat on and those close at hand, and cast a gigantic uncouth shadow of himself on the rough wall behind. All beyond was solid darkness, blacker even than a black Sark night.

He sat wondering vaguely if any before him had penetrated to that strange place. It was odd and uncanny to feel that his eyes were the very first to look upon it. And then, away in front, and apparently at a great distance above him, he became aware of a difference in the solid darkness. It seemed almost as though it had thinned. His eye had seemed able for a moment to carry beyond the narrow circle of the torch, but when he peered into the void to see what this might mean, it all seemed solid as before.

As his straining eyes sought relief in something visible, their side-glance caught once more that same impression of movement in the darkness. And presently it came again and stronger--a strange greenish fluttering up in the roof--very faint, as though the roof were smoke on which a soft green light played for a moment and vanished.

But by degrees the light grew, though at no time did it become more than a wan ghost of a light, and from its curious fluttering he judged that it came through water.

Reasoning from the trend of the cavern, he came to the conclusion that somewhere on that further side there were openings into the deep water beyond, on which the sunlight played and struck at times into the cave, and he was keen to look more closely into it.

He lowered his torch to the side of his rock, and its feeble flicker fell on a chaos of rocks below. He looked long and cautiously for supple yellow arms or tiny whip-like threads which might coil suddenly round his legs and drag him to hideous death.

But he saw nothing of the kind. The rocks were dry and bare, not a limpet nor a sea-weed visible, and leaving his jacket for a landmark as before, he slowly let himself down from one huge boulder to another, till he found himself climbing another great pile in front.

When at last his head rose above this ridge, he almost rolled over at the sight of two huge green eyes blinking lazily at him out of the darkness in front--two great openings far below sea-level, through which filtered dimly the wavering green light whose refractions fluttered in the roof.

The vast trough below him heaved gently now and then, with a ponderous solemnity which filled him with awe. He felt himself an intruder. He felt like a fly creeping about a sleeping tiger. He hardly dared to breathe, lest the brooding spirit of the place should rise suddenly out of some dark corner and squash him on his rock as one does a crawling insect; and his anxious eyes swept to and fro for the smallest sign of danger.

But, plucking up courage from immunity, and dreading to be caught in the dark in that weird place, he crawled over the boulders towards the side wall of the cavern to get as near to those openings as possible. From the very slight movement of the water, which was ever on the boil round the outside of L'Etat, he judged them deep down among the roots of the island, far below the turmoil of the surface, but he must see and make sure.

With infinite toil and many a sc.r.a.pe and bruise, he got round at last, and could look right down into the dim green depths, and what he saw there filled him with sickening fear.

The water was crystal clear, and in through the nearer opening, as he looked, a huge octopus propelled itself in leisurely fashion, its great tentacles streaming out behind, its hideous protruding eyes searching eagerly for prey.

Just inside the opening it gathered itself together for a moment, and seemed to look so meaningly right up into his eyes that he found himself shrinking behind a rock lest it should see him. Then it clamped itself to the side of the opening and spread wide its arms for anything that might come its way.

He watched it, fascinated. He saw fishes large and small unconsciously touch the quivering tentacles, which on the instant twisted round them and dragged them in to the rending beak below the hideous eyes. And then he saw another similar monster come floating in on similar quest, and in a moment they were locked in deadly fight--such a writhing and coiling and straining and twisting of monstrous fleshy limbs, which swelled and thrilled, and loosed and gripped, with venom past believing--such a clamping to this rock and that--such tremendous efforts at dislodgment.

It was a nightmare. It sickened him. He turned and crawled feebly away, anxious only now to get out of this awful place without falling foul of any similar monsters among the rocks.

CHAPTER x.x.x

HOW NANCE WATCHED FROM AFAR

From the headland above Breniere, Nance had watched the boats go plunging across to L'Etat.

Very early that morning she had sped across the Coupee and up the long roads to the Seigneurie, but the Seigneur was away in Guernsey still, busied on the vital matter of raising still more money for the mines in which he was a firm believer, mortgaging his Seigneurie for the purpose, a.s.sured in his own mind that all would be well in the end.

Then to the Vicar and the Senechal, and these set off at once for the harbour, but found themselves powerless in the face of public opinion.

Argument and remonstrance alike fell on deaf ears. The Vicar appealed to their sense of right; the Senechal forbade their going. But their minds were doggedly set on it, and they went.

"I shall hold you to account," stormed Philip Guille.

"B'en, M. le Senechal, we'll pay it all among us," and away they went; and back to her look-out by Breniere went Nance, and the Vicar with her for comfort in this dark hour.

They watched the boats circling the rock, round and round. They heard the firing, and Nance flung herself on the ground in an agony of weeping, sure that the end had come. For they could only be firing at Gard, and what could one man do against so many?

"They have killed him," she moaned.

And the Vicar could only tighten his pale lips, and smooth her hair with his thin white hand, as she writhed on the ground at his side. For he could but think she was right. They were good shots, the Sark men, and it needs but one bullet to kill a man.