A Maid of the Silver Sea Part 45

"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 pa.s.sed 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, ba su. And if he has--ma fe, 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 Coupee, and so old Mrs. Guille set oft for the Coupee 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 Coupee, 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 Coupee 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 Coupee. 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 d.y.k.e 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 Coupee ... 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 Senechal 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,"