Carette of Sark Part 18

Gray Robin's mild eyes glanced apprehensively into the depths as we went slowly over, and his ears and nostrils twitched to and fro at the growl of the surf down below on either side. I held him firmly by the head and soothed him with encouraging words. The old horse snuffled between grat.i.tude and disgust, and Carette clung tightly up above, and vowed that she would not cross on Black Boy whatever Torode might say.

She was devoutly thankful, I could see, when Gray Robin stepped safely onto the spreading bulk of Little Sercq. I lifted her down, and loosed the old horse's bit and set him free for a crop among the sweet short gra.s.ses of the hillside, while we sat down with the rest to watch the others come over.

Caution was the order of the day. Most of the girls kept their seats and braved the pa.s.sage in token of confidence in their convoys. Some risked all but accident by meekly footing it, and accepted the ironical congratulations on the other side as best they might.

Young Torode had waited his turn with impatience. He and Black Boy were on such terms that the latter would have made a bolt for home if the grasp on his bridle had relaxed for one moment. Again and again his restlessness had suffered angry check which served only to increase it. Neither horse nor rider was in any state for so critical a pa.s.sage as the one before them.

There was no community of feeling between them, except of dislike, and the backbone of a common enterprise is mutual trust and good feeling.

To do him that much justice, Torode must have known that under the circ.u.mstances he was taking unusual risk. But he had confidence in his own skill and mastery, and no power on earth would have deterred him from the attempt.

He leaped on Black Boy, turned him from the gulf and rode him up the Common. Then he turned again and came down at a hand gallop, and reaped his reward in the startled cries and anxious eyes of the onlookers. The safe sitters in the heather on the farther side sprang up to watch, and held their breath.

"The fool!" slipped through more clenched teeth than mine.

The stones from Black Boy's heels went rattling down into the depths on either side. The first pinnacles were gained in safety. Just beyond them the path twisted to the right. Black Boy's stride had carried him too near the left-hand pillar. An angry jerk of the reins emphasised his mistake. He resented it, as he had resented much in his treatment that morning already.

His head came round furiously, his heels slipped in the crumbling gravel, he kicked out wildly for safer holding, and in a moment he was over.

At the first feel of insecurity behind, Torode slipped deftly out of the saddle. He still held the reins and endeavoured to drag the poor beast up.

But Black Boy's heels were kicking frantically, now on thin air, now for a second against an impossible slope of rock which offered no foothold. For a moment he hung by his forelegs curved in rigid agony, his nostrils wide and red, his eyes full of frantic appeal, his ears flat to his head, his poor face pitiful in its desperation. Torode shouted to him, dragged at the reins--released them just in time.

Those who saw it never forgot that last look on Black Boy's face, never lost the rending horror of his scream as his forelegs gave and he sank out of sight, never forgot the hideous sound of his fall as he rolled down the cliff to the rocks below.

The girls hid their faces and sank sobbing into the heather. The men cursed Torode volubly, and regretted that he had not gone with Black Boy.

And it was none but black looks that greeted him when, after standing a moment, he came on across the Coupee and joined the rest.

"It is a misfortune," he said brusquely, as he came among us.

"It is sheer murder and brutality," said Charles Vaudin roughly.

"Guyabble! It's you that ought to be down there, not yon poor brute," said Guerin.

"Tuts then! A horse! I'll make him good to Hamon."

"And, unless I'm mistaken, you promised him not to ride the Coupee," I said angrily, for I knew how George Hamon would feel about Black Boy.

"Diable! I believe I did, but I forgot all about it in seeing you others crawling across. Will you lend me your horse to ride back, Carre?

Mademoiselle rides home with me."

"Mademoiselle does not, and I won't lend you a hair of him."

"That was the understanding. Mademoiselle promised."

"Well, she will break her promise,--with better reason than you had. I shall see her safely home."

"Right, Phil! Stick to that!" said the others; and Torode looking round felt himself in a very small minority, and turned sulkily and walked back across the Coupee.

The pleasure of the day was broken. Black Boy's face and scream and fall were with us still, and presently we all went cautiously back across the narrow way. And no girl rode, but each one shuddered as she pa.s.sed the spot where the loose edge of the cliff was scored with two deep grooves; and we others, looking down, saw a tumbled black ma.s.s lying in the white surf among the rocks.

CHAPTER XV

HOW I FELT THE GOLDEN SPUR

George Hamon was sorely put out at the loss of his horse and by so cruel a death. In his anger he laid on young Torode a punishment hard to bear.

For when the young man offered to pay for Black Boy, Uncle George gave him the sharpest edge of his tongue in rough Norman French, and turned him out of his house, and would take nothing from him.

"You pledged me your word and you broke it," said he, "and you think to redeem it with money. Get out of this and never speak to me again! We are honest men in Sercq, and you--you French sc.u.m, you don't know what honour means." And Torode was forced to go with the unpayable debt about his neck, and the certain knowledge that all Sercq thought with his angry creditor and ill of himself. And to such a man that was bitterness itself.

During the ten days that followed Riding Day, my mind was very busy settling, as it supposed, the future,--mine and Carette's. For, whether she desired me in hers or not, I had no doubts whatever as to what I wanted myself. My only doubts were as to the possibilities of winning such a prize.

The effect of the Miss Maugers' teaching on Carette herself had been to lift her above her old companions, and indeed above her apparent station in life, though on that point my ideas had no solid standing ground. For, as I have said, the Le Marchants of Brecqhou were more or less of mysteries to us all, and there had been such upsettings just across the water there, such upraisings and downcastings, that a man's present state was no indication of what he might have been. The surer sign was in the man himself, and much pondering of the matter led me to think that Jean Le Marchant might well be something more than simply the successful smuggler he seemed, and that Carette's dainty lady ways might well be the result of natural growth and not simply of the Miss Maugers' polishing.

I would not have had it otherwise. I wanted the very best for her; and if she were by birth a lady, let the lady in her out to the full. Far better that the best that was in her should out and shine than be battened under hatches and kept out of sight. Better for herself, if it was her nature; and better for the rest of us who could look up and admire. For myself, I would sooner look up than down, and none knew as I did--unless it were Jeanne Falla--how sweet and generous a nature lay behind the graces that set her above us. For none had known her as I had, during all those years of the camaraderie of the coast.

But, while I wished her every good, I could not close my eyes to several things, since they pressed me hard. That, for instance, we were no longer boy and girl together. And that, whereas Carette used to look up to me, now the looking up was very much the other way. What her feelings might be towards me, as I say, I could not be sure; for, little as I knew of girls, I had picked up enough sc.r.a.ps of knowledge to be quite sure in my own mind that they were strangely unaccountable creatures, and that you could not judge either them or a good many other things entirely by outside appearances. And again, it was borne in upon me very strongly, and as never before, that, where two start fairly level, if one goes ahead, the other must exert himself or be left behind. Carette was going ahead in marvellous fashion. I felt myself in danger of being left behind, and that set my brain to very active working.

I had a better education, in the truest sense of the word, than most of my fellows, thanks to my mother and grandfather and Krok and M. Rousselot, the schoolmaster. That gave me the use of my brains. I had in addition a good sound body, and I had travelled and seen something of the world. Of worldly possessions I had just the small savings of my pay and nothing more, and common-sense told me that if I wanted to win Carette Le Marchant I must be up and doing, and must turn myself to more profitable account.

I do not think there was in me any mercenary motive in this matter. I am quite sure that in so thinking of things I attributed none to Carette. It seemed to me that if a man wanted a wife he ought to be able to keep her, and I considered the girl who married a man of precarious livelihood--as I saw some of them do--very much of a fool. I have since come to know, however, that that is only one way of looking at it, and that to some women the wholehearted love of a true man counts for very much more than anything else he can bring her.

For money, simply as money, I had no craving whatever. For the wife it might help me to, and the security and comfort it might bring to her, I desired it ardently, and my thoughts were much exercised as to how to arrive at it in sufficiency. I found myself at one of the great cross-roads of life, where, I suppose, most men find themselves at one time or another.

I knew that much--to me, perhaps, everything--must depend on how I chose now, and I spent much time wandering in lonely places, and lying among the gorse cushions or in the short gra.s.s of the headlands, thinking of Carette and trying to see my way to her.

There were open to us all, in those days, four ways of life--more, maybe, if one had gone seeking them, but these four right to our hands.

I could ship again in the trading line,--and some time, a very long way ahead, I might come to the command of a ship, if I escaped the perils of the sea till that time came. But I could not see Carette very clearly in that line of life.

I could join a King's ship, and go fight the Frenchmen and all the others who were sometimes on our side and sometimes against us. But I could not see Carette at all in that line of life.

I could settle down to the quiet farmer-fisherman life on Sercq, as my grandfather had done with great contentment. But I was not my grandfather, and he was one in a thousand, and he had never had to win Carette.

And, lastly,--I could join my fellows in the smuggling or privateering lines, in which some of them, especially the Guernsey men, were waxing mightily fat and prosperous.

For reasons which I did not then understand, but which I do now, since I learned about my father, my mother's face was set dead against the free-trading. And so I came to great consideration of the privateering business and was drawn to it more and more. The risks were greater, perhaps, even than on the King's ships, since the privateer hunts alone and may fall easy prey to larger force. But the returns were also very much greater, and the life more reasonable, for on the King's ships the discipline was said to be little short of tyranny at times, and hardly to be endured by free men.

When, as the result of long turning over of the matter in my own mind, I had decided that the way to Carette lay through the privateering, I sought confirmation of my idea in several likely quarters before broaching it at home.

"Ah then, Phil, my boy! Come in and sit down and I'll give you a cup of my cider," was Aunt Jeanne's greeting, when I dropped in at Beaumanoir a few days after the party, not without hope of getting a sight of Carette herself and discussing my new ideas before her.

"No, she's not here," Aunt Jeanne laughed softly, at my quick look round.

"She's away back to Brecqhou. Two of them came home hurt from their last trip, and she's gone to take care of them. And now, tell me what you are going to do about it, mon gars?" she asked briskly, when I had taken a drink of the cider.

"About what then, Aunt Jeanne?"