Carette of Sark Part 27

We could see his deck black with men, and presently a boat dropped neatly and came bounding towards us.

"Depress your carronades and discharge them," ordered a black-bearded young man in her, in excellent English, as they hooked on. "If one is withdrawn, we will blow you out of the water."

The guns were discharged. The schooner gave a coquettish shake and came sweeping down alongside the Indiaman; some of her crew leaped into our main chains, and lashed the two ships together. Then a mob of rough-looking rascals came swarming up our side, and at their head was one at sight of whom my breath caught in my throat, and I rubbed my eyes in startled amazement, lest their forty-eight hours' salting should have set them astray.

But they told true, and a black horror and a cold fear fell upon me. I saw the b.l.o.o.d.y sc.u.m swirling round on the _Swallow's_ deck as she sank. I saw the heads of my struggling shipmates disappearing one by one under those felon shots from the schooner. I saw once more that little round hole bore itself in John Ozanne's forehead on the spar. And I knew that there was not room on earth for this man and me. I knew that if he caught sight of me I was a dead man.

For the last time I had seen that grim black face--which was also the first time--he was leaning over the rock wall of Herm, watching me steadfastly as I pulled away from him towards Peter Port, and his face was stamped clear on my memory for all time.

It was Torode of Herm, and in a flash I saw to the bottom of his treachery and my own great peril. No wonder he was so successful and came back full from every cruise, when others brought only tales of empty seas. He lived in security on British soil and played tinder both flags. By means of a quickly a.s.sumed disguise, he robbed British ships as a Frenchman, and French ships as an Englishman. That explained to the full the sinking of the _Swallow_ and the extermination of her crew. It was to him a matter of life or death. If one escaped with knowledge of the facts, the devilment must end. And I was that one man.

His keen black eyes had swept over us as he came over the side. I shrank small and prayed G.o.d he had not seen me.

He walked up to the captain and said gruffly, "You are a, wise man, monsieur. It is no good fighting against the impossible."

"I know it, or I'd have seen you d.a.m.ned before I'd have struck to you,"

growled the old man sourly.

"Quite so! Now, your papers, if you please, and quick!" and the captain turned to go for them.

All this I heard mazily, for my head was still whirring with its discovery.

Then, without a sign of warning, like one jerked by sudden instinct, Torode turned, pushed through the double row of men behind whom I had shrunk--and they opened quickly enough at his approach--and raising his great fist struck me to the deck like an ox.

When I came to I was lying in a bunk, bound hand and foot. My head was aching badly, and close above me on deck great traffic was going on between the ship and the schooner, transferring choice pickings of the cargo, I supposed, when my senses got slowly to work again.

But why was I there--and still alive? That was a puzzle beyond me entirely. By all rights, and truly according to my expectation, I should have been a dead man. Why was I here, and unharmed, save for a singing head?

Puzzle as I might, I had nothing to go upon and could make nothing of it.

But since I was still alive, hope grew in me. For it would have been no more trouble to Torode to kill me--less indeed. And since he had not, it could only be because he had other views.

For a long time the shuffling tread of laden men went on close above my head--for hours, I suppose. The sun was sinking when at last the heel and swing of the schooner told me we were loosed and away.

No shot had been fired, save the first one calling the Indiaman to stop, and the second one that drove the command home. To that extent I had been of service to them, bitter as surrender without a fight had been, for an utterly impossible resistance could only have ended one way and after much loss of life.

Long after it was dark a man came in with a lantern and a big bowl of soup, good soup such as we get in the Islands, and half a loaf of bread, and a pannikin of water. He set the things beside me, and untied my hands, and placed the light so that it fell upon me, and stood patching me till I had finished.

From his size I thought it was Torode himself, but he never opened his mouth, nor I mine, except to put food into it. When I had done, he tied my hands again and went out.

I slept like a top that night, in spite of it all, and felt better in the morning and not without hope. For, as a rule, civilised men, ruffians though they may be, do not feed those they are going to kill. They kill and have done with it.

The same man brought me coffee and bread and meat, and stood watching me again with his back to the porthole while I ate.

It was, as I had thought, Torode himself, and I would have given all I possessed--which indeed was not overmuch--to know what was pa.s.sing concerning me in that great black head of his. But I did not ask him, for I should not have expected him to tell me. I just ate and drank every sc.r.a.p of what he brought me, with as cheerful an air as I could compa.s.s, and thanked him politely when I had done.

CHAPTER XX

HOW I LAY IN THE CLEFT OF A ROCK

On the third day of my confinement, and as near as I could tell about midday, the small round porthole of my cabin was suddenly darkened by a flap of sail let down from above, purposely I judged, and shortly afterwards I found the ship was at rest.

It was after dark when Torode came in, and, without a word, bandaged my eyes tightly, and then called in two of his men, who shouldered me, and carried me up the companion and laid me in a boat. The pa.s.sage was a short one, about as far I thought as, say, from the anchorage at Herm to the landing-place. Then they shouldered me again, and stumbled up a rocky way and along a pa.s.sage where their feet echoed hollowly, and finally laid me down and went away. Torode untied my hands and feet and took off the bandage.

By the light of his lantern I saw that I was in a rock room, with rough natural walls, and sweet salt air blowing in from the farther end. There was food and water, and a mattress and blanket. He left me without a word, and locked behind him a grating of stout iron bars which filled all the s.p.a.ce between floor and roof. I was long past puzzling over the meaning of it all. I ate my food, and lay down and slept.

A shaft of sunlight awoke me, and I examined my new prison with care. It was a bit of a natural rock pa.s.sage, such as I had often seen on Sercq, formed, I have been told, by the decay of some softer material between two ma.s.ses of rock. It was about eight feet wide, and the roof, some twenty feet above my head, was formed by the falling together of the sides which sloped and narrowed somewhat at the entrance. In length, my room was thirty paces from the iron grating to the opening in the face of the cliff. This opening also was strongly barred with iron. The floor of the pa.s.sage broke off sharply there, and when I worked out a piece of rock from the side wall, and dropped it through the bars, it seemed to fall straight into the sea, a good hundred feet below. The left-hand wall stopped a foot beyond the iron bars, but at the right hand the rock wall ran on for twenty feet or so, then turned across the front of my window and so obscured the outlook. I hated that rock wall for cutting off my view, but it was almost all I had to look at, and before I said good-bye to it I knew every tendril of every fern that grew on it, and the colours of all the veins that ran through it, and of the close-creeping lichen that clothed it in patches.

By squeezing hard against the bars where they were let into the rock on the right, I found I could just get a glimpse of the free blue sea rolling and tossing outside, and by dint of observation and much careful watching I learned where I was.

For, away out there among the tumbling blue waves, I could just make out a double-headed rock which the tide never covered, and I recognised it as the _Grand Amfroque,_ one of our steering points in Great Russel.

So, then, I was in Herm, not four miles away from Brecqhou, and though, for any benefit the knowledge was to me, I might as well have been in America itself, it still warmed my heart to think that Carette was there, and almost within sight but for that wretched wall of rock. If fiery longing could melt solid rock, that barrier had disappeared in the twinkling of an eye.

The time pa.s.sed very slowly with me. I spent most of it against the bars, peering out at the sea. Once or twice distant boats pa.s.sed across my narrow view, and I wondered who were in them. And I thought sadly of the folk in Peter Port still looking hopefully for the _Swallow_, and following her possible fortunes, and wishing her good luck--and she and all her crew, except myself, at the bottom of the sea, as foully murdered as ever men in this world were.

Twice each day Torode himself brought me food and watched me steadfastly while I ate it. His oversight and interest never seemed to slacken. At first it troubled me, but there was in it nothing whatever of the captor gloating over his prisoner; simply, as far as I could make out, a gloomy desire to note how I took matters, which put me on my mettle to keep up a bold front, though my heart was heavy enough at times at the puzzling strangeness of it all.

I thought much of Carette and my mother, and my grandfather and Krok, and I walked each day for hours, to and fro, to and fro, to keep myself from falling sick or going stupid. But the time pa.s.sed slower than time had ever gone with me before, and I grew sick to death of that narrow cleft in the rock.

By a mark I made on the wall for each day of my stay there, it was on the tenth day that Torode first spoke to me as I ate my dinner.

"Listen!" he said, so unexpectedly, after his strange silence, that I jumped in spite of myself.

"Once you asked to join us and I refused. Now you must join us--or die. I have no desire for your death, but--well--you understand."

"When I asked to join you I believed you honest privateers. You are thieves and murderers. I would sooner die than join you now."

"You are young to die so."

"Go where you can, die when you must," I answered in our Island saying.

"Better die young than live to dishonour."

He picked up my dishes and went out. But I could not see why he should have kept me alive so long for the purpose of killing me now, and I would not let my courage down.

One more attempt he made, three days later, without a word having pa.s.sed between us meanwhile.

"Your time is running out, mon gars," he said, as abruptly as before. "I am loth to put you away, but it rests with yourself. You love Le Marchant's girl, Carette. Join us, and you shall have her. You will live with us on Herm, and in due time, when we have money enough, we will give up this life and start anew elsewhere."

"Carette is an honest girl--"

"She need not know--all that you know."

"And your son wants her--"

When you have had no one to speak to but yourself for fourteen days, the voice even of a man you hate is not to be despised. You may even make him talk for the sake of hearing him.