Dead Men Tell No Tales Part 14

This was the only sound; the wind had died away; the moonlit valley lay as still as the dread old house in its midst but for the splash and gurgle of the beck. I fancied this grew louder as I paused and listened in my helplessness. All at once-was it the tongue of Nature telling me the way, or common gumption returning at the eleventh hour? I ran down to the water's edge, and could have shouted for joy. Great stones lay in equal profusion on bed and banks. I lifted one of the heaviest in both hands. I staggered with it to the wall. I came back for another; for some twenty minutes I was so employed; my ultimate reward a fine heap of boulders against the wall.

Then I began to build; then mounted my pile, clawing the wall to keep my balance. My fingers were still many inches from the coping. I jumped down and gave another ten minutes to the back-breaking work of carrying more boulders from the water to the wall. Then I widened my cairn below, so that I could stand firmly before springing upon the pinnacle with which I completed it. I knew well that this would collapse under me if I allowed my weight to rest more than an instant upon it. And so at last it did; but my fingers had clutched the coping in time; had grabbed it even as the insecure pyramid crumbled and left me dangling.

Instantly exerting what muscle I had left, and the occasion gave me, I succeeded in pulling myself up until my chin was on a level with my hands, when I flung an arm over and caught the inner coping. The other arm followed; then a leg; and at last I sat astride the wall, panting and palpitating, and hardly able to credit my own achievement. One great difficulty had been my huge revolver. I had been terribly frightened it might go off, and had finally used my cravat to sling it at the back of my neck. It had shifted a little, and I was working it round again, preparatory to my drop, when I saw the light suddenly taken from the window in the tower, and a kerchief waving for one instant in its place. So she had been waiting and watching for me all these hours! I dropped into the garden in a very ecstasy of grief and rapture, to think that I had been so long in coming to my love, but that I had come at last. And I picked myself up in a very frenzy of fear lest, after all, I should fail to spirit her from this horrible place.

Doubly desolate it looked in the rays of that bright October moon. Skulking in the shadow of the wall which had so long baffled me, I looked across a sharp border of shade upon a chaos, the more striking for its lingering trim design. The long, straight paths were barnacled with weeds; the dense, fine hedges, once prim and angular, had fattened out of all shape or form; and on the velvet sward of other days you might have waded waist high in rotten hay. Towards the garden end this rank jungle merged into a worse wilderness of rhododendrons, the tallest I have ever seen. On all this the white moon smiled, and the grim house glowered, to the eternal swirl and rattle of the beck beyond its walls.

Long enough I stood where I had dropped, listening with all my being for some other sound; but at last that great studded door creaked and shivered on its ancient hinges, and I heard voices arguing in the Portuguese tongue. It was poor Eva wheedling that black rascal Jose. I saw her in the lighted porch; the n.i.g.g.e.r I saw also, shrugging and gesticulating for all the world like his hateful master; yet giving in, I felt certain, though I could not understand a word that reached me.

And indeed my little mistress very soon sailed calmly out, followed by final warnings and expostulations hurled from the step: for the black stood watching her as she came steadily my way, now raising her head to sniff the air, now stooping to pluck up a weed, the very picture of a prisoner seeking the open air for its own sake solely. I had a keen eye apiece for them as I cowered closer to the wall, revolver in hand. But ere my love was very near me (for she would stand long moments gazing ever so innocently at the moon), her jailer had held a bottle to the light, and had beaten a retreat so sudden and so hasty that I expected him back every moment, and so durst not stir. Eva saw me, however, and contrived to tell me so without interrupting the air that she was humming as she walked.

"Follow me," she sang, "only keep as you are, keep as you are, close to the wall, close to the wall."

And on she strolled to her own tune, and came abreast of me without turning her head; so I crept in the shadow (my ugly weapon tucked out of sight), and she sauntered in the shine, until we came to the end of the garden, where the path turned at right angles, running behind the rhododendrons; once in their shelter, she halted and beckoned me, and next instant I had her hands in mine.

"At last!" was all that I could say for many a moment, as I stood there gazing into her dear eyes, no hero in my heroic hour, but the bigger love-sick fool than ever. "But quick-quick-quick!" I added, as she brought me to my senses by withdrawing her hands. "We've no time to lose." And I looked wildly from wall to wall, only to find them as barren and inaccessible on this side as on the other.

"We have more time than you think," were Eva's first words. "We can do nothing for half-an-hour."

"Why not?"

"I'll tell you in a minute. How did you manage to get over?"

"Brought boulders from the beck, and piled 'em up till I could reach the top."

I thought her eyes glistened.

"What patience!" she cried softly. "We must find a simpler way of getting out-and I think I have. They've all gone, you know, but Jose."

"All three?"

"The captain has been gone all day."

Then the other two must have been my horse-men, very probably in some disguise; and my head swam with the thought of the risk that I had run at the very moment when I thought myself safest. Well, I would have finished them both! But I did not say so to Eva. I did not mention the incident, I was so fearful of destroying her confidence in me. Apologizing, therefore, for my interruption, without explaining it, I begged her to let me hear her plan.

It was simple enough. There was no fear of the others returning before midnight; the chances were that they would be very much later; and now it was barely eleven, and Eva had promised not to stay out above half-an-hour. When it was up Jose would come and call her.

"It is horrid to have to be so cunning!" cried little Eva, with an angry shudder; "but it's no use thinking of that," she was quick enough to add, "when you have such dreadful men to deal with, such fiends! And I have had all day to prepare, and have suffered till I am so desperate I would rather die to-night than spend another in that house. No; let me finish! Jose will come round here to look for me. But you and I will be hiding on the other side of these rhododendrons. And when we hear him here we'll make a dash for it across the long gra.s.s. Once let us get the door shut and locked in his face, and he'll be in a trap. It will take him some time to break in; time enough to give us a start; what's more, when he finds us gone, he'll do what they all used to do in any doubt."

"What's that?"

"Say nothing till it's found out; then lie for their lives; and it was their lives, poor creatures on the Zambesi!" She was silent a moment, her determined little face hard-set upon some unforgotten horror. "Once we get away, I shall be surprised if it's found out till morning," concluded Eva, without a word as to what I was to do with her; neither, indeed, had I myself given that question a moment's consideration.

"Then let's make a dash for it now!" was all I said or thought.

"No; they can't come yet, and Jose is strong and brutal, and I have heard how ill you are. That you should have come to me notwithstanding-" and she broke off with her little hands lying so gratefully on my shoulders, that I know not how I refrained from catching her then and there to my heart. Instead, I laughed and said that my illness was a pure and deliberate sharp, and my presence there its direct result. And such was the virtue in my beloved's voice, the magic of her eyes, the healing of her touch, that I was scarce conscious of deceit, but felt a whole man once more as we two stood together in the moonlight.

In a trance I stood there gazing into her brave young eyes. In a trance I suffered her to lead me by the hand through the rank, dense rhododendrons. And still entranced I crouched by her side near the further side, with only unkempt gra.s.s-plot and a weedy path between us and that ponderous door, wide open still, and replaced by a section of the lighted hail within. On this we fixed our attention with mingled dread and impatience, those contending elements of suspense; but the black was slow to reappear; and my eyes stole home to my sweet girl's face, with its glory of moonlit curls, and the eager, resolute, embittered look that put the world back two whole months, and Eva Denison upon the Lady Jermyn's p.o.o.p, in the ship's last hours. But it was not her look alone; she had on her cloak, as the night before, but with me (G.o.d bless her!) she found no need to clasp herself in its folds; and underneath she wore the very dress in which she had sung at our last concert, and been rescued in the gig. It looked as though she had worn it ever since. The roses were crushed and soiled, the tulle all torn, and tarnished some strings of beads that had been gold: a tatter of Chantilly lace hung by a thread: it is another of the relics that I have unearthed in the writing of this narrative.

"I thought men never noticed dresses?" my love said suddenly, a pleased light in her eyes (I thought) in spite of all. "Do you really remember it?"

"I remember every one of them," I said indignantly; and so I did.

"You will wonder why I wear it," said Eva, quickly. "It was the first that came that terrible night. They have given me many since. But I won't wear one of them-not one!"

How her eyes flashed! I forgot all about Jose.

"I suppose you know why they hadn't room for you in the gig?" she went on.

"No, I don't know, and I don't care. They had room for you," said I; "that's all I care about." And to think she could not see I loved her!

"But do you mean to say you don't know that these-murderers-set fire to the ship?"

"No-yes! I heard you say so last night."

"And you don't want to know what for?"

Out of politeness I protested that I did; but, as I live, all I wanted to know just then was whether my love loved me-whether she ever could-whether such happiness was possible under heaven!

"You remember all that mystery about the cargo?" she continued eagerly, her pretty lips so divinely parted!

"It turned out to be gunpowder," said I, still thinking only of her.

"No-gold!"

"But it was gunpowder," I insisted; for it was my incorrigible pa.s.sion for accuracy which had led up to half our arguments on the voyage; but this time Eva let me off.

"It was also gold: twelve thousand ounces from the diggings. That was the real mystery. Do you mean to say you never guessed?"

"No, by Jove I didn't!" said I. She had diverted my interest at last. I asked her if she had known on board.

"Not until the last moment. I found out during the fire. Do you remember when we said good-by? I was nearly telling you then."

Did I remember! The very letter of that last interview was cut deep in my heart; not a sleepless night had I pa.s.sed without rehearsing it word for word and look for look; and sometimes, when sorrow had spent itself, and the heart could bleed no more, vain grief had given place to vainer speculation, and I had cudgelled my wakeful brains for the meaning of the new and subtle horror which I had read in my darling's eyes at the last. Now I understood; and the one explanation brought such a tribe in its train, that even the perilous ecstasy of the present moment was temporarily forgotten in the horrible past.

"Now I know why they wouldn't have me in the gig!" I cried softly.

"She carried four heavy men's weight in gold."

"When on earth did they get it aboard?"

"In provision boxes at the last; but they had been filling the boxes for weeks."

"Why, I saw them doing it!" I cried. "But what about the gig? Who picked you up?"

She was watching that open door once more, and she answered with notable indifference, "Mr. Rattray."

"So that's the connection!" said I; and I think its very simplicity was what surprised me most.