THE SECRET IN THE HILL.
My first impression, as I sat up to gather my wits, was of awakening
from a falling nightmare to the comfortable security of bed and early
morning. The frantic fears engendered of that fathomless descent were
all resolved in laughter. I giggled as I recalled them, shaking my
dusty noddle to get the brains into place in it. Opposite me I could
discern a shadowy figure, squatting in a like process of
self-recovery.
“Well, old chap,” I said; “here we are!”
The sound of my voice, clanging in a vaulted space, gave me a start.
“O!” I exclaimed; and the monosyllable rolled away into the darkness
like a barrel.
We scrambled up, while it was still echoing, and catching
involuntarily at one another, looked fearfully about us. At a height
of twelve feet or so behind us shone the opening through which we had
entered. It made a great splotch of light, with a dim tail running
fanlike from it down the slope by which we had fallen. The effect to
us, standing possessed by gloom, was as of our being involved in the
tail of a comet. So long as we looked that way, it dazzled and
perplexed us. We turned our backs on it.
Then, gradually, the obscure details of the place gathered coherence;
and we saw that we were standing in a low vaulted chamber, giving at
its further end upon a sewer-like mouth of blackness.
“Dicky,” said Harry, in a rather tremulous whisper, “have you got the
candles and lucifers all safe? This is p-p-prime, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I gulped, to either question. But I answered without heart,
being sick to postpone the advance, by whatever means, for a little.
“Don’t let me go, you old idiot!” I complained in a panic, as he made
as if to step forward. “Supposing we lost one another. Ha-Harry, do
you know what I saw under my arm as you p-pulled me up outside there?”
“No. What?”
“Rampick--the b-beast--scuttling for the Gap. He must have been
watching us again, hidden below somewhere this time; and like enough
now he’s making for the cliff overhead.”
Harry began chuckling, but stopped in a fright to hear himself
answered, as it were, by a patter of little laughing hiccoughs.
“He won’t find much,” he whispered, “and we needn’t be afraid he’ll
follow us down here. Light a candle, Dicky, for goodness’ sake. There
seem to be all sorts of things creeping and rustling.”
My hands shook so that I boggled three good matches in coaxing the
wick to take; but I would not let Harry hold the candle, for fear that
he might run ahead with it, and perhaps in some labyrinth of passages
leave me to follow the wrong one.
The flame caught at last, flared with a momentary brilliancy, and
shrunk to a mere blink. It is the common way with candles, yet I know
nothing more maddening in a nervous emergency. And if philosophy
sneers over that statement, let it ponder, and be thankful but take no
credit, because it had nothing whatever to do with the making of its
own temperament. At length, after a moment of tension indescribable,
the wicked little tongue stretched, and glowed steady; and I lifted it
high, while we glared right and left.
The cellar in which we found ourselves was, or had been till shorn of
its seaward end, a four-square room, with Norman vaulting--crossed
flat half-hoops of stone--going down into the corners. It was very
small, and very low (the candle flame, as I lifted it, blackened the
roof), and very massive; and because of the three, very ancient.
Probably it had once been a death-chapel under some older foundation
than the abbey, and connected only as a matter of piety with the newer
crypts, which, to meet it, had been tunnelled eastwards, in a manner
very unusual, from beneath the nave. But, so far as we could see, it
was quite empty, and undamaged by the earthquake, or explosion.
I waved the light to and fro.
“Nothing here,” whispered Harry. “Let’s get on!”
The black sewer faced us. There, we knew, was our way. If for a minute
or two we hesitated to follow it, by so long was Providence our
friend. For, indeed, we had never thought to take account of the
stale, confined gases which for years must have been poisoning these
glooms, and our delay gave the draught that we had created time to
take effect.
For draught there was, though we were unconscious of the significance
of it when we saw the flame of our candle draw towards the tunnel. But
in truth we had forgotten in our excitement all about the badger.
At last we made a move, holding on to one another’s hands like Hansel
and Gretel entering the witch’s forest. We reached the black mouth of
the passage, and went in on tiptoe. It was arched, and high enough in
its middle to enable one to walk erect; yet not so wide but that Harry
must drop behind and follow me. I sniggered a little to feel him
treading nervously on my heels, and the sense of laughter was like a
tonic. If one touch of nature makes the world kin, it is surely the
touch that tickles one under the fifth rib.
The passage seemed to run on endlessly--just a high stone drain with a
floor of hammered earth driving straight into the hill. No other
diverged from it, nor did any ruin block our path; and we were
beginning to move quite merrily, when suddenly the end came in a
flight of half a dozen steps going down, and at the bottom a great
door torn off its hinges and shivered into splinters.
At the sight we drew back on the very brink, and stood gaping and
dumbstruck, afraid for the moment to proceed.
“Dicky,” said Harry, staring over my shoulder, “here comes the tug,
don’t it?”
I did not answer. Suddenly he dipped under my arm and ran down, and,
terrified at the thought of being left alone, I followed him.
The fragments of the door stood wrenched at any angle; but through the
black gaps in the wreck flowed the sense of shattered spaces beyond.
“Now for it!” said Harry. “Hand me the light when I’m in, and follow
yourself.”
I would have lingered yet, but he broke from me, and, fearing to
precipitate I knew not what nameless ruin, I let him go with only a
show of interference.
He was through in a moment, and calling back to me, “Pass the light,
and come on. It’s all serene.”
And then in an instant I had followed him.
The draught was still strong enough here to flutter the candle flame,
so that for a little we could make out nothing of our surroundings.
But stepping cautiously to one side, away from the door, we found the
light to stand suddenly steady, and immediately before our eyes there
grew into grotesque and shadowy being a vision of enormous
destruction.
It was again a vaulted chamber we were in, but of apparent proportions
infinitely greater than the other. Apparent, I say, for for two-thirds
of its extent it was just one unresolvable ruin. A great part of the
roof had collapsed, snapping in its downfall, like sticks of celery,
the squat massive piers which had supported it. The walls on either
side were bowed to an arch above, or swayed drunkenly with colossal
knees bent outwards. To the further side, gaping at us across the
havoc, a huge blackened rent seemed to invite to nameless horrors
beyond; and scattered and spattered and spurted from under the fringe
of the stony avalanche were staves of casks, and fragments of burst
chests from which fountains of tea had showered all over the floor.
We stood awestruck, scarce daring to breathe. The sense of yet
impending disaster, the terror of calling it down upon us by a
stumble, a false step, kept us as still as mice. Before us a path went
clear round the ruin to another broken archway, and yet remoter
vaults. But by this time my curiosity was become something less than a
negative quantity.
“Harry,” I whispered at last, almost querulously, “we’ve seen enough.
I’m going back.”
His face looked into mine like a little ghost’s.
“I’m not,” he said. “But I don’t want you to come. Light me another
bit of candle from yours, and stay here while I go and explore. We’ve
found out nothing yet, you know.”
I am ashamed to say I let him go, only imploring him to return
soon--to be satisfied with a look. He did not answer, but stole off
resolutely with his bit of a torch, and it was with a feeling of agony
that I saw him disappear through the opening.
It is a question with psychologists how much one can dream in a
second. I will answer for the eternity of nightmare I suffered during
those few moments of Harry’s absence. He could hardly, in point of
fact, have set foot in the further chamber when a strange little cry
from him made me start violently. And immediately, as if in response,
there sprang into voice near me a step, a rustle, the menace of a
coming roar, and I screamed out and fled towards my friend. The crash
answered behind me as I ran, and a film of dust followed. Half blinded
and deafened, I almost fell at Harry’s feet as he met me. We clutched
one another convulsively, and for a minute could not speak.
The concussion was succeeded by an appalling silence. Presently he was
staring over my shoulder, swaying his light to and fro.
“Dick!” He went muttering in my ear: “Dick! Dick! Dick! the roof has
fallen, down by the door, and blocked our way back!”
Horror took me of a heap. I could only bite into Harry’s arm up and
down with my fingers, dumbly entreating him to do something to save us
from going crazy.
“O, why did we come?” I moaned at last. “Why didn’t you come when I
asked you?”
“What good would that have been,” he said miserably, “if we’d been
caught and squashed?”
If he could not see the way to save, he could to make a man of me. He
was the first to return to his sturdy self. It struck me like
sacrilege to hear him suddenly emit a faint little laugh.
“O, don’t!” I said. “It’s too awful!”
“What is?” he answered. “Look here, Dick, we’re just fools, that’s
all, There must be a way out somewhere--we’d forgotten what the badger
showed us.”
In an instant, at his words, I had leapt to the ultimate pole of hope.
“O, Harry!” I said, “you good old fellow to think of it! Why, of
course there must be; if only we could----”
“Wait a bit!” he interrupted me. “You’ll have to make up your mind to
go on.”
“I’ll go anywhere,” I said, “to get safe out of this. O, don’t stop!
Any moment may bring down some more of it.”
I was wriggling and sweating in a perfect agony over his hesitation.
“All right,” he said; “pull a long breath and prepare yourself.”
“For what?”
The truth came upon me in a flash. I fell back, panting at him.
“_Harry! They’re there!_”
He nodded.
“Yes, they’re there. If you like to shut your eyes, I’ll lead you
past.”
But he had shamed me once.
“No,” I said, with a catch in my voice. “If you stood it, so can I. Go
on--quick. Are they--are they--very----”
We were in the further vault before I could shape my question; and I
took one glance, and shrieked, and shrunk back under the wall. And so,
in the very act, at a leap the horror was gone.
Why? I cannot tell. The problem is again for the psychologists. All I
know is that, as I cried out, the sickness left me. A spring of some
human sympathy gushed up in my heart and expelled it. These pitiful
remnants seemed to greet us as with a wistful hail of comradeship.
They were ugly, disjointed, ghastly enough in all conscience; but they
appealed as from the lost to the lost, and seeing them, their quiet,
sad decay, I no longer feared them as I had feared them unseen. Who
might swear, indeed, that our own bones would not mingle with these
others presently? They were dust of our dust in the great Commonwealth
of death. If I had been a desert castaway, lying down to die beside
some parched human skeleton, I could not better have testified to my
sense of the sorrow that makes us kin than I did now in my changed
emotions.
Yet, indeed, the scene was a very awful one. Near the whole of the
further side of the crypt had collapsed, making of the place a huge
cave-like mouth stuck with blackened splinters of teeth, and gorged to
the throttle with a litter of human remains. They lay scattered all
over the vast jaw of it--chewed, dismembered, scarce one to be
identified in its entirety. Here it might be a red-capped skull, with
a naked brown cutlass tilted across its teeth; here a limbless body,
horribly suggestive in its crumbling stumps of a mangled doll
dribbling sawdust; here something, whole but for its head, crooking
its fingers into the dusty scalp of a comrade from whom the legs had
been torn. They may have counted to near a dozen in all, if one had
had the stomach to tally the flannel caps and brass-buttoned jackets
and disjointed slops. But, ten or twenty, the moral was the same. Here
at the crook of a finger was the whole life of the hill blown into
fragments; and the legend of the earthquake laid.
I understood that plain enough before Harry’s low excited voice
sounded over my shoulder.
“Come away, Dick! Look there; don’t you see how it happened?”
He drew me back and we stood, figures of tragedy, flashing the light
from our candle-ends into dark corners. In all the hideous _mélange_
there were two details unmistakable in their significance. To our
right, lying front-downwards with its face smashed into the floor, and
its legs caught into the closing throat of the vault, was a little
flattened blue-coated figure, its hands flung out, and the left yet
closed upon the butt of a pistol. To our left, bolt upright against
the wall through which the great rent had been blown into the
adjoining crypt, sat a thing grotesque almost beyond naming. It wore,
with a little air of sagging weariness, a seaman’s common jersey and
good white ducks and shoes with shining buckles, and its right elbow
was crooked and the hand beneath rested with a sort of exhausted
jauntiness on its bent right knee. In all of which there was wonder,
but no indecency, had it not been that, above, the thing had no head,
nor any left arm but a stump, which stood oddly upraised from its
shoulder.
And somehow one knew that these two were correlative in the tragedy,
and somehow responsible for the human scatteration between them--for
the bright gleams and splotches of colour which budded from the
ancient soot of the holocaust--for these gaudy, half-perished
weed-heaps scoring the garden of death.
“Do you see?” urged Harry again.
I sighed and shook my head, not meaning ignorance, but simply
overwhelmed under the weight of my own conclusions.
“Why,” he whispered, in an awestruck voice; “that--_that_ there was
reaching up for the ammunition, the--the armoury in the wall where
they kept their powder and things, and, as he opened the cupboard, the
other fired his pistol across. The bullet must have missed who it was
meant for and gone into a powder barrel.”
As he spoke, one of the lights sputtered and went dim; and he caught
suddenly at me.
“Come away!” he cried. “Why don’t you come? We haven’t candles and to
spare.”
His words reawoke me instantly to the unresolved horror of our
situation.
“I’m coming,” I answered tremulously. “Which way? Harry, don’t go
without me!”
We stumbled a few blind paces, dazzled again for the nonce.
“Look here,” he said; “we must economize these. It won’t do to waste
our lights.”
Instantly, in a panic, I blew out my candle, and simultaneously he
blew out his. Thus was illustrated the weakness of generalities; and,
correspondingly, the value, as you shall see, of accidents. We were
plunged, on the breath, into subterranean night; lapped in lead and
buried beyond hope of release. At least, so it seemed for the moment;
and moments make the sum of time.
We stood rigid, paralysed, too dumb-stricken for speech or movement.
And, in that pass, if you will believe me, the most unearthly horror
of a voice hard by came to complete our demoralization. It rose
between a hiss and bark, a swinish indescribable thing that tailed off
into a bubbling snarl; and I thought it was the dead man caught by the
legs struggling to rise and get at us.
I could not have survived and kept my reason, I think, had not Harry
at this instant scattered all shadows with a jubilant shout--
“Daylight! Look up there, Dicky! We’ve found the way.”
I shook with the cry, and raised my despairing eyes. Sure enough, at a
good height before and above us, a gleam of blessed dawn filtered down
through the superincumbent soil. The accident of darkness had revealed
it to us so soon as our pupils had forgotten the false glare of the
candles.
“O, Harry!” I cried, half hysterical. “O, Harry! what was that noise?”
And he laughed out--“Light up again, you old funk! It was the best
friend in the world to us.”
Amazed, without understanding, I tremblingly rekindled the candle; and
there, right before us, was a flight of stone steps going up--the
ancient entrance to the crypts; and, risen bristling from his bed of
straw and sticks at the foot of it, was our ally, our preserver, our
most noble and honoured _the badger_.
He was a surly auxiliary, resentful for his broken slumber. He stood
setting at us, and bubbling, and showing his teeth, as cross a little
Cerberus as ever divided his duty between guarding the way down and
keeping damned souls from escaping. Harry softly pulled the geological
hammer from his pocket.
“Don’t!” I gasped. “You mustn’t! He saved us.”
“I’m not going to attack,” said Harry. “But I must defend, if he makes
a rush. Try a bite of him first, if you’re doubtful. I tell you, if he
once fastens on, you’ll have to take him up with you.”
Keeping close together, and our eyes on the little grey gentleman, we
edged gingerly round towards the foot of the flight. Fortunately, as
we advanced, he withdrew, coming behind us in a circle.
“Go up first,” whispered Harry, “while I keep the rear.”
Holding the candle to light him, I went backwards up the steps, until
my head touched the canopy of soil and ruin which blocked their exit;
and then, backwards, Harry followed me. The badger snuffed and
gurgled, pointing his snout at us, but not offering to follow.
“Now,” said Harry, turning round, “for the way!”
It was a narrow one as it first offered--a mere beast-earth driven
down between chance interstices in the ruins above to meet the
stair-head. But all the time while we wrought at to enlarge it, the
sweet light was stretched to us to comfort and inspire, and the smell
of liberty came down more and more in draughts like wine, as if Harry
with his strenuous hammer were tapping the very reservoir of day. The
only fear was that, striking carelessly, he might loosen some poised
mass, and bury us under an avalanche of stone. But luckily, both sunk
vault and tumbled ruin had so well adjusted between them the balance
of collapse that our puny grubbing was all insufficient to disturb it.
For which, thank God! And tenfold for that glorious moment when,
struggling and pushing up by way of the last of the littered steps, we
shouldered and tore ourselves through into the mid-thicket of brambles
by the fallen plinth, and felt the light of day, broken by the
branches, burst over us like a salvo of resplendent rockets!