RESCUE.
Confession, discussion, incredulity, conviction, with all their
concomitants of amazement, awe, emotion, were long over; long put
aside in reservation was the unsolvable problem of Rampick’s part in
the dark mystery of the hill; long had our last exhausted
consideration of these questions lapsed into something like a silence
of despair, as we drifted, with gentle lap and wallow, over those
immeasurable heart-breaking wastes.
At least with Harry and me, I think, hope had attenuated almost to the
vanishing point. Brain-sodden, benumbed, half lifeless, grown near
unconscious of time or place, the instinct to hold on, the power to
keep at bay the last fatal drowsiness alone remained to us in
ever-diminishing degree. We did not know, in the confusion of our
senses, whether we were drawing inshore or to sea; we did not know
whether we were rocking, an idle log, virtually unprogressive, or
slipped into one of the coast currents, and speeding silent on an
interminable journey. We could not tell the sick drawl of the hours,
for our watches had, of course, stopped. But we dreaded horribly the
time when dusk should fall, if it should find us derelicts still. And
so it found us, drooping down and closing in; and then Providence
seemed hidden, and we despaired.
I cannot picture, indeed, the terror of that darkening desolation; the
running fields of water, spectral with foam, fenced within an
ever-contracting cyclone of dusk, devouring their own boundaries, and
committing us slowly to entombment in one final sepulchre of night. It
is all an impossible dream, in my mind--a sort of horrible pantomime,
in which a sense of induration, of fixity, while I watched grotesque
figures, born of my imagination, come and go in my brain, was
ineffably dissolved by the spirit of the moon, and changed into
consciousness of heaven.
Joshua, I knew, felt nothing of what we did, except, in a measure,
physically; and, even there, the exultation in his soul was tonic to
his body. Since our capping of his secret with our own, he had been a
changed creature--a bent bow released and snapped upright. It is
difficult to describe his transformation--his translation, rather,
inspired as Bottom’s. Where had been sombreness, depression, some
self-deprecation, was self-assurance, some rallying blitheness,
boisterousness almost. He had been crushed, and was expanded; beaten,
and was triumphant. That he should have run, when near broke with the
chase, his shadow to earth, and through me, the son of the man whose
memory he worshipped! It was stupendous. He could not contain his
glee, or discipline his expectancy, now it had once burst those
year-long bonds. He was convinced with, more utterly convinced than,
us, that the body was Abel’s. He would tolerate no suggestion of
error. And where the body was, would be the book, the clue--finally
the treasure. I doubted if, in all these generations, it could still
lie hidden there undiscovered and unravished. He laughed my scepticism
to scorn. That Vining would never have concealed the evidences of his
crime in a place easy or inviting to be come at, he declared.
Probably, indeed, he had restored them to the original _oubliette_,
which, I might make sure, would have been chosen by the monks with a
cunning genius for its inaccessibility, either by smugglers or other
casual squatters in their abandoned vaults. Moreover history, or at
least gossip, might be trusted to have left us record of such costly
treasure-trove thus unearthed, if unearthed it had been. Nevertheless,
he questioned us closely as to our underground observations, which,
indeed, had not been exhaustive. But they were enough, it appeared, to
confirm his assurance. Desire is the most credulous of all
enthusiasts.
All this was before the last abandonment to despair had overwhelmed
us, Harry and me; and it was useful in helping us to a sort of
fictitious endurance. We might have succumbed sooner, otherwise, and
actually foregone our living rescue. He was so strong and hopeful; so
certain that Destiny would not have led him thus far, by such tortured
ways, only to see him founder when within sight of his goal, that some
part of his faith could not fail to communicate itself to us with
vital results. At the same time, I think, we shrunk from the merciless
expression of his triumph. _Our_ concern, in revealing the truth as we
supposed it, had been with the tragic end of his brother. Not so his.
He had no sentiment for Abel even now; no pity for the fate which had
overtaken him. The best he could find to say about him was that he had
paid the penalty and called quits, and left the better man to come
into his own. Not for himself--that was the moral reservation, after
all, which silenced and confounded us. He longed for the treasure; he
gloated in the thought of its resurrection; but now for my sake, not
his own. With the prospect of its recovery instant in his mind, he
never wavered in his intention to bestow it all on the son of the man
who had died to vindicate his honesty. I could have laughed again over
this tragic, comical, chimerical bequest to me; only tears were too
near the source of humour. It was terrible, and indecent, and pathetic
in one. _We_ sought life for no end but sweet life’s own. The rest was
a mockery.
Well, he kept us alive with it, that I believe. Even after he himself
was numbed and silenced from stimulating us, from encouraging us by
sympathy and example to prevail through hope, he would keep nodding
brightly to us to rally our spirits, until his neck got too stiff to
nod at all.
It must have been half-past six and near the time of ebb, when the
spectral dark which engulphed us knew a change. The fog, lying low on
the water, grew slowly diaphanous, waxing from a weak dawn, like
heaven seen through dying lids, to a sweet and solemn lightness. For
long we were too exhausted, body and mind, to consider what this
portended. The lightness increased; and suddenly high over the bank
shone a little red spark like a lantern. We lifted our dazed heads; we
stirred stiffly where we sat. O God! O God! what did it mean?
Swiftly it broadened, glowing like a rising fire. It mounted, or the
haze shrunk beneath it--who could tell? In a moment it was free, and
we knew it, in wonder and thankfulness, for the moon.
She was in her first quarter--a child moon, swelling into maidenhood.
Slowly, slowly she rose, while we watched her, gloating, absorbed.
Gradually the blush with which she had first observed us, sole
spectators of her girlish disrobing, faded into a white glow of pity.
Her tresses fell from her neck upon the sea, the mist parting to let
them by, and were extended to us, “Climb to me by them,” she seemed to
whisper; “here is the way to hope.” And lo! full in the midst of that
shining path rode a little boat.
There was a man in it, a solitary fisherman trawling for soles. The
agony of the moment gave us life and voice. We screamed to him; we
waved; we made every frantic demonstration that was possible to us in
our condition. He heard and saw us--and he sat as if stricken.
Ghostly, leisurely, we drifted past, and the boat faded and became a
phantom behind us.
We could not believe it. We never ceased to cry out. It was too
hideous, too cruel for truth. Harry, with a dying effort, half rose. I
don’t know what desperate thought was in his mind.
“Hush!” I suddenly implored; and we all became stone.
There was a little knock and paddle coming to us out of the mist. In a
moment the boat forged into sight, approached us, and hung off.
“Who be ye?” said a fearful voice.
We answered all together in a babble.
“Nay, let me speak alone,” said Joshua; and he hailed the man clearly.
“We went to visit the wreck on the sands; we were abandoned there by a
scoundrel, and we have been floating on this spar ever since.”
Still the man was not convinced. We could hear him distinctly spit
into the water. It is so his class exorcises all demons.
“What might be your names, now?” he asked cunningly.
Here was a poser for the devil.
“First of all, Master Richard Bowen,” began Joshua.
“Hey!” interrupted the boatman, with all his voice of wonder; and he
sculled rapidly up, and alongside. “Master!” He peered through the
mist. “Lord have mercy on ’s, ’tis himself trewthfully!”
“Old Jacob!” I cried, in a faint voice between laughing and sobbing.
“Old Jacob, help us off this before we die!”
And after that I remember nothing.