DOWN TO THE SEA.
_Dr. Fabos Leaves the Valley House._
There was not a sound within the house, nor did an open window upon the
landing admit any signal of alarm from the gardens. I could but hazard
that the little Jap had crossed the gully of the river and come by such
a road into the valley. To question him would have been as absurd as to
delay. Here he was, and there stood the open door. When he thrust a
revolver into my hand and bade me follow him by the low verandah to the
gardens below, I obeyed without further hesitation. The mystery of
Joan’s disappearance asked for no clever solution. This night, I said,
the Jew had meant to kill me. And for the first time, it may be, I
realised the deadly peril I had lived through at the Valley House.
Okyada has never been a man of many words. I think he uttered but two
that night as we crossed the valley garden and made for the river bank.
“Shoot, master,” he said, meaning that if any barred the way, the time
for passive flight had passed. I nodded my head in answer, and pressed
closer upon his heels as he entered the maze of shrubs which defended
the gully. The silence about us had become a burden to the nerves. Was
it possible that none of the Jew’s men watched the garden? Indeed, for a
moment, that appeared to be the truth.
We gained the bank of the whirlpool of yesterday, and for a few minutes
lay flat in the shadow of the great border of the rock which rises up
above the gully. Behind us we could espy the lighted windows of the
bedroom I had just left and the clear shape of the silent châlet. The
gardens and the woods were so many patches of black against an azure sky
of night. The water below us flowed, in colour a deep indigo, between
walls of lightless rock, in a bed of polished stone. Not a breath of
wind stirred the pines upon the hill side. We could no longer see the
ocean without or the friendly lights it showed to us. We might have been
fugitives upon a desert island; and this deception would have continued
possible until the sound of a distant rifle-shot awoke a thousand echoes
in the hills and shattered in a single instant the dream of security we
had found so pleasing.
Okyada sprang up at the sound and began to speak with an earnestness of
which he was rarely guilty.
“They have found the honourable Captain—quick, master, we must go to
him,” he said.
My answer was to point up to the sloping lawn of the garden we had left.
There, in single file, the figures of seven men, crossing the grass
boldly toward the châlet, were clearly to be discerned. I had scarcely
observed them when a movement in the shrubbery immediately behind us
betrayed the presence of others—three in all—who came out to the
water’s edge at a place not ten yards from where we stood, and halting
there a little while to inspect the gully, afterwards made off through
the woods as though to join the others above.
“Old Val gets such notions into his woolly cranium,” said one of them as
he went. “If there’s any lousy Englishman going across there to-night,
I’m derned if he ain’t a flip-flop mermaid.”
A second ventured that the water was lower than he had ever seen it,
while the third added the opinion that, low or high, it was hot enough
to warm the grog of a Congo nigger, and a —— sight too hot for any
police nark to try it.
We listened to them, crouching low on the rock and with our revolvers
ready to our hands. Had the most trifling accident occurred, a falling
pebble or a clumsy movement betrayed us, that, I am convinced, would
have been the whole story of the night. But we lay as men long practised
in the arts of silence, and not until the trees hid the men from our
sight did Okyada stand up again and prepare to cross the gully.
“Go first, master,” he said. “Here is the rope. Our friends with the
honourable Captain wait yonder above. Let us bring them the good news.”
Now, I saw that, as he spoke, he had caught up a rope which had been
dexterously fixed to a boulder upon the opposite bank of the stream and
allowed to trail in the water while he went to fetch me from the house.
Fixing this as cleverly to the rock upon our side, he made a bridge by
which any strong lad could have crossed, the pool being as low as it
then was; and no sooner had he given me the signal than I swung myself
out and almost immediately found a footing upon the further shore. His
own passage, when first he crossed, must have been very perilous, I
thought; and I could but imagine that he had thrown the rope over first
and trusted to the grappling iron affixed to the end upon the garden
side. This, however, was but a speculation. He crossed now as I had
done, and together we cast the knot from the boulder and drew the rope
in. If all our acts were cool and collected, I set the fact down to the
knowledge that we were prisoners of the valley no longer, and that the
hills were before us. What mattered the alarm now sounding through the
gardens, the hoarse cry of voices, the blowing of whistles, the running
to and fro of excited men? More ominous by far was a second rifle-shot,
awakening crashing echoes in the mountains. This, I believed, one of my
own yacht’s company had fired. Plainly our men had either stumbled upon
an ambush or fallen into some snare set upon the road we must follow.
The truth of the issue could not but be momentous to us all. Either we
must find them prisoners or free men who stood in instant danger. There
could be no moment of delay which was not hazardous, and we permitted
none directly our foothold had been secured and the rope drawn in.
“Did you come alone, Okyada?” I asked my servant presently.
He dissented as he folded the coils of rope.
“The honourable Scotchman—he is waiting with the lantern, excellency.”
I smiled, but did not offend his sense of that which was due to so great
a person as Balaam, the Scotch boatswain.
“Would it be far from here, Okyada?”
“That which your excellency could walk in a minute.”
I said no more, but followed him up the cliff side, scrambling and
slipping like a boy upon a holiday jaunt, and no less eager for the
heights. To the darkness of the night and the quickness of our
movements, my faithful servant and I undoubtedly owed our lives.
Remember that the valley now raised the cry of alarm from one end to the
other. Whistles were blown, bells were rung, rifles fired wildly. That
the bullets struck the rocks both above and below us, my ears told me
unmistakably. Had we been an open mark moving in the clear light of day,
the suspense of this flight, the doubt and the hazard of it had been
easier to support. As it was, we went on blindly, our hands clasping the
rough boulders, our feet scattering the pebbles of the path; and
conscious through it all that a wild bullet might find a lucky billet
and grass either or both of us as though we had been hares in a tricky
covert. Never was a man more thankful than I when a vast fissure in the
cliff side appeared before us suddenly as a sanctuary door opened by an
unknown friend’s hand. By it we passed gladly, and were instantly lost
to the view of those in the valley; while a profound silence of ultimate
night enveloped us. There was no longer the need to pant and toil upon a
crazy slope. Nature herself had here cut a path, and it appeared to lead
into the very heart of the mountain.
Now, this path we followed, it may have been for some two hundred yards
in a direction parallel to that of the valley we had quitted. Its gentle
declivity brought us in the end to a low cavern of the rock, and here we
found the boatswain, Balaam, sitting with his back to the cliff, smoking
his pipe and guarding his ship’s lantern as calmly as though the scene
had been Rotherhithe and the day a seaman’s Saturday. Hearing our
approach, he bestirred himself sufficiently to fend the light and to ask
a question.
“Would it be the Doctor and the wild man?” he asked, and without waiting
for an answer he ran on, “I kenned your step, Doctor, and said you were
doing finely. There’s firing on the hills, sir, and ye would be wise not
to bide. I’m no gleg at the running myself, but yon manny can take the
licht, and I’ll make shift for myself. Ay, Doctor, but if I had that bit
of an ass the boys go daft upon——”
I told him to show the way and not to talk, though I was glad enough to
hear the good fellow’s voice. His name was Machie, but a donkey ride at
Cowes christened him Balaam for good and all aboard the _White Wings_.
Very methodically now, and with a seaman’s widening lurch, he set out to
cross the cavern, Okyada and I upon his heels and all the mesh of
subterranean wonder about us. Here, for a truth, a man might have feared
to go at all, lantern or no lantern in his hand; for the cavern revealed
the source of the boiling springs, and there was one great chamber of
the rock so dreadful to breathe in, so white with steam and scalding
spray, that my own courage would have recoiled from it but for the
example set me by these brave fellows. They, however, held straight on
without a word spoken, and coming to a clearer air presently they
indicated to me that we were approaching some place of danger, and must
now go with circumspection. Then I saw that the cavern roof narrowed
rapidly until we stood in a passage so regularly moulded that the hand
of man might have excavated it. And beyond this lay the Atlantic,
plainly visible though the night was moonless. Never did a glimpse of
the open water cheer my heart so bravely. Liberty, home, my friends! A
man is a man upon the sea, though every port but one be shut against
him. And the breath of life is in his lungs, and the desire of life at
his heart. Nay, who shall deny it?
A sharp exclamation from the Scotchman, a sudden halt upon my servant’s
part, quickly tempered these reflections upon liberty and brought me
back to a sense of our situation and its dangers. That which they had
seen, I now perceived to be nothing less than the figure of a man
standing with his back to the rock as though guarding the entrance to
the tunnel and there keeping watch, not only upon the path, but upon
another figure which lay prone in the fair way and was, I had no doubt
whatever, a figure of the dead. To come instantly to the conclusion that
the dead was one of our own, and that he had been killed by one of the
rifles whose report we had so recently heard, I found natural enough.
Not only was it my thought, but that of the others with me, and together
we halted in the cavern and asked what we should do. To be sure, we were
not to be affrighted by a single sentry, though he carried a rifle in
his hand; but the certainty that others would be within call, and that a
single cry might bring them upon us, robbed us for a moment of any clear
idea, and held us prisoners of the cave.
“’Twould have been the firing that I heard syne,” the boatswain
whispered.
I turned to Okyada and asked him what we should do. His own uncertainty
was reflected in his attitude. He stood as still as a figure of marble.
“The master wait,” he said presently. “I think that I shall know if the
master wait. Let the lantern be covered. I shall see by the darkness.”
I told him that I forbade him to go, and that it was madness to suppose
that the sentry would stand there alone. He did not hear me,
disappearing immediately upon his words, and being lost to our view as
completely as though the earth had opened and swallowed him up. I shall
always say that a quicker, surer-footed, or more faithful fellow never
lived to earn the gratitude of an unemotional master. My own confidence
in him found its best expression in the complacency with which I waited
for his news. He would kill the sentry if need be—of that I felt
sure—and there was something horrible in the thought that a living man,
whose figure we could see in the dim light beyond the cavern, stood upon
the very brink of eternity and might have spoken his last word on earth.
This reflection was my own. The stolid boatswain made nothing of it. He
covered the lantern methodically and squatted back against the rock.
“Yon yellow laddie’s fine,” he whispered. “’Twould be as good as dead
the man were. Has your honour such a thing as a bit of baccy upon ye?
No; well, I’ll do well wanting it.”
I smiled, but did not answer him. In truth, I had begun to find the
minutes of waiting intolerable. What with the oppressive atmosphere of
the tunnel, the heated, steam-laden air, and upon this the ghostly
fascination of the spectre at the cavern’s mouth, it came to me that my
own strength might not carry me safely through the ordeal. What kept
Okyada? The sentry, on his part, did not appear to have moved since I
had first seen him. There was no sound in the cave save that of the
hissing steam behind us. I could not discover the little figure of my
servant, though I was looking from the darkness toward the light. Had he
come to the conclusion that it was dangerous to go on? This seemed
possible, and I had already taken a few steps towards the tunnel’s mouth
when his figure suddenly emerged into the light, and standing side by
side with the sentry, he uttered that soft, purring whistle which called
to us to come on.
“Yon’s one of our own, then,” the boatswain said, starting to his feet
clumsily.
“Then someone has gone under, and he is keeping watch over him,” I
replied. “God send that it is not one of our crew.”
“Amen to that, sir, though ’twere in a Christian man to say that we maun
all die when the day comes.”
“But not in this cursed island or at the hands of a rascally Jew. The
day will be an unlucky one if it comes here, my man. Put your best foot
foremost, and say that it shall not.”
My words were Greek to him, of course; and he answered me with a strange
oath and an expression of opinion upon Portuguese and others which was
quite valueless. My own curiosity now turned, however, to consider the
odd fact that the sentry remained motionless, and that Okyada did not
appear to have exchanged a single word with him. Who, then, was the man,
and what kept him in that grotesque attitude? At a distance of fifty
yards from the light I could not have told you, but at twenty yards I
understood. The wretched man was as stone dead as his comrade who lay
upon the path. A bullet from an unknown rifle had shot him through the
heart as he stood in ambush waiting for me. So much I hazarded on the
instant. The truth must be made known to me upon the yacht’s deck.
I name the yacht, and this is to tell you in a word that, coming out of
the pit, we espied her, lying off the headland—a picture of life and
light upon the still water. There below, upon the shore, stood the
friends who had known so many anxieties, suffered upon my account such
weary days of waiting, such long hours of strenuous labour since I had
left them. And now I had but to scramble down the rugged cliff side and
clasp their hands, and to tell them that all was well with me. But nine
days away from them, I seemed to have lived a year apart, to have
changed my very self, to be a new man coming into a living world of
action from a grave of dreams.
And what voice more earthly could I have heard than that of the
unsurpassable Timothy McShanus crying, “Me bhoy!” in tones that might
have been heard upon the mountain top?
No, indeed, and Timothy was the first to greet me, and I do believe
there were tears of gladness in his eyes.