THE RED CAVE.
There was no mistaking that figure, and if the figure had not been
ample confirmation of identity, there were the full widow's weeds,
and, above all, the pale, placid face. The full light of the unclouded
sun fell on her. The distance was not great, and she stood out in bold
relief against the white field of cloud stretching across the northern
sky.
On impulse, Alfred rose in the boat, and took off his hat and bowed.
She returned his salute, and without a moment's pause drew back from
the edge on which she had been standing, and disappeared from view.
"Mrs. Davenport!" said Phelan, forgetting his ill-humour in his
surprise. "What a place for a lady to be all by herself! I thought
Mrs. Davenport was away somewhere in foreign parts."
Alfred sat down. The boatmen had resumed their oars, and the yawl was
gliding steadily through the water.
"Is the Rock really dangerous at this time?" asked Alfred anxiously of
Phelan. O'Brien was buried in thought, and did not heed what the
others were saying.
"Not dangerous now, sir--not dangerous when the water is so smooth and
the air so calm; but if there's a little sea on, and a little breeze,
you never know what may happen here. Sometimes the sea alone will do
it, and sometimes the wind alone will do it, and sometimes both
together won't do it. You can only be sure she'll spout when the sea
is high and the wind a strong gale from the south-west. What surprises
me to see the lady there is because the place has a bad name, and she
was just standing on the worst spot of all when we saw her first."
"How a bad name, and how the worst place of all? Are you quite sure
there is no danger to the lady now?" asked Alfred, struggling
violently and successfully to conceal his extraordinary solicitude.
"I am perfectly sure there is no danger of the spout now. The reason I
said it has a bad name is because of all the people who were carried
off that Rock; and where Mrs. Davenport stood is just the worst spot
of all."
"But Mrs. Davenport must know the Rock well. I dare say, as her house
is near, she often comes to see it."
"Ay, she may often come to see it. But to see it and to walk on it are
different things. There are very few women in the village who would
care to go on it without a man to lend them a hand. Why, sir, it's as
slippery as ice, and two people fell and were killed on it out of
regard to its slipperiness."
"Is there no way of landing here?"
"No, sir. You can't get a foot ashore anywhere nearer than Kilcash.
You might, of course, land on many a rock here and there, but you
couldn't get up the cliffs. It's iron-bound for miles."
"But could not the lady be cautioned in some way? She could hear a
shout even though we cannot see her. She cannot yet be out of
hearing?" Paulton could scarcely sit still in the boat.
"And suppose she could hear a shout, sir, what could you tell her she
doesn't know? Do you think Mrs. Davenport has lived all these years
and years a mile from the Black Rock, and doesn't know as much as any
of us could tell her about it? Why, she lives nearer to it than any
one else in the world! Her next-door neighbours are, I may say, the
ghosts of men who lost their lives on that very spot."
"What is that you're saying?" asked O'Brien, coming suddenly out of
his reverie.
"Only, sir, that Mrs. Davenport's next-door neighbours are the ghosts
of the men who lost their lives on the Black Rock."
O'Brien looked in amazement at the boatman. He had been recalled from
his abstraction by the word "ghost;" but he had not fancied, when he
asked his question, that the answer would lie so close to the thoughts
which had been occupying his mind a moment before. For a while he
could not clear his mind of the effect of this coincidence.
"What on earth do you know or guess about the matter, Phelan?" he
cried, quite taken off his guard.
"I suppose I know as much about the Rock as any man of my years along
the coast," answered Phelan, with a slight return of his former
sullenness.
O'Brien at once saw that he had made a mistake, that Phelan's words
were perfectly consistent with ignorance of what he knew of the Fahey
affair--or, indeed, with the absence of intention to refer to the
Fahey affair. He hastened to put himself right.
"Of course you do, Phelan," said he cordially. "No man knows more than
you. Excuse me for what I said. I was thinking of something else when
you spoke, and I did not exactly hear what you said. I did not mean to
annoy you. I was only stupid myself."
Jim Phelan considered this a very handsome and ample apology, not only
for the words just then spoken, but for what had occurred a few
minutes before.
"He was thinking, poor gentleman," thought Phelan, "of those
blackguards of Commissioners. I know how anxious a man gets about
fish."
"He was thinking," thought Alfred, "of Madge. I know all about that
kind of thing."
He had not been thinking of one or the other. He was wondering how
Mrs. Davenport would have been affected if the figure of Fahey
suddenly rose before her on that Rock.
"This, sir," said the boatman, addressing Alfred, the stranger, "is
what we call the Red Gap, and the cave beyond is what we call the Red
Gap Cave--or the Gap Cave, or the Red Cave, for short."
Alfred looked around him, and then up.
Above towered the great perpendicular cliffs, silent and forlorn. From
the dark green water at their bases, to the hard, dark line they made
against the azure plain of sky that roofed the chasm, was no break, in
form or colour, no noteworthy ledge or hollow, no clinging weeds below
or verdurous patch above. All was smooth, and bluff, and huge, and
liver-coloured.
A peculiar silence, a silence of a new and startling quality, filled
the gigantic cleft. The silence abroad upon the sea was that in which
vast spaciousness engulfed sound. Here adamantine walls, beetling and
threatening, a thousand feet thick, stood between the stagnant air and
the large breathings of the sea. The atmosphere was dense, motionless,
inert with salt vapours. The prodigious circumvallation of cliff
crushed vitality out of the air. There was a breathless whisper of
water against the sea line of the ramparts, and deep in the gorge of
the cave a smothered snore, like the hushed breathing of some
stupendous monster.
The yawl glided slowly up between the closing walls of the Red Gap. No
one spoke. The two boatmen were indifferent to the place. O'Brien and
Paulton were lost in thoughts of diverse kinds, awakened by the
spectacle of Mrs. Davenport on the Black Rock. None of the men was
paying attention to the Gap.
At last a sudden darkness fell upon the boat. O'Brien and Paulton
looked up. The sky was no longer overhead. A gloom of purple brown was
above them. The light of day stood like a lofty, luminous pillar in
their wake. They had entered the Red Cave.
The boatmen ceased rowing, and Phelan lit a torch.
For a few moments nothing could be seen but the blazing red torch
flare against a vast black blank, and round the glowing red boat a
narrow pool of glaring orange water.
No one moved. No sound informed the silence but the hiss of the torch
and the profound sighs of distant, impenetrable hollows.
The water illumined near the boat looked trustworthy, denser than
water, a ruddy platform with shadowy verge. No undulation moved over
its face save a dulling ripple caused by the boat's imperceptible
motion. The boat and figures in it seemed the golden boss of a fiery
brazen shield hung in a night of chaos.
Alfred Paulton put his hand outward and downward. It touched the
gleaming surface of the water. He drew his hand back with a start. The
cold of the water froze his fingers, his soul. The water shone like
solid metal, felt less buoyant than the ruddy air he breathed. Instead
of resting on a firm plain of luminous beaten gold, the boat hung on a
faint, thin fluid over a sightless abyss.
This was a terrible place. Here was nothing but space for thought--for
visions and fears too awful to dwell upon. Nothing was surer than that
no loathsome dangers lurked, or swam, or hung pendulous above. Nothing
was surer than that the imagination crouched back from dreads which
had never affrighted it before.
This water was only phantom water. It was no better than the spume of
sea-mists held between invisible crags of blackness, of mute eternity.
If one should fall out into that water, he would sink through it swift
as lead through air. One would shoot down, and down, and down, giddy,
but not stunned. One would sink--whither? Whither? To what fell
intimacy with dripping rocks and clammy weeds and slime would one
come? What agonising sense of impending gloom reaching infinitely
upwards would lie upon one, as one fell! Would the falling ever cease?
Never, never. Nor would one live, for to fall thus for a moment of
time would serve to fill the infinite of eternity with chimeras of
ebon adamant too foul for human eyes.
The oars dipped. The boat moved forward into the immeasurable
vagueness of shadow--into this sleeping chamber of night. It glided
over the silent floor between hushed arras, which saw neither the
gaudy sun that drowns in light the tender whisperings of the sea, nor
the silver moon that hearkens forlorn to the faint complainings of the
weary waves, arras woven of the flame of earth's primal fire, and
limned by night in the smoke of ancient chaos.
Something floated from the side of the boat and shone a while in the
wake, and then was lost in the darkness as the boat moved slowly on.
"Keep her west," whispered a voice in the boat.
"We're keeping west," whispered another voice in the boat. The noise
of the oars in the rowlocks clanked in the echoes like the
complainings of a gigantic wheel whose bearings were dry. The whispers
came back from the echoes like the whispers of a Titan whose teeth
were gone, and whose tongue was thick with age or clumsy with disease.
The voice of the giant seemed near--on a level with the head. It
stirred the hair.
The torch went out.
"Light--give us light," whispered a voice in the boat.
"Wait. Watch astern," whispered another voice.
"Astern," whispered the awful, almost inarticulate voice close to the
ear, in the hair.
Then all was still. The oars stopped. All eyes were, unseeing, turned
in the direction whence the boat had come. The faintest glimmer
indicated the opening to the cave. All was black as the heart of
unhewn granite.
"Now watch," whispered a voice in the boat.
"Now watch," whispered the echo against the throat and neck.
"On no account start or stir. The report will be very loud. Hold on to
the thwarts. I am going to fire!"
Blended with the earlier portion of this speech, the echoes gave back
a sharp battering sound like that of throwing metal from a height.
This was the cocking of the gun.
When this sound ceased, the echo whispered:
"Fire!"
A jagged rod of flame and luminous smoke shot outwards and upwards
into the black void from the boat aft, and cleared the black space for
a moment.
Then the clash and clangour of a thousand shattered echoes close at
hand bore downward on the head and bent the head, while out of
far-reaching caverns thunders were torn with shrieks and yells and
flung against concave-resounding roofs, until the whole still air of
the monstrous hollows roared, and secret off-spring tombs of darkness,
never seen by man, answered with fearful groans and shrieks of the
Mother Cave.
Paulton let go the thwart, bent his head, flung his arms up, and
crossed them over his head.
Here was the solid earth riven through and through with prodigious
thunders of all the heavens!
The roar of sound fell to a shout, the shout to a groan, the groan to
a mutter. Then all was still, stiller than before--still with the
silence of annihilation accomplished. Nothing that had been was. The
echoes were dead, and would speak no more. The material had failed to
be, and only darkness and the unweary spirit of man remained.
A voice whispered, "Watch."
Some lingering phantom of an echo whispered in ghostly gutturals,
"Watch!"
There was a hiss, a purple commotion on the surface of the water, in
the air on the wake of the boat. A cone of intense red flame, as thick
as a man's arm, rose up from the level of the water in the wake, and
stood a cubit high:
The air took fire and burned, and out from the brown darkness leaned
huge polished pillars, copper-red, and broken walls, smooth pilasters,
and architraves keen with light, and sightless gargoyles blurred with
fire, and cloisters whose rich arches dripped with flame, and
buttresses with fierce outlines impacted on plutonian shade, plinths
with shafts of Moorish lightness and arabesques with ruby tags, sturdy
bastions and flat curtains, broken Gothic windows, capitals of
acanthus leaves flushed with ruddy flare.
Aloft yawned arches and domes and hollow towers, vast in sombre
distances and sultry with hidden fires. The secrets of their depths no
eye could pierce. They were abysmal homes of viewless voices--homes of
virgin night.
Hither and thither, chapels and aisles and corridors and galleries,
reached from the great central space into the copper gloom. Here above
the surface of watery floor stood columns of fallen pillars, masses of
broken walls, points of ruined spires.
In the centre of the level floor rose a block of stone, flat, a little
above the surface of the water, and on this the headless form of a
colossal figure, showing in rude outline like an Egyptian sphinx.
The ground was polished red granite here and there, ribbed with ruby
marble, that shone with dazzling brightness against the aqueous glare.
On the pedestal of the sphinx the men of the boat landed, and stood to
gaze upon this Pompeii beneath Vesuvia's pall--this subterranean
Venice in ruins--this water-floored Heliopolis without the sun!
There was a loud hiss. The blood-red architecture thrust forward in
fiercer light. A louder reverberating hiss, and all was dark!
Everything had vanished--had drawn back into immeasurable darkness.
The crimson light had burned down to the level of the tiny raft which
bore it, and the water of the cave had quenched its flame.
All was black darkness, turn which way one might.
"Light!" whispered Paulton, overcome by what he had heard and seen.
"What is that?" asked O'Brien, catching Phelan's hand, and pointing
down to where the western gallery had glowed a minute ago. Light was
seen piercing the cliff to the westward.
For a while no answer was given. Then, in accents of awe and fear, the
boatman answered:
"A light--a light made by no mortal hand!"
Far down in the gloom of the western gallery a yellow spot shone!