Little Sark provides ample opportunity for the adventurous scrambler,
and Graeme, having tested the novel sensation of those delicious
heart-thrills, was eager for more.
They prowled round the old silver mines, and sat on the great rocks at
Port Gorey which had in those olden times served for a jetty, while he
told them how Peter Le Pelley had mortgaged the island to further his
quest after the silver, and how a whole ship-load of it sank within a
stone's throw of the place where they sat, and with it the Seigneur's
hopes and fortunes.
They peered into the old houses and down the disused shafts, lined now
with matted growth of ivy and clinging ferns,--the bottomless pits
into which the Le Pelley heritage had disappeared. Then he took them
for mild refection to Mrs. Mollet's cottage; and after a rest,--and
with their gracious permission, a pipe,--he led them across to the
wild south walls of the island, with their great chasms and fissures
and tumbled strata, their massive pinnacles, and deep narrow inlets
and tunnels where the waves champed and roared in everlasting
darkness.
The dogs harried the rabbits untiringly, Punch in long lithe bounds
that were a joy to behold; Scamp in panting hysterics which gave
over-ample warning of his coming and precluded all possibilities of
capture.
Graeme led them down the face of the cliff fronting L'Etac, the great
rock island that was once a part of Little Sark itself.
"Once upon a time there was a Coupée across here," he said. "Some time
our Coupée will disappear and Little Sark will be an island also."
"Not before we get back, I hope," said Miss Penny.
"Not before we get back, _I_ hope," said Graeme, for would he not hold
Margaret's hand again on the homeward journey?
Down the cliff, along white saw-teeth of upturned veins of quartz,
with Margaret's hand in his, then back for Miss Penny, till they sat
looking down into a deep dark basin, almost circular: lined with the
most lovely pink and heliotrope corallines: studded with anemones,
brown and red and green: every point and ledge decked with
delicately-fronded sea-ferns and mosses: and the whole overhung with
threatening masses of rock.
"Venus's Bath," he told them. "Those round stones at the bottom have
churned about in there for hundreds of years, I suppose. The tide
fills it each time, as you will see presently, but the stones cannot
get out and they've helped to make their own prison-house,--wherein I
perceive a moral. It's a delicious plunge from that rock."
"You bathe here?" asked Margaret.
"I and the dogs bathe here at times. There's one other thing you must
see, and I think you may see it to-day. The tide is right, and the
wind is right, and there's a good sea on."
They waited till the long waves came swirling up over the rocks and
filled the basin and set the great round stones at the bottom grinding
angrily. Then off again along the splintered face of the cliff, one by
one, that is two by two over the difficult bits, till he had them
seated among some ragged boulders with the waves foaming white below
them, and swooking and plunking in hidden hollow places.
The wind was rising, and the crash of the seas on the rocks made
speech impossible. He pointed suddenly along the cliff face, and not
twenty yards away, with a hiss and a roar, a furious spout of water
shot up into the air a rocket of white foam, a hundred feet high, and
fell with a crash over the rocks and into the sea.
Twenty times they watched it roar up into the sky, and then they
crawled back up the face of the cliff, wind-whipped and rosy-faced,
and with the taste of salt in their mouths.
"That is a fine sight," said Margaret, with sparkling eyes and diamond
drops in her wind-blown hair. He thought he had never seen her so
absolutely lovely before. He had certainly never seen anyone to
compare with her.
"That's the Souffleur--the blow-hole. There's a bigger one still in
Saignie Bay, we'll look it up if the wind gets round to the
north-west. I'm glad you've seen this one. It was just a chance."
"I'm blow-holed all to rags, and, Meg, your hair is absolutely
disgraceful," said Miss Penny. So differently may different eyes
regard the same object, especially when the heart has a say in it. He
would have given all he was worth for an offered lock of that
wind-blown hair.
As Margaret turned she caught his eye, perhaps caught something of
what was in it.
"Am I as bad as all that?" she laughed in rosy confusion.
"You're"--he began impetuously, but caught himself in time.--"You're
all right. When you go to see the Souffleur you must expect to get a
bit blown."
"It's worth it," she said. "And I'm sure we're much obliged to you for
taking us. We could never have got there alone."
"We'd never have got to Little Sark, to say nothing of the Souffleur,"
said Miss Penny very emphatically.
"And now perhaps you'll forgive me for making you buy those shoes."
"My, yes! They're great," said Miss Penny, looking critically at her
feet. "But decidedly they're not beautiful."
X
They loitered homewards, chatting discursively of many things, in a
way that made for intimacy. Miss Penny and Graeme, indeed, still did
most of the actual speaking, as he remembered afterwards, but Margaret
was in no way outside their talk, and if she did not say much it is
probable that she listened and thought none the less.
The Coupée afforded Graeme another all-too-short span of delight,
while Margaret's hand throbbed in his and she entrusted herself to his
protection.
He took them home by the Windmill, and through the fields and
hedge-gaps into the grounds of the Red House, and in his heart's eye
saw Margaret standing once more in the opening of the tall hedge with
the morning glory all about her--just as he would remember her all his
life.
"Time?" demanded Miss Penny, as they passed along the verandah.
"Half-past seven."
"Then you are half an hour late for your dinner. I propose that we ask
Mrs. Carré to serve us all together to-night," said Miss Penny, "or we
may all fare the worse."
"I shall be delighted," began Graeme exuberantly, "unless--" and he
snapped a glance at Miss Brandt.
"We shall be glad if you will join us," she said quickly.
"I will be there in two minutes," he said, and sped up the Red House
stairs to make ready.
"I hope to goodness he won't," said Miss Penny, as they passed through
the hedge. "Now don't you say a word to me, Margaret Brandt. It was
you invited him"
"Oh!"
"'We shall be glad if you will join us.' If that isn't an invitation
I'd like to know what it is. And I heard you say it with my own two
ears,--moi qui vous parle, as we say here."
"You know perfectly well that I could not possibly do anything else,
Hennie. I believe you just did it on purpose. I don't know what's come
over you."
"John Graeme. I like him. And after all he'd done for us--that Coupée,
and Venus's Bath, and the Souffleur, and he like to lose his dinner
over it all! What could a kind motherly person like me do but
suggest--simply suggest, in the vaguest manner possible--"
"Yes?--" as she stopped in a challenging way.
"I merely threw out the suggestion, I say, in the vaguest possible
way, that as we were nearly dying of hunger he should allow us to ask
Mrs. Carré to let us have our dinner half an hour earlier than
usual--"
"Oh!"
"And then you struck in, in your usual lordly fashion, and begged him
to join us. And I'm bound to say he took it very well, not to say
jumped at it."
"Hennie, you're a--"
"Yes, I know. And if I live I'll be a be-a, and perhaps more
besides,"--with a cryptic nod.
"Now, what do you mean by that?"
"Wait patiently, my child, and you'll see."
"I believe the Sark air is affecting your--whatever you've got inside
that giddy head of yours."
"Of course it is. That's what I came for, and to keep you out of
mischief, you infantile law-breaker."