THE PIXIES' HOLE.
On the following evening Sybil had set forth on an errand of charity
to one of the many poor who blessed the bounteous hand of her
mother--the widow of a fisherman who had perished during the pilchard
season in the past summer--and she meant to return, as she stated, by
the sea-shore.
Sybil had much cause for thought, and was somewhat disposed to linger
on the way. The ample means enjoyed by her parents on the one hand,
with the general seclusion of their lives on the other, and their
studied avoidance of society when in England, had now given the girl
much reason for reflection.
Her papa's mysterious absence too, and her mamma's nervous anxiety
about American letters, were not without singularity; and why had
both so sedulously abstained from all introduction to the family of
the Trecarrels, who were greatly esteemed in the neighbourhood, and
who were undoubtedly people of the best style? By the system of
which this seemed merely a portion, she was even now debarred from
having properly presented to her this Mr. Audley Trevelyan, who
seemed so well disposed to admire--perhaps, to love her.
"We have made but few acquaintances and, of course, still fewer
friends at Porthellick," said Sybil, half aloud; "now why is it
thus--to have means in plenty and so few to love us? What can be the
reason? Mamma has some _secret_; but what can that secret be? Poor
mamma--she looks so sweet always, and yet so sad at times!"
She would write to Denzil, she thought, on the subject of these
mysteries; but Denzil was yet at sea, and it would be long, long,
before she might receive his answer; and, then, there would be an
awkwardness in their parents' reading, as they would certainly wish
to do, his letters and perceiving the doubts she had suggested--the
secrets she wished to probe. Perhaps when her papa, whose especial
pet she wras, returned, she might venture to give some hints, to make
some inquiries; and as she saw the white sails of the shipping and
the smoke of many a passing steamer, she lifted her eyes to heaven
with an unuttered prayer in her heart, that she might soon again hear
his voice and cast herself into his arms.
By one of those lanes peculiar to Cornwall, where the old road is
sunk so deep in the ground and the bordering walls are so high that
the surrounding scenery is sometimes hidden, lanes where in summer
the elms cast their leafy shadows, and the fragrant wild rose and
honeysuckle mingle with the long tangles of the bramble, Sybil
reached the shore and descended to the very margin of the sea.
It was one of those evenings which, even in the last days of autumn,
come to the rocky and rugged duchy, when the atmosphere is so mild
and balmy that one might think it was in the early weeks of spring,
when the grey cliffs and purple moorland glisten in the yellow rays
as the sunlight falls softly between the flying clouds, on land and
sea; and the sparkling stream, that rolls from rock to rock on its
passage to the shore, makes music in its plash as it falls from the
cascade into the pool below, where the brown trout lurks in safety
and unseen; and Sybil, as she wandered on, felt, she knew not why, an
emotion of calm and contentment growing in her heart.
But in its serenity and beauty the evening was deceptive, and old
fishermen on the heights, and other weather-beaten salts who
lingered, telescope in hand, on many a rude pier that jutted into the
Bristol Channel, when looking seaward detected that which the
landsman saw not--the tokens of a coming storm; for seamen have
strange instincts peculiarly their own, and can read the sky like the
pages of a mighty book.
Across the sea the sun, now setting, poured a steady stream of golden
radiance, like a broad and glittering pathway from the far horizon to
the very shore, by the margin of which Sybil was now lingering; and
it tinted with warm light the flinty brow of many a storm-beaten
headland, and those fantastic piles of grey granite which cap the
hills in Cornwall, and are there called _carns_.
Seated on a fragment of rock, lulled by the regular and monotonous
rolling of the surge, Sybil was immersed in thoughts of her absent
father and brother, each now traversing the same sea, and yet so far
apart upon its waters; she thought of Audley Trevelyan. Should she
ever meet him in society as she wished to do? A little time and it
might be too late, for Rose Trecarrel was so lovely, and already
seemed to consider him as her own property; for it was by her side he
sat in church, where they used the same books, and it was she that he
usually shawled or cloaked first for the carriage; so if they were
not already engaged, they might very soon be so.
Amid this reverie she was startled by a distant voice holloing, and
apparently to her. She looked up, and on the summit of a cliff that
overhung the shore, some two hundred feet or so above where she was
seated, a man was gesticulating violently and beckoning to her.
Was he mad or tipsy? was her mamma ill; or what did this person mean?
She listened intently and thought she heard her own name; he was
evidently addressing her, and pointing to the sea. At last his voice
distinctly reached her ear.
"Look out, Miss Devereaux,--the tide is coming in!"
She glanced hastily round her, and a chill struck upon her heart, for
the fragment of granite on which she sat was almost environed by the
encroaching sea, and the stripe of yellow sand, by which she had been
walking at the base of the cliffs, was nearly covered by the surf,
which was already chafing white and angrily about the rocky headlands
which formed the horns of a little bay.
Heedless of wetting her feet, Sybil gathered her skirts in her hand
and rushed shoreward, when a greater terror smote her heart as she
looked around her. The man on the cliff had disappeared; no aid
seemed nigh, and no living thing was visible save a solitary chough
or red-legged crow, which was perched on a fragment of rock, from
whence he eyed her in quiet security.
She was at a part of the coast where the land receded and the sea
advanced between two headlands of granite, precipitous and sheer, but
crowned by groves of ancient trees. The water, as yet, was smooth as
a mill-pond within the bay, and reflected in its glassy depths the
coast that towered above it; while no sound came along the vast
expanse of shore, save the hollow gurgle of the flowing tide, as it
sought the recesses of the many caverns and fissures in the lower
rocks. In the offing, however, the rising waves were edged with
white, and this sign, together with the lowering sky and gathering
clouds, showed that the coming night would be a rough one.
From the stripe of sandy beach, now nearly covered by the incoming
sea, the only path lay round a little moss-grown slope at the base of
an enormous rock, from whence it wound upward to the verge of a steep
precipice and led to the deep old lane, already described. Over this
mossy and angular ledge the angry tide had already rolled its spray,
consequently it was too slippery for the footsteps of the affrighted
girl, who, after thrice approaching it, finally shrunk back, and ran,
with wetted feet, towards the centre of the bay, keeping close to the
sheer cliffs, against which the flowing sea was rising fast, and
beginning to surge and boom, throwing masses of foam and froth over
her whole person, while the scared seagulls and puffins whirled in
flights around her.
Once or twice a wild shriek escaped Sybil; then her voice began to
fail her, and she could only utter prayers that were earnest, deep,
and piteous.
Wildly and despairingly she looked upward to the summits of the
cliffs; they were impending and inaccessible, by their gloomy outline
fully illustrating the influence and fury of what is called "the
Atlantic drift," which is especially turned into the Bristol Channel,
where the rocks, by the waves for ever heaving and rolling in mighty
undulations, are worn into concave fronts, and form thus a hopeless
barrier to the shipwrecked, and to all who might seek to ascend them.
She turned seaward with haggard eyes and wrung her poor little hands;
not a boat was near, and nothing now was visible between the horns of
the bay save the smoke of some distant steamer, hull-down below the
horizon line, as she sped on her way to the coast of Ireland. The
flowing tide was above Sybil's ankles now; she knew that at high
water it would mount to several feet, and that ere long her drowned
corse should be dashed and battered, at the sport of the waves,
against those very rocks at which she glanced so despairingly!
The man who had seen from their summit and warned her--where was he
now, and who was he? He knew her name, and yet had he abandoned her
to her fate in that terrible place, with the sea and the darkness
closing fast around her; for the sun had set and dun clouds were
piled in stormy masses now, where so lately all was golden sheen.
Suddenly she bethought her of a cavern in the rocks known as the
Pixies' Hole, which her brother Denzil had often explored--a gloomy
place, the haunt at times of the seal and of the _zart_, as old
Cornish folks called the sea-urchin. It was one of those great
caverns in which, in the barbarous times of old, the Cornish men took
shelter from the Romans and Saxons, just as the children of Israel
did from the Midianites in the dens of the mountains; and there, by
local superstition, still abode, unscared by the whistle of the
adjacent railway, certain little beings known as the Pixies, who came
hither from Devonshire on dark nights, mounted on the farmers'
horses, and were heard to sing in its recesses while pounding their
cider.
Gathering her skirts again, the poor girl dashed through the water,
and ere long reaching the mouth of the cavern, clambered in
breathlessly, falling, the while, more than once on her tender hands,
when her feet slipped, on the glassy surface of the sea-weedy rocks
and stones, which covered all the ascent to this gaunt and gloomy
place of refuge.
She knew that it penetrated far inland, and hoped that there for a
time she should be safe; but there would be hours of darkness, cold,
and captivity to endure, ere the ebb of the tide would permit her to
escape, and by that time what must be the terror of her poor mamma!
When fairly within this place her courage rose a little, for she saw
that it closely resembled a grotto she had frequently visited and
sketched--the Cave of Porthmellin. The floor of this great fissure
in the rocks ascended at an angle from the shore, mid as the tide
advanced, Sybil found herself compelled to retire further and further
still, inward and upward amid its dreary uncertainties, while the
rising tide, now rolling into the bay with the full force of a west
wind, began to surge with a sound as of thunder, about the mouth by
which she had entered, and that orifice seemed to lessen rapidly as
the water rose within it.
The roar of the sea woke a hundred weird echoes amid the impenetrable
gloom beyond her; while the view outward from the point now attained
by the breathless and affrighted girl, for a time proved strange and,
to her artistic eye, full of wonderful effects. The walls of rock
were dark, and yet so polished by time and the seas of ages as to
emit reflected light, and to reveal little pools of crystal water
lying still and motionless in fissures and crevices, where star-fish,
shells, and hermit-crabs had been left by the last ebb-tide.
With growing terror Sybil could perceive that by each successive wave
the mouth of her refuge grew smaller, and it was evident that ere
long it would be covered by the sea, while she should be shut within!
A cry escaped her with this awful conviction; but she uttered no
more, for the echoes of her voice came back to her strangely and with
melancholy variations, as if from vast distances. If the cavern
mouth were totally submerged, should she be suffocated; or if not,
might she otherwise too surely die of cold, and lie there till some
holiday explorer, or some boy in search of puffins' nests, found her
remains? A cold current of air that swept past her from within the
cavern warned her that it had an outlet somewhere; but it filled her
soul with greater terror, for she remembered to have heard Denzil,
old Derrick Braddon, and others say, that the Pixies' Hole terminated
in the shaft of an old and long unused mine, down which she might
fall and be dashed to a very pulp, if she ventured one foot further;
for all was gloomy horror round her now; and as her knees yielded
under her, and she sank upon them to pray, she felt the still rising
tide flow over them as it had rolled completely above the rocky arch
of the cave and submerged it!
Feeling the ground with her hands outspread, the unhappy girl
continued to creep a few yards further in, and then she paused, for
all that she knew to the contrary, on the very verge of the fatal
mine!
One little while she was full of pious resignation to die, for she
had lived an innocent and guiltless life. She drew from her bosom a
locket and fervently kissed it, as it contained the hair of her
parents and Denzil--all she loved on earth. She knelt with her bowed
head between her hands to shut out the horrid booming and sucking
sounds of the sea in the lower part of the cave, and closing her
eyes, as if the more to concentrate her thoughts, burst into
passionate and vehement prayer.
Then anon the horror of death--and especially of such a death, amid
gloom and darkness, unseen, unpitied, and unknown, would draw from
her a piteous wail, that was lost amid the bellowing of the sea, for
a storm of wind had now risen in the channel.
Of that newly-found admirer whom she had been learning to love,
Audley Trevelyan, she had totally ceased to think; her heart was
wholly occupied by thoughts of her papa, her mamma, her brother
Denzil--all of whom she might never, never see more!
Dread of falling headlong down the shaft of the ancient mine, more
than a thousand feet, perhaps, made her, we have said, pause
breathlessly, and lie on the sloping floor of rock, listening to her
watery death coming nearer and nearer with a gurgling sound, that, to
her nervous and excited imagination, seemed like the chuckle of a
destroying fiend! The dark unspeakable himself was alleged by the
peasantry to frequent the oozy recess of the Pixies' Hole, and the
bottom of the old shaft was said, by the same veracious authorities,
to be haunted by the unquiet spirits of ancient miners, who had
perished there in the time of old.
Rapidly, yet terribly, through the mind of Sybil, then, as she fully
believed herself to be, hovering on the verge of death, came back the
eighteen years of her past life; at Como, in the old palace by the
Arno; among the Apennines and the wild Abruzzi; Rome, Athens, and
elsewhere, all passed before her like a rapid phantasmagoria--days
and hours of happiness and pleasure. The faces and voices of her
parents and her brother so beloved, came vividly amid those memories
of their strange and aimless wandering in foreign lands. The secret
of her mother--whatever it was--she should never learn now; but
gleams of hope and the desire to live, mingled with the blackness of
her despair, for existence seemed sweet, and she felt so young to
die, when a long life should be before her.
At Porthellick she must long since have been missed, and her fancy
pictured the agony of her lonely and tender mother; the wild, noisy
grief of Winny Braddon, and the honest anxiety of those who might be
fruitlessly seeking for her along the cliffs or through the bay by
boats; seeking for her alive or dead.
All their search would be vain, for the tide was still rising, and
now where she stood, not daring to go further, the water flowed above
her knees. A little time, a very little time more, and she should be
lying drowned, the sport of the waves within the Pixies' Hole, or
borne by them in their reflux, into the mighty waste of sea that
washes the rugged shore of Cornwall.
A shrill cry escaped her as the water flowed to her waist; and
gaspingly she felt with her hands for a little ledge of rock, up
which she clambered, being in her terror endued by unnatural
strength; and then, dripping and despairing, she felt a numbness come
over all her faculties, which prevented her responding to certain
strange sounds, somewhat like those of human voices mingled with the
barking of a dog, now coming out of the inner gloom, while again a
superstitious dread, the result of Winny Braddon's teaching, began to
mingle with her more solid fears and sufferings.