HOW LOVE TOOK LOVE TO SANCTUARY
It all seemed monstrous strange to him, now that he had time to think of
the actual fact apart from the difficulties of its accomplishment.
An hour ago he was lying in his bed at Plaisance, in low enough spirits,
indeed, at the outlook before him, but his gloomiest thought had never
plumbed depths such as this.
He wondered briefly if so extreme a step had been really necessary.
And then he heard again the purposeful tramp of those heavy feet on the
Coupée, and fathomed again the menace of them.
And he felt Nance’s guiding hand trembling violently in his once more,
and he said to himself that she and Bernel knew better than he how the
land lay, and that he could not have done other than he had done.
Then he became aware that the dew was drenching him, and so he bent and
groped in the dark for the shelter Nance had spoken of.
The strip of moon had paled as it rose, the huge white stones glimmered
faintly in it, and a darker patch below showed him where the entrance
must be. He crept into the darker patch on his hands and knees, bumping
his head violently, but once inside found room to sit upright. Snaking
out again, he laid hold of the two bundles and the gun, and dragged them
into shelter.
What the bundles contained he could not tell in the dark, but one felt
like a thick woollen cloak, and the other like a blanket, and among
their contents he felt a loaf of bread, and a bottle and a powder-flask.
So he rolled himself up in the blanket and the cloak, and lay wondering
at the strange case in which he found himself, and so at last fell
asleep.
* * * * *
He woke into a dapple of light and shade which filled his wandering wits
with wonder, till, with a start, he came to himself and remembered.
The place he was in was something like a stone bee-hive, about eight
feet across from side to side, with a rounded sloping roof rising at its
highest some four feet from the ground, and the great blocks of which it
was built fitted so ill in places that the sun shot the darkness through
and through with innumerable little white arrows of light. The dark
opening of the night was now a glowing invitation to the day. He shook
off his wraps and crawled out into the open.
And what an open!
He drew deep breaths of delight at the magnificence of his outlook--its
vastness, its spaciousness, its wholesome amplitude and loneliness. He
felt like a new man born solitary into a new world.
The sky, without a cloud, was like a mighty hollowed sapphire, in which
blazed the clear white sun; and the vast plain of the sea, sweeping away
into infinity, was a still deeper blue, with here and there long swathes
of green, and here and there swift-speeding ruffles purple-black.
A brisk easterly breeze set all the face of it a-ripple, and where the
dancing wavelets caught the sun it glanced and gleamed like sheets of
molten silver.
“A silver sea! A silver sea!” he cried aloud, and into his mind there
flashed an incongruous comparison of the bountifulness of Nature’s
silver with the pitiful grains they hacked out of her rocks with such
toil and hardship.
Away to the south across the silver sea the Jersey cliffs shone clear in
the sunshine, and on the dimpling plain between, the black Paternosters
looked so like the sails of boats heading for Sark that he remembered
suddenly that he was in hiding, and dropped to cover alongside the great
stones of his shelter.
But careful observation of the square black objects showed him that they
did not move, and anyway they were much too far away to see him. So he
took courage again, and, full of curiosity concerning his hiding-place,
he crept up the southern slope till he reached the ridge of the roof, so
to speak, and lay there looking over, entranced with the beauty of the
scene before him.
The whole east coast of Sark right up to the Burons, off the Creux, lay
basking in the morning light. Dixcart and Derrible held no secrets from
him; he looked straight up their shining beaches. Their bold headlands
were like giant-fists reaching out along the water towards him.
Brenière, the nearest point to his rock, was another mighty grasping
hand, but between it and him swept a furious race of tossing,
white-capped waves, with here and there black fangs of rock which stuck
up through the green waters as though hungering for prey.
He could just see the upper part of the miners’ cottages on the cliff
above Rouge Terrier, but, beyond these and the ruined mill on Hog’s
Back, not another sign of man and his toilsome, troublesome little
works. But for these, Sark, in its utter loneliness, might have been a
new-found island, and he its first discoverer.
Ranging on, his eye rested on the shattered fragments of Little Sark,
scattered broadcast over the sea about its most southerly point--bare
black pinnacles, ragged ledges, islets, rocklets, reefs, and fangs,
every one of which seemed to stir the placid sea to wildest wrath.
Elsewhere it danced and dimpled in the sunshine, with only the long slow
heave in it to tell of the sleeping giant below, but round each rock,
and up the sides of his own huge pyramid, it swept in great green
combers shot with bubbling white, and went tumbling back upon itself in
rings of boiling foam.
Beyond, he saw the rounded back of Jethou, and just behind it the long
line of houses in Guernsey.
He lay long enjoying it all, with the warm sun on his back, and the
brisk wind toning his blood, but no view, however wonderful, will
satisfy a man’s stomach. He had fed the day before mostly on most
unsatisfying emotions, and now he began to feel the need of something
more solid. So he crept back along the slope to find out what there was
for breakfast.
His stores lay about the floor of his resting-place, just as he had
turned them out in the night; a couple of long loaves, a good-sized
piece of raw bacon, and another of boiled pork which he thought he
recognized, some butter in a cloth, a bottle which looked as if it might
contain spirits, the powder-flask, and a small linen bag containing
bullets, snail-shot, and percussion caps. These, with Bernel’s gun and
the blanket, and the old woollen cloak, which he recognized as Mr.
Hamon’s roquelaure, and his pipe, and the tobacco he happened to have
in his pouch, constituted, for the time being, his worldly possessions.
He spread his cloak and blanket in the sun to dry and air, and, doubtful
whether his rock would supply any further provision or when more might
reach him from Sark, he proceeded to make a somewhat restricted meal of
bread and cold pork.
The raw bacon suggested something of a problem. To cook it he must have
a fire. To have a fire he must have fuel; his tinder-box he always
carried, of course, for the new matches had not yet penetrated to Sark.
Moreover, to light a fire might be dangerous as liable to attract
attention, unless he could do it under cover where no stray gleams could
get out.
He pondered these matters as he ate, spinning out his exiguous meal to
its uttermost crumb to make it as satisfying as possible.
He saw his way at once to perfecting his cover. All about him where he
sat, the grey rock pushed through a thin friable soil like the bones of
an ill-buried skeleton. And everywhere in the scanty soil grew thick
little rounded cushions, half grass, half moss, varying in size from an
apple to a foot-stool, which came out whole at a pluck or a kick. After
breakfast he would plug up every hole in his shelter, and pile
half-a-dozen sizeable pieces outside with which to close the front door.
Then, if he could find anything in the shape of fuel, he saw his way to
a dinner of fried bacon, but it would have to be after dark when the
smoke would be invisible.
But first he must find out about his water supply.
Down at the south end, Nance had said. That must be over there, on that
almost-detached stack of rocks, where the waves seemed to break loudest.
So, after another crawl up to the ridge to make certain that no boats
were about--for he had frequently seen them fishing in the neighbourhood
of L’Etat--he crept down the flank of his pyramid almost to sea-level to
get across to the outer pile.
He had to pick his way with caution across a valley of black rocks,
rifted and chasmed by the fury of the waves. He could imagine--or
thought he could, but came far short of it--how the great green rollers
would thunder through that black gully in the winter storms.
There were great wells lined all round with rich brown sea-weeds, and
narrow chasms in whose hidden depths the waters swooked and gurgled like
unseen monsters, and whose broken edges, on which he had to step, were
like the rough teeth of gigantic saws set up on end alongside one
another.
He crawled across these rough serrations and scaled the rifted black
wall in front, and came at once on a number of shallow pools of
rain-water lying in the hollows of a mighty slab.
But the moment his head rose above the level of the steep black wall his
ears were filled with a deafening roaring and rushing, supplemented by
most tremendous dull thuddings which shook the stack like the blows of a
mighty flail.
From behind a further wall there rose a boiling mist, through which
lashed up white jets of spray which slanted over the rocks beyond in a
continuous torrent.
He crawled to the further wall and looked over into a deep black gully,
some fifteen feet wide and perhaps thirty feet deep, into which, out of
a perfectly calm sea, most monstrous waves came roaring and leaping,
till the whole chasm was foaming and spuming like an over-boiling
milk-pan. In the middle of the chasm, for the further torment of the
waters, was jammed a huge black rock, against which the incoming green
avalanche dashed itself to fragments and went rocketing into the air.
The solid granite at the further end was cleft from summit to base by a
tiny rift a foot wide through which the boiling spume poured out to the
sea beyond.
But the marvel was where those gigantic waves came from. Save for the
dancing wind-ripples and its long, slow internal pulsations, the sea was
as smooth as a pond to within twenty yards of the rocks. Then it
suddenly seemed to draw itself together, to draw itself down into itself
indeed, like a tiger compressing its springs for a leap, and then, with
a rush and a roar, it launched itself at the rocks with the weight of
the ocean behind it, and hurtled blindly into the chasm where the black
rock lay.
It was a most wonderful sight, and Gard sat long watching it, then and
later, fascinated always and puzzled by that extraordinary
self-compression and sudden upleap of the waters out of an otherwise
placid sea.
It was but one more odd expression of Nature’s fantastic humour, and the
nearest he could come to an explanation of it was that, in the sea bed
just there, was some great fault, some huge chasm into which the waters
fell and then came leaping out to further torment on the rocks.
It was as he was returning to his own quarters by a somewhat different
route across the valley of rocks, that he lighted on another find which
contented him greatly.
In one of the saw-toothed chasms he saw a piece of wood sticking up, and
climbed along to get it as first contribution to his fire. And when he
got to it, down below in the gully, he found jammed the whole side of a
boat, flung up there by some high spring tide and trapped before it
could escape. Excellent wood for his firing, well tarred and fairly dry.
He hauled and pulled till he had it all safely up, and then he carried
it, load after load, to his house, and laid it out in the sun to dry
still more.
He worked hard all day, keeping a wary outlook for any stray fishermen.
First he culled a great heap of the thin wiry grass which seemed the
chief product of his rock, and spread it also to dry for a couch. There
was no bracken for bedding, no gorse for firing. The grass would supply
the place of the one, the broken boat the other.
Then he made good all the holes in his walls and roof, except one in the
latter for the escape of the smoke, and built a solid wall of the tufted
cushions round the seaward side of his doorway, as a screen against his
light being seen, and as a protection from the south-west wind if it
should blow up strong in the night.
He found it very strange to be toiling on these elemental matters, with
never a soul to speak to. He felt like a castaway on a desert island,
with the additional oddness of knowing himself to be within reach of his
kind, yet debarred from any communication with them on pain, possibly,
of death.
At times he felt like a condemned criminal, yet knew that he had done no
wrong, and that it was only the mistaken justice of a simple people
that wanted blood for blood, and was not over-heedful as to whose blood
so long as its own sense of justice was satisfied.
But, he kept saying to himself, things might have been worse with him,
very much worse, but for Nance and Bernel. And before long, any day, the
matter might be cleared up and himself reinstated in the opinion of the
Sark men.
Even that would leave much to be desired, but possibly, he thought, if
they found they had sorely misjudged him in this matter, they might
realize that they had done so in other matters also, and that he had
only been striving to do his duty as he saw it.
And then, wherever else his thoughts led him, there was always Nance,
and the thought of Nance always set his heart aglow and braced him to
patient endurance and hope.
He retraced, again and again, all the ways they had travelled together
in these later days, recalled her every word and look, felt again the
trembling of her hand--for him--on the Coupée, heard again the tremors
of her voice as she urged him to safety. And those sweet ingenuous
kisses she had given him! Yes, indeed, he had much to be grateful for,
if some things to cavil at, in fortune’s dealings.
But, behind all his fair white thought of Nance, was always the black
background of the whole circumstances of the case, and the grim fact of
Tom Hamon’s death, and he pondered this last with knitted brows from
every point of view, and strove in vain for a gleam of light on the
darkness.
Could the Doctor be mistaken, and was Tom’s death the simple result of
his fall over the Coupée? The Doctor’s pronouncement, however, seemed
to leave no loophole of hope there.
If not, then who had killed Tom, and why?
He could think of no one. He could imagine no reason for it.
Tom had been a bully at home, but outside he was on jovial terms with
his fellows--except only himself. He had to acknowledge to himself the
seeming justice of the popular feeling. If any man in Sark might, with
some show of reason, have been suspected of the killing of Tom Hamon, it
was himself.
Once, by reason of overmuch groping in the dark, an awful doubt came
upon him--was it possible that, in some horrible wandering of the mind,
of which he remembered nothing, he had actually done this thing? Done it
unconsciously, in some over-boiling of hot blood into the brain, which
in its explosion had blotted out every memory of what had passed?
It was a hideous idea, born of over-strain and overmuch groping after
non-existent threads in a blind alley.
He tried to get outside himself, and follow Stephen Gard that night and
see if that terrible thing could have been possible to him.
But he followed himself from point to point, and from moment to moment,
and accounted for himself to himself without any lapse whatever; unless,
indeed, his brain had played him false and he had gone out of the house
again after going into it, and followed Tom and struck him down.
With what? The Doctor said with some blunt instrument like a hammer.
Where could he have obtained it? What had he done with it?
The idea, while it lasted, was horrible. But he shook it off at last
and called himself a fool for his pains. He had never harboured thought
of murder in his life. He had detested Tom, but he had never gone the
length of wishing him dead. The whole idea was absurd.
All these things he thought over as, his first essential labours
completed, he lay under the screen of the ridge and watched the sun
dropping towards Guernsey in a miracle of eventide glories.
Below him, the long slow seas rocketted along the ragged black base of
his rock with mighty roarings and tumultuous bursts of foam, and on the
ledges the gulls and cormorants squabbled and shrieked, and took long
circling flights without fluttering a wing, to show what gulls could do,
or skimmed darkly just above the waves and into them, to show that
cormorants were never satisfied. And now and again wild flights of
red-billed puffins swept up from the water and settled out of his sight
at the eastern end of the rock, and he promised himself to look them up
some other day if opportunity offered.
From the constant tumult of the seas about his rock, except just at low
water, he saw little fear of being taken by surprise, even if his
presence there became known. Twice only in the twenty-four hours did it
seem possible for any one to effect a landing there, and at those times
he promised himself to be on the alert.
He lay there till the sun had gone, and the pale green and amber, and
the crimson and gold of his going had slowly passed from sea and sky,
and left them grey and cold; till a single light shone out on Sark,
which he knew must be in one of the miners’ cottages, and many lights
twinkled in Guernsey; till beneath him he could no longer see the sea,
but only the white foam fury as it boiled along the rocks. Then he crept
away to his burrow, rejoicing in the thought of the companionship of a
fire and hot food.