HOW HE CAME HOME FROM L’ETAT
This is what had happened.
Since Tom Hamon’s death, his friend Peter and his widow Julie had, as we
know, found themselves drawn together by a common detestation of Stephen
Gard and a common desire for his extinction.
For Peter considered he had been supplanted in Nance’s regards, though
Nance had never regarded him as anything but a nuisance and a boor. And
Julie considered herself scorned and slighted, though Gard had never
considered her save as Tom Hamon’s wife.
It was they who had stirred up the Sark men against Gard, and they
missed no opportunity of keeping their ill brew on the boil.
Their offensive alliance brought them much together. Peter was often at
La Closerie. He was like wax in the hands of the fiery Frenchwoman, and
she moulded him to her will. The neighbours might have begun to talk,
but that it was obvious to all that the only bond between them at
present was their ill-will towards Gard, and in that feeling many shared
and found nothing strange in Tom’s wife and Tom’s chief friend joining
hands to make some one pay for his death.
In time, if it had gone on, the neighbours would doubtless have had
plenty to say on the subject, for old wives’ tongues rattled fast of a
winter’s evening, when they all gathered in this house or that, and sat
on the sides of the green bed with their feet in the dry fern inside,
and the oil crasset hanging down in the midst, and plied their needles
and their tongues and wits all at once, and wrought scandalously good
guernseys and stockings in spite of it all.
But these were summer evenings yet, and the _veilles_ had not begun, and
reputations were out at grass till the time came round for their
inspection and judgment.
And so, when Peter Mauger never reached home the night before this day
of which we are telling, his old housekeeper, whatever she thought about
it at the time, only said afterwards that she supposed he had stopped
somewhere and would turn up all right in the morning, though she
admitted that he was not in the habit of staying out of a night. Anyway,
she was an old woman and all alone, and she was not going out to look
for him at that time of night.
The morning surprised her by his continued absence. Never in his life,
so far as she knew, had he behaved like this before. Vituperation of him
gave place to anxiety about him.
She questioned the neighbours. All they knew was that he had been seen
going down to Little Sark soon after sunset.
“That black Frenchwoman of Tom Hamon’s twists him round her finger,”
said one.
“You tie him up, Mrs. Guille,” chuckled another, “or sure as beans
she’ll steal him from you and leave you in the cold.”
And then, who should they see coming striding along the road but Madame
Julie herself, and evidently in a hurry;--in a state of red-hot
excitement, too, as she drew near. And they waited, hands on hips, to
hear what she was up to now.
“Where’s Peter?” she demanded, a long way in advance. “Tell him I want
him. That man Gard is still on L’Etat, though those fools who went
across for him couldn’t find him. Cré nom! What are you all staring at,
then?”
“Where’s our Peter?” demanded Mrs. Guille shrilly, with the strident
note of fear in her voice, as she becked and bobbed towards the
Frenchwoman like an aged cormorant.
“Peter? I’m asking you. I want him. Where is he?”
“He went to Little Sark last night, and he’s never come home.”
“Never come home? Why, what’s taken him? If he’d been with me last night
he’d have seen something! That Nance Hamon swam across to the rock with
nothing on but her shift to take food to Gard, and I caught her at
it--the shameless hussy!”
“Maybe Peter’s heard of it an’ gone across with ’em again,” suggested
one. “He was terrible hot against Gard.”
“And reason he had to be hot against him,” cried Julie. “Who’ll find out
for me where he’s got to, and when they’re going out after Gard? I would
go too and see the end of him.”
A couple of burly husbands came rolling round the corner towards their
breakfasts and caught her words.
“Doubt you’ll have to go alone, mistress,” said one, phlegmatically.
“There’s ghosts on L’Etat, they do say, though sure the one John
Drillot brought across was dead enough.”
“If he’s there,” said the other, plumbing Julie’s feelings, “he’s safe
as a pig in a pen.”
“Where’s our Peter?” demanded Mrs. Guille.
“Peter? I d’n know. What’s come of him?” and they stared blankly at her.
“He went to Little Sark last night to see her”--with a beck of distaste
towards Julie--“and he’s never come home.”
The men looked from the speaker to Julie, as though the next word
necessarily lay with her.
“I never set eyes on him. I was out after that girl. I came here to tell
him about Gard. Has he been to the harbour?”
“No, he hasn’t. We are from there now.”
“He’s maybe with some of them arranging about going to L’Etat,” said
Julie. “I’ll go and find out;” and she set off along the road past the
windmill.
The morning passed in fruitless enquiries. She asked this one and that,
every one she could think of, if they had seen Peter, and was met
everywhere with meaning grins and point-blank denials. Apparently no one
had set eyes on Peter, and every one seemed to imply that she ought io
know more about him than any one else.
It was past mid-day before she was back at Vauroque, but Mrs. Guilie was
still standing in the doorway of Peter’s empty house as if she had been
looking out for news of him ever since.
“Eh b’en? Have you found him?” she cried.
“Not a finger of him!” snapped Julie savagely, tired out with her
fruitless labours.
“Then he’s come to some ill, bà sú. And if he has--ma fé, it’s
you!--it’s you!” The old lady’s scream of denunciation choked itself
with its own excess, and the neighbours came running out to learn the
news.
Stolid minds travel in grooves, and old Mrs. Guille’s had been groping
along possibilities of all kinds, clinging at the same time to the hope
that Peter would still turn up all right.
Now that her hope was shattered her mind dropped naturally into a grim
groove, along which it had taken a tentative trip during the morning and
had recoiled from with a shudder.
The last time Mrs. Tom Hamon had come seeking a man who was missing,
that man had been found under the Coupée, and so old Mrs. Guille set oft
for the Coupée as fast as her old legs and her want of breath and
general agitation would let her.
“Nom de Dieu! What--?” began Julie, with twisted black brows, and then
drifted on with the rest in Mrs. Guille’s wake--all except one or two
housewives whose men were due for dinner, and knew they must be fed
whatever had come to Peter Mauger.
“Gaderabotin!” said one of these as he came up, and stood scratching his
head and gazing down the road after them. “What’s taken them all?”
“Think because they found Tom Hamon there, they’ll find Peter too,”
guffawed another, and they rolled on into their homes, chuckling at the
simplicity of women and children.
Arrived at the Coupée, the little mob of sensation-seekers peered
fearfully about. One small boy, cleverer or more groovy-minded than the
rest, struck off along the headland to the left. It was from there
Charles Guille had seen Tom Hamon. Perhaps from there he would see
something, too.
And no sooner was he there, where he could see to the foot of the cliffs
in Coupée Bay, than he commenced to dance and wave his arms like a mad
thing, because the words he wanted to shout choked him tight so that he
could hardly breathe.
They streamed out along the cliff and huddled there, struck chill with
fright in spite of the blazing sun.
For there, under the cliff, in the same spot as they found Tom Hamon,
lay another dark, huddled figure, and they knew it must be Peter.
The finding of Tom had filled them with anger against Gard. The finding
of Peter filled them with fear.
Gard had sufficed as explanation and scapegoat for Tom’s death, and as
vent for their feelings. But what of Peter’s?
It had not been Gard, then? And if not Gard, who?
For, whoever it was, he was still at large, and any of them might be the
next.
There were new terrors in the eyes that gazed so wildly on the narrow
white path and the towering pinnacles of the Coupée. They had been
familiar with it all, all their lives, but suddenly it had become
strange to them.
If grisly Death, all bones and scythe, had come stalking along it before
their eyes at that moment, they would have shrieked, no doubt, and
fallen flat, but he would have no more than answered to their feelings
and fulfilled their expectations.
As it was, when the Seigneur’s big white stallion stuck his head over
the green dyke behind them, and gave a shrill neigh at the unexpected
sight of so many people in a field which was usually occupied only by
Charles Guille’s two mild-eyed cows and their calves, the women screamed
and the children lied.
“Man doux! but I thought it was the devil himself,” said old Mrs.
Guille. “Oui-gia!” and shook an angry fist at him.
But the discoverer of the body was already away along the road to
Vauroque, covering the ground like a little incarnation of ill-news.
The exertion of running cleared away the choking, if it took his breath.
He shouted as he drew near the houses.
“Ah, bah!” growled one of the diners inside. “What’s to do now, then?”
“He’s there ... Peter ... under Coupée ... Where Tom Hamon....” panted
the news-bearer as he tore past to his own home. And the rest of
Vauroque emptied itself into the road and stood looking along it, as the
stragglers came up, white-faced and wild-eyed.
“He’s there,” confirmed one woman, twisting up her loosened hair. “And
just same place where Tom Hamon lay.”
“’Tweren’t Gard killed _him_, then,” said one of the diners, chewing
over that thought with his last mouthful.
“Nor Tom neither, then, maybe,” said another.
“We’ve bin on wrong tack, then;” and they went off round the corner at a
speed their build would hardly have credited them with.
One to the Sénéchal and one to the Doctor, and then to the Creux, both
telling the news as they went. So that when the officials came hurrying
through the tunnel the greater part of the Island was waiting for them
on the shingle, except those who preferred the wider view from the
cliff above.
Some of the men had been for pulling across at once, but they were
overborne.
“Doctor said he’d like to have seen him afore he was moved last time,”
said old John de Carteret weightily, and would not let a boat go out
till the Doctor and the Sénéchal came.
It was all waiting for them the moment they arrived, however, and they
stepped in and swung away round Les Lâches, and three other boats
followed them so closely that it looked almost like a gruesome race who
should get there first.
There was little talking in any of the boats, but there was some solid
hard thinking, in a mazed kind of way.
Until they knew more of the facts, indeed, they scarce knew what to
think yet. But more than one of them remembered disturbedly how they had
gone in force two days before to fetch Gard off his lonely rock, or to
make an end of him there; and here they were going in force on a very
different errand--an errand which, they could not help seeing, would
bring him off his rock in a very different way, if this present matter
was what it looked as if it might be.
And the Doctor was not long in giving them the facts, when they had run
up on to the shingle, and then crunched through it to the place where
Peter’s body lay under the steep black cliff--in the exact spot where
Tom Hamon’s had lain just eighteen days before.
But that it was undoubtedly Peter’s face and body, those who had come
after Tom the last time might have thought they were going through their
previous experience over again. It was all so like.
They all stood round in a dark, silent group while the Doctor carefully
examined the body, and the Sénéchal looked on with stern and troubled
face.
“It is most extraordinary,” said the Doctor, straightening up from his
task at last, and his face, too, was knitted with perplexity, but had
something else in it besides. “This man has been done to death in
exactly the same way as Hamon”--a rustle of surprise shook the group of
silent onlookers. “The head has been beaten in just as Hamon’s was--with
some blunt rounded tool, I should say. These other wounds and contusions
are the results of his fall down the cliff. He has been dead at least
eight hours. Lift him carefully, men. We can do nothing more
here--unless by chance the one who did it flung his weapon after him,
and we could find it.”
They scattered, and searched the whole dark bay minutely, but found
nothing. Then with rough gentleness they bore the body to the boat and
laid it under the thwarts.
“Men!” said the Sénéchal weightily, as they were just about to climb
back into their boats. “This matter brings another matter home to all
our hearts. You have been persecuting another man under the belief that
he killed Tom Hamon. From what some of us knew of Mr. Gard, we were
certain he could have had no hand in it. This, I take it, proves it?” He
looked at the Doctor.
“Undoubtedly!” nodded the Doctor. “The man who killed this one killed
the other, and that man could not be Stephen Gard, for he is on L’Etat.”
“It’s God’s mercy that you haven’t Mr. Gard’s blood on your heads. Some
of you, I know, have done your best that way. Suppose you had killed
him that other night--what would you have felt as you stood here to-day?
Take that thought home with you, and may God keep you from like
misjudgment in the future!”
And they had not a word to say for themselves, but crawled silently
aboard, and in silence pulled back to Creux Harbour.
Once only old John de Carteret spoke to the Sénéchal, soon after they
had started.
“One of them”--nodding over at the boats behind--“could go to the rock
and bring him off,” he suggested.
“I thought of that, but there’s one I want to go with me. She’ll be down
at the Creux, I expect, and we’ll go as soon as we’ve disposed of this.”
There was a very different feeling visible in the silent crowd that
awaited them at the harbour this time from that manifested on the last
occasion, Then, it was a sympathetic anger that united them all in a
common feeling against the perpetrator of the deed. Now--even before the
whisper had run round that Peter Mauger had been done to death in the
same way as Tom Hamon--fear was among them, and doubt. Fear of they knew
not exactly what, and doubt of they knew not whom.
But here were two men done to death in their midst, and the man on whom
all their suspicions had settled in the first case could not possibly
have had anything to do with the second, and so had most likely had
nothing to do with either--in which case the man who had was still at
large among them, and no man’s life was safe, much less any woman’s or
child’s.
Their thoughts did not run, perhaps, quite so clearly as that, but that
was the result of it all, and their faces showed it. Furthermore, every
man and woman there began at once to cast about in his and her mind for
the possible murderer, and men looked at the neighbours whom they had
known all their lives, with lurking suspicions in their eyes and the
consideration of strange possibilities in their minds.
Tom Hamon’s death had bound them closer together; Peter Mauger’s set
them all apart. The strange dead man up in the school-house added to
their discomfort.
It was not until the hastily-constructed litter with its gruesome burden
had been sent off to the Boys’ School, in charge of the constables and
the Doctor, that the Sénéchal caught sight of Nance’s eager white face
and anxious eyes, in the crowd that lingered still in answer to another
whisper that had flown round.
If they were at once pig-headed and hot-blooded and suspicious, they
were also warm-hearted and willing to atone for a mistake--once they
were sure of it.
No crowd followed Peter on his last journey but one, though the whole
Island had swarmed after Tom Hamon.
They wanted to see the man who would have been killed for killing Tom,
though he didn’t do it, but for--circumstances, and his own pluck and
endurance.
And when the Sénéchal beckoned to one of the circumstances, and put his
hand on her slim shoulder, and said--
“We are going for him. I thought you would like to come too,” her face
went rosy with gratitude, and the brave little hands clasped up on to
her breast, as she murmured--
“Oh, M. le Sénéchal!” and choked at anything more.
Those nearest gave her rough words of encouragement.
“Cheer up, Nance! You’ll soon have him back!”
“That’s a brave garche! Don’t cry about it now!”
“We’ll make it up to him, lass. We’ll all come and dance at the
wedding”--and so on.
But the Sénéchal patted her on the shoulder and asked--
“And where is your brother? He should come, too. I hear you have both
been in this matter.”
“Ah, monsieur!” she said, with brimming eyes and a pathetic little lift
and fall of the hand, which expressed far more than she could put into
words. “We fear ... we fear he is drowned. He swam out to the rock
taking food, and ... and ... we have not seen him since;” and her hand
was over her face and the tears streaming through.
“Mon Dieu! Another!” said the Sénéchal, aghast. “When, child? When was
this?”
“The night after the storm, monsieur.”
“Perhaps he is there, on the rock.”
“No, monsieur. I was over there myself last night. He never got there,
and we fear he must be drowned.”
“You were over there, child? Why, how did you get across?”
“I swam, monsieur;” and he stared at her in amazement.
“Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! You make up for some of the others,” he said
bluntly. “Come then, and we will make sure of this one, anyhow;” and he
led the way to John de Carteret’s boat, and all the people gave them a
cheer as they pulled out of the harbour to catch the breeze off the
Lâches.
Then the crowd waited for their return, and talked by snatches of all
these strange happenings, and discussed and discounted the chances of
Bernel’s being still alive.
“For, see you, the Race! And that was the first night after the storm,
and it would be running like the deuce, bidemme!” “It’s best not to know
how to swim if it leads you to do things like that, oui-gia!” “When a
man’s time comes, he cuts his cleft in the water, whether he can swim or
not, crais b’en!” “And that slip of a Nance had been over there last
night--par madé, some folks have the courage!” “All the same, it was
madness--”
But behind all the broken chatter, in every mind was the grim question,
“Who is it, then, that is doing these things amongst us?” And there was
a feeling of mighty discomfort abroad.
All the same, they cheered vigorously as the boat came speeding back,
and they saw Gard sitting between Nance and the Sénéchal, and crowded
round as it ran up the shingle, and would have lifted him out and
carried him shoulder-high through the tunnel and up the road, if he
would have had it.
They saw how his imprisonment on the rock--“Ma fé, think of it!--all
through that storm, too!”--had told upon him. His cheeks were hollow,
and his eyes sunken, and he looked very weary--“and, man doux, no
wonder, after eighteen days on L’Etat!”--though their friendly shouts
had put a touch of colour in his face and a spark in his eyes for the
moment.
“Now, away home, all of you!” ordered the Sénéchal. “We’ve all had
enough to think about for one day. To-morrow we will see what is to be
done.”
“Too much!” croaked one old crone, who had something of a reputation
among her neighbours. “What I want to know is--who killed Peter Mauger?”
And that was the question that occupied most minds in Sark that night.