My studied indifference had not, however, the effect of making him avoid me. On the contrary, he seemed rather to resume his earlier practice, going out of his way to get in mine, and strutting by whistling to show his unconsciousness of my neighbourhood. Yet all the time, I knew, he was never more in need of a friend. Mr. Sant’s protest, followed by a public rebuke in the school, had put an end to the active bullying; but, to compensate themselves for this deprivation, his companions had, by tacit agreement, sent poor Harry to perpetual Coventry. He was disclaimed and excluded from all games and conversation; isolated in the midst of the others’ merriment. What this meant to the bright fallen little spirit only Lucifer himself, perhaps, could say; and only Lucifer himself, perhaps, so endure with unlowered crest while the iron ate into his soul. But, in justice to myself, I could make no further overtures where my every advance was wilfully misunderstood.
So the year went its course without any reconciliation between us; and early in November fell a hard frost, with snow that seemed disposed to stop. Awaking one morning, we saw the whole land locked in white under a stiff leaden canopy, as if sea and sky had changed places. The desolation of this remote coast winter-bound it is impossible to describe. We seemed as cut off from the world as Esquimaux; and Uncle Jenico, who had never conceived such a situation, stood aghast before the prospect of a beach ankle-deep in snow. So we found it. The golden sand was all replaced by dazzling silver, into which the surf, so spotless in summer, thrust tongues of a bilious yellow. The sea, from being sportive with weak stomachs, looked sick unto death itself; and the wind in one’s teeth was like a file sharpening a saw. And all this lifelessness cemented itself day by day, until it seemed that we could never emerge again from the depths of winter into which we had fallen.
One afternoon I was loitering very dismal, and quite alone as I thought, near the foot of Dunberry Gap, when a snowball took me full on the back of the head and knocked my cap off. I was stooping to pick it up, when another came splosh in my face, blinding, and half suffocating me. I staggered to my feet, gasping, only to find myself the butt of a couple of snow forts, between whose fires I had unconsciously strayed. A row of little heads was sprung up on either side, and I was being well pounded before I could collect my wits.
I must premise that at this time my empire was much fallen from its former greatness. Never having confirmed it by a second achievement, it had gradually lost the best of its credit, and, though I was still respected by the unit, there was a psychologic point in the association of units beyond which my reputation was coming to be held cheap. I was learning, in fact, the universal truth that to rest on one’s laurels is to resume them, in case of emergency, in a lamentably squashed condition.
Now, with half the breath knocked out of my body and my arm protecting my face, I tried to struggle out of the line of fire, only to find the opposing forces basely combining to pelt me into helplessness. I made some show of retaliating; but what was one against twenty? In the midst, I looked up the Gap, my one way of retreat, and there, standing halfway down, watching the fray, was Harry Harrier. I was smarting all over, with rills of melted snow running down my neck, and still the bombardment took me without mercy.
“Harry!” I cried. “Come and help me!”
The appeal did at a stroke what months of propitiation would have missed. It put him right with himself once more. Like a young deer he came leaping down, stooping and gathering ammunition as he approached. The shower ceased on the instant; the craven enemy retreated pell-mell to its double lines of shelter.
“Are you ready, sir?” said Harry, excitedly. “Git your wind and coom on. We’ll drive en out of one o’ them places, and take cover there ourselves.”
He was eagerly gathering and piling the snow as he spoke. In a minute I was myself again, and burning for reprisals. Each of us well armed, we charged upon the left-hand position, which seemed the more accessible of the two, and carried it by storm against a faint show of resistance. The garrison shot out and fled, encountering a volley from the opposing force, while we peppered it in the rear. Our victory was complete. As we sank back, breathed but glowing, I looked Harry silently in the face and held out my hand for the last time. He took it in his own, hanging his silly head; but the nip he gave it felt like a winch’s.
“That’s all right, then,” said I. “It’s pax between us, ain’t it, you old fool?”
He nodded. A long silence fell between us, and I began to whistle. Suddenly he looked up shyly, but his eyes were quick with curiosity.
“I say,” he said, “what’s a parryshoot?”
The problem had evidently haunted him ever since I had told him that my uncle had fallen from one.
“Well, what do you think?” says I.
“I dunno,” he answered carelessly. “Thought, maybe, ’twas one o’ them things that shoots the malt refuge out of brewhouses.”
I sniggered with laughter. Fancy Uncle Jenico having been shot out of a brewery!
“It’s an umbrella,” I said; “a thing that you jump into the air with off a cliff, and come down without hurting yourself.”
“Mighty!” he cried, all excitement. “Is it reelly? Let’s make one—and try it first on that Derrick,” he added, with commendable foresight.
My heart crowed at the idea. We discussed it for many minutes. In the midst we heard a sound of distant jeering, and cautiously raised our heads above the snow rampart. The whole body of our enemies was in full retreat, and already nearing the top of the Gap. We were left alone, sole inseparable masters of the field. It was the happiest omen of what was to be.
I camein all glowing to Mr. Sant, who greeted my good news with a sigh of such relief that one could have thought a nightmare had rolled off his chest.
“We have him,” he said gleefully. “You did very well, Dick; better than I could have told you. And now—h’m!”
He fell into a fit of abstraction, the fruits of which did not appear till the following day. Then, as I was leaving him after lessons, he detained me a moment.
“Are you going to meet him?” he asked.
“Yes, if he will,” I answered.
“Then,” he said, “tell him that if he likes, and can obtain his mother’s consent, he can come here with you for the future instead of going to school.”
I could only breathe a great round “O!” of rapture.
“Yes,” said Mr. Sant, between relish and severity; “I cannot have so promising a spirit warped by a sense of injustice. He has grit—I must put my foot down—he—yes, tell him I will undertake his education, if he is willing.”
I ran off, big with the delight of my mission; and, sure enough, met Harry loitering near the Playstow by the way I should come, though he would not let me suppose it was intentional. His freckled face flushed as he spied me, and he grinned. There was already observable towards him an attitude of increased respect on the part of some of his schoolfellows who played near.
“Mighty!” he exclaimed, as I accosted him, “Who’d ever a-thought o’ meetingyouhere!”
“Harry!” I whispered, too eager to get him away to feel any embarrassment. “Come with me. I’ve got something to tell you.”
He came, looking both pleased and curious, but still with a certain half-defiant swagger.
“Tell away,” he said; “I’m listening;” and he began to whistle.
“Mr. Sant,” I said, “wants you to chuck up the old school and come and be his pupil with me, if you and your mother’s willing.”
He was fairly hipped. He stopped whistling, and rubbed his round nose till it shone; then suddenly halted, in a quiet place, and stared at me.
“Was it you axed him that?” he said.
“No, indeed.”
“Honour bright?”
“Of course. Why should I lie, you old stoopid?”
He tried to whistle again, and broke down. I didn’t know the depths of the little soul, nor what it had endured.
“I dunno,” he said, hesitating, and with a curious husky sound in his voice, “as—if it had been—I could a-brought myself to it. Now——”
He held out his hand quickly, and his eyes were shining.
“Ef you’ll let me be your friend, master, I’ll swear to be yours—till death do me part—and so help me God!”
We shook hands firmly on it. “Only,” I said, “I’m Dick to you, you know, just as you are Harry to me.”
“I’ll get used to it in time,” he answered; and so the compact was made, and I am sure we had none of us reason to regret it.
He was a pretty untamed colt at first, with a little of the savage lingering about him. But he was wonderfully sensitive and intelligent, and soon got, under Mr. Sant’s vigorous and manful tuition, not only to cultivate the graces of a scholar and the muscles of an athlete, but to understand those right principles of a gentleman, which are to temper natural combativeness with consideration for others. In this respect, no doubt, his misfortunes had helped to shape him; but I am not going to moralise over the result, which I dare say not one boy in a thousand, coming from such a stock, would have effected. Harry seemed to have inherited all the hardihood, with none of the brutality, of his father; and, for the rest, we became inseparable chums, who, so combined, were a match for any puling forces the village could bring against us.
Mischief? Of course, we were always in it. One of our first escapades was to make a parachute out of Uncle Jenico’s big sun umbrella, and, having beguiled Derrick to the cliff edge by the Gap, tie his wrists to the handle and push him over. We might have killed him; only we didn’t. He fell into a snow-drift, with no more hurt than to rasp his nose on the broken ice. But he smashed the umbrella, for which Mr. Sant made us pay with extra lines.
We scoured the coast together, and were for ever, forgetting my embargo, prowling about the Mitre, dislodging bits of the ruin and imperilling our precious necks. On such occasions Rampick was always our self-elected policeman, watching us and warning us away. Singly, I think, we had an awe of this great sinister hulk of a creature, though, together, we flouted him a good deal, resenting his interference. But he was a pet of Mr. Sant’s, which made any open affront from us difficult.
Harry, by virtue of his training, knew a heap about animals. I am afraid we snared, in our time, more than one of the Squire’s rabbits, fixing loops of copper wire in the runs under the hedgerows. The “kill” went to Mrs. Harrier, whose poverty I used for salve to my conscience, and whose rather weak fondness accepted the tribute with some nervous deprecation. But it was not long before our mighty reverence for Mr. Sant, both as a gentleman and a sportsman, cured us of this temporary obliquity. A poacher gives no “law” to the game he kills; a gentleman does; we gave no “law”;ergowe were poachers,ergowe were not gentlemen. The revelation came upon us one day when our tutor was illustrating some forgotten parable. “The man of honour,” said he, “the God’s gentleman, don’t bet on a certainty, or run his fox with a line tied to his tail, or kill a disarmed enemy, or shoot his pheasant sitting. He sports for the glory of the battle, the test between skill and skill.”
Harry and I looked at one another, and then down. After lessons he addressed me rather resentfully—
“It’s all very well for you, as was brought up to it.”
“What do you mean?” I answered; “that you ain’t going to take the hint?”
“If ever I snare another,” he said, growling, “may I be shot myself and nailed to a barn door!”
“Well, then,” I said, “for all my being brought up to it, as you call it, you’re the better gentleman, because I was still in two minds about giving it up, it was such fun.”
“You’ll have to,” he said. He was grown more loyal even than I to Mr. Sant.
“O! shall I?” I retorted. “Who’s going to make me?”
We were both bristling for a moment. Then Harry chuckled.
“Guess you won’t catch a-many without me to help you, anyhow,” he said; which was so disgustingly true that I had to laugh in my turn.
Before this moral reformation occurred, however, we made some thrilling captures. One day it was a hare, which Harry caught in the most wonderful way with his hands alone. We were crossing an open space between two copses, when he suddenly threw down his hat in the snow, bidding me at the same time to take no notice, but walk on with him as if unconcerned. There were tufts of gorse and withered bracken projecting all over the clearing. We advanced briskly a short distance, then quickly wheeled and came back, making a crooked line for the hat. As we neared it, Harry, as swift as thought, swerved aside to a patch of red dead fern and bramble, and, plunging down his hand, brought up what looked like a mat of leaves and snow. But it was a hare, which in that unerring swoop he had clutched behind the poll; and before the startled creature could shriek or struggle, he had seized its hind legs in his other hand, stretched its body, and cracked its neck upon his knee. I could not have imagined such quickness of eye and action. It could only be done, he told me, in cold weather, when the frost gets in the animals’ brains and makes them stupid. They are sort of fascinated by the hat thrown down, watching for it to move; and when the steps return, finding themselves, as it were, between two fires, they can think of nothing but to crouch close. I have seen Harry bring out rats from a rick in the same way. It was just a question of unwincing nerve; but I never had the courage to try it myself. They say that if one has the resolution to hold one’s hand unmoved to a snapping dog, the beast’s teeth will close on it without inflicting an injury. It may be true; only the first time I put it to the test will be in boxing-gloves.
A more legitimate poaching of ours—but that was later, in the spring—was on the preserves of a beautiful unfamiliar sea-bird, which came nesting upon our coasts, driven there by storms probably. We were on the Mitre one day, when we saw it fly out from the top of the Abbot’s well, and swoop down upon the shore, where, no one being by, it gorged itself on a heap of dead dog-fish. We immediately fell flat on the cliff edge to watch for its return. The broken top of the well was perhaps thirty feet below us, but the ground sloping obtusely from where we lay, prevented us from seeing far into it. Presently the bird came back and settled on the rim, so that we could mark it plainly. It was gull-shaped, but unlike any of the species we knew—white-waistcoated, yellow-beaked, and a tender ash colour on the wings—a St. Kilda’s petrel, in fact, we came to learn, which had likely been driven down from the Orkneys. It hopped into the well and disappeared.
“Mighty!” said Harry. “It’s got its nest there, I do believe.”
By-and-by the mother bird showed herself, and the fact was virtually settled. Then there was nothing for it but to climb the well and see. Harry accomplished it somehow, when the village was at dinner and the beach deserted. He got up, claw and toe (the well inclined a little outwards from the land), and availing himself of every hole and projection reached the top and sprawled over the edge, so that I could see nothing but his legs waving in the air. The birds shot out, and wheeled screaming about him. I heard him utter a cry; and then he emerged and descended with a very blank face, coming down the last yard or two with a run. His hands were barked and bloody, and the right one smeared with an orange slime.
“There was one egg,” he said, “white and a whopper; but it just broke to pieces when I clawed it.”
It was a pity we had not left it alone, for, as it turned out, the bird was a rarity on our coasts, and, laying as it does only a single egg, would not likely outstay so cruel a welcome. Which, indeed, proved to be the case; and the only reward we got for our venture was the knowledge that the well was choked with sand to near its top, a discovery which dissipated for ever some long-cherished dreams of ours as to the ineffable secrets it would reveal if once surmounted and looked down into.
During all this time, I am afraid, I neglected Uncle Jenico a good deal. He was so sweet and kind, he made no complaint, but only rejoiced that I had found a companion more suited than he to my years.
“He’s a fine boy, Richard,” he would say; “a fine promising boy. And if he reconciles you to staying here——”
“Doyouwant to leave Dunberry, uncle?”
Then he would look at me wistfully.
“I, my dear? No, no; I am content, if you are. We are doing wonderfully well. It’s a place of really extraordinary possibilities. Do you know, Richard, I shouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be our promised land, after all. The extent of coast to be explored makes it a little tiring sometimes, but that’s a trifle. We can’t expect to find all Tom Tiddler’s ground in an acre or so, can we?”
That should have been a jog to my conscience; but youth, I fear, is selfish. A dull day’s hunt with Uncle Jenico through the shingle had come to show very blank by contrast with the exciting adventures contrived by Harry and me. So I kept my deaf side to the calls of duty, and Uncle Jenico pursued his hobby alone.
During the continuance of the frost he had, however, to divert his imagination into other channels, as the beach was impracticable; and really, I think, the distraction did him no harm. Being confined much to the house, he turned his thoughts to an old invention of his for cleaning chimneys, with which he had competed ages ago for a prize offered by a syndicate of anti-climbing-boy philanthropists. I am sure, if simplicity and economy counted for anything, Uncle Jenico ought easily to have come out first; but it was the usual story of showiness being preferred to plain utility. The contrivance was homeliness itself; just a huge compressible ball of wool, attached through its centre to the middle of a cord of indefinite length; and the only objection to it—which was, after all, an extremely idle one—was that it required two operators, one to stand on the roof, and the other on the hearth below. But, once they were in a position, the task was a pastime rather than a labour. The top-sawyer, so to speak, lowered one end of the cord, weighted, down the flue; his companion seized it, and between them they worked the ball up and down till every particle of soot was dislodged. Could anything be more obvious? And yet the committee rejected it! Well, all I can say is that Harry and I proved its efficacy beyond a doubt; though, of course, Mrs. Puddephatt, while she benefited by it, was sarcastic about an invention which had failed to recommend itself to the particularity of London.
“Itmaybe all right,” she would say; “and so may the himage of a piece of fat pork pulled up and down one’s throat with a string, which, I am told, is hemployed at sea to encourage ’eaving. At the same time, sir, I may venture to remark, that there are remedies known to Londoners to be worse than their diseases.”
Uncle Jenico, in the first instance, secretly inveigled Fancy-Maria into helping him in his experiment. The parlour fire was extinguished, and the worthy girl despatched to the roof through a trap-door, where she performed her share of the task with such inflexible tenacity that when my uncle tugged at his end of the cord, which she had dutifully lowered, he pulled her head into the chimney, and would have ended by drawing her bodily down, I believe, if her gasps and chokings reaching him below had not warned him in time. Then he slackened his hold, and commended her excess of loyalty and instructed her further; but in the end she descended from the roof an absolute negress, and for days afterwards shed soot from her boots and sneezed it from her hair in little clouds that flavoured everything.
Subsequently, Harry and I were taken into his confidence and made his operators, much to our gratification. Climbing-boys, indeed! It was become a luxury to be a sweep, thanks to Uncle Jenico; and the world called him a crank! Every one but himself might profit by his inventions. Certainly Harry and I did. We polished every flue in Mrs. Puddephatt’s house as clean as a whistle, and, until we tired of the sport, whatever other chimneys in the village the housewives would lay open to us. And it was only when we took to angling with the great sooty ball over parapets for unsuspecting faces pausing below, that Mr. Sant, giving ear to furious complaints, stepped in with his authority, and put an end to the game.
So, on us, black and joyous and inseparable, I will let down the act-drop of our little stage, to raise it on a later development of the drama I set out to record.
END OF PART I.
Itis with an odd sense of nervousness, and almost of oppression, that I open upon the second act of my story. In the first, the schoolboy, with his “shining morning face” and serene irresponsibility, had it all his own way. Now—an interval of five years having been supposed, as the play-bills say, to elapse—the “shining morning face” shows a little sobered, a little greyer in the dawn of manhood, like a young moon in the dawn of day. We have not eschewed adventure, Harry and I; only the spirit of it in us is beginning to be tempered with a sense of moral obligations. We are indulgent to the flippancies of youth but in so far as they do not venture to presume upon our patronage. Only when alone together do we relax our vigilance in the matter of what is due to ourselves and our extremely incipient moustaches.
Harry, in short, takes up the tale at sixteen, and I at a few months younger. The interval had served to shape us, I do believe, after a manly enough model. We might have been “oppidans”—to put an extreme case—at Eton, and had our characters stiffened, like cream, by whipping, and have coursed hares, and drunk small-beer at the Christopher, and enjoyed all the other social and educational advantages which, according to the evidence put before the late Commission, [Reported in 1864.] are peculiar to this seminary of the gods, and not found in its Provost such a leader, counsellor and noble confidant as little remote Dunberry was able to furnish us with in the person of Mr. Sant. And this I say in no Pharisaic spirit of self-satisfaction, but simply as a testimony to the qualities of this prince among tutors, whom we loved and respected with the best reason in the world.
Not much had figured to us, perhaps, during these five years except the shapes of romance with which strong young souls can always people a desert. We had put on mind and muscle. We could run, swim, fight, eat anything that was set before us, and want more. Our excursions were further afield; our walks more extended along the road to Parnassus. We were very fine fellows, no doubt, in our own opinions; and our voices were beginning to growl handsomely.
Harry had, for his part, developed into a shapely, fearless young figure, with a good manner of speech and a great attachment to my uncle. He had, moreover, developed a decided bent towards mechanics, and went now on two days in the week to a technical school in Yokestone, making the journey to and from on foot, and sleeping each night with a cousin of his mother’s, who owned a small foundry there, and who, since the boy’s proof of himself, had taken a practical interest in his welfare. The periodic partings were without savour to us, had it not been that to them the periodic reunions supplied the salt. But no doubt they were helpful in giving us opportunity for a more individually independent growth; and certainly during them “Coke upon Littleton” (for Mr. Sant was training me with an eye to the Law) secured my less divided attention.
As to Dunberry itself and its familiar figures, there was little change to be noted. On the one side there was the ripening of the young fruit towards maturity; on the other, a little whiter growth of lichen on the decaying branches. Uncle Jenico must count among the latter; though surely no tree past fruiting ever retained more unimpaired the sweetness of its sap. He had collected during this period enough antiquities to furnish out an old rag, bone, and iron shop; and, indeed, I am afraid the bulk of his stock was not suited to a much more exclusive repository. There was little which, provided it was gathered from the beach and had once been a part of something living or manufactured, he would not give a place in it. His veneration for rust was the most artless thing. An object had only to be corroded with it, to figure in his eyes for an assured antique. In this way he amassed great quantities of bolts, links, sheet-iron fragments, and other rarities, to most of which he assigned a use and period, which, I am convinced, had never been theirs. There was, for instance, a breastplate of the Renaissance era, which I do believe had never been anything but a dish-cover of our own. There was an iron skull-cap, or morion, of Edward the First’s time, which I will swear was nothing but a saucepan without its handle; the handle itself, indeed, being found near the same spot a few days later, and catalogued for the head of a boar spear. Part of a whale’s under jaw, much decayed, figured for the prow of a Viking ship; and divers teeth, mostly, I think, horses’, for the grinders of prehistoric monsters. There were some bronze coins certainly—none too many—whose value was conjectural, and whose legends were largely undecipherable. Uncle Jenico would never submit these, the cream of his collection, to expert criticism. He hugged them as a miser hugs his gold, but with a diviner intent. I alone was permitted to gloat with him over the hoard.
“There’s your jointure, Dicky,” he would say. “Look at it accumulating for you, without an effort of its own, at compound interest. There’s no trustee like a collector who knows his business. You may turn over current money to increase it; but the more you leave that alone the better you’ll realize on it some day. The antiquity market is always a rising one. Every year adds its interest to it. We won’t touch the principal yet—not till you come of age. Then we’ll put it up, my boy—then we’ll put it up; and you shall eat your dinners, and follow in your dear father’s footsteps, and have chambers in Fountain Court itself.”
Did he have a real faith in this picture? He had a faith in having a faith in it, anyhow. Yet sometimes I could not help thinking he shrunk from that same test of criticism; from the conceivable discovery that he had wasted all these years of his life on a fond chimera. I am glad that in the end the test was never forced; that circumstances came to lay for ever the necessity of it, and in a way than which none other could have delighted him better. For I believe a realization of the truth would have broken his kind, unselfish heart.
He had not during this time altogether eschewed his former habits and enthusiasms. Periodic inventions of purely local inspiration marked it. He designed a respirator to be lined with porous shavings of driftwood, so that the asthmatic merchant might inhale ozone in the thickest fogs of Lombard Street. He planned a boat to be steered from the front by means of a rudder which was merely a jointed elongation of the prow, or false beak hinging to the neck, like a fish’s head and gills: a splendid conception, seeing how the steersman would be also the look-out, and the crew aft suffer no more responsibility than passengers in a train.
Other happy notions of his were “the luminous angler,” a hook rubbed with phosphorus for night fishing; a scheme for pickling sandhoppers; and an uncapsizable boat, the buoyant principle whereof was an armour of light iron pipings, each tube of which was to be divided into a number of little water-tight compartments.
None of these was ever, to my knowledge, put to the actual test, so pledged is our conservatism to run in a circle. The old stern-steerer was good enough for our fathers, and were we to be more exacting than they, who stand to us for all holy prescription? No inspired inventor ever yet profited by his inspiration; nor did his descendants find that inspiration marketable until it was mellowed to a tradition. For which reason Uncle Jenico had to be content, like the magnanimous soul he was, with planting for the generations to come.
He never dreamt now, more than I, of leaving the village in which circumstance had laid us to take root. Aliens at first, we were become of the soil, and bound to it by many ties of interest and affection. As to the place itself, Mr. Sant’s hopes of seasonable visitors, of whom we had been welcomed for the pioneers, were doomed to non-fulfilment. Whether it was its isolation, its shocking primitiveness in those days of antimacassars and the social proprieties, or perhaps its rather forbidding reputation for inhospitality, which kept strangers away, I do not know; but in any case they came rarely, and then only as birds of passage. I think it, at least, quite likely that the third consideration was most operative. Dunberry, before the days of Mr. Sant, had borne, it must be confessed, a sinister notoriety—a name for determined and organized smuggling. Visitors then were neither desired nor welcomed, the whole native population, or at least with few exceptions, forming a lawless confederacy for the disposal of contraband. But after the earthquake (or what was generally cited for such, and by many, I am persuaded, who knew better, though it made no difference in the moral), things should have been otherwise, when the new rector, using its opportunity to reclaim his wayward flock to godliness, sought to compensate by legitimate trade for the lost wages of sin. But it is easier to cure the itch than to convince others of your patient’s recovered cleanness. And so Dunberry reformed had still to suffer the penalty of Dunberry unregenerate. Visitors came not to it, and it was in the position of having dropped the carnal substance for the moral shadow. And what made it worse was that the Excise, unpersuaded of its reclamation, chose this very penitential time to dump down a coastguard station on the cliffs a mile south, and so knocked on the head for ever any possibility of its relapse into the old prosperous condition.
The blow fell in the second year of our stay; and from it dated, I think, the final demoralisation of the ancient order, of which Rampick might be considered the prominent expression. This man deteriorated thenceforth year by year, recognizing, I suppose, the practical uselessness of his hypocrisy. His gradual self-revelation was a real grief to Mr. Sant, whose worldly common sense was not always proof against his missionary zeal. He had the pain to see this cherished convert of his sink into an idle, drunken loafer, with a heart poisoned with a shapeless black resentment against all whom he chose to consider were in any way responsible for his ruin; amongst whom he included, for some unaccountable reason, my uncle and me, and in only less degree, the dear clergyman himself. But bankruptcy knows no reason.
At the date at which I reopen my story, Joel Rampick was a shambling, degraded, evil-looking man, half crazed between drink and his sense of injury; full of suppressed snarlings and mutterings; still, as of old, the watchful spirit of the ruins on the hill; still, as of old, policing Harry and me, though secretly rabid now in his impotency to control or terrify us; still, as of old, nevertheless, a hypocrite in form, while he carried his heart on his tattered sleeve. And so, as a main factor to be in the development of the strange drama, to the dark accomplishment of which in this year of our opening manhood I have been reluctantly leading, I reintroduce, and for the moment leave him.
* * * * * *
It was a wild, wet November, a season full of tempest and the promise of it, when guns would boom beyond the fatal sandbanks, and sudden rockets tear the sky; when the wives would gather a rich harvest of driftwood, coming down in the morning to a prospect of frenzied waters, and black spots of wreckage swooping in them like swallows blown about a storm. Near the end of the month the winds quieted, and one afternoon fell dead calm, so that Harry and I were moved to stroll out after dark to stretch our long unexercised limbs. It was so peaceful after the turmoil, that to enlarge our sense of convalescence, we took the way of the lonely valley, and climbed the Abbot’s Mitre. The moon was in its last quarter, and stooping towards its rest in the earth like a bent and wearied old soul; an idle drift or two of cloud pursued it, trying the effect of a star here and there on its gauze, as it loitered; and not a sound broke the stillness but the whispering chuckle of the small surf on the shingle below.
We sat down on a block of stone in the midst of the huge and silent congress of ruin. Here were ghostly corridors, which the sea still mocked with an echo of monkish footsteps; pitch-black corners, where the faint rustle of mortar falling might have been the muttering whisper of the confessional; drifts of broken arches, colossal-shouldered, heaven-supporting in their time, now bowed under the weight of their hanging-gardens of ivy; shattered windows that were without a purpose, like open gates set up in a desert. Dim and tragic in the moonlight, they stood around us, a spectral deputation of giants, making its unearthly appeal for some human redress or sympathy. They seemed to hem us in, to throng closer and closer. An odd nightmare mood possessed me. I shivered, and stamped on the ground.
“Harry,” I said, with a nervous giggle; “supposing these smuggler chaps down here everwalk!”
With my very words he started, and nipped my arm like a vice.
“Look!” he whispered thickly, and pointed.
Out from the blackness of the overturned plinth hard by slipped a grey shadow, a thing that might have been a dog, but was not.
“O!” I shuddered, falling against my friend. “Let’s get away—Harry! at the back here.”
The sound of my voice, little though it was, appeared to startle the creature. It turned, paused as if regarding us, seemed to be coming our way, and vanished again into the glooms from which it had emerged. I had had a dreadful moment; and so it was with a sense of outrage that I heard Harry laugh out as he sprang to his feet.
“O!” he cried, skipping and sniggering before me; “to see it come so pat, and hear his tone change. Wasn’t it beautiful? And him not to know a bogey from a badger! O, Master Dicky, really!”
“A badger!” I echoed awfully. Then recovered myself and added with a rather agitated laugh; “Well, don’t pretend you weren’t startled yourself at first.”
“I?” he exclaimed. “Why, you old donkey, I brought you up here on purpose, on the chance of seeing it.”
“Bosh!” I snapped.
“Very well,” he said. “I’ll show you its tracks in the mud to-morrow, if you don’t believe me. I guessed it was somewhere in the hill, and now I know.”
“Did you?” I said resentfully. “Then I’d rather you played the fool with me by day.”
“Played!” said he; “what have I played? ’Twas you began with your ghosts and things. Besides, any fool knows that badgers onlywalkat night.”
He sniggered again; then, seeing that I was hurt, took my arm in his, and patted me down.
“It’s really rather a start, though,” said he—“I mean the thing being here at all; because they live in woods, you know. But I’ll tell you what I make of it; that it was driven down by those burnings” (it had been a very hot summer, with two fires, destroying some acres, up in the Court woods) “to get near the water. Anyhow, I spotted its tracks in the soft ground here some days ago, and made up my mind to run it to earth. We’ll come up to-morrow and have a look by daylight.”
We did as he proposed, and found, amongst the bramble and other vegetable and miscellaneous litter which choked the neighbourhood of the great tumbled mass of masonry, indubitable signs of a passage leading to the creature’s earth.
“Don’t say anything about it,” said Harry, desisting, excited, from his examination; “and we’ll just have a try to dig it out some day. Wonder if it could tell us anything about the earthquake?”
He was staring at me, and I at him.
“Harry,” I whispered, thrilling all through; “supposing there’s a way down after all!”
“Don’tyou—believe it, sir,” said Rampick’s breathless voice.
The man had, after his customary fashion, come softly upon us from some hidden coign of espial. His hands were slouched in his pockets, and he mumbled a little black clay pipe, shaped like a death’s head, between his teeth.
“I wouldn’t think—ifI were you,” he went on, “furto pry into the Lord’s secrets. Let the grave keep its own—pervided I may be so bold.”
“I wishyouwouldn’t pry into our secrets, Mr. Rampick,” said Harry, loftily. “It’s got to be rather a nuisance this, you know.”
The ex-smuggler snatched his pipe from his lips, and seemed for an instant as if he were about to dash it to the ground in a fury. But he recovered himself, and pretended only to be shaking out the ashes before he returned the cutty to his mouth.
“Secrets?” said he. “Why, you makes me laugh to talk of having secrets here!”
He broke off, restless in a shaking way to get his pipe to draw; then turned suddenly upon me.
“You’rea gen’leman, sir,” he said, “and should know better—nor to meddleinthings what don’t concarn you. The Lord has putt His seal on this here hill:youlet it alone—ifI may make free to be His mouthpiece, like Ezekiel what was told to warn the evil doers that they come not to grief—anddie.”
I laughed.
“O, you flatter yourself, Mr. Rampick!” I said. “You aren’t a bit like Ezekiel.”
He stood regarding me, half perplexed, half malignant, for a minute; then settled himself down on a stone and smoked away, silent, his eyes staring and full of a vicious resolution.
“Come on, Dick,” said Harry, seeing it obvious that the man meant to outstay us, and took my arm and walked me off.
“But we’ll have the badger, nevertheless,” he said, when we were out of hearing, “and in spite of that sot. Can’t make him out, can you? Should have thought he’d have welcomed the chance of recovering some of his old brandy tubs.”
“Whichit’s well known that ’ope deferred maketh a cat sick,” said Mrs. Puddephatt, with unintentional irreverence, referring to my report to my uncle of our late meeting with Mr. Rampick. She was by this time quite in the family confidence. “Bless you, Master Richard,” said she, “it’s not the Lord’s secret the man’s so keerful of; it’s ’is hown, living all these years on the ’opes of salvidge from the ’ill, and jealous of hothers steppin’ hin and anticepting of ’im.”
Uncle Jenico laughed.
“You’re still as sceptical as ever about the earthquake, Mrs. Puddephatt,” said he. “Now, it occurs to me, if the hill was, as you suppose, a rendezvous for smugglers, who by some folly entombed themselves therein, why wasn’t the whole village plunged immediately into mourning for the loss at a blow of so many fathers and brothers?”
Mrs. Puddephatt, standing with folded arms and a bleak, patient smile, awaited his good pleasure to answer.
“Hev you adone, sir?” she now demanded. “Don’t let me hinterrupt you before you’ve got it hall hout.”
“Thank you,” said Uncle Jenico, a little abashed. “I think there’s nothing more.”
“Ho!” said the lady, drawing in a sharp breath. “Then let me hexpress at once, sir, before more’s said, my hobligation for your supposing as I’m supposing.”
“I admit it was unpardonable,” answered my uncle, with a beaming but rather frightened smile. “I should have understood, of course, that you have warrant for your smugglers.”
“Notmysmugglers, sir,” she said, “beggingyourpardon. Faults there may be in my pronounciation; but ’awking and spitting in his langwidge was never yet, so far as I know, laid to the charge of a Londoner.”
“My dear soul!” began Uncle Jenico. But she interrupted him—
“No, sir; nor to hend the names of his towns with a hoath, which it is not permitted to a lady’s lips to pollute themselves with huttering.”
“O, really, Mrs. Puddephatt, I don’t understand!” said my uncle in despair.
“I dare say not, sir,” went on the inexorable female. “But you must excuse me if I draw the line at Hamster and Rotter.”
“O!” said Uncle Jenico, gathering light through the gloom. “You mean to imply that these smugglers were Dutchmen?”
She condescended to smile a little, and, pursing her lips, nodded at him with a very stiff neck.
“Bein’, you see, a Londoner yourself, sir, to which a nod is as good as a wink. It was Dutchmen what landed and stowed the stuff, and Dunberry what distributed of it. They howned to no connection with one another, and worked apart, which was their safety. Dunberry, bless you, would be dreaming in their beds that hinnercent, while ’Olland would be stuffing of the ’ill with contraband. Honly that Rampick was the master sperrit and go-between; and now you knows the truth about ’im.”
We both stared at her breathless.
“Then,” said my uncle at last, “the unfortunate creatures caught up there, if caught they were——”
“Made no widders in Dunberry, sir,” she put in decisively.
“God bless me!” said Uncle Jenico, much agitated. “Then Rampick——”
He turned to me.
“Don’t bait the man, Dick,” he said. “Remember, whoever’s to blame for it, he’s half crazed by his misfortunes; and small wonder, when some of us find it difficult to keep our heads in prosperity. Why, dear, dear! It isn’t the part of luck to throw stones, and certainly not at a dog in a trap. It’s like enough the poor creature’s dangerous. I dare sayIshould be if things had gone against me. Don’t bait him, Dick. Give him a wide berth.”
He had always been a little nervous about this fellow and our attitude towards him. His appeal was, however, superfluous. The ex-smuggler was not attractive; and Harry and I were certainly never the first to invite collision with him. For, what with blight and rum and sanctimony—which last, from being assumed for a disguise, had become a half-demoniac possession in him—he was little better at this day than a smouldering madman. Nevertheless, I tried loyally henceforth to emulate Uncle Jenico’s better Christianity by making allowances for the man because of his provocation. After all, calumny could visit him with no more formidable charge than that of having been a successful smuggler—a negative indictment even in these days. And perhaps, the main impeachment admitted, Mrs. Puddephatt’s cockney perspicacity was not so deadly a detective as she supposed.
I took Mr. Sant and Harry, of course, into my confidence with regard to our landlady’s story. It was little more than a confirmation to them, if that were needed, that Rampick had been the head and front of the old trade. But the Dutch part was news to us, and nothing less, I do believe, to Mrs. Puddephatt herself, who, however she had become acquainted with it, had acquired her knowledge recently, I am sure, or she would not have omitted hitherto to impress us with it in her many allusions to the “herthquake.” The rector, for his part, had speculated, no doubt, like my uncle, upon the equanimity with which the village had accepted the supposed visitation of God upon a number of its bread-winners; but had never to this day, I think, in spite of the respect in which he was held, succeeded in getting behind the localesprit de corpswhich hid the real truth from him. Now much was explained—provided Mrs. Puddephatt had actually been permitted to discover what had been kept from us—much, that is to say, except the nature and cause of the catastrophe; and that, I supposed, we should never find out. But there I was mistaken, as events will show. For Destiny, having got her puppets at last into position, was even now gathering the strings into her hands for the final “Dance of Death.”
In the meanwhile, the last month of the year opened upon us with a falling barometer and fresh menace of tempest, which it was not long in justifying. The little calm had been but a breathing time, to enable Winter to brace his muscles and fill out his lungs. It was on the night of the fifteenth, I think, that the great storm which followed, notable even on those coasts, rose to its height. The wind came from the north-east, with a high tide, which, racing obliquely, cut the cliffs like a guillotine. The whole village hummed and shook with the roar of it. Not a chimney but was a screaming gullet into which its breath was sucked like water. There were ricks scattered like chaff on the uplands, and trees uprooted with mandrake groans of agony. God knows, too, what the quicksands knew that night! When the day broke the worst was already over, and the sea, scattered with the bones of its prey, sullenly licking its jaws. Far on the drifts of the Weary Sands gaped the ribs of a mammoth it had torn, the solitary monument to its rage. The rest was matchwood.
That same night Uncle Jenico and Harry and I were supping at the rectory. The occasion is vivid in my memory because of a story which Mr. Sant told us. After the meal we had drawn our chairs to the fire, and moved, perhaps, by the unearthly racket overhead, were fallen upon talk of the supernatural. The house lay so close-shut within trees that the booming of the tempest came to us half muffled. In its pauses, we could even hear the drip from broken gutters treading the drive beneath, upon which the dining-room windows looked, with a sound like stealthy footsteps. It brought to his mind, said Mr. Sant, a legend he had once heard about a werewolf—the German vampire. These creatures, men by day, but condemned, for their unspeakable crimes, to become wolves with the going down of the sun, are like nothing mortal. It is forbidden to notice, to pity, to sympathize with them in any way. Whosoever does, yields himself to their thrall.
One winter evening a peasant-woman, belated in the snow-bound woods, was hurrying home, with her basket of provisions for the morrow over her arm, when she heard a pattering behind her, and looking back, there was a werewolf following. In the hunger of the miserable creature’s face she saw an expression which haunted while it terrified her. It was faintly suggestive of something, or somebody; but of what or whom she could not tell. Yet the lost horror in it moved her in spite of herself. Her pity mastered her fear. She took meat from her basket and threw it back, conscious of her secret sin. “But who will know!” she thought; “and I could not sleep without.” The creature stopped to devour the morsel, which enabled the woman to escape and reach her home in safety. But all the following day her deed dwelt with her, so that towards evening, unable to bear her own sole confidence any longer, she went down to the lonely church to confess her sin and be absolved of it. She rang the little sacristy bell, and summoned the solitary confesser. He came, and behind the bars heard her avowal. Then, as listening to it he turned his face, she saw that snap and change in the gloom. The eyes rounded, the brows puckered and met, the jaw shot down and forth. Before her, glaring through the bars, was the werewolf of the preceding night. It barked and snapped at the grating which divided them, then dropped, and she heard it issue forth and come pattering round to the side where——
We were never to know, for at that instant, weird and unearthly in a pause of the storm, there rose a long melancholy bay outside the window. We all fell like mutes, staring at one another; then, moved by a single impulse, jumped to our feet and made for the front door. The wind battled to crush us with it, driving us back as we raised the latch, and so whipped our eyelashes and flared the lights in the hall that for a minute we could do nothing. But when at last we emerged and stood in the drive, not a living shape of any sort was to be seen—only the tossed bushes and black tree trunks.
“It must have been a wandering dog,” said Mr. Sant; “something attracted by the light. Come in again, all of you.”
But we would only re-enter to get our coats and caps for the homeward march. Some growing sense of unbounded licence in the storm awed us, I think, and drew us like cowed beasts to our lairs.
As we butted through the darkness, a form detached itself from the shadows in a deep part of the lane, and followed staggering and hooting in our wake. It was Rampick, blazing drunk, and his maniac laugh pursued my uncle and me long after we were housed and shuddering between the sheets.
I hada vision sometimes of our tight little island lying on the sea like a round of bread and butter on a plate, and the Angel of the Storm amusing himself by biting patterns out of its edges. The coast in our part of the world was particularly inviting to him, because, I suppose, it was crumb, and not rocky with crust like other parts. Anyhow he never flew near without setting his teeth in it somewhere, and on this occasion to such gluttonous effect that he must have blown himself out before he had fairly settled down to his meal. His attack was as short as it was violent. For miles north and south the cliffs had been torn and gulped—only the birds, mapping them from above, could have said into what new fantastic outline. Landmarks were gone, and little bays formed where had been promontories. Here and there a fisherman’s boat had been licked out of its winter perch, that that same angel might play bounce-ball with it on the cliffs until it was broken to bits. The wreck and flotsam on the shore were indescribable; and sad and ugly was the sight of more than one drowned mariner entangled in them. I turn my memory gladly from such retrospects, to concentrate it upon those features of the havoc which most concern this history.
Waterside folk are a strangely incurious and fatalistic race. Once having satisfied themselves after a storm that their craft, disposed here and there in winter quarters, are untouched, the changes wrought on their sea-front interest them only in so far and so long as those changes mean profitable wreckage. When that is all gathered, they withdraw again to their winter burrows and winter occupations, and leave the foreshore to its natural desolation.
At least, that is what Dunberry did after the gale and within a couple of days following it, than which no longer was needed, it appeared, to secure any salvage worth the landing. For there is this characteristic of great tempests, that from their destructive rage they yield a poorer harvest of “whole grain,” so to speak, than do moderate ones. The latter, maybe, deposit some literal pickings in the shape of crates, barrels, seamen’s chests, etc., yet compact; the former for the most part meredisjecta membra. It followed, therefore, that when Harry and I next visited the beach—which, as it happened, he having been away, and I confined to the house with a beastly cold, we did not do until the afternoon of the third day succeeding that night of uproar—we found we had the whole place virtually to ourselves.
Uncle Jenico, who, from his anxious concern for me, had also kept at home during the interval, came with us, full of suppressed eagerness to glean the torn fields of shingle for relics. I think I only realized the self-restraint which his affection must have imposed upon him in those two days, when I saw the almost childish joy with which he greeted the sight of the weedy litter strewn, as far as the eye could reach, along the shore.
“Why, Richard!” he exclaimed, rubbing his hands, while his spectacles seemed to twinkle again, “here’s a chance indeed! It’s an ill wind that blows nobody—— Poor souls, poor souls! I feel like robbing the grave to take such advantage of their misery.”
His countenance fell a moment; but his mood was not proof against the stupendous prospect.
“The sea’s a pretty big grave, sir,” said Harry. “You might as well have scruples about digging gold out of the earth, seeing we’re all buried there.”
“That’s true,” said Uncle Jenico, with serious delight. “That’s quite true, my boy. I only hope I’ve not left it to too late.”
This gave me a little qualm.
“Shall I come with you, uncle?” I said.
“No, Dicky,” he answered; “no, no, no. You and Harry amuse yourselves as you will. I wouldn’t deny myself for anything the gratification of the treat I’m going to bring you by-and-by. It’s selfish, no doubt; but—but I’d rather be alone.”
And he hobbled away, calling out to us not to let our expectations runtoohigh, or he might be defrauded of his opportunity to surprise us.
“He’s a real trump,” said Harry. “I hope you think so, Dick.”
“Of course I do,” I answered, rather testily, and began to whistle.
“That’s all right, then,” said he. “And now let’s explore.”
It was a fine, still afternoon, with the tide at quiet ebb, and a touch of frost in the air. The sun, low down, burned like a winter fire, and gleamed with a light of sadness on the ribs of the gaunt wreck lying far away on the Weary Sands. She was visible only at low water; at high being completely submerged. No one, so far as I knew, had yet had the curiosity or venturesomeness to row out and investigate the poor castaway. It was just plain to see, by the aid of glasses, that she had broken her back on the drift, and that only her stern half remained, wedged into the sand. But what her name or condition Dunberry had not had the energy to inquire.
We were standing at gaze at the foot of the Gap, and when Uncle Jenico went north, we, in obedience to his wish to be left alone, turned our faces down the coast. But we had not taken a score or so of steps when we hooted out simultaneously over the sight that was suddenly revealed to us. The storm had bolted a great hunk, good ten feet through at its thickest, of the Mitre, obliterating the already half-effaced step-way by which Rampick had been wont to ascend, and laying bare, high up in the cliff, a mass of broken masonry. From the character of this last it was evident at a glance what had happened. The seaward limit to the crypts of the old abbey had been shorn through, and the extreme vaulting of that ancient underworld exposed. Nor was this all. The well, now thus further isolated from the hill which had once contained it, was grown, from the washing away of the sand at its base, an apparent five feet or so taller, and was leaning outwards at a distinctly acuter and more ominous angle with the shore.
We stood excited a moment, then, without a word, raced to get a closer view. The wrack and downfall, as we looked up at their traces, must have been stupendous; yet so great had been the pulverising force of the waves, the mighty silt from them, except for a few tumbled blocks of stone, was all dispersed and distributed about the shore below, so that a new cliff face, clear of ruin, went up in a pretty clean sweep from beach to summit sixty feet above. From the lower curve of this, where it ran out and down into the sand, the well projected, not ten feet above us, like a little tower of Pisa; and yet thirty feet higher, at a point in the hill face about on a level with the well top, gaped the jagged ruin of masonry which the storm had laid bare.
“Dick!” whispered Harry—“Dick!” (He was gulping and gripping my arm hard, as he stared up.) “Supposing we could climb to there and look in!”
“Yes!” I choked back. I knew what was in his mind; and the thought fascinated while it frightened me horribly.
“I’ve never seen a Dutchman,” he said. “Mrs. Puddephatt, she—it would be fun to find out the truth. What are they like?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, shivering. “They wear lots of breeches, I believe. But it’s no good. The place is all choked up. You can see for yourself.”
There was no apparent entrance that way, indeed. The contour of the vaulting was roughly discernible, it is true, but so stopped with mud anddébrisas to offer no visible passage.
“Besides,” I went on, swallowing fast and trying to escape from the fluttering spell the mere suggestion had laid upon me,—“whether it was an earthquake or gunpowder, it’s all the same. It must be just all squash and ruin inside; and—and the things——” I stuck, feeling that I dare not speculate further.
Harry released my arm, and for some time looked down, making thoughtful patterns with his foot in the sand.
“Well, I don’t know,” he said, raising his face suddenly. “But I’d mighty like to see.”
We were both rather silent for the rest of the afternoon; and, though we neither of us alluded to the subject for a day or two afterwards, it was evident it stood between us. We avoided the spot, too; until one evening a long ramble brought us back by the shore past it. Then, by a common impulse, we stopped, and stood gaping silent up once more. The light from the sinking sun smote level upon the face of the cliff, so that it stood out as bright as a grate back. Its surface, quite dried from the tempest, reflected no glaze of water. The rivulets of mud, which had flowed over and sealed the scar of ruin above, were hardened like plaster, though shrinkage had opened black fissures in them here and there.
Harry, softly whistling, left me suddenly, and, with his hands in his pockets, toiled indifferently up the slope to the well foot. Here, still whistling, he began kicking round the base; but in a moment desisted and called to me. I went up, and he fell upon his knees, and set to scraping with his fingers.
“See?” he said, stopping.
“No; what?” I answered.
“Why, look, you bat!” said he. “Nothing under; nothing deeper. Here’s the last bottom course of the thing; the foundation stones, or I’m a——”
He checked himself, grinning.
“I was going to say ‘Dutchman,’” said he; “and, for all we know, they may be listening up there.”
“O, don’t be a beast!” I exclaimed, with a wriggle of discomfort.
He chuckled again.
“Well, anyhow,” he said, “here’s the old well just standing on its end, like a drain-pipe with a tilt to it. If we brought spades and dug away underneath on the outside, it would fall—and on the top of us, too; but that’s a detail. Wonder the storm didn’t finish it, don’t you? Must have come pretty near to.”
As he spoke, staring up at me, he suddenly uttered a soft exclamation, and scrambling to his feet, pulled at my arm.
“Look there!” he whispered. “Don’t move!”
I followed the direction of his hand, which was pointing to the scar in the cliff-face above. I could see nothing.
“Hush, you old fool!” he said impatiently. “Keep quiet!”
I did not stir; till, at the end of a long interval, something made me start involuntarily. It was a wink—a flutter—a motion of some sort, I knew not what, on the hill front.
“Did you see?” whispered Harry.
“Yes,” I muttered back. “What was it?”
He ran down the slope to the sand, and I followed at a leap, thinking he meant that the cliff was falling. But when I saw his face I knew that some excitement other than fear was moving him.
“It was the badger,” he said, turning sharp on me. “Now, do you understand what that means?”
Perhaps I had a glimmering; but I shook my head feebly to repudiate it.
“Why!” he cried reproachfully. “Dicky, you gowk! If he goes to earth at the top and comes and puts his nose out here, what does it mean but that the crypts ain’t as blocked as we supposed!”
“There must be a passage through, of course,” I murmured.
Harry nodded, primming his lips. “Well?” said he.
“Why, it don’t follow that where a badger can go, we can.”
“It does with me,” he said shortly.
An odd little silence fell between us. Then Harry turned away, and began to move off, whistling. At a bound I was after him, with a furious red face, and, seizing his arm, had whipped him round.
“I’m going to try to get into the hill up there,” I cried. “If you’re afraid to come too, stop behind like a coward!”
He stared at me amazed; then fell a’ grinning.
“I never said you were a coward,” he retorted.
“But you meant it,” I answered, fuming.
We were bristling, actually, as on that far-off day when we had first come into collision. Our fists were clenched; the backs of our necks tingled; it was really a pregnant moment.
But the good old fellow resolved it, and in the best way possible. The fire suddenly left his eyes.
“O, Dick,” he said; “what asses we are! Look here, I’ll tell you—I should funk it going up there alone, and you wouldn’t, it seems; that’s the truth. I only wanted to dare you, for my own sake.”
“O, all right!” I said, pocketing my fists, and pretty ashamed of myself. I kicked the sand about, not knowing how to escape the situation gracefully. At last I in my turn blurted out: “What rot this is! Let’s forget it all, and just discuss ways and means.”
“You really intend to try?” said Harry, his face relighting.
“If I die for it now,” I answered.
“O, well!” he said, heaving a profound sigh. “It’s simple enough. We’ll just climb up there, and say ‘open sesame,’ and walk in.”
This little inspiration to identify our adventure with Ali Baba’s was quite a happy one. Not forty Dutch smugglers, but forty beautiful Persian thieves with scimitars and waxed moustaches! It tinctured with romance at once the thought of the ugly sights it was possible we might encounter. Our half fearful design became, in a flash of coloured light, a tingling conspiracy.
It was too late, of course, to attempt anything that evening. But the following afternoon was a half-holiday with us, and quite apt to our purpose. In the interval we secured some candles and a box of the friction matches then lately come into use, as also, privately, Uncle Jenico’s geological hammer, a sturdy tool with a heavy butt and a long steel pick to balance its head. And with these, and nothing else whatever but our trust in ourselves, we issued forth after a hasty early dinner, and no word said to anybody, to dare and do.
We had resolved, after consultation, to make the attempt from above rather than below; because, in the first place, we should be less likely to attract attention, and, in the second, because a descent of twenty feet appeared easier of accomplishment than a climb of thirty up that slippery glacis. So we started, unregarded of any one, as we supposed, by way of the valley, and were not long in reaching the brow of the Mitre where it overlooked the well and the recent landfall.
It was all strangely altered here, and, near the edge, risky footing at the best. But we stole up cautiously, and, going upon our stomachs the last yard or two, looked down. Below us, at a rather giddy distance, projected some spars and ledges of the fractured masonry. Fortunately, however, the interval between us and them was not balked by any bulge in the cliff, but showed a smooth descent, and not too sheer for the essay. Still, it did not do to dwell upon it.
“Are you ready?” I whispered. “I’m going down.”
“No, you aren’t,” said Harry. “Me first.”
I only answered by crooking my elbow to keep him back.
“Don’t be a fool!” he protested. “We shall break away, and both go faster than we want, if you aren’t careful.”
I made no reply but to resist him doggedly, till at last, with a grunt, he let me go, and I turned, lying flat-faced, and swung my legs over the precipice.
“O, you old brute!” he said. “Well, go easy, then, and dig your toes in.”
And with that I let go and slid away, clawing and scratching like a cat coming down a tree. It was just to fasten on and commit one’s self to luck, which, fortunately for me, directed my feet to a ledge, on which I brought up, gasping and spitting out dirt. But once secure of my hold, and in a state to look about me, I was relieved to find that the position was much more possible than it had seemed either from above or below, the projecting spits of stonework being more and more pronounced than had showed at a distance.
I took a minute to get my wind, and then called up to Harry to follow; but he was already on his way. I saw him coming at a risky pace, and by a slightly divergent course, which he had taken to avoid me. It would have carried him clear of the ruin altogether had I not, at the psychologic moment, clapped my hand to the seat of his small-clothes and checked his descent.
“O!” he howled, “let go!”
“I won’t!” I cried. “Don’t be an ass! Stick your foot out here!”
With a desperate effort he managed to wriggle oblique, and in a moment we were standing together on the ledge.
“That was give and take,” he panted. “Like being saved from drowning by a shark. Can’t say your bark’s worse than your bite.”
I chuckled so that I was near falling off our perch, till a sudden thought sobered me.
“Supposing, after all, we can’t get in, or up or down neither?” I said dismayed. “A pretty picture we shall make, stuck up here.”
“Well, it’s too late to think of that now,” answered Harry, coolly. “Lend me a hand while I kick.”
He let out on the wall of mud in front, which we had hoped was just a mask or screen hiding a cavity behind; but his foot only sunk to the ankle in it without effect.
“So there!” he said. “We must look for a better place, that’s all.”
We were standing, so far as we could judge, about midway up the groining of the vault, and right under the apex, a little above and to the right of us, gaped a small round fissure.
“See?” said Harry, excitedly; “that’s the place. It don’t go perpendicular like the others, which means that it’s sunk away from some support above it. Hold me, now.”
I clutched him the best I could, gripping a stone with my other hand, and he brought the big hammer from his jacket pocket, and poised himself, standing high on his toes. “Open sesame!” says he, and struck with all the force he could muster on the soil just under the hole. The result made him stagger, for he had expected some resistance, and there was none. The whole top of a mound of silt, which stopped the neck, it seemed, of the decapitated crypts, and into the thick base of which he had first struck his foot, broke away and fell inwards, revealing an aperture, already, under that one blow, large enough for a man to crawl through.
Harry, recovering himself, quietly repocketed the tool, and turned to me. His face was a little white, but his mouth was set as grim as sin.
“It’s my turn,” he said. “Think you can give me a leg up?”
It was no use my disputing, as he was on the right side. Working with infinite caution and difficulty on that perilous eyrie, I managed to stoop, and, getting my hands under one of his feet, levered him slowly up, while he drew on every projection he could reach, until he was able to claw his arms into the hole and hang on.
“Now,” came his voice out, muffled and hollow, “one shove, and——”
I drove with the word; dig went his feet and knees; he sprawled convulsively a moment; got hold; the mound jerked and sunk a little under him, a clatter ofdébriswent down the cliff face, and he was in.
Almost in the same instant his face, hot and staring, re-emerged, and then his arms.
“Here,” he panted. “Can you reach?”
Not by a couple of feet could I.
“Hold tight and catch me,” I said. “I’m going to jump.”
Fixing my eyes on him, and crouching to the lowest I dared, I sprang, and he snatched and gripped my wrists.
“Now!” he gasped; and instantly the both of us were battling and struggling, he to hold me firm, and I to get way on and leverage.
For a minute the issue was doubtful; the mound sunk and crumbled still lower; I clawed frantically with my toes, my legs going like a frog’s on a slippery basin. But at last I got hold, and a little ease to my lungs; and so, hauling on to the hands held out to me, and wriggling up foot by foot, was drawn into the opening, now much enlarged, and crawling through, rolled, tangled up with Harry, down a slope into darkness.