III
The Parson staggered.
"Nelson!" he cried, ghastly.
His mind clutched in the dark at something it had lost.
"The plot, sir…. Beachy Head."
"My God!" cried the Parson, and died against the wall.
The despatch-bag and its contents had so possessed him that Nelson's need had for the moment slipped his mind.
"And I call myself a soldier!"
He leapt to life again.
"What's to-day?" savagely.
"Wednesday, sir."
"Is it to-morrow?"
"Yes, sir."
The life faded out of his blue eyes.
Till that moment he had been hugging the comfortable belief that Time, the soldier's best ally and worst enemy, was on his side. Sooner or later relief must come. Cosy in their tiny fortress, they could afford to wait for it. The Gentleman could not. Now for the first time the Parson learned that his anticipated ally was his foeman's.
"Talk of Knapp!—I'm the one ought to be shot."
"How soon shall we be relieved, sir?" asked the boy feverishly at his side. "When may we expect the soldiers?"
The words revived the Parson like a whip-lash. Knapp, a soldier, had betrayed his trust. He, a soldier, had let slip thirty golden hours. He was bitterly jealous for his dear Service.
"We shan't be relieved," he snarled. "How can the soldiers relieve us when they don't know we want relief? Knapp didn't get through—told you so already once."
"But the country-folk, sir! Surely they'll report."
"No, they won't," stonily. "This is Sussex. We aren't alive in Sussex: we're dead-alive…. If they did see anything was up they'd only think it was one of the ordinary rows between the blockade-men and the gentlemen, as they call the smugglers."
He looked out of the Downward window. There was little comfort. Tall men in French uniforms swaggered about England's greensward as though already it was theirs. He could catch their beastly foreign lingo. The sight and sound made him mad. Grim old watchdog that he was, he felt the bristles at the back of his neck rising. What right had these strange folk in his back-yard?—O to make his teeth meet in their gaitered legs!
Besides the Frenchmen, not a soul stirring.
English rooks cawing over English green, and an English sheepdog answering them.
A lonely land at the best of times, it was a desert now.
Westward in a cloud of beeches, a grey house glimmered—George Cavendish's—empty. The Seahouses over by Splash Point—empty too. So was every house of any size for ten miles inland from Fair-light to Selsea Bill. Everybody bolted who could afford it. The old lady of Hailsham quite a proverb for pluck in these parts; and they said she looked under her bed every night to see if the French had come.
And the luck! where was the luck?
Ten days since this uttermost corner of England had stirred to the strange music of men making ready for battle: bugle-calling Cavalry in the new barracks in Eastbourne on the hill; thundering Artillery in the Circular Redoubt at Langney Point; Sea-Fencibles in the martello- towers along Pevensey Levels. Now all was still and dead again. A concentration in force had taken place at Lewes. The Cavalry had been withdrawn to the camp there. A case of cholera had emptied Langney Fort. The Sea-Fencibles had run away. Black Diamond had swept up the blockademen.
Darkness, darkness, everywhere.
Kit stole to his side.
"We must get a message through to Nelson," he chattered. "We must."
The boy felt himself at war with destiny, and crushed by it. He recalled the Man of Despair in the Iron Cage in Pilgrim's Progress. The fate of the country was in his hands. He alone had the knowledge that could save her, and he could not use it. He was a dumb thing, possessed of a vast world-secret, which he could not impart for lack of voice.
"If there's no other way, we must cut our way through."
The Parson met him with a rough,
"Nonsense."
"Why?" hotly.
"Impossible—that's why."
It was the first time he had thrown that dead-wall word across the lad's path, and it maddened the boy.
After all, he was responsible, not this beefy soldier.
"That's a word we don't know in our Service, sir," he cried with scornful nostrils.
The taunt touched the Parson on the raw.
He swung round savagely.
"Your Service!" he stormed. "At a time such as this, there is only one Service for loyal hearts, and that's the Service of his country."
The lad quailed before the thunder-and-lightning of the man's wrath.
"Why can't we sally?" sullenly.
The Parson shot a hand toward the window.
The boy followed his pointing finger.
In the open, behind the wall, was a camp-fire, a group of soldiers squatting round it, arms piled. To right and left, embracing the cottage, a chain of sentries ran, tall men all in tall-plumed bear- skins.
Old Piper was right. A cordon indeed!
"Grenadiers of the Guard!" rumbled the Parson in the boy's ear, rolling his r's like a feu de joie. "Marksmen to a man; veterans all; and half of them decorated."
Grenadiers of the Guard! the men of the Bridge of Lodi, of the Battle of the Pyramids and Mount Tabor, of Hochstadt and Hohenlinden.
Kit recalled the tops of the Cocotie swarming with riflemen, and old Ding-dong's surprised disgust.
Now he understood.
On the success of this venture hung Napoleon's world-projects. Coûte que coûte, he had told Mouche, he must bring off this coup. So he was employing on it the pick of the first Army the world had ever seen.
As he thought of the issues at stake, the boy's soul fainted within him.
How could he, Kit Caryll, aged fifteen, and hovering on the brink of tears, stand up against the Victor of Marengo?