HOW NANCE SENT FOOD AND HOPE TO HIM
Next morning, when he crawled out of his burrow, Gard found everything swathed in dense white mist. Upon which he promptly lit his fire, and in due course enjoyed a more satisfying meal than he had eaten since he landed on the rock.
Then he decided to take advantage of the screening mist to explore such parts of his prison-house as were not available to him at other times. So he walked along the ridge, secure from observation since he could not himself see down to the water from it, though the rushings and roarings along the black ledges below never ceased.
Every nook and ledge of the out-cropping rock on the south side of the ridge was occupied by lady gulls in all stages of their maternal duties. From the surprise they expressed at his intrusion, and the way they stuck to their nests, they were evidently quite unused to man and his ways, and it was all he could do to avoid stepping on them and their squawking families as he picked his way along.
He clambered down the eastern slope nearest Sark, and found the ground there covered with a fairly deep soil, and green growths that were strange to him. The soil was perforated with holes which at first he ascribed to rabbits, but when he inserted his hand into one he got such a nip from an unusually strong beak that he changed his mind to puffins, and, standing quite still for a time, he presently saw the members of the colony come creeping out behind their great red bills and scurry off across the water in search of breakfast.
Then the great semi-detached pinnacle below attracted him, and he scrambled down amid the complaints of a great colony of gulls and cormorants but found the tide still too full for him to cross the intervening chasm. Those wonderful great green waves out of a smooth sea came roaring along the sides of the island and met full tilt in the chasm below him, as they leaped exultant from their conflict with the rocks. They hurled themselves against one another in wildest fury, and the foam of their meeting boiled white along the ledges, and dappled all the sea.
As he crawled through the lank wet grass and soft spongy soil, he found himself suddenly confronted with a great barrier of fallen rocks; as though, at some period of its existence, the north end of the island had tapered to a gigantic peak which, in the fulness of its time, had come down with a crash, and now lay like a titanic wall from summit to sea-board. Huge and forbidding, of all shapes and sizes, the mighty fragments barred his course like a menace, and he attacked them warily, drawing himself with infinite caution from one to another; over this one, under this, deftly between these two, lest an unwary weighting should start them on the movement that might grind him to powder.
The fog increased their forbidding aspect tenfold. He could not see a foot before him, and could only worm his way among them, testing each before he trusted it, and finding at times monsters become but mediocre when his hand was on them. More than once he had to rest his hands on cautiously-tried ledges and swing his legs forward and grope with his feet for foothold, and whether the space below was trifling, or whether it ran to incredible depth, he could not tell.
It was a mighty relief to him to come out at last on the other side of the wall, and to find himself on the great north slope which faced Sark, and so was closed to him in clear weather.
The long thin grass grew rankly here, and was beaded with moisture, but he pushed along with an eerie feeling at the wildness of it all.
The mist clung close about him, but had suddenly become luminous. He felt as though he were packed loosely all round with cotton wool on which a strong light was shining. It gave him a feeling of light-headedness. Everything was light about him, and yet he could not see more than a couple of feet before his face. The waves roared hoarsely below him, and once he had unknowingly got so low down that a monstrous white arm, reaching suddenly up out of the depths, seemed about to lay hold on him and drag him back with it into the turmoil.
He was panting and full of mist when at last he climbed the second great rock barrier and rounded the corner towards the south.
And as he sat resting there, the whiff of a westerly breeze tore a long lane in the white shroud, and for a moment he saw, as through a telescope, the houses of Guernsey gleaming in bright sunshine. Then it closed again, and presently began to drift past him in strange whorls and spirals, like hurrying ghosts wrapped hastily in filmy garments, which loosed at times and trailed slowly over the rocks and caught and clung to their sharp projections. Then the sun completed the rout, and the mist-ghosts swept away towards France, harried by the west wind like a flock of sheep before the shepherd's dog.
In the afternoon the heat grew so intense that he was driven to the wells in the valley of rocks for a bathe, for there was no shelter available, and his bee-hive was like an oven.
None of the pools was large enough for a swim, and it was more than a man's life was worth to venture among the boiling surges of the outer rocks. But he could at all events get under water, if it was only to sit there and cool off.
So he stripped, and was just about slipping into a deep still bath, emerald green, with a fringe of amber weeds all round its almost perpendicular sides, when, glancing down to make sure of an ultimate footing, his eye lighted with a shock of surprise on a pair of huge eyes looking straight up at him out of the water. They were violet in colour, protuberant, and malevolent beyond words.
He sat down suddenly on the baking black rock, with a cold shiver running down his back in spite of the scorch of the sun. The utter cold malignity of those great violet eyes, and the thought of what would have happened if he had stepped into that pool, made him momentarily sick.
He had seen small devil-fish in the pools in Sark, but never one approaching this in size. He crept away at last, leaving it in possession, and found a pool clear of boulders or caving hollows, and sat in it with no great enjoyment, wondering if the great unwholesome beast in the other would be likely to climb the cliff and come upon him in the night. He thought it unlikely, but still the idea clung to him and caused him no little discomfort. He blocked his door that night with great green cushions, though he felt doubtful if they would be effective against the wiles and strength of a devil-fish, if half that he had heard of them was true.
In the middle of the night—for he went to bed early, having nothing else to do, except to watch the stars—he woke with a cold start, feeling certain that hideous creature had crawled up the slope and was feeling all round his house for an entrance.
Certainly something was moving about outside, and feeling over the stones in an uncertain, searching kind of a way. And when you have been wakened up from a nightmare in which staring devil-eyes played a prominent part, something may be anything, and as like as not the owner of the eyes.
But even devil-fishes in their most advanced stages have not yet attained the power of human speech. If they speak to one another what a horrible sound it must be!
It was with a sigh of relief, and a sudden unstringing of the bow, that he heard outside—
"Mr. Gard!" and with a lusty kick, which expressed some of his feeling, he sent his doorway flying and crawled out after it.
The myriad winking stars lifted the roof of the world and the darkness somewhat, sufficient at all events for him to make out that it was not Nance.
"You, Bernel?" he queried, as the only possible alternative.
"Yes, Mr. Gard. I've brought you some more things to eat."
"Good lad! I'm a great trouble to you. Where is Nance? In the boat?"
"No, she couldn't come. That Julie's watching her like a cat. It was she and Peter stirred up the men against you. All day yesterday the whole Island was out looking for you, dead or alive, and very much puzzled as to what had become of you. And Julie's got a suspicion that we know. They searched the house for you in spite of mother and Grannie, but they won't forget Grannie in a hurry, and I don't think they'll come back," and he laughed at the recollection of it.
"What did Grannie do?"
"She just looked at them from under that big black sun-bonnet, and muttered things no one heard. But her eyes were like points of burning sticks, and they all crept out one after another, afraid of they didn't know what. But Julie's been on the watch all day, and would hardly let us out of her sight. But she couldn't watch us both when we were not together. So Nance got a bundle of things ready for you, and then went out with another bundle and Julie followed her, and I slipped off here."
"Bernel, I don't know how to thank you all! What should I have done without you?"
"You'd have been dead, most likely. It's not that they cared much for Tom, you know, but they don't like the idea of a Sark man being killed by a foreigner and no one paying for it."
"But I'm not a foreigner—"
"Yes you are, to them. Of course you're not a Frenchman, but all the same you're not a Sark man. Good thing for you you'd lived with us and we'd got to know you and like you."
"Yes, that was a good thing indeed. I'm only sorry to have brought you trouble and to be such a trouble to you."
"If we thought you'd done it of course we wouldn't trouble. But we know you couldn't have."
"Nothing fresh has turned up?"
"Nothing yet. But Nance says it will, sure. Truth must out, she says."
"It's a weary while of coming out sometimes, Bernel. And I can't spend the rest of my life here, you know."
"She said you were to keep your heart up. You never know what may happen."
"Tell her I can stand it because of all her goodness to me. If I hadn't her to think of I might go mad in time."
"I've brought you a rabbit I snared. Nance cooked it."
"That was good of her. Can you eat puffins' eggs?"
"They want a bit of getting used to," laughed the boy. "But they're better cooked than raw."
"I can cook them. I found part of an old boat, and I've plugged up all the holes in the shelter, and I only light a fire at night. Could I fish here?"
"Too big a sea close in. I've got some in the boat. I put out a line as I came across. I'll leave you some."
"And have you a bottle—or a bailing-tin? Anything I could bring home some water from the pools in? I have to go over there every time I need a drink, and in the dark it's not possible."
"You can have the bailer. It's a new one and sound."
"Now tell me, Bernel, if they find out I'm here what will they do?"
"They might come across and try and take you, unless they cool down; and that won't be so long as that Julie and Peter talk as they do. She makes him do everything she tells him. He's a sheep."
"And if they come across, what do you and Nance expect me to do?"
"You've got my gun," said the boy simply.
"Yes, I've got your gun. But do you expect me to kill some of them?"
"They'd kill you," said Bernel, conclusively. On second thoughts, however, he added, "But you needn't kill them. Wing one or two, and the rest will let you be. With a gun I could keep all Sark from landing on L'Etat."
"Suppose they come in the night? How many landing-places are there?"
"There's another at the end nighest Guernsey, but it's not easy. And it's only low tide and half-ebb that lets you ashore here at all."
"How about your boat?"
"She's riding to a line. Tide's running up that way, but I'd better be off."
They stumbled through the darkness and the sleeping gulls, which woke in fright, and volubly accused one another of nightmares and riotous behaviour—and Bernel hauled in his boat, and handed Gard the tin dipper and three good-sized bream.
"If you can't eat them all at once, split them open and dry them in the sun," he said. "They'll keep for a week that way."
"Tell Nance I think of her every hour of the day, and I pray God the truth may come out soon."
"I'll tell her. It'll come out. She says so," and he pulled out into the darkness and was gone.
And the Solitary went back to his shelter, secure in the knowledge that the tide was on the rise, and half-ebb would not be till well on into next day. And he thought of Nance, and of Bernel, and of all the whole matter again; white thoughts and black thoughts, but chiefly white because of Nance, and Nance was a fact, while the black thoughts were shadows confusing as the mist.
He could only devoutly hope and pray that a clean wind might come and put the shadows to flight and let the sun of truth shine through.