The Lake of Wine

by Bernard Capes

Now this was all a matter of a few seconds, but the noise had roused the household; and steps were heard hurrying down the stairs—as Sir David and the groom having come to their feet again were all re-making for the combatants—when the climax of the tragedy broke in a clap of fury to which the prelude had been a whisper. For, in some quarter of the house, a sudden shot rang out, and immediately there was a roar like a peal of subterranean thunder, and on its heels a hell of clanging and splintering sounds and the explosion of shattered glass—and the very floor of the room seemed to yawn and belch forth flame and cloud, as if a crater were formed beneath the foundations of the building.

Half-blinded and half-stunned, Tuke staggered to his feet and stood reeling. A monstrous silence succeeded the uproar, accented only—as a spout of black smoke rose to the ceiling and blossomed out there into a great fungus of death—with falling and tinkling sounds as of glass and dropping plaster. Then, close at hand, he heard voices crying to him, and he tottered towards them.

CHAPTER LII.

Captain Luvaine—misanthrope, ascetic, wiry as a ferret and disciplined on a drum-head—had fallen asleep at his post. No doubt the exhaustion induced by cold, hunger, and the emotion to which he had lately been subjected, was responsible for this lapse into a condition quite humanly natural. It was unfortunate for all, however, and very particularly for the unfortunate gentleman himself, that it should have occurred in the place and at the moment most fatal to the cause he had to serve.

For half-an-hour—his pistol cuddled in his left arm as if it were a wakeful baby—he measured his monotonous tramp in the little circumscribed chamber where was situated the “Priest’s Hole.” Upon a bracket on the wall a single candle burned, its flames shrugging peevishly in the cold draught that came through the high grating in the masonry. The trap of the vault was thrown open, the woodwork lying flat upon the floor; but the stone below was swung to upon its pivot, and at every recurring wheel in his march, he glanced down to see that this stone held its place, and that no stealthy pressure was applying to it from the tunnel-side. For, an extreme probability that the rogues would follow in the tracks of their escaped victim (no fresh snow having fallen to obliterate them) as far as the ice-house in the clearing, and would so learn of the existence of the underground passage, had led all engaged in the defence of the house to accept this quarter of it as the one most open to attack, and therefore to be more jealously watched than any other.

Often the soldier would bend and listen acutely for any least murmur of voices or rustle of secret footstep whispering into the blank deadliness of the pit beneath him. He heard nothing; was conscious of no sound he could set apart from the distant noises of the house as suspicious and unaccountable. Yet the voices were there and the footsteps; but muffled so completely by the thick stone as to be inaudible to the solitary man above.

Presently he found something irresistibly attractive in the swaying flame of the candle on the wall. It was an aspen leaf blown by the wind. A certain fever in his blood seemed to temper the cutting draught to the caress of a summer zephyr. He was on a breezy common he had known in childhood, eagerly hunting over a familiar poplar tree for the moth (he remembered all at once, it went by the name of the “Sycamore”) that lay cunningly hid by day in the furrows of the bark, from which in colour it might scarcely be distinguished. He put out his hand with a smile, staggered on the brink of the pit, recovered himself and resumed his tramp with a curse at his own folly. But by and by the flame fixed his attention once more. Tibbie! Who was she, and why should he associate her with the jumping light? He remembered all at once. It was the queer name of a little Scotch girl he had worshipped as a boy. She had had hair golden as barley straw, and he had begged a curl and had put it in his Bible, where it was always connected in his mind with the tongues of flame. Good God! how long ago was that? And would Tibbie give him a curl now, if she knew? Quite suddenly his eyes were thick with tears. He pressed his hand to them fiercely, and went up and down again—up and down. What strange caprice of memory was renewing for him these shining ghosts of his past? The new emotion, with a touch of ancient sorrow in it, sang in his brain like restful music. Standing, he leaned against the wall, shut his eyes—and immediately, with a throb and swerve of ecstasy, he was asleep.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Mr. Fern had set his snare with fine tact. In his desperation (for he had, indeed, come to that condition) he was resolved to win or lose all by a single coup de main. His statement of his case—so far as it went—was unexaggerated. His rascal improvidence had provided against no contingencies. His gang was mutinous from cold and hunger—most of all from the failure of liquor-supply through the impossibility of communicating with Mr. Breeds of the “Dog and Duck.” Baulked by the unexpected return of the master of “Delsrop”; baulked in his design to “rush” the house at the very outset of his daring swoop upon the estate; out-manœuvred in his attempt to make capital of the hostages that a fickle rogue’s Providence had flung into his arms, he must exercise all his diplomacy of scoundrelism to quiet the rebellion that had broken out in his own ranks. The discovery of the escape of the prisoners was the critical moment of his authority; and it was only when pursuit led to the revelation of the subterranean passage, that he found a new argument to the favour of his fellows, and to the postponement of the sacrifice of his life to their fury.

Very noiselessly, he had in person explored the tunnel, and satisfied himself that a guard was stationed at its outlet. The trap also (so it happened at the time) was closed and bolted; and it was evident that this must be forced, at the crucial moment, by means instant and effectual. Now, though he was ignorant of the real numerical strength of the garrison, he could not doubt that so obviously weak a position would be strenuously cared for by the enemy. A single man, indeed, properly posted and armed, might account for his entire gang, one by one, as it issued into the pit through the narrow aperture (the secret of whose revolving stone he had, with superior craft, easily unravelled); and a mere struggle to force this point was therefore out of the question. He would conceive a subtler plan. He would himself venture into the stronghold and would engage its defenders in talk, while Brander and the rest made their silent way under the house to the vault-opening. Here a bag of powder was to be fastened under the trap and fired by a train run up a stick. The sentry would be either killed or disabled by the explosion—the way burst clear for the uprush of his fellows; and, in the terror and confusion that should ensue, he would take the enemy in the rear and complete its demoralization.