The secret in the hill

by Bernard Capes

At least with Harry and me, I think, hope had attenuated almost to the vanishing point. Brain-sodden, benumbed, half lifeless, grown near unconscious of time or place, the instinct to hold on, the power to keep at bay the last fatal drowsiness alone remained to us in ever-diminishing degree. We did not know, in the confusion of our senses, whether we were drawing inshore or to sea; we did not know whether we were rocking, an idle log, virtually unprogressive, or slipped into one of the coast currents, and speeding silent on an interminable journey. We could not tell the sick drawl of the hours, for our watches had, of course, stopped. But we dreaded horribly the time when dusk should fall, if it should find us derelicts still. And so it found us, drooping down and closing in; and then Providence seemed hidden, and we despaired.

I cannot picture, indeed, the terror of that darkening desolation; the running fields of water, spectral with foam, fenced within an ever-contracting cyclone of dusk, devouring their own boundaries, and committing us slowly to entombment in one final sepulchre of night. It is all an impossible dream, in my mind—a sort of horrible pantomime, in which a sense of induration, of fixity, while I watched grotesque figures, born of my imagination, come and go in my brain, was ineffably dissolved by the spirit of the moon, and changed into consciousness of heaven.

Joshua, I knew, felt nothing of what we did, except, in a measure, physically; and, even there, the exultation in his soul was tonic to his body. Since our capping of his secret with our own, he had been a changed creature—a bent bow released and snapped upright. It is difficult to describe his transformation—his translation, rather, inspired as Bottom’s. Where had been sombreness, depression, some self-deprecation, was self-assurance, some rallying blitheness, boisterousness almost. He had been crushed, and was expanded; beaten, and was triumphant. That he should have run, when near broke with the chase, his shadow to earth, and through me, the son of the man whose memory he worshipped! It was stupendous. He could not contain his glee, or discipline his expectancy, now it had once burst those year-long bonds. He was convinced with, more utterly convinced than, us, that the body was Abel’s. He would tolerate no suggestion of error. And where the body was, would be the book, the clue—finally the treasure. I doubted if, in all these generations, it could still lie hidden there undiscovered and unravished. He laughed my scepticism to scorn. That Vining would never have concealed the evidences of his crime in a place easy or inviting to be come at, he declared. Probably, indeed, he had restored them to the original oubliette, which, I might make sure, would have been chosen by the monks with a cunning genius for its inaccessibility, either by smugglers or other casual squatters in their abandoned vaults. Moreover history, or at least gossip, might be trusted to have left us record of such costly treasure-trove thus unearthed, if unearthed it had been. Nevertheless, he questioned us closely as to our underground observations, which, indeed, had not been exhaustive. But they were enough, it appeared, to confirm his assurance. Desire is the most credulous of all enthusiasts.

All this was before the last abandonment to despair had overwhelmed us, Harry and me; and it was useful in helping us to a sort of fictitious endurance. We might have succumbed sooner, otherwise, and actually foregone our living rescue. He was so strong and hopeful; so certain that Destiny would not have led him thus far, by such tortured ways, only to see him founder when within sight of his goal, that some part of his faith could not fail to communicate itself to us with vital results. At the same time, I think, we shrunk from the merciless expression of his triumph. Our concern, in revealing the truth as we supposed it, had been with the tragic end of his brother. Not so his. He had no sentiment for Abel even now; no pity for the fate which had overtaken him. The best he could find to say about him was that he had paid the penalty and called quits, and left the better man to come into his own. Not for himself—that was the moral reservation, after all, which silenced and confounded us. He longed for the treasure; he gloated in the thought of its resurrection; but now for my sake, not his own. With the prospect of its recovery instant in his mind, he never wavered in his intention to bestow it all on the son of the man who had died to vindicate his honesty. I could have laughed again over this tragic, comical, chimerical bequest to me; only tears were too near the source of humour. It was terrible, and indecent, and pathetic in one. We sought life for no end but sweet life’s own. The rest was a mockery.

Well, he kept us alive with it, that I believe. Even after he himself was numbed and silenced from stimulating us, from encouraging us by sympathy and example to prevail through hope, he would keep nodding brightly to us to rally our spirits, until his neck got too stiff to nod at all.

It must have been half-past six and near the time of ebb, when the spectral dark which engulphed us knew a change. The fog, lying low on the water, grew slowly diaphanous, waxing from a weak dawn, like heaven seen through dying lids, to a sweet and solemn lightness. For long we were too exhausted, body and mind, to consider what this portended. The lightness increased; and suddenly high over the bank shone a little red spark like a lantern. We lifted our dazed heads; we stirred stiffly where we sat. O God! O God! what did it mean?

Swiftly it broadened, glowing like a rising fire. It mounted, or the haze shrunk beneath it—who could tell? In a moment it was free, and we knew it, in wonder and thankfulness, for the moon.

She was in her first quarter—a child moon, swelling into maidenhood. Slowly, slowly she rose, while we watched her, gloating, absorbed. Gradually the blush with which she had first observed us, sole spectators of her girlish disrobing, faded into a white glow of pity. Her tresses fell from her neck upon the sea, the mist parting to let them by, and were extended to us, “Climb to me by them,” she seemed to whisper; “here is the way to hope.” And lo! full in the midst of that shining path rode a little boat.

There was a man in it, a solitary fisherman trawling for soles. The agony of the moment gave us life and voice. We screamed to him; we waved; we made every frantic demonstration that was possible to us in our condition. He heard and saw us—and he sat as if stricken. Ghostly, leisurely, we drifted past, and the boat faded and became a phantom behind us.

We could not believe it. We never ceased to cry out. It was too hideous, too cruel for truth. Harry, with a dying effort, half rose. I don’t know what desperate thought was in his mind.