“Were you wicked?”
“Bad, bad!” He answered, setting his lips, and shaking his head. “A nest of smugglers and forswearers, till He set His hand on us.”
“Mr. Rampick! How?”
“It tuk the form of an ’arthquake,” he said, with a little cough.
I jumped, and ejaculated: “O! Where?”
“Yonder, in the Mitre,” he said, waving his hand towards the hidden bluff. “It’ll be fower months ago, won’t it, as they run their last contraband to ground in the belly of that there hill. A cave, it was supposed, sir; but few knew for sarten, and none will ever know now till the day when the Lord ‘shall judge the secrets of men.’ There was a way in, as believed, known only to the few; and one night, as believed, them few entered by it, each man with his brace o’ runlets—and they never come out agen!”
I gasped and knotted my fingers together. It did not occur to my innocence to question the source of his knowledge, or conjecture.
“Why?” I whispered.
“Why?” he echoed in a sort of asthmatic fury. “Why, sir, because it was a full cargo, and their iniquity according; and so the Lord He spoke, and the hill it closed upon ’em. In the dark, when we was all abed, there come a roaring wind from underground what turned our hearts to water; and in the morning when we gathered to look, there was the hill twisted like a dead face out of knowledge, and the Abbey—two-thirds of what was left—scrattled abroad.”
I could only stare up at him, breathing quick in face of this wonderful romance. It had, I knew, been a year strangely prolific in earth-shocks.