All danger over, Thomasin felt oddly faint, and let her father go on ahead across the moor while she hung heavily on Robin's arm, her numbed hands slowly tingling back to life as they went. Arrived at the cottage, a faint light, that went out even as they looked, told of Bendigo's entry, and Robin set the lantern he carried on the flagstones between the buttresses. Thomasin leant back against one of them, and the dim light, flickering upwards, softened her marked bones and brightened her eyes. Every defect of skin was hidden; it showed pale, and her mouth velvet dark upon it. Robin's lips fastened on her throat below her ear and stayed there till she stirred and gave a little cry, then his mouth moved on and up till it found hers. The kiss deepened between them; his head bent, hers upstretched. Time stayed still for one moment, during which she wanted nothing further—she was not conscious of the ground beneath her or the pain in her back-tilted neck, not even of his supporting arms or the throbbing of him against her—all her being was fused at the lips, and she felt as though hanging in space from his mouth alone.
* * * * *
Robin Start waited till the cargo had been safely run and sold, and then he went across the moor to the village and made a compact with the Preventive men. The excitement of that night had had its usual way with him, and he wished never to meet danger again as long as he lived. He was suffering from a somewhat similar revulsion as regarded Thomasin, though there he knew the old allure would raise its head again for him. Bendigo's suspicious guard of him had relaxed, partly because the elder man admitted that it was Robin's nerve which had planned the dash that saved them, partly because he guessed how it was with his daughter, and thought Robin safely theirs. . . . And Robin had at last done that which had been in his mind ever since the beginning, and had sold the secret of the caves to his Majesty's Government. Nervous of being overheard in the village inn, Robin took the two head men with him over the moor to the headland, safe in the knowledge that Bendigo was drinking heavily in the cottage—the way in which he always rewarded himself for a successful run. Robin showed the men the cunningly hidden entrances to the passages, and then for a few minutes they all three stood making their final arrangements. Robin found it wonderfully simple, the step once taken. It was agreed that the officers of the law were to surround the cottage that night after its inmates were abed, all save Robin, who was to be sitting in the kitchen ready to open the door. No harm was to be done to the girl—and, indeed, the Preventive men knew enough of Cornish juries to know that Bendigo Keast himself would get an acquittal; but his claws would be drawn, which was all they wanted. Robin, unaware of this peculiarity of a Cornish jury, would have been considerably alarmed had he known of it. Bendigo free to revenge himself had not entered into the scheme of the man from up-country, where the law was a less individual matter.
"At ten o'clock then, my man," were the last words of the Preventive officer; but he added to his companion as they walked away: "The dirty double-mouth!" and the distaste of the official for the necessary informer was in his voice. "At ten o'clock," echoed Robin, and then was aware of a quick rustling behind him—much the noise that a big adder makes as it leaves its way through a dry tuft of grass. The sun was already setting, and the glamorous light made vision uncertain, yet Robin thought he saw a movement of the gorse more than the breeze warranted. The bush in question was one of those which concealed an opening to the caves, and Robin pulled it aside and peered into the darkness. Silence and stillness rewarded him, and he swung his legs over and descended a little way. All was quiet and empty in that passage; he turned into another—that, too, was innocent of any presence save his. He went through up that exit, and, still uneasy, stared across the moor. If anyone—if by chance Thomasin had been in the passage, she could have slipped out that way while he was entering by the other, and be out of sight by now. . . . The sweat sprang on to Robin's brow. Then he took counsel with himself. There was no reason why Thomasin should be at the caves; nothing was doing there. It would be the most unlikely thing on earth, because neither she nor her father ever ran the unnecessary risk of going there between the cargoes. Robin knew this, and felt reassured—how, after all, could he imagine that Thomasin, sick at the reaction she felt in him, might have gone to re-gather force at the place where she had first felt him hers? . . . He thought over what he had said, and took still more heart when he remembered he had not let fall a word that showed a light holding of Thomasin; and that, he told himself, was the only thing a woman could not forgive. He felt it safe to count on passion as against the habit of a mere business partnership, which was all her relationship with her father had ever been. Dimly Robin was aware that all her spiritual life had gone into that partnership, into the feeling of her family against the world that had become an obsession with her until he had brought another interest into her life; but Robin Start would not have believed an angel from heaven who had told him that the habit of years could be stronger with a woman than a new passion. And, as regarded most women, Robin would probably have been right. Besides, it was impossible that any one could have been there, and Thomasin was his. . . . He gave himself a little shake and set off to the cottage, and such was the force of his revulsion against a life of dangers and the sinister suggestiveness of the Keasts' muscular superiority, that he felt his heart lighter than it had been for months past. He was even pleasurably, though subconsciously, aware of the poignant beauty of the evening, and noted the rich shrilling of a thrush from the alders by the stream. It was one of those evenings when, for a few minutes, the light holds a peculiarly rosy quality that refracts from each sharply angled surface of leaf or curved grass-blade; steeps even the shadows with wine-colour, and imparts a reddish purple to every woody shoot, from the trunks of trees to the stray twigs of thorn piercing the turf. Wine-coloured showed the stems of the alders, the lines of blackthorn hedges, the distant drifts of elms whose branches were still only faintly misted with buds. Beneath Robin's feet the yellow red-tipped blossoms of the bird's-foot trefoil borrowed of the flushed radiance till they seemed as though burning up through the ardent grass, and on the alders the catkins gleamed like still thin flakes of fire. The whole world for a few magic moments was lapped in an unharmful flame that had glow without heat, and through the gentle glory of it Robin went home.
At ten o'clock that night, with no lanterns to betray them, half a dozen Preventive men, followed by several of the leading men in the village, who had got wind of the affair and were eager to see the self-sufficient Keasts brought to book, all came up over the moor through the darkness. No light showed in the cottage as they neared it, but that was merely because the buttress, sweeping at right angles to the window, obscured it from the approach. The buttress once rounded, the men saw the light shining as Robin Start had promised. The officer motioned the others to stay quiet, and then—he was a mere lad, and eager to be the first in everything—he tiptoed to the window and peeped through.
Robin Start was sitting quietly in the armchair, a candle burning on the stool beside him. There was nothing alarming in that, yet the next moment the boy at the window stepped back with a great cry.
"He's got two mouths!" he shrieked. "He's got two mouths!"
* * * * *
Far out on the dark Channel father and daughter were drawing away in the Merrymaid, the rising wind and some other urgent thing at their backs, but the sense of justice done as their solace.
And in the cottage, his wrists tightly roped to the arms of the chair and his silky beard shaved away, sat Robin Start. The footlight effect of the candle eliminated all shadow under his sloping chin, making it seem one with his throat, and that was cut from ear to ear. For the only thing on which he had not calculated was that before such treachery as his passion drops like a shot bird.