The Smuggler's Cave

by George A. Birmingham

"My grave! My dear Beth! Dug my grave! But I haven't. Nothing of the sort."

"Then what on earth were you digging?" said Beth.

"That," said the vicar, "is quite a long story."

It was; but he told it. Sitting on a flat tombstone with Beth on the grass at his feet, and Jimmy, fairly comfortable, full stretch on the bier.

Years before, soon after coming to Hailey Compton, the vicar had heard that there was some connection between the church and the cave. A legend existed, repeated without conviction by the old people in the parish, that the smugglers, in the irreverent days of the eighteenth century, used to store their goods in the church itself. But such stories are common all over England. There is scarcely an ancient church but rumour speaks of a covered way between it and a cave or the ruins of a monastery or a house which occupies the site of what was once a baron's castle. There is at least one church which tradition insists on connecting with a neighbouring public-house. If that passage could be found—and traces of it were discovered lately by men engaged in making a drain—it might be used as an argument by temperance reformers to demonstrate that an immoral alliance has always existed between the church and the brewery. Or by the advocates of more and better beer, to prove that the church, in the days when its faith was still undefiled by Henry VIII and Elizabeth, was not hostile to the natural joys of life. Such is the peculiar value of arguments based on historical and archæological research. They can be used with equal force on either side in any modern dispute.

Mr. Eames, knowing the untrustworthy nature of local legends, paid no particular attention to that which connected his church with the smugglers' cave, and might never have investigated the matter if he had not been troubled by a loose board in the floor of the pew to which he had retired to read Epictetus. Day after day this board wobbled and shook under the leg of his chair when he sat down. He remembered the same thing happening when he had retired to the church for a few days during the starting of his wife's plays. Then, since he did not stay long, the thing had not mattered much. On the occasion of the pageant it became a serious annoyance. It was no use moving the chair, for wherever he put it one of its legs stood on a loose board. It appeared that nearly all the boards in the floor of that pew were loose.

Goaded to exasperation he at last took up the well worn and exceedingly dirty carpet to find out what was the matter with the boards. He discovered to his amazement that they were not only loose but movable, and evidently intended to be movable. One of them had a brass ring, by which it could without difficulty be lifted out of its place. Once it was lifted those on each side could be moved too. Mr. Eames, mildly excited, uncovered a square hole into which it was possible to step.

The legend of the existence of a passage connecting the church with the cave came back to his mind. There must, he thought, be some truth in it, for he had lit on what looked like the end of a passage leading from the church to somewhere, perhaps into the cave. With the aid of an ordnance survey map and some measurements which he took, he reached the conclusion that the end of the cave must be directly under the church. He discovered the chimney in the cave's roof which had excited Beth and Jimmy when they found it. It seemed perfectly plain that the hole inside the church and the chimney in the cave were part of one passage. Unfortunately the hole was filled with stones and loose earth. In order to establish the connection, Mr. Eames had to do some excavating. He brought up the spade from the vicarage and afterwards the pickaxe which Mrs. Eames missed and supposed to be lost or stolen. Coming on a large block of stone, one of the main causes of the obstruction, he found that he could not move it with his hands. He went very early in the morning and took young Bunce's tackle from the mouth of the cave. After the removal of that stone he got on rapidly and had almost completed the clearance when Beth and Jimmy visited the cave.

"I have great hopes," he said simply, "that your aunt will be pleased when I show her the hole leading straight down into the cave."

"I'm sure she will," said Beth.