“Well, I’m glad that’s over,” she said.
“So am I,” I returned, as we set down the litter.
“Poor papa! I’ve pulled his arms to pieces! and Mr. Percivale’s too!”
Percivale answered first by taking up a huge piece of stone. Then turning towards her, he said, “Look here, Miss Connie;” and flung it far out from the isthmus on which we were resting. We heard it strike on a rock below, and then fall in a shower of fragments. “My arms are all right, you see,” he said.
Meantime, Wynnie had scrambled down to the shore, where we had not yet been. In a few minutes, we still lingering, she came running back to us out of breath with the news:
“Papa! Mr. Percivale! there’s such a grand cave down there! It goes right through under the island.”
Connie looked so eager, that Percivale and I glanced at each other, and without a word, lifted her, and followed Wynnie. It was a little way that we had to carry her down, but it was very broken, and insomuch more difficult than the other. At length we stood in the cavern. What a contrast to the vision overhead!—nothing to be seen but the cool, dark vault of the cave, long and winding, with the fresh seaweed lying on its pebbly floor, and its walls wet with the last tide, for every tide rolled through in rising and falling—the waters on the opposite sides of the islet greeting through this cave; the blue shimmer of the rising sea, and the forms of huge outlying rocks, looking in at the further end, where the roof rose like a grand cathedral arch; and the green gleam of veins rich with copper, dashing and streaking the darkness in gloomy little chapels, where the floor of heaped-up pebbles rose and rose within till it met the descending roof. It was like a going-down from Paradise into the grave—but a cool, friendly, brown-lighted grave, which even in its darkest recesses bore some witness to the wind of God outside, in the occasional ripple of shadowed light, from the play of the sun on the waves, that, fleeted and reflected, wandered across its jagged roof. But we dared not keep Connie long in the damp coolness; and I have given my reader quite enough of description for one hour’s reading. He can scarcely be equal to more.
My invalids had now beheld the sea in such a different aspect, that I no longer feared to go back to Kilkhaven. Thither we went three days after, and at my invitation, Percivale took Turner’s place in the carriage.