Aleck closed his glass and rose to make his way back along the cliff and leave the place clear, a feeling of gentlemanly delicacy urging him to go right off and not intrude his presence upon one who must be suffering terribly from anxiety and pain.
“It seems so dreadful,” he mused, as he went right on without once turning his head in the woman’s direction; “but somehow it only seems fair that both sides should suffer. She’s all in misery because her husband has been dragged away. Yes, he said he’d come back to her, but it’s a great chance if she ever sees him again, and it’s as great a chance whether that poor young middy’s friends ever see him again. I don’t like it, and it’s a great pity there’s so much trouble in the world. Look at poor uncle! Why, I don’t know what real trouble is. I might have gone off to sea all in a huff after what uncle said, and then might have come back as badly off as poor old Double Dot. Well, I’m very, very sorry for poor Eben’s wife, and—there I go again with my poor Eben. Why should I talk like that about a man who has the character of being a wrecker as well as a smuggler? He was never friendly to me and I quite hate him. But whether the King wants men or whether he doesn’t, I just hate Eben so much that if he wanted to escape back to his wife and asked me to help him I’d do it; and just the same, if the smugglers had caught that young middy and were going to ill-use him—kill him perhaps—why, I’d help him too. It’s very stupid to be like that perhaps, sort of Jack o’ both sides, but I suppose it’s how I was made, and it isn’t my fault. Why, I say, it must be near dinner-time. How hungry I do feel!”
The coast was clear for Eben Megg’s wife, and as soon as the lad was out of sight she once more made her way towards the cliff.
Chapter Twenty One.
Aleck went along the cliff the next day to look out for the boat, fully intending to turn back if he caught sight of Eben’s wife; but as far as he could make out she was nowhere in that direction. Still he concluded that she might possibly come to the place she affected, so he determined to keep on his own side of the depression, lowering himself down to the shelf in which was the niche or crack, in the belief that he could get a fair view over the sea from among the scattered masses of rock while being quite out of the woman’s sight if she should come after all.
He swung himself down till he stood upon the shelf, and gave one hasty look round, to come to the conclusion directly after that if the poor woman sought his favourite look-out spot he could not have chosen a worse place, for he would be in full view, no matter where he crouched.
“I know,” he said to himself; “I can get over here and lie down in the crack on the other side.”
He began to climb, after making for the hole where the lanthorn and tinder-box still lay tucked tightly in beyond the reach of the wind; and the next minute, after making his way diagonally upward, he came upon the beginning of a steep narrow gully, going right down more and more deeply, so that forty or fifty yards away he could not see the bottom, the place having the appearance of being a vast crack formed by a sudden subsidence of the rocky cliff.