Carette of Sark

by John Oxenham

It was dark, with a blackness of darkness to be felt, and all was very still, which meant that the tide was out, so it was probably early morning. But it seemed to me that a sound unusual to the place lingered in my ear, and I lay with straining senses.

It was not such a sound, it seemed to me, as Carette might have made in her sleep or in wakening, but something altogether foreign and discordant.

Whether, in my sudden wakening, I had made some sound, I do not know, but there had been heavy silence since. And in that thick silence and darkness I became aware of another presence in the place besides our own,—by what faculty I know not, but something told me that we were not alone. My very hair bristled, but I had the sense to lie still, and there was in me a great agony of fear lest Carette should move and draw upon herself I knew not what.

Safety seemed to lie in silence, for I knew that other, whatever it was, was listening as I was.

I held my breath, but my heart was thumping so that it seemed impossible that it should not be heard. From the place where Carette lay I could not hear a sound, not even the sound of her breathing.

I think I must have burst soon if that state of matters had continued. Every drop of blood in my body seemed throbbing in my head just back of my ears, and all the rest of me was cold and tense with the strain. It was like waiting on a fearsome black day of thunder for the storm to break.

Then I heard a movement close to me where I lay on the ground, and, like the lightning out of the thundercloud, there came the click of steel on flint and I breathed soundlessly. It was, at all events, human.

And then my breath caught again. For the tiny lightning flash that came out of the flint lit, with one brief gleam, the face of the man to whom my death was as necessary as the breath of life,—whose presence there held most dreadful menace for us both,—Torode of Herm.

For one moment life stood still with me. For here, in this close darkness, were we three within arm's length of one another;—the man I had reason to fear and hate above any other on earth, and the price of whose life was my own, a price I would not pay; the woman whose life was dearer to me than my own, for whom I would gladly pay any price, even the utmost; and myself, by force of circumstances, the unwilling link that had brought them both there, and the menace to both their lives, for Torode came for me and Carette came with me.

The wheels of life began to turn for me again, and my hand felt stealthily along the ledge at my side, where George Hamon's pistol had lain ever since he gave it to me.