CHAPTER XVIII.
DOWN TO THE SEA.
Dr. Fabos Leaves the Valley House.
There was not a sound within the house, nor did an open window upon the landing admit any signal of alarm from the gardens. I could but hazard that the little Jap had crossed the gully of the river and come by such a road into the valley. To question him would have been as absurd as to delay. Here he was, and there stood the open door. When he thrust a revolver into my hand and bade me follow him by the low verandah to the gardens below, I obeyed without further hesitation. The mystery of Joan’s disappearance asked for no clever solution. This night, I said, the Jew had meant to kill me. And for the first time, it may be, I realised the deadly peril I had lived through at the Valley House.
Okyada has never been a man of many words. I think he uttered but two that night as we crossed the valley garden and made for the river bank. “Shoot, master,” he said, meaning that if any barred the way, the time for passive flight had passed. I nodded my head in answer, and pressed closer upon his heels as he entered the maze of shrubs which defended the gully. The silence about us had become a burden to the nerves. Was it possible that none of the Jew’s men watched the garden? Indeed, for a moment, that appeared to be the truth.
We gained the bank of the whirlpool of yesterday, and for a few minutes lay flat in the shadow of the great border of the rock which rises up above the gully. Behind us we could espy the lighted windows of the bedroom I had just left and the clear shape of the silent châlet. The gardens and the woods were so many patches of black against an azure sky of night. The water below us flowed, in colour a deep indigo, between walls of lightless rock, in a bed of polished stone. Not a breath of wind stirred the pines upon the hill side. We could no longer see the ocean without or the friendly lights it showed to us. We might have been fugitives upon a desert island; and this deception would have continued possible until the sound of a distant rifle-shot awoke a thousand echoes in the hills and shattered in a single instant the dream of security we had found so pleasing.
Okyada sprang up at the sound and began to speak with an earnestness of which he was rarely guilty.
“They have found the honourable Captain—quick, master, we must go to him,” he said.
My answer was to point up to the sloping lawn of the garden we had left. There, in single file, the figures of seven men, crossing the grass boldly toward the châlet, were clearly to be discerned. I had scarcely observed them when a movement in the shrubbery immediately behind us betrayed the presence of others—three in all—who came out to the water’s edge at a place not ten yards from where we stood, and halting there a little while to inspect the gully, afterwards made off through the woods as though to join the others above.
“Old Val gets such notions into his woolly cranium,” said one of them as he went. “If there’s any lousy Englishman going across there to-night, I’m derned if he ain’t a flip-flop mermaid.”