There were two men at the sea's edge, and they did not hear me, I believe, until the first door of that trap was down. Perchance, even then, they thought that a comrade played a jest upon them, and that this was all in the night's work, for one of them coming up leisurely peered into the hole and put a question to me in the German tongue. This man, my heart beating like a piston, and my nerves all strung up, I struck down with the butt-end of my pistol, and, as God is my witness, I swung over the trap and shot the bolts and locked the great padlock before the other could move hand or foot. For the foreigner fell, without a cry, headlong into the sea which played at his very feet.
"Shut—shut, by thunder!" cried I to those below, and gladder words a seaman never spoke to comrades waiting for him. "One gate more and the night is ours, lads!"
They heard me in astonishment. Remember how new this place of mystery was to them; how little I had told them of that which I do. If they followed me like the brave men that they were, set it down to the affection they bore me, and the belief that I led them on no child's errand. So much must have occurred to them as we gained the upper house and shut the iron doors behind us. The way lay to the sea again, the road most dear to the heart of every sailor. Let the main gate of Czerny's house be closed and all was won, indeed.
Aye, and you shall stand with me as, mounting a broad stairway beyond Miss Ruth's own door, I found myself out upon a great plateau of rock, and beheld the silent ocean spread out like a silver carpet before my grateful eyes, and knew that the house was ours—that house the like to which no man has built or will build during the ages.
CHAPTER XIX
WHICH SHOWS THAT A MAN WHO THINKS OF BIG THINGS SOMETIMES FORGETS THE LITTLE ONES
I was the first to be out on the rock, but Peter Bligh was close upon my heels, and, wonderful to tell, the Italian almost as quick as any of us. To what gate of the sea the staircase was carrying me I knew no more than the others. The time was gone by when anything in Czerny's house could surprise me; and when at the stairs' head we found that which looked for all the world like a great port-hole with a swing door of steel to shut it, I climbed through it without hesitation, and so stood in God's fresh air for the first time for nearly three days.
That this was the main gate to the sea I had all along surmised, and now proved surely. No sooner was I through the door than all the world seemed to spread out again before my eyes—the distant island, the shimmering sea, the blue sky shut to us through such long hours. The rock itself, where we gained foothold, lifted itself clear and dry above the breakers at my feet. There were steps leading down to the water's edge, a still pool wherein boats were warped, other crags of the reef defying the tides; these and the silence of the night everywhere; but of men I saw nothing. The bloody fight we had anticipated, blow for blow, and ringing alarm, the struggle for foothold on the rock, the challenge to Czerny's men—such things did not befall. We stood unchallenged on the plateau, and we stood alone.
I said that it was a miracle, and yet the Lord knows it was no miracle at all.