[CHAPTER XXXIX]
SATAN SPIES OUT PARADISE
As he had expected, Wat found the boat safely anchored in its rocky haven, where the water lay dead and still as in a tank. He drew himself on board, dripping salt-water all over the inside from his lithe body and scanty clothing. He was busying himself loosening the oars and mast, which had been tied along the side, when he heard, faintly but unmistakably, the sound of a human voice speaking.
At first Wat, busy with his work, paid no heed. He supposed it must be Scarlett talking to Wise Jan, and idly wondered why he spoke so loud. But in a moment he remembered that the rocks of Fiara and the deep Sound lay between him and his companions.
Yet quite clearly and continuously some one was certainly speaking, and at no great distance either. As before, the cave was not quite dark, for the moon had risen, and the boat lay close by the entrance which gave upon the Sound. Wat hastened to climb up on one of the rocky walls which formed the edge of the tiny haven in which the vessel floated. The water-way which constituted the floor of the cave slept black beneath, a long, almost invisible heave passing up from without, which was just the great Atlantic Sea breathing in its sleep. But so smooth were these undulations that hardly a swish on the projections of the walls told of their passage. Outward from where Wat stood the great lane of water gradually brightened to the huge square of the sea-door. Inward it grew blacker and more gloomy, till the young man's eye could not trace it farther into the solemn bosom of the rock. It was out of this inner gloom that the voice was proceeding.
Presently the single voice became two, and Wat could hear the words of one speaker, who spoke low and almost delicately, and then of another who more gruffly and briefly replied. From the darkness of the inner cavern a new sound was borne to Wat's ear—the panting of men in exertion, and the little splash made by the swimmer as he changes position, or when a wavelet, running diagonally, laps against his breast. It is an unmistakable sound, and yet it is no louder than the plunge of a leaping fish that falls back again into the water.
Wat lay motionless on his ledge. He had lifted the moorings from the stern of the boat in the rock basin behind him, and he could hear that she had swung round and that her timbers were rasping gently against the stone pier. Wat prayed that the swimmers might not hear the noise. The uneasy water pavement of the cavern swayed beneath him with measured undulations, glimmering with that pale phosphorescence which is the deceiving ghost of true illumination. Yet it was light enough for Wat to observe the heads of the men who swam, as they emerged into its glow out of the perfect darkness of the inner cave.
There was one who led, swimming a good half-dozen strokes in advance of the others.
"We cannot be far from the north gate now, surely," said a voice, which Wat instantly recognized as that of Barra, "if the cailleach hath told the truth and her man did really find his way to the island of Fiara by this passage."
The man who swam in the middle of the three who followed Barra only grunted in reply. Wat could see the shapeless round of his head but dimly; nevertheless, he knew that it was the featureless, scarred visage of Haxo the Bull which glared like a death's-head above the water in the wake of his arch-enemy. And he had no doubt that on either side of him swam the Calf and the Killer, the other members of that noble trinity.
The heads on the water grew smaller and blacker as they passed him, and the men swam on towards the outer entrance of the cave. Presently they came underneath the great span of the arch. Wat could see Barra drag himself out of the water and clamber on a rocky point which jutted out into the Sound. The three followers lifted themselves after him, and sank on the rocks in attitudes of fatigue. But Barra stood erect, his slim figure so black against the dim moonlight without that he might have been wearing his court suit of sable velvet, although actually he was naked to the waist.