A Maid of the Silver Sea Part 30

He had given over much time to pondering the subject of Tom Hamon's death, but had come no nearer any reasonable solution of it. That hideous doubt as to himself in the matter recurred at times, but he always hastened to dissipate it by some other interest more practical and palpable, lest it should bring him to ultimate belief in its possibility, and so to madness.

And so he spent hours watching that wonderful roaring cauldron on the south stack where his water pools were. Other hours in study of the social and domestic economies of gulls and cormorants. He saw families of awkward little fawn-coloured squawkers force their way out of their sh.e.l.ls under his very eves, while indignant mothers told him what they thought of him from a safe distance.

He bathed regularly in the heat of the day, but always after careful inspection of his chosen pool, and one day fled in haste up the black rocks at sight of the tip of a long, quivering, flesh-coloured tentacle coming curling round a rock in the close neighbourhood of the pool in which he was basking.

That monster under the rock gave him many a bad dream. It seemed to him the incarnation of evil, and those horrible, bulging, merciless eyes stuck like burrs in his memory.

One day, when he had been watching the cauldron, and filling his tin dipper at the freshwater pools, as he came to descend the black wall leading to the valley of rocks, he witnessed a little tragedy.

Down below, on the edge of the pool where the octopus dwelt, a silly young cormorant was standing gazing into the water, so fascinated with something it saw there that it forgot even to jerk its head in search of understanding.

Gard stood and watched. He saw a tiny pale worm-like thing come creeping up the black rock on which the cormorant squatted. The cormorant saw it too, and he was hungry, as all cormorants always are, even after a full meal. So presently he made a jab at it with his curved beak, and in a moment the pale worm had twisted itself tightly round his silly neck, and dragged him screaming and fluttering under the water.

Another day, when he was coming down by the break in the cliff, where some great winter wave had bitten out such a slice that the top had come tumbling down, he saw the monster sunning itself on the flat rock by the side of its pool, like a huge nightmare spider.

The moment he appeared its great eyes settled on his as though it had been waiting only for him. And when he stopped, with a feeling of shuddering discomfort at its hugeness--for its body seemed considerably over a foot in width, while its arms lounging over the rocks were each at least six feet long, and looked horribly muscular--he could have sworn that one of the great devil-eyes winked familiarly at him, as though the beast would say, "Come on, come on! Nice day for a bathe!

Just waiting for you!"

He could see the loathsome body move as it breathed, swinging comfortably in the support of its arms.

In a fury of repulsion he stooped to pick up a rock, but when he hurled it the last tentacle was just sliding into the pool, and it seemed to him that it waved an ironical farewell before it disappeared.

More than once fis.h.i.+ng-boats hovered about his rock, but kept a safe distance from the boiling underfalls, and he always lay in hiding till they had gone.

But he saw more gracious and beautiful things than these.

As he lay one morning, looking over the ridge at the Sark headlands s.h.i.+ning in the sun--with a strong west wind driving the waves so briskly that, Sark-like, they tossed their white crests into the air in angry expostulation long before they met the rocks, and went roaring up them in dazzling spouts of foam--his eye lighted on a gleam of unusual colour on the racing green plain. It came again and again, and presently, as the merry dance waxed wilder still, every white-cap as it tossed into the air became a tiny rainbow, and the whole green plain was alive with magical flutterings, of colours so dazzling that it seemed bestrewn with dancing diamonds. A sight so wonderful that he found himself holding in his! breath lest a puff should drive it all away.

That same evening, too, was a glory of colour such as he had never dreamed of. The setting sun was ruby; red, and the cloud-bank into which he sank was all rimmed with red fire that seemed to corruscate in its burning brilliancy.

To Gard indeed, in the somewhat peculiar state of mind induced by his sudden cutting-off from his kind and flinging back upon himself, it seemed as though the blood-red sun had fallen into a vast consuming fire behind that dark, fire-rimmed cloud, and that that was the end of it, and it would never rise again.

The sky, right away into the farthest east, was flaming red with a hint of underlying smoke below the glow. The sea was a weltering bath of blood, and the cliffs of Sark, save for the gleam of white foam at their feet, shone as red as though they had just been bodily dipped in it.

His lonely rock, when he looked round at it in wonder, was all unfamiliarly red. There was a red fantastic glow in the very air, and he himself was as red as though he had in very fact killed Tom Hamon, and drenched himself with his blood.

So startling and unnatural was it all, that he found himself wondering fearfully if these outside things were really all blood-red, or whether something had gone wrong with his brain and eyes, and only caused them to look so to him alone, or whether it was indeed the end of all things shaping itself slowly under his very eyes. And in that thought and fear he was not by any means alone.

But the wonderful red, which in its universality and intensity had become overpowering and fearsome, faded at last, and he hailed its going with a sigh of relief. His eyes and his brain were all right, he had not killed Tom Hamon, and this was not the earth's last sunset.

And again that night, as he sat on the ridge on sentinel duty till the rising tide should lock the doors of his castle, the sea all round him shone with phosph.o.r.escence; every breaking wave along the black plain was a lambent gleam of lightning, and where they tore up the sides of his rock they were like flames out of a fiery sea, so that he sat there looking down upon a weltering band of nickering green and blue fires, which clung to the black ledges and dripped slowly back into the seething gleam below.

It was all very strange and very awesome, and he wondered what it might portend in the way of further marvels.

And he had not long to wait.

Far away in the Atlantic a cyclone had been raging, and carrying havoc in its skirts. Now it was whirling towards Europe, and the puffins crept deep into their holes, and the gulls circled with disconsolate cries, and the cormorants crouched gloomily in lee of their snuggest ledges, and all nature seemed waiting for the blow.

Gard was awakened in the morning by the gale tearing at the ma.s.sive stones of his shelter as though it would carry them bodily into the sea.

And when he crawled out, flat like a worm, the wind caught him even so, and he had to grimp to earth and anchor himself by projecting pieces of rock.

Such seas as these he had never imagined round Sark; forgetting that behind Guernsey lay thousands of miles of waters tortured past endurance and racing now to escape the fury of the storm.

A white lash of spray came over him as he lay, and soaked him to the skin, and, turning his face to the storm, he saw through the c.h.i.n.ks of his eyes a great wavering white curtain between him and the sky line.

The south-west portion of his island, where his freshwater pools were, and the valley of rocks, were all awash, the mighty waves roaring clean over the south stack, and rus.h.i.+ng up into the black sky in rockets of flying spray. The tide had still some time to run, and he feared what it might be like at its fullest. It seemed to him by no means impossible that it might sweep the whole rock bare.

CHAPTER XXV

HOW HE LIVED THROUGH THE GREAT STORM

It was a fortunate thing for Gard that the storm--the great storm from which, for many a year afterwards, local events in Sark dated--came when it did; two days after Bernel's visit and the replenishment of his larder. For if he had been caught bare he must have starved.

Eight whole days it lasted, with only two slight abatements which, while they raised his hopes only to dash them, still served him mightily.

During the first days he spent much of his time crouched in the lee of his bee-hive, watching the terrific play of the waves on his own rock and on the Sark headlands.

He wondered if any other man had seen such a storm under such conditions. For he was practically at sea on a rock; in the midst of the turmoil, yet absolutely unaffected by it.

On s.h.i.+pboard, thought of one's s.h.i.+p and possible consequences had always interfered with fullest enjoyment of Nature's paroxysms. It was impossible to detach one's thoughts completely and view matters entirely from the outside. But here--he was sure his rock had suffered many an equal torment--there was nothing to come between him and the elemental frenzy. Nothing but--as the days of it ran on--a growing solicitude as to what he was going to live on if it continued much longer.

Never was Sark rabbit so completely demolished as was that one that Nance had cooked and sent him. Before he had done with it he cracked the very bones he had thrown away, for the sake of what was in them, and finally chewed the softer parts of the bones themselves to cheat himself into the belief that he was eating.

That was after he had devoured every crumb of his bread, and finished his three fishes to the extreme points of their tails.

He was, I said, in the very midst of the turmoil yet unaffected by it.

But that was not so in some respects.

Bodily, as we have seen, the storm bore hardly upon him, since rabbit-bones and fish-tails can hardly be looked upon as a nutritious or inviting dietary.

But mentally and spiritually the mighty elemental upheaval was wholly crus.h.i.+ng and uplifting.

As he cowered, with humming head, under the fierce unremitting rush of the gale, and felt the great stones of his shelter tremble in it, and watched the huge green hills of water, with their roaring white crests, go sweeping past to crash in thunder on the cliffs of Sark, he felt smaller than he had ever felt before--and that, as a rule, and if it come not of self-abnegation through a man's own sin or folly, is entirely to his good; possibly in the other case also.

To feel infinitely small and helpless in the hands of an Infinitely Great is a spiritual education to any man, and it was so to this man.

He felt himself, in that universal chaos, no more than a speck of helpless dust amid the whirling wheels of Nature's inexplicable machinery, and clung the tighter to the simple fundamental facts of which his heart was sure--behind and above all this was G.o.d, who held all these things in His hand. And over there in Sark was Nance, the very thought of whom was like a coal of fire in his heart, which all the gales that ever blew, and all the soddened soaking of ceaseless rain from above and ceaseless spray from below, could not even dim.

For long-continued and relentless buffeting such as this tells upon any man, no matter what his strength of mind or body to begin with; and a perpetually soaked body is apt in time to sodden the soul, unless it have something superhuman to cling to, as this man had in his simple trust in G.o.d and the girl he loved.

In all those stressful days, so far as he could see, the tides--which in those parts rise and fall some forty feet, as you may see by the scoured bases of the towering cliffs--seemed always at the full, the westerly gale driving in the waters remorselessly and piling them up against the land without cessation, and as though bent on its destruction.

Great gouts of clotted foam flew over his head in clouds, and plastered his rock with s.h.i.+vering sponges. The sheets of spray from his south-west rocks lashed him incessantly. His shelter was as wet inside as out, as he was himself.

He felt empty and hungry at times, but never thirsty; his skin absorbed moisture enough and to spare. But, chilled and clammed and starving, on the fifth day when he had crawled into his wet burrow for such small relief as it might offer from the ceaseless flailing without, he broached his bottle of cognac and drank a little, and found himself the better of it.