Bernard Capes

“ It was a fine, still afternoon, with the tide at quiet ebb, and a touch of frost in the air. The sun, low down, burned like a winter fire, and gleamed with a light of sadness on the ribs of the gaunt wreck lying far away on the Weary Sands. She was visible only at low water; at high being completely submerged. No one, so far as I knew, had yet had the curiosity or venturesomeness to row out and investigate the poor castaway. It was just plain to see, by the aid of glasses, that she had broken her back on the drift, and that only her stern half remained, wedged into the sand. ”

“ The sense of yet impending disaster, the terror of calling it down upon us by a stumble, a false step, kept us as still as mice. Before us a path went clear round the ruin to another broken archway, and yet remoter vaults. But by this time my curiosity was become something less than a negative quantity.
“Harry,” I whispered at last, almost querulously, “we’ve seen enough. I’m going back.”
His face looked into mine like a little ghost’s.
“I’m not,” he said. “But I don’t want you to come. Light me another bit of candle from yours, and stay here while I go and explore. ”

“ At least with Harry and me, I think, hope had attenuated almost to the vanishing point. Brain-sodden, benumbed, half lifeless, grown near unconscious of time or place, the instinct to hold on, the power to keep at bay the last fatal drowsiness alone remained to us in ever-diminishing degree. We did not know, in the confusion of our senses, whether we were drawing inshore or to sea; we did not know whether we were rocking, an idle log, virtually unprogressive, or slipped into one of the coast currents, and speeding silent on an interminable journey. ”

“ We had taken our measures with infinite precaution, so that not a hint of our designs should leak out; yet still we had delayed, sitting, like the party in the parlour, “all silent and all damned,” while Dunberry sunk into deep and deeper unconsciousness of our conspiracy in its midst. We were assembled, in fact, in the rector’s study, Joshua, Mr. Sant himself, my uncle, and we two; and there we stuck, spelling out the blessed quarters, until the chimes of the school clock, coming in a flurry out of silence, called up a single rebukeful stroke from Time, and subsided upon it. ”

“ In five minutes we had emerged, sleek and dripping, on the further side, and the wreck was close before us.
We shook ourselves like dogs, and ran up the sand. The shivered frame of the thing lay pitched on the sharp back of the drift, where the poor ship must have dumped herself to be broken like a stick across a housemaid’s knee. What remained was a melancholy witness to the impotence of man’s bravest efforts to command Nature in her passions. She must have been a fine craft, of many thousand tons burden, by evidence of this fragment. ”

“ But all the time while we wrought at to enlarge it, the sweet light was stretched to us to comfort and inspire, and the smell of liberty came down more and more in draughts like wine, as if Harry with his strenuous hammer were tapping the very reservoir of day. The only fear was that, striking carelessly, he might loosen some poised mass, and bury us under an avalanche of stone. But luckily, both sunk vault and tumbled ruin had so well adjusted between them the balance of collapse that our puny grubbing was all insufficient to disturb it. ”

“ Then in a moment he turned upon us with a laugh in which there was not even a tinge of mirth.
“If there is any land too much in the world,” said he, “put me to walk upon its shore, and it will vanish before me yard by yard. My breath is blasting powder; my feet are earthquakes. I must drown if I live long enough.”
He walked off towards the cliff, and paused at its edge, looking down gloomily on the leaning shaft of the well.
“He is thinking of Abel and his book,” I whispered to Harry as we followed. ”

“ The thin, harsh air, the melancholy cry of the birds, the eternal desolation of the coast, chilled me with a creeping terror of our remoteness from all that friendly warmth and comfort we had rashly deserted. Not a light greeted us from the shore but such as shone ghastly in the lifeless wastes of foam. The last coast town, miles behind, seemed to have passed us beyond the final bounds of civilization. So that it was with something like a whimper of joy that I welcomed the sudden picture of a hill notched oddly far ahead against the darkening sky. I ran hurriedly to Uncle Jenico. ”

“ One of our first escapades was to make a parachute out of Uncle Jenico’s big sun umbrella, and, having beguiled Derrick to the cliff edge by the Gap, tie his wrists to the handle and push him over. We might have killed him; only we didn’t. He fell into a snow-drift, with no more hurt than to rasp his nose on the broken ice. But he smashed the umbrella, for which Mr. Sant made us pay with extra lines.
We scoured the coast together, and were for ever, forgetting my embargo, prowling about the Mitre, dislodging bits of the ruin and imperilling our precious necks. ”

“ Was not this the very first time that his genius for invention promised him a harvest of gold? He took a long breath, and tightened his hold on the spokes.
Joshua stood rigid, awaiting the result. Harry and I shook on wires, staring from the wrench to the shaft, and hardly stifling the exclamations that rose to our lips. It was a solemn moment.
“Go!” cried Uncle Jenico; and the wheel spun a little, stiffened, and began to cry ominously.
Something cracked; thank Heaven it was only Uncle Jenico’s braces! The old man tugged and puffed, wrestling with his task. ”

“ Right under the rising sun, like a bar beneath a crest, stretched the line of the Weary Sands, a perilous bank situate some five miles from shore; and between bank and coast rode a solitary little two-masted lugger, with shrouds of gossamer and hull of purple velvet, it seemed, in the soft glow. Even while I looked, this shook out sails like beetles’ wings, and, drawing away, revealed a tiny boat speeding shorewards. I bent and peered over. Ten fathoms beneath me the gully we had climbed in the dark discharged itself, a river of sand, upon the beach ”

“ He gazed at me rapturously a moment, then fell to urging me to walk with him.
“Come,” he cried. “I must move, or I shall be a woman. Ask me, ask me everything. This accident—this destiny—this heart-filling spring in the desert! No, I have not found Abel, my friend, my dear friend, though I have never ceased to seek him, like the spectral dog I am.”
I thought of the werewolf of Mr. Sant’s story. So damned, so abhorrent, so pitiful appeared this grey shadow moving at my side. He put his arm within mine, and hurried me up and down the desolate beach. ”

“ The accident of darkness had revealed it to us so soon as our pupils had forgotten the false glare of the candles.
“O, Harry!” I cried, half hysterical. “O, Harry! what was that noise?”
And he laughed out—“Light up again, you old funk! It was the best friend in the world to us.”
Amazed, without understanding, I tremblingly rekindled the candle; and there, right before us, was a flight of stone steps going up—the ancient entrance to the crypts; and, risen bristling from his bed of straw and sticks at the foot of it, was our ally, our preserver, our most noble and honoured the badger. ”

“ Sant threw down his shovel.
“We are feet below the well bottom. Are you satisfied at last, Mr. Pilbrow?” he said, really in a quite quarrelsome way. He had been cheated, he felt, of the fruits of his own condescension.
“No,” snarled Joshua, “I’m not. Here was mud, perhaps, once. It was a loaded box of iron—we know that. It may have sunk far.”
Mr. Sant laughed offensively. The best of us bear awakening from engaging dreams badly. As for me, I had desisted from working when he did, and was sitting disconsolately on the lower part of the shaft, fumbling with my fingers in the fracture. ”

“ What more scandalous than to convict his Fire-Derrick—a noble invention, like a crane dangling a little cabin, for saving life at conflagrations—because the first time it was tested the box would not descend, but kept the insurance gentlemen swinging in the air for an hour or two; or his Infallible Lifebelt, which turned upside-down in the water for the single reason that they tried it on a revenue officer who had lost his legs in an explosion? No practical innovation was surely ever started without a stumble. But Uncle Jenico had no luck. ”

“ Abel, who knew this coast, had written guide-books, about it—misleading guide-books, indeed, to me in my killing search—and who was aware that the place, the actual caché of the treasure, still survived—or why should he have sought to hide the truth from me, and have fled in the night, himself like a thief? Abel, the cursed shadow that I follow, and cannot run to earth!”
“O, Dick, tell him!” cried Harry once more.
“Mr. Pilbrow!” I broke out, trembling with excitement. “I believe you have hunted counter; I believe we can show you where your shadow lies. ”

“ At last, and for the last time of many, we mounted the slope of stubborn planks, to struggle with some fractured balk of timber, some broken rib end, which might seem to promise yielding to our frenzied blows and kicks. It was all of no avail. Like lost souls we paused, looking down on a litter of splinters, our great need’s only recompense; and, “O, my God!” whispered Harry, and staggered back where he stood, and flung himself, quite ill and overcome, upon the bulwarks.
He was up by the broken stern-post, and, sick to note the rising of the tide, he looked down. ”

“ We shall get away, after all, with nothing but a ducking. And Uncle Jenico——”
A sudden choke stopped me. I turned away so that my friend shouldn’t see my shame.
“Dick, old man,” he said, soberly. “You mustn’t be too wild even now. It’s all right, I hope; only—well, it’s cold, and three of us to drift five miles on a spar——”
But I wouldn’t heed a word of his admonition. The recoil from despair had sent my wits toppling clean head over heels. If nothing but a bowl had offered, I should have been as joyous as a wise man of Gotham to commit our destinies to it. ”

“ It was become a luxury to be a sweep, thanks to Uncle Jenico; and the world called him a crank! Every one but himself might profit by his inventions. Certainly Harry and I did. We polished every flue in Mrs. Puddephatt’s house as clean as a whistle, and, until we tired of the sport, whatever other chimneys in the village the housewives would lay open to us. And it was only when we took to angling with the great sooty ball over parapets for unsuspecting faces pausing below, that Mr. Sant, giving ear to furious complaints, stepped in with his authority, and put an end to the game. ”

“ Then I, too, uttered a yell; for here, unnoticed by us before, was at least a straw of hope to catch at.
It was a great spar, which lay down the slope of the sand, with some wreck of tackle yet tangled about it, and its butt wedged under the stern of the ship.
“Lord!” shrieked my friend. “Come and pull, Dicky! O, Lord! Come and pull!”
He was skipping and sobbing as if he were cracked. “Get a purchase!” he screeched. “We must have it out if we bust ourselves!” ”

“ For a time Harry and I—I may surely admit it without shame—were beside ourselves. To be thus cast away and abandoned on a sandbank in mid-ocean—for to all appearances, and intents and purposes, our fate seemed nothing less—it was horrible beyond words. An hour—perhaps two hours—and a lingering death must overtake us. Already—we could see by the near lines of foam, could gather from the changed whisper of the tide—the seaward surges were freshening to their return. ”

“ The storm had bolted a great hunk, good ten feet through at its thickest, of the Mitre, obliterating the already half-effaced step-way by which Rampick had been wont to ascend, and laying bare, high up in the cliff, a mass of broken masonry. From the character of this last it was evident at a glance what had happened. The seaward limit to the crypts of the old abbey had been shorn through, and the extreme vaulting of that ancient underworld exposed. ”

“ We have not eschewed adventure, Harry and I; only the spirit of it in us is beginning to be tempered with a sense of moral obligations. We are indulgent to the flippancies of youth but in so far as they do not venture to presume upon our patronage. Only when alone together do we relax our vigilance in the matter of what is due to ourselves and our extremely incipient moustaches. ”

“ Joshua, sir, was arrested and put upon his trial for murder and arson.”
I was listening with all my eyes and ears.
“Who defended him?” I whispered, gulping; for I knew something of the legal terms.
The answer took me like a smack.
“Your father, sir.”
“O!” I exclaimed, thrilling. And then, after a pause, with a pride of loyalty: “He got him off, didn’t he?”
Mr. Quayle put me down, and yawned dyspeptically.
“What!” he said. “If any man can, papa will. I ask your pardon, Master Dicky, I really do, for palming off fact instead of fiction on you. But my poor brain wasn’t equal. ”

“ Uncle Jenico would never submit these, the cream of his collection, to expert criticism. He hugged them as a miser hugs his gold, but with a diviner intent. I alone was permitted to gloat with him over the hoard.
“There’s your jointure, Dicky,” he would say. “Look at it accumulating for you, without an effort of its own, at compound interest. There’s no trustee like a collector who knows his business. You may turn over current money to increase it; but the more you leave that alone the better you’ll realize on it some day. ”

“ It was a fable, probably, in a land of fables; yet it served to emphasize the wreck of time, and will show upon what a haunted border-land of ghosts we had come to make our home. The modern village itself was old. How ancient, then, those grey ruins on the cliff, which had survived to see the last of the glory, of which they had once been a part, claimed by the deep, and their own hoary traditions engulfed into the pettier traditions of a little clan!
These same ruins consisted of the great tower of the abbey, with a mass of tumbled and complicated masonry at its foot ”

“ We stood rigid, paralysed, too dumb-stricken for speech or movement. And, in that pass, if you will believe me, the most unearthly horror of a voice hard by came to complete our demoralization. It rose between a hiss and bark, a swinish indescribable thing that tailed off into a bubbling snarl; and I thought it was the dead man caught by the legs struggling to rise and get at us.
I could not have survived and kept my reason, I think, had not Harry at this instant scattered all shadows with a jubilant shout—
“Daylight! Look up there, Dicky! We’ve found the way.” ”

“ I said, airily, “there’s the wreck on the sands. It’s the only other thing I can call to mind.”
“Mighty!” said Harry. “What a genius you are, Dicky! I’d never thought of that. Would you care to pull out and see a wreck, Mr. Pilbrow?”
“Infinitely,” said the old man, handsomely. “And what wreck is it now?”
We told him.
“It’d be rather a lark,” said Harry. “Only we must time our visit to the tide. It’ll be low about to-morrow midday, if that’ll suit. If you’ll believe me, sir, we shall be the first to show any curiosity about the thing. ”

“ I cried, with a real laugh. “We should have both been in a bad way, I dare say, if Harry hadn’t had the sense to catch my foot. He towed us in. If there’s any credit it’s to him.”
“He did the resourceful thing, and you the brave,” persisted Joshua. “I owe to him through you; but to you first. If I live, I will honour that debt. If I am to die——”
“In good time, Mr. Pilbrow!” I cried reassuringly. “This little contest had flushed and rallied us all. “In good time! We aren’t going to give up, I can assure you, having come so far as this.”
“By God’s providence!” ”