John Oxenham

“ From his upper windows in the house of Carne that other old man watched them also, with scowling face and twisted heart. The sands were running--running--running, and he was no nearer the solution of his life's puzzle than he had been ten years ago. Farther away if anything, for babies die more easily than lusty, tight-knit, sun-tanned boys who never knew an ailment, and grew stronger every day.
But there were keener eyes still, sharpened by a vast craving love for the wakening souls committed to his care, watching them all the time, and eager for every sign of growth and development. ”

“ For over three hundred years the grim gray house of Carne has stood there and watched the surface of all things round about it change with the seasons and the years and yet remain in all essential things the same. When the wild equinoctials swept the flats till they hummed like a harp, the sand-hills stirred and changed their aspects as though the sleeping giants below turned uneasily in their beds. For, under the whip of the wind, grain by grain the sand-hills creep hither and thither and accommodate themselves to circumstances in strange and ghostly fashions. ”

“ Jim felt himself dragged to the side, and then they were wrestling, waist deep, with the terrible backward rush of the surf. His feet were swept from under him, but an iron hand gripped his arm and anchored him till he felt the sand again. Then a thundering wave swirled them on, and they were able to crawl up a steep, hard bank of sand on their hands and knees.
They lay there panting, while the gale howled and the white waves gnashed at them like wild beasts ravening for their prey. And Jim felt cleaner and better than he had done since he boarded the smack. ”

“ It is doubtful kindness to spare it. Far better end the matter for all concerned. Then we could all go home and become human beings again. I've no fight left in me, Jim."
"A couple of months on the flats will make you as sound as a bell," said Jim cheerfully. "The air here is full of gunpowder and dead men. What you want is Carne."
"I've thought a good deal about it all while I lay there and couldn't talk," said Jack. "You'll have to take it all on, Jim. I shall be a broken man all my life--I feel it inside me; and Carron of Carne must be a whole man. You must take it on, Jim." ”

“ The theatre was shattered out of all knowledge; in every barricaded street the roadway was furrowed like a ploughed field by the shot and shell which came raining in, and these were collected each day and piled into pyramids ten feet high. Not a house but was damaged, many were in ruins; the vertical shells from the mortars came down like bolts from heaven and spread destruction where they fell.
It was death to walk the streets, and no safer to stop indoors. Many crossed the harbour to the northern heights. The Greskis and Jim fitted up their cellars and lived there as in a bomb-proof. ”

“ A new fort had sprung up in the night between the Malakoff, which till now had been the foremost Russian work on that side, and the French trenches--a fort of size too, all a-bristle with gabions and fascines round the crown of the flat hill. The thousands of men still working at it made it look like a great ant-heap.
"French!" said Jim, after his first quick glance, with a feeling of exultation, for the new work must seriously menace, if not command, the Malakoff.
"French?--no, my friend!--Russian! Truly your people are not very wideawake. ”

“ I have been looking to that as the only settlement," said Jim solemnly.
"Meaning that Jack would most likely come back, and that you would most likely not."
"I think that would be the best settlement, sir. The better man should get the prizes, and there can be no question which is the better of us two."
"Jim, my boy,"--and the long thin white hand came down gently on the boy's strong brown one, and rested on it impressively--"there are better things in this world even than brains. Clean hearts, clean consciences, clean lives----"
"Jack has all those, sir." ”

“ So he slipped in among the sand-hills and threaded a devious path parallel with the sea, now and again crawling like a snake up a hummock, and peering through the wire-grass to ascertain his position and make sure that the boat had not gone off.. That was his only anxiety, that she would get away before he had the chance of a nearer view.
He was delighted with his adventure. Here was treasure-trove better than all the tantalising possibilities of the beach. Here was something real and new to set against Jack's musty, but still exciting, stories of old Greeks and Romans. He felt rich. ”

“ The jib had been wrapped round the forestay, and the wind, working at it as though of one mind with him, had loosened the clew, and it was thrashing to and fro in desperate excitement.
He climbed aboard, fitted the tiller, and sat in vast enjoyment. Why, it would only need a pull at a rope here and there, and he believed she would be off. The rain had hardened the soft sand, and there was a good slope down to the ribbed flats below. He had always longed for a run all by himself, and he knew the ropes and how to steer her as well as Mr. Eager did. ”

“ Gracie was enjoying the spice of adventure. Jack wanted to find Jim. Eager himself was beginning to feel anxious, though he would not let the others see it.
"If he is not here--where?" he asked himself, as they ploughed through the sand and the crackling seaweed. And he had to confess that he did not know where to look next. The grim desolation of the sand-hills made him shiver to think of. Suppose the boy had damaged himself in some way and was lying there waiting for help. A thousand boys might lie there unfound till help was useless. ”

“ He revelled in the freedom of the flats as fully as ever, rode and bathed and ran, and held his own in cricket and hockey; but, at the same time, the habit of thought had visibly grown upon him, and it made him seem the older of the two.
Time wrought its personal changes in them all, but brought no great variation from these earlier characteristics. Gracie grew more beautiful in every way each time the boys came home; Jack more deliberative; Jim remained light-hearted and joyously careless as ever, enjoying each day to its fullest, and troubling not at all about the morrow. ”

“ A magnanimous, even a reasonably balanced nature would have assumed the burden and done its best for both alike, and trusted to Time and Providence for a solution of the problem. But no one ever miscalled Sir Denzil Carron to the extent of imputing to him any faintest trace of magnanimity. Time he had some hopes of. Providence he had no belief in. He was simply the product of his age: an unmitigated old heathen, with but one aim in life--the resuscitation of the house of Carne, and to that end ready to sacrifice himself, or any other, body, soul, and spirit. ”

“ Madame Greski and Tatia devoted themselves to Jack as if he had been brother John himself. No single thing that could make for his comfort and well-being was lacking on their part. Never was wounded man tended with more loving and unremitting attention.
And when Jim thought of the bleak miseries of the camps up there on the hill-sides, and the long-drawn horrors of the passages on the hospital ships, he thanked God in his heart that Jack was where he was. ”

“ Jim ambled on, kicking asunder lumps of seaweed which might conceal treasure, stooping now and again to pick up and examine some find more closely, and so came to the bend in the coast out of sight of Carne.
And there he stopped suddenly, like a pointing dog.
Away along the shore, and as close in as the long shoal of the sands would permit, was a large fishing-smack. Between her and the beach a boat was plying, and when it grounded a string of men was rapidly passing its contents up into the sand-hills. ”

“ For men without a single common view of life, he and Sir Denzil had become quite friendly. A verbal tussle with the old heathen, in which each spoke his mind without reserve, always braced him up, just as the boys' more primitive method of argument seemed to do them good.
The old gentleman always greeted him, over a pinch of snuff, with an expression of regret that he had not yet succeeded in settling the matter out of hand by drowning one of his pupils.
"Well, Mr. Eager," he would say, "no progress yet?"
"Oh, plenty. We're improving every day." ”

“ You did well for her when you placed her in the Beteta's hands, my boy."
"Poor little Kattie!" said Jim. "I'm glad she came to me that night."
And here this chronicle may end. The more one ponders this strange and complex coil of life, with its broken hopes and unexplained mysteries, its short-cut strands and long-spun ropes, the more one draws to simple hope and trust in the Higher Powers. The knots and tangles twisted by man's ill doing defy at times all human efforts at their straightening. ”

“ So small a span of time has made no difference in the great house of Carne, or in its surroundings. Many times have the sand-hills sifted and shifted hither and thither. Many times have the great yellow banks out beyond lazily uncoiled themselves like shining serpents, and coiled themselves afresh into new entanglements for unwary mariners. In the narrow channels the bones of the unwary roll to and fro, and some have sunk down among the quicksands. Times without number have the mighty flats gleamed and gloomed. ”

“ It was like climbing through a charnel-house--dead horses and mules stuck up out of the mud on every side, just as they had fallen under their loads and been left to die; and Jim's love for every dumb thing that went on four legs was sorely bruised before he got to the plateau.
And when he did get there the sights were more painful still--mud everywhere, and dirty pools and trickling streams, sodden tents, and gaunt, hungry-looking men in rags, trudging to and fro, with bare feet or with boots that only added to the dilapidated looks of their wearers. ”

“ Jim wandered out, and we cannot find any trace of him."
"Hm! . . . Ah! . . ." And the grim old head nodded thoughtfully over another pinch of snuff. "Well, I don't really see what we can do to-night, Mr. Eager. If, as you suggest, he is lying hurt somewhere in the sand-hills, it would take an army to find him, even in the daytime. We must wait and see. If we don't find him"--hopefully--"if he is gone for good, I shall feel myself under deepest obligation to him or to whoever is concerned in the matter. It leaves us only one boy to deal with--the wrong one, of course--but still, only one." ”

“ Forcefulness could do much in the bending and shaping of life, but here force was powerless.
And it was then, as he brooded over the whole matter, that one of life's great lessons was borne in upon Jim Carron--that the dead hand of the past still works in the moulding of the present and the future, that what has gone is still a mighty factor in what is and what is to come. ”