III
They had turned their backs on the dark scene.
Before them the land rolled away, fold upon fold, the sea encircling it.
Big Jerry"s coombe lay vast and vault-like beneath them on the right, certain dark specks in the centre of it.
They were not sheep, those specks: Kit knew what they were.
Over the shoulder of the coombe, a great flat bay, the sea white along the brown edge of it, swept away scimitar-wise into the mist.
The Gentleman stopped, his hand on the boy"s shoulder.
"Pevensey Bay! That is where the first Frenchman who ever conquered England landed. Hastings yonder! Battle Abbey over there!--my name on its Roll. Such a wonderful old Church!"
He stopped abruptly.
A ship, lying insh.o.r.e beneath him, tiny on the plain of sea, had caught his eye.
He flashed round on the boy.
"What nationality?" fiercely, and with pointing finger.
Kit knew at a glance. Even at that distance the ship had something of the dishevelled appearance of a virago after a street-fight. She was the privateer.
"Double Dutchman."
A hand clutched his throat. Eyes of steel pierced him to the heart.
"Frenchman or English? tell, or take the consequences!"
"I couldn"t tell you that," choking.
A python arm swept about him.
A face smiled into his.
"I knew you wouldn"t. And I wouldn"t have liked you if you had. But--"
The boy snapped his eyes. After all he couldn"t blame the man!
It was no quick stab that he felt, no maddening darkness that drowned him; but a swift forward thrust that shot him down the slope of the coombe.
It was steep as the roof of a house. Down he pelted, headlong, his legs attempting to catch up his falling body. In vain: head over heels, rolling, b.u.mping, tumbling, a ripple of mocking laughter pursuing him.
There was no danger, he knew. The bottom of the coombe was flat as a floor, the cliff running athwart it a quarter of a mile away.
At last he fetched up, battered and breathless.
Above him he could see the figure of the Gentleman tiny against the sky.
"Forgive me, Little Chap," came a far voice. "I am in a hole, and have to get out as best I can. _Il faut que je file_. Here is your little prodder."
His arm swung. Something flashed in the sky, fell, always flashing, and stuck in the hillside above him, quivering there.
It was the boy"s dirk.
III
ABERCROMBY"S BLACK c.o.c.k
CHAPTER XXIX
THE FLAG OF HIS COUNTRY
I
The Gentleman had gone, and the scent-bottle with him.
The boy stood on a track that ran among the gorse, and looked about him.
The wind was at his back, and the sun on his cheek. Above him the brow, rough with gorse, swelled up against the light.
He rushed up the hill into the sky.
On the top, he hunted the landscape with anxious eyes. There was nothing to be seen; no round but the zig-a-zig of the heartless gra.s.shoppers, merry all about him, and the thunder of his own heart.
He swung round. About him, above him, below him, dumb earth, blind sea, deaf heaven.
What was his agony to them?
His hopes died, and he with them. Here was the end of his mission and the end of him.
Old Ding-dong had trusted him--and now!
Mother believed in him--and now!