The old man opened quietly.
A sweet wind stole in, and with it a flood of light.
Kit peeped out.
How naked it looked, how terrible!
"One moment."
He bent, untied his shoe-lace, and tied it up again.
Upstairs it had seemed such an easy thing to dare this deed, so full of the poetry and romance of war. Down here, face to face with the bare fact, it was a different matter. A plank, as it were, had been thrust out from solid earth over Eternity; it was his to walk that plank; and he didn"t like the job.
Piper held the door, waiting respectfully. The old man"s sleeves were rolled to the arm-pit. On one hairy fore-arm a dancing-girl was tattooed, record of the days, now forty years since, before, in his own simple phrase, he had larned Christ.
He knew no fear himself: for he knew that he was impregnable. But his heart went out to this slip of a lad, who had to face Eternity alone, and found it terrible.
The twilight of love, always in all faces the same, which comes when at a call the Christ rises from the deeps of the heart, darkened his eyes.
He gave a shy little cough.
"There"s one bower-anchor"ll weather any storm, by your leave, sir,"
he said, the sailor and the Christian quaintly commingled.
The boy felt the other"s strength flow into his.
"I know," he panted, and plunged.
CHAPTER LXV
THE DOINGS IN THE CREEK
I
As he ran he seemed to himself to be a body of lead borne on watery dream-legs.
In the sally of yesterday at least he had Knapp with him. Now he was alone. And to dare alone is to be revealed to yourself, naked as you are.
A visible danger would have strengthened him. It was the horror of he- knew-not-what coming from he-knew-not-where that made his heart hammer.
The boy"s body screamed to go back. His will thrust it forward. The shock and struggle of the two charged him as with electricity. A touch, he felt, and he might go off in a flash of lightning.
As he held on, and nothing happened, mind began to ride body more masterfully. The flesh, beaten, gave and gave; till in despair, abandoning its backward pull, it threw forward into the work.
What was death? was it what the parsons seemed to think--a foreign land, millions of miles away, with an old man in a temper waiting somewhere in the middle to be nasty to him?
Heaven and earth, this world and the next! Were there indeed two? a great gulf between them. Or were both one and everlasting? Was he, believing himself in Time, dwelling in Eternity now? Was he immortal now?
His heart answered, _Now or never_.
What then to fear?
The thought whirled him forward.
The gra.s.s felt goodly beneath his feet. The sun, still pale in mist, blessed him. A fresh wind flowed about him, fl.u.s.tering hair and shirt.
His heart eased.
After all his rear was fairly safe, and his flank unthreatened. As to his front--well, he had his eyes and his dirk.
Gripping himself together, every hair alert, he ran.
He was nearly across the sward now. Tall gra.s.s-blades p.r.i.c.ked spa.r.s.ely through the sand. The shingle-bank, roan against the sparkle of the sea, surged before him, and behind it--what?
He was living in his eyes.
The knoll lay now to his right rear. Behind it, across the creek, rose the Wish; and on the crest a Grenadier gazing seawards.
Opposite the little hill, standing on the bank somewhere just above the entrance to the sluice, stood the Gentleman.
II
Kit dropped to his hands and knees.
The other had not seen him: for he was standing, back turned, and a short black-snouted pistol in the hand behind him; directing operations in the creek.
What did it all mean? what was that banging and business in the creek?
It was to find this out that he had come.
A sound close at hand drew his mind to his ears.
The crest of the shingle-bank was some twenty yards away. From the reverse slope came the crunch and scream of disturbed pebbles.
Somebody was scrambling up the bank towards him, the pebbles pouring noisily away beneath his feet.
What to do?--turn and bolt? He could be back across the gra.s.s before the slow-foot Frenchman had sworn himself to the crest. Lie there out in the open, to be made prisoner, or potted at thirty yards?
No, no, no! To retreat was shame: to stay death. But one course remained--the riskiest, which, as he had heard the Parson say, in a tight place is often the safest. That course was forward. Take the man unawares as he crested the rise; dirk him; one swift glimpse at the lugger and the doings in the creek; and then pelting home before the enemy had realised the situation and begun to shout.
"_Francois! Francois!_" came an irritable voice.