Maid of the Mist

MAID OF THE MIST

JOHN OXENHAM

HODDER AND STOUGHTON
PUBLISHERS LONDON

Printed in 1917

TO
MY FRIEND
FREDERICK CÆSAR de SUMICHRAST
Professor Emeritus of French Literature
at
Harvard University
in
HIGHEST ESTEEM
and
MOST AFFECTIONATE REGARD.

CONTENTS

For a Woman's Sake

No Man's Land

Bone of Contention

Love in a Mist

Garden of Eden

BOOK I

FOR A WOMAN'S SAKE

At sight of where the chase was leading, most of the riders reined in their panting horses and sat watching those in front with anxious faces.

The Old Roman Road—so called, though with possibly somewhat doubtful claim to antiquity so remote—had an evil reputation. At best of times it was dangerous. More than one of them had sacrificed a horse to it at some time or other. Some had come near to sacrificing more.

After several hours in the field, wound up by a fast five-and-twenty minutes' run which had led round Endsley Wood and the coppices almost to Wynn Hall, and then back through Dursel Bottom, and up Whin Hill, it was too much to ask of any horse. Besides, it meant the end of the run in any case, for that old fox, if he failed to shake them off elsewhere, always made for the Roman Road and always managed it there.

The hedge on this side was as thick and matted a quickset as ever grew. The sunk road had no doubt originally been a covered way from the old fort up above. It was indeed more of a trench than a road, with a sheer descent from the quickset of ten good feet, a width of about as much, and a grass slope on the other side at a somewhat lower level.

The leap was therefore by no means impossible if your horse could rise to the hedge and cover the distance and the extra bit for a footing.

But what was the good? The bottom of the old road was always a muddy dribble from the fields above, and up and down it went several flocks of sheep whenever they changed pasture. And the wily old fox knew the effect of these things on scent as well as any hound or huntsman. So, when it was his day, and he had had enough of them, he made for the Old Roman Road, and then went home with a curl in his lip and a laugh in his eye.

But there were riders among them to whom a ride was nothing without a risk in it, and the Roman Road a standing test and temptation. It was two such that the rest who had got that length stood watching, some with tightened faces, none without anxiety. For a leap that is good sport when one's horse is fresh may mean disaster at the end of the run. Even old Job, the huntsman, and young Job, his son, who acted as whipper-in, watched with pinched faces and panted oaths between their teeth. Pasley Carew, the Master, lifted his foam-flecked black to the hedge, and the dull crash of his fall came up to them, horribly clear on the still autumn air.

Wulfrey Dale, the Doctor, on his big bay, cleared hedge and road with feet to spare, flung himself off as soon as he could pull up, and ran back to help.

It was as bad as it could be. Carew lay in the road, smothered in mud and obviously damaged. His horse had just rolled off him, and the Doctor saw at a glance that one of its forelegs was broken. It was kicking out wildly with its heels, flailing clods out of the steep bank and floundering in vain attempts to rise.

Carew, on one elbow, was cursing it with every oath he could lay tongue to, and with the pointed bone handle of his crop in the other hand was hammering the poor brute's head to pulp.

"Stop it, Carew!" shouted Wulfrey, sickened at the sight, as he jumped down the bank. "Damn it, man, it wasn't her fault!"

"—— her! She's broken my back."

"You shouldn't have tried it. I told you you were too heavy for her. Stop it, I say!" and he wrenched the crop, all dripping with hair and blood, out of the other's hand, and with difficulty bit off the hot words that surged in his throat. For the man was broken and hardly responsible.

It was a hard age and given to forceful language. But never in any age are there lacking some to whom brutality to the dumb beast appeals as keenly as ill-treatment of their fellows.

Wulfrey Dale was of these, and a great lover of horses besides, and Carew's maltreatment of his broken beast cut him to the quick.

With another quick look at the useless leg, and a bitter word which he could not keep in, at the horror of the mauled head, he drew from his pocket a long knife, which had seen service on many a field, opened it, pressed down the blinded tumbling head with one hand, and with the other deftly inserted the blade at the base of the skull behind the ears and drove it home with all his force, severing the spinal cord.

"Poor old girl!" he said, as, with a quick sigh of relief, the great black body lay still.

Then he turned to Carew and knelt down to examine into his injuries.

"No need," said the broken man. "Curse it all! Get a gate. My back's gone. I've no legs,"—and the others, having found their roundabout ways, came flocking up, while the dogs still nosed eagerly up and down the road but got no satisfaction.

Young Job plied his whip and his tongue and carried them away. His father looked at Carew, then at the Doctor, who nodded, and the old man turned and hurried away to get what long experience of such matters told him was needed.

"Take a pull at this, Carew," said the Doctor, handing him a flask. And as he drank deeply, as though to deaden the pain or the thought of it, Dale beckoned to one of the group which stood a little aloof lest the broken man should take their anxiety for morbid curiosity.

"Barclay, will you ride on and break it to Mrs. Carew?"

"Is it bad?"

"Yes, his back's broken."

"Good God!" and he stumbled off to his horse, and with a word to the rest, mounted and rode away.

Old Job came back in a minute or two with a hurdle he had rooted up from the sheep-fold, and they lifted the Master on to it and carried him slowly and heavily home.

Carew was on the front door steps as they came up the drive. The Doctor went on in advance to speak to her.

"Dead?" she jerked breathlessly, as he strode up.

"Not dead. Badly broken. He may live," and her tightened lips pinched a trifle tighter.

She was a slight, extremely pretty woman of three and twenty, white-faced at the moment with the sudden shock; in her blue eyes a curious startled look—anxiety?—expectancy? Even Dale, who had known her all his life, could not have said. All he knew was that it was not quite the look one found in some wives' faces in similar circumstances, and this was not the first he had seen.

She looked scarcely more than a girl, though she had been married five years. That was due largely to the slim grace of her figure. Her face was thinner than he had known it, less eloquent of her feelings, somewhat tense and repressed, and her eyes seemed larger; and all that, he knew, was due to the fact that it was to Pasley Carew to whom she had been married for five years, for he had seen these changes come upon her gradually.

They had played together as boy and girl, when he was just little Wulf Dale, the Doctor's son, and she Elinor Baynard, living with her mother at Glynne. As youth and maiden they had flirted and even sweet-hearted for a time. But Mrs Baynard of Glynne had no intention of letting her pretty girl throw herself away on a mere country doctor's son, however highly she might esteem both father and son personally.

Wulf had at that time still to prove himself, and even if he did so, and eventually succeeded his father in the practice, it meant no more than a good living at the cost of constant hard work.

Elinor, she was sure, had been gifted by Nature with that face and figure for some better portion in life than that of a country doctor's wife, and so she saw to it that the feelings of the young people should not get too deeply entangled before it was too late.

As for Elinor herself she was very fond of Wulf. She liked him indeed almost well enough to sacrifice everything for him. But not quite. If he had only been in the position and possessions of Pasley Carew of the Hall, now, she would have married him without a moment's hesitation, and she would undoubtedly have had much greater chance of happiness than was vouchsafed her.

If, indeed, Wulf had ardently pushed his suit he might possibly have prevailed on her to marry him in spite of her mother, though whether Wulf without the possessions would have satisfied her eventually may be doubted. But Wulf, two years older than herself, had no intention of marrying at twenty, even if his father would have heard of it.

He was a gay, good-looking fellow, with the cheerfullest of humours, and on the best of terms with every man, woman and child, over all the country-side. Moreover he was an excellent shot, a fearless rider, good company at table, an acceptable and much-sought-after guest,—whenever circumstances and cases permitted of temporary release from duties with which no social engagements were ever allowed to interfere. Marrying and settling down were for the years to come.

As his father's assistant he had proved his capabilities. And when the old man died, Wulf stepped up into the vacant saddle and filled it with perfect acceptation to all concerned.

His ready sympathy, and his particular interest in and devotion to everyone who claimed his services, endeared him to his patients. They vowed that the sight of him did them as much good as his medicines, but he made them take the medicines all the same.

He had also lately been appointed Deputy-Coroner for the district, in order, in case of need, to relieve Dr Tamplin—old Tom Tamplin who lived at Aldersley, ten miles away. So that matters were prospering with him all round. All men spoke well of him, and the women still better.

A practitioner from the outside, with a London degree and much assurance, had indeed hung out his large new brass plate in the village about a year before, and lived on there in hope which showed no sign of fulfilment. For everyone knew and liked Wulf Dale, and Dr Newman, M.B., clever though he might be and full worthy of his London degree, was still an outsider and an unknown quantity, and the way of the medical outsider in a country district is apt to be as hard as the way of the transgressor.

So Elinor Baynard, for the sake of her bodily comfort and her own and her mother's worldly ambitions, married Pasley Carew and became Mistress of Croome, and learned all too soon that it is possible to pay too high a price even for bodily comfort and the realisation of worldly ambition.

Worldly ambition may, indeed, be made to appear successfully attained, to the outside world; but bodily comfort, being dependent more or less on peace of mind, is not to be secured when heart and mind are sorely exercised and bruised.

Jealous Jade Rumour even went the length of whispering that it was not heart and mind alone that had on occasion suffered bruising in this case. For Carew was notoriously quick-tempered and easily upset—and notoriously many other things also. His grooms and boys knew the feel of his hunting-crop better than his reasons for using it at times—though doubtless occasion was not lacking. As to his language!—it was said that the very horses in his stables lashed out when he began, as though they believed that, by much kicking, curses might be pulverised in mid-air and rendered innocuous.

Now a wife cannot—Elinor at all events could not—kick even to that extent under the application of sulphur or riding-whip. Nor can she legally, except in the extremest case, throw up her situation, as the stable-boys could, but did not. For the pay in both cases was good, and for the sake of it the one and the other put up with the discomforts appertaining to their positions.

Pasley Carew's redeeming characteristics were a large estate and rent-roll, sporting instincts, and extreme openhandedness in everything that ministered to his own pleasures.

He ran the hounds and was a fine rider, though over-hard on his horses, with whom he was never on terms of intimate friendship. He esteemed them solely for their carrying capacities. He preserved, was a good shot, and free with his invitations to the less-happily situated. He was a jovial host and a hard drinker as was the fashion. He enjoyed seeing his friends at his table and under it. He was not a hard landlord, and this, and his generosity in the matter of compensation for hunt-damage, secured him the good-will of the country-side and palliated all else.

Morals were slack in those days, and no one would have thought for a moment of affronting Carew by calling him a moral man.

On the whole, Elinor paid a somewhat high price for the bodily comfort from which—according to the Jealous Jade—sulphurous language and an occasional blow were not lacking, and for the satisfaction of a worldly ambition which, if the gradual shadowing of her pretty face was anything to go by, had not brought her any great peace of mind.

III

Wulfrey Dale was a very general favourite. With men and women alike, quite irrespective of their station in life, his manner was irresistibly frank and charming. With the women it might be said to be almost unfortunately so.

He was so absolutely and unaffectedly sympathetic, so exclusively and devotedly interested in every woman he met, that it is hardly matter for wonder that in many quarters impressionable hearts beat high at his coming, and thought tenderly and hopefully of him when he had gone. That, too, in spite of the fact that their owners knew perfectly well that it was simply Wulf's way, as it had been his father's before him, and that neither of them could change his nature any more than he could change his skin or the colour of his eyes.

He took a deep and genuine human interest in every man, woman and child with whom he came into contact, and showed it. With men and children it made for good-fellowship and extraordinary confidence. The older folk all trusted young Wulfrey as they had all their lives trusted the old Doctor. The children would talk to him as between man and man, and with an artlessness and candour which as a rule obtained only among themselves. With the women it led in some cases to little affections of the heart—flutterings and burnings and barely-self-confessed disappointments, for which their owners, if honest in their searchings after truth, had to acknowledge that the blame lay entirely with themselves.

It was a time of hard drinking, hard riding, and quite superfluously strong language, but none the less, among the women-folk, of a sentiment which in these days of wider outlook and opportunity we should denominate as sickly. The blame was not all theirs.

So far Wulf had shown exceptional interest or favour in no direction, that is to say in all, and so none could claim to say with any certainty in which way the wind blew, or even if it blew at all.

Not a few held that Elinor Baynard's marriage with Pasley Carew had so wounded his affections that it was probable he would never marry, unless——. And therein lay strictly private grounds for hope in many a heart.

For a heart-broken man, however, Wulfrey managed to maintain an extremely cheerful face, and his manner to Elinor, whenever they met, was just the same as to other women.

If it had in fact been somewhat different it would not have been very surprising. For it needed no professional acumen to recognise that her marriage with Pasley had not fulfilled her expectations.

She was, indeed, Mrs Carew of Croome, mistress of the Hall and all such amenities—and otherwise—and luxuries of living as appertained to so exalted a position, winner of the prize so many had coveted, and—wife of Pasley Carew. And sometimes it is possible she wished she were none of these things because of the last.

For Carew made no pretence of perfection, or even of modest impeccability, never had done so since the day he was born, never would till the day he must die, would have scorned the very idea. Was he not a man,—rich and hot-blooded, able and accustomed all his life to have his own way in all things, easy enough to get on with when he got it, otherwise when thwarted?

And Wulfrey Dale had seen the freshness of the maiden-bloom fade out of Elinor's pretty face, in these five years of her attainment, had seen it stiffen in self-repression, and even harden somewhat. Her eyes had seemed to grow larger, and there were sometimes dark shadows under them. Without doubt she had not found any too large measure of the comfort and happiness she had looked for. At times, mind acting on body, her health was not of the best, and then she sent for Wulfrey to minister to her bodily necessities, and found that he could do it best by allowing her to relieve her mind of some of its burdens.

They had always been on such friendly terms that she could, and did, talk to him as to no other. Her mother was worse than useless as a burden-sharer. Her only counsel was not to be too thin-skinned, and above all to present a placid face to the world. Which, as medicine to a sorely-tried soul, was easier to give than to take, and proved quite ineffective.

Wulfrey, on the other hand, gave her tonics, and, to the fullest limits of his duty to Carew, his deepest sympathy in her troubles and vexations, and his friendly advice towards encouragement and hope of better times, when Pasley's hot blood would begin to cool and he would settle down to less objectionable courses.

At times, under stress and suffering from some more than usually immoderate outbreak on her husband's part, she would let herself go in a way that pained and surprised him, both as friend and doctor. He doubted if she always told him all, even at such times. More than once she had seemed on the point of still wilder outbreak, and it was all he could do to soothe her and bring her back to a more reasonable frame of mind.

On one occasion she openly threatened to take her life, since it was no longer worth living, and it took Wulfrey a good hour to wring from her a solemn promise not to do so without first consulting him. So over-wrought and alternately excited and depressed was she that there were times when, in spite of her promise, he would not have been greatly surprised by a sudden summons to the Hall with the news that its mistress had made a summary end of her troubles.

His mind was sorely exercised on her account, but it was only the effects that came within his province. The root of the trouble was beyond his tackling. He did, indeed, after much debate within himself, bring himself to the point of discussing the matter, in strictest confidence, with the parson, one night. But he, jovial sportsman and recipient of many bounties from Pasley, including the privilege of subsiding under his table whenever invitation offered, genially but flatly refused to interfere between man and wife.

"No good ever comes of it, Doctor. You know that as well as any man. It's only the intruder suffers. They both turn and rend him like boars of the wood and wild beasts of the field. Take my advice and leave 'em alone. These things always straighten themselves out in time—one way or the other. Deuce take the women! They're not blind kittens when they marry. They've got to take the rough with the smooth. Another glass of punch before you go!"—was the irreverent Reverend's final word on the matter. And Wulfrey could do no more in that direction.

It was under such circumstances that they carried Pasley Carew home to Croome on the hurdle; under such circumstances that Elinor met them on the steps and asked Wulfrey, with that curious, startled look in her eyes which might be anxiety and might be expectancy.—

"Dead?"

And Wulfrey, subconsciously wondering whether she really had got the length of hoping for her husband's death, and subconsciously feeling that if it were so it was not much to be wondered at, though undoubtedly greatly to be deplored, had answered her, somewhat sternly, "Not dead. Badly broken. He may live,"—for the shock of the whole matter, and the extreme discomfort of having had to sever that poor Blackbird's spinal cord, were still heavy on him.

Elinor shot one sharp, searching glance at his face, and turned and went on before the bearers to show them the way.

The staircase at Croome was a somewhat notable one, wide enough to accommodate hurdle and bearers with room to spare, so they carried the Master right up to his own bedroom and as gently as possible transferred him to his bed.

The explosive fury of his outbreak against Fate and Blackbird, in the first shock of his fall, had been simply a case of vehement passion disregarding, and momentarily overcoming, the frailty of the flesh. Exhaustion and collapse followed, and as they carried him home he lay still and barely conscious.

He came to himself again as they placed him on the bed, and after lying for a moment, as though recalling what had happened, murmured in a bitter whisper, "Damnation! Damnation! Damnation!" and his eyes screwed up tightly, and his face warped and pinched in agony of mind or body, or both.

As Wulfrey bent over him, and with gentle hands assured himself of the damage, Carew looked up at him out of the depths; horror, desperation, furious revolt, hopelessness, all mingled in the wild gleam that detected and scorched the pity in Wulfrey's own eyes, and gave him warning of dangers to come.

"—— it all! It's no good, Dale," he growled hoarsely. "I'm done. —— that horse! Give me something that'll end it quick!"

"Don't talk that way, man! You know I can't do that. We'll pull you through."

"To lie like a log for the rest of my life! I won't, I tell you. —— it, man, can't you understand I'd liefer go at once?"

"I'll bring you up a draught and you'll get some rest," said Dale soothingly.

"Rest! Rest! A dose of poison is all I want, —— you! Don't look at me like that, —— you!" to his wife, who stood watching with her hands tightly clasped as though to hold in her emotions. She walked away to the window and stood looking out.

"Carew, you—must—be—quiet. You're doing yourself harm," said the Doctor authoritatively.

"Man, I'm in hell. Poison me, and make an end!"

"Not till tomorrow, anyway. I'll run down and get that draught. We'll see about the other in the morning."

Mrs Carew turned as he left the room, and followed him out, and the sick man sank back with a groan and a curse.

"Will he die?" she asked quickly, as she closed the door behind them.

"Not necessarily. But if he lives he'll be crippled for life."

"He would sooner die than live like that."

"We can't help that. It's my business to keep him alive. I'll run down and mix him a draught which may give him some rest. You'll need assistance. He may go off his head. He's a bad patient. I'll send you someone up——"

"Not Jane Pinniger then. I won't have her."

He knitted his brows at her. "It was Jane I was thinking of. She's an excellent nurse, both brains and brawn, and he may get violent in the night."

"I won't have her here," said Elinor obstinately, and he remembered that gossip had, not so very long ago, been busy with the names of Pasley and Jane, as she had at other times occupied herself with Pasley and many another. Undoubtedly Elinor had had much to bear.

"All right! If I can find anyone else——" he began.

"I won't have Jane Pinniger here,"—and he went off at speed to get the draught and find a substitute for Jane if that were possible.

His doubts on that head were justified. He sent his boy up with the draught, and started on the search for a nurse who should combine a modicum of intelligence with the necessary strength of mind and body.

But his choice was very limited. Old crones there were, satisfactory enough in their own special line and in a labourer's cottage, but useless for a job such as this. There was nothing for it at last but to go back to the Hall and tell Mrs Carew that it was Jane or nobody.

"Nobody then," said she decisively. "I will manage with one of the girls from downstairs, and young Job to help."

"Young Job is all very well with the dogs——"

"He will do very well for this too. We may not require him, but he can be at hand in case of need," and he had to leave it at that.

Carew suffered much, more in mind even than in body. The thought of lying there like a damned log, as he put it, for the rest of his days filled him with most passionate resentment, and drove him into paroxysms of raging fury. He cursed everything under the sun and everyone who came near him, with a completeness and finality of invective which, if it had taken effect or come home to roost, would have blighted himself and all his surroundings off the face of the earth.

Even his wife, and the maid who took turns with her to sit within call, accustomed as they were to his outbreaks, quailed before the storm. Young Job alone suffered it without turning a hair, and paid no more heed to it all, even when directed against himself, than he would to the yelping of his dogs.

Wulfrey Dale came in for his share, chiefly by reason of his quiet inattention to the sufferer's impossible demands for extinction.

But he found his visits to the sick-room trying even to his seasoned nerves. What it must all mean to the tortured wife he hardly dared to imagine.

Once when he was there, Carew hurled a tumbler at her which missed her head by a hair's-breadth. Dale got her out of the room, and turned and gave his patient a sound verbal drubbing, and Carew cursed him high and low till his breath gave out.

"Has he done that before?" the Doctor asked the white-faced wife, when he had followed her downstairs.

"Oh, yes. But I'm generally on the look-out. I was off my guard because you were there. Oh, I wish he would die and leave us in peace."

"He'll kill himself if he goes on like this."

"He'll kill some of us first. He's wanting to die. It would be the best thing for him—and for us. Can't you let him die?" and a tiny spark shot through the shadowy suffering of her eyes as she glanced up at him.

"You know I can't. Don't talk like that!" he said brusquely, and then, to atone for the brusqueness, "I am sorely distressed for you, but there is nothing to be done but bear it as bravely as you can. What about your mother? Couldn't you——"

"It would only make him worse still, if that is possible. Pasley detests her. Oh, I wish I were dead myself. I cannot bear it," and she broke into hysterical weeping, and swayed blindly, and would have fallen if he had not caught her.

A woman's grief and tears always drew the whole of Wulf's sympathy. And he and she had been almost as brother and sister all their lives—till she married Carew.

"Don't, Elinor! Don't!" he said soothingly, as with her shaking head against his breast she sobbed as though her heart were broken.

Mollie, the maid, came hastily in, without so much as a knock, her red face mottled with white fear.

"He's going on that awful, Ma'am, I vow I daresn't stop in there alone with him. It's as much as one's life's worth when he's in his tantrums."

"Get your mistress a glass of wine, Mollie, and then find young Job and send him up. I'll go up and wait with Mr Carew till he comes."

He led Mrs Carew to the couch and made her lie down there, and explained matters to the girl by asking her,

"Does he throw things at you too?"

"La, yes, Doctor, at all of us, if we don't keep 'em out of his reach. He do boil up so at nothing at all," and she went off in search of young Job, who was passing a peaceful holiday hour in the company of thirty couple of yelping hounds.

Dale was confronted with the problem with which every medical man comes face to face during his career.

Here was a man who, both for his own sake and still more for the sake of those about him, would be very much better dead than living; who wanted to die, and, as he believed, make an end; who begged constantly for the relief of death;—and yet, against his own equally strong feeling of what would be best for all concerned, his doctor must do his very utmost to keep his patient alive and all about him in torment.

Wulfrey wished, as devoutly as the more immediate sufferers, that he would die. He wished it more ardently each time he saw Mrs Carew, and wholly and entirely on her account.

Her white face, which grew more deathly white each day, and her woful eyes, which grew ever more despairing in their shadowy rings, were sure indexes of what she was passing through. Dale wondered how much longer she would be able to stand it.

He gave her tonics, and his most helpful sympathy and encouragement. And at the same time, by the irony of circumstance and the claims of his profession, he must do everything in his power to perpetuate the burden under which she was breaking.

But the whole matter came to a sudden and unlooked for end, on the seventh day after the accident.

Wulfrey was hastening up to the Hall to clear this, the unpleasantest item, out of his day's work, when he met young Job coming down the drive with a straw in his mouth and three couples of young hounds at his heels.

"Wur comen fur you, Doctor," said young Job. "He's dead."

"Dead?" jerked the Doctor in very great surprise, for his patient had been more venomously alive than ever the night before.

"Ay—dead. An' a good thing too, say I, and so too says everyone that's heard it."

"But what took him, Job? He was going on all right last night."

"'Twere the Devil I expecs, Doctor, if you ask me straight. He were getten too strampageous to live. Th' air were so full o' fire and brimstone with his curses, it weren't safe. 'Twere like bein' under a tree wi' th' leeghtnin' playin' all round."

"And Mrs Carew? ... Who was with him when he died? Tell me all you know about it," as they hurried along.

"I come up at ten o'clock as ushal, an' the missus met me at door wi' her finger to her lips. 'He's sleeping, Job,' she says, an' glad I was to hear it. 'I'll go an' lie down, Job, for I'm very tired,' she says, and she looked it, poor thing. 'Knock on my door if you need me, Job,' she says, and she went away. He were lying quiet and all tucked up, an' I sat down an' waited for him to wake up and start again. But he never woke, and when the missus came in this morning she went and looked at him, and she says, 'Why, Job, I do believe he's dead,' and I went and looked at him, and, God's truth, he looked as if he might be. But I couldn't be sure, not liking to touch him, and I says, 'No such luck, ma'am, I'm afraid,'—polite like, for we all knows the time she's had wi' him, and she says, 'Go and fetch Dr Dale.' So I just loosed these three couple o' young uns—they're all achin' for a run,—an' I'm wondering who'll work th' pack now he's gone, if so be as he's really gone, which I'm none too sure of. Th' Hunt were best thing he ever did, but he were terrible hard on his horses."

Dale hurried into the house and up the stair, and into the sick-room, the windows of which were opened to their widest, as though to cleanse the room of the fire and brimstone which had seemed over-strong even to such a pachyderm as young Job.

Carew lay there on the bed, at rest at last, as far as this world was concerned, startlingly quiet after the storm-furies of the last seven days and nights.

Dale was still standing looking down at him, full of that ever-recurring wonder at the quiet dignity which Death sometimes imparts even to those whose lives have not been dignified; full too of anxious desire to learn how it had come about.

The tightly-clenched hands and livid rigidity of the body suggested a startling possibility. He was bending down to the dead man to investigate more closely when a sound behind him caused him to look round, and he found Mrs Carew standing there. Her face was whiter, her eyes heavier and more shadowy, than he had ever seen them.

"He is dead," she said quietly.

"One can only look upon it as a merciful release—for all of you. How was it?"

"He wanted to die," she began, in the dull level tone of a child repeating an obnoxious lesson. Then the self-repression she had prescribed for herself gave way somewhat. Her hands gripped one another fiercely and she hurried on with a touch of rising hysteria, but still speaking in little more than a whisper. "You know how he wanted to die. He was asking you all the time to give him something to end it. But you could not. I know—I quite understand—being a doctor, of course you could not. But there was something he kept—for the rats, you know, in the stables. And he told me where it was and told me to get some. So I got it and gave it him in his sleeping-draught, and——"

"Good God! Elinor!..." he gasped. "... You never did that!"

"Yes, I did. Why not? He wished it. We all wished it. It is much better so," and she pointed at the dead man on the bed. "It is better for him ... and for all of us. I only did what he told me."

He stood staring at her in blankest amazement, and found himself unconsciously searching her face and eyes for signs of aberration. Her face was wan-white still, but had lost the broken, beaten look it had worn of late. The shadow-ringed eyes were perfectly steady and had in them a curious wistful look, like that of a child expecting and deprecating a scolding.

"Do you know what it means?" he asked at last, in a hoarse whisper.

"It means release for us all," she said quickly, and then more quickly still, "Oh, Wulfrey, I couldn't help thinking—hoping that—sometime—not for a long time, of course,—but sometime—when we have forgotten all this—you might—you and I might——"

"Stop!" he said sternly. "Were you thinking that when you did this?" and he pointed to the bed.

"Not then—at least—no, I think not. I just did what he told me to do. But when I saw he was really dead——"

He stopped her again with a gesture, and broke out with brusque vehemence, "Is it possible you don't understand what you have done? Do you know what the law will call it?"——

"The law? No one needs to know anything about it but you and me——"

"The law will want to know how this man died——"

"But you can tell them all that is necessary. It was Blackbird falling at the old road that killed him. If he hadn't broken his back he wouldn't have been lying here, and if he hadn't——"

"He might have lived for twenty years," he said, breaking her off short again with an abrupt gesture. "The law requires of me the exact truth. Do you understand you are asking me to swear to a lie? I would not do it to save my own life."

"He took it himself——"

"He could not get it himself, and the law will hold you responsible for supplying it."

"Oh—Wulfrey! ... You won't let them hang me?"—and he saw that at last she understood clearly enough the peril in which she stood if the whole truth of the matter became known.

Hang her they most certainly would if the facts got out, or coop her for life in a mad-house, which would be infinitely worse than hanging. And the thought of either dreadful ending to her spoiled life was very terrible to him.

She stood before him, little more than a girl still, woful, wistful, with terror now in her white face and shadowy eyes, and he remembered their bygone days together.

"Go back to your room, and rest, if you can. And say nothing of all this to anyone. You understand?—not a word to anyone. I must think what can be done," he said, and she turned and went without a word.

VII

Wulfrey Dale thought hard and deep.

He must save her if he could.

How?

For a moment—inevitably—he weighed in his mind the question of his own honour versus this woman's life.

With a few strokes of the pen he could probably bury the whole matter safely out of sight along with Carew's dead body. But those few strokes of the pen, certifying that this man died as the result of his accident, were as impossible to him as would have been the administration of the poisoned draught itself.

Moreover—though that weighed nothing with him compared with the other—there was in them always the possibility of disaster, should rumour or tittle-tattle cast the shadow of doubt upon his statement; and an idle word from Mollie or young Job might easily do that. The neighbours also had made constant enquiry after Pasley since his accident, and had been given to understand that he was progressing as well as could be expected. His sudden death might well cause comment. Indeed, it would be strange if it did not. That might lead to investigation, and that must inevitably disclose the fact that he died from strychnine poisoning.

The Dales had never been wealthy, but their standards had been high, and Wulfrey had never done anything to lower them. He could not sell his honour even for this woman's life.

He pitied her profoundly. He understood her better probably than any other. He knew how terribly she had suffered, and could comprehend, quite clearly, just how she had fallen into this horrible pit. But cast his honour to the dogs for her, he could not.

Then how?

And, pondering heavily all possibilities, he saw the only feasible way out.

It meant almost certain ruin to himself and his prospects, but, if it came, it would be clean ruin and he would feel no smirch.

It involved a false statement of fact, it is true, but of a very different cast and calibre from the other, and one that he himself felt to be no stain upon his honour.

As a matter of pure ethics a lie is a lie, and of course indefensible. I simply tell you what this man did and felt himself untarnished in the doing.

And the very first thing he did was to go straight home to the little dispensary which opened off his consulting-room, and alter the positions of some of the bottles on the shelves; and from one of them he withdrew a measured dose which he tossed out of the window into the garden.

Then he sat down at his desk and quietly wrote out a certificate of the death of Pasley Carew, of Croome Hall, Gentleman, through the administration of a dose of strychnine in mistake for distilled water, in a sleeping-draught compounded by Dr Wulfrey Dale. And he thought, as he wrote the word, of the awful pandemonium Pasley Carew, Gentleman, had created in his own household these last seven days.

He enclosed this in a covering letter to Dr Tamplin, the coroner, in which he explained more fully how the mistake had occurred. The bottles containing the strychnine and the distilled water stood side by side on his shelf. He had come in tired from a long country round. Had remembered the draught to be sent up to the Hall. As to the rest, he could not tell how he came to make such a mistake. But there it was, and he only was to blame. He could only express his profound regret and accept the consequences.

Then, having completed his documents, instead of galloping off to see his waiting patients, he sat down before the fire and let his thoughts play gloomily over the whole matter. His man was off delivering medicines, and would not be back till midday. Time enough if Tamplin got his letter during the afternoon. As to his own patients, he had run rapidly over them in his own mind, and saw that there was no one vitally demanding his attention. He could not go his rounds and say nothing, and the thought of carrying the news of his own default was too much for him. As soon as the matter got bruited about, he thought grimly, there would probably be a run on Dr Newman's services, which would greatly astonish and delight that gentleman and would compensate him for all his months of weary waiting.

It was a good thing for Elinor, he thought, as he sat staring into the fire, that he was not married. If he had had a wife and children, they must have gone into the scale against her, and she must certainly have been hanged.

Quite impossible to bring it in as an accident on her part. That he had seen at a glance. The jury would be composed of neighbours, and in spite of the placid face she had turned to the world, it was well enough known that she and Pasley had not lived happily together. And though the fault of that was not imputed to her, every man's thought would inevitably jump to the worst, and condemn her even before she did it out of her own mouth, which she most certainly would do the moment she opened it to explain matters.

No, this was the only possible way. If the cost was heavy, he was more capable of bearing it than she. In any case he could not hand her over to the hangman. That was out of the question.

He could pretty well forecast the consequences. His practice would be ruined, for who would trust a doctor capable of so fatal a mistake? He would have to go away and start life afresh elsewhere. It would have to be somewhere where he was quite unknown, or this thing would dog him all his life. Some new country perhaps,—say Canada or the States. Gad, it was a heavy price to pay for a foolish woman's lapse!

He would not be penniless, of course. His father had laid by a considerable sum in the course of his long and busy life. If necessary he could live in quiet comfort, without working, for the rest of his days. But it was hard to break away like this from all that had so far constituted his life. A heavy price to pay for mere sentiment—but not too heavy for a woman's life!

There was no doubt of his having to go. The question was whether he should go at once, or wait till there was nothing left to wait for.

It would be dismal and weary work waiting. But going would feel like bolting, and he had never run from trouble in his life. As a matter of fact he had never until now had any serious trouble to face, but now that it had come he found himself in anything but a running humour.

If there had been anything to fight he would have rejoiced in the mêlée and plunged into it with ardour. But here was nothing to be fought. By his own deliberate act he was labelling himself untrustworthy, and no uttermost striving on his part could rehabilitate him. For the essence of healing is faith, and a doctor who has forfeited one's confidence is worse than no doctor at all.

VIII

In the afternoon he sent off his man on horseback with the letter to Dr Tamplin, and towards evening he came galloping back with this very characteristic reply:

"MY DEAR WULFREY,

Shocking business and I'm sorely grieved about whole matter. Humanum est errare, but a doctor's not supposed to. Good thing for us we're not always found out. Could you not bring yourself to certify death as result of the accident? I consider it a mistake to admit the possibility of such a thing, so d—d damaging to the profession. And have you considered the matter from your own point of view? Cannot fail to have bad effect. Perhaps give that new fellow just the chance he's been waiting for. —— him!

Think it over again, my boy, from all points, and be wise. I return certificate. Your man will tell you all about my fall. My cob stumbled over a stone last night and broke me a leg and two ribs. I'm too heavy for that kind of thing and he's a —— fool! But it was very dark and we're neither of us as young as we were. For all our sakes I hope you'll come through this all right. We can't spare you. And it might come to that. Remember what silly sheep folks are.

Yours truly,
THOMAS TAMPLIN."

Just like the dear, easy-going old boy, fall and all, thought Wulfrey, and the advice tendered and the course suggested did not greatly surprise him. But he had to make allowances for the old man's age and easy-goingness, and his lack of detailed knowledge of all the circumstances of the case,—how almost impossible it would be to ascribe Carew's death to the accident, even if he could have brought himself to do so.

The old man's own shelving would add greatly to the unpleasantness of the situation, for, as deputy-coroner, he would have to call a jury himself, and submit the matter to their consideration and himself to their verdict.

However, there was no way out of that, so he set to work at once and sent out his summonses, calling the inquest for ten o'clock the next morning, at the Hall; and to relieve Elinor as much as possible, he gave orders to the undertaker at Brentham to do all that was necessary, and sent her word that he had done so.

Early next morning, before he was up, young Job was knocking on his front door, with half the pack yelping and leaping outside the gate.

"Well, Job? What's it now?" he asked, from his bedroom window.

"That gal Mollie says you better come up and see th' missus——"

"Why? What's wrong with her?"

"I d'n know, n' more don't Mollie. She thinks she's had a stroke."

"Wait five minutes and I'll go back with you," and in five minutes they were crunching through the lanes, all hard underfoot with frost that lay like snow, and white and gay with hedge-row lacery of spiders' webs in feathery festoons, and, up above, a crimson sun rising slowly through the mist-banks over the bare black trees.

"What makes Mollie think your mistress has had a stroke?" asked the Doctor. "What does Mollie know about strokes?"

"I d'n know. 'Sims to me she've had a stroke,' was her very words. She've just laid on her bed all day an' all night without speakin' a word, Mollie says,—eatin' noth'n, and drinkin' noth'n, which is onnat'ral; an' sayin' noth'n, which in a woman is onnat'ral too."

"She was quite worn out with nursing Mr Carew."

"Like enough. He wur a handful an' no mistake. Th' house is a deal quieter wi'out him. But who's goin' to run th' pack?—that's what bothers me."

"Don't you worry, Job. Someone will turn up to run the pack all right."

"Mebbe, but it depends on who 'tis. Why not yourself now, Doctor?"

"That's a great compliment, Job, and I appreciate it. But," with a shake of the head, "I'll have other work to do," and he wondered grimly where that work might lie.

Mollie took him straight up to Mrs Carew's room, where she lay just as she had sunk down on the bed when he sent her away the previous morning.

"She's nivver spoke nor moved since she dropped down there yes'day," whispered Mollie impressively. "I covered her up, but she took no notice. An' I brought her up her dinner and her supper but she's never ate a bite."

"Get me a cup of hot milk with an egg and a glass of sherry beaten up in it, Mollie," he whispered back. "And I'll see if I can induce her to take it. You did quite right to send for me," and Mollie hurried away with a more hopeful face.

Elinor lay there with her eyes closed and a rigid, stricken look on her white face, a picture of hopeless despair. But Wulfrey's quick glance had caught the flutter of her heavy lids, and the gleam of terrified enquiry that had shot through them, as they came into the room, and he understood.

He bent over her and whispered, "I have made it all right, Elinor. You need have no further fears——"

"They will not hang me?" she whispered, and looked up into his face with all the terrors of the night still in her woful eyes.

"No one will know anything about it unless you tell them yourself. You will eat something now, and then you had better lie still. Get some sleep if you can or you will make yourself ill. If you fell ill you might say things you should not, you know."

She struggled up on to one elbow. "You are quite sure they will not hang me?" she whispered again.

"Quite sure, unless you are so foolish as to tell them all about it."

"I have felt the rope round my neck all night. Oh, it was terrible in the dark. It was terrible ... terrible——" and she felt about her pretty white neck with her trembling hands.

"Forget all about it now. I have made all the necessary arrangements. There will have to be an inquest. It will be held here—-"

"Here?" she shivered.

"At ten o'clock this morning. You are too ill to be present, so you will just lie still. It will not take long. And I have done everything else that had to be done."

"It is very good of you," she murmured, with a forlorn shake of the head.

She did not ask by what means he had saved her from the consequences of what she had done. Perhaps she dared not. Perhaps she believed he had, after all, forsworn himself for her sake, and refrained from questioning him lest it should only add to his discomfort. Anyway she was satisfied with the fact. She was not going to be hanged. That was enough.

Mollie came in with her deftly-compounded cup.

"Drink it up," said the Doctor. "I will look in again later on," and he went away to prepare the household for the coming meeting in the big dining-room.

The sixteen jurymen, whom Wulfrey had summoned in order to make quite sure of a legal panel, came riding up in ones and twos, with faces tuned to the occasion, disguising, as well as they could, the vast curiosity this sudden call had excited in themselves and all their various households.

That there was something gravely unusual behind it they could not but feel. They were all friends and neighbours; many of them had witnessed Carew's accident and had been constant in their enquiries as to his progress. The news of his death had come as a surprise and a shock, and such of them as happened to join company on the road discussed the matter by fits and starts, and surreptitiously as it were, but did not venture below the surface. Their women-folk at home had done all that was necessary in that respect for the fullest ventilation of the subject, without in any degree rendering it more savoury or comprehensible.

Every man had felt it his bounden duty to be there, and so it was sixteen keenly interested faces that confronted Wulfrey when he took the chair at the head of the table and stood up to speak to them.

His face was very grave, his manner noticeably quiet and restrained and very different from its usual jovial frankness.

"This painful duty, doubly painful under the circumstances, as you will understand in a moment, has fallen to me in consequence of Dr Tamplin being laid up through the fall of his horse yesterday. I am sure you will not make it any more painful for me than it is. I shall not trouble you long. The matter is unfortunately clear and simple. Our friend, Mr Pasley Carew, died the night before last from the effects of a dose of strychnine, administered in a sleeping-draught in mistake for distilled water which was in the bottle alongside it on the shelf in my dispensary."

His eyes ranged keenly over the startled faces round the table at which they had all of them so often sat,—under which some of them had not infrequently lain.

Every face was alight with startled surprise. Not one of them showed the remotest sign of questioning his statement.

Indeed, why should they? A man does not as a rule confess to so grave a lapse unless it is absolutely unavoidable, unless the truth must out and there is no possible loophole of escape.

Not many men would fling away their life's prospects from simple pity for a woman. For love—yes, without a doubt, and count the cost small. But from simple pity, in remembrance of the time when the greater love had been possible? ...

But no such idea found place in any of their minds. His eyes searched theirs for smallest flicker of doubt, but found none. Whatever the women at home might have suggested as extreme possibilities, these men accepted his word without a moment's hesitation. Elinor was perfectly safe.

"He was in great pain and could only get rest and relief by means of opiates. How the mistake occurred I cannot explain, except that the bottles of distilled water and of strychnine stand alongside one another on my shelf, and that I had come in very tired that night and the sleeping-draught was prepared hurriedly. I deplore the results more than any of you possibly can, and of course I must accept the consequences. I have not judged it necessary to make any post-mortem examination. I was called by young Job early yesterday morning, and when I got here Carew was dead and the symptoms were those of poisoning by strychnine. I was amazed and horrified, but when I hurried back home I saw at once how the mistake might have been made, and—and—well, there the matter is and you must bring in such verdict as you deem right. You can see the body if you wish. You can examine the servants. Mrs Carew, I am sorry to say, is quite broken down with the shock. She has been, I am told, practically unconscious for nearly twenty-four hours and has only just come to herself. But if you would like to see her——"

"No, no." "No need whatever," said the jurymen deprecatingly.

Dr Wulfrey sat down and dropped his head into his hands, then got up again heavily and said, "You will discuss this matter better without me. I will leave you——"

"Couldn't you possibly say he died as result of the accident, Wulf?" asked one—Jim Barclay of Breme.

They all liked the Doctor. With some he had been on terms of very close friendship. Some of them had known him all his life and his father before him.

"Ay, couldn't you?" chorussed some of the others.

"If I could I should have done so," he said quietly. "But it wasn't so and I couldn't say it was."

"Say it now, Wulf," urged his friend. "And I swear none of us will let it out. Isn't that so, gentlemen?"

"Ay, ay!"—but somewhat dubiously from the older members, who saw that after this revelation of the actual facts to themselves their relations with the Doctor could never be quite the same again, however they might succeed in hoodwinking the world outside.

They knew him, they liked him, but—well, at the back of their minds was the thought that if Dr Wulf could make a mistake in one case, there was no knowing but what he might in another,—that he might at any time come in tired and pick up the wrong bottle,—that, whatever risks one might accept on one's own account for old friendship's sake, one's wife and daughters should hardly be put into such a position all unknown to themselves. And more than one of them wondered what he would do if he should happen to be taken ill that night—send for Dr Wulf or the new man down in the village?

Dale diagnosed their symptoms with the sensitiveness born of the equivocal nature of the new relationship in which his confession placed him towards them.

"It is like your good-heartedness to suggest it, Barclay," he said to his impetuous friend, "but it cannot be. I can only do what seems to me right," and he left them to talk over their verdict.

"Gad! but I'm mighty sorry this has happened," said one old squire who had known Wulf from the year one. "Many's the time I've sat at this table——"

"And under it," interjected one.

"Ay, and under it, and I never expected to sit round it on Pasley Carew. I'd give a year's rents to have him back, even if he was all in pieces and raging like the Devil."

"Same here. Whatever we decide it'll get out, and it's bound to tell against Dr Wulf."

"He's bound to suffer,—can't help it,—it's human nature. Suppose you took ill tonight now, Barclay. What would you do?"

"What would I do? I'd send for Wulf Dale of course, and I'd have same faith in him as I've always had."

"Of course, of course,"—but even those who said it had more the air of wishing to placate Barclay, who had a temper, rather than of any deep conviction as to their own course should the unfortunate necessity arise.

"Well," said Barclay, with the manner of a volcano on the point of eruption. "All I can say is that if any man I know goes ill and does not send for Wulf Dale, he'll have me to reckon with if the other man doesn't kill him."

"Hear, hear!" from various points about the table.

"Well, we've got to decide something and make an end of the matter," said one. "Barclay, you write out what you think and I've no doubt we'll all agree to it."

"I'm going to write nothing," said Barclay, whose strong brown hand was more accustomed to the hunting-crop than the pen. "I say 'Accidental Death,' and keep your mouths shut."

They all said 'Accidental Death' and promised to keep their mouths shut; and Wulfrey, when he was called in, thanked theta soberly for their good intentions, but added to their verdict,—"as the result of strychnine poison administered in mistake for distilled water in a sleeping-draught prepared by Dr Wulfrey Dale."

Jim Barclay, who was a bachelor, kept his bed next morning with an alleged bad cold,—-a thing he had never been troubled with in all his born days, and ostentatiously sent his man galloping for Dr Wulfrey as though his master's life depended on it.

Wulfrey smiled at the message, understanding the staunch friendliness which lay behind it, and went.

"Well, what's wrong with you?" he enquired of the burly patient, when he was shown up to his bedroom.

"Just you, my boy. Haven't slept a wink all night for thinking of the whole —— mess. Wulf, my lad, I'm afraid you'll have a deuce an' all of a time of it. Thought I'd show 'em there was one man thought none the worse of you. ——! ——! ——! Can't any man make a little mistake like that? Trouble is, most of those other fools have got a pack of yelping women-folk about 'em, and they're all on the quee-vee and as keen on the scent as any old——," and he launched into comparisons drawn from the kennels into which we need not enter. "They all promised not to blab, and they'll none of 'em tell any but their wives under promise of secrecy, and it'll be all over the country-side in a week."

"I know it, old man. I've just got to stand it," said Dale soberly.

"What's in your mind then?"

"I'll just wait quietly and see what comes. I can't expect things to be as they were before."

"And if things go badly? —— —— —— it all!"

"Then I'm thinking I'll go too."

"Where?"

"Oh, right away. America maybe, or Canada. It's a big country they say and just beginning to open up. I shan't starve anyway, wherever I go."

"But,—to leave us all and all this? —— —— —— it all, man! The place won't be like itself without you. —— Pasley Carew!"

"It wasn't his fault, you know——"

"It was his —— fault putting Blackbird at that —— Old Road after the run we'd had, wasn't it? I told him he was two stone too heavy for her. But he always was a fool."

"He was to blame there undoubtedly. But the rest I take to myself. If folks go to the other man I can't blame them. I shall go nowhere unless I'm sent for."

"You'll have a —— long holiday," growled Barclay.

"Well, I can do with one."

"I've half a mind to have a smash-up just to keep your hand in."

"If you do I'll—I'll turn the other man on to you."

"If he puts his nose in here he'll go out faster than he came, I wager you."

It was comforting to have so whole-hearted a supporter; but one patient, and a sham one at that, does not make a practice, and Dale very soon felt the effects of the course he had chosen.

He adhered resolutely to the decision he had come to to visit none of his patients unless he were sent for. It would be neither fair to them nor agreeable to himself. It might do more harm than good.

As to Mrs Carew,—he had visited her immediately after the inquest, and told her briefly that all was right and she need have no further fears. There was nothing wrong with her which a few days' rest and the relief of her mind would not set right. All the same he rather feared she might send for him, and he debated in his own mind whether, if she did so, he should go or send her messenger on to Dr Newman. It appeared to him hardly seemly that the man who had accepted the responsibility for the death of the husband should continue his attendance on his widow.

She did not of course as yet know the facts of the case as outsiders did. He was somewhat doubtful of the effect upon her when she came to a clear understanding of the matter. On the whole, he decided it would be better if possible not to see her again. What he had done for her had been done out of pity, but it was not the pity that sometimes leads to warmer feeling. All that had died a natural death when she married Carew.

He attended the funeral with the rest. It would only have made comment if he had not. And Jim Barclay and most of the others were at pains to manifest their continued friendliness and confidence.

Whether the full facts had got out he could not tell, but, rightly or wrongly, imagined so, and for the second time in his life he found himself ill at ease among his neighbours.

The day after the funeral, young Job and a bunch of lively dogs came down again with an urgent message from Mrs Carew requesting him to call.

"Is your mistress worse, Job?" he said.

"She be main bad, Doctor, 'cording to that gal Mollie, but what 'tis I dunnot know. Mebbe she's just down wi' it all. Have ye heard ony talk yet as t' who's going to tek on th' pack?"

"Mr Barclay will, I believe. He's a good man for it."

"Ay, he may do. Bit heavy, mebbe, an' he's got a temper 'bout as bad as Pasley's."

"Bit hot perhaps at times, but he's an excellent fellow at bottom."

"All that, and his cussin' ain't to compare wi' Pasley's, which is a good thing. I c'n stand a reasonable amount o' cussin' myself and no offence taken, but Pasley did go past th' mark at times. Th' very hosses kicked when he let out. An' Jim Barclay he is good to his hosses, an' he only cusses when he must or bust. Ay, he'll do, seein' you won't tek it on yourself, Doctor."

"It's not for me, Job. A doctor's time is not entirely his own, you know."

"Ah!" said Job, and picked a twig from the hedge, and stuck it in his mouth, and trudged on in solemn silence.

"We wus rather hopin', feyther an' me," he grunted after a time, "you'd mebbe have more time now fur th' pack an' would tek it on."

"Why that, Job?"

"Well, y' see, it'll mek a difference this. It's bound to mek a difference. Folks is such silly fools 'bout such things——"

"What things?"

"Why, that there strychnine. 'S if anyone couldn't mek a li'l mistake like that. Might have sense to know ye'd never let it happen again. Even th' leeghtnin', they say, never strikes twice i' same place. Though sure 'nuff it did hit th' old mill one side one day and t'other side next day. But even then 'twere opposite sides. But folks is fools."

"So you know all about it."

"Ay, sure! 'Twere that gal Mollie told me, an' it were Mrs Thelstane's gal Bet told her. None o' us think a bit the worse o' you, Doctor, you b'lieve me. But some folks is fools—most folks, if it comes to that.... An' as to Pasley—well, he were a terror now'n again. Th' Hall's like Heaven wi'out him."

They went on again in silence for a time. But there was that in young Job's mind which had to come out.

"If 'twere me, Doctor, askin' your pardon in advance for bein' so bold, what I'd do would be this. I'd just sit quiet till they done yelpin' and yappin' 'bout it all, then I'd marry th' missus,—we all knows you was sweet on her once,—and settle down comfortable at th' Hall and tek over th' pack an' mek us all happy."

"That's out of the question, Job."

"Is it now? ... Well, I'm sorry. Wus hopin' mebbe a word of advice from a man what's old enough to be your feyther, an's known you since day you was born, might be o' some use to ye. We'd like you fain well for Master, both o' th' Hall an' th' Hunt."

"You're a good old chap, Job, and so's your father, but you'll both be doing me a favour if you'll stop any talk of that kind."

"No manner o' use?"

"No use at all."

"Well, I'm main sorry. An' so's feyther, I can tell ye."

Mrs Carew was sitting in a large chintz-covered armchair before the fire in her bedroom, when he was taken up to her by Mollie, who favoured him with her own diagnosis as they mounted the stairs.

"She's that bad again. Can't sleep and off her food. Ain't had hardly anything all day or yes'day. Just sits 'fore th' fire and mopes from morn'n till night. 'Taint natural for sure, for him 'at's gone weren't one to cry for, that's cert'n.... No, she don't complain of any pain or anything. Just sits and mopes and cries on the quiet 's if her heart was broke. Sure she'd more cause to cry before he was took than what she has now."

When he entered the room he did not at first see her, so sunk down was she in the depths of the great ear-flapped chair.

She made no attempt to rise and greet him. When he stood beside her and quietly expressed his regret at finding her no better, she covered her face with her hands and sobbed convulsively.

She looked little more than a girl, slight and frail and forlorn, as she crouched there with hidden face, and he was truly sorry for her. It was impossible for him to keep the sympathy he felt entirely out of his voice.

"What can I do for you, Mrs Carew?" he asked quietly, and the forlorn figure shook again but made no response.

"You are doing yourself harm with all this," he said gently again. "And there is really no occasion for it, that I can see."

Her silent extremity of grief—her utter discomfiture was pitiful to look upon. It touched him profoundly, for he penetrated the meaning of it. She was overwhelmed with the knowledge of the sacrifice he had made for her—and with pity for herself.

All he could do was to wait quietly till the feeling, roused afresh by his presence, had spent itself.

"Oh, I did not know," she whispered at last, through the shielding hands. "I did not know you would do that.... You have ruined yourself.... You should have let them hang me."

And there and then, on the spur of the moment, he leaped up a height which he had not even sighted a second before.

He had, by the sacrifice of his prospects, saved her from the legal consequences of her act. That was irrevocably past and done with, and he must pay the price. But she was paying a double due—remorse for what she herself had done, bitter sorrow at the ruinous price he had paid for her safety.

He had saved her life. Why not save her the rest?—her peace of mind, all her possibilities of future happiness.

In any case it would make no difference to him. For her it might mean all the difference between darkness and light for the rest of her life. And she looked pitifully helpless and hopeless as she lay there sobbing convulsively in the big chair.

He saw the possibility in a flash and gripped it.

"Hang you? Why on earth should anyone want to hang you?" he asked, with all the natural surprise he could put into it.

"You know,"—in a scared whisper. "Because I got him the poison——"

"Come, come now! Let us have no more of that. I was hoping a good night's rest would have ridded you of that bad dream."

"Dream?" and she looked up at him wildly. "Ah, if I could only believe it was a dream!" and she shook her head forlornly.

"Why, of course it was a dream. You were over-wrought with it all, and your mind took the bit in its teeth and ran away with you. What you've got to do now is to try to forget all about it."

"Forget!"

"How I came to make such a mistake I cannot imagine, but when I got home I saw at once that there was an extra dose gone out of my strychnine bottle instead of out of the distilled water, and that explained it at once."

"You? ... You made the mistake?" she looked up at him again, eagerly, with warped face and knitted brows, and a wavering flutter of hope in her eyes.... "You are only saying it to comfort me."

"I'm trying to show you how foolish it is to allow yourself to be ridden by this strange notion you've got into your head."

"Strange notion? ... Did he not beg me to get him that stuff he used for the rats? And did I not get it for him? And he took it. And then——" she shivered at the remembrance of what followed when her husband took the draught.

"All in that horrible dream when your mind was running away with you——"

"And did you not come and tell me they would hang me unless I kept my mouth shut? And I lay all that dreadful night with the rope round my neck——"

"All in your dream. I'm sorry. It must have been terribly real to you."

"A dream?" and she stared wistfully into the fire, hex hands clasping and unclasping nervously. "If I could believe it!"

"You must believe what I tell you, and forget all about it and recover yourself."

"And you?" she said after a pause.

"I shall be all right. Don't trouble your head about me."

"If I did not do it," she said, after another long silent gazing into the fire, "then there would be no need for you to hate me——"

"No need whatever,—all part of that stupid dream."

"And ... sometime perhaps ... you would think better of me ... as you used to do. Oh,—Wulfrey! ..."

If it had all happened as he had almost persuaded her to believe, he might have fallen into his own pit.

For, under the stress of her emotions,—the wild hope of the possibility of relief from the horror that had been weighing her down,—the letting in of this thread of sunshine into the blackness of her despair,—the sudden joy of the thought that it was not she who needed Wulfrey's forgiveness, but he hers;—the shadows and the years fell from her, and she was more like the Elinor Baynard he had once been in love with than he had seen her since the day she married Pasley Carew.

"We must not think of any such things," he said quickly, but not unkindly. He was very sorry for her, but he was no longer in love with her. "At present all we've got to think about is getting you quite yourself again. I will send you up some medicine,—if you won't be afraid to take it——"

"Oh, Wulfrey! ..." with all the reproach she could put into it, and anxiously, "You will come again soon?"

"If you get on well perhaps. If you don't I shall turn you over to Dr Newman," and he left her.

"She ain't agoing to die, Doctor?" asked Mollie, as she waylaid him.

"No, Mollie. She's going to get better."

"Ah, I knew it'd do her good if you came to see her," said the astute handmaid with an approving look.

"Get her to eat and feed her up. She's been letting herself run down."

"Ah, she'll eat now maybe, if so be 's you've given her a bit of an appetite," said Mollie hopefully; and Dr Wulfrey went away home.

But even two patients hardly make a practice, and though from the stolid commoner folk calls still came for 'th' Doctor's' services, upon the better classes a sudden blessing of unusual health appeared to have fallen, or else——

Dr Newman bought a horse about this time, and, though he did not as yet cut much of a figure on horseback, it enabled him to get about as he had never had occasion to do since he settled in the village, and it seemed as though, in his case as in others, practice would in time make him passable.

Wulfrey watched the course of events quietly and with a certain equanimity. His mind was quite made up to go abroad, but he would not go till he was satisfied that that was the only course left to him.

Everybody he met was as friendly as ever, the men especially, but sickness was a rare thing with them at any time, and their women-folk seemed to be getting along very well, for the time being without medical assistance, so far at all events as Dr Wulfrey Dale was concerned.

Mrs Carew was better. Whatever she really believed as to the actual facts of her husband's death, she apparently accepted Dale's statement, to the great relief of her mind and consequent benefit to her health. She sent for the Doctor as often as she reasonably could, and sometimes without any better reason than her desire to see him. Until at last he told her she was perfectly well and he would come no more unless there were actual need.

"But there is actual need, Wulfrey. It does me good to see you. If you don't come I shall fall into a low state again."

"If you do I shall know it is simple perversity and I'll send Dr Newman to you."

"Mollie would never let him in."

Which was likely enough, for Mollie's mind was quite made up as to the only right and proper course for matters to take under all the present circumstances.

The March winds brought on a mild epidemic of influenza.

Dr Newman and his new horse were ostentatiously busy. Wulfrey saw that he had waited long enough, and that now it was time to go. No one could accuse him of running away. It was his practice that had found its legs and walked over to Dr Newman.

He made his arrangements at once and by no means downcastly. The hanging-on had been trying. It was new life to be up and doing, with a new world somewhere in front to be discovered and conquered.

He packed his trunks, gave Mr Truscott, the lawyer, instructions to dispose of his house and everything in it except certain specified articles and pictures, arranged with his bankers at Chester to collect and re-invest his dividends, drew out a couple of hundred pounds to go on with, told them he was going abroad and they might not hear from him for some time to come, and went round to say good-bye to Jim Barclay and Elinor Carew.

"Where are you going?" asked Barclay, when he heard he was off.

"Wherever the chase may lead," said Wulfrey, in better spirits than he had been for many a day. "I shall go first to the States and Canada and have a good look round. If any place lays hold of me I may settle down there."

"For good and all?"

"Possibly. Can't say till I see what it's like. I want you to take Graylock and Billyboy till I come back. You know all about them. There's no one else I'd care to leave 'em with and I don't care to sell them."

"They'll miss you, same as the rest of us."

"For a week or two, maybe. Dr Newman is getting into things nicely, but you might give him a lesson or two in riding, Jim."

"—— him, I'd liefer break his back!" was Barclay's terse comment. "You'll let me know where you get to, Wulf, and maybe I'll take a run over to see you, if you really find it in your heart to settle out there. I'll bring the horses with me if you like."

"I'll let you know. Fine sporting country, I believe,—bears, wolves, buffaloes, game of sorts."

"Well, good-bye and God bless you, my boy! Remember there'll always be one man in the old country that wants you. I'd sooner die than have that new man poking round me. I'll send for old Tom Tamplin, hanged if I don't."

Wulfrey rode on to the Hall.

"Going away, Wulf? Where to and for how long?" asked Elinor, anxious and troubled.

"That depends. I've not been up to the mark lately and a good long change will set me up."

"But you will come back?"

"I have really no plans made, except to get away for a time and see a bit of the outside world."

"I was hoping ... you would stop and ... sometime, perhaps..." and the small white hands clasped and unclasped nervously, as was her way when her mind was upset.

"The change I am sure will be good for me. And you are quite all right again. You are looking better than I've seen you for a long time past."

"I'm all right," she said drearily, "except that I have bad dreams now and again. I cannot be quite sure in my own mind——"

"Now, now!"—shaking a peremptory finger at her. "That is all past and done with. Bad dreams are forbidden, remember!"

"I can't help their coming. They come in spite of all my trying at times. And they are always the same. I see Pasley lying on the bed, raging and cursing, and ordering me to go and get him——"

"It's only a dream of a dream. I was hoping you had quite got the better of it. You must fight against it. Now I must run. Got a lot of things to do yet, and I'm off first thing in the morning. Good-bye, Elinor,—and all happiness to you!"

BOOK II

NO MAN'S LAND

XII

Wulfrey Dale, as he strolled about the Liverpool docks and basins, felt very much like a schoolboy who had run away from home in search of the wide free life of the Rover of the Seas.

He had, however, one vast advantage over the runaway, in that he had money in his pocket and could pick and choose, and there was no angry master or troubled parent on his track to haul him back to bondage.

He had no slightest regrets in the matter. Under all the circumstances of the case, he said to himself, he could have done nothing else. Elinor, left to herself, would undoubtedly have paid with her life, either on the gallows or in a mad-house, and that was unthinkable. The inexorable Law would have taken no account of the true inwardness of the case. He had saved her because he understood, and because the alternatives had been too dreadful to think of.

As to the cost to himself,—the long blue-green heave of the sea, out there beyond the point, made little of that, changed it indeed from one side of the account to the other, and presented it, not as a loss, but as very substantial gain.

Out beyond there lay the world, the vast unknown, the larger life; and the windy blue sky streaked with long-drawn wisps of feathery white cloud, and the tumbling green waves with their crisp white caps, and the screaming gulls in their glorious free flight, all tugged at his heart and called him to the quest.

And these cumbered quays, with their heaps of merchandise, and the jerking ropes and squeaking pulley-blocks that piled them higher and higher every moment,—the swaying masts up above and busy decks down below,—the strange foreign smells and flavour of it all,—the rough tarry-breeks hanging about and spitting jovially in the intervals of uncouth talk,—all these were but a foretaste of the great change, and he savoured them all with vastest enjoyment.

He inspected, from a distance, the great clippers that did the voyage to New York in twenty to twenty-five days, stately and disciplined, in the very look of them, as ships of the line almost.

There were ships loading and unloading for and from nearly every port in the world. It was like being at the centre of a mighty spider's web whose arms and filaments reached out to the extremest ends of the earth. He had never felt so free in his life before.

He was in no pressing hurry to settle on either his port or his ship, but in any case it would not be on one of those great packet-boats he would go. His fancy ran rather to something smaller, something more intimate in itself and less likely to be crowded with passengers whose acquaintance he had no desire to make.

He wandered further among the smaller craft, with a relish in the search that was essentially a part of the new life. He developed quite a discriminating taste in ships, though it was only by chatting with the old salts who lounged about the quay-walls that he learned to distinguish a ship from a barque and a brig from a schooner. His preferences were based purely on appearances. The sea-faring qualities of the various craft were beyond him.

But here and there, one and another would attract him by reason of its looks, and he would return again and again to compare them with still later discoveries, saying to himself, "Yes, that would do first-rate now, if she should happen to be going my way. We'll see presently."

He came, in time, upon a brig loading in one of these outer basins, and even to his untutored eye she was a picture,—so graceful her lines, so tapering her masts, so trim and taut the whole look of her.

"Where does she go to?" he asked of an old sailor-man, who was sitting on a cask, chewing his quid like an old cow and spitting meditatively at intervals.

"Bawst'n, 'Merica, 's where she's bound this v'y'ge, Mister, an' ef she did it in twenty days I shouldn' be a bit s'prised, not a bit, I shouldn'."

"Good-looking boat! What does she carry?"

"Miskellaneous cargo. Bit o' everything, as you might say."

"And when does she sail?"'

"Fust tide, I reck'n, ef so be's her crew a'n't been ganged. Finished loading not ha'f an hour ago she did."

"Does she take any passengers?"

"Couldn' say. Passenger boats is mostly down yonder."

"I know, but I like the look of this one better than the big ones."

"Well, you c'n ask aboard."

"Yes? How can I get on board?"

"Why, down that there ladder," and Wulfrey, following the direction of a ponderous roll of the old fellow's head and a squirt of tobacco-juice, came upon some iron rungs let into a straight up-and-down groove in the face of the quay-wall. By going down on his hands and knees, and making careful play with his feet, he managed at last to get on to this apology for a ladder and succeeded in climbing down it, over the side of the ship on to its deck.

The deck, dirty as it was with the work of loading, felt springy to his unaccustomed feet. It was the first ship's deck he had ever trodden. The very feel of it was exhilarating. It was like setting foot on the bridge that led to the new life.

As he looked about him,—at the neatly-coiled ropes, the rope-handled buckets, the blue water-casks lashed to the deck below one of the masts, the masts themselves, massive below but tapering up into the sky like fishing-rods, the mazy network of rigging, four little brass carronades and the ship's bell, all polished to the nines and shining like gold,—the worries and troubles of the last few months fell from him like a ragged garment. Elinor Carew, and Croome, and Jim Barclay, and even Graylock and Billyboy, the parting with whom had been as sore a wrench as any, all seemed very far away, things of the past, shadowy in presence of these stimulating realities of the new life.

He walked aft along the deck towards a door under the raised poop, and at the sound of his coming a man came out of the door and said, "Hello!" and stood and stared at him out of a pair of very deep-set, sombre black eyes.

He was a tall, well-built fellow of about Wulfrey's own age, black-haired, black-bearded and moustached, and of a somewhat saturnine countenance. His face and neck were the colour of dark mahogany with much sun and weather. He wore small gold rings in his ears, and Wulfrey set him down for a foreigner,—a Spaniard, he thought, or perhaps an Italian.

"I was told you were sailing tomorrow for Boston," said Wulfrey. "I came to ask if you take passengers."

The man's black brows lifted a trifle and he took stock of Wulfrey while he considered the question. Then he said, "Ay? well, we do and we don't," and Wulfrey rearranged his ideas as to his nationality and decided that he was either Scotch or North of Ireland, though he did not look either one or the Other.

"That perhaps means that you might."

"Et's for the auld man to say——"

"The Captain?"

"Ay, Cap'n Bain."

"Where could I see him?"

"He's up in the toon."

"If you'll tell me where to find him I'll go after him."

The other seemed to turn this over in his mind, and then said, "Ye'd best see him here. He'll mebbe no be long."

"Then I'll wait. What time do you expect to clear out?"

"We'll know when the old man comes."

"Perhaps you would let me see the rooms, while I'm waiting."

The dark man turned slowly and went down three steps into the small main cabin. His leisurely manner suggested no more than a willingness not to be disobliging.

It was a fair-sized room, with a grated skylight overhead, portholes at the sides, seats and lockers below them, and a table with wooden forms to sit on. At the far end were two more doors.

"Cap'n's bunk and mine," said his guide, with a roll of the head towards the left-hand door, and opened the other for Wulfrey to look in at the narrow passage off which opened two small sleeping-rooms.

"You are then——?" asked Wulfrey.

"Mate."

"You're Scotch, aren't you? I took you at first sight for a foreigner."

"I'm frae the Islands.... Some folks hold there's mixed blood in some of us since the times when the Spaniards were wrecked there. Mebbe! I d'n know."

"And Captain Bain? He's Scotch too, I judge, by his name."

"Ay, he's Scotch—Glesca."

"If he'll take me as passenger I'll be glad. This would suit me uncommonly well."

"Ay, well. He'll say when he comes," and whenever his black eyes rested on Wulfrey they seemed to be questioning what it could be that made him wish to travel on a trading-brig rather than on a passenger-liner.

However, he asked no questions but pulled out a black clay pipe, and Wulfrey pulled out his own and anticipated the other's search for tobacco by handing him his pouch. They had sat silently smoking for but a few minutes when a heavy foot was heard on the deck outside, and there came a gruff call for "Macro!"

"Ay, ay, sir!" and the doorway darkened with the short burly figure of a man whose words preceded him, "Tom Crimp'll have 'em all here by ten o'clock an' we'll—— Wha the deevil's this?"

"Wants to go passenger to Boston," explained the mate, and left Wulfrey to his own negotiations.

"If you're open to take a passenger, Captain Bain, I've fallen in love with the looks of your ship."

"What for d'ye no want to go in a passenger-ship? We're no a passenger-ship," and the Captain eyed him suspiciously.

"Just that I dislike travelling with a crowd, I've been looking round for some days and your ship pleases me better than any I've seen."

"Where are you from, and what's your name and rating!"

"I'm from Cheshire. Name, Wulfrey Dale. Rating, Doctor."

"An' what for are ye wanting to go to Boston!"

"I'm going out to look round. I may settle out there if I find any place I like."

"Are ye in trouble? Poisoned ony one? Resurrectionist, mebbe?"

"Neither one nor the other. I've no work here. I'm going to look for some over there."

"Can ye pay?"

"Of course. I'm not asking you to take me out of charity."

"That's a guid thing."

"How much shall we say? And when do you sail?"

"Et'll be twenty guineas, ped in advance, an' ef ye want ony victuals beyant what the ship provides, which is or'nary ship's fare same as me and the mate eats, ye'll provide 'em yourself."

"Understood! And you sail——"

"To-night's flood, ef the men get aboard all safe. They're promised me for ten o'clock."

"I'll pay you now and go up for my things."

"An' whaur may they be?"

"At Cotton's, in Castle Street."

"Aweel! Juist keep a quiet tongue in your heid, Doctor, as to the ship ye're sailing on. The 'Grassadoo' doesna tak passengers, ye ken, an' I dinna want it talked aboot."

"I understand. I've only got a box and a bag, but I'll have to get a man to carry them."

"Ay—weel!" and after a moment's consideration, "You wait at Cotton's an' we'll send Jock Steele, the carpenter, up for them at eight o'clock. Ye can coach or truck 'em as far as he says and carry 'em between you the rest."

So Wulfrey paid down his twenty guineas, and Captain Bain stowed them away in his trouser pocket, and buttoned it up carefully, with a dry, "Donal' Bain's word's his only recipee. You be here before ten o'clock and the 'Grassadoo' 'll be waiting for you."

"That's all right, Captain," said Wulfrey. "And I'm much obliged to you for stretching a point and taking me."

"It's me that's doing it, ye understand, not the owners. That's why."

XIII

The 'Grace-à-Dieu' justified Wulfrey's inexperienced choice. She was an excellent sea-boat, fast, and as dry as could be expected, seeing that she was chock full to the hatches, as Jock Steele informed him, while they carried down his baggage.

But after his first four hours on board his personal interest in her character and performance lapsed for three full days. He had stood leaning over the side watching the lights of Liverpool as they dropped away astern, and then those of the Cheshire and North Welsh coasts, and felt that now indeed he had cut loose from the past and was in for a great adventure.

It gave, him a curious, mixed feeling of depression and elation. He felt at once homeless and endowed with the freedom of the universe. He had burned his boats, he said confidently to himself, and was going forth to begin a new life, to conquer a new world. And he set his teeth and hung on to the heaving bulwark with grim determination.

But the sense of elation and width of outlook dwindled with the sinking lights. The feeling of homelessness and helplessness grew steadily upon him. He had taken the precaution of stowing away a good meal before he set foot on board, and he lived on it for three days.

He had never been bodily sick in his life before, but sick as he now was he was not too far gone to note the wretched peculiarity of his sensations, and to muse upon them and the ridiculousness of the provision he had made, at the Captain's suggestion, to supplement the usual cabin fare.

He could not imagine himself ever eating again, as he lay there in his heaving bunk, with nothing to distract his mind from the unhappy vacuums above and below but the heavy tread of feet overhead at times, and the ceaseless rush and thrash of the waves a few inches from his ear, and the grinning face of the cabin-boy who came in at intervals to ask if he would like anything yet.

But by degrees his head ceased to swim if he lifted it an inch off the pillow. By further degrees he found himself crouching up and clinging like a cat while he gazed unsteadily out of the tiny round porthole at the tumbling green and white water outside. Still further determination got him somehow into his clothes, and he dared to feel hungry and empty without nausea. Then he crawled out to the deck, feeling like a soiled rag. But the brisk south-west wind cleaned and braced him, and presently he nibbled a biscuit and found himself as hungry as a starving dog.

After that he very soon found his sea-legs, and by the fourth day he was a new man, eating ravenously to make up for lost time, and keenly interested in all about him.

So far they had had favourable weather and made good way. But Captain Bain was a fervent believer in the inevitability of equinoctials, and prophesied gales ahead, and the worse for being overdue.

Wulfrey learned, from one and another, chatting at meals with the Captain or Sheumaish Macro, one or other of whom was generally on deck, or with Jock Steele the carpenter, who also acted as boatswain, that the 'Grace-à-Dieu' was French-built which, according to Steele, accounted for the fineness of her lines.

"We build stouter but we cannot touch them for cut. She's as pretty a little ship as ever I set eyes on and floats like a gull," was the character Steele gave her. And he should know, as he'd made four voyages in her since their owners in Glasgow bought her out of the Prize Court, and she'd never given them any undue trouble even in the very worst of weather.

The crew, again according to Steele, were a very mixed lot, a few good seamen, the rest just lubbers out of the crimp house.

With Captain Bain and Sheumaish Macro, the mate, he got on well enough, but found both by nature very self-contained and manifesting no inclination for more than the necessary civilities of the situation.

"And why should they?" he said to himself. "I'm an outsider and they know nothing more about me than I've told them myself. Another fifteen or twenty days and we part and are not likely ever to meet again."

He made one discovery about them, however, which disquieted him somewhat. They were both heavy drinkers, but they usually so arranged matters, by taking their full bouts at different times, as not to bring the ship into serious peril.

Wulfrey's eyes were opened to it by the fact of his not being able to sleep one night. After tossing and tumbling in his bunk for a couple of hours, and finding sleep as far off as ever, he dressed again sufficiently to go on deck for a blow. As he passed through the cabin he found Captain Bain there with his head sunk on his arms on the table, and, fearing he might be ill, he went up to him. But he needed no medical skill to tell him what was the matter. The old man was as drunk as a lord and breathing like an apoplectic hog. So he eased his neck gear and left him to sleep it off.

Macro was on deck in charge of the ship. Wulfrey simply told him he had been unable to sleep, but made no mention of the Captain's condition. And the mate said,

"Ay, we're just getting into thick of Gulf Stream and it tells on one."

Another night he found Steele in charge, and on the growl at the length of his watch, and gathered from him that both Captain and mate had on this occasion been indulging in a bit drink and were snoring in their bunks.

He could only hope that Captain Bain's prognosticated equinoctials, which were now considerably overdue, would not come upon them when both their chiefs were incapacitated. And his only consolation was the thought that this was not an exceptional occurrence but probably their usual habit when well afloat, and that so far no disaster had befallen them.

So, day after day, they sped along west-south-west, making good way and sighting none but an occasional distant sail. Then they ran into mists and clammy weather, and sometimes had a wind and drove along with the swirling fog or across it, and sometimes lay rocking idly and making no way at all.

Wulfrey gathered, from occasional words they let fall between themselves, and from their answers to his own questions, that this was all usual and to be expected. They were getting towards Newfoundland where the Northern currents met the Southern, hence the fog, and it was too early for icebergs, so there was no danger in pressing on whenever the wind permitted.

Their seventeenth day out was the dullest they had had, heavy and windless, with a shrouded sky and a close gray horizon and, to Wulfrey's thinking, a sense of something impending. It was as though Nature had gone into the sulks and was brooding gloomily over some grievance.

Captain Bain stripped the ship of her canvas, and sent down the topmasts and yards, and made all snug for anything that might turn up. All day and all night they lay wallowing in vast discomfort, and Wulfrey lost all relish for his food again.

"What do you make of it, Bo's'un?" he asked, as he clawed his way up to Steele on the after deck, where he was temporarily in charge again.

"Someth'n's comin', sir," said Steele portentously, "but what it is beats me, unless it's one o' them e-quy-noctials the skipper's bin looking for."

In the night the fog closed down on them as thick as cotton wool; and, without a breath of wind, the long seas came rolling in upon them out of the thick white bank on one side and out into the thick white bank on the other, till their scuppers dipped deep and worked backwards, shooting up long hissing white jets over the deck, and making everything wet and uncomfortable. Every single joint and timber in the ship seemed to creak and groan as if in pain, and Wulfrey, as he listened in the dark to the strident jerkings and grindings and general complainings of the gear, and pictured the wild sweeps and swoops of the masts away up in the fog there, wondered how long it could all stand the strain, and how soon it would come clattering down on top of them. Once, when a bigger roll than usual flung him against the mainmast and he clung to it for a moment's safety, the rending groans that came up through it from the depths below sent a creepy chill down his spine. It sounded so terribly as though the very heart of the ship were coming up by the roots.

Sleep was out of the question. His cabin was unbearable. Its dolorous creakings seemed to threaten collapse and burial at any moment. If they had to go down he would sooner be drowned in the open than like a rat in its hole. And so he had crawled up on deck to see what was towards.

The only comfort he found—and that of a very mixed character—was in the sight of Captain Bain and the mate, sitting one on each side of the cabin table with their legs curled knowingly round its stout wooden supports, which were bolted to the floor, and which they used alternately as fender and anchor to the rolling of the ship.

They had made all possible provision against contingencies. They could do no more, and it was no good worrying, so now they sat smoking philosophically and drinking now and again from a bottle of rum which hung by the neck between them from a string attached to the beam above their heads.

Wulfrey stood the discomforts of the deck till he was chilled to the marrow, then he tumbled into the cabin, and annexed a third leg of the table and sat with the philosophers and waited events.

"It's hard on the ship, Captain," he said, by way of being companionable. But the Captain only grunted and deftly tipped some rum into his tin pannikin as the bottle swung towards him on its way towards the roof. And the mate looked at him wearily as much as to say, "Man! don't bother us with your babytalk," and it seemed to him that they had both got a fairly full cargo aboard.

However, he decided it was not for him to judge or condemn. They knew their own business better than he did. There was no wind, no way on the ship, and all they could do was to lie and wallow and wait for better times. And the fact that they took it so calmly reassured him somewhat.

The cabin was so full of fog and tobacco-smoke that the light from the swinging oil-lamp could barely penetrate beyond the table. It made a dull ghastly smudge of yellow light through which the bottle swung to and fro like an uncouth pendulum, and he sat and watched it. Now it was up above his head between him and the mate; now it was sweeping gracefully over the table; now it was up above the Captain, who reached out and tipped some more rum into his pannikin.

He watched it till it began to exert a mesmeric influence on, him and his head began to feel light and swimmy. He knew something about Mesmer and his experiments from his reading at home. He experienced a detached interest in his own condition and wondered vaguely if the bottle would succeed in putting him to sleep. He tried to keep his eyes on it, but they kept wandering off to the Captain, on whom it had already done its business, though in a different way.

He was dead tired. It was, he reckoned, quite six-and-thirty hours since he had had any sleep. What time of night or morning it was he had no idea. This awful rolling and groaning and creaking seemed to have been going on for an incalculable time.

What with the heavy unwholesomeness of the atmosphere, and the monotonous swing of the bottle, and the lethargic impassivity of his companions, he fell at last into a condition of dull stupidity, which might have ended in sleep but for the necessity of alternately hanging on to and fending off the table, as the roll of the ship flung him away from it or at it. And how long this went on he never knew.

He was jerked back to life by a sudden clatter of feet overhead and a shout. Then he was flung bodily on to the table, and found himself lying over it and looking down at Captain Bain, who had tumbled backwards in a heap into a corner. The rum-bottle banged against the roof and rained its fragments down on him. The lamp leaned up at a preposterous angle and stopped there.

"We're done," thought Wulfrey dazedly, and became aware of fearsome sounds outside,—a wild howling shriek as of all the fiends out of the pit,—thunderous blows as of mighty hammers under which the little ship reeled and staggered,—then grisly crackings and rendings and crashes on deck, mingled with the feeble shouts of men.

Then, shuddering and trembling, the ship slowly righted herself and Wulfrey breathed again. Outside, the howling shriek was as loud as ever, the banging and buffeting worse than before.

Macro unhooked his long legs from the table and made for the door. The Captain gathered himself up dazedly and rolled after him, and Wulfrey followed as best he could.

But he could see very little. The fog was gone. The fierce rush of the gale drove the breath back into his throat and came near to choking him. Huge green seas topped with snarling white came leaping up over the side of the ship near him. A man with an axe was chopping furiously at the shrouds of the fallen main-mast amid a wild tangle of ropes and spars. As they parted, the ship swung free and went labouring off before the gale under somewhat easier conditions, and Wulfrey hung tight in the cabin doorway and breathed still more hopefully. He had thought the end was come, but they were still afloat, though sadly shorn and battered. What their chances of ultimate safety might be was beyond him, but while there was life there was hope.

XIV

For three days life to Wulfrey was a grim experience made up of damp discomfort, lack of food and rest, and growing hopelessness.

Both their masts had gone like carrots, leaving only their ragged stumps sticking up out of the deck. "An' if they hadn't we'd bin gone ourselves," growled the carpenter to him one day. Where they fell the sides of the ship were smashed and torn, and the hungry waves came yapping up through the gaps, most horribly close and threatening.

Three men had been washed overboard in that first fierce onrush. The rest crouched miserably in the forecastle, and no man on board could remember what it felt like to be dry and warm and full.

Meals there were none. When any man's hunger forced him to eat, he wolfed sodden biscuit and a chunk of raw pork, and washed it down with rum.

So ghastly did the discomfort become, as the wretched days succeeded the still more miserable nights, that at last Wulfrey, for one, was prepared to welcome even the end as a change for the better.

Observations were out of the question. In these four days they never once saw sun or moon or star, nothing but a close black sky, gray with flying spume. The great seas came roaring out of it behind them and rushed roaring into it in front of them, and where they were getting to, beyond the fact that they were driving continuously more or less west-by-north, no man knew.

Captain Bain and the mate and the carpenter had done all that could be done since the catastrophe, but that was very little. An attempt was made to rig a jury mast on the stump of the foremast, but the gale ripped it away with a jeering howl and would have none of it. With some planking torn from the inside of the ship they barricaded the seas out of the forecastle as well as they could. It was the carpenter's idea to fix these planks upright, so that their ends stood up somewhat above the top of the forecastle, and so great was the grip of the gale that that slight projection sufficed to keep their head straight before it and afforded them slight steerage way.

So they staggered along, dismantled and discomfited, and waited for the gale to blow itself out or them to perdition, and were worn so low at last that they did not much care which, so only an end to their misery.

And the end came as unexpectedly as the beginning. From sheer weariness they slept at times, in chill discomfort and dankest wretchedness, just where they sat or lay. And Wulfrey was lying so, in a stupor of misery, caring neither for life nor death, when the final catastrophe came.

Without any warning the ship struck something with a horrible shock that flung everything inside it ajee. Then she heeled over on her starboard side, baring her breast to the enemy.

The great green waves leaped at her like wolves on a foundered deer. They had been chasing her for three days past and now they had got her. She was down and they proceeded to worry her to pieces. No ship ever built could stand against their fury. The 'Grace-à-Dieu' melted into fragments as though she had been built of cardboard.

Wulfrey, jerked violently out of the corner where he had been lying, rolled down towards the door of the cabin as the ship heeled over. As he clawed himself up to look out, a green mountain of water caught him up and carried him high over the port bulwarks which towered like a house above him, and swept him along on its broken crest.

He could swim, but no swimmer could hope to save himself by swimming in such a sea, and he was weak and worn with the miseries of the last three days.

He had no hope of deliverance, but yet struck out mechanically to keep his head above water, and his thrashing arm struck wood. He gripped it with the grip of a drowning man and clung for dear life.

It was a large square structure, planking braced with cross-pieces, almost a raft. He hung to the edge while the water ran out of his mouth and wits, and then, inch by inch, hauled himself cautiously further aboard, and, lying flat, looked anxiously about for signs of his shipmates, but with little hope.

He could see but a yard or two on either side, and then only the threatening welter of the monstrous green seas, terrifyingly close and swelling with menace.

Nothing? ... Stay!—a white gleam under the green, like a scrap of paper in a whirlpool, and a desperate face emerged a yard or so away and a wildly-seeking hand.

The anguished eyes besought him, and, not knowing what else to do, he gripped two of the cross-pieces of his raft and launched his legs out towards the drowning man. They were seized as in a vice, and presently, inch by inch, the gripping hands crept up his body till the other could lay hold of the raft for himself. And Wulfrey, turning, saw that it was the mate, Sheumaish Macro, whose life he had saved.

They drew themselves cautiously up into such further safety as the frail ark offered and lay there spent. And Wulfrey, for one, wondered if the quicker end had not been the greater gain.

Sleeping and eating anyhow and at any time, they had lost all count of time this last day or two. It was, however, daylight of a kind, but so gray and murky and mixed with flying spume that they could see but little.

Neither man had spoken since they crawled up on to the raft. Death was so close that speech seemed futile. They both lay flat on their stomachs, gripping tight, and peering hopelessly through nearly closed eyes, expectant of nothing, doubting the wisdom of their choice of the longer death.

"God!" cried Macro of a sudden, as they swung up the back of a wave. "Where in —— ha' we got to?"

And Wulfrey got a glimpse of most amazing surroundings.

Right ahead of them the sea was all abristle with what, to his quick amazed glance, looked like the bones and ribs of multitudinous ships, the ruins of a veritable Armada.

Now it was all hidden, as they sank into a weltering green valley with tumbling green walls all about them. Then the solid green bottom of their valley was ripped into furious white foam, and stark black baulks of timber came lunging up through it, all crusted with barnacles, festooned with hanging weeds, and laced with streaming white. They looked like grisly arms of deep-sea monsters reaching up out of the depths to lay hold of them. They seemed intent on impaling the frail raft. They seemed to change places, to dart hither and thither as though to head it off, to lie in wait for it, to spring up in its course. It was frightful and unnerving. Wulfrey shut his eyes tight and set his teeth, and waited for the inevitable crash and the end.

A great wave lifted them high above the venomous black timbers and, swinging on its course, dropped them as deftly as a crane could have done it, into the inside of a mighty cage.

Wave after wave did its best to lift them out and speed them on. Their raft rose and fell and banged rudely against the ribs of their prison. Up and down they swung, and round and round, bumping and grinding till they feared the raft would go to pieces. But the tide had passed its highest and the storm was blowing itself out, and they had come to the end of the voyage.

"We're in hell," gasped the mate, as he clung to the jerking cross-pieces to keep himself from being flung off, and to Wulfrey's storm-broken senses it seemed that he was right.

XVI

All that night they swung and bumped inside their cage, with somewhat less of bodily discomfort as the wind fell and the sea went down, but with only such small relief to their minds as postponement of immediate death might offer.

Wulfrey lay prone on the raft, grimping to it mechanically, utterly worn out with all he had gone through these last four days. He sank into a stupor again and lay heedless of everything.

The tide fell to its lowest and was rising again when dawn came, and though the huge green waves still rolled through their cage, and swung them to and fro, and sent them rasping against its massive bars, they were as nothing compared with the waves of yesterday.

It was the sound of Macro cracking shell-fish and eating them that roused Wulfrey. He raised his heavy head and looked round. The mate hacked off a bunch of huge blue-black mussels from the post they were grinding against at the moment, opened several of them and put them under his nose. Without a word he began eating and felt the better for them.

Presently he sat up and looked about him in amazement, and rubbed the salt out of his smarting eyes and looked again.

"Where in heaven's name are we?" he gasped.

And well he might, for stranger sight no man ever set eyes on.

"Last night I thocht we were in hell," said Macro grimly. "An' seems to me we're not far from it. We're in the belly of a dead ship an' there's nought but dead ships round us."

Their immediate harbourage, into which the friendly wave had dropped them, was composed of huge baulks of timber like those that had tried to end them the night before, sea-sodden and crusted thick with shell-fish, and as Wulfrey's eyes wandered along them he saw that the mate was right. They were undoubtedly the mighty weather-worn ribs of some great ship, canting up naked and forlorn out of the depths and reaching far above their heads. There in front was the great curving stem-piece, and yon stiff straight piece behind was the stern-post.

But when his eyes travelled out beyond these things his jaw dropped with sheer amazement.

Everywhere about them, wherever he looked, and as far as his sight could reach, lay dead ships and parts of ships. Some, like their own, entire gaunt skeletons, but more still in grisly fragments. Close alongside them a great once-white, now weather-gray and ghostly figurehead representing an angel gazed forlornly at them out of sightless eyes. From the position of its broken arms and the round fragment of wood still in its mouth, it had probably once blown a trumpet, but the storm-fiends would have no music but their own and had long since made an end of that.

Close beside it jutted up a piece of a huge mast, with part of the square top still on and ragged ropes trailing from it. Alongside it a bowsprit stuck straight up to heaven, defiant of fate, and more forlornly, a smaller ship's whole mast with yards and broken gear still hanging to it all tangled and askew. And beyond, whichever way he looked—always the same, dead ships and the limbs and fragments of them.

"It's a graveyard," he gasped.

"Juist that," said the mate dourly, "an' we're the only living things in it."

And presently, brooding upon it, he said, "There'll be sand down below an' they're bedded in it. When tide goes down again maybe we can get out."

"Where to?"

"Deil kens! ... But it cann't be worse than stopping here."

The slow tide lifted them higher and higher within their cage, hiding some of the baleful sights but giving them wider view over the whole grim field. They sat, and by way of change stood and lay, on their cramped platform. They knocked off shell-fish and ate them. So far, so water-sodden had they been of late, they had not suffered from thirst, but the dread of it was with them.

Then, slowly, the waters sank, and all the bristling bones of ships came up again.

"Can you swim?" asked Macro abruptly at last.

"I can. But I feel very weak. I can't go far I'm afraid."

"We can't stop on here."

"Where shall we go?"

"Over yonder. They're thickest there and they stand out more. Mebbe it's shallower that way."

"I'll do my best to follow you. If I can't, you go on."

"Nay. You gave me a hand last night. We'll stick together, and sooner we start the better.... Stay ... mebbe we can——" and he began pounding at the end planks of their raft with his foot to start them from the cross-pieces.

"'Twas the roof of the galley," he explained, "and none too well made. It got stove in last voyage and we rigged this one up ourselves. My wonder is it held together in the night."

He managed at last with much stamping to loosen four boards.

"One under each arm will help," he said, "An' we can paddle along an' not get tired."

He let himself down into the water, shipped a board under each arm, and struck out between two of the gaunt ribs, and Wulfrey followed him, somewhat doubtful as to what might come of it.

But the mate had taken his bearings and was following a reasoned course. Over yonder the wrecks lay thick. There might be one on which they could find shelter—even food. But that he hardly dared to hope for. As far as he had been able to judge, at that distance, they were all wrecks of long ago and mostly only bare ribs and stumps.

To Wulfrey, from water-level, the sea ahead seemed all abristle with shipping, as thick, he thought to himself, as the docks at Liverpool. But there all was life and bustling activity, and here was only death,—-dead ships and pieces of ships, and maybe dead men. The feeling of it was upon them both, and they splashed slowly along with as little noise as possible, as though they feared to rouse the sleepers who had once peopled all these gruesome ruins.

"See yon!" whispered Macro hoarsely, as he slowed up and waited for Wulfrey to come alongside, and following the jerk of his head Wulf saw the figure of a man grotesquely spread-eagled in a vast tangle of cordage that hung like a net from a broken mast.

"We had better see," said Wulfrey, and kicked along towards it, the mate following with visible reluctance.

It was the body of Jock Steele, the carpenter, livid and sodden, and many hours dead.

"I would we hadna seen him," growled Macro.

"He'll do us no harm. He was a decent man. I'm sorry he's gone. Is there any chance of any of the others being alive?"

"Deil a chance!"

"Still, we are——"

"You had the deil's own luck and it's only by you I'm here. Let's get on," and they splashed on again.

Past wreck after wreck, grim and gaunt and grisly, mostly of very ancient date, all swept bare to the bone by the fury of the seas, all with the water washing coldly through them. Now and again Macro growled terse comments,—

"A warship,—from the size of her. See those ribs, they'll last another hundred years. And yon's a Dutchman. They build stout too. Mostly British though, bound to be, hereabouts."

"Have you any idea where we are, then?"

"An idea—ay! I've heard tell o' this place, but I never met anyone had been here. They mostly never come back. They call it what you called it a while ago—'The Graveyard.'"

"And where is it?"

"Sable Island, if I'm right,—'bout one hundred miles off Nova Scotia."

"And is there any island?"

"Ay,—on the chart, but I never met any man had been there. We're looking for it. There's no depth here or all them ribs wouldn't be sticking up like that. They're stuck in the sand below. Must be over yonder where they lie so thick.... An' a fearsome place when we get there, with the spirits of all them dead men all about it—hundreds of 'em,—thousands, mebbe."

"Do ships ever call there?"

"Not if they can help it, I trow. It's Death brings 'em and he holds 'em tight.... Hearken to that now!"—and he stopped as though in doubt about going further.

And Wulfrey, listening intently, caught a faint thin sound of wailing far away in the distance. It rose and fell, shrill and piercing and very discomforting, though very far away.

"What is it?" he jerked.

"Spirits," breathed Macro, and his face was more scared and haggard even than before.

"Nonsense!" said Wulfrey, with an assumption of brusqueness for his own reassurance, for this dismal progress through the graveyard was telling sorely on him also, and the sounds that came wavering across the water were as like the shrieking of souls in torment as anything he could imagine. "There are no such things. Don't be a fool, man!"

"Man alive!—no spirits? The Islands are full o' them, an' this place fuller still. Yes, indeed!"

But it was obviously impossible to float about there for ever. The water was not nearly so cold as Wulfrey had expected, but the strain of the night and of the preceding days of semi-starvation had told on him, and he was feeling that he could not stand much more. He set off doggedly again towards the thickest agglomeration of dead shipping in front, and the mate followed him with a face full of foreboding.

They went in silence, paying no heed now to the things they passed on the way, though the apparently endless succession of dead ships and the parts of them was not without its effect on their already broken spirits.

"Gosh!" cried Macro of a sudden. "I touched ground or I'm a Dutchman! Ay—sand it is," and Wulfrey sinking his feet found firm bottom.

"Better keep the floats," suggested the mate. "Mebbe it's only the side of a bank we're on."

They waded on, breast-deep, and presently were out of their depth again. But the feel of something below them, and the certainty that it was still not very far away, were cheering. In a few minutes they were walking again, having evidently crossed a channel between two banks. And so, alternately walking and swimming, they drew at last towards the jungle of wreckage; and all the time, from somewhere beyond it, rose those piercing, wailing screams which Macro in his heart was certain came from the spirits of the dead.

Here the water was no more than up to their knees and shoaling still, and they came now upon more than the bones of ships,—chaotic masses of masts and spars and rigging piled high and wide in fantastic confusion, and in among them, tangled beyond even the power of the seas to chase them further, barrels and boxes and crates, some still whole, mostly broken; rotting bales, and pitiful and ridiculous fragments of their contents worked in among them as if by impish hands.

"Gosh, what wastry!" said Macro at the sight. "There's many a thousand pounds of goods piled here,—ay, hunderds of thousands, webbe."

"I'd give it all for a crust of bread," said Wulfrey hungrily.

"An' mebbe there's that too. If any o' them casks has flour in 'em we needn' starve. It cakes round the sides wi' the wet, but the core's all right."

Then, beyond the gigantic barrier of wastry, rose again that shrill screaming and shrieking, louder than ever, and Macro said "Gosh!" and looked like bolting back into the sea.

Wulfrey, determined to fathom it, hauled himself painfully up a tangle of ropes and clambered to the top of the pile and saw, about a mile away, a narrow yellow spit of sand, and all about it a dense cloud of sea-birds, myriads of them, circling, diving, swooping, quarrelling.

One moment the vast gray cloud of them drooped to the sea and seemed to settle there, the next it was whirling aloft like a writhing water-spout, every component drop of which was a venomous bundle of feathers shrieking and screaming its hardest in the bitter fight for food. And the harsh and raucous clamour of them, each intent on its own, had in it something fiendishly inhuman and chilling to the blood.

"It's only sea-birds, man," he cried to Macro. "Come up and see for yourself," and the mate, with new life at the word, hauled himself up alongside and stood staring.

"My Gosh! ... I never saw the like o' that before," he said at last. "There's millions of 'em. They're fighting ... over our shipmates mebbe.... We needn' starve if we can get at 'em," a sentiment which somehow, in all the circumstances of the case, did not greatly appeal to Wulfrey, hungry as he was.

"If they all set on a man he wouldn't have much chance," he said, with a shiver. "They could pick him clean before he knew where he was."

"It's only dead men they feed on," said Macro, quite himself again, since it was only birds they had to deal with and not disembodied spirits. "There's land. Let's get ashore," and they crawled precariously along over the wreckage, which sagged and dipped beneath them in places, and in places towered high and had to be scaled as best they could, and at times they had to wade or swim from pile to pile.

Amazing things they chanced upon in their course, but were too intent on reaching land to give them more than a passing glance or a shudder. More than once they came on bones of men, jammed in tight among the raffle, and slowly picked by the sea and the things that lived in it till they gleamed white and polished and clean. And their grinning teeth, set in the awful fixed smile of the fleshless, seemed to welcome them as future recruits to their company.

"Ah—ah! So you've come at last!" they seemed to say, as they laughed up at them out of holes and corners. "We've been waiting for you all these years and here you are at last."

There were, too, bales and boxes of what had been rich cloths and silks and satins and coarser stuffs, worried open by the fret of the sea and reduced to sodden slimy punk, and casks and barrels beyond the counting.

"Wastry! Wastry!" panted Macro. "We'll come back sometime, mebbe."

But, for the moment, their only craving was for dry land, to savour the solid safety of it, and get something to eat if they could, and a long long rest.

With desperate determination they dragged their sodden and weary bodies through the shallows beyond, and blind fury filled them with spasmodic vigour as they saw what the sea-birds were feeding on.

Over each poor body the carrion crew settled like flies, and tore and screamed and quarrelled. The two living men dashed at them with angry shouts, and the birds rose in a shrieking host amazed at their interference. But only for a moment. They came swooping down again in a gray-white cloud, with raucous cries and eyes like fiery beads, and beat at them with their wings, and menaced them with already reddened beaks. And they looked so murderously intentioned that the men were fain to bow their heads and run, with flailing arms to keep them off.

And so at last to dry land, and grateful they were for the feel of it, even though it seemed no more than a waste of sand but a few feet above tide-level. That last tussle with the birds had drained their strength completely. They dropped spent on the beach and lay panting.

Their flight had set their chilled blood coursing again, a merciful sun had come up above the clouds that lay along the horizon, and in spite of their hunger and the fact that their very bones felt soaked with salt water, they both fell asleep where they lay.

XVII

Wulfrey was wakened by a sharp stab in the neck, and when he sat up with a start a huge cormorant squawked affrightedly at the dead man coming to life again, and flapped away, gibbering curses and leaving a most atrocious stink behind him.

The mate was still sleeping soundly, and Wulfrey, for the time being more painfully cognisant of the gnawing emptiness within than of the miracle that permitted him any sensation whatever, sat gazing anxiously about and revolving the primary problem of food.

Out there among all that mass of wreckage it would be strange if they could not find something eatable,—cores of flour barrels, perhaps pickled pork, rum almost certainly; and the clammy void inside him craved these things most ardently. But he could not, as yet, imagine himself venturing out there again to get them. Later on perhaps, but for the present the land, such as it was, must provide, for him at all events. He felt that he simply had not the heart or the strength to make the attempt.

Let me say at once that the trying of these men, which came upon them presently, was not in the matter of ways and means. It was of the spirit, not of the flesh. But yet it is necessary to show you how they came through these lesser trials of the flesh only to meet the greater trials of the spirit later on. And even these smaller matters are not entirely devoid of interest.

Many birds came circling round expectantly, and swooped down towards the dark figures lying in the sand, and went off in shrill amazement when they were denied. And Macro at last stretched and yawned and sat up, staring dazedly at Wulfrey.

"Gosh, but I'm hungered," he said at last, as that paramount claim emphasised itself. "Anything to eat?"

"I'm wondering. Plenty of birds, and very bad they smell. I've seen nothing else."

The mate got up heavily and found himself sore and stiff. He stood looking thoughtfully about him.

"What about all that stuff?" and he jerked his head towards the graveyard wreckage.

"I couldn't go again yet."

"Nor me either.... Ground's higher over yonder," he said. "Let's go and see," and they set off slowly over the sand.

The level of high water was thickly strewn with seaweed and small wreckage. The slope of the shore was so long and gentle that no large object could come in unless it were first broken into fragments outside.

The mate kicked over the sea-weed and found some which he put into his mouth.

"Any good?" asked Wulfrey anxiously, hungrier than ever at sight of the other's working jaws.

"Better'n nothing," and he rooted up another piece and handed it over. Wulfrey found it tough and pungent of the sea and, after much chewing, capable of being swallowed, but the most he also could say for it was that it was just that much better than nothing.

They each picked up a piece of wood with which to root in the tangle, and, bending and picking and munching, made their way slowly towards the hummocks in front.

These were a low range of sandhills, some of them as much as thirty feet high, and on the seaward side, which they climbed, they were sparsely clothed with coarse slate-green wire-grass about a foot in height, which bristled up like porcupines' quills and helped to keep the loose soft sand together. They pulled some up to see if the roots looked edible, and found them spreading far and wide below ground in a matted tangle of white succulent-looking tendrils, which proved as tough and unsatisfying as the sea-weed, but had the advantage of a different flavour.

Grubbing along, they climbed heavily through the yielding sand to the top of the nearest hummock. Macro, arriving there first, jerked a gratified "Gosh!" and floundered down the other side whirling his stick, and Wulfrey was just in time to catch the amazing sight of the whole surface of the little valley beyond in violent motion.

He thought at first that something had gone wrong with his eyes, for everywhere he looked the sand seemed to be jumping and skipping and burying itself in itself. And then from the innumerable little flecks of white, bobbing spasmodically all over the place, he perceived that these were rabbits, and the mate was in among them, knocking them on the head as fast as his stick could whirl. By the time Wulfrey reached him he was sitting in the sand, skinning one with his knife, and half a dozen more lay round him.

"Better than roots and seaweed," he said, as he hacked the first in pieces and stuffed some into his mouth and handed some to Wulfrey. "There's millions of 'em. We won't starve," and he started skinning another.

Raw meat was a novelty, to Wulfrey at all events but baby-rabbit flesh is eatable, even raw, and it put new life into them both.

The little valley in which they sat was like an oasis in the sandy desert outside. For here, among the wire-grass grew innumerable small creeping-plants and that so sturdily though so modestly that, in spite of the vast horde of rabbits, the whole place was carpeted with green, and right in the centre, where the ground was lowest and the undergrowth thickest and darkest, was a considerable pool of rainwater, which they found brackish but drinkable.

"All we want now is shelter and fire, and we'll live like kings and fighting-cocks," said Macro, when he had time for anything but rabbit-flesh, and lay back comfortably distent.

"And where shall we find shelter and fire in this place?"

"Man! There's more'n we'll ever need in all our lives, over yonder. But it'll keep.... I'm not for going back there this day anyway. To-morrow, mebbe,——" he said drowsily, and presently they were both fast asleep again. And the rabbits came out at sunset and hopped about them, and sniffed them with quivering noses and disrelish, and the heavy dew fell on them, but they never woke. For Nature had now got all she needed for the reparation of the previous waste, and she was busily at work making good while they slept.

XVIII

Morning broke dull, and heavy. The air was mild but full of moisture, and they were chilled with their long sleep in the open.

"Gosh! but I'd like to feel dry again," said Macro, as they sat munching raw rabbit for breakfast. "D'you feel like going out yonder?"

"I feel three times the man I was yesterday. But should we not go on further first? There may be someone living on the island."

"Not a soul but us two, I warrant you."

"But since we're here there might be others."

"That's so. There might be, but not likely. It's just luck, deil's own luck, 'at those screeching deevils out yonder aren't picking us to pieces like the rest."

"Say Providence, and I'll agree with you," said Wulfrey, who saw no need to ascribe to the devil so obviously good a work as far as they were concerned.

"Ca' it what you like, not one man in a thousand comes alive through what we came through. And I'm not forgetting that but for you I'd no be here myself. We can take a bit look round, but I'm sore set on a covering of some kind and a fire, and some rum would be cheerful. It's in my bones that we'll find all we want out there, and more besides."

So, after breakfast, they set off, carrying a couple of rabbits for provision by the way.

Looking round from the top of the highest hummock, they saw the great twisting cloud of sea-birds hovering over the distant wreckage, and the shrill clamour of their screaming came faintly to them on the still air. They had cleaned up what the sea had stranded on the spit and had had to go further afield.

From this vantage point they could to some extent make out the lie of the island. It ran nearly west and east and the narrow sand-spit on which they had landed was the extreme western point. Where they stood, the land was about a quarter of a mile in width and it stretched away in front further than they could see, in vast stretches of sand with a line of hummocks all along the northern side. It seemed very narrow, just a long thin wedge of sand, with illimitable gray sea on each side, as far as their eyes could reach. Right ahead, and about a mile away, was a great sheet of water, whether lake or inlet they could not tell. The hummocks ran along its northern side, and a narrow strip of sand divided it from the sea on the south.

"We'd best keep to the ridges," said Macro. "Yon spit on the other side may only end in the sea," so they tramped on along the firm beach on the seaward slope of the line of hummocks, and every now and again climbed up to see what was on the other side. When they found themselves abreast of the sheet of water they went down and found it salt and very shallow. It stretched away in front as far as they could see, but Macro thought he could see more sand hummocks at the far end.

Every here and there, when they climbed the ridge to look over, they came on little basins like their own, comparatively green and populous with rabbits. But never a sign of human life or habitation, not a tree or a shrub, not an animal except the rabbits.

"A God-forsaken hole," was the mate's comment, as they stood, after a couple of hours' trudging, looking out over the interminable ridges in front, and the great unruffled sheet of water below, and the gray slow-heaving sea beyond on both sides, and the gray sky enclosing all.

"There's nought here and never has been. Let's go back and get to work."

"That lake, or inlet, or whatever it is, seems to narrow over there. Suppose we see where it goes to," suggested Wulfrey.

"Only back into sea, I reckon."

However, they tramped on along the beach, and next time they looked over the ridge the land below had broadened out. The water had shrunk to a mere channel which ran, they saw, not into the sea but into a still larger lake beyond, unless it in turn should prove to be a long arm of the sea running all through the middle of the island. They could follow the low sand-spit which divided it from the sea on the south side, and the long line of hummocks on the north, till they faded out of sight in the distance.

Right in front of them spread the largest valley they had yet come across, and the coast ridges ran down into the middle of it and ended in the highest hill they had seen, and between the hill and the lake lay a number of large ponds.

"We must get up there," said Wulfrey.

"No manner o' use," growled the mate, who found tramping through the sand very tiring, and was eager to get back and attack the wreckage for shelter and fire and food and rum.

"Stop you here then, Macro, and I'll go on. If there's anything to see I'll wave my arms. You might skin those rabbits too. I'm beginning to feel empty again."

He struck straight across the valley to the ponds, and was delighted to find them fresh and much better to the taste than their own little pool. Then he climbed the hill, which was not far short of a hundred feet in height. And then Macro, who had been watching him intermittently as he hacked at the rabbits, saw him wave his arms in so excited a fashion that he picked up the rabbits and ran, wondering what new thing he'd found now that set him dancing in that fashion.

And when at last he panted heavily up the yielding side of the hill and saw, he gasped "Gosh!" with all the breath he had left, and sat down open-mouthed and stared as if he could not believe his eyes.

Beyond the end of the valley, the great lake stretched away further than they could see, and in a deep bend on the north side of it lay two ships.

"Schooners, b' Gosh!" jerked Macro, as soon as he could speak; and eyed them intently. "How in name of sin did they get there?" and his eye travelled quickly along the sand-spit that shut out the sea, in search of the break in it through which the schooners must have entered. But no break was visible. Still it might well be that this great inland lake joined the outer sea somewhere over there, beyond their range of sight, and that this was a harbour of refuge, though he had certainly never heard of it before.

"We must find out about 'em," he said at last, and they set off at speed towards the ships to which his eyes seemed glued.

"Not a sign of a man aboard either of 'em," he jerked one time, as he lurched up out of a rabbit-hole. "Nor ashore either."

And to Wulfrey also there was something strange and uncanny in the look of them. The absence of any slightest sign of life anywhere about imparted to them something of a lifeless look also. And their masts were bare of sails, spars, or even cordage, just bare poles sticking up out of the hulls like blighted pine trees. The sea outside had a long slow heave in it, but the water of the lake was smooth as a pond, not a pulse in it, not a ripple on it, and the two little ships lay as motionless as toy boats on a looking-glass sea.

Macro was evidently much exercised in his mind. He never took his eyes off the ships. So intent was he on them that he stumbled in and out of rabbit holes without noticing them, and the "Gosh!" that jerked out of him now and again was provoked entirely by the puzzle of the ships.

So they came at last round the curve of the land and stood opposite the nearer of the two, which lay about a hundred yards out from the shore of bare sand, and neither on ship nor shore nor water had they discovered any sign of life.

"Schooner a-hoy!" bellowed the mate through his funnelled hands. And again. "Schooner a-hoy!"

But no sudden head bobbed up at the hail, and but that they were whole and afloat the ships looked as dead as those others out past the point.

"Gosh, but it's odd!" and he looked quickly both ways along the shore and over his shoulders, as though he feared some odd thing might start up suddenly and take him unawares. "What's it mean?"

"There's no one there. They're deserted."

"Deserted? Man alive! Who'd desert ships afloat like that? What in —— does it mean?" his native fears of the unnatural and inexplicable getting the better of him.

"We'd better go and see," said Wulfrey.

"Swim?"

"I suppose so. I don't expect we can wade."

The mate shook his head. He had evidently no liking for the job, keen as was his desire to get to the bottom of it.

"Let's feed first anyway," he said, and produced the rabbits, which he had held on to in spite of his surprise and many stumblings. So they sat in the sand and ate raw rabbit, with their eyes on the ships all the time.

"They're dead ships like all the rest," was the sum of Macro's conclusions. "But how they got there beats me flat."

"They're afloat anyway and they'll be better to sleep in than the sandhills."

"Ay—mebbe,—if so be's there's no dead men aboard—or ghosts."

"There's no ghosts anyway. If there are any dead men we'll bury them decently and occupy their bunks."

At which the mate gave a shiver of distaste and chewed on in silence.

"Isn't it possible there's an opening to the sea over yonder?" asked Wulfrey, with an eastward jerk of the head.

"Mebbe, but I don't think it. There's no seaweed here, and no move in the water, and no tide-mark. It's dead level. But what if there is?"

"Why, then they might have got in that way, and then some storm blocked the opening and they couldn't get out."

"Mebbe. We can find out by travelling along yon spit till we get to the end of it. I'd liefer do that than go aboard."

"We'll sleep better on board than on the sand."

"Man, ye don't know what ill things may be aboard yon ships! There's a wrong look about 'em," which was undeniable, but still not enough to commend the chill sand to Wulfrey as a resting-place when shelter and possibly bunks might be had on board.

"It seems to me," he said, as they finished their meal, "that it doesn't matter much how they got there. We can perhaps find that out later. There they are, and if they're habitable we want to make use of them. I'm going to swim out to this nearest one and find out what's the matter."

"If you go I go," grumbled the mate uncheerfully.

"It's evident there's no one aboard or anywhere about, and it's absurd to sit here looking at them," said Wulf, and began to peel off his clothes, which had got almost dry with walking. "No good getting them wet again," he explained. "I've been all of a chill for the last five days. I'll fasten them on to my head."

"We'll be coming back."

"We might decide to stop there all night. Better take what's left of the meat."

"Gosh!" with a perceptible shiver of distaste again.

However, he peeled also, and by careful contrivance with belt and braces they bound their bundles on to their heads and stepped into the water.

"Phew! It's cold,—colder than the sea," said Wulfrey through tight-set teeth, as they struck out.

"'Tis that," and the mate's teeth chittered visibly, between the chill of the water and distaste of the adventure.

"Temperature ought to be same ... if sea comes in," sputtered Wulfrey.

"'Tisn't, all same. It's cauld as death."

They ploughed along till they reached the nearer ship, and swam round it in search of entrance, and failing other means laid hold of the rusty anchor-chain, which peeled in ruddy flakes at their touch. By the time Wulf tumbled in over the bows he was streaked from head to foot with iron-mould, and presented so ghastly an appearance that Macro's jaw fell as he came up the side, and he looked half inclined to drop back into the water.

"Man! You look awful. I tuk you for a ghost," he gasped in a whisper.

"You're nearly as bad yourself, but I took the cream of it. Now let us see what's what."

The mate's experienced eye showed him at once that the condition of the ship was not due to storm or accident. She had been deliberately stripped of everything that could be turned to account elsewhere. She was bare as a board,—not a rope nor a spar was left. The hatches were closed and looked as though they had not been touched for years.

They came to the fore-hatch leading down to the fo'c's'le, and he hauled it up with some difficulty and looked suspiciously down into the darkness within.

"Below there!" he cried, in a repressed hollow voice. But only the echoes answered him.

They passed the main-hatch leading to the hold, and went along, past a grated skylight thick with green mould, to the covered gangway leading to the officers' quarters. The doors were closed and bolted with rusty bolts. There could not by any possibility be anyone below, not anyone alive, that is.

Macro wasted no breath here, when they had managed to undo the bolts, but he visibly hesitated. Wulf stepped down into the cabin, and he followed.

Just bare walls, nothing more. Table, stools, lamps, everything movable or unscrewable had been carried away. In the four small rooms adjacent there were just four empty bunks and not a thing besides.

"Gosh, but it's queer!" whispered Macro. "Mebbe they're all lying dead in the hold."

"We'll make sure," and they went up on deck again, and with some labour, for the wood had swelled and stuck, got up the main hatch and dropped down into the hold.

But that was bare like the rest. The ship was as empty as a drum.

"Not so much as a rat, b' Gosh!" said the mate, with recovered spirits, seeing no sign of dead men or ghosts.

"What do you make of it?" asked Wulf.

"She's been stripped bare, that's plain. But why, beats me."

"Anyway, there's no objection to our stopping here now, I suppose. Bare bunks will be drier than the sand over there."

"That's so.... And I'm thinking that if we can bring over some of the stuff from that big pile out yonder we can make ourselves mighty comfortable here."

"We can start on that tomorrow. We've done enough for one day."

"We'll make a raft, like old Robinson Crusoe, and bring the stuff right down to the spit yonder," said Macro, waxing quite cheerful at the prospect. "Then we'll make a smaller raft to bring it aboard here."

"We'd better walk along that spit tomorrow and see if there's any opening to the sea."

"We can do that, but I doubt there's not, else this water wouldn't be so cold, and there'd be some movement in it. It's all dead like everything else."

They spent the rest of the daylight poking into every corner of the ship, and in the dark fo'c's'le Macro made a find of surpassing worth.

He had rooted everywhere, with a natural enjoyment in the process, and come on nothing but bare boards. "But you never know," he said, and went on rooting. And in the blackest corner his foot struck something loose which slid away and eluded him. He went down on his hands and knees and groped till he found it, and then gave a triumphant shout which brought up Wulfrey in haste.

It was a small round metal box such as was used for carrying flint and steel and tinder, well-worn and battered, but tightly closed, and the mate's fingers trembled with anxiety as he opened it with his knife.

"Thanks be!" he breathed deeply, for there in the little battered box lay all the possibilities of fire,—warmth, cooked food, life—all complete.

And—"Thank God!" said Wulfrey also. "That's the best find yet."

"If it'll work it's worth its weight in Guinea gold. But it's old, old," and he poked the tinder doubtfully with his finger, "as old as the ship, and that's older than you or me, I'm thinking. It's dropped out of some old pocket and rolled out of sight. We do have the deil's own luck."

"Providence!" said Wulfrey. "Can't we make a fire and roast some rabbit? I'm sick of raw meat."

"Where'd we make it? Galley-stove's gone with all the rest, and galley too for that matter.... Wouldn't do to set the ship afire.... There's only one safe way. Soon as we've got a bit of a raft together we'll bring over sand enough to make a fire-bed in the hold. Then we can roast all the rabbits in the island."

"What about the cover of the big hatchway there? Wouldn't that carry one of us and sand enough."

"Might. And there's wood enough and to spare in the skin of her down below. But it'll be dark in an hour."

"Come on. Let's get it overboard. I'll go. Can you rip up a board for a paddle?"

The hatch-cover was slightly domed and had four-inch coamings all round, and when let upside down on to the water made a sufficiently effective raft for light freight. Macro dropped down into the hold and ripped up a board and jumped it into pieces, and Wulfrey lowered himself gingerly down on to his frail craft and set off for the shore, with roast rabbit in his face.

"Ye'll have to look smart or ye'll be in the dark," Macro called after him, as he leaned over the side watching his clumsy progression.

"Ay, ay! I'll shout if I get lost," and the mate went down to break up firewood and shred filmy shavings in default of sulphur sticks.

Wulfrey, wafting slowly ashore, lighted on a colony of rabbits intent on supper, and was able to capture a couple in their panic rush for their holes. Then he hastily loaded his float with all the sand it could safely carry and set off again for the ship in great content of mind.

The transfer of his cargo to the deck of the ship was a much more difficult and precarious job than getting it alongside. He tried throwing it up in handfuls, but that proved slow work and more than once came near to spilling him overboard. And finally, as the night was upon them, he took off his coat and sent up larger parcels in it; and so at last Macro cried enough, and having shown him how to wedge his float in between the rusty anchor-chain and the bows, so that the wind should not drift it away in the night, he helped him up over the side.

It was an anxious moment when the first sparks shredded down into the ancient tinder. But they caught and glowed, and with tenderest coaxing lighted the mate's carefully-prepared matches, and these the chips, and these the faggots, and the mighty cheer and joy of fire were theirs.

They slept that night in great comfort, replete with roasted meat, roofed from winds and dew, and grateful both, each in his own way, for the marvellous encouragement of this first day on the island.

Though their beds were but bare boards, they had no fault to find with them, but slept like tops. And Macro's black head was so full of the wonderful possibilities of that vast pile of wastry out beyond the point, in conjunction with this amazing find of the ships, that there was no room left in it for any thought of ghosts or evil spirits.

XIX

Over their last night's fire they had made provision of roast meat for breakfast, and after it they paddled precariously across to the other schooner, a couple of hundred yards away, and explored it thoroughly. But it was in exactly the same condition as their own, so they closed all the hatches again and then, after a short discussion, decided to leave the solution of the puzzle of the ships for the present and devote the day to the salvage of any necessaries they could discover among the wreckage.

They paddled across to the southern spit which divided the lake from the sea, and found it a bare hundred yards in width, and at its highest point not more than ten feet above high-water level. They walked briskly along the side of the narrow channel that joined the two lakes, on past the first one, and in a couple of hours reached the sandy point where they had landed two days before. Out above the piles of wreckage the gray cloud of sea-birds swung and whirled, and their shrill screamings rose and fell with the varied fortunes of their quest.

"Screeching deevils!" was the mate's comment on them, and presently, "It'll be a long pull back with a log of a raft. It must be six or seven miles, I reckon."

"Perhaps we'll strike a boat among the wreckage."

"Ah—p'r'aps. We do have the deil's own luck."

It was almost dead low water. The storm of the previous days seemed to have exhausted the elements for the time being. The sea was smooth, with no more movement than the long slow heave which curled, as it neared the shore, into great green and white combers of exquisite beauty, rushing up the beaches in a dapple of marbled foam, and back into the bosom of the next comer with a long-drawn sibilant hiss.

There was a soft south-west wind and even a cheering touch of the sun, and as their work was like to be of the wettest, and dry clothes were a luxury, they left them above tide-level and went out stripped to the fight, their only weapon the mate's sailor's-knife in the belt which he buckled round his waist. But, in view of the screeching deevils already in possession, they forethoughtfully armed themselves with the weightiest clubs they could pick out of the raffle of the beach. For in that countless predatory host, although its components were but birds, there was menace passing words. It made them feel bare and vulnerable, and Macro cursed them heartily as he went.

They reached the pile without any difficulty, and the mate's keen eye raked round for the likeliest stuff for a raft. It was no good acquiring cargo till they had a craft to carry it.

There was no lack of timber, however, and cordage was to be had for the cutting, and with these the skilled hands of the seaman soon constructed a raft large enough for their utmost probable requirements. Then he turned with gusto to the more satisfying joys of plunder, and developed new and startling sides to his character.

Wulf laughed, but found him surprising, as the cateran spirit of his forebears came uppermost with this tremendous opportunity.

He climbed up and down and in and out of the high-piled wreckage like a hungry tiger, bashed in boxes and cases with a huge club of mahogany which had once adorned the cabin-staircase of a ship, and raked over their contents with the avidious claws of a wrecker of the evil coasts. Now and again strange ejaculations broke from him. More than once, in the wild glee of pillage and unexpected booty, he shouted snatches of weird runes and chanties which Wulf supposed were Gaelic. At times he stood and shook his fist at the screaming birds that swooped about him, and cursed them volubly. And once, Wulfrey, on the raft below, knitted his brows and watched him with doubtful perplexity as, in the disappointment of his hopes respecting one great case which had resisted his efforts and finally yielded nothing of consequence, he attacked another with shouts of fury and a Berserk madness that scattered chips and splinters far and wide. An incautious cormorant swooped by him. With a stroke he sent it spinning, a bruised and broken bundle of feathers, and it fell with a dull flop into the sea.

The man seemed demented, drunk with a rage for plunder and the destruction of everything that stood between him and it. His great club whirled, and the blows flailed here and there without any apparent regard to direction. The lust of slaughter and demolishment burst from him in volcanic fire and fury. For the moment he had reverted to his elemental type.

To the cooler head below he looked dangerous. Wulfrey's amused amazement gave place to doubt and a touch of anxiety. He could only hope that his companion was not often subject to fits such as this.

But the Berserk madness was not wholly without method, and presently plunder of all kinds came raining down on the raft.

Heralded by a sharp "Below there!" came a roll of linen and one of woollen cloth, a bale of blankets, more rolls,—this time of silk and satin and velvet, all more or less damaged by the sea, though they were the pick and cream of his salvaging, and all no doubt dryable.

"Good heavens! What does he want with these?" thought Wulfrey, but piled them up obediently.

Then, following the unmistakable course of the marauder up above, and clawing the raft along to keep in touch with him, down came on his head a bulging little sack, which felt like beans but proved to be coffee, and presently, after a pause, necessitated by packing arrangements up above, a series of soft bundles made up in crimson silk and tied with slimy rope.

Then, after another pause punctuated by shouts and crashes, down came a rattling heap of rusty cooking utensils all slung together with more slimy rope, a rusty axe, four broken oars. Till at last the raft became so crowded that there was barely standing room left on it.

"Steady, above there! We're full up. I can't take another pound, and I doubt if we can get this all home safely."

"Just this, man!" and Macro appeared up above with a small keg in his arms, and let himself and it carefully down on to the raft, with every appearance of a return to sanity.

"Man!" he said, with the afterglow of it all still in his face. "That was fine. We'll come again."

"We've got to get all these things home first."

"Easy that. This wind'll carry us fine," and he set to work with a couple of the broken oars and a blanket, and contrived a sail of sorts. Then, taking another oar and thrusting one into Wulfrey's hands, he propelled the clumsy raft along the side of the wreckage till it got clear, and the wind caught their sail and wafted them slowly towards the island.

"A grand grand place, yon!" he broke out again.

"There's stuff enough there to load a hundred ships.... Gosh, I've forgotten the pork!" and he uprooted the sail and began paddling back to the wreckage. "I stove in the head of a barrel and was smelling at it when I spied the wee keg."

"Was it eatable?"

"I've eaten worse."

"Couldn't we get it next trip?"

"Man, my stomach's been crying for it ever since I set eyes on it. 'Sides, those deevils of birds will finish it in no time. See them! They're at it now. Och, ye greedy deevils!"

He clambered up the pile with his oar and laid about him lustily, The birds rose up from the meat like a dense cloud of flies, and screamed and raved at him, and swooped at him with vicious eyes and beaks and claws, so that in a moment he became the centre of a writhing, fluttering, shrieking mass which threatened to annihilate him completely.

He flailed blindly at them with his oar, smashing them by dozens. But they were too many for him. He shouted for help, and when Wulfrey scrambled up he found him in very sore case, fighting blindly and streaming with blood.

"Come away, man!" shouted Wulfrey, and thrashed away at the nightmare of whirling birds. "Come away before they end us!" and in a moment he found himself the centre of a similar shrieking mass, dazed and blinded with their numbers and their fury. The terrified glimpse he got of their cold glittering eyes and gnashing beaks, and the compressed venom of their overwhelming assault, were too much for him. It was like fighting single-handed against all the fiends out of the pit.

He hurled his oar overboard, put up his arms to protect his eyes, and staggered to the edge of the pile, acutely conscious of jags and pecks and rips innumerable on his bare arms and shoulders. As he flung himself down into the water and dived under, a plunge alongside told him that Macro had done the same. A raucous swarm of birds followed them, but on their disappearance fluttered off to more visible chances above.

"Man! but that was awful!" gasped the mate hoarsely. "They nigh ate me alive."

"Let's get aboard or they'll be at us again. There's my oar," and he swam quietly to it and they climbed back on to the raft.

"An' never ae piece o' pork," lamented Macro. "The poaching deevils!"

"Be thankful you're alive, man! It was a close touch that."

"'Twas that. I'm bit all over. I'd like to end 'em all with one crack."

Fortunately the birds were too busy quarrelling up above to give them more than cursory attention. A few came whirling and swooping after them with greedy eyes and ravening beaks. But it was only in their multitudes that they were formidable and they soon gave up a chase that offered no easy prey.

The men, shaken and trembling, clawed along the pile till they caught the wind again, when Macro readjusted his masts and sail, and they drifted slowly back towards the island.

"Ye deevils! Ye scratching, scrawming, skelloching deevils!" breathed Macro deeply, every now and again, and shook his fist at the twisting column of birds behind. "I wish ye had ae neck and me ma hond on it."

Their weighty progress was of the slowest. When they drew alongside the yellow spit Macro plunged overboard and waded ashore for their clothes, and they drifted on along the low southern beach. But it was well after mid-day before they came abreast of the stark little ships which stood to them for home.

Then they made busy traffic transporting their salvage to the shore and carrying it across the bank to the edge of the lake. And when that was all done Macro unlashed the raft and they carried it over piece by piece, and roughly put it together there and loaded up again.

"It'll all come in for firing," said the mate. "We can't go on burning our own inside all the time."

It was no easy work propelling their rough craft with broken oars. Moreover Macro insisted on taking the hatch-cover in tow. But the spirit of accomplishment was upon them and the weight they dragged was a comforting one.

All the way, as they joggled slowly along, the mate never ceased enlarging on the wonders of the wreckage, nor forgot his one disappointment, which evoked resentful curses each time he thought of it.

"Man, but we're doing fine! A roof we've got, and fire, and things to eat.—There's flour in yon bundles,—just the cores of half a dozen casks. And yon bag's coffee, but we'll need to roast it and grind it. And the wee keg's rum, unless I've mistook it. An' there's enough stuff out yonder to last us for a thousand years. But, blankety-blank-blank-blank!—my stomach's crying after yon pork that them screeching deevils took out of our mouths, as you might say. Blankety-blank-blank 'em all—every red-eyed son o' the pit among 'em! But we'll try again, and next time I'll not broach the barr'l an' they'll know noth'n about it."

"Maybe they'll attack us all the same. It was the most horrible situation I was ever in. One felt so utterly helpless."

"Ay, blank 'em! There was no end to 'em.... They'd have ate me alive if you hadn't come and helped me tumble overboard. Blank 'em! Blank 'em! Blank 'em!"

"What on earth are all these things for?" asked Wulfrey one time, kicking a roll of crimson silk with his heel.

"Blankets to sleep on,—better than boards. The others for their gay gaudery,—the bonny reid and blue o' them. They mek me feel good and warm just to look at 'em. I just couldna leave them. Man, they're grand!"

They hoisted all their stuff on board, and found themselves hungry and thirsty with the heavy day's work. There were but the scantiest remnants of their breakfast left, and Macro undertook to chop wood and make a fire, scour some of the rusty cooking-utensils, and make flour-and-water cakes as soon as he had some water, if Wulfrey would go across for it and some fresh meat.

So he set off on the hatch-cover with a good-sized kettle, and was back inside an hour with water from the ponds by the hill and a couple of young rabbits, and found that the mate had not been idle. He had transferred a sufficiency of sand to the cabin to make a hearth at the foot of the steps, and had broken up wood enough to last for a week. He had spread out all the blankets, scoured most of the rust off a frying-pan and a small kettle and a couple of tin pannikins, and had opened the keg and sampled its contents and found it French cognac of excellent quality.

In the best of spirits he skinned the rabbits and set them roasting, with an incidental commination of thae screeching deevils that had robbed them of the pork which would have been such a welcome accompaniment. Then he compounded cakes of flour and water and fried them deftly, and set a kettle to boil wherewith to make hot grog, and boastfully promised coffee for the morrow when he had time to roast and grind it.

They both ate ravenously, and found great content in the taste of hot food and drink once more, after all these days of clammy starvation, and then they slept. And Wulfrey dreamed horribly all night of fighting helplessly with legions of screeching birds, and several times fought himself awake, and each time found Macro actively engaged in the same unprofitable business.

In spite of his torn shoulders and unrestful night, Macro was for setting off again first thing next morning for more plunder. That huge pile of wastry drew him like a magnet. He hungered and thirsted to be at it again.

But Wulfrey flatly refused. They had enough to go on with, and he claimed at least a day to recover from the effects of the last excursion. And as Macro declined to tackle the job single-handed he was fain to agree, though with none too good a grace.

"This weather mayn't last. We'd best get all we can while we can," he urged.

"The stuff will be there tomorrow. Most of it's been there for years, you said."

"Ay, but man, there's mebbe things out of the 'Grassadoo,' that'll be spoiling for want of finding."

"They'll not spoil much more in one day. You're more used to this kind of work than I am, you see. I must have a rest."

Macro consigned rest to the bottomless pit, but after relieving his feelings in that way, consented at last to an easy-going exploration of the southern spit, to see if their lake opened into the sea, though he expressed himself satisfied, from his observations, that it did not.

First, however, out of the larger raft he constructed a smaller one, which bore them better than the hatch-cover and was more manageable, and the hatch they hauled on board again and fitted into its place, so as to keep the ship dry in case of bad weather. Then they paddled across to the spit and set off along it, both scrutinising the lie of the land carefully.

For a good hour they trudged through heavy sand, the sea swirling with long soft hisses up the yellow beach on their right hand, and on their left the placid water of the lake without a pulse in it. The dividing bank was nowhere in all its length more than a hundred yards wide, nor more than ten feet high at its crown.

More than once Macro stood and studied it in places, and when in time they came to long ridges of hummocks which stretched as far in front as they could see, he stood again, looking back from the top of the first they climbed, and said, "I'm thinking there's no opening this end. Mebbe it was on the level there. But this stuff shifts so in a gale you never know where you are."

Presently they came on the shallow rounded end of the lake, with higher sandhills beyond it, which ran along both sides of the island further than they could see. In between lay a vast unbroken stretch of level sand, and when they climbed to the top of the highest hill, they saw this sandy desert dwindle in the far distance to a point, with the sea on each side of it, like the one at the other end of the island.

"There's not a sign of anybody else," said Wulfrey.

"If there'd been anyone they'd bin living on them ships. We've got it all to ourselves, that's certain. And what's more, we'll have it all to ourselves till Kingdom come. No one else'll ever come, 'cept dead men."

"Those two ships came."

"Twenty, thirty years ago,—mebbe more. Must have bin an opening then and it's got silted up. They couldn't have got washed over the spit."

There were several more large fresh-water ponds close to these larger hills, and rabbits everywhere. They secured a couple and tramped back the way they had come.

Macro seemed to accept the whole situation and outlook with the utmost equanimity. They had very much more than they had had any right to expect; more was always to be had for the fetching from that wonderful pile out yonder; what that pile might yield in the way of richer plunder remained to be seen, and he was the man to see to it.

But Wulfrey had been cherishing a hope that the great lake would prove an inlet from the sea, a harbour of refuge into which other ships might be expected to run at times. And the fact that it was not, that no relief was to be looked for in that direction and that this desolate sandbank, bristling with wrecks, must necessarily be shunned by all who knew of it, weighed more and more heavily on him as he thought about it.

They were alive, where all their shipmates had perished. They were provided for beyond their utmost expectation. For all that he was most deeply grateful. But the prospect of passing the rest of his life on this bare bank troubled him profoundly and reduced him to silence and the lowest of spirits.

XXI

They woke next morning into a dense white fog, so thick that they could not see across the deck. Macro, intent on plunder, hailed it as an excellent screen from possible attack by the other pillagers of the wreck-pile, and though Wulfrey had his doubts, he would not counter him again.

His knowledge of human nature suggested to him the almost impossibility of two men living alone, in intimacy so close and exclusive, and with so little outlet for their thoughts and energies, without coming to loggerheads at times. He determined that, so far as in him lay, the provocation thereto should not come from him.

So far he had not only had nothing to complain of in his companion's presence, but, on the contrary, had found himself distinctly the gainer by it in every material way. But the strange wild outbursts, to which he had given vent when they were at the wreckage before, warned him of hidden fires below, and suggested the advisability of non-provocation of the under-man, if it were possible to avoid it.

So they paddled across to the spit, which they could not well miss, and set off on foot for the point, steering by the sullen lap and hiss of the waves as they stole softly up out of the fog on their left hand. There was a clamminess in the air which commended the idea of clothes to them while they worked on the pile. So they made their things into tight bundles, and carried them above their heads as they waded out neck-deep to their store-house. The shrill cries of the birds came dull and thin through the fog, more ghostly than ever from their invisibility. Now and again an inquisitive straggler fluttered down at them out of the close white curtain, and whirled back into it with a terrified squawk when it found they were alive.

They climbed the pile cautiously, but the birds seemed mostly at a distance; and when they had flung down sufficient timber Macro proceeded to construct another raft, while Wulfrey poked about up above on his own account.

And as he climbed about among the chaotic mass of barrels, boxes, cases, bales, he came to understand the wild craving to get at them, to bash them open and learn what they contained, which had possessed the mate that other day. There might be anything hidden there—goods of all kinds for the easement of their present situation. There might even be treasure of gold and jewels. It was impossible to say what there might not be. And though gold and jewels were absolutely useless to them, placed as they were, and with no prospect, according to Macro, of rescue or relief, the possibility of such things lying hidden in untold quantity all about him stirred him strangely.

He recognised feelings so abnormal to himself with no little surprise. He felt as a penniless small boy might feel if he were given the freedom of a great shop full of boxed-up toys and told to help himself. He wanted to smash open very closed case he came to, to see what was inside it.

The water lapped and clunked dismally in the hollows below, and at times he had to climb almost down to it, and then up the further side, to get across faults in the pile. In one such black gully, on what was usually the leeward side of the pile, he had stepped cautiously from ledge to ledge, and laid hold of a projecting spar and was hauling himself up the other side, when he came face up against a dark little cranny between two great cases. And in the niche sat the skeleton of a man, all huddled up and jammed together, but grinning at him in so ferociously jovial a manner, as though he had been expecting him and was rejoiced at the sight of him, that Wulfrey came near to loosing his hold and falling into the water. He scrambled hastily past, and saw grinning faces in every dark corner for the rest of the day, and some of them were fact and some were only fancy. For the tumbled pile of wreckage was like a huge trap for the catching of anything the sweeping gales might bring it.

He heard Macro's voice, dulled by the mist, calling to him, and he answered but knew not which way to go to get to him. It was only by constant shouting and long and precarious scrambling that they came together again.

"We'd best keep close in this fog," said the mate, "or one of us'll be stopping the night here. Found anything?"

"A dead man——"

"Any of ours?"

"No, he was only bones."

"It's full of 'em. They're no canny, but they'll not harm us. Where'll we begin?"

"One place is as good as another. Here, I should say, and quietly, or those fiends of birds will be at us again."

"Bear a hand with this, then," laying hold of a newly-stranded barrel. "That's pork out of the 'Grassadoo,' so it'll be all right," and heaving and hauling, they managed to get the barrel down on to the raft.

As they poked about the pile in the mist, it was evident they had struck a spot where a good portion of the contents of the 'Grace-à-Dieu' had lodged. Macro, having superintended the loading, recognised many of the marks and in some instances could recall their contents.

"Women's fallals," he said, with a scornful crack at one large case. "If they'd been men's, now, they'd have come in handy.... Boots and shoes, if I remember rightly,"—nodding at another case. "We'll soon see," and with a chunk of wood he stove in one side and hauled out a handful of its contents.—"Women's troke again! Mebbe we'll find some men's stuff in time.... I've seen yon chest before.... Old Will Taggart's, I think," and he stove it open, and went down on his knees and raked over the contents. "Seaman's slops, not much account.... A new pipe and a tin of tobacco! Thanks be! We'll take that ... and another flint and steel. Always useful! ... Clothes not much good, but we might be glad of 'em later on.... Yon's a box of tea and it'll be lead-lined inside. Should be more about. We had two hunderd aboard.... Glory! yon barrels are hard-tack. These ones are flour. If we work hard and get 'em ashore before the weather breaks again we'll live in clover.... What's this now? ... 'Duke of Kent'"—and he hauled up a stout wooden box by one handle out of a raffle of cordage and ragged sail-cloth. "Name of a ship—or name of a man? That's no a ship's box."

A deft blow under the lock and the box lay open, displaying a number of uniforms, richly decorated with gold braid and lacing, all more or less damaged by water, but otherwise in good condition.

"Duds enough to keep us going for a couple of years if so be as they fit," said the mate exuberantly, and Wulfrey laughed out at the idea of their peacocking about their sandbank rigged out in court costumes.

"He was Governor-General of Canada," he said. "I remember hearing he lost his baggage on the journey."

"We'll be Governor-Generals here when we're needing a change.... Nothing but his clothes," as he ran his hands all over the box. "Mebbe we'll find more of 'em lying about. Man! what a place it is! It'd take a man a lifetime to work through all the stuff there is here."

They worked hard and carried home a huge load, but as there was no wind they had to paddle all the way, and even Macro acknowledged to being a bit tired before they got all their plunder across the spit and on board, the transit across the lake on the smaller raft necessitating three separate journeys. He was in the highest of spirits however, and keen to be back at the pile next day. As for Wulfrey, hardening though he was with all these unusual labours, he found himself almost too weary to eat.

The fog lay on them like a white pall for six days. Macro predicted that it would go in a storm, and was urgent on salvaging all they could before it came.

So, day after day, they went out to the pile, and came back loaded at night till they had stuff enough in their hold to keep them in comfort for many months to come.

They had meat and drink, clothes and firing, and comfortable quarters. What more could any man want, unless it were to get away from it all? And that, the mate asserted, time after time, was the unlikeliest thing that could happen.

"We're here till Kingdom come," was the burden of his tune. "So we may as well be comfortable. And we've had the deil's own luck. We might ha' been living on rabbits and roots, and sleeping on the sand. Man! be thankful at being tired to such good purpose!"

"I'm thankful enough and tired enough, and we've got stuff enough for a year. I'm going to take a rest."

"I'm for the pile again tomorrow. If you won't come I'll e'en make shift alone," and Wulfrey let him go alone.

XXII

The smothering white fog lay thick on them for six days and then disappeared in the night. The morning broke dull and heavy, with a gusty wind from the south-west, and they could hear the waves breaking on the spit with a sound like the low growl of a menacing beast.

"I'm off to the pile," said the mate.

"Better take a day off. You've been working too hard."

"Not me. I cannot sit here while all yon stuff's crying aloud to be picked up."

"Well, I'll be on the look-out, and come across to give you a hand from the spit when you get there."

"I'll lash you up a bit float that'll bring you over, before I go. And you'll mebbe have some food ready against I get back. It's hungry work out there."

"I'll be ready for you. If you load up too heavily you'll not get back at all."

"I'll see to that. Wind's fair, it'll bring me home all right."

So Wulfrey had the day to himself, and had time, which the labours of the previous days had not permitted him, to consider the situation in all its aspects.

So far they had been marvellously favoured, without doubt. Ten days ago they were swinging up and down on the galley-roof inside the cage of the dead ship's ribs, possessed of nothing but their bare lives, and those but doubtfully. And here they were, provided for in every respect, with comforts which shipwrecked men had no right to expect, and with unlimited further stores to draw upon. They could live without fear....

But what a life, after all. Eating, drinking, sleeping,—raking over the wreckage for possible plunder that was useless to them,—rambling among the rabbits and the sandhills. Quarrelling in time, maybe. Perhaps it was a good thing there was a ship for each of them.

He was not himself of a quarrelsome disposition. The mate, he thought, might be difficult to put up with if he took a crooked turn. But it would be the height of folly for two men, bound together by ill-fortune, and to this bare bank for all time, to fall out. Every circumspection within his power he resolved to exercise, and so far, indeed, his companion had given him no cause to mistrust or doubt him.

But he had a somewhat discomforting feeling that he knew very little of the real man that lay beneath that saturnine exterior, that there might be elemental depths there which would surprise him if they came to be revealed. This Macro that he knew was to him something in the nature of a sleeping volcano, outwardly quiet but full of hidden fires.

He could imagine no likely grounds for dispute between them. Each worked for the common good, and so far they had shared all things equally and without question. But how would it be as the weeks dragged into months, and the months into years?

So far the rifling of the wreckage had afforded the mate all the outlet he needed for his activities. In ministering to the cravings of the riever spirit that was strong in him it had also supplied their wants in overwhelming abundance. The longer it kept him busy the better, and if it yielded him plunder of value he was entirely welcome to it.

Wulfrey could not imagine his discovering anything out there which could by any possibility lead to any serious difference between them. And yet, in spite of all that, from little glimpses he had caught at times of the strange wild, hidden nature of the man, he was not without doubts as to his absolute congeniality as a sole companion for the rest of his days.

In short he had a vague feeling that, if by any chance they came to loggerheads, Macro might prove an extremely unpleasant person to be shut up with, within bounds so limited as this great bank of sand.

He recognised such feelings, however, as unnecessarily morbid, and ascribed them to the general murkiness of the outlook and over-weariness from the exertions of the last few days. So he tumbled overboard on to the new raft and paddled to the nearer shore, and set off for a brisk walk over the sandhills and along the beach, in search of a more hopeful frame of mind.

Why could they not build a boat? Macro said the coast of Nova Scotia was but a hundred miles or so away. A hundred miles was no great affair, and there was wood among that pile enough to build a thousand boats. So far, indeed, they had not come upon any tools except the rusty axe, for tool-chests probably sank at once on the outer banks where the ships went to pieces.

Still, he would suggest it to Macro. It might prove a further outlet for his energies. If he should by chance find plunder of value out there he might, when he was satiated, favour the idea of an attempt at escape. In fact, plunder without any attempt to utilise it would be absurd.

The opportunity of making his own position clear, and thereby obviating any cause for dispute, occurred that same day.

When, in the afternoon, he saw the mate coming slowly along before the wind, he paddled over to the spit to meet him and found him in great spirits.

"Man! it's been a great day, and if ye'd been there ye'd have had your chance. I lit on some graand things. Wait while I show you——"

"Let's get 'em all aboard first. They'll keep, and I'll be bound you're tired and hungry."

"Hungert as a wolf, but finding siccan things takes the tired out o' one," and his black eyes sparkled over his finds, and he must go on telling about them as they worked.

"It was down under where we found yon Duke o' Kent box. I spied another, and then more, mebbe there's, more yet down below."

"More fancy coats?"

"Ah!—and some with jewelled stars on 'em and swords with fancy hilts. I'll show you when we get aboard."

"You didn't come across any tools, I suppose?"

"Tools? No. What would we want tools for?"

"I was wondering if it might not be possible to build some kind of a boat and get across to Nova Scotia."

"We're safer here than trying that, I'm thinking."

"When you've got all there is to be got out there you'll want to get home and enjoy it——"

"Man! It'd take a hunderd years to go through it all. It's bin piling up there since ever this bank silted up."

"Oh well, we don't want to stop here a hundred years, that's certain. What's the good of it all if you can't make any use of it?"

"It's graand to handle anyway."

And when they had eaten, he opened some of his bundles and displayed his treasures,—a jewelled 'George,' roughly cut from some Garter-knight's court-coat, several smaller decorations, all more or less ornamented with precious stones, three dress-swords with mountings, in ivory and gold, a small wooden box lined with sodden blue velvet in which were half a dozen rings, some of which from the size of the stones and the massiveness of their setting, seemed to Wulfrey of considerable value.

"They're worth something, all those," said Macro, as he handled them with loving exultation.

"Ay, if you could get them home and turn them into money. I don't see what use they're going to be to you here," said Wulfrey, fiddling his own string again.

"They're fine to have anyway."

"I'd sooner have another pipe and some more tobacco than the whole of them."

"Ye can have that too," and he rooted in another bundle and produced both. "They're oot a dead man's chest and they're wet. But he's no use for 'em and they'll dry. So there ye are. Ye dinnot care for jewels?" and he looked at Wulfrey wonderingly.

"As to that, I don't say I wouldn't pick them up if I came across them, but I've no hankering for them."

"Ye've plenty money of your own, mebbe."

"As much as I need—if ever I get ashore."

"Ah! It meks a difference, ye see. I never had any to speak of, and these bonny sparklers pluck at the heart o' me."

"You're welcome to all you can get, as far as I'm concerned——"

"Ay, man, they're mine, for I found 'em."

"But they're no use to you unless we can get away from here. Get ashore and you can turn them to account. Now why couldn't we build some kind of a boat and get across to Nova Scotia? There's wood enough and to spare out yonder——"

"Ay, there's wood, but ef we had the tools 'twould still be no easy matter. An' then ye've got to reckon wi' the weather. 'Twould be a bad move to spend our time building a boat only to go to the bottom in her with all the gear we'd gathered. We're safe here, anyway. Mebbe some day a boat'll come ashore not so broke but we can patch her up.... How'd ye like to be afloat in a home-made boat a night like this?"

For while they sat, eating and talking, the day had darkened, and now and again there came a menacing whuffle down the open hatch, and the little ship was filled with a tremulous humming as the rising wind played on their bare masts, and the growl of the spit had deepened into a long hoarse roar.

"It'll be a bitter bad night I'm thinking. I saw it coming away out yonder. Mebbe it'll add some to our pile of stuff. Mebbe it'll bring us a boat."

"We will not hope for either," said Wulfrey soberly, "for that means more deaths out yonder——"

A long shrill scream outside sent a creepy chill down his spine for a moment. He glanced apprehensively across at Macro in the flickering light of the fire, and saw his face livid, his eyes like great black wells, his jaw dropped.

"The spirits o' the dead!" jerked the mate. "There's a hantle o' them out there.... They're mebbe after me for these things...." and he rocked himself to and fro, where he sat on the floor, and muttered strange words,—"An ainm au Athar, 's an Mhic, 's an Spioraid Naoimh,"—in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

The weird shrieking waxed louder and shriller. Wulfrey got up and climbed the steps, and found the stormy twilight gray with that vast cloud of birds, all fleeing blindly before the gale and each one screaming its loudest.

It was a fearsome, blood-curdling clamour, an ear-splitting pandemonium, a whirling Sabbat, as if all the demons of the pit had broken loose and clothed themselves in wings and shrieks and deadly fear.

"It's only those damnable birds," he bent and shouted gruffly down to Macro, vexed with himself at his own momentary fright.

But the mate was not for accepting any such simple explanation as that.

"Man!" he said hoarsely. "Birds ye may think 'em, but I know better. It is spirits they are,—spirits of all the dead that ever died in this dread place,—a great multitude—their bones are white out there, but the spirits of them cannot rest. A Mhoire ghradhach! 'Twas under the Dark Star we were born, and here we'll die and leave our bones to whiten in the sand, and the spirits of us will go screeching and scrauchling wi' the rest. Come away, man, and shut the doors tight or they'll be in on us!"

Wulfrey had never seen anything like it. Those myriads of fluttering wings looked as though the whole gray sky had come tumbling down in fragments. It was like a snowstorm on a gigantic scale, every whirling flake a bundle of wildly screaming feathers.

He stood watching for a time and listening to the growing thunder of the rollers on the spit. He imagined their crashing in white foam-fury among the stark ribs of the dead ships out there on the banks.

He shivered as he recalled the chill horrors of their own undoing and deliverance. It was wonderful beyond words, with that in his mind, to be standing there, safe and warm, and well provided, and his heart was full of gratitude.

"God help any who are out there this night!" he said to himself, and closed the doors on the storm-fiends, and squatted on the floor over against the mate, who sat rocking slowly to and fro in great discomfort and muttered Gaelic seuns as a protection against the unholy things that wandered outside.

All night long their little ship was filled with the hum of the shuddering masts, broken now and again with the creaking and jerking of their rusty cable. And whenever Wulfrey, warm in his bunk with many blankets, woke up for a moment, he heard the deep thunder of the waves on the spit, and the howl of the wind, outside, and the thrashing of the rain on deck; and he thanked God for warmth and shelter, and lay listening for a moment, and then rolled over and went to sleep again.

The storm lasted three full days, during which they never once left the ship. They had all they needed, and fresh water was obtainable in any quantity by slinging an empty keg outside one of the scupper-holes through which the rain drained off the deck.

Macro's gloomy humour lasted, off and on, as long as the storm. The birds had mostly hidden themselves in sheltered nooks among the sandhills. But every now and again the evil in them, or maybe it was hunger, would stir them up and set them whirling and shrieking round the ship, and sometimes lighting on it in prodigious numbers, and the mate would curse them long and deep and fall once more to his spells and invocations. The fury of the storm did not trouble him, but the screaming of the birds seemed to touch the superstitious spot in his nature and set all his nerves jangling.

It was during one of the lull times that he astonished Wulfrey by hauling out his rolls of silks and velvets, and with an elemental, almost barbaric, delight in their rich colourings, he cut them into long strips, which he fixed neatly to the walls of the cabin by means of wooden pegs. The gorgeous results afforded him the greatest satisfaction, which nothing but the wailing of the birds could damp. Whenever their shrill clamour broke out the darkness fell on him again. He hurled uncouth curses at them and no arguments availed against his humour.

To Wulfrey, on the other hand, the birds and their dismal shriekings were but an incident, the fury of the storm a wonder and a revelation.

All through that former time of stress, which had ended in their undoing, his powers of observation and appreciation had been dulled by his fears of disaster. Then, the howl of the gale and the onslaught of the seas had been like hungry deaths close at his heels. But here, in the perfect security of the land-locked lake, he was free to watch and to wonder.

At times, indeed, it seemed to him that the terrible force of the wind might lift them bodily, ship and all, and hurl them into the turmoil beyond. Then he remembered that many such storms must have swept the island and still the ships were there.

The waves that broke on the spit seemed to him higher than tall houses, and the weight of them, as they curled and crashed on the sand, made the whole island tremble, he was certain. The uproar was deafening, and at times great lashes of white spray came hurtling over into the lake, and scourging it into sizable waves of its own.

When Wulfrey woke on the fourth morning he was conscious of a change, and running up on deck he found the sun shining in a pale-blue, storm-washed sky, and nothing left of the gale but the great green waves breaking sullenly on the beach beyond the spit.

He stripped and plunged overboard, and climbed up again full of the joy of life and physical fitness.

XXIII

The days crept into weeks, the weeks into months, with nothing to break the monotony of their life but visits to the wreckage, an occasional skirmish with the birds, rabbit-hunts, rude attempts at fishing, which met with so little success from lack of anything approaching proper material that they gave it up in disgust, and rambles among the sandhills.

They got along companionably enough; the mate's only complaint,—and that not untinged with satisfaction, and obviously prompted more by a desire for his help than from any wish to halve his spoils—that Wulfrey showed so poor a spirit in the matter of plunder, and so shamefully neglected the opportunities of a lifetime.

For himself, if he could have found safe lodging out there, he would have lived on the wreck-pile, to save the time and trouble of going to and fro. The riever spirit of his forefathers was kept at boiling-point by the possibilities of fortune which lurked there. The search in itself at once satisfied and stimulated the natural craving for booty which rioted in his Highland-Spanish blood, and he never tired of it.

He came back laden every time with things for the common good, and rarer pickings for his private hoard, over which he exulted like a chieftain returned from a successful foray.

Wulfrey was on the whole not ungrateful to the pile for affording him such distraction. He discussed the latest additions to his treasure-trove with him, as they sat by the fire of a night, and speculated with him on their probable origin and value, and the higher he assessed this the more the mate's black eyes glowed.

He would sit watching Wulfrey as he turned the latest find over and over, and weighed it in his hand, and polished a bit of it to get at its basic metal, and mused on its shape and endeavoured to arrive at its history. And at such times there was in the sombre black eyes something of the look of an uncertain-tempered dog whose lawful bone is in jeopardy.

Once or twice, Wulfrey, glancing up as he passed an opinion, caught that curious suspicious look bent on him, and was amused and annoyed at it, and also somewhat discomfited. Did the man think he coveted his useless little gauds?—useless in their present extremity, though some of them doubtless valuable enough if they could be sold. Why, he esteemed a dryable twist of tobacco infinitely more highly than any silver candlestick or shapely silver cup that the other could fish up from the depths. It seemed to him just as well that the plunder-fever had attacked only one of them, for he doubted if his companion would willingly have shared with another. For the fever grew with his finds.

Once they came within an ace of a quarrel, and though it blew over, the seeds remained.

Where the mate hid his spoil, Wulfrey neither knew nor cared nor ever troubled his head about. He would no more have occupied his thoughts with it than he would have taken more than his proper share of the food or tobacco.

But increase breeds suspicion, and suspicion clouds the outlook. Among other things, Macro one day brought home a small crucifix and some strings of beads, which he believed to be of gold, while Wulfrey, from their hardness to the touch of the knife, pronounced them only brass. They were all curiously carved or cast, however, and, whatever the metal of which they were made, he expressed his admiration of the workmanship.

A night or two later, to his amazement, Macro came out of his own cabin more black-a-vised than he had ever seen him, and asked abruptly, "Where's that cross?"

"What cross?"

"You know what cross. Yon gold cross I showed you two nights ago. Where is it?" and he lowered at Wulfrey like a full-charged thunder-cloud.

"I know nothing of your cross, man. I suppose you put it with the rest of your things."

"I did that, and it's gone. Where is it?"

"Don't speak to me like that, Macro. I won't have it. I know nothing about your cross or any of your plunder. I've told you before, it is nothing to me. If I wanted it I'd go and get it for myself."

"It was there with the rest and it's no there now. And——"

"—— —— ——!" cried Wulfrey, springing up ablaze with indignation. "Do you dare to think I would touch your dirty pilferings?" and it looked as though the next instant would find them at grips.

But the mate had broken out in the sudden discovery of his loss. Wulf stood full as tall as himself. He looked very fit and capable, and looked, moreover, as the mate's common sense told him, as soon as it got the chance, the last person in the world to tamper with another man's goods—even though he might be the only one circumstantially able to have done so.

"It's gone anyway," he growled. "But it's no good fighting about it."

"That's not enough. Your greed for gain has blinded you. Till you come to your senses I've nothing more to do with you," and for two days not a word passed between them.

Each prepared his own food as and when he chose, and ate it apart from the other. The mate hung about as though loth to leave Wulfrey in sole charge at home, and the atmosphere of the little cabin was murky and charged with lightning.

On the third day Wulfrey ostentatiously set off for the wreck-pile by himself. He was running out of tobacco and would not have accepted any from the mate if it had been offered.

He waded out, made a rough raft on Macro's lines, and smashed open such seamen's chests as he could discover, for it was always in them that they found tobacco.

He got several small lots, and a couple of new pipes, and a flint and steel, charged his raft with a keg of rum and a case of hard-tack, and managed to get it all back to the spit and to the ship single-handed.

As he came up the side, the mate met him, with the missing crucifix in his hand.

"The little deevil of a thing," he said, with quite unconscious incongruity, "had slipped down a crack, back o' the locker, and I were wrong to think ye could have taken it."

"Well, don't play the fool again," said Wulfrey shortly. "If your greed for other folk's goods hadn't blinded you, you would understand that a gentleman does not stoop to stealing."

"I've seen some I wouldn't trust further'n I could see 'em, and then only if their hands were up over their heads. But ye're not that kind, an' I was wrong. So there 'tis, an' no more to be said. What have ye found?"

"Pipes and tobacco. That is all I went for."

After his two days of enforced silence Macro was inclined to expand, but found his advances coldly received. Wulfrey's pride was in arms and the insult rankled.

By degrees, however, the storm-cloud drifted by, and matters between them became again much as they had been, with somewhat of added knowledge, on each side, of the character of the other.

The mate had learned that the Doctor, quiet as he might appear, was not a man to suffer injustice or to be meddled with. And Wulfrey had got a further warning of the possibilities of trouble should he and the mate come to serious differences.

It seemed absurd that two men, stranded, perhaps for life, on this bare sandbank, should be unable to live together in amity. Yet, his experience of men told him that it was just such enforced close intimacy—the constant rubbing together of very divergent natures, with nothing in common between them but the necessities entailed by their common misfortune—that might, nay almost certainly must, come to explosion at times, unless they both set themselves sedulously to the keeping of the peace.

If any actual rupture took place between them, he foresaw that the mate might develop phases of character which would be exceedingly awkward and difficult to deal with. Freedom from all the ordinary restraints which civilisation imposed upon the natural inner man might easily run to wildest licence.

At bottom this man was just a wild Highland cateran with a dash of Spanish buccaneer, hot-blooded, avid of gain under circumstances so propitious, insatiable. The chance of a lifetime had come to him and he was exultantly set on making the most of it. He was like a cage-bred wolf set down suddenly into the midst of an unprotected flock of sheep. There was his natural prey in profusion and there was none to stay him. To be dropped unexpectedly on to this enormous pile of plunder was like the realisation of a fairy tale. No wonder he was inclined to lose his head.

It was fortunate, thought Wulfrey, that they were built on different lines, and that the plunder-pile made absolutely no appeal to himself beyond the necessaries of life.