Part 5 (1/2)
”The hell you are! D'you want to sink us? What do you think this is, anyway--an excursion steamer? You stay where you are and--I say--take care of this till I coood fellow”
He thrust the butt of his shot-gun into Aorous push that sent him back half a dozen feet At the sa an end of the eel-pot stake on the hard sand bottoht upon it Before A swiftly into the shadows
After a bit Quain's voice caht”
A in response Simultaneously the last, least, indefinite blur that stood for the boat in the darkness, vanished in a swirl of snow; and he was alone with the stors Upon these he put a check--would not dwell upon theh to breed in hi up and down a five-yard stretch of co his feet to keep his blood circulating, lugging both guns, one beneath either ar his shoulders up about his ears in thankless atte in between his neck and collar--thus, interminably it seemed, to and fro, to and fro
In the course of time this occupation defeated its purpose; the veryback to Quain; he worriedhio alone--or at all Quain had a wife and children; that thought proved insupportable Had he ained it only to find the rass that choked the shoals? In either instance he would be at the mercy of the wind, for even with the sail close-reefed he would have no choice other than to fly before the fury Or had the boat possibly gone aground so hard and fast that Quain had found himself unable to push her off and doo of the tide? Or (last and uess of all) had the ”skimmy” proved as unseaworthy as its dilapidated appearance had proclai ever more densely, the sno an impenetrable wan curtain between Aht and warale see even the incessant deep bellow of the ocean surf Once A he had heard, the staccato _plut-plut-plut_ of ahis gun skywards and pulled both triggers The double report rang in his ears loud as a thunderclap
In the , with every fibre of his being keyed to attention, the sense of his utter isolation chilled his heart as with cold steel
A little frantically he loaded and fired again; but what at first ht the faint far echo of a hail he in the end set down reluctantly to a trick of the hag-ridden wind; to whose savage voice he durst not listen long; in such a storht, a e and terrible voices whispering, shrieking, gibbering, howling untold horrors
An hour passed, punctuated at frequent intervals by gunshots Though they evoked no answer of any sort, hope for Quain died hard in Aht he laboured to convince hi boat, and, forced to relinquish his efforts to regain the beach, have scudded across the bay to the mainland and safety; but this seemed a sur to be dwelt upon, lest by that very insistence its tenuity be emphasised, that Amber resolutely turned froht and proble of his situation was painfully accurate: he was marooned upon what a flood tide made a desert island but which at the ebb was a peninsula--a long and narrow strip of sand, bounded on the west by the broad, shallow channel to the ocean, on the east connected with the ed
He had, then, these alternatives: hethe leeward side of a dune till daybreak (or till relief should come) or else undertake a five- at the end of it the tide out and the sandbar a safe footway from shore to shore Between the two he vacillated not at all; anything were preferable to a night in the dunes, beaten by the iht of Quain; and even though he were to find the eastern causeway under water, at least the exercise would have served to keep hie had been fruitlessly discharged, he set out for the ocean beach, pausing at the first dune he came upon to scrape a shallow trench in the sand and cache therein both guns and his gaht, he pressed on, eventually pausing on the overhanging lip of a twenty-foot bluff To its foot the beach beloas aswirl knee-deep with the wash of breakers, broad patches of water black and glossy as polished ebony alternating with vast expanses of foaloith pale winter phosporescence Momentarily, as he watched, at once fascinated and appalled, rey heart, offshore, and, curling crests edged with lu in to crash and shatter thunderously upon the sands
Awed and disappointed, Amber drew back The beach was impassable; here was no wide and easy road to the east, such as he had thought to find; to gain the sandbar he had now to thread a tortuous and uncertain way through the bewildering dunes And the prospect was not a little disconcerting; afraid neither of wind nor of cold, he retchedly afraid of going astray in that uncertain, shi+fting labyrinth To lose oneself in that trackless wilderness!
A demon of anxiety prodded hio mad Once on the mainland it were a e of Shalewood and charter a ”team”
to convey him thither He shut his teeth on his deterhly buffeted by the gale; the snow settling in rippling drifts in the folds of his clothing and upon his shoulders clinging like a cloth; his face cut by clouds of sand flung horizontally ell-nigh the force of birdshot froun: he bowed to the blast and plodded steadily on
Ie of his emotions; even the care for Quain became a mere dull ache in the back of his perceptions; of physical suffering he was unconscious He fell a prey to freakish fancies--could stand aside and watch hi in the mad dance of the tempest, as the snow-flakes whirled, as little potent He saw hiainst the infinite force of the ele nothing: an atorew quite oblivious, his thoughts wandering in the past, oddly afar to half-reotten, both wholly irrelevant; picturesque and painful memories cast up from the deeps of the subconsciousness by so ti contereen, steale; there was a dense blue sky above, and below, on the beach, dense blue waters curled lazily up the feet of a little, naked, brown child that played contentedly with a shell of rainbow hues Again he saw a throng upon a pier-head, and in its forefront an unknooman, plainly dressed, with deep brown eyes wherein Despair dwelt, tearless but white to the lips as she watched a steaain, he seemed to stand with others upon the threshold of the cardrooht adress lay prone across a table on whose absorbent, green cloth a dark and ugly stain idening slowly
But for the h scented, autumnal woods, beside a woman whose eyes were kind and dear, whose lips were sweet and teirl he had known not an hour but whoh he himself did not dream it nor discover it till too late And with these many other visions fororia; but of theirl in the black riding-habit, walking by his side down the aisle of trees So that presently the tired and overwrought , pleading desperately for his heart's desire; and wakened with a start, to hear the echo of her voice as though she had spoken but the instant gone, to find his own lips fraely he came to know that beyond question he loved And he stopped short and stood blinking blindly at nothing, a little frightened by the depth and strength of this passion which had co for the first tier of the soul And she was lost to him; half a world lay between them--or soon would All his days he had awaited, a little curiously, a little sceptical, the co men call Love; and when it had couessed it until its cause had slipped away froained consciousness of his plight, and with an effort shook his senses back into his head It was not precisely a ti And he realised that he had been, in a way, more than half-asleep as he walked; even noas drowsy, his eyes were heavy, his feet leaden--and numb with cold besides He had no least notion of what distance he ht line or a circle; but when he thought to glance over his shoulder--there was at the moment perhaps more ith less snow than there had been for so him as it had from the first: as if he had not won a step away fro eye winked sardonically through a mist of flakes, was blotted out and turned up a baleful red It seemed toIt still th held, since he had ht and the ocean beach upon his right to win to the Shampton sandbar, whether soon or late
Inflexible of purpose in the face of all his weariness and discourage his march when he was struck by the circumstance that the whitened shoulder of a dune, quite near at hand, should see, speculative, he hung in the wind--inquisitive as a cat but loath to waste tiht was, there should be er stride opened up a wide basin in the dunes, filled with eddying veils of snow, and set, at soht--s in an invisible dwelling In the space between them, doubtless, there would be a door But a second ti that the island was said to be uninhabited Only yesterday he had asked and been so infore he held it, indeed, that he was conscious of a singular reluctance to question the phenomenon That superstitious dread of the unknohich lies dormant in us all, in A hand Or, if there be such a thing as a premonition of misfortune, he may be said to have experienced it in that hour; certainly a presentiment of evil crawled in his brain, and he hesitated at a tiht in the world so ht, heat and human companionshi+p He had positively to force hiainst its step he twice lifted his hand and let it fall without knocking
There was not a sound within that he could hear above the claht
In the end, however, he knocked stoutly enough
CHAPTER IV