PERHAPS a half-hour elapsed before any one of the exhausted men was able to do more than sigh and shift his aching limbs on the bed of rubbish where he lay. They had taken the precaution to pull the door to behind them, and though they were thereby condemned to a profound darkness, the close sunken quarters, warmed with the natural heat of their bodies, wrought a life in them by degrees and a gradual curiosity as to the character of their refuge.
Luvaine was the first to drag himself upright. Standing with his shoulders on a level with the door-sill, he cautiously made a little opening and looked forth long and critically. Then he reclosed the aperture and sat himself down again.
“David,” he said (from that time he, as far as possible, ignored his host), “are you recovered?”
“Convalescent, sir”—he was heard to sit up in the darkness; “I’m at the brandy and beef-tea stage.”
“That’s a pity, for neither will you taste again this side the grave.”
“Oh, Luvaine! What do you mean, man? Where are we?”
“That I can’t tell you—unless it’s a tool-house sunk in some spinney. But, for our prospects—look for yourself, David.”
“Is it so bad as that?” said Tuke, sitting up in his turn.
“Look for yourself, David,” repeated the soldier; “and tell me if you see one hope of escape.”
Both hearers scrambled to their feet, and one of them flung open the door. The mouth of their refuge looked westwards, so that by good fortune it was little encumbered of the driving snow; but that had drifted and piled itself over the easterly slope of the mound in such a manner as to throw an irregular outwork, varying from one yard to many in depth, all about them, and upon this fresh deposits from the bewildered sky were ceaselessly accumulating. It had fallen deep dusk through all the high thicket that encompassed their clearing; but it was yet light enough to see how the white storm—disciplining its fury as the wind dropped with night—was settled to a direct purpose of crushing under the whole resistance of life. Now the flakes fell in dense, sluggish lines upon the open ground, as if the vast weight already cast down were drawing out the very entrails of the heavens.
Blythewood levered himself up and sprang outside. The fall made of him in a moment a man of snow.
“What are we to do?” he shouted. “Good Lord! think of the house and of them two fuming for us to return! Shan’t we make a dash through the wood and try at least to get our bearin’s?”
Tuke had heard a sound, and had bent over Dennis. He came to the opening.
“The poor fellow is half-delirious, I think,” said he, “and in no state to go on. Make the effort, you, and I’ll stay here with him.”
“David,” said Luvaine, “I’m for you. Give me a hand.”
“No,” said the baronet—“not for all the little devils of Angels in the world!”
He jumped down again.
“We’ll stick together,” he cried. “What ails the man?”
He was lying on his heap, flushed and with his eyes closed. Now and again his lips would mutter meaningless fragments of speech.
“This is a girl in breeches,” said Luvaine. “We should have set him on a jackass.”
“It wouldn’t have been courteous to throw all the burden on you, sir,” said Tuke politely.
Blythewood burst out laughing.
“David,” said the soldier in a high voice, “there have been those who have learnt before now the danger of riding me roughshod, and——”
A fresh explosion greeted him, and he stopped, frowning heavily.
“Captain Luvaine,” said Tuke, looking round, “I would remind you that this man, knowing himself of a poor constitution, has cheerfully submitted it to considerable hardship for your benefit——”
“Well, sir, I make no denial of his cheerfulness, or of his sense of duty to his superiors.”
“—And that for some time now a large burden of responsibility, wholly unconnected with any interest of mine, has lain upon my shoulders.”
“You refer to the stone? Surely, sir, you don’t hold me to blame for it, or, in a matter of such importance to me, grudge the sacrifice of a little personal comfort?”
“I leave you to judge of that—as of the propriety of some little courteous acknowledgment.”
“You have it in full,” said the soldier sullenly. “If I fail to express it, you must understand me to be a man of few words.”
Blythewood had his tongue in his cheek.
“We’re all babes in the wood,” he cried; “with a fair chance of sufferin’ their fate. Let’s get under the leaves and tell stories, and not risk goin’ to heaven squabblin’. Hasn’t a man of us a flask about him?”
They were not vouchsafed even that comfort. The long night drew upon them huddled down there in their burrow. The cold was at first piercing, and they soon fell silent, each as wrapped in dismal reflection as, inadequately, in his great-coat. They could not sleep, but only shiver and suffer; and the servant moaned and whispered intermittently through the endless hours. His master did what he could for him in the pitchy darkness, building him a pillow of dead leaves and drawing the skirts of his own surtout about the icy feet.
Towards dawn, however, a little comfort of warmth triumphed in the cabined hole. This was because the snow had then completely enwrapped their place of refuge. One by one, weak and exhausted, they dropped into a shallow abyss of sleep.
Tuke was the first to come to himself again. He started up with a jerk, and felt the rat of hunger gnawing at his ribs.
“Now,” he thought—when he could at last recall his senses—“whither does this tend? We have not eaten or drunk for nigh twenty-four hours, if I may judge, and a definite movement of some sort becomes necessary. Surely four strong men should be able to master any situation.”
Then he thought of Whimple, and bent his head to listen. The man was breathing regularly and profoundly.
Looking up again, with an exclamation of pleasure, he was aware of a little weak finger of light pointing into the gloom. Day had broken. He got to his cramped feet, jubilant in a moment, and, feeling for the door above, essayed to open it. Something resisted. He put all his nerve into a mighty push, felt the hinges yield—then the obstruction; and in an instant a great buttress of snow fell away from the outside and light leaped into the pit.
Light gorgeous and bountiful. The snow had ceased; a hard wintry sun revealed a little surrounding world of heaped and drifted desolation, wherein the very trees seemed but accidents of the storm, or frost-flowers enamelled upon the wide windows of the mist.
The noise of his onset and the gush of radiant air awakened two other of the sleepers.
“Out!” he cried softly, for fear of disturbing Dennis—“up and out and reconnoitre!”
He scrambled, himself, to the open, and was joined by his companions.
“Where in the name of mystery are we?” he murmured.
In the heart of a little wood, apparently—in a clearing ringed about with trees, and so choked, in the course of those fifteen or so pregnant hours, with the white fall, as to seem to offer an insurmountable barrier to their escape. Towards the middle of the circle the snow lay shallowest; but all around against the tree-trunks it sloped upwards to a considerable height, suggesting a bowl of whipped cream that had stiffened to the shape of the vessel it lay in.
“Gentlemen,” said Tuke, “it behoves us to make the struggle. The sky is resolute steel; to remain here is to perish. What do you say?”
Blythewood gave out a rather tortured little laugh. He, as they all did, wore an unshorn and haggard look; but his lips were set grimly.
“I’m with the fox that bit off his foot rather than remain in the trap,” he said.
“And I. Now, will you two try to push into and through the trees somewhere, that we may at least get our bearings? I will remain with Whimple while you are gone, and will make the attempt on my own account if you return unsuccessful. It will be as well to keep a reserve of strength.”
“Oh! certainly,” said Luvaine. “And if we are fortunate, sir, you can set your care for a fellow-creature against our trouble and endurance.”
Sir David pulled the speaker hastily away.
“Au revoir!” he cried over his shoulder. “I hope we shall bring you tidings.”
Tuke watched them wade their first, comparatively easy, paces; then he dived into the cabin once more.
“Dennis!” he cried.
The man was sitting up, an expression of the most profound astonishment on his face; but all token of fever vanished.
“My good fellow—you are in your senses again?”
“Am I, sir? Then they are queerly lodged. Wait!”
He passed his hand over his forehead in a bewildered manner.
“I remember,” he muttered. “The walk and my dead mother, and then——?”
“We fought our way back, Dennis. Lost and beaten we stumbled upon this unspeakable refuge, and here we have lain all night.”
“This?—this?” (Whimple’s eyes were wandering over roof and floor of the little chamber.) “Surely, sir, you know where we are?”
“Not I, indeed.”
“In your own grounds, sir—the old ice-house in the thicket.”
Tuke stared a moment; then, with a shout, scrambled up through the opening and gave out a yell of recall. There was no response. His two companions, to whatever fortune, were vanished and out of earshot. Convinced of this, he turned and slipped again into his burrow.
“You are sure, Dennis?”
“Quite sure, sir.”
“And we have fancied ourselves buried in some isolated spinney, and looked to nothing but a lingering death where none could come nigh us through the drifts.”
“Is it so bad as that? We may find it hard to win to the house even yet, then.”
“Tush! you faint rogue. My heart sings like a cricket. Sir David and Captain Luvaine are gone to explore. We will have the laugh of them when they return.”
“Are they away, sir?”
Something of the familiar look of nervousness and hesitation came to his face.
“What is it, Whimple?”
The man burst out all at once:
“Let me take the opportunity, now and for ever, to ease my heart of the last of its burden—to tell my dear master all that I have so long withheld from him.”
“You wish to?”
“I have always wished to; but while she lived—sir, she was my mother, and it were bitter that a son should record his mother’s shame.”
He turned away his head, so that his face fell into shadow.
“The wrong she suffered was at the hands of my father that was murdered and strung up on the downs.”
“Yes, yes,” said Tuke. “That is not all unexpected.”
“It was a fearful wrong, sir, committed on a helpless girl; for she had flouted and dared him; and I it was that was born to be the shameful witness of my father’s violence, and the victim now of my mother’s hate and loathing, now of her furious caresses. She carried me with her into the hiding her profession secured her; for she was a bold horse-woman and popular in travelling shows. But when I was turned nine, she left me under care in a seaport town; and thereafter I saw her but at long intervals, and then to mark little but the hardening of her nature and the steady elimination from it of all kindly and social sentiments. Still, I was to learn from her own lips what, I think, a man can never find it in his sympathy to interpret—the inconsistency of a woman’s soul. No doubt that is like the figure called a parallax——”
“Oh! Dennis—confound your parallax. To my mind it is more like a parachute—an empty thing that any draught shall influence.”
“You don’t mean that, sir.”
“Don’t I?—Well, talk in English, you rascal. Your learning hips a simple country squire.”
“It is no learning, indeed; but a little love for books. She told me of my origin, sir. Judge of what the revelation was to me, who was ignorant as yet of any word of the wicked story. She told me all, and she told me—sir, she said to me, in a burst of wild defiance, that she was about to place herself under the protection of the very man who years before had wrought her that great evil.”
“Am I surprised, Dennis? I think not. I have gone to school in the world. Woman is the archetype of rebellion. She it was pulled down the angels. She must revolt against any restriction not imposed by herself, and she has always a fiercer joy in defying the social laws than she has pleasure in subscribing to them. She knows the world was her original birthright, I suppose, and has a secret admiration for the sort of crime that lost her her heritage. Cutwater scorned the conventions that ostracized her, and he had blackened his soul for her sake. Queer reasoning, maybe from our point of view; but—yes, I can understand her returning to him.”
“She did, sir; and for years I saw her no more. She returned to him, and, as I afterwards learned, soon wearied my father of her presence, and left him, taking with her the baby-daughter that she had borne to him. You know the rest—how, but a little before his death, my father, remembering the fact of my existence, summoned me to him and sought to practise on my simplicity. It was what I had dreaded ever since I had been acquainted of the cruel truth. It finished what my long anguish of suspense had begun. Constitutionally without fibre, I became the nerveless, haunted creature of your first knowledge.”
“And it was after his death that your mother brought the girl to burden you with its charge?”
“No burden, sir. I joyed to have the little thing. But she was uncanny. From near the first she showed herself instinctively attracted to the dreadful thing on the downs, and when the head fell and she could secure it, she came home with a posy face of delight. It was chance hearing of the story of his murder that brought my mother to me with the child; and at first she would give a little to its keep; but, as the years went on, and she herself become poorer and wilder, it was she also that must become in a measure my charge; though she would never set foot in his house, or take from me aught but the barest of necessaries.”
“Well, Dennis—and this was the story you confided to Mr. Creel?”
“The story, sir; as you know it all now—and God bless you and him!”
“And do you think the poor woman there had knowledge of the treasure she bore away in the skull?”
“I cannot think so. He was not the man to put his confidence in any of her sex; and you must remember, sir, that he had always carried a make-believe in his eye-socket, that was a mark of the familiar terror of his glance; and that ’twas his cunning only substituted the stone for the glass. That the thing dropped out anywhere on its passage to and from is the most likely solution.”
“No doubt; and we can’t hunt over seven square miles or so of grassy down, as we hunted—that reminds me; you never heard of our discovery in the wardrobe, when——”
A joyous whoop sounded in their ears, and, as Tuke got to his feet, the aperture was darkened by the figures of the returned explorers.
“Now,” said Sir David, looking down into the pit, with his arms akimbo—“ain’t we heroes? And where would you guess we’ve been to the trouble to pitch our camp?”
“Not in mine own grounds?” said Tuke. “No, no!”
“Who the deuce has been tellin’ you? P’raps you think that spells the end of our difficulties? Are you Julius Cæsar, sir—or whoever the cove was that went over Mount Blank? I tell you there’s a range of drifts between this and the house as big as Snowdon.”
“Then, now comes my turn. Stay you here and leave the rest to me.”
As he spoke, distant, but sharp through the frosty air, came the report of a gun.