CHAPTER III
MAROONED
A cry in the windy dusk; a sudden, hollow booming overhead; a vision ofcountless wings in panic, sketched in black upon a background of dulledsilver; two heavy detonations and, with the least of intervals, athird; three vivid flashes of crimson and gold stabbing the purpletwilight; and then the acrid reek of smokeless drifting into Amber'sface, while from the sky, where the V-shaped flock had been, twostricken bundles of blood-stained feathers fell slowly, fluttering....
Honking madly, the unscathed brethren of the slain wheeled abruptlyand, lashed by the easterly gale, fled out over the open sea,triangular formation dwindling rapidly in the clouded distances.
Shot-gun poised abreast, his keen eyes marking down the fall of hisprey, Amber stood without moving, exultation battling with a vagueremorse in his bosom--as always when he killed. Quain, who had droppedback a pace after firing but one shot and scoring an unqualified missat close range, now stood plucking clumsily, with half frozen fingers,at an obstinate breech-lock. This latter resisting his every wile, histemper presently slipped its leash; as violently as briefly he swore:"Damn!"
"Gladly," agreed Amber, without turning. "But what?"
"This gun!"
"Your gun?"
"Of course." There were elaborations which would not lend themselves todecorative effect upon a printed page.
"Then damn it yourself, Quain; I'm sure you can do it ever so much morethoroughly than I. But what's the matter?"
"Rim-jammed cartridge," explained Quain between his teeth. The lockjust then yielding to his awkward manipulation, stock and barrel cameapart in his hands. "Just my beastly luck!" he added gratuitously. "Itwouldn't've been me if--! How many'd you pot, Davy?"
"Only two," said Amber, lowering his weapon, extracting the spentshells, and reloading.
"Only _two!_" The information roused in Quain a demon of sarcasm.Fumbling in his various pockets for a shell-extractor, he grunted hisdisgust. "Here, lend us your thingumbob; I've lost mine. Thanky....Only two! How many'd you expect to drop, on a snapshot like that?"
"Two," returned Amber so patiently that Quain requested him,explosively, to go to the devil. "If you don't mind," he said, "I'll goafter my ducks instead. You'll follow? They're over there, on our way."And accepting Quain's snort for an affirmative he strolled off in thedirection indicated, hugging his gun in the crook of his arm.
Fifty yards or so away he found the ducks, side by side in a littlehollow. "Fine fat birds," he adjudged them sagely, weighing each in hishand ere dropping it into his lean game-bag. "This makes up for a lotof cold and waiting."
Satisfaction glimmering in his grave dark eyes, he lingered in thehollow, while the frosty air, whipping madly through the sand-hills,stung his face till it glowed beneath the brown. But presently, likethe ghost of a forgotten kiss, something moist and chill touched gentlyhis cheek, and was gone. Startled, he glanced skywards, then extendedan arm, watching it curiously while the rough fabric of his sleeve wassalted generously with fine white flakes. Though to some extentapprehended (they had been blind indeed to have ignored the menace ofthe dour day just then dying) snow had figured in their calculations aslittle as the scarcity of game. Amber wondered dimly if it would work achange in their plans, prove an obstacle to their safe return acrossthe bay.
The flurry thickening in the air, a shade of anxiety colored his mood."This'll never do!" he declared, and set himself to ascend a nearbydune. For a moment he slipped and slid vainly, the dry sand treacherousto his feet, the brittle grasses he clutched snapping off or comingaway altogether with their roots; but in time he found himself upon therounded summit, and stood erect, straining the bitter air into pantinglungs as he cast about for bearings.
Behind him a meagre strip of sand held back a grim and angry sea;before him lay an eighth of a mile of sand-locked desolation, and thenthe weltering bay--a wide two miles of leaping, shouting waves,slate-coloured but white of crests. Beyond, seen dimly as a wallthrough driving sheets of snow, were the darkly wooded rises of themainland. In the west, to his left, the blank, impersonal eye of thelight-house, its pillar invisible, winked red, went out, and flashed upwhite. Over all, beneath a low and lustreless sky as flat as a plate,violet evening shadows were closing in like spectral skirts of theimminent night. But, in the gloom, their little cat-boat lay occult tohis searching gaze.
Quain's voice recalling him, he turned to discover his host stumblingthrough a neighbouring vale, and obeying a peremptory wave of the elderman's hand, descended, accompanied by an avalanche in miniature.
"Better hurry," shouted Amber, as soon as he could make himself heardabove the screaming of the gale. "Wind's freshening; it looks like meanweather."
"Really?" Quain fell into step at his side. "You 'stonish me. But thegood Lord knows I'm willin'. Whereabout's the boat?"
"Blessed if I know: over yonder somewhere," Amber told him, wavingtoward the bay-shore an arm as vaguely helpful as his information.
"Thank you so much. Guess I can find her all right. Hump yo'self,Davy."
They plodded on heavily, making fair progress in spite of the hinderingsand. Nevertheless it had grown sensibly darker ere they debouched uponthe frozen flats that bordered the bay; and now the wind bore down uponthem in full-winged fury, shrieking in their ears, searing their eyes,tearing greedily at the very breath of their nostrils, and searchingout with impish ingenuity the more penetrable portions of theirclothing.
For a moment Quain paused, irresolute, peering right and left, thenbegan to trudge eastwards, heavy boots crunching the thin sedge-ice. Alittle later they came to the water's edge and proceeded steadily alongit, Quain leading confidently. Eventually he tripped over someobstacle, stumbled and lurched forward and recovered his balance withan effort, then remained with bowed head, staring down at his feet.
"Hurt yourself, old man?"
"No!" snapped Quain rudely.
"Then what in--"
"Eh?" Quain roused, but an instant longer looked him blankly in theeye. "Oh," he added brightly--"oh, she's gone."
"The boat----?"
"The boat," affirmed Quain, too discouraged for the obvious retortungracious. He stooped and caught up a frayed end of rope, exhibitingit in witness to his statement. "Ain't it hell?" he inquiredplaintively.
Amber's gaze followed the rope, the further end of which was rovethrough the ring of a small grapnel anchor half buried in the spongyearth. "Gone!" he echoed dismally.
"Gone away from here," said Quain deliberately, nodding at the rope'send. "The tide floated her off, of course; but how this happened isbeyond me. I could kill Antone." He named the Portuguese labourercharged with the care of the boats at Tanglewood. "It's his job to seethat these cables are replaced when they show signs of wear." He castthe rope from him in disdain and wheeled to stare baywards. "There!" hecried, levelling an arm to indicate a dark and fleeting shadow upon thestorm-whipped waters. "There she goes--not three hundred feet off. Itcan't be five minutes since she worked loose. I don't see why...! If ithadn't been for that damned cartridge...! It's the devil's own luck!"
A blur of snow swept between boat and shore; when it had passed theformer was all but indistinguishable. From a full heart Quainblasphemed fluently.... "But if she holds as she stands," he amendedquickly, his indomitable spirit fostering the forlorn hope, "she'll goaground in another five minutes--and I know just where. I'll go afterher."
"The deuce you will! How?"
"There's an old skimmy up the shore a ways." Already Quain was movingoff in search of it. "Noticed her this morning. Daresay she leaks likea sieve, but at worst the water's pretty shoal inshore, hereabouts."
"Cold comfort in that."
"Better than none, you amiable--"
"Can you swim?" Amber demanded pointedly.
"Like a fish. And you?"
"Not like a fish."
"Damn!" Quain brought up short with a shin barked against a thwart ofthe rowboat he had been seeking, and in recognition of the misha
pliberally insulted his luck.
Amber, knowing that his hurt was as inconsiderable as his ill-temper,which was more than half-feigned to mask his anxiety, laughed quietly,meanwhile inspecting their find with a critical eye.
"You don't seriously mean to put off in this crazy hen-coop, do you?"he asked.
"Just precisely that. It's the only way."
"It simple madness. I won't--"
"You don't want to stay here all night, do you?"
"No, but--"
"Well, then, lend us a hand and don't stand there grumbling. Bethankful for what you've got, which is me and my enterprise."
"Oh, all right."
Together they put their shoulders to the bows of the old, flat-bottomedrowboat, with incredible exertions uprooting it from its ancient bed,and at length had it afloat.
Panting, Quain mopped his forehead with a handkerchief much the worsefor a day's association with gun-grease, and peered beneath his handinto the murk that veiled the bay.
"There she is," he declared confidently: "aground." He pointed. "I'llfetch up with her in no time."
But Amber could see nothing in the least resembling the catboat, andsaid so with decision.
"She's there, all right," insisted Quain. "'Tain't my fault if you'reblind. Here, hold this, will you, while I find me a pole of some sort."He thrust into Amber's hand an end of rotten painter at which therowboat strained, and wandered off into the night, in the course oftime returning with an old eel-pot stake, flotsam of some summer storm."Pure, bull-headed luck!" he crowed, jubilant, brandishing his trophy;and jumped into the boat. "Now sit tight till I come back?...Huh--what?"
"I'm coming, too," Amber repeated quietly.
"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--takecare of this till I come back, like a good fellow."
He thrust the butt of his shot-gun into Amber's face, and the latter,seizing it, was rewarded by a vigorous push that sent him back half adozen feet. At the same time the painter slipped from his grasp andQuain, lodging an end of the eel-pot stake on the hard sand bottom, puthis weight upon it. Before Amber could recover, the boat had slid offand was melting swiftly into the shadows.
After a bit Quain's voice came back: "Don't fret, Davy. I'm all right."
Amber cupped hands to mouth and sent a cheerful hail ringing inresponse. Simultaneously the last, least, indefinite blur that stoodfor the boat in the darkness, vanished in a swirl of snow; and he wasalone with the storm and his misgivings. Upon these he put acheck--would not dwell upon them; but their influence none the lessproved strong enough to breed in him a resistless restlessness and keephim tramping up and down a five-yard stretch of comparatively solidearth: to and fro, stamping his feet to keep his blood circulating,lugging both guns, one beneath either arm, hunching his shoulders upabout his ears in thankless attempt to prevent wet flakes from siftingin between his neck and collar--thus, interminably it seemed, to andfro, to and fro....
In the course of time this occupation defeated its purpose; the verymonotony of it sent his thoughts winging back to Quain; he worried morethan ever for his friend, reproaching himself unmercifully for that hehad suffered him to go alone--or at all. Quain had a wife and children;that thought proved insupportable.... Had he missed the catboataltogether? Or had he gained it only to find the motor disabled or thepropeller fouled with the wiry eel-grass that choked the shoals? Ineither instance he would be at the mercy of the wind, for even with thesail close-reefed he would have no choice other than to fly before thefury. Or had the boat possibly gone aground so hard and fast that Quainhad found himself unable to push her off and doomed to lie in her,helpless, against the fulling of the tide? Or (last and most grudgedguess of all) had the "skimmy" proved as unseaworthy as its dilapidatedappearance had proclaimed it?
Twenty minutes wore wearily away. Falling ever more densely, the snowdrew an impenetrable wan curtain between Amber and the world of lifeand light and warmth; while with each discordant blast the strength ofthe gale seemed to wax, its high hysteric clamour at times drowningeven the incessant deep bellow of the ocean surf. Once Amber paused inhis patrol, having heard, or fancying he had heard, the staccato_plut-plut-plut_ of a marine motor. On impulse, with a swelling heart,he swung his gun skywards and pulled both triggers. The double reportrang in his ears loud as a thunderclap.
In the moments that followed, while he stood listening, with everyfibre of his being keyed to attention, the sense of his utter isolationchilled his heart as with cold steel.
A little frantically he loaded and fired again; but what at first mighthave been thought the faint far echo of a hail he in the end set downreluctantly to a trick of the hag-ridden wind; to whose savage voice hedurst not listen long; in such a storm, on such a night, a man had butto hearken with a credulous ear to hear strange and terrible voiceswhispering, shrieking, gibbering, howling untold horrors....
An hour passed, punctuated at frequent intervals by gunshots. Thoughthey evoked no answer of any sort, hope for Quain died hard in Amber'sheart. With all his might he laboured to convince himself that hisfriend must have overtaken the drifting boat, and, forced to relinquishhis efforts to regain the beach, have scudded across the bay to themainland and safety; but this seemed a surmise at best so far-fetched,and one as well not overlong to be dwelt upon, lest by that veryinsistence its tenuity be emphasised, that Amber resolutely turned fromit to a consideration of his own plight and problematic way of escape.
His understanding of his situation was painfully accurate: he wasmarooned upon what a flood tide made a desert island but which at theebb was a peninsula--a long and narrow strip of sand, bounded on thewest by the broad, shallow channel to the ocean, on the east connectedwith the mainland by a sandbar which half the day lay submerged.
He had, then, these alternatives: he might either compose himself tohug the leeward side of a dune till daybreak (or till relief shouldcome) or else undertake a five-mile tramp on the desperate hope offinding at the end of it the tide out and the sandbar a safe footwayfrom shore to shore. Between the two he vacillated not at all; anythingwere preferable to a night in the dunes, beaten by the implacablestorm, haunted by the thought of Quain; and even though he were to findthe eastern causeway under water, at least the exercise would haveserved to keep him from freezing.
Ten minutes after his last cartridge had been fruitlessly discharged,he set out for the ocean beach, pausing at the first dune he came uponto scrape a shallow trench in the sand and cache therein both guns andhis game-bag. Marking the spot with a bit of driftwood stuck upright,he pressed on, eventually pausing on the overhanging lip of atwenty-foot bluff. To its foot the beach below was aswirl knee-deepwith the wash of breakers, broad patches of water black and glossy aspolished ebony alternating with vast expanses of foam and clottedspume, all aglow with pale winter phosporescence. Momentarily, as hewatched, at once fascinated and appalled, mountainous ridges ofblackness heaved up out of the storm's grey heart, offshore, and,curling crests edged with luminous white, swung in to crash and shatterthunderously upon the sands.
Awed and disappointed, Amber drew back. The beach was impassable; herewas 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 waythrough the bewildering dunes. And the prospect was not a littledisconcerting; afraid neither of wind nor of cold, he was wretchedlyafraid of going astray in that uncertain, shifting labyrinth. To loseoneself in that trackless wilderness...!
A demon of anxiety prodded him on: he must learn Quain's fate, or gomad. Once on the mainland it were a matter of facility to find his wayto the village of Shampton, telephone Tanglewood and charter a "team"to convey him thither. He shut his teeth on his determination and sethis face to the east.
Beset and roughly buffeted by the gale; the snow settling in ripplingdrifts in the folds of his clothing and upon his shoulders clinginglike a cloth; his face cut by clouds of sand flung hori
zontally withwell-nigh the force of birdshot from a gun: he bowed to the blast andplodded steadily on.
Imperceptibly fatigue benumbed his senses, blunted the keen edge of hisemotions; even the care for Quain became a mere dull ache in the backof his perceptions; of physical suffering he was unconscious. He fell aprey to freakish fancies--could stand aside and watch himself, an atomwhirling in the mad dance of the tempest, as the snow-flakes whirled,as little potent. He saw himself pitting his puny strength of mind andbody against the infinite force of the elements: saw himself fall andrise and battle on, gaining nothing: an atom, sport of high gods! Tothe flight of time he grew quite oblivious, his thoughts wandering inthe past, oddly afar to half-remembered scenes, to experiences morethan half-forgotten, both wholly irrelevant; picturesque and painfulmemories cast up from the deeps of the subconsciousness by someinexplicable convulsion of the imagination. For a long time he moved onin stupid, wondering contemplation of a shining crescent of sand backedby a green, steaming wall of jungle; there was a dense blue sky above,and below, on the beach, dense blue waters curled lazily up the feet ofa little, naked, brown child that played contentedly with a shell ofrainbow hues. Again he saw a throng upon a pier-head, and in itsforefront an unknown woman, plainly dressed, with deep brown eyeswherein Despair dwelt, tearless but white to the lips as she watched asteamer draw away. And yet again, he seemed to stand with others uponthe threshold of the cardroom of a Hong-Kong club: in a glare of garishlight a man in evening dress lay prone across a table on whoseabsorbent, green cloth a dark and ugly stain was widening slowly....But for the most part he fancied himself walking through scented,autumnal woods, beside a woman whose eyes were kind and dear, whoselips were sweet and tempting: a girl he had known not an hour but whomalready he loved, though he himself did not dream it nor discover ittill too late.... And with these many other visions formed anddissolved in dream-like phantasmagoria; but of them all the strongestand most recurrent was that of the girl in the black riding-habit,walking by his side down the aisle of trees. So that presently thetired and overwrought man believed himself talking with her, reasoning,arguing, pleading desperately for his heart's desire;... and wakenedwith a start, to hear the echo of her voice as though she had spokenbut the instant gone, to find his own lips framing the syllables of hername--"Sophia!"
Thus strangely he came to know that beyond question he loved. And hestopped short and stood blinking blindly at nothing, a littlefrightened by the depth and strength of this passion which had come tohim with such scant presage, realising for the first time that his needfor her was an insatiable hunger of the soul.... And she was lost tohim; half a world lay between them--or soon would. All his days he hadawaited, a little curiously, a little sceptical, the coming of thething men call Love; and when it had come to him he had not known itnor guessed it until its cause had slipped away from him.... Beyondrecall?
Abruptly he regained consciousness of his plight, and with an effortshook his senses back into his head. It was not precisely a time whenhe could afford to let his wits go wool-gathering. And he realised thathe had been, in a way, more than half-asleep as he walked; even now hewas drowsy, his eyes were heavy, his feet leaden--and numb with coldbesides. He had no least notion of what distance he might havetravelled or whether he had walked in a straight line or a circle; butwhen he thought to glance over his shoulder--there was at the momentperhaps more wind with less snow than there had been for some time--hefound the lighthouse watching him as it had from the first: as if hehad not won a step away from it for all his struggle and his pains. Thewhite, staring eye winked sardonically through a mist of flakes, wasblotted out and turned up a baleful red. It seemed to mock him, butAmber nodded at it with no unfriendly feeling. It still might serve hispurpose very well, if his strength held, since he had merely to keephis back to the light and the ocean beach upon his right to win to theShampton sandbar, whether soon or late.
Inflexible of purpose in the face of all his weariness anddiscouragement, he was on the point of resuming his march when he wasstruck by the circumstance that the whitened shoulder of a dune, quitenear at hand, should seem as if frosted with light--coldly luminous.
Staring, speculative, he hung in the wind--inquisitive as a cat butloath to waste time in footless inquiry. The snow-fall, setting in withaugmented violence, decided him. Where light was, there should be man,and where man, shelter.
His third eager stride opened up a wide basin in the dunes, filled witheddying veils of snow, and set, at some distance, with two brilliantsquares of light--windows in an invisible dwelling. In the spacebetween them, doubtless, there would be a door. But a second time hepaused, remembering that the island was said to be uninhabited. Onlyyesterday he had asked and been so informed.... Odd!
So passing strange he held it, indeed, that he was conscious of asingular reluctance to question the phenomenon. That superstitiousdread of the unknown which lies dormant in us all, in Amber stirred andawoke and held him back like a strong hand. Or, if there be such athing as a premonition of misfortune, he may be said to haveexperienced it in that hour; certainly a presentiment of evil crawledin his brain, and he hesitated at a time when he desired naught in theworld so much as that which the windows promised--light, heat and humancompanionship. He had positively to force himself on to seek the door,and even when he had stumbled against its step he twice lifted his handand let it fall without knocking.
There was not a sound within that he could hear above the clamour ofthe goblin night.
In the end, however, he knocked stoutly enough.