Max Pemberton - Murder Mysteries Boxed-Set - 40+ Books in One Edition

“Did you come alone, Okyada?” I asked my servant presently.

He dissented as he folded the coils of rope.

“The honourable Scotchman—he is waiting with the lantern, excellency.”

I smiled, but did not offend his sense of that which was due to so great a person as Balaam, the Scotch boatswain.

“Would it be far from here, Okyada?”

“That which your excellency could walk in a minute.”

I said no more, but followed him up the cliff side, scrambling and slipping like a boy upon a holiday jaunt, and no less eager for the heights. To the darkness of the night and the quickness of our movements, my faithful servant and I undoubtedly owed our lives. Remember that the valley now raised the cry of alarm from one end to the other. Whistles were blown, bells were rung, rifles fired wildly. That the bullets struck the rocks both above and below us, my ears told me unmistakably. Had we been an open mark moving in the clear light of day, the suspense of this flight, the doubt and the hazard of it had been easier to support. As it was, we went on blindly, our hands clasping the rough boulders, our feet scattering the pebbles of the path; and conscious through it all that a wild bullet might find a lucky billet and grass either or both of us as though we had been hares in a tricky covert. Never was a man more thankful than I when a vast fissure in the cliff side appeared before us suddenly as a sanctuary door opened by an unknown friend’s hand. By it we passed gladly, and were instantly lost to the view of those in the valley; while a profound silence of ultimate night enveloped us. There was no longer the need to pant and toil upon a crazy slope. Nature herself had here cut a path, and it appeared to lead into the very heart of the mountain.

Now, this path we followed, it may have been for some two hundred yards in a direction parallel to that of the valley we had quitted. Its gentle declivity brought us in the end to a low cavern of the rock, and here we found the boatswain, Balaam, sitting with his back to the cliff, smoking his pipe and guarding his ship’s lantern as calmly as though the scene had been Rotherhithe and the day a seaman’s Saturday. Hearing our approach, he bestirred himself sufficiently to fend the light and to ask a question.

“Would it be the Doctor and the wild man?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer he ran on, “I kenned your step, Doctor, and said you were doing finely. There’s firing on the hills, sir, and ye would be wise not to bide. I’m no gleg at the running myself, but yon manny can take the licht, and I’ll make shift for myself. Ay, Doctor, but if I had that bit of an ass the boys go daft upon⁠——”

I told him to show the way and not to talk, though I was glad enough to hear the good fellow’s voice. His name was Machie, but a donkey ride at Cowes christened him Balaam for good and all aboard the White Wings. Very methodically now, and with a seaman’s widening lurch, he set out to cross the cavern, Okyada and I upon his heels and all the mesh of subterranean wonder about us. Here, for a truth, a man might have feared to go at all, lantern or no lantern in his hand; for the cavern revealed the source of the boiling springs, and there was one great chamber of the rock so dreadful to breathe in, so white with steam and scalding spray, that my own courage would have recoiled from it but for the example set me by these brave fellows. They, however, held straight on without a word spoken, and coming to a clearer air presently they indicated to me that we were approaching some place of danger, and must now go with circumspection. Then I saw that the cavern roof narrowed rapidly until we stood in a passage so regularly moulded that the hand of man might have excavated it. And beyond this lay the Atlantic, plainly visible though the night was moonless. Never did a glimpse of the open water cheer my heart so bravely. Liberty, home, my friends! A man is a man upon the sea, though every port but one be shut against him. And the breath of life is in his lungs, and the desire of life at his heart. Nay, who shall deny it?

A sharp exclamation from the Scotchman, a sudden halt upon my servant’s part, quickly tempered these reflections upon liberty and brought me back to a sense of our situation and its dangers. That which they had seen, I now perceived to be nothing less than the figure of a man standing with his back to the rock as though guarding the entrance to the tunnel and there keeping watch, not only upon the path, but upon another figure which lay prone in the fair way and was, I had no doubt whatever, a figure of the dead. To come instantly to the conclusion that the dead was one of our own, and that he had been killed by one of the rifles whose report we had so recently heard, I found natural enough. Not only was it my thought, but that of the others with me, and together we halted in the cavern and asked what we should do. To be sure, we were not to be affrighted by a single sentry, though he carried a rifle in his hand; but the certainty that others would be within call, and that a single cry might bring them upon us, robbed us for a moment of any clear idea, and held us prisoners of the cave.

“’Twould have been the firing that I heard syne,” the boatswain whispered.

I turned to Okyada and asked him what we should do. His own uncertainty was reflected in his attitude. He stood as still as a figure of marble.

“The master wait,” he said presently. “I think that I shall know if the master wait. Let the lantern be covered. I shall see by the darkness.”

I told him that I forbade him to go, and that it was madness to suppose that the sentry would stand there alone. He did not hear me, disappearing immediately upon his words, and being lost to our view as completely as though the earth had opened and swallowed him up. I shall always say that a quicker, surer-footed, or more faithful fellow never lived to earn the gratitude of an unemotional master. My own confidence in him found its best expression in the complacency with which I waited for his news. He would kill the sentry if need be—of that I felt sure—and there was something horrible in the thought that a living man, whose figure we could see in the dim light beyond the cavern, stood upon the very brink of eternity and might have spoken his last word on earth. This reflection was my own. The stolid boatswain made nothing of it. He covered the lantern methodically and squatted back against the rock.

“Yon yellow laddie’s fine,” he whispered. “’Twould be as good as dead the man were. Has your honour such a thing as a bit of baccy upon ye? No; well, I’ll do well wanting it.”

I smiled, but did not answer him. In truth, I had begun to find the minutes of waiting intolerable. What with the oppressive atmosphere of the tunnel, the heated, steam-laden air, and upon this the ghostly fascination of the spectre at the cavern’s mouth, it came to me that my own strength might not carry me safely through the ordeal. What kept Okyada? The sentry, on his part, did not appear to have moved since I had first seen him. There was no sound in the cave save that of the hissing steam behind us. I could not discover the little figure of my servant, though I was looking from the darkness toward the light. Had he come to the conclusion that it was dangerous to go on? This seemed possible, and I had already taken a few steps towards the tunnel’s mouth when his figure suddenly emerged into the light, and standing side by side with the sentry, he uttered that soft, purring whistle which called to us to come on.

“Yon’s one of our own, then,” the boatswain said, starting to his feet clumsily.

“Then someone has gone under, and he is keeping watch over him,” I replied. “God send that it is not one of our crew.”

“Amen to that, sir, though ’twere in a Christian man to say that we maun all die when the day comes.”