by W. W. Tarn
CHAPTER III
THE HAUNTED CAVE
A sunlit sheet of sea, violet and azure, clothed in slender cloudshadows and heaving gently to the long Atlantic ground-swell. Upthrough the calm water, to meet the eye of the gazer, came the greenclearness of stone, and blinks of unveined sand showing white betweenthe brown tangled blades of the great oar-weed; and you might see aschool of little cuddies, heads all one way, playing hide and seek inthe sea forest, and caring no whit for the clumsy armored crab beneaththem, who crawled sideways, a laborious patch of color in theshimmering transparency. Up out of the deep water the gray rocks roseclear and fine, a mass of platforms and pinnacles, roughened withbarnacles and tufted with dulse, whose crimson leaves floated andswung in the white foam of the lisping swell; and above the rocks andbeyond the sea's reach the cliff stood up black, showing all thestrata that had gone to the making of it outlined with little patchesof coarse grass. On one such patch grazed without concern a sheepwhich had slipped over, happy in her ignorance of the fact that shecould never be drawn up again alive; the wiser raven overhead wasclanging away with short barks to tell his mate. On a ridge on thecliff side sat a pair of young scarfs, almost invisible save when theytwisted their long necks about like two snakes, trying to make uptheir minds to follow their mother, who had just flopped clumsily intothe water, feet first, and had turned there and then into a miracle ofeasy grace, as she used her head to dash the spray over her back. Outat sea a solan rose steadily in a sweeping spiral, the white and blackof him glittering in the sun; suddenly he checked, reversed engines,and fell plump like an inverted cross, his long raking wings clappingto as he struck the water; a moment, and he was up, and there sat,choking and gobbling over his fish, ere he rose again in his majesticrings.
The two children had grounded their boat on a little pebble beachbetween the rocks, and were sitting on a big tuft of sea pinks,munching handfuls of the sweet dulse and watching the solan at hisfishing. They were by way of fishing themselves, but the afternoon wasas yet too early and too clear for them. The Urchin had a pile ofstones beside him, and was apparently trying to see how many times intwenty he could miss a large and obvious spur of rock. Fiona had abook of poetry, and was making intermittent efforts to read; but theworld was too full of things to give poetry a fair chance.
The Urchin threw his last stone away.
"Silly sitting here," he said; "come and explore."
So, scrambling and sliding, the two made their way across the rocks,stopping at every rock pool to raise its fringe of weed with carefulhands and investigate the wonder of the little world below; seaflowers of every hue, white and green, gray and orange, purple andwhite and gray and purple again, some smooth and satisfied, otherswith tentacles greedily awash, that could be induced to suck at asmall finger dexterously inserted; sea shells of every contour, someliving and clutching at the rock, some cast off and dead, others againprotruding alien claws, resurrected to a life of artificial movementby the little hermit crabs whose tails they sheltered; here and therethe spiky pink globe of a sea urchin, waiting for the tide to floathim off. And in one deep little pot, with sides green like a grotto offerns, they found a miniature battle. A small green crab, who had casthis shell, sat humped in a recess of the grotto, a thing soft andvulnerable, a delight to the enemy; and in front of him, excited andtransparent, were half a dozen shrimps, the horn on each foreheadpointed at him; from time to time some young gallant would dash in toprod the helpless monster, and at once backwater again into the ranksof his friends. The crab bore his torment with a patience born of theknowledge that each minute his new carapace was hardening; the shrimpshad no wit to count the cost, or reckon the odds that the rising tidemight bear them away in safety from the day of vengeance.
On hands and knees, not daring to breathe on the limpid surface of thepool, the children watched the little drama. From the cliff top theheated air rose dancing into the sky. So still were earth and air andsea that the old finner's rise sounded as though the cliff werefalling. He had worked nearer in to the rocks than seemed possible forhis ninety feet of blubber and muscle, and as his black side rolledover, the water about him boiled like a pot; but he did not splash,for he had been well brought up and always knew what his tail wasdoing, though it was so far away.
"Shiver these rocks," he began in a rage, as he flung two fountainsout of his nose. Then he caught sight of Fiona and the gleam of thered bracelet.
"Oh my fins and flippers!" he spouted. "I ask pardon, young lady; Ihaven't the manners of a grampus. And they told me about you."
"Who's they?" asked Fiona, ungrammatically.
"Friends at Court, friends at Court," said the finner. "What a thingto have. 'No need of the old sailorman,' said I. But they said I mustgo. And I've scraped the barnacles off my precious tail. Will it runto some tobacco?"
"Will what run?" said the girl. "Your tail? What is it you want?"
"Hints are wasted, I see," said the whale. "'One question,' said I.Only one. But magic is magic, you know, even for a tough oldsailorman. Come now, one question. I'm too far inshore for myliking."
Fiona understood.
"Is it about my treasure?" she said.
"Yours, or that boy's there, whichever you like," said the whale. "Butonly one, only one."
For about two seconds Fiona did some hard mental drill. Then she said:
"Will you please tell me where the Urchin can find his treasure?"
"You do have luck," said the finner. "Think of it, then. O you littlefishes, think of it. If you'd asked the other, I didn't know theanswer. Wouldn't have got an answer, and my tail all scraped fornothing. And this one, my great-great-grandmother saw it all, andnobody knows here but me and the seals and one man, and he's too fatto count. West cave, Scargill Island; and bring you luck, my dear.Will it run to some tobacco?"
"Thank you so much," said Fiona politely. "And I'm sorry I haven't anytobacco with me. But if you could wait a few minutes . . ."
"Shiver it, I'm scraping again," said the whale. "No tobacco and veryfew barnacles in this world. O my grandmother's flukes, I might aswell be a bottlenose!"
Once more the water boiled, and beneath it the huge black body shotaway for the open sea.
"Fiona," said the boy, "do you really think it's cricket?"
"What isn't cricket?" she asked.
"Fiona," he said, "I've been a brother to you. I have done all thethings a brother ought to do. I have taught you to throw like a boy. Ihave pinched you for new clothes. I have called you names, to make yougood-tempered. I have made remarks on your personal appearance, toprevent your being vain. I have even fought with you, solely for yourgood. And this is how you repay me. The other day you pretended to betalking to a shore lark; to-day it was an old whale, who spouted andbanged his tail on the rock. If it's a joke, I don't see it. If it'snot a joke, do go into a lunatic asylum, and let me find a simplerjob."
Fiona tossed up mentally between hitting him and laughing; it camedown laughing.
"Urchin," she said, "it's all right. I don't understand it much betterthan you do, but it has something to do with this bracelet of mine. Ican really understand them and they can understand me. If you doubt myword, we will fight a duel with the boat stretchers, and I will buryyou in the sand here afterwards."
"Oh, I believe you when you talk like that," said the Urchin; "onlyit's worse than the Latin grammar. _Psittacus loquitur_, "the parrottalks"; but this thing seemed to be a whale; it was very like one."
"It was a whale," said Fiona. "He said his great-great-grandmother hadseen the Spanish captain land his doubloons, and that it was in thewest cave on Scargill Island."
"That means the big cave at the end facing the sea," said the boy.
"The cave that no one has ever got to the end of," said Fiona.
"The cave that's haunted," said the boy.
"But of course it's haunted; it's the ghosts of the Spaniards. Sillyof us not to have guessed."
Fiona had a hazy recollection of things her fath
er used to say.
"I expect the haunting is thousands of years older than theSpaniards," she said. "Urchin, are you afraid of ghosts?"
"Not a bit," said the Urchin stoutly. "They would be splendid to throwstones at. It wouldn't hurt them."
"Come on then, let's go," said the girl. "There's lots of daylight."
"None of the people here will go into it, you know," said the Urchin.
"I know," said Fiona. "All the more reason for going on our own. Theremight really be something there, if no one ever goes to take it away."
So the boat was launched, and the adventure also. Fiona pulled stroke;the Urchin was a clumsy and unpunctual bow, and the girl had to steerfrom the stroke oar, which needs more doing than you may think if youhaven't tried it. But they made the end of Scargill in time, and thenFiona took both the oars and coasted, while the Urchin got out acouple of bamboo poles, garnished with white flies, and let the caststrail, occasionally getting one of the beautiful little scarlet lythe,that came at the fly with the spring and dash of a sea trout. For evenadventurers need supper. And so they came, past many a smaller cavemouth in the black side of the island, to the huge bluff that frontsthe full Atlantic, and the great west cave.
Atlantic was half asleep to-day, and muttered drowsily to the quietrocks outside. But the great cave was seldom quiet. In the winter,when Atlantic turned himself restlessly and spoke aloud, the sound ofhis speaking came back from its depths like the roar of a heavy gun;and even in the stillness the lisp of the swell in it echoed as fromthe roots of the island in a low intermittent boom. Outside, on thecalm water, floated the whiskered head of a seal, watching the boatwith gentle, fearless eyes,--"the officer on guard," Fionawhispered;--and from the black cliff's face, like a hanging fringeover the mouth of the cave, the water splashed down, trickle bytrickle, in quick, heavy drops. The children rowed in through thelittle shower, and Fiona paddled gently up the cave. Its hugelimestone walls stood up stark on either hand, rising into thedarkness above, and sinking below into the green water, as far as eyecould follow them. Near the water-line grew a little seaweed, and somewhite whelks clung; but as they went down the waterway these vanished,and gray cliff and green water alike began to turn black. Lookingback, Fiona could see a bright patch, a patch of sky andsky-reflecting sea, framed in the narrow slit of the cave's mouth. Thewaterway was narrowing now; she shipped her oars and stood up, usingone as a paddle, and instructing the Urchin how to fend off the boat'sstern with his hands. In front, on a ledge in the cave's roof, it wasjust possible to make out a row of blue dots in the growing darkness;as the boat drew nearer, the blue dots fluttered, detached themselvesfrom the cliff, and a swarm of pigeons came whirring over the boat anddown the cave toward the sunlight;--"Your ghosts, Urchin," said thegirl. Henceforward the cave was void of life, unless some strange,eyeless fish lurked in its inky depths. Darker and darker grew thewaterway, and the last gleam of light vanished. Fiona was feeling herway now, aided by the phosphorescent drip from her oar blade; theUrchin, with unusual sense, splashed his hands in the water toincrease the pale glow, which just revealed the line of the cliff.Neither dare speak now; possibly, had Fiona not had some idea of whatwas coming, she would have turned. But already there was a faint gleamahead, faint as a glow worm, but still a gleam; and as the boat slidforward, and the low boom in the depths of the cave grew closer, thecave walls very slowly began to grow gray again out of the blackness.A few minutes more, and the walls were an outline, and before them, afringe of white on round wet stones, the end of the waterway. And asthe boat grounded, Fiona pointed up, and the Urchin, looking, saw alittle round hole; a natural shaft ran down into the cave from thesurface of the island, giving light enough for their eyes, nowaccustomed to the darkness, to distinguish outlines.
They drew their boat up on the stones far enough for the swell not todislodge it; then the same impulse seized them both and they burst outlaughing, not aloud, for something in the place made it impossible tolaugh or talk aloud, but in a kind of mirthless whisper.
"We've come without any lights," said Fiona in an undertone.
"We have," said the Urchin. "But probably the stuff is only a fewyards above high-water mark; they wouldn't go far in."
"They might have," said Fiona; "they'd have had torches orsomething."
"Let's go as far as we can, anyway, as we are here," said the Urchin.
So they started scrambling over the stones in the gray half-light.Presently there rose before them a great mass of rock and earth, halfblocking the cave; it looked like some old landslip.
"It's easy at this end, Fiona," said the boy; and up they went, tofind that the rock barrier blocked most of what little light remained.Beyond was darkness.
"We must go back and get light," said Fiona. "I can't even see thestones below." A pause; then, "Stop swinging your feet, Urchin; I wantto listen."
"I'm not," said the Urchin.
Another pause, and then the Urchin spoke again, in a kind of stagewhisper, "I'm frightened." The words seemed squeezed out of him.
"We may as well go back, anyhow," said Fiona, in a strained voice."Down you go, Urchin."
The Urchin did go down at a considerable pace, and ran for the boat.Fiona managed to walk, by repeating to herself all the time under herbreath, "You mustn't run, you mustn't run." But once in the boat shedid not rebuke the Urchin for standing up and taking the other oar;and the pair paddled out, with many bumpings and scrapings, in a morespeedy and less scientific manner than that in which they had entered.
Once out in the sunlight they felt better. They started automaticallyto fish home, and presently were talking again. But neither of themreferred to the thing that was uppermost in each mind, though each waswondering if the other knew. For as they had sat on the wall of rock,each had heard clearly, in the utter darkness of the unvisited cave,the sound of heavy footsteps.
