The Lord of the Sea Part 14

"Yes".

Hogarth whispered: "It was _I_ who got him off".

Bates whitened to the lips. "I--I thought as much".

"There is yet another chance, which _you_, if you like, may take".

Bates saw heaven opening; but with this vague hope was left two days.

On the third, Hogarth explained what he a.s.sumed to be the new plan of Loveday.

"I take it", he said, "that he will pa.s.s over the moor in a balloon trailing a rope, which will have a loop to be slipped under the arms. I tell you, there are dangers in this scheme: you may be shot. Are you for trying it?"

"Trying it, aye", said Bates, with fifty times the boldness of O'Hara.

And now began for these two a painfulness of waiting days, the sleep of both, meanwhile, being one nightmare of confused affrights, balloons and deliriums.

Ten times they re-discussed every possibility of the scheme, Hogarth giving messages for Loveday, heaping counsels upon Bates. Nothing remained to be said, and still the days pa.s.sed over the time-worn hearts, till a month went by.

At last something was observed in the sky--afar to the N.W.--in the afternoon turn, about two o'clock, a mist on the moor, but the sky almost cloudless.

Whereupon Hogarth, who first saw the object, stepped, as if looking for something, close to Bates, hissing: "_Goodbye!_ Keep cool--choose well--"

Bates shovelled on steadily, as though this was a day like others; but twice his knees gave and bent beneath him; and there was a twitching of the livid under-lip, piteous to see.

It drew nearer, that silent needle, while Bates worked, delving, barrowing, making little trips; plenty of time; and no one noted his lip which pulled and twitched.

Without visible motion it came, wafted on the breaths of high heaven: half an hour--and still it was remote, fifteen hundred feet up. Bates and Hogarth peered to see a rope, but could none.

After fifty minutes it was actually over the moor, all now conscious of it; but the rope was indistinguishable from the air.

Yet it was there, walking the ground, at its end a horizontal staff....Hogarth, with wiser forethought than Loveday's, had predicted, not a staff, but a loop.

It pa.s.sed twenty yards from the quarry, Loveday no doubt imagining that Hogarth still worked there; but the quarry was some hundred and fifty yards from the trench.

Its course, nevertheless was toward the trench: and on walked deliberately the fluctuating rope, the staff now travelling the gorsey ground, now bounding like a kangaroo yards high, to come down once more yonder.

A moment came when Hogarth, with intense hiss, was whispering to himself: "If I were he, I should dash _now_".

But Fred Bates did not move.

Hogarth suffered agonies not less excruciating than the rack.

"Oh, whyever does he wait?" he groaned.

But now--all suddenly--it was known, it was felt, deep in five hundred ecstatic hearts, that a convict was gone--a man overboard--a soul in the agony--battling between life and death.

Like tempests the whistles split the air.

Where is he? Who is he? What mother bare him? It is 57! And he is _there!_--on high--caught, to the skies.

The tumbling of four ballast bags from the balloon was marked: the balloon darted high, wildly high; and with her, seated on the bar, the cord between his thighs, darted high Fred Bates.

Exultant! the five hundred faces wax fire-eyed, each heart a flame of madness. But yonder is Warder Black taking trembling, yet careful, aim: now the report is echoing from the two Tors, the granite-works; and that smoke no sooner thins than a whole volley of crackling musketry is winging toward that dot under the clouds.

And it was hideous--pitiful--the quailing heart waited and was still to see the dot dissever itself from its rod: he had been hit: was in the middle of the vast and vacant air: and wheeling he came.

A shockingly protracted interval did that fall fill up: the five hundred, gazing as at some wonder in heaven, did not, could not, breathe: the outraged heart seemed to rend the breast in a shriek. Would it _never_ end, that somersault? Wheeling he came.

In reality it occupied much less than a minute: and now he is no more ethereal, but has grown, is grossly near, attended by the raving winds of his travelling: is arrived. And the thump of his coming was heard. As he touched the earth he jerked out circular....

Here was a tragedy remembered many a year at Colmoor, and always with feelings of the deepest awe.

XVII

OLD TOM'S LETTER

The fate of Bates filled Hogarth's mind with a gloom so funereal, that now his strength, his great patience, all but succ.u.mbed.

One evening, while his broom lay stuck out under the notch of his cell-door in order that Warder Black might count him, he took his tin knife, and began to scratch over the hills and valleys of his corrugated wall some s.h.i.+ning letters:

VEN

He was now, after long reflection, convinced that he was the victim of a plot of Baruch Frankl's: yet in his heart was little rancour against Frankl, nor, when he wrote his "V E N", was he thinking specially of Frankl--hardly knew of whom, or what. It may have been of the system of things which had given to Frankl such vast powers over him; but, the "N"

finished, he pshawed at himself, and threw the knife down. If something was wrong, he knew not at all how to right it, supposing the world had been his to guide.

But a simple incident was destined to transform his mood--a letter from old Tom Bates, the father of Fred.

And as. .h.i.therto we have seen him pa.s.sive, bearing his weight of pain with patience, after that letter we shall find him in action.

Old Bates' letter was handed him three weeks after the scratching of his vague "VEN".

"DERE MISTER HOGARTH:

"thise fu lines is to ast you how you er getn on, and can you giv a pore old feller ane noos ov that G.o.dfussakn sun ov mine hopn they ma find you as they leave me at present wich i av the lumbeigo vere Bad and no Go the doctor ses bob wot you no was in the ninth lansers he dide comen home so ive only fred left out of the ate. I rote to im fore munths agorne, but no anser, no doubt becos i c.u.m to london soon arter, so no more at present from

"Yours trule,

"TOM BATES".

The old fellow, Hogarth saw, did not know of Fred's fate: Fred, the last of eight. He would find it hard to answer that letter.

When "beds down" was called, his head was still full of one thought: old Tom Bates; and he could not sleep; heard the bell ring for the change of warders; the vast silence of the prison's night; and still his brain revolved old Tom.

The stealthy slipper of the night-warder pa.s.sed and re-pa.s.sed. Anon a click of metal on metal, and the bull's-eye searched him.