The Dew of Their Youth - Samuel Rutherford Crockett (chromebook ebook reader TXT) 📗

the assailants if they should force a passage!
One should never encourage one's real sister in the belief that she can ever by any chance do right. So I said at once that whether she was behind the door or sitting on the weathercock at Marnhoul Tower would make no difference if the people were enemies and once got in.
"Hush!" she said. "What is that I hear now?"
And from away down the glade came slow and steady blows like those which a man might make as he lifts his axe and smites into the butt. There was a sort of reverberation, too, as if the tree were hollow. But that might only be the effect of the night, the stillness, and the heavy covert of great woods which lay like a big green blanket all about us, and tossed every sound back to us like a wall at ball-play.
"Oh, if we could only see what they were doing--who they are?" I groaned. "I could go out quite safely by the door in the tower, but then who would fire off 'King George'?"
"Toc! Toc!" came the sounds. And then a pause as if the woodsman had straightened himself up and was wiping his brow. The timing of the strokes was very slow. Probably, therefore, the labour itself was fatiguing. Sometimes, too, the axe fell with a different swing, as if other hands grasped it, but always with the same dull thudding and irritating slowness.
Then Agnes Anne made an astonishing proposition.
"See here, Duncan," she whispered, "let _me_ out by the little postern door at the foot of the tower. Miss Irma can watch behind it to let me in if I come running back, and you stay on the top ready with 'King George.' I will find out for you everything you want to know." And I got ready to say, brother-like, "Agnes Anne, you are a fool--your legs would give way under you in the first hundred yards."
But somehow she saw (or felt) the speech that was coming, and cut me short.
"No, I wouldn't either," she said hurriedly and quite boldly. "You think that because I hate that great thing there filled with powder and slugs (which even you can't tell when it will go off, or what harm it will do when it does) that I am a coward. I am no more frightened than you are yourself--perhaps less. Who was the best tracker when we played at Indians and colonists, I should like to know? Who could go most quietly through the wood? Or run the quickest? Just me, Agnes Anne MacAlpine!"
Well, I had to admit it. These things were true. But then they had little to do with courage. This was serious. It was taking one's life in one's hand.
"And pray what are we doing here and now?" snapped Agnes Anne. "If they are strong enough to break in one of the doors, or get through one of the windows, what can we do? Till we know what is coming against us, we are only going from one blunder to another!"
Now this was most astonishing of our Agnes Anne. So I told her that I had known that Irma was plucky, but not her. And she only said, very shortly, "Better come and see!"
So we went down and told Irma. At first she was all against opening any door, even for a moment, on any account. The strength of these defences was our only protection. She would rather do anything than endanger that. But we made her listen to the slow thud of the axe out in the wood, and even as we looked the figure of a man passed across the glade, black against the greyish-green of the grass, on which a thick rise of dew was catching the starlight.
This figure wrapped in a sea-cloak, with head bent forward, passing across the pale glimmer of the glade, sufficed to alter the mind of Irma. She agreed in a moment, and locking the door of little Louis's room, she declared herself willing to keep watch behind the little postern door of the tower, ready to let Agnes Anne in again, on the understanding that I should be prepared from the open window above to deal with any pursuer.
I admit that in this I was persuaded against my judgment. For I felt certain that though Agnes Anne could move with perfect stillness through woods, and was a fleet runner, her nerve would certainly fail her when it came to a real danger. And so great was the sympathy of my imagination that I seemed already to feel the pursuer gaining at every stride, the muscles of my limbs failing beneath me and refusing to carry me farther, just as they do in a dream.
But Agnes Anne was serious and determined, and in the end had to have her way. I can see the reason now. She knew exactly what she meant to do, which neither Irma nor I did--though of course both of us far braver.
We got the door open quite silently--for it was the one Irma had used in her few and brief outgates. Then, shrouded in her school cloak of grey, and clad, I mean, in but little else, Agnes flitted out as silent as a shadow along a wall.
But oh, the agony I suffered to think what my father, and still more my grandmother, would say to me because I had let my sister expose herself on such an errand. Twenty times I was on the point of sallying forth after her. Twenty times the sight of the pale face of Irma waiting there stopped me, and the thought that I was the only protector of the two poor things in that great house. Also after all Agnes Anne had gone of her own accord.
All the same I shivered as I kneeled by the window above with the wide muzzle of "King George" pointing down the path which led from the glade. Every moment I expected to hear the air rent with a hideous scream, and "King George" wobbled in my hands as I thought of Agnes Anne lying slain in the glow-worm shining of that abominable glade, with that across her white neck for which my conscience and my grandmother would reproach me as long as I (and she) lived. One thing comforted me during that weary waiting. The hollow thudding as of axe on wood never ceased for a moment. So from that I gathered (and was blithe to believe) that the alarm had not been given, and that wherever Agnes Anne was, she herself was still undiscovered.
My eyes were so glued to that misty glade that presently I got a great surprise. "There she is!" cried Irma, looking round the door, and I saw a figure flit out of the dusk of the copse-covert within two yards of the postern door. The next moment, without advertisement or the least fuss, Agnes Anne was within. I heard the sliding of bolts, the hum of talk, and then the patter of returning feet on the stair.


CHAPTER XI
AGNES ANNE'S EXPERIENCES AS A SPY
"Well, at first I did not think much about anything" (said Agnes Anne), "except keeping quiet and doing what Duncan did not believe I could do. But I knew the wood. It was not so dark as one would think, and once out of the echo of the house walls I could hear far better. I leaned against a larch, holding on to the trunk and counting the sticky rosettes on its trailers to keep me from thinking while I listened. Twice I thought I had made out exactly from which direction the sound came, and twice I found I was mistaken. But the third time I followed the ditch under the sunk fence till I came to the mound which is shaped like a green hat at the end next the house. The thudding came from there--I was sure of it. When I could hear men talking, I was (and I am not saying it to put Duncan in the wrong) more glad than afraid.
"The bottom of the ditch was full of all sorts of underbrush--hazel and birch roots mostly--growing pretty close as I found when once I got there, but rustling horribly while I was getting settled. However, there was nothing for it, if I wanted to find out anything, but to go on. So on I went. I was close to the mound now, and could hear the voices.
"'Quiet there a moment!' said some one, 'I'll swear I heard a noise in the ditch!'
"And as I crouched something like a blade of a sword or maybe a pike came high above me stabbing this way and that. Twigs and leaves pattered down, but I was safe behind the stump of a fallen tree. Presently the steel thing I had seen glinting struck the dead and sodden wood of the tree-trunk, and snapped with a sharp tang like a fiddle-string--a hayfork it may have been, or one of the long thin swords such as are hung up in the hall.
"But another and deeper voice--like that of a man somewhat out of breath, said gruffly, 'Better get the job done! 'Tis only a fox or a rabbit--what else would be out here at this hour?'
"And then, with the noise of spitting on the hands, the sound of the heavy tool began again. It had a ring in it like steel on stone. I think they had been chopping something with a pickaxe and had got through. For now the clink was quite different, though that again might be because I was nearer.
"'Have you found the passage? Surely it is long in showing?'
"That was the first voice again, the better educated one, I take it. He spoke like a gentleman, like the General or even the Doctor himself, though there was much rudeness in the voice of the other when he answered him.
"'D'ye think I am breaking my back over this stone-door for fun?' growled the man in panting gasps. 'If I imagined you were any hand at a tool, you should have a chance at this one quick enough!'
"'Steady, Dick!' said the first, always in his pleasant tone, 'it can't be far away at the farthest now!'
"'Hang it, it may not be there at all. Did you ever hear of a mouldy old castle but had its tale about a secret passage? And did anybody ever see one? Better make the woman speak, I tell you!'
"'Well,' argued the first suavely, 'it may come to that, of course. But let us give this a good trial first. To it, Dick--to it!'
"'Aye, "To it, Dick--to it!" And your own arm up to the elbow in your blessed pocket,' he grunted, and I could hear him set to work again with an angry snarl. 'If this doesn't fetch it--well--there's always the woman!'
"'Aye--but it _will_ do it this time,' said the man with the soft voice. 'I hear by the clink of the crow that you are nearly through. My uncle used often to tell me about this. The big green mound is the ice-house of Marnhoul. It was his father that made it, and the passage also to connect with the cellar. See where it drains sideways into that ditch. That is what makes the green stuff grow so rank about there!'
"Between the noise of the heavy crowbar and the dispute, I ventured to edge a bit closer, so that at last I could make out the two men, and beyond them something that looked like a figure of a woman lying under a cloak. But all was under the dimness of the stars and the twinkling dew, so that I could see nothing clearly.
"But what I