"We must wait and see the last of it," said he upon the grass suddenly, and the other nodded.
Up and up breathlessly crept the light. On the patch of bracken in the hollow, rallying round a spur of rock, flying for a fresh stand across a shaly slope, so holding its own for an instant against a scarp, driven over the ledge! Ned's hand went out to touch it, but found it behind him; so, turning swiftly he saw the last flicker of sunlight resting, ere final flight, on a yellow placard--
"Ginger beer, 6d."
He started to his feet. "Damn it all!" he cried, "fancy finding that ultimate sixpence here!"
"Sixpence?" queried Ted, rousing himself from a day dream. "Ah! I was thinking of the hundred pounds you left over yonder. It really is d----d rot, you know. What's to hinder my claiming it--well--say to-morrow morning?"
"You've time now if you wish it," assented Ned, "and if the thunderstorm----"
As he spoke there came a quiver of light far out over the hidden sea.
It seemed to come from below the threshold of the visible world, like the sudden gleams from the beyond, which, at times, irradiate the mind of man with some infinite message.
Ted turned round startled at the greyness that was fast settling down on hill and sky. "We had better get down as sharp as we can," he cried hastily, taking his bearings. "I think if we try to the left a little we shall get down the rocky part before dusk makes going difficult."
Once again, however, the short cut proved the longer way. The path grew more and more hopeless, until after scrambling down an almost precipitous corrie they found themselves brought up on a jutting spur, by a thirty feet drop as the only onward way.
"It's--it's----" muttered Ted, as he satisfied himself they must go back.
"Worth it," remarked Ned; for the jag of rock on which he stood overhung a wilderness of grey shadow and grey water; the grey hills watching the grey water recede from the shores, leaving behind it still greyer patches of sand that rose roundly from the level reaches of the ebbing tide.
He stood, long after Ted had started upward, watching also, and thinking how like these billowy sand-banks were to a drowned woman's clothes. Some goddess of the earth, surely, lay dead there, her body compassed by the hills.
"I say! Aren't you coming?" came his companion's shout. "We haven't time to lose. Look there!"
A vivid flash of lightning shot beyond the deep bank into the rolling clouds that were coming up swiftly with the rising wind; and, more quickly than one would have expected, a low mutter of thunder caught the crags in monotonous echoes.
"Go on! I'll soon catch you up," shouted Ned in return. And he did so; for there was a lightness, a certain stress of action about his every movement which differentiated him from his companion's more deliberate steadiness.
The wind rose at every gust, and in the fast growing dusk, the sheep sought shelter behind rocks and boulders for the night.
Yet still the downward path could not be found.
"We had best follow the stream yonder," said Ned at last. "It will be longer, but it will take us down eventually, and I don't want to camp out with my pipe in that storm."
The first drop or two of rain emphasised his advice; but it was no easy task to follow it with the mist closing in on all sides. Then darkness came, bringing a perfect deluge with it. They could scarcely see the stones at their feet, except when, with the sudden summer lightning, the whole world of hill and dale and sea was revealed to them for a second, then shut out again as if in obedience to the immediate roll-call of the thunder.
But they were young, and it was soft, warm rain; so, with many a slip and tumble, and many a laugh, they made way somehow, pausing at length to leeward of a large rock to light a fresh pipe and look at the time.
"Half past ten!" exclaimed Ted, "who'd have thought it!" He spoke joyously, for his pulses were bounding with the vitality due to the exercise of mind and body.
"I should," replied Ned; "I'm beastly hungry. However"--here a brilliant flash gave them the world again, "I believe that's the bottom down there."
The vision of a stream in flood surging through a low-lying wooded valley not far beneath them, was certainly the bottom, but it was nearer twelve o'clock than eleven ere they found level footfall, and that only on the brink of the stream.
To cross, or not to cross became the question. They referred it to the next flash of lightning; a long wait in the darkness, for the storm was passing, the rain had ceased.
When it came, it showed them an oasis of field, a clump of trees, and something amongst them which might or might not be a human habitation.
The point was settled, however, the next moment by the sudden twinkle of a wandering light quite close on the other side. It stopped dead at their view halloo, then retreated, evidently at a run, to reappear, nevertheless, almost immediately in company with a remonstrant voice, clear, pleasant, decided.
"Boggles!" it said. "There ain't no sech things as boggles! I've told 'ee so a dozen times, Adam, and I won't 'ave it said. So there!"
"Why, Martha, woman, I'm none fur sayin' 'twas boggles, fur sure, it might 'a bin a screech howl, but-- Lud 'elp us!--what's that?"
The light was evidently snatched at and held aloft. Then it came forward a step, and the voice rose in angry scorn.
"Get yer gone, you lazy, good-for-nothin' Welsh libe'tynes. I tell you she's gone, and right glad was I to get quit o' her. An impident lass, that friv'lous, her 'ead wouldn't 'old nothing but you young sparks."
"I beg your pardon," called Ned, interrupting the flow of wrath, "but we have lost our way, and being drenched through, want to know----"
"Well, I never!" came the voice, its owner grasping the situation at once. "Here, Adam, man, take the light an' show the gentle folk across the ford, an' I'll just run back and see to things."
Five minutes later, escorted by an apple-cheeked man of about fifty, they were entering a cottage where the fire had evidently been newly brushed up, a kettle put on, and a few hurried touches added to already existing tidiness by an apple-faced woman forty or thereabouts.
She bobbed them a truly primeval curtsey.
"Dear sakes, gentlemen, you must be through to your vests. Adam, set a cheer for the gentle folks, man. Adam and me was just after the hi'fer, sir, she's down calvin', an' they lays like lead on me till it's over, that they do. An' Adam is such a heavy sleeper, but there!
Two of a sort can't live together, no, they can't."
This calm, philosophic treatment of him, brought a half-conscious giggle from Adam, and she passed on to treat of other subjects in like manner. "The village, h'm, not much of a place for _sleepin'_ in, an'
a good mile anyhow, with the bridge locked. Better a hayloft _to yourself_ than some of them cottages. As for supper, they wouldn't get nothin' fit for gentle folk to eat. She could see what she'd got, an'
meanwhile Adam'd show them the loft, and bring 'em over pillows an'
blankets; they'd dry easy in the hay, while the clothes hung 'andy on the rafters, or Adam could bring 'em back to the fire when he tuk over supper, not but what it _was_ perhaps better to 'ave somethin' to put on in case o' fire!"
A quarter of an hour afterwards, having made a most excellent meal of cold beefsteak pie and tea, which, they were assured, was "better to keep a chill off than beer," they duly put out the lantern, with which they had been bidden "to be real careful because of the yay," and listened to the clear, dispassionate voice saying, as its owner passed the loft--
"You go ter yer bed, Adam, an' sleep while you can. She's passed midnight, and it wunt come now till dawn; but I ain't the mind to sleep. They lies too heavy, poor dears."
"That woman," said Ned, from his blanketed bed in the hay, "ought to have been a Field Marshal or a Prime Minister."
There was absolute conviction in his voice.
CHAPTER III
They found the summer sun had been at work for some hours on the storm-drenched world ere they woke to the lowing roar of the heifer from the neighbouring cow-house. Motherhood had evidently come to her at dawn, bringing its wider outlook, its larger self; and sure enough, when they scrambled down from the loft, they found at the foot of the ladder, penned in by an old door, a big, black bull-calf lustily answering anxiety by assertion.
The cottage over against them, however,--it formed part of a long range of farm-steadings, which stretched right away to the stream they had crossed the night before--showed no sign of life. The door was closed, the window-blinds down; the inmates were most likely sleeping sound after their broken rest.
So, their clothes being still damp, the two young men went up stream to a long, deep pool, and spreading them out to dry in the hot sunshine, had a morning bath, thereinafter drying themselves in the same fashion on a grassy bank, whence, looking up the valley, they could see the mountains closing in on the narrow strip of level pasture. Behind them, the downward view was absolutely shut out by the farm-buildings, above which showed a yew tree, and by a dense clump of rhododendrons, which trended away until it met the other wooded hillside of the little glen.
"I believe we are really on an island," remarked Ted, critically appraising the values of some willows and elders which, higher up beyond the pasture fields, seemed to betoken another channel of water.
"A desert island," said Ned, busy over the intricacies of cold water and a razor from his, shoulder-wallet. "We are reduced to the makeshifts of primitive manhood. What more do we want?--and all without that hundred pounds! I never slept better than I did in that hay."