CHAPTER XII.

THE PIXIES' HOLE.

On the following evening Sybil had set forth on an errand of charity to one of the many poor who blessed the bounteous hand of her mother--the widow of a fisherman who had perished during the pilchard season in the past summer--and she meant to return, as she stated, by the sea-shore.

Sybil had much cause for thought, and was somewhat disposed to linger on the way. The ample means enjoyed by her parents on the one hand, with the general seclusion of their lives on the other, and their studied avoidance of society when in England, had now given the girl much reason for reflection.

Her papa's mysterious absence too, and her mamma's nervous anxiety about American letters, were not without singularity; and why had both so sedulously abstained from all introduction to the family of the Trecarrels, who were greatly esteemed in the neighbourhood, and who were undoubtedly people of the best style? By the system of which this seemed merely a portion, she was even now debarred from having properly presented to her this Mr. Audley Trevelyan, who seemed so well disposed to admire--perhaps, to love her.

"We have made but few acquaintances and, of course, still fewer friends at Porthellick," said Sybil, half aloud; "now why is it thus--to have means in plenty and so few to love us? What can be the reason? Mamma has some _secret_; but what can that secret be? Poor mamma--she looks so sweet always, and yet so sad at times!"

She would write to Denzil, she thought, on the subject of these mysteries; but Denzil was yet at sea, and it would be long, long, before she might receive his answer; and, then, there would be an awkwardness in their parents' reading, as they would certainly wish to do, his letters and perceiving the doubts she had suggested--the secrets she wished to probe. Perhaps when her papa, whose especial pet she wras, returned, she might venture to give some hints, to make some inquiries; and as she saw the white sails of the shipping and the smoke of many a passing steamer, she lifted her eyes to heaven with an unuttered prayer in her heart, that she might soon again hear his voice and cast herself into his arms.

By one of those lanes peculiar to Cornwall, where the old road is sunk so deep in the ground and the bordering walls are so high that the surrounding scenery is sometimes hidden, lanes where in summer the elms cast their leafy shadows, and the fragrant wild rose and honeysuckle mingle with the long tangles of the bramble, Sybil reached the shore and descended to the very margin of the sea.

It was one of those evenings which, even in the last days of autumn, come to the rocky and rugged duchy, when the atmosphere is so mild and balmy that one might think it was in the early weeks of spring, when the grey cliffs and purple moorland glisten in the yellow rays as the sunlight falls softly between the flying clouds, on land and sea; and the sparkling stream, that rolls from rock to rock on its passage to the shore, makes music in its plash as it falls from the cascade into the pool below, where the brown trout lurks in safety and unseen; and Sybil, as she wandered on, felt, she knew not why, an emotion of calm and contentment growing in her heart.

But in its serenity and beauty the evening was deceptive, and old fishermen on the heights, and other weather-beaten salts who lingered, telescope in hand, on many a rude pier that jutted into the Bristol Channel, when looking seaward detected that which the landsman saw not--the tokens of a coming storm; for seamen have strange instincts peculiarly their own, and can read the sky like the pages of a mighty book.

Across the sea the sun, now setting, poured a steady stream of golden radiance, like a broad and glittering pathway from the far horizon to the very shore, by the margin of which Sybil was now lingering; and it tinted with warm light the flinty brow of many a storm-beaten headland, and those fantastic piles of grey granite which cap the hills in Cornwall, and are there called _carns_.

Seated on a fragment of rock, lulled by the regular and monotonous rolling of the surge, Sybil was immersed in thoughts of her absent father and brother, each now traversing the same sea, and yet so far apart upon its waters; she thought of Audley Trevelyan. Should she ever meet him in society as she wished to do? A little time and it might be too late, for Rose Trecarrel was so lovely, and already seemed to consider him as her own property; for it was by her side he sat in church, where they used the same books, and it was she that he usually shawled or cloaked first for the carriage; so if they were not already engaged, they might very soon be so.

Amid this reverie she was startled by a distant voice holloing, and apparently to her. She looked up, and on the summit of a cliff that overhung the shore, some two hundred feet or so above where she was seated, a man was gesticulating violently and beckoning to her.

Was he mad or tipsy? was her mamma ill; or what did this person mean? She listened intently and thought she heard her own name; he was evidently addressing her, and pointing to the sea. At last his voice distinctly reached her ear.

"Look out, Miss Devereaux,--the tide is coming in!"

She glanced hastily round her, and a chill struck upon her heart, for the fragment of granite on which she sat was almost environed by the encroaching sea, and the stripe of yellow sand, by which she had been walking at the base of the cliffs, was nearly covered by the surf, which was already chafing white and angrily about the rocky headlands which formed the horns of a little bay.

Heedless of wetting her feet, Sybil gathered her skirts in her hand and rushed shoreward, when a greater terror smote her heart as she looked around her. The man on the cliff had disappeared; no aid seemed nigh, and no living thing was visible save a solitary chough or red-legged crow, which was perched on a fragment of rock, from whence he eyed her in quiet security.

She was at a part of the coast where the land receded and the sea advanced between two headlands of granite, precipitous and sheer, but crowned by groves of ancient trees. The water, as yet, was smooth as a mill-pond within the bay, and reflected in its glassy depths the coast that towered above it; while no sound came along the vast expanse of shore, save the hollow gurgle of the flowing tide, as it sought the recesses of the many caverns and fissures in the lower rocks. In the offing, however, the rising waves were edged with white, and this sign, together with the lowering sky and gathering clouds, showed that the coming night would be a rough one.

From the stripe of sandy beach, now nearly covered by the incoming sea, the only path lay round a little moss-grown slope at the base of an enormous rock, from whence it wound upward to the verge of a steep precipice and led to the deep old lane, already described. Over this mossy and angular ledge the angry tide had already rolled its spray, consequently it was too slippery for the footsteps of the affrighted girl, who, after thrice approaching it, finally shrunk back, and ran, with wetted feet, towards the centre of the bay, keeping close to the sheer cliffs, against which the flowing sea was rising fast, and beginning to surge and boom, throwing masses of foam and froth over her whole person, while the scared seagulls and puffins whirled in flights around her.

Once or twice a wild shriek escaped Sybil; then her voice began to fail her, and she could only utter prayers that were earnest, deep, and piteous.

Wildly and despairingly she looked upward to the summits of the cliffs; they were impending and inaccessible, by their gloomy outline fully illustrating the influence and fury of what is called "the Atlantic drift," which is especially turned into the Bristol Channel, where the rocks, by the waves for ever heaving and rolling in mighty undulations, are worn into concave fronts, and form thus a hopeless barrier to the shipwrecked, and to all who might seek to ascend them.

She turned seaward with haggard eyes and wrung her poor little hands; not a boat was near, and nothing now was visible between the horns of the bay save the smoke of some distant steamer, hull-down below the horizon line, as she sped on her way to the coast of Ireland. The flowing tide was above Sybil's ankles now; she knew that at high water it would mount to several feet, and that ere long her drowned corse should be dashed and battered, at the sport of the waves, against those very rocks at which she glanced so despairingly!

The man who had seen from their summit and warned her--where was he now, and who was he? He knew her name, and yet had he abandoned her to her fate in that terrible place, with the sea and the darkness closing fast around her; for the sun had set and dun clouds were piled in stormy masses now, where so lately all was golden sheen.

Suddenly she bethought her of a cavern in the rocks known as the Pixies' Hole, which her brother Denzil had often explored--a gloomy place, the haunt at times of the seal and of the _zart_, as old Cornish folks called the sea-urchin. It was one of those great caverns in which, in the barbarous times of old, the Cornish men took shelter from the Romans and Saxons, just as the children of Israel did from the Midianites in the dens of the mountains; and there, by local superstition, still abode, unscared by the whistle of the adjacent railway, certain little beings known as the Pixies, who came hither from Devonshire on dark nights, mounted on the farmers' horses, and were heard to sing in its recesses while pounding their cider.

Gathering her skirts again, the poor girl dashed through the water, and ere long reaching the mouth of the cavern, clambered in breathlessly, falling, the while, more than once on her tender hands, when her feet slipped, on the glassy surface of the sea-weedy rocks and stones, which covered all the ascent to this gaunt and gloomy place of refuge.

She knew that it penetrated far inland, and hoped that there for a time she should be safe; but there would be hours of darkness, cold, and captivity to endure, ere the ebb of the tide would permit her to escape, and by that time what must be the terror of her poor mamma!

When fairly within this place her courage rose a little, for she saw that it closely resembled a grotto she had frequently visited and sketched--the Cave of Porthmellin. The floor of this great fissure in the rocks ascended at an angle from the shore, mid as the tide advanced, Sybil found herself compelled to retire further and further still, inward and upward amid its dreary uncertainties, while the rising tide, now rolling into the bay with the full force of a west wind, began to surge with a sound as of thunder, about the mouth by which she had entered, and that orifice seemed to lessen rapidly as the water rose within it.

The roar of the sea woke a hundred weird echoes amid the impenetrable gloom beyond her; while the view outward from the point now attained by the breathless and affrighted girl, for a time proved strange and, to her artistic eye, full of wonderful effects. The walls of rock were dark, and yet so polished by time and the seas of ages as to emit reflected light, and to reveal little pools of crystal water lying still and motionless in fissures and crevices, where star-fish, shells, and hermit-crabs had been left by the last ebb-tide.

With growing terror Sybil could perceive that by each successive wave the mouth of her refuge grew smaller, and it was evident that ere long it would be covered by the sea, while she should be shut within!

A cry escaped her with this awful conviction; but she uttered no more, for the echoes of her voice came back to her strangely and with melancholy variations, as if from vast distances. If the cavern mouth were totally submerged, should she be suffocated; or if not, might she otherwise too surely die of cold, and lie there till some holiday explorer, or some boy in search of puffins' nests, found her remains? A cold current of air that swept past her from within the cavern warned her that it had an outlet somewhere; but it filled her soul with greater terror, for she remembered to have heard Denzil, old Derrick Braddon, and others say, that the Pixies' Hole terminated in the shaft of an old and long unused mine, down which she might fall and be dashed to a very pulp, if she ventured one foot further; for all was gloomy horror round her now; and as her knees yielded under her, and she sank upon them to pray, she felt the still rising tide flow over them as it had rolled completely above the rocky arch of the cave and submerged it!

Feeling the ground with her hands outspread, the unhappy girl continued to creep a few yards further in, and then she paused, for all that she knew to the contrary, on the very verge of the fatal mine!

One little while she was full of pious resignation to die, for she had lived an innocent and guiltless life. She drew from her bosom a locket and fervently kissed it, as it contained the hair of her parents and Denzil--all she loved on earth. She knelt with her bowed head between her hands to shut out the horrid booming and sucking sounds of the sea in the lower part of the cave, and closing her eyes, as if the more to concentrate her thoughts, burst into passionate and vehement prayer.

Then anon the horror of death--and especially of such a death, amid gloom and darkness, unseen, unpitied, and unknown, would draw from her a piteous wail, that was lost amid the bellowing of the sea, for a storm of wind had now risen in the channel.

Of that newly-found admirer whom she had been learning to love, Audley Trevelyan, she had totally ceased to think; her heart was wholly occupied by thoughts of her papa, her mamma, her brother Denzil--all of whom she might never, never see more!

Dread of falling headlong down the shaft of the ancient mine, more than a thousand feet, perhaps, made her, we have said, pause breathlessly, and lie on the sloping floor of rock, listening to her watery death coming nearer and nearer with a gurgling sound, that, to her nervous and excited imagination, seemed like the chuckle of a destroying fiend! The dark unspeakable himself was alleged by the peasantry to frequent the oozy recess of the Pixies' Hole, and the bottom of the old shaft was said, by the same veracious authorities, to be haunted by the unquiet spirits of ancient miners, who had perished there in the time of old.

Rapidly, yet terribly, through the mind of Sybil, then, as she fully believed herself to be, hovering on the verge of death, came back the eighteen years of her past life; at Como, in the old palace by the Arno; among the Apennines and the wild Abruzzi; Rome, Athens, and elsewhere, all passed before her like a rapid phantasmagoria--days and hours of happiness and pleasure. The faces and voices of her parents and her brother so beloved, came vividly amid those memories of their strange and aimless wandering in foreign lands. The secret of her mother--whatever it was--she should never learn now; but gleams of hope and the desire to live, mingled with the blackness of her despair, for existence seemed sweet, and she felt so young to die, when a long life should be before her.

At Porthellick she must long since have been missed, and her fancy pictured the agony of her lonely and tender mother; the wild, noisy grief of Winny Braddon, and the honest anxiety of those who might be fruitlessly seeking for her along the cliffs or through the bay by boats; seeking for her alive or dead.

All their search would be vain, for the tide was still rising, and now where she stood, not daring to go further, the water flowed above her knees. A little time, a very little time more, and she should be lying drowned, the sport of the waves within the Pixies' Hole, or borne by them in their reflux, into the mighty waste of sea that washes the rugged shore of Cornwall.

A shrill cry escaped her as the water flowed to her waist; and gaspingly she felt with her hands for a little ledge of rock, up which she clambered, being in her terror endued by unnatural strength; and then, dripping and despairing, she felt a numbness come over all her faculties, which prevented her responding to certain strange sounds, somewhat like those of human voices mingled with the barking of a dog, now coming out of the inner gloom, while again a superstitious dread, the result of Winny Braddon's teaching, began to mingle with her more solid fears and sufferings.