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When my grandfather waved his hand, as they ran out past Castle Cornet, the last link broke between Sercq and myself for many a day. Before I saw any of them again except the distant sight of the Island lying like a great blue whale nuzzling its young, as we passed up Little Russel next morning many things had happened for the changing of many lives.
And who are you, mon gars?" and I was facing Carette's father, Jean Le Marchant, of whose doings I had heard many a wild story on Sercq. He was a very striking-looking man, tall and straight, and well-built. His face was keen as a hawk's, and tanned and seamed and very much alive. His eyes were very sharp and dark, under shaggy white eyebrows.
One came past us towards the north-east, and Uncle George made us lie flat behind gorse cushions till it was out of sight round Bec du Nez, though by crawling a little way up the head we could see it lying watchfully about a mile away. Another went off round Little Sercq to stop any communication with Jersey. The third lay in the way between Sercq and Peter Port.
I peeped out of the window. Three men with muskets and cutlasses stood there watching it. We were trapped of a surety. Carette and Sercq seemed to swing away out of sight, and visions of the routine and brutality of the King's service loomed up very close in front. We had no weapons except my sailor's knife, which would be little use against muskets and cutlasses.
For Midsummer Day is Riding Day in Sercq, and he who asks a maid to share his horse that day is understood to desire her company on a longer journey still, and her consent to the one is generally taken to mean that she agrees to the other as well.
Here and there great green breakers stood up above the rest with bristling crests of wire grass, and the darker patches of tiny tangled shrubs and heather and the long black pools and ditches were like the shadows that dapple the sea. The sky was almost as clear a blue as we get in Sercq, and was so full of singing larks that it set us thinking of home.
A sturdy boy of twelve, short if anything for his age at that time, though later he grew to full Sercq height and something over; but strong and healthy, with a pair of keen blue eyes, and nothing whatever distinctive about his brown face, unless it was a touch of the inflexible honesty which had been diligently instilled into him from the time he was three years old.
If ever you disclose what you know, whether you come back or not, I will blot out all you hold dear in Sercq from top to bottom, though I have to bring the Frenchmen down to do it. You understand?" "I understand." "Be advised, then, and keep a close mouth."
Then, of a sudden, Le Marchant jerked a cry, and I saw what he saw the topsail of a schooner rising white in the sun above the sky-line, and to our hearts there was menace in the very look of it. We looked round at Sercq, at the cracks in the headlands, and the green slopes smiling in the sunshine, and the white tongues of the waves as they leaped up the cliffs. "Five miles!" gasped Le Marchant.
"My faith, I think you will be better on Sercq than on Brecqhou. But you will be getting yourself drowned in the Gouliot, and that would be a sad pity," said the Seigneur. "But I can swim, M. le Seigneur, and I will be very, very careful." "Well, well! You can have the boat, child. But if any ill comes of it, remember, I shall feel myself to blame. So be careful for my sake also."
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