WHEN THE WATERS ROSE
Presently, while I lay upon the shingle panting, a wet hand touched my
head, and looking up with dazzled eyes I saw Grace bending down beside me.
The water drained from her garments, she was shivering, but at least she
had suffered no injury.
"Ralph! Ralph! tell me you are not hurt!" she said, and something in her
voice and eyes thrilled me through, but, though I struggled to do so, I
could not as yet overcome the weakness, and lay still, no doubt a ghastly
half-drowned object, with the blood from the wound the branch made
trickling down my forehead, until stooping further she laid her hand on my
shoulder, and there was more than compassion in the eyes that regarded me
so anxiously.
Then, slowly, power and speech came back together, and covering the
slender fingers with kisses I staggered to my feet.
"Thank God, you are safe!" I said, "and whatever happens, I have saved
you. You will forgive me this last folly, but all the rest was only a
small price to pay for it."
She did not answer, though for a moment the hot blood suffused her cheek,
and I stood erect, still dazed and bewildered--for the quartz reef had
cruelly bruised me--glancing round in search of the canoe. Failing to find
it, I again broke out gratefully:
"Thank heaven, you are safe!"
Grace leaned against a boulder. "Sit down on that ledge. You have not
quite recovered," she said; and I was glad to obey, for my limbs were
shaky, and the power of command was born in her. Then with a sigh she
added very slowly: "I fear you are premature. Still, I think you are a
brave man, and no Carrington was ever a coward. Look around and notice the
level, and remember the daily rise."
Stupidly I blinked about me, trying to collect my scattered wits. The
strip of shingle stood perhaps a foot above the river and was only a few
yards wide. In front, the horrible eddy lapped upon the pebbles at each
revolving swirl, and behind us rose a smooth wall of rock absolutely
unclimbable, even if it had not overhung. That, however, was not the
worst, for a numbing sense of dismay, colder far than the chilly
snow-water, crept over me as I remembered that most mountain streams in
British Columbia rise and fall several feet daily. They are lowest in
early morning, because at night the frost holds fast the drainage of
snow-field and glacier which feeds them on the peaks above; then, as the
sun unchains the waters, they increase in volume, so that many a ford
which a man might pass knee-deep at dawn is swept by roaring flood before
the close of afternoon.
"Watch that stone," said Grace with a stately calmness, though first she
seemed to choke down some obstruction in her throat. "There! the last wash
has buried it, and when we landed the one with the red veins--it is
covered several inches now--was bare."
A sudden fury seized me, and raising a clenched hand aloft I ground my
heels into the shingle, while Grace looked on pityingly.
"I was almost afraid to mention it at first," she said. "I--I hoped you
would take it differently."
Then at last I began to understand clearly. I flung back my head as I
answered: "It is not for my own miserable safety that I care one atom.
Neither if we had gone down together in the fall would it have seemed so
hard; but after bringing you in safety so far it is horrible to be held
helpless here while inch by inch the waters rise. Great God! is there
nothing I can do? Grace, if I had ten lives I would gladly give them all
to save you!"
Again the tell-tale color flickered in her face; then it vanished, and her
voice shook a little.
"I believe you," she answered. "Indeed, it seems only too probable that
you gave up one when you leaped the poor horse into the river. It was done
very gallantly, and now you must wait as gallantly for what that great God
sends."
She seemed so young and winsome and beautiful that suddenly in place of
rage a great pity came upon me, and I think my eyes grew dim, for Grace
looked at me very gently as she added: "No; death comes to all of us some
time, and you must not grieve for me."
But because I was young and the full tide of lusty life pulsed within me,
I could not bear to think of what must follow. Again, it seemed beyond
human comprehension that she, the incarnation of all that was fair and
lovable, must perish so miserably, and once more I had to struggle hard to
restrain a fresh outbreak of impotent fury. Presently, however, her great
fortitude infected me, and with the calmness it brought there came a
feeling that I must tell her all now or never. Nevertheless, I felt that
she knew it already, for one glance had made many things manifest when we
first entered the canyon.
"Grace," I said huskily, "I want you to listen while I answer a question
which, without speaking, you asked me--Why should I, a rough railroad
contractor, esteem it an inestimable privilege to freely lay down my life
for you? It is only because I love you, and have done so from the day we
talked together on Starcross Moor--it seems so long ago. Listen yet. I
meant never to have told you until I had won the right to do so, and had
something to offer the heiress of Carrington, and I fought hard for it,
toiling late and early, with a dead weight of adverse fortune against me;
but all that was little when every blow was struck for your sweet sake.
And, if you had chosen another, I should have kept my secret, and prayed
that you might be happy. Now when, so far as worldly rank goes, we stand
as equals in the valley of death, I dare open all my heart to you; and, if
it must be, I should ask no better end than to enter eternity here holding
your hand."
She trembled a little, great tears were brimming in her eyes, but again I
read more than pity or sorrow in their liquid depths, and the next moment
I had spread my wet arms about her and her head rested on my shoulder.
There are some things that concern but two souls among all those on earth,
and the low answer that came for the first time falteringly through her
lips is to be numbered among them; but a little later, with my arm still
about her, Grace smiled up at me wistfully as the remorseless waters
lapped nearer.
"I loved you because you were steadfast and fearless," she said.
"Sweetheart, it will not be so hard to die together now. Do you know this
is all a part of the strange memories, as though I had learned somewhere
and somehow what was to be. Either in dreams or a mental phantasy I saw
you riding across the prairie through the whirling snow. When you strode
with bronzed face, and hard hand on my bridle through the forest, that was
familiar too, and--you remember the passage about Lancelot--I knew you
were my own true knight. But this is not the last of the dream forecasts
or memories, and there was something brighter beyond it I could not grasp.
Perhaps it may be the glories of the hereafter. I wonder whether the
thought was born when that sunset flamed and flashed?"
I listened, tightening my grasp about her and shivering a little. This may
have been due to physical cold, or a suggestion of the supernatural; but
Grace spoke without terror, reverently, and ended:
"Ralph, have you ever thought about that other world? Shall we be
permitted to walk hand in hand through the first thick darkness,
darling?"
"Don't!" I cried, choking. "You shall not die. Wait here while I try to
climb round those boulders; there might be a branch that would float us,
or a log of driftwood in a lower eddy," and leaving her I managed with
much difficulty to scale a few great water-worn masses that had fallen
from above and shut out the view of the lower river. Still, though I
eagerly scanned the boulders scattered here and there along the opposite
bank, there was only foam and battered stone, and at last I flung myself
down dejectedly on a ledge. I dare not go back just then and tell her that
the search was quite hopeless, and it may have been inherited obstinacy,
but I would not own myself quite beaten yet. So I lay watching the cruel
water slide past, while a host of impossible schemes flashed through my
bewildered brain. They all needed at least a rope, or a few logs, though
one might have been rendered feasible by a small crowbar. But I had none
of these things.
Meantime a few white cloudlets drifted across the rift of blue above, and
a cool breadth of shadow darkened the pine on the great rocks. Something
suggested a fringe of smaller firs along the edge of a moor in Lancashire,
and for a moment my thoughts sped back to the little gray-stone church
under the Ling Fell. Then a slow stately droning swelled into a measured
boom and I wondered what it was, until it flashed on me that this was a
funeral march I had once heard there on just such a day; and it was
followed by a voice reading something faint and far away, snatches of
which reached me brokenly, "In the sure and certain hope," and again,
"Blessed are the dead."
There was, perhaps, a reason for such fancies, though I did not know it at
that time, for, as I found afterward by the deep score across the scalp,
my head must have been driven against the stone with sufficient violence
to destroy forever the balance of a less thickly covered brain. However,
it could not have lasted more than a few moments before I knew that the
funeral march was only the boom of the river, and if I would not have it
as sole requiem for one who was dearer far than life to me I must summon
all my powers of invention. The waters had risen several inches since I
first flung myself down. Great events hang on very small ones, and we
might well have left our bones in the canyon, but that when crawling over a
boulder I slipped and fell heavily, and, when for a moment I lay with my
head almost in the river, I could see from that level something in the
eddy behind a rock on the further shore which had remained unnoticed
before.
It was a dark object, half-hidden among grinding fragments of driftwood
and great flakes of spume, but I caught hard at my breath when a careful
scrutiny showed that beyond all doubt it was the overturned canoe. Still,
at first sight, it seemed beyond the power of flesh and blood to reach it.
The rapid would apparently sweep the strongest swimmer down the canyon,
while the revolving pool span suggestively in narrowing circles toward the
deadly vortex where the main rush from the fall went down. Second thought,
however, suggested there might be a very small chance that when swept
round toward the opposite shore one could by a frantic struggle draw clear
of the rotary swirl into the downward flow, which ran more slackly close
under the bank. I came back and explained this to Grace, and then for the
first time her courage gave way.
"You must not go," she said. "No one could swim through that awful pool,
and--I am only a woman, weak after all--I could not stay here and see you
drown. Ralph, it was the thought of having you beside me that gave me
courage--you must not leave me alone to the river."
"It is our last chance, sweetheart," I said very slowly, "and we dare not
neglect it, but I will make a promise. If I feel my strength failing, when
I know I can do no more, I will come back to you. Standing here you could
reach my hand as the eddying current sweeps me round. Now, wish me good
fortune, darling."
Grace stooped and kissed my forehead, for even as I spoke I knelt to strip
off the long boots. This was no time for useless ceremony. Then with a
faint ghost of a blush she added, "You must not be handicapped--fling away
your jacket and whatever would hamper you," after which, standing beside
me at the edge of the water, she said very solemnly, "God bless and keep
you, Ralph."
Then I whirled both hands above my head, leaped out from the quartz shelf,
and felt the chilly flood part before me until, instead of dull green
transparency, there was daylight about me again, and my left hand swept
forward through the air with the side-stroke which in younger days I had
taken much pains to cultivate. Now there was the hardness in muscles which
comes from constant toil behind it, besides a force which I think was not
born altogether of bodily strength, and even then I could almost rejoice
to feel the water sweep past me a clear half-fathom as the palm drove
backward hollowed to the hip, while the river boiled and bubbled under my
partly submerged head. But I swung right around the eddy, and almost under
the tail rush of the fall, while once for a moment I caught sight of
Grace's intent face as, husbanding my strength for a few seconds, I
passed tossed about on the confused welter close by the quartz shelf.
Then, as the circling waters hurried me a second time round and outward
toward the further shore, I made what I knew must be the last effort, made
it with cracking sinews and bursting lungs, and drew clear by a foot or
two of the eddy's circumference. A few more strokes and an easy paddling
carried me down-stream, and a wild cry of triumph, which more resembled a
hoarse cackle than a shout, went up when at last I drew myself out of the
water beside the canoe.
I lay on the cold stone breathing hard for several minutes; then I managed
to drag the light shell out and empty her, after which I tore up a strip
of the cedar flooring to form a paddle, and found that though one side was
crushed the damage was mostly above flotation level. It would serve no
purpose to narrate the return passage, and it was sufficiently arduous,
but a man in the poorest craft with a paddle has four times the power of
any swimmer, and at last I reached the shingle, which was almost covered
now. Grace stood on the brink to meet me with a cry of heartfelt relief
when I ran in the bows, then a momentary dizziness came upon me, as, all
dripping as I was, I lifted her into the stern. After I thrust off the
craft, and, struggling clear of the eddy, we shot away on the outgoing
stream, she smiled as she said:
"It was splendidly done! Ralph, is it foolish--I once supposed it would be
so--that because you have the strength to do these things you make me
proud of you?"
There is little more to tell, and that passage through the canyon left
behind it an unpleasant memory. Though it was rising all the time, the
stream ran more evenly, there were no more cataracts or whirlpools, and
while Grace was obliged to bail hard with--so closely does burlesque
follow on tragedy--one of my long boots, she could keep the leaks under.
I did my best with the paddle, for I could see the tension was telling on
her, and at last the great rock walls fell back on either hand, and dwarf
pines and juniper climbed the less precipitous slopes, until these too
opened out into a wide valley, and we slid forth safely into clear
sunlight. Never had brightness and warmth so rejoiced me as they did after
the cold damp horror of that passage through the dark rift in the earth.