THE DEFILE IN THE ROCKS.—THE HORSEMAN AND THE ACCIDENT.
The Grange-house was visible from the cottage of the sexton, and so the
vampyre had declined the offer of Will Stephens to be his guide.
As it happened, though, it would have been better as regarded his
reaching the Grange quickly that he should have taken the sexton with
him, for the cliffs that were close at hand concealed to the eye many
deep gullies and frightful precipices that had to be coasted round,
before any one could reach the Grange-house by that route.
If he could have gone directly onward, about half a mile’s walking
would have sufficed to enable him to reach the place, but before he
had proceeded a quarter of that distance, he came upon a deep ravine
or splitting in the cliff, too wide to jump across, and with all
the appearance of extending inland a considerable distance without
narrowing.
“I had indeed better have brought a guide with me,” muttered Varney.
He then paused for a few moments, as if he was debating with himself
whether or not he should return back and get the sexton. But the mental
hesitation did not last long, and accustomed as he was to trust to his
own sagacity and his own resources more than to other people, he walked
along by the side of the fissure in the cliff, muttering to himself,—
“Were all the guides in the country here, they could but do as I am
doing, namely, walk on until the ravine closes.”
With this idea he pursued it, but to his mortification he found that
it widened instead of presenting the least symptoms of closing, and
suddenly it opened to his eyes to a width of about fifty feet, and he
paused again irresolute.
“How am I to proceed?” he said; “this is a perplexity.”
He advanced close to the brink, and looked down. The depth was very
considerable, and at the bottom there was evidently a road made of sand
and chalk, which wound down somewhere from the interior of the country
to the sea-beach.
As he looked, he heard the rapid sound of a horse’s feet.
In another moment there dashed down the road towards the sea, a horse
bearing on his back a man, who was exerting himself in every possible
way to stop the maddened, headlong career of the animal, but it would
not be checked.
With starting eyes and dilated nostrils, and with its flanks covered
with foam, the frighted steed, which had evidently come some distance
in that state, rushed on, but the broken nature of the ground made it
almost impossible that it should make such great speed then as it had
been making, at least with any degree of safety.
This was what occurred to the thoughts of Varney, and it was
sufficiently proved to be a correct idea, by the horse stumbling the
next moment, and throwing his rider heavily upon the sand and broken
rock that was strewn around.
The steed, now disencumbered of its load, recovered itself in a moment,
and with a snort of rage and probably of pain likewise, dashed and
disappeared from the sight, round the abrupt corner of the ravine to
the left hand on the beach.
“So be it,” said the vampyre, calmly; “another being is snatched away
from the muster roll of the living, one who perhaps would gladly have
preserved his existence, while I—I remain and cannot, let me do what I
will to accomplish such a purpose, shake off the cumbrous load of life
that will cling to me.”
Suddenly quite a whirlwind of passion seemed to come on him, and,
standing on the brink of the ravine with his arms extended, he cried,—
“Since death is denied to me, I will henceforward shake off all human
sympathies. Since I am compelled to be that which I am, I will not
be that and likewise suffer all the pangs of doing deeds at which a
better nature that was within me revolted. No, I will from this time
be the bane of all that is good and great and beautiful. If I am
forced to wander upon the earth, a thing to be abhorred and accursed
among men, I will perform my mission to the very letter as well as the
spirit, and henceforth adieu all regrets, adieu all feeling—all memory
of goodness—of charity to human nature, for I will be a dread and a
desolation! Since blood is to be my only sustenance, and since death is
denied to me, I will have abundance of it—I will revel in it, and no
spark of human pity shall find a home in this once racked and tortured
bosom. Fate, I thee defy!”
He continued for some few moments after uttering this speech in the
same attitude in which he had spoken the words. Then suffering his
hands slowly to fall, again he looked cold, and passionless, as he had
been before.
But his determination was made.
By looking carefully about him, he saw that there was a kind of
footpath down the side of the ravine, which an active person might
descend by, although, probably, not altogether without some risk, for
the least false step might precipitate him to the bottom.
The vampire, however, had no such fears. He seemed to feel that he
possessed a kind of charmed life, and that he might adventure to do
what others might well shrink from.
This feeling begot a confidence which was almost certain to be his
protection, even if it had been only founded upon imagination, for it
fortified his nerves, and when he began the descent down the side of
the ravine, it was without the smallest terror.
He found, however, that when he was fairly on the path, it was a
better and a wider one than he had a first supposed it to be, and in
the course of five minutes he had got completely down to the narrow
road, on which, apparently dead, lay the wounded man, for he was only
grievously hurt by his fall, although he was quite insensible.
The vampyre strode up to him.
“Ah,” he said, “young, and what the world would call handsome. Ha! ha!
Heaven takes but little care sometimes of its handiwork.”
After a few moments’ contemplation of the still form that lay at his
feet, he knelt on one knee by its side, and placed his hand upon
the region of the heart, after roughly tearing open the vest of the
stranger.
“He lives—he lives. Well, shall I crush the fluttering spirit that now
is hovering ’twixt life and death, or shall I let it linger while it
may within its earthly prison? Let it stay. The worst turn that any one
can do another in this world, is surely to preserve existence after
once the pang of what would be all the agony of death is past.”
The vampyre rose, and was moving away up the ravine, when a sudden
thought seemed to strike him, and he turned back again.
“Gold,” he said, “is always useful to me, and I think with my new
thoughts and feelings it will now be more so than ever. This insensible
man may have some about him.”
Again he knelt by the side of the young man, and soon possessed himself
of a tolerably well-stocked purse that he found upon him. Round his
neck, too, by a thin chain of gold, hung a small portrait of a young
and beautiful girl, upon which Varney gazed intently.
“She is fair,” he said, “very fair—she would make a fit victim for me.
I will take this portrait; it might stand me in some stead should I
encounter the original.”
He placed the portrait in his pocket, and was in the act of rising,
when he heard the sound of a footstep.
“Ah, some one comes; it will be no part of my plan to have been seen by
the body.”
He darted forth down the narrow gorge or ravine, and was soon
sufficiently hidden from the sight of those who were advancing. They
proved to be some fishermen going to spread their nets upon the beach,
which just below the spot where the seemingly fatal accident had taken
place, was as level as a carpet, screened from the wind, and composed
of the finest sand.
Of course, it was impossible to avoid seeing the body that lay in their
path, and Varney had no need to be fearful that he would be seen, when
an object of so much greater and more absorbing interest lay in their
direct and unavoidable path.
He heard from the sudden exclamations that fell from them, that they
had seen the body, and upon advancing a step or two, he found that they
were collected round it in a dense throng, for there were about a dozen
men in all.
“’Tis well,” said Varney, “it matters not to me if he be living or
dead. I can doubtless now find my way to the Grange-house by this path
along the shore. I will pursue it at all events, and see whither it
will lead me.”
He did so, and after going about half a mile, he found another ravine,
which, upon entering and ascending for a time, led him quite close to
one of the entrances of the Grange-house, as it was called, and which
he was so anxious to reach.