THE LAST OF THE BAY HUNTER.
"He is rightly named Rooke Chesters," muttered Cyril, as his horse
began to caracole sideways along the high road, "for he has rooked me
to some purpose. By Jove! I can never confess my folly to my
father, after all his warnings too. Halloa, old nag, what is the
matter with you?"
He now became sensible that his horse was becoming extremely restive;
something was wrong with the bridle he knew, but the conduct of the
animal rapidly became so outrageous that he feared to dismount lest
it should kick him or run away, in which case he felt that he would
cut a ridiculous figure before his own household, by arriving on foot
and whip in hand without his nag. His father and brother he knew
would quiz him unmercifully. Dismount! Pshaw! the idea was not to
be thought of. So being a good horseman he kept his saddle, and
endeavoured by every means, first to soothe, and then by the whip to
control, the growing fury of the bay hunter, but strove in vain.
It was swelling, trembling, and panting with rage; its quivering ears
lay backward flat, its head was outstretched, and its bloodshot eyes
turned back, till at times he could see the white of them in the
darkness.
After plunging and rearing, and endeavouring by every means to throw
the rider, and after twice attempting to crush him against the park
wall of Chesterhaugh, he suddenly flung out his forefeet, and with a
fierce snort of rage, galloped at a terrible pace along the high
road. The beautiful bay of which Cyril was so proud, as showing all
the best points of a fine English hunter, seemed now changed into a
tearing devil!
The curb chain was loose, the bit was clenched between its teeth, the
reins were powerless, and Cyril Wedderburn could no more control its
actions than he could rule a whirlwind.
Ploughed fields and gates, stackyards and farm steadings, houses and
cottages, all sunk in darkness, even as their inmates in sleep, were
all passed with frightful speed, and seeking only to keep his seat
till the animal became exhausted, Cyril trusted to his skill as a
rider, and let the hunter take its way.
The open waste of Lonewoodlee, the dark thicket, and the quaint old
Tower with its corner tourelles, were quickly at hand. As he swept
past, Cyril saw the light in Mary's window: nay more, he saw her
figure for an instant, and then it was that the irrepressible cry
which Mary heard escaped him; for he had begun to fear that there was
more than the warm mash fermenting in the interior of his maddened
nag; that the animal had been drugged, as there were few "horsey"
tricks of which Ralph Rooke Chesters, and his man Bill Trayner, were
ignorant.
As this exasperating conviction forced itself upon him, he conceived
the idea of stunning the horse by a blow between the ears.
His riding whip had a ponderous silver handle, and with the thong
twisted round his right hand, he dealt upon the hunter's head a
downward stroke that might have felled an ox; but instead of finding
it sink beneath him, as he confidently expected, so that he might
leap from the saddle, a fresh gust of rage seemed to inspire the
horse, which actually bounded from the earth, and snorting, panting,
and quivering afresh, it went blindly and madly thundering onward in
its fierce career.
This was at Falaknowe, where the whip which had dropped from his hand
was afterwards found.
For a time he had thought that the horse might know its way home, and
stop at the park-gate of Willowdean; but gate and lodge had long been
left behind, the woods and house of Renton too; the rising ground
beyond was soon devoured by the rapid hoofs, and Cyril might have
said, with Mazeppa, as alarm gathered in his heart--
"All behind was dark and drear,
And all before was night and fear.
How many hours of night or day
In those suspended pangs I lay
I could not tell; I scarcely knew
If this were human breath I drew--"
for before him were the impending bluffs of a rocky shore, and the
dashing billows of the German Sea!
By stern use of his spurs, burying the sharp rowels in blood, he had
forced the animal to clear by a flying leap more than one closed
toll-gate; but the idea pressed upon him, that if he lost his seat or
was dashed on the hard road, to be found a bleeding mass of broken
bones, of what the emotions of the mother who doted on him, of his
tender Mary, of his ambitious father, and of all his friends would
be, if he were brought home to Willowdean an unsightly corpse; and
now, as death seemed close and nigh, innumerable episodes of his past
life--good, bad, and foolish--came thronging fast upon him, as he
rode this terrible race. With these came a longing for vengeance
upon Chesters, and a loathing of the infuriated brute that bore him.
How he longed for a loaded pistol, that he might put a bullet through
its head.
Cyril was an excellent horseman, and had always been a little vain of
his riding; but now he was becoming worn out.
After a twenty miles run, the horse had now left the highway, and was
traversing one of those large fields (of some forty Scottish acres or
so) that are peculiar to the Merse and West Lothian. It had been
recently ploughed, and as the hunter's small hoofs and slender
fetlocks sank deep amid the soft and loamy soil, while its panting
and breathing grew harder, Cyril hoped that it was weary and would
soon stop; but the hope was vain.
Cyril's fingers were powerless with grasping the twisted reins of the
useless bridle, and his arms ached and tingled to the shoulders with
the long strain upon them; his whole body trembled, and he felt that
little now would dismount him, so fast and furious had been the
career of his runaway steed, so many the leaps he had made over gates
and walls of turf and stone, over high hedges and deep water-courses;
a regular steeplechase over everything that came in his way. The
roughest hurdle-race was as nothing compared with it; and now, we
have said, before him lay the sea.
He knew the ground well, and the whole locality; he had too often
rambled there birdnesting when a happy, heedless boy, and while
hunting or shooting in manhood; and he knew also every foot of that
terrible shore from Eymouth to the Bridge of Dunglass; and he was
aware that at the end of the field he traversed there was no
enclosure, no wall or hedge, no boundary but the giddy verge which
overhung the sea that foamed some forty feet below. So now the time
had come when he must cast himself from his saddle or perish.
He released his right foot from the stirrup-iron, but somehow omitted
to clear the left so readily. In a moment he was on his back among
the soft loamy furrows, and dragged furiously along; the next, he
felt himself shot fearfully through the air, which seemed to whiz
upward past him.
"God--oh, God save me!" escaped him, while his mother's face, and
Mary's too, flashed on his memory, with Mary's gentle voice and
tender eyes, as he fell through space; and ere he could again respire
he found himself headlong in the midnight sea, with the black water
closed above his head.
Panting he rose to the surface, but to sink again and again, for he
was weak, powerless, and breathless; yet being a good swimmer, when
he rose the third time he kept himself afloat and looked around.
He was free from the fatal bay hunter now.
High over him towered a ridge of those black, beetling rocks which
bound the shore and culminate in the cliffs of Fast Castle and those
of St. Abb, covered with sea fowl, and with the foam of the German
Ocean rolling against them. The moon, which had been hitherto veiled
by a mass of clouds, now emerged from them, and as she was waning
from amid the ragged edges of the floating vapour, her light, cold,
pale, and ghastly, shone along the tossing sea.
Even if he could have protracted his existence by swimming, in the
end he must perish; for all along that shore no footing place or
sandy beach was nigh, and the waves, he feared too surely, would dash
him on the bluffs a battered corpse.
Already his horse, with true instinct, had turned to the shore and
swam through the billows, which dashed it again and again upon the
wall of rock, the slippery face of which it beat and pawed with its
hoofs in vain to find a footing.
A mass of weedy and isolated rock some yards from that perilous shore
caught the eye of Cyril in the moonlight. The waves boiled and
seethed around but not over it. There he would find footing he hoped
for a time, till daylight broke and his situation might be seen from
the land or the sea; and with a prayer of thankfulness to Heaven in
his heart and on his lips, he swam boldly and reached its slippery
apex by grasping the seaweed that covered it.
Cold and drenched he sat there with the white waves seething round
him; and he could remember that many a time when a boy he had
striven, by tossing stones from the cliff above, to hit this
identical rock which now afforded him a temporary place of safety.
Ere long he felt sensible that the water was rising, that the tide
was flowing inshore, and might in time, perhaps, cover the rock, in
which case he was certain to be washed off and drowned.
The moon soon disappeared behind that stupendous rock which is
crowned by the ruins of Fast Castle, and is inaccessible on all
sides, save by a narrow neck of land, and then a double gloom seemed
to fall upon the sea. About a mile off he could see a solitary light
in the window of a house upon the shore, the light too probably of
some watcher by a sick bed; and wistfully and yearningly he regarded
it, as he sat, or crouched rather, on that isolated rock, perishing
miserably within a few miles of his splendid home.
There he knew that by this time all would be a-bed, after his father,
his brother, and Horace Ramornie had had a few amicable strokes at
billiards, and after his mother had grown weary of weaving out the
future of the coming heiress; and he knew that Gervase Asloane, the
old butler, would be sleepily awaiting his return from Chesterhaugh.
One other light was visible for a time; it was on board a large
steamer about eight miles distant in the offing, where gradually it
passed out of sight as she sped on her way to England or Holland.
To shout, Cyril knew was worse than useless; few craft ever ventured
near that iron shore, and there his voice would be heard by sea birds
only.
Poor Cyril Wedderburn! He had not been much given to prayer since he
became a man of the world, or since he had last lisped his childish
orisons at his mother's knee; but now, in his hour of desperate need,
he invoked God earnestly for deliverance from a death so early and so
terrible as that which menaced him: and by some strange idiosyncrasy
of the human mind, amid these pious thoughts, and amid the
bewildering horrors of his situation, there occurred to his ear and
his memory scraps of mess-room songs, of frivolous banter, and
operatic airs, as if in grotesque mockery, till he feared he was
growing mad!
Suddenly a terrible cry--a cry that seemed to belong neither to
Heaven nor earth--a cry altogether dissimilar to any other sound he
had ever heard before, pierced his ears. Its singularity of tone
made the pulses of his heart stand still. Were the tales he had
heard of the water kelpy, and his shrieks of triumph over the
drowning, true after all?
No other sound followed but the monotonous dashing of the waves, the
hiss of the surf upon the rocks, and the voices of the now startled
sea birds as they were roused from their nests by that unearthly yell.
It was the death scream of his drowning horse; for a horse, when in
extremity of terror, can utter a dreadful cry at times; and now its
body floated passively in the eddy round a wave-beaten promontory,
the sport of the billows, and Cyril, with little regret certainly,
saw it tossed to and fro in the starlight, till it disappeared, and
that was the last he saw of his fatal bay hunter!
And now another deep invocation of God escaped him, for he became
assured that slowly, but steadily and terribly, the rising tide was
closing round him!