THE CASTAWAYS
Denis had been a swimmer all his life; how he struck out now every
swimmer will know, though none so well as the happy few who have
themselves saved life. It is good to think that that noblest of human
instincts had its secret place even now in this glowing heart; that
Denis Dent would have given himself as unstintedly to the rescue of some
unknown person; yet surely the sacred flame alone could have fired those
spent members to the last pitch of redoubled endurance. The white left
arm, brown as a glove from the wrist down, flew over as white a shoulder
in flashing curves; the brown head dipped in the blue, to rise
spluttering and dripping a good yard further; but the yards were close
on two hundred from shore to spar, and when Denis came up with the
latter, it was his love, indeed, but she was already senseless.
They had tied her in a life-belt, and lashed the life-belt to a spar; in
time she would have been cast up on the warm sand, dead! She was not
dead yet; she should not die. Denis took the hem of her dear drenched
garment between his teeth, and swam in, if possible, more strenuously
than he had swum out, but with the breast stroke, and in twice the time.
At last she lay where he had lain, only in the sun. Already the sand was
gloriously hot to bare knees; and there was still a faint throbbing in
the inanimate wrist, though the eyelids lay leaden in a livid face.
Denis caught up his scattered clothes, raced behind a ti-tree thicket,
and put them on as hurriedly as he had plucked them off.
The thicket grew under the cliffs between the two caves, and Denis
delayed some seconds to fill his arms with branches before running back
to the girl.
Her pulse seemed stronger. He arranged some of the branches, but left
the sun beating on her feet. It was the month of October, and early
summer in Australia.
Sundry packages had already come ashore; there was the inevitable barrel
of salt junk; there was a box of soap, that Denis spurned, and another
box so similar that he left it to the last. Judge therefore of his joy
on eventually discovering that here was nothing less than a case of
Spanish brandy! He shrieked the good tidings to the girl. She did not
stir. He had to run back to her, and lift that leaden wrist once more,
before he could bear to open the box.
His sailor's knife was worth a thousand pounds to him in that hour; the
great blade made short enough work of the lid, but the heavy haft
knocked the neck off a bottle so prettily as to provide a measure with
the medicine. Denis filled the inverted neck as he ran, and was soon
spilling as much over the marble face as he managed to get between the
bloodless lips. Then, for the first time, fear came to him: he retreated
a little on his knees. The stuff had caught her breath, her eyelids
twitched, and as she coughed the marble flushed to flesh. She did not
quite open her eyes.
"I am so cold," she moaned; and the white feet were drawn up a very
little, but so stiffly, as though the whole body had been dragged with
them.
Denis's blood froze as he remembered some vague saying that the feet die
first; even in the hot sun these looked dead enough; they also must be
brought to life, and the arch enemy repulsed at every point, at any
sacrifice. In Denis, or rather in the Denis who was least a Dent, the
act would almost outstrip the thought; this was the Denis who was saving
his darling's life without time to realize what she was to him. Quicker
than thought he had tipped up the bottle itself, so that the brandy came
out in gulps, first over one pale foot and then the other. And now the
left, now the right, now with one hand apiece, and anon with both
together for one foot, did he chafe and rub, and rub and chafe, until
the little lead feet were such pink shells, but so warm, so warm that
the tears stood in his eyes. For he had been long enough at it to think
a little as he rubbed; but as yet it was otherwise with her; she could
only lie there with closed eyes, as meek and unashamed as any other
dying soul.
She was not going to die, however, unless Denis dropped dead first. When
he could leave her feet he had a turn at her hands, a much shorter
journey for the blood, and by the time they began to clasp his feebly
there was no more brandy left. Denis went for another bottle, and half
the next dose she swallowed properly; the rest she pushed toward him.
"To please me," she whispered: they were her first words, and it his
first drop.
Now she was lying with her eyes tight shut, but not in sleep. Her lips
moved, first in the faintest smile, then in more whispers.
"I remember--everything. I knew you would come to me. I knew it!"
He could only say her name.
"Nan! Nan! Nan!"
It was as though his heart had broken, it was so full. He had dared to
call her his, the other night under the awning; he never dreamed of
doing so now. His conception of honour forbade an endearment which she
could not repudiate if she would; his own delicacy deplored the vital
offices which had been thrust upon him. He had brought the life's blood
back to leaden limbs, but he had brought it back at an expense which he
already apprehended dimly. In her right senses she might have chosen
death. He had taken on himself to give her life, and now she would live
to love or loathe him.
Gentle birth and hard upbringing had produced in Denis an essential
delicacy underneath a somewhat bluff exterior; but he was not
self-conscious on either score. Qualm and pang came upon him as part of
the situation, almost as his deserts. He was not aware of any fine
feeling in the matter. He was full of feeling, but he did not know that
it was fine.
Presently he saw she was asleep, and when he bent to listen she was
breathing beautifully; he just touched one hand, with the strange new
awe he had for her, and it was warmer than his own. But now he was in a
new difficulty; he found time to appreciate his own exhaustion; a stiff
pull of brandy alone kept him from fainting, and he foresaw in alarm how
it would be. They would both lie sleeping where they were, the almost
tropical sun would beat down on them all day, and they might never see
another. The nearer cave was not twenty yards away. Denis went to it,
and it was lined with far finer sand than outside; he came back and
gazed a moment on the girl. She was very young, and so delicately made!
He knew that he could carry her, feeble though he now felt: if only it
did not wake her. He gathered her tenderly in his arms: he carried her
to the cave, he put her down on the cool fine sand, and all she did was
to smile on him in her sleep.
If only she would when she awoke!
Meanwhile a pillow she must have before Denis would lay his own head
anywhere, and he had seen some rushes in the thicket. He cut an armful,
and thin bundle by thin bundle he got the lot under her head at last.
Then there was the table. He caught sight of it along the beach, and
thought what a fine screen it would make for Nan. It kept him up another
ten minutes; but by that time, and thereafter, the sun might stream into
the cave, but not a fiery finger would it lay on Nan. So then Denis
measured his length at last, outside the screen, as a dog lies across
the door.
On finally awaking (for many times he dropped off again deliciously),
his first act was to listen on hands and knees; and since the sound he
could just hear was as peaceful as it was regular, his next was to go
outside and stick a rush upright in the sand. Its shadow was a short
finger pointing seaward, so that he knew it was about noon. The tide had
gone down. Denis walked to the edge of the surf, and there stood gazing
up at the cliff for many minutes. No; there was no way up that he saw or
could conceive. Yet the little beach was only as the lees in the flagon
of a bay. There was assuredly no way round.
It is fifty years since the wreck of the _North Foreland_ and the second
mate's extraordinary climb, but the scene of each remains an object of
interest to visitors at the station on the heights above, while the
minor incident is unfailing matter for conjecture, contention, and much
open incredulity. It has been handed down that the sailor himself failed
to identify the place within an hour of his alleged performance. The
tradition is so far true. Denis never pretended to know how he had
achieved the superhuman: had he been in a condition fully to appreciate
what he was doing, the chances are that he never would have made the
attempt. He did not mean to make it as it was. But with the brandy in
him (and little else) he had clambered a few feet to see whether the
thing was as impossible as it appeared. Of course, it was not; but
already it seemed safer to climb a little further than to drop at the
risk of broken bones; and so in a minute he found himself committed to
the ascent. The cliff had beetled by insidious degrees; all at once
there was nothing to be seen between his naked feet and the beach far
below; one foot was soon bleeding, and the drops falling clear into the
sand. To drop clear himself would have meant certain injury now; as well
break neck as leg, thought Denis, for all the use he would be to Nan
with either. So on and up he went, now flattened for breath against a
favourable slope, now swinging by the fingers from some ledge that
threatened to saw them to the bone, anon testing tuft or twig with his
life, yet all with so light a head that the protracted jeopardy was an
exhilaration almost to the last. According to Denis, it was just at the
top, when a bunch of bracken came up so slowly as to enable him to grasp
a stronger bunch in time, that his gorge rose with the roots.
Remains the undisputed fact that between one and two in the afternoon, a
lad on the station, whose boundary was these cliffs, saw an eerie figure
approaching through the yellow dust of a mob of sheep which he happened
to be driving at the time. It was this lad whom the papers mentioned as
Mr. James Doherty; but like Denis he was Irish only by descent, and not
for an instant did he imagine that he had seen the devil. He appeared to
be a very quick youth, who knew the bush, and a glance convinced him
that the ragged wretch had been lost in it and driven to some dreadful
extremity; for his face and hands were all bloody, and even his bare
feet incrusted with blood and dust. Moreover, his speech was slightly
indistinct, as is the case with men who are half-dead with thirst.
This lad Doherty was the first person in Australia to learn the fate of
the _North Foreland_, and the first to discredit the wild finish of the
wild man's talk.
"Why, there's stairs right down," he cried. "Over two hundred on 'em,
cut in the sandstone."
"What a silly lie," sighed Denis.
"Did you sample the caves?"
"One of them."
"Which one?"
"The one with the big mouth."
"Don't you tell me you never went into the other! It's a nat'ral
chimbley at the fur end, and the boss had it shoved right through, and
steps cut in the sandstone for bathing."
The sailor's bloodstains were cracking in a ghastly grin.
"So that won't do, old man," added Mr. Doherty, severely.
"Will these?"
And Denis lifted one naked foot after the other; the left sole showed a
purple bruise, the right a gash that still dripped as he held it up.
Mr. Doherty supposed that he must be the liar, but only allowed himself
to look confounded for the moment; the next, he was emptying his
water-bag, from which Denis had already enjoyed a deep pull, over the
wounds. The sheep had scattered right and left, but the horse stood
apparently fast asleep in the sun.
"Now up you jump," said Doherty. "He's as quiet as a cow."
Denis stared at him.
"Jump up? What for?"
"You're within a mile of the homestead. You struck the right track on
top."
"Oh, but I'm not going on," said Denis hastily. "I must go back
to--her."
"With them feet and without your tucker?"
And the lean brown lad stood with his bare arms akimbo, a stained statue
in a flannel shirt and moleskins.
"At once," said Denis. "I've wasted time enough; and if there are stairs
there's no difficulty. Go you back to the homestead, and tell them to
send down everything they can think of for a young lady. Food and
clothes; mind, she hasn't had a bite since dinner yesterday."
The young Australian doffed his wide-awake with a sweep.
"Why, mister!" he got out, but that was all. "I'm sorry I didn't call
you 'mister' before," he added, after the stare of an idolater. "I'll
never leave it out again!"
Denis was limping along only a few minutes later when the sound of a
gallop made him look round for the rider who had just left him; and the
same horse it was, but a different horseman, for whom the stirrups were
grotesquely short. In a few seconds he had bobbed and bounded into a
blue-eyed man with fair beard blowing and tanned face filled with humane
distress.
"Get on this horse," he cried, flinging himself off. "If you don't, I'll
carry you myself! There--let me give you a hand; my name's Kitto; this
is my run. Everything's following in the buggy, but here's a biscuit to
begin on; the beds will be made and aired by the time we get you both
back. But only two of you--only two!"
Mr. Kitto had a heart of gold, and wore it on his sleeve; rarer still
was a tact almost incongruous in that desolate spot. Not a question had
Denis to answer as the horse ambled under him and the squatter strode
alongside. But when they came to the mouth of a long stair tunneled
through the soft sandstone, it was Mr. Kitto who looked curiously at the
rude steep steps.
"Nobody has come up here," said he. "We had a dust-storm yesterday
before the wind went round, and the sand on these top steps is as it
drifted."
Denis could afford to smile.
"So you didn't believe it either."
"What's that? I could believe the side of a house of you, my brave
fellow!" cried Mr. Kitto. "I only mean that your companion hasn't found
her way up in your absence."
"Ah, if she could!" sighed Denis. "But she is so weak I am afraid we
shall have to carry her up between us."
The squatter smiled, but said nothing.
"If only she is no weaker--if only she has slept right through!" Denis
went on, and repeated himself all the way down; but at the base he
button-holed his guide.
"Do I look very awful, sir? Is my face as bad as my hands? Wait a bit,
then--stay where you are."
And his injured feet could still dance him down to the water's edge; but
he came stealing back, one index finger to his lips, signing with the
other to Mr. Kitto to let him go first; and the smile on the cleansed
face told that good man a tale.
The mouth of the greater cave was just as Denis had left it. He crept on
all fours between the table legs, and listened. There was no sound. He
leaped up and looked over.
The cave was empty.