He pointed with his finger to a dark figure, now distinctly seen,
cowering low at the white cliff's foot.
"O Walter, I'm ready; I won't say a word more;" and he leant to his oar,
and plied it like a man.
It is a pretty, a delightful thing, in idle summer-time to lie at full
length upon the beach on some ambrosial summer evening, when a glow
floats over the water, whose calm surface is tenderly rippled with gold
and blue. And while the children play beside you, dabbling and paddling
in the wavelets, and digging up the ridges of yellow sand, which take
the print of their pattering footsteps, nothing is more pleasant than to
let the transparent stream of the quiet tide plash musically with its
light and motion to your very feet; nothing more pleasant than to listen
to its silken murmurs, and to watch it flow upwards with its beneficent
coolness, and take possession of the shore. But it is a very different
thing when there rises behind you a wall of frowning cliff, precipitous,
inaccessible, affording no hope of refuge; and when, for the golden calm
of summer eventide, you have the cheerless drawing-in of a loud and
stormy February night; and when you have the furious hissing violence of
rock-and-wind-struck breakers for the violet-coloured margin of rippling
waves--knowing that the wind is wailing forth your requiem, and that,
with the fall of every breaker, unseen hands are ringing your knell of
death.
The boy crouched there, his face white as the cliffs above him, his
undried limbs almost powerless for cold, and his clothes wetted through
and through with spray--pushing aside every moment the dripping locks of
hair which the wind scattered over his forehead, that he might look with
hollow, staring eyes on the Death which was advancing towards him,
wrapping him already in its huge mantle-folds, calling aloud to him,
beckoning him, freezing him to the very bone with the touch of its icy
hands.
And the brutal tide coming on, according to the pitiless irreversible
certainty of the fixed laws that governed it--coming on like a huge
wallowing monster, dumb and blind--knew not, and recked not, of the
young life that quivered on the verge of its advance--that it was about
to devour remorselessly, with no wrath to satiate, with no hunger to
appease. None the less for the boy's presence, unregardful of his
growing horror and wild suspense, it continued its uncouth play--leaping
about the rocks, springing upwards and stretching high hands to pluck
down the cliffs, seeming to laugh as it fell back shattered and
exhausted, but unsubdued; charging up sometimes like a herd of white
horses, bounding one over the other, shaking their foaming manes--
hissing sometimes like a brood of huge sea-serpents, as it insinuated it
winding streams among the boulders of the shore.
It might have seemed to be in sport with _him_ as it ran first up to his
feet, and playfully splashed him, as a bather might splash a person on
the shore from head to heel, and then ran back again for a moment, and
then up again a little farther, till, as he sat on the extreme line of
the shore and with his back huddled up close against the cliff, it first
wetted the soles of his feet, and then was over his shoes, then
ankle-deep, then knee deep, then to the waist. Already it seemed to
buoy him up; he knew that in a few moments more he would be forced to
swim, and the last struggle would commence.
His brain was dull, his senses blunted, his mind half-idiotic, when
first (for his eyes had been fixed downwards on the growing, encroaching
waters) he caught a glimpse, in the failing daylight, of the black
outline of a boat, not twenty yards from him, and caught the sound of
its plashing oars. He stared eagerly at it, and just as it came beside
him he lost all his strength, uttered a faint cry, and slipped down
fainting into the waves.