“A woman’s way.”
Haggard cliffs, of every ugly altitude, are as common as sea-fowl along
the line of coast between Exmoor and Land’s End; but this outflanked
and encompassed specimen was the ugliest of them all. Their summits are
not safe places for scientific experiment on the principles of
air-currents, as Knight had now found, to his dismay.
He still clutched the face of the escarpment—not with the frenzied hold
of despair, but with a dogged determination to make the most of his
every jot of endurance, and so give the longest possible scope to
Elfride’s intentions, whatever they might be.
He reclined hand in hand with the world in its infancy. Not a blade,
not an insect, which spoke of the present, was between him and the
past. The inveterate antagonism of these black precipices to all
strugglers for life is in no way more forcibly suggested than by the
paucity of tufts of grass, lichens, or confervae on their outermost
ledges.
Knight pondered on the meaning of Elfride’s hasty disappearance, but
could not avoid an instinctive conclusion that there existed but a
doubtful hope for him. As far as he could judge, his sole chance of
deliverance lay in the possibility of a rope or pole being brought; and
this possibility was remote indeed. The soil upon these high downs was
left so untended that they were unenclosed for miles, except by a
casual bank or dry wall, and were rarely visited but for the purpose of
collecting or counting the flock which found a scanty means of
subsistence thereon.
At first, when death appeared improbable, because it had never visited
him before, Knight could think of no future, nor of anything connected
with his past. He could only look sternly at Nature’s treacherous
attempt to put an end to him, and strive to thwart her.
From the fact that the cliff formed the inner face of the segment of a
huge cylinder, having the sky for a top and the sea for a bottom, which
enclosed the cove to the extent of more than a semicircle, he could see
the vertical face curving round on each side of him. He looked far down
the facade, and realized more thoroughly how it threatened him.
Grimness was in every feature, and to its very bowels the inimical
shape was desolation.
By one of those familiar conjunctions of things wherewith the inanimate
world baits the mind of man when he pauses in moments of suspense,
opposite Knight’s eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low
relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and
turned to stone, were even now regarding him. It was one of the early
crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated by millions of years in their
lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met in their death. It
was the single instance within reach of his vision of anything that had
ever been alive and had had a body to save, as he himself had now.
The creature represented but a low type of animal existence, for never
in their vernal years had the plains indicated by those numberless
slaty layers been traversed by an intelligence worthy of the name.
Zoophytes, mollusca, shell-fish, were the highest developments of those
ancient dates. The immense lapses of time each formation represented
had known nothing of the dignity of man. They were grand times, but
they were mean times too, and mean were their relics. He was to be with
the small in his death.
Knight was a geologist; and such is the supremacy of habit over
occasion, as a pioneer of the thoughts of men, that at this dreadful
juncture his mind found time to take in, by a momentary sweep, the
varied scenes that had had their day between this creature’s epoch and
his own. There is no place like a cleft landscape for bringing home
such imaginings as these.
Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at one extremity
of the years, face to face with the beginning and all the intermediate
centuries simultaneously. Fierce men, clothed in the hides of beasts,
and carrying, for defence and attack, huge clubs and pointed spears,
rose from the rock, like the phantoms before the doomed Macbeth. They
lived in hollows, woods, and mud huts—perhaps in caves of the
neighbouring rocks. Behind them stood an earlier band. No man was
there. Huge elephantine forms, the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the
tapir, antelopes of monstrous size, the megatherium, and the
myledon—all, for the moment, in juxtaposition. Further back, and
overlapped by these, were perched huge-billed birds and swinish
creatures as large as horses. Still more shadowy were the sinister
crocodilian outlines—alligators and other uncouth shapes, culminating
in the colossal lizard, the iguanodon. Folded behind were dragon forms
and clouds of flying reptiles: still underneath were fishy beings of
lower development; and so on, till the lifetime scenes of the fossil
confronting him were a present and modern condition of things. These
images passed before Knight’s inner eye in less than half a minute, and
he was again considering the actual present. Was he to die? The mental
picture of Elfride in the world, without himself to cherish her, smote
his heart like a whip. He had hoped for deliverance, but what could a
girl do? He dared not move an inch. Was Death really stretching out his
hand? The previous sensation, that it was improbable he would die, was
fainter now.
However, Knight still clung to the cliff.
To those musing weather-beaten West-country folk who pass the greater
part of their days and nights out of doors, Nature seems to have moods
in other than a poetical sense: predilections for certain deeds at
certain times, without any apparent law to govern or season to account
for them. She is read as a person with a curious temper; as one who
does not scatter kindnesses and cruelties alternately, impartially, and
in order, but heartless severities or overwhelming generosities in
lawless caprice. Man’s case is always that of the prodigal’s favourite
or the miser’s pensioner. In her unfriendly moments there seems a
feline fun in her tricks, begotten by a foretaste of her pleasure in
swallowing the victim.
Such a way of thinking had been absurd to Knight, but he began to adopt
it now. He was first spitted on to a rock. New tortures followed. The
rain increased, and persecuted him with an exceptional persistency
which he was moved to believe owed its cause to the fact that he was in
such a wretched state already. An entirely new order of things could be
observed in this introduction of rain upon the scene. It rained upwards
instead of down. The strong ascending air carried the rain-drops with
it in its race up the escarpment, coming to him with such velocity that
they stuck into his flesh like cold needles. Each drop was virtually a
shaft, and it pierced him to his skin. The water-shafts seemed to lift
him on their points: no downward rain ever had such a torturing effect.
In a brief space he was drenched, except in two places. These were on
the top of his shoulders and on the crown of his hat.
The wind, though not intense in other situations was strong here. It
tugged at his coat and lifted it. We are mostly accustomed to look upon
all opposition which is not animate, as that of the stolid, inexorable
hand of indifference, which wears out the patience more than the
strength. Here, at any rate, hostility did not assume that slow and
sickening form. It was a cosmic agency, active, lashing, eager for
conquest: determination; not an insensate standing in the way.
Knight had over-estimated the strength of his hands. They were getting
weak already. “She will never come again; she has been gone ten
minutes,” he said to himself.
This mistake arose from the unusual compression of his experiences just
now: she had really been gone but three.
“As many more minutes will be my end,” he thought.
Next came another instance of the incapacity of the mind to make
comparisons at such times.
“This is a summer afternoon,” he said, “and there can never have been
such a heavy and cold rain on a summer day in my life before.”
He was again mistaken. The rain was quite ordinary in quantity; the air
in temperature. It was, as is usual, the menacing attitude in which
they approached him that magnified their powers.
He again looked straight downwards, the wind and the water-dashes
lifting his moustache, scudding up his cheeks, under his eyelids, and
into his eyes. This is what he saw down there: the surface of the
sea—visually just past his toes, and under his feet; actually
one-eighth of a mile, or more than two hundred yards, below them. We
colour according to our moods the objects we survey. The sea would have
been a deep neutral blue, had happier auspices attended the gazer it
was now no otherwise than distinctly black to his vision. That narrow
white border was foam, he knew well; but its boisterous tosses were so
distant as to appear a pulsation only, and its plashing was barely
audible. A white border to a black sea—his funeral pall and its edging.
The world was to some extent turned upside down for him. Rain descended
from below. Beneath his feet was aerial space and the unknown; above
him was the firm, familiar ground, and upon it all that he loved best.
Pitiless nature had then two voices, and two only. The nearer was the
voice of the wind in his ears rising and falling as it mauled and
thrust him hard or softly. The second and distant one was the moan of
that unplummetted ocean below and afar—rubbing its restless flank
against the Cliff without a Name.
Knight perseveringly held fast. Had he any faith in Elfride? Perhaps.
Love is faith, and faith, like a gathered flower, will rootlessly live
on.
Nobody would have expected the sun to shine on such an evening as this.
Yet it appeared, low down upon the sea. Not with its natural golden
fringe, sweeping the furthest ends of the landscape, not with the
strange glare of whiteness which it sometimes puts on as an alternative
to colour, but as a splotch of vermilion red upon a leaden ground—a red
face looking on with a drunken leer.
Most men who have brains know it, and few are so foolish as to disguise
this fact from themselves or others, even though an ostentatious
display may be called self-conceit. Knight, without showing it much,
knew that his intellect was above the average. And he thought—he could
not help thinking—that his death would be a deliberate loss to earth of
good material; that such an experiment in killing might have been
practised upon some less developed life.
A fancy some people hold, when in a bitter mood, is that inexorable
circumstance only tries to prevent what intelligence attempts. Renounce
a desire for a long-contested position, and go on another tack, and
after a while the prize is thrown at you, seemingly in disappointment
that no more tantalizing is possible.
Knight gave up thoughts of life utterly and entirely, and turned to
contemplate the Dark Valley and the unknown future beyond. Into the
shadowy depths of these speculations we will not follow him. Let it
suffice to state what ensued.
At that moment of taking no more thought for this life, something
disturbed the outline of the bank above him. A spot appeared. It was
the head of Elfride.
Knight immediately prepared to welcome life again.
The expression of a face consigned to utter loneliness, when a friend
first looks in upon it, is moving in the extreme. In rowing seaward to
a light-ship or sea-girt lighthouse, where, without any immediate
terror of death, the inmates experience the gloom of monotonous
seclusion, the grateful eloquence of their countenances at the
greeting, expressive of thankfulness for the visit, is enough to stir
the emotions of the most careless observer.
Knight’s upward look at Elfride was of a nature with, but far
transcending, such an instance as this. The lines of his face had
deepened to furrows, and every one of them thanked her visibly. His
lips moved to the word “Elfride,” though the emotion evolved no sound.
His eyes passed all description in their combination of the whole
diapason of eloquence, from lover’s deep love to fellow-man’s gratitude
for a token of remembrance from one of his kind.
Elfride had come back. What she had come to do he did not know. She
could only look on at his death, perhaps. Still, she had come back, and
not deserted him utterly, and it was much.
It was a novelty in the extreme to see Henry Knight, to whom Elfride
was but a child, who had swayed her as a tree sways a bird’s nest, who
mastered her and made her weep most bitterly at her own insignificance,
thus thankful for a sight of her face. She looked down upon him, her
face glistening with rain and tears. He smiled faintly.
“How calm he is!” she thought. “How great and noble he is to be so
calm!” She would have died ten times for him then.
The gliding form of the steamboat caught her eye: she heeded it no
longer.
“How much longer can you wait?” came from her pale lips and along the
wind to his position.
“Four minutes,” said Knight in a weaker voice than her own.
“But with a good hope of being saved?”
“Seven or eight.”
He now noticed that in her arms she bore a bundle of white linen, and
that her form was singularly attenuated. So preternaturally thin and
flexible was Elfride at this moment, that she appeared to bend under
the light blows of the rain-shafts, as they struck into her sides and
bosom, and splintered into spray on her face. There is nothing like a
thorough drenching for reducing the protuberances of clothes, but
Elfride’s seemed to cling to her like a glove.
Without heeding the attack of the clouds further than by raising her
hand and wiping away the spirts of rain when they went more
particularly into her eyes, she sat down and hurriedly began rending
the linen into strips. These she knotted end to end, and afterwards
twisted them like the strands of a cord. In a short space of time she
had formed a perfect rope by this means, six or seven yards long.
“Can you wait while I bind it?” she said, anxiously extending her gaze
down to him.
“Yes, if not very long. Hope has given me a wonderful instalment of
strength.”
Elfride dropped her eyes again, tore the remaining material into narrow
tape-like ligaments, knotted each to each as before, but on a smaller
scale, and wound the lengthy string she had thus formed round and round
the linen rope, which, without this binding, had a tendency to spread
abroad.
“Now,” said Knight, who, watching the proceedings intently, had by this
time not only grasped her scheme, but reasoned further on, “I can hold
three minutes longer yet. And do you use the time in testing the
strength of the knots, one by one.”
She at once obeyed, tested each singly by putting her foot on the rope
between each knot, and pulling with her hands. One of the knots
slipped.
“Oh, think! It would have broken but for your forethought,” Elfride
exclaimed apprehensively.
She retied the two ends. The rope was now firm in every part.
“When you have let it down,” said Knight, already resuming his position
of ruling power, “go back from the edge of the slope, and over the bank
as far as the rope will allow you. Then lean down, and hold the end
with both hands.”
He had first thought of a safer plan for his own deliverance, but it
involved the disadvantage of possibly endangering her life.
“I have tied it round my waist,” she cried, “and I will lean directly
upon the bank, holding with my hands as well.”
It was the arrangement he had thought of, but would not suggest.
“I will raise and drop it three times when I am behind the bank,” she
continued, “to signify that I am ready. Take care, oh, take the
greatest care, I beg you!”
She dropped the rope over him, to learn how much of its length it would
be necessary to expend on that side of the bank, went back, and
disappeared as she had done before.
The rope was trailing by Knight’s shoulders. In a few moments it
twitched three times.
He waited yet a second or two, then laid hold.
The incline of this upper portion of the precipice, to the length only
of a few feet, useless to a climber empty-handed, was invaluable now.
Not more than half his weight depended entirely on the linen rope. Half
a dozen extensions of the arms, alternating with half a dozen seizures
of the rope with his feet, brought him up to the level of the soil.
He was saved, and by Elfride.
He extended his cramped limbs like an awakened sleeper, and sprang over
the bank.
At sight of him she leapt to her feet with almost a shriek of joy.
Knight’s eyes met hers, and with supreme eloquence the glance of each
told a long-concealed tale of emotion in that short half-moment. Moved
by an impulse neither could resist, they ran together and into each
other’s arms.
At the moment of embracing, Elfride’s eyes involuntarily flashed
towards the Puffin steamboat. It had doubled the point, and was no
longer to be seen.
An overwhelming rush of exultation at having delivered the man she
revered from one of the most terrible forms of death, shook the gentle
girl to the centre of her soul. It merged in a defiance of duty to
Stephen, and a total recklessness as to plighted faith. Every nerve of
her will was now in entire subjection to her feeling—volition as a
guiding power had forsaken her. To remain passive, as she remained now,
encircled by his arms, was a sufficiently complete result—a glorious
crown to all the years of her life. Perhaps he was only grateful, and
did not love her. No matter: it was infinitely more to be even the
slave of the greater than the queen of the less. Some such sensation as
this, though it was not recognized as a finished thought, raced along
the impressionable soul of Elfride.
Regarding their attitude, it was impossible for two persons to go
nearer to a kiss than went Knight and Elfride during those minutes of
impulsive embrace in the pelting rain. Yet they did not kiss. Knight’s
peculiarity of nature was such that it would not allow him to take
advantage of the unguarded and passionate avowal she had tacitly made.
Elfride recovered herself, and gently struggled to be free.
He reluctantly relinquished her, and then surveyed her from crown to
toe. She seemed as small as an infant. He perceived whence she had
obtained the rope.
“Elfride, my Elfride!” he exclaimed in gratified amazement.
“I must leave you now,” she said, her face doubling its red, with an
expression between gladness and shame “You follow me, but at some
distance.”
“The rain and wind pierce you through; the chill will kill you. God
bless you for such devotion! Take my coat and put it on.”
“No; I shall get warm running.”
Elfride had absolutely nothing between her and the weather but her
exterior robe or “costume.” The door had been made upon a woman’s wit,
and it had found its way out. Behind the bank, whilst Knight reclined
upon the dizzy slope waiting for death, she had taken off her whole
clothing, and replaced only her outer bodice and skirt. Every thread of
the remainder lay upon the ground in the form of a woollen and cotton
rope.
“I am used to being wet through,” she added. “I have been drenched on
Pansy dozens of times. Good-bye till we meet, clothed and in our right
minds, by the fireside at home!”
She then ran off from him through the pelting rain like a hare; or more
like a pheasant when, scampering away with a lowered tail, it has a
mind to fly, but does not. Elfride was soon out of sight.
Knight felt uncomfortably wet and chilled, but glowing with fervour
nevertheless. He fully appreciated Elfride’s girlish delicacy in
refusing his escort in the meagre habiliments she wore, yet felt that
necessary abstraction of herself for a short half-hour as a most
grievous loss to him.
He gathered up her knotted and twisted plumage of linen, lace, and
embroidery work, and laid it across his arm. He noticed on the ground
an envelope, limp and wet. In endeavouring to restore this to its
proper shape, he loosened from the envelope a piece of paper it had
contained, which was seized by the wind in falling from Knight’s hand.
It was blown to the right, blown to the left—it floated to the edge of
the cliff and over the sea, where it was hurled aloft. It twirled in
the air, and then flew back over his head.
Knight followed the paper, and secured it. Having done so, he looked to
discover if it had been worth securing.
The troublesome sheet was a banker’s receipt for two hundred pounds,
placed to the credit of Miss Swancourt, which the impractical girl had
totally forgotten she carried with her.
Knight folded it as carefully as its moist condition would allow, put
it in his pocket, and followed Elfride.