THE KELPIE'S CLEUGH.
On the extreme flank of his party, and rather farther out or off than
usual, Roland, intent on following his game, took no heed at first of
the swiftly down-coming mist, till it fell like a curtain between him
and his companions, who had drawn their cartridges and ceased firing.
Even the sound of their voices was muffled by the density of the
atmosphere and he knew not where they were; but, thinking the cloud
would lift, he felt not the least concern, but went forward, as he
conceived, in the direction of home, and that which led towards the
field where the last beat of the day had been made; but as he
proceeded the ground seemed less and less familiar to him.
Over a high bank, slippery with dead leaves and the thawed rime of
the past morning, he went, a nasty place to get across, and in doing
so he prudently removed the cartridges from his gun, lest he might
slip, trip, or stumble to the detriment of himself or some adjacent
companion.
Pausing at times, he uttered a hallo, but got no response. He could
see nothing of the belts of firs before referred to; but he came upon
clumps of hazel, nearly destitute of leaves, growing thickly about
the roots, and expanding as they rose some nine feet or so above the
ground.
There was a dense undergrowth of bracken and intertwisted brambles
here, a tangle of dead leaves, stems, and thorns, most perplexing to
find one's self among in a dense mist. From amid these a rabbit or
hare scudded forth; but he took no heed of it.
Suddenly a bird--a fine golden pheasant--whirred up, and settled down
again in the covert very near him. He remembered the request of
Annot. Never had the latter seemed brighter, dearer, or sweeter too,
than that morning when she playfully asked him to bring a golden
pheasant's wing, and secretly returned his farewell caress with such
joy and warmth.
Dropping a charge into one of his barrels, he fired, but failed to
kill the bird, which, hit somewhere, beat the earth with its wings
and rolled or ran forward into the mist. Dropping his gun, Roland
darted forward after it--the tendril of a bramble caught his feet,
and a gasping cry escaped him as he fell heavily on his face and then
downward--he knew not where!
Instinctively and desperately he clutched something; it was turf on a
rocky edge. He felt it yielding; a small tree, a silver birch, grew
near, and wildly he caught a branch thereof; and swung out over some
profundity, he knew not what or where, till like a flash of lightning
there came upon his memory the Burn Cleugh, a deep, rocky chasm,
which had been the mysterious terror of his boyhood--as the fabled
shade of a treacherous kelpie, a hairy fiend with red eyes and red
claws--a rent or rift in the low hills some miles from his home, and
at the bottom of which, about sixty feet and more below, the burn
referred to as passing through the Earl's Haugh, and near the hamlet
of the same name, flowed towards Eden.
'Save me--God save me!' rose to his lips, and with each respiration
as he clung to the branch and the bead-drops started to his forehead,
he lived a lifetime--a lifetime as it were of keenest agony.
He knew well the profoundity of the rocky abyss that yawned in
obscurity below him, and he heard the slow gurgle of the burn as it
chafed against the stones that barred its downward passage, and,
mechanically, as one in a dream who fears to fall, he strove to sway
his body upward, but could find no rest for his footsteps, and felt
that the birch branch to which he clung was gradually but
surely--rending! He had no terror of death in itself--none of death
in the battlefield, as we have shown; but from such a fate as this he
shrank; his soul seemed to die within him, and with every respiration
there seemed to come the agony of a whole lifetime.
His nerve was gone, and no marvel that it was so. He might escape
instant death; but not the most dreadful mutilation; and, sooth to
say, he dreaded that a thousand times more than death.
One glance downward into that dark and misty chasm was in itself a
summons to death, and he knew well the terrible bed of stones and
boulders that lay below.
He became paralyzed--paralyzed with a great and stunning fear. The
rending of the branch continued; his arms were waxing faint and
strained; his fingers feeble; and it was only a question of moments
between time and eternity--fall--fall he must--how far--how deep
down--the depth he had forgotten.
The suspense was horrible; yet it was full of the dire certainty of a
dreadful end.
Every act and scene of his past life came surging up to memory--the
memory of less than a minute, now.
The branch parted; but, still grasping it, down he went whizzing
through the mist--there was a stunning crash as he fell first on a
ledge of rock and then into the stream's stony bed below, and then
sight and sense and sound passed away from him!
How long he lay there he knew not. After a time consciousness
returned, but he felt himself incapable of action--of motion--almost
of thinking.
The ledge or shelf of rock, which was covered by soft turf, had first
received him, and thus broken the fall, which ended, we have said, in
the bed of the stream, in which he was partially immersed from the
waist downwards; but whether his limbs were broken or dislocated he
knew not then, and there he lay helpless, with the cold current
trickling past and partly over him, the rocks towering sharply and
steeply up on either side of him to where their summits were hidden
in the masses of eddying mist, that now began to rise and sink as the
wind increased and the afternoon began to close.
How long might he lie there undiscovered in that desolate spot, which
he knew so few approached? How long would he last, suffering as he
did then? And was a miserable death, such as this--there and amid
such surroundings--to be the end of his young life, with all its
bright hopes and loving aspirations for the future?
Cold though he began to feel--icy cold--hot bead drops suffused his
temples at the idea, and at all his fancy began to picture, and more
than once a weak cry for aid escaped him.
The Cleugh became more gloomy; he heard the bellowing of the wind,
and felt the falling rain, the torrents of which were certain to
swell and flood this tributary of the Eden, and the terror of being
drowned helplessly, as the darkness fell and the water rose, impelled
him to exertion, and by efforts that seemed almost superhuman he
contrived to drag his bruised body and--as he felt assured--broken
limbs somewhat more out of the bed of the stream; but the agony of
this was so great that he nearly fainted.
With all his constitutional strength and hardihood, he was certain
that he could never survive the night; and even if he did, the coming
morning and day might bring him no succour, for save when in search
of a lost sheep or lamb in winter, what shepherd ever sought the
recesses of the Kelpie's Cleugh?
As he lay there, with prayer in his heart and on his lips, his whole
past life--and then indeed did he thank God that it had been
well-nigh a blameless one--seemed to revolve again and again as in a
panorama before him; while a thousand forgotten and minute details
came floating back rapidly and vividly to memory.
His boyhood, his dead brother, his mother's face, as he had seen it
bending over him tenderly in his little cot, while she whispered the
prayer she was wont to give over him every night, till it became
woven up with the life of his infancy and riper years; his
roystering, fox-hunting father; his regiment--the jovial mess--the
gallant parade, with familiar faces seen amid the gleam of arms; his
service in Egypt--Tel-el-Kebir, with its frowning earthworks towering
through the star-lit gloom and dust of the night-march, till the red
artillery and musketry flashed over them in garlands of fire, as the
columns swept on and the Highland pipes sent up their pæan of victory!
Then came memories of Kashgate--its bloody and ghastly massacre--the
flight therefrom into the desert; and then sweet Merlwood and Hester
Maule, and Annot with her fair and goddess-like loveliness.
Then came the realities of the present again in all their misery,
power, and sway--the ceaseless rush of the cold stream, the pouring
rain upon his upturned face, the drifting clouds, the occasional
glinting of the stars, the rustle of the wet leaves torn from the
trees by the gusty wind, and the too probable chances of the coming
death through pain, chill, exposure, and utter exhaustion.
Again, exerting all his powers, a despairing cry escaped him, and
this time a sound responded. It was only a heron, however, that,
full of terror, seemed to flash out from its nest in the rocks, and
winged its way out of sight in a moment.
As he lay there it seemed to him as if time had a torturing power of
spinning out its seconds, minutes, and hours that he had never known
it to have before.
But to lie there perishing within almost rifle-shot of the roof under
which he was born--so near his friends and so many who loved
him--Annot more than all--was a terrible conviction--one apparently
unnatural, unrealizable!
The mist had gone now, and the dark rocks between which he lay began
to assume strange and gruesome forms in the weird light of the
occasional stars, still more so when once or twice a weird glimpse of
the stormy moon penetrated into the Cleugh.
'Oh, God!' cried he imploringly, 'to perish--to perish thus!'
At that moment, in a swiftly passing gleam of moonshine, he saw a
face--a human face--peering over the rocks above as if seeking to
penetrate the watery gloom below, and again a cry for help--help for
the sake of mercy, for the sake of Heaven, escaped him.
For a moment, we say, the face was there; the next it vanished, as a
dark mass of cloud swept over the silver disc of the moon, and a
sound, painfully and unmistakably like a mocking laugh, reached the
ears of the sufferer.
The face--if face it actually was--and not that of the fabled fiend,
the Kelpie of the Cleugh, appeared no more; the hours went by; no
succour came, and Roland, as he now resigned himself to the worst,
believed that what he had seen, or thought he had seen, was but the
creation of his own fevered and over-excited fancy.