Chapter Thirty Two.
In the Valley of the Shadow.
“Olive, it is I who have brought you to your death!”
His face was ghastly with the horror of his self-reproach and desperation. The two were standing now, locked in each other’s embrace, beneath the cliff, watching the narrow strip of beach rapidly disappear as the fierce tide came pouring in. Nothing could be seen immediately above, for the rock beetled overhead as though about to topple upon them, but running out on each side of the bay rose a crescent of frowning wall. And from thence no succour need be expected, for its summit was lost in the gathering mist. The winter twilight was fast descending, the chill blast howled and shrieked over the heaving, storm-lashed main, and a chaos of driving, leaping billows, whose great leaden backs and white rearing crests rose hideous and spectral in the gloaming as they dashed the one upon the other in their tumultuous rush, flinging themselves high against the adamantine walls and falling back with a roar and a hiss. The grim coastline was enveloped in wreathe of white spray, and the surf-lashed base of the heights rang again as it repelled the onset of each watery monster, while in showers of milky foam the sea ran from the black, slippery rocks. A scene of wild grandeur, unparalleled in its tremendous loneliness—a terrible scene, even when viewed from a point of safety. What must it then have been to the two who stood there awaiting an inevitable death!
“It is I who have brought you to this!” She looked up at him and nestled more closely in his embrace. In the midst of her bodily fear—the natural fear of a weak woman suddenly brought face to face with a horrible death—she was able to smile. And it was a smile of unselfish reassurance.
“No, dearest. It is not your doing,” she said. “If it had not been for finding me here, you would have gone your way in safety. Roland—it is I who have destroyed you.”
“By heaven—no!” he broke in passionately. “I would sooner die with you than live without you. But nothing can get rid of the fact that it is owing to me that you are here at all. You, for whom I would have given five hundred lives—would have lost the salvation of a thousand souls to see in safety now. Oh, my darling—my heart’s sweet love—will not your God again take me at my word and work a miracle to save only you!” he added with a despairing, bitter cry, as he sank upon his knees at her feet, still clasping her with both his arms.
She bent her face down till it rested against his, and her soft, caressing hands were round his neck.
“Hush—my own!” she said. “Do not talk in that desperate way. A very little while, and we shall be united to part no more. We—you especially—have been terribly tried; now we are about to pass through the waters of death, but our sweet Saviour is very merciful. He will not part us again.”
Her calm courage and the solemn conviction of her tender tones seemed to breathe a halo of peace amid that jarring scene of storm and chaos. Their faces were wet with the showers of salt spray, and the girl’s soft hair, partially unfastened, was tossed rudely about by the cutting wind. The thunder of the surf upon the shore and the shrieking of the fierce gale drowned all other sound, yet in an interval in the turmoil, her voice could be heard fervently praying. She pleaded that if it was agreeable to the Divine Will they might be rescued from their imminent peril, but if not, and it was appointed to them now to pass through the awful waters of death, that grace might be given them both patiently to undergo whatever period of penance might be necessary to their purification, so that they might at last be united, never again to part, safe in the Heavenly Country. Then, with her head upon her lover’s shoulder, his arms around her, and her hands in his, it seemed to Olive Ingelow that the world was very far away, and she could await with perfect resignation the short but terrible struggle which should set them both free.
Rolling in, huge and awful in the dim gloaming, the mighty billows roared nearer and nearer, hurling great masses of milky foam at their very feet. They could hardly see each other’s face in the weird, sepulchral light.
“Roland, we are close to Smugglers’ Ladder, are we not?”
He started at the sound of her voice, in which there was a ring of hope.
“Quite close. Why?”
“Is there no chance of escape that way?”
He shook his head sadly.
“None whatever. I had thought of that, but it seemed better to—to face the worst here in the open than to be drowned like rats in a hole. Why, the tide runs up it like a mill-race.”
He had thought of it, and now her suggestion revived the ghastliness of the idea. What a terrible revenge of Fate! Come what might there could be no hope. Had the awful Shape been seen upon The Skegs again? Would not men be discussing the apparition with bated breath the next morning as the chill dawn revealed to the eyes of the devoted searchers two drowned corpses? Could this legion of leaping, hungry billows be the same blue, smiling, peaceful sea, on whose shore they two had sat together, when from Olive’s lips he first heard about the drear tale of violence and revenge which overshadowed the spot as with a curse. If he were to meet his end in that place of all others? Then another idea struck him. They might by singular good luck find some ledge that would place them above the reach of the waters. He himself had no such hope, but it was just barely possible.
“It is our only chance,” he continued, “and the very poorest of poor ones. But come; we will try it.”
On they sped, straining every nerve to reach the great jagged rent in the cliff, which they could see not far ahead. Farther than they thought, though, for as they stood within its dismal portals, the advance-guard of the tide already swirled knee-deep around them.
Gloomy and terrible in the extreme was the aspect of the chasm. The last faint light from without, straggling through, here and there fell upon the black, slippery rock, and the bellowing of the surf as it came dashing in, white and seething, was echoed in hollow clamour up the sides of the abyss. No light was visible above, and the atmosphere within this hideous cave hung cold and dank as the breaths of the grave. And upon the man who knew the grisly secret which these slimy walls had witnessed and had kept so well, the horrors of the place weighed an hundredfold. The outer darkness; the roaring and hissing of the great surges; the shriek of the gale and the flapping of the long wisps of seaweed against the face of the rock; all were as accusing voices—the exultant gibbering of demons come to claim their just due—and it seemed to his overtaxed brain that ghostly hands were stretched forth to drag him to his everlasting woe. A cold sweat was on his brow and his knees trembled under him. Were it not that a most precious life depended on his exertions, he would have yielded up the struggle then and there, and have plunged headlong into the boiling surf.
It was of no avail. They had immured themselves in their living tomb. A dozen great seas came sweeping in one after the other, and the chasm was a mass of white, churning water dashing backwards and forwards with resistless velocity. They had retreated as far as they could go, and now stood up to the waist in water. The very next wave would carry them off their feet—and then—
It came—crashing high against the cliff overhead, and whirling back with lightning speed. Then another and another, and Roland Dorrien was struggling in the surge—alone.
Oh, the agony of that moment! Even while battling wildly for a minute more of dear life, the awful, aching void of separation was the only consciousness he retained—that he was not to be allowed even to die with her hand clasped in his. We know that a man can dream the events of hours in as many seconds. In this fleeting moment this man endured an eternity of everlasting woe. He was separated from her in death—he would be separated from her in the future life—and his lot would be among the lost for ever.
Then his senses began to fail. He was hurled to and fro, there was a roaring in his ears; he was sinking—down, down, down—then up again into black space. Then he struck against hard rock—his footing was firm. Instinctively he threw out his hands and grasped something long and trailing; the waters fell back, and with a mighty effort he resisted their suction. He was on a ledge.
But Olive? Had the Eternal Vengeance spared him and taken her life? Was she drowned and dead in that hell-cave while he wae doomed to live? No—a thousand times no!
And then a cry, so awful and blood-curdling in its unspeakable agony, rang out above the thundrous turmoil in that grisly cave, as surely was never emitted from human breast before. It rose above the bellowing of the mighty surges, it rang upward through the black sides of the chasm, with many a weird echo—upward into the outer air—upward, till assuredly it must have mounted to the very throne of high Heaven.
“Great God! Great God! Spare her and take me!” But a grim spectre stood at his side—only a voice from the pit of the grave answered in his ear:
“Life for life. Blood for blood. Live on, accursed one, but her thou shalt never behold again in this world or in that which is to come. Never—never!”
The survivor stood for a moment on the edge of the black, slippery rock, straining his haggard eyes as he strove to pierce the gloom through which the white, seething foam was dimly rushing.
“Never—never!” he shouted, with a maniacal laugh, and poising himself he leaped headlong into the surf.
What was that? As he rose, something came in contact with him. It was a human body, limp, lifeless. A thrill of the most exquisite relief shot through his heart. He had found her. And now he felt that he had the strength of a hundred men. Half-a-dozen powerful, yet judicious strokes—for to be dashed against the rock would be fatal—and he was again grasping the ledge. A wave swept up, lifting them high in the air, but he clung to his hold with the tenacity of despair, and then, before he knew how it was done, he was crouching on the ledge, holding the girl’s insensible form in his arms.
Was she dead? Ah, no. He could hear her faint, regular breathing as he pressed his lips to hers. Wave after wave swept their precarious refuge, but now he was filled with a new hope. They had been spared for a purpose. Even if they were to die they would die together, and this reflection was sufficient to fill him with the keenest bliss after the awful agony of that moment of separation.
With one foot planted firmly against a projection in the rock, and grasping with both hands the slender and precarious hold which the seaweed and rock afforded above, Roland Dorrien crouched there for two long hours in the pitchy darkness, supporting the girl’s unconscious form. Waves surged over them, and more than once it was all he could do to avoid being swept from the slanting ledge, and his muscles cracked as he strained every nerve to resist the potent suction of the receding seas. For two long hours he dared not move a finger or alter his position by a hair’s breadth, and his laboured breathing was loud and stertorous in the intervals between the howling of the waves in the cavernous gloom and the hollow, metallic echoes, like the booming toll of a great bell, which thundered from the overhanging rocks. At length, when his exhausted strength threatened to bear no more, he suddenly realised that the onslaughts of the waves were becoming less frequent, and their force when they did come was weaker. Surely the tide had turned.