"Make a spring at it!" exclaimed Horace, and shuddered at his own words, lest Enrico should obey, miss the rope, and be dashed to pieces down the fall.
"He has done it! Oh, merciful Heaven!" gasped the youth, almost faint with extreme excitement. "Hold on, hold on for your life!" And with a strength beyond his years—a strength which seemed to be superhuman—Horace, throwing his whole weight on the upper end of the rope, drew it hand over hand towards him. He was in momentary dread of feeling it suddenly become light from the yielding of a knot, or from the numbed hands below giving up their desperate grasp; he was not without an undefined sense of terror lest he should be overbalanced himself, and instead of saving Enrico, be dashed with him over the abyss. Not even when Horace had passed Marco in safety had he experienced a feeling of relief so intense as when Enrico's dripping head appeared above the fall, and, a moment after, with a tremendous effort, he swung himself on the bank.
"Thank God! Oh, thank God!" exclaimed Horace.
Enrico lay motionless, senseless. His failing powers had been concentrated on that one effort, and he swooned as soon as it had been made.
Horace did all that he could to fan the flickering spark of life. He first dragged Enrico a few paces from the edge; for in that moment of dizzy horror, he could not disconnect nearness to the Cascata della Morte from the idea of danger; he longed to get beyond hearing of its roar. He then removed part of the clothes of the half-drowned man, which were torn, saturated, and dripping with water. He chafed Enrico's limbs, breathed on his lips, tried to impart warmth to the bruised and benumbed frame. He wrung the water from the long black hair which hung in tangled strands over the ghastly face, which even in its senselessness retained a look of distress which told of the agony of the late struggle for life.
While Horace is thus engaged, I will relate how Enrico had come into the strange and fearful position from which he had been thus wonderfully rescued.
Slipping on the rough tree-bridge and losing his balance, Enrico had fallen into the stream, struggling in vain with the current, and had been (as Marco had described), borne onward to the edge of the cataract. In vain had he attempted to catch at the reeds of grasses near, in vain he had shrieked for help. He had been whirled on, and then over in that awful plunge which involved almost inevitable destruction!
From the centre of the rock wall that backed the cataract, and not very far from the summit, jutted out small fragment of crag, round and over which the furious waters had for centuries dashed, bearing away articles of the solid stone by ceaseless wear, yet leaving a tooth-like projection, only visible when the flood was not full, though its opposition always whirled the spray in wider circles from that spot.
On this projection the unfortunate Enrico was dashed, stunned, and bruised. Caught by his clothes, he had been suspended for some minutes in an almost unconscious state, unable even to utter a cry. He revived, indeed, but only to become aware of the full horrors of his situation. His eyes being, from his position, turned below, he beheld the awful depth down which he expected every moment to be hurled, as the fierce hissing waters, with unceasing flow, seemed like merciless enemies determined to tear him down, to wrench him away from the one little point of refuge afforded by the projecting crag to which he now wildly clung.
Enrico's soul sickened, his brain reeled; the din of the torrent rushing, rolling, roaring—above, below—almost maddened the wretched man! A strange idea possessed his mind, that it was Raphael's prayer which suspended him now, as it were, by a hair above the gulf, of not only temporal but eternal destruction. If Raphael should cease, even for a moment, to pray, the half-frenzied Enrico believed that the waters would have their wild will, and bear him crashing down to perdition, swathed in the white shroud of their foam!