KIT STARTS ON HIS MISSION
The boy blew his nose, and set off along the foot of the cliff, the scent-bottle in his hand.
Beneath the chalk boulders that strewed the bottom of the cliff, weird in the white gloom, a band of shingle ran like a road before him. He took it, the shingle crunching beneath his feet.
The tide was rising: he could hear its stealthy rustle beneath him. He must reach the Head and round it before the water; and how far off the ultimate point might be, he did not know, and could not see.
Once round it, if he had understood the old man aright, the cliffs fell away. There he would climb them; and he hoped to be on the top of the Downs before the mist rolled away and the frigate, were she still lying off the wreck, could send boats to search the beach.
He was very hungry; but his heart soared. Youth, the great healer, had done its work. Already the terrors of that fierce yesterday, the tendernesses of that solemn night, were far away.
He laboured on as rapidly as the backward drag of the shingle would permit; at every stride clutching the scent-bottle to make sure of it.
His was a tremendous mission.
Yet surely it was not for the first time he had set out on such an errand? alone, journeying through perilous lands, the fate of the world on his shoulders. No, no, no. Somewhere, somewhen…. He had forgotten; yet somehow he remembered.
Well, he had won through then: he must have—else he would not be here now. Yet not in this little life, these fifteen years of home- experience. Death then, perhaps a thousand deaths, must have intervened between him—and him. Such a strange mystery!—What was the answer to it?—Was death a sham? was there no such thing?—did He, the real He, go on for ever not merely in heaven, as the parsons affirmed, but on earth? was this life of his One, One reiterated, One to Everlasting, a tide ebbing and flowing between the night of Time and the day of Eternity? these recurring deaths only barriers blocking off terms of his Eternal Self?