“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.
Chapter Thirty Three.
Cain.
“Are you here, Roland?”
The tone was the faintest of whispers, but the voice was as if the silvern echoes of heavenly harps had suddenly been wafted to the listener’s anxious ear. He could hardly murmur a reply.