Denis Dent: A Novel

by E. W. Hornung

It was long enough and loud to reach the one top-gallant mast of the North Foreland that they descried between the heads, at a certain stage of their wanderings, standing out of the waves for a monument to those beneath: had a single sailor been clinging to it, he must have heard so penetrating and so sustained a call: but from the lost one on shore, as from the drowned multitude without the gateway of sparking blue, not a sound, not a sign.

Doherty and another arrived with blankets, clothes, coffee, mutton, damper, billy-can, everything that kind thought could send, with a sweet message from her who sent them; but this fell on deaf ears. Denis would touch nothing till she whom he had lost was found again; so the squatter thrust him down into the sand, and between them they forced him to make a meal. And being at last in a more reasonable frame, he would have ended by putting on the shoes which he had cast off in the morning, and forgotten or despised ever since; but now his feet were so swollen, he could not get them on. But as for letting them send him back to the station in the buggy, and leaving the search to them, as Mr. Kitto had now the temerity to suggest, it was as much as Denis could do to hear him out civilly.

The survivor went his own way after this, and it led him first to the summit of the cliffs, to see for himself whether there was no trace up there; for he had been incredulous on that point all along; but now so many had been up and down that he had still only one man's word for the absence of foot-marks in the beginning, and he roamed far afield in vigilant circles. He had been lost himself but for a fire they made on top of the cliff; and when he came shambling back to the brink, down below there was quite a galaxy of lanterns moving in different directions, a constellation of creeping stars. So they had not found her yet; and now it was black night.

In the utter heart-break of the hour, and the last stage of physical distress, Denis had half a mind to fling himself over and be done with it all; but only half a mind, and not a hundredth part of the heart. Instead, as he went down gingerly in the dusk, one painful step at a time, he reviled himself from top to bottom for the unnecessary climb which is not wholly credited to this day. It was already at the root of everything in the climber's mind. Had he only explored the smaller cavern, he had been back with succour in one hour instead of three.

Mr. Kitto meanwhile had made up his mind. "We shall never find her alive," he whispered to his overseer, who arrived upon the scene a little before Denis's return. "But for that poor fellow's sake we must keep up the pretence a bit longer. I can see there was something between them; and when we find her body it will probably kill him; and after all every soul will have been lost. Did you know the bodies were beginning to come ashore? There's a little chap I take to be the skipper: last to leave and first to land."

"But you aren't looking for this girl among them?" the overseer exclaimed aghast.

"Not yet; but it will come to that," whispered Kitto. "I cooeyed till I was hoarse; that's why I can't raise my voice above a whisper now; and all the rest of us are in the same box. Mark my words, it's a case of suicide, and a fearful case: the poor thing was so terrified at her position when she awoke and found herself deserted on this desert coast, that it drove her clean out of her mind. I almost hope he won't live to realize it was that—though he's the sort we want in this colony—if he gave up the sea."

"Was there no tracking her?"

"Scarcely a yard from the mouth of the cave, and he doesn't know I did that; the sand is so heavy outside. But the tracks I did find pointed straight to the sea. I grant you there were not enough of them to mean anything in themselves."

They chanced to be passing close to the ti-tree clump as they conversed. Suddenly the overseer stood still.