The post-girl

by Edward Charles Booth

And there, resting awhile, with the assistance of his own pain that had roused him, and the stern sight he saw, the girl assiduously coaxed and fretted, and rubbed his apathetic consciousness, like a cold hand, till it returned at last some vital warmth of understanding. As far as his loosened brain would allow, all the doings of this night came back to him, remotely remembered. Through clouds of intervening suffering he called back his quarrel with the schoolmaster; the words, even, that had been uttered; his horrid plunge over the cliff, and that sickening arrest at the bottom. And before these things had happened, came back to him his love for the girl, and his loss of her; his resolution and his irresolution; his night's packing, and the letters he had received. Even it occurred to him that the big lamp would be still burning—unless its oil were exhausted by now. It was all unreal and incomprehensible, but he remembered it and never doubted. This was no new life, but the old—to whose jagged splinters of breakage he was being so painfully spliced. What a wonder his breakage had n't been beyond all repair! How on earth had he come, neck downwards from that great height—a height it would have sickened him to contemplate jumping—and yet been spared? The mill of his mind ground slowly, by fits and starts, and not over-fine. All its mechanism seemed dislocated and rusty and out of order; in mid-thought it would be brought up suddenly with a horrid jolt that seemed like taking his head off. The noise of its working, too, was almost deafening.

"What are you doing here?" he asked vaguely, all at once, of the girl, who, with one arm about him, was seeing how far he might be trusted to keep his own balance against the cliff. It was a question that had been glimmering at the bottom of his well for some time past—only, so far, he had never been able to perceive clearly why she should not be here as well as anywhere else. But now the strangeness of her presence forced itself upon him.

"I was on the cliff..." she said, speaking in quick gasps, as the result of her exertion, "and heard you fall. At least ... I heard you cry out. You cried out ... did n't you? as you fell."

"Yes..." he admitted slowly, for the mills of thought were grinding again, and he knew whose cry had brought him succor. Murderous, cowardly cur! Friction of anger set up in his mind and heated him—who knows? ... perhaps for his own good. Anything, only to rouse him.

The girl shuddered at that cry's remembrance.

"... I heard you. I was by the boat ... and I knew something dreadful had happened ... and ran back, and looked over the cliff ... and saw you, and scrambled down to you. But we must n't waste time. Not a moment. If once the tide gets over here.... Do you think you can let me leave you ... for a minute? I must find a way up the cliff. So." She withdrew her hand from him, holding it outstretched, however, for a moment, with fingers close upon him, in case he might show any dangerous subsidence. But he did not. "Are you all right now? Do you think you can keep just like that?"

He assured her he was all right, and could keep just like that. He was by no means convinced in his own mind that such was the case, but he felt his acquiescence due to the girl, and gave it.

And she, with a final adjusting touch of finger, that was a caress all told, consigned him timidly to his own insecure care, and turned her energy upon the cliff.

Even as she looked up its black, forbidding side, smooth and sheer, and clayey with the recent rains—and remembered the desperate abandon of her descent—her heart forsook her. Calmly, first of all—trying to stimulate her bosom to courage by deliberateness of action—she sought of the cliff for some mode of ascent; desperately, after awhile, when none forthcame, flinging herself at the slimy earth, kicking with feet for a foothold—that slid down with her when she used it, as though she had been trying to scale butter; tearing with her hands at straggling tufts of grass, that pulled out by the wet roots, soft and sodden—struggling, scrambling, fighting.

And at last the fearful truth was borne in upon her—or perhaps, more accurately, the seal was put upon the truth that her bosom had secreted when she sacrificed herself over the cliff-edge for this man's saving—and with tears, not of terror, but of bitter defeat, she came back to him. Oh, the agony of that confession! Yet with death so close upon them, it was no moment to offer the cup of false hopes. However she tried to screen the knowledge from him, death would shortly tell him everything.