The Love That Prevailed

by Frank Frankfort Moore

Wesley and his companion stood in astonishment, watching that wonder. Its course was not directly for the cliff where they were standing; but they saw that if it reached the shore it would do so a hundred yards or thereabouts to the westward.

They were not wrong. It reached the shore not farther away from them. It struck the sand where the sun had dried it, and in a moment it had scooped out a hollow eight or ten feet deep; then it whirled on to the shingle. They heard the noise as of the relapse of a great wave among the pebbles, sweeping them down beneath the scoop of its talons; only now it seemed as if the prow of a frigate had dashed into the ridge of pebbles and was pounding its way through them. It was a moving pillar of stones that struck furiously against the stones of the cliff—an avalanche in the air that thundered against the brow, breaking away a ton of rock, and turning it into an avalanche that slid down to the enormous gap made in the shingle. At the same instant there was the roar of a cataract as the whirling flood of the waterspout broke high in the air and dropped upon the land. It was as if a lake had fallen from the skies in a solid mass, carrying everything before it.

It was the girl who had grasped Wesley by the arm, forcing him to rush with her to the higher ground. Together they ran; but before they reached it they were wading and slipping and surging through a torrent that overflowed the cliff, and poured in the wave of a waterfall over the brink and thundered upon the rocks beneath.

They only paused to take breath when they reached the highest ledge of the irregular ground beyond the cliff pathway. There was a tangle of lightning in the air—it fell from a cloud that had black flowing fringes, like a horse's tail trailing behind it, and it was approaching the shore. They fled for the rocks of the Bed Tor.

If he had been alone he never would have reached the place. The air was black with rain, and he and his companion seemed to be rushing through a cloud that had the density of velvet. It was a blind flight; but this girl of the coast needed not the lightning torch that flared on every side of them to guide her. She held his arm, and he suffered himself to be led by her. She even knew where the sheltering rocks were to be found; they had not to search for them. At the back of the slight eminence that had formed his pulpit, half a dozen basalt boulders of unequal size lay tumbled together. Two of them were on end and three others lay over them, the remaining one lying diagonally across the arched entrance to what had the appearance of the ruin of a doorway four feet high. The high coarse herbage of the place, with here and there a bramble branch, was thick at this place, and if the girl and the companions of her childhood had not been accustomed to play their games here, calling the hollow between the stones their cave sometimes, their palace when it suited them, it would have escaped notice.

She bent her head and crept under the stones of the roof, and he followed her. They had a depth of scarcely three feet behind them, for the bank of the mound against which the stones lay sloped naturally outward, and the height was not more than four feet; but it was a shelter, although they had to kneel upon its hard floor. It was a shelter, and they had need of one just then. The cloud had burst over them just as they reached their hospitable cleft in the rocks, and the seventh plague of Egypt had fallen upon the rude amphitheatre of the Red Tor—it was hail mingled with fire; and when a pause came, as it did with a suddenness that was more appalling than the violence of the storm, the ninth plague was upon them. The darkness might have been felt. They could see nothing outside. They knew that only ten yards away there was another pile of rocks with a few stunted trees springing from their crevices; but they could not even see this landmark. Farther away, on a small plateau, was the celebrated rocking-stone of Red Tor; but it seemed to have been blotted out. They could hear the sound of the wind shrieking over the land, making many strange whistlings and moanings through the hollows among the stones—they could hear the sound of thousands of runnels down the banks, but they could see nothing.

In that awful black pause Wesley began to repeat the words of the eighteenth Psalm:

“The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler, and my high tower....

“In my distress I called upon the Lord, and cried unto my God: he heard my voice out of his temple, and my cry before him, even into his ears.

“Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations also of the hills moved and were shaken, because he was wroth.