Part 2, Chapter V.
What Plan Next?
James Magnus had just struggled to his knees, feeling half mad with rage at his impotence, for it was only now that he fully realised how terribly he had been reduced by his illness. Here before him was the man whom he had to thank for his sufferings, and against whom for other reasons as well he nourished a bitter hatred; and yet, instead of being able to seize him by the throat and force the scoundrel to his knees, he was as helpless as a child.
“Dog! villain!” he panted, as he staggered up, and made at the fellow; but Jock Morrison gave him a contemptuous look for answer, and turned to him, but seemed to alter his mind, and as if alarmed at what he had done, started off at a brisk trot; while after vainly looking round for help, Magnus tottered towards the edge of the cliff, his eyes starting and the great drops of perspiration gathering upon his face.
For a few moments he dared not approach the extreme verge, for everything seemed to be swimming before his eyes, but at last, horror-stricken, and trembling in every limb, he went down on hands and knees, crept to the spot where Artingale had gone over, and peered down, expecting to see the mangled remains of his poor friend lying upon the stones beneath.
“Ahoy!” came from below, in the well-known voice of Artingale; and then, as Magnus saw his friend some twenty feet below, trying to clamber back, he uttered a low sigh, and sank back fainting upon the turf.
For in spite of Jock Morrison’s murderous intent, fate had been kind to Harry Artingale, who had been hurled over the edge in one of the few places where instead of going down perpendicularly, the friable cliff was broken up into ledges and slopes, upon one of which the young man had fallen and clung for his life to the rugged pieces of stone, slipping in a little avalanche of fragments some twenty or thirty feet farther than his first fall of about ten. Here he managed to check himself, while one of the largest fragments of stone that he had started in his course went on, and as he clung there he saw it leap, as it were, from beside him, and a few seconds after there came up a dull crash from where the stone had struck and splintered, two hundred feet below.
“I shall lose my nerve,” he thought, “if I stop here;” and rousing himself into action, he began to climb back, and was making his way up the steep slope without much difficulty, when he saw his friend’s ghastly face for a moment, peering over the edge, and then it disappeared.