One Maid's Mischief

by George Manville Fenn

A blind kind of instinct seemed to keep her to the savage track near the bank of the river, and the same strange instinct led her from time to time to lie down in some convenient place to lap the cool, fresh water from her hand, and bathe her burning cheeks and brow.

As the day wore on and the heat increased, Helen’s journey became to her a blind kind of dream. She had a sort of instinct as guide that she must get farther away—struggle on at any cost, in spite of heat, weariness, and the delirium that robbed her of her reason; and staggering forward with the hands bleeding that beat back the thorns and parasites enlacing her path, sunset still found her at the task.

How long this lasted Helen could not tell. She had a sort of memory of always hearing the rushing liver, and of sometimes lying down to bathe her face and drink. She knew, too, that she was in pain, and that the thorns cut her feet and tore her clothes; but pain and suffering were as nothing so long as she could struggle on.

Then a feeling of anger came over her at the Malay girl’s desertion, for this was a new light in which she viewed her absence; and at last she toiled on till the trees seemed to come to an end, and it was only her weary torn feet now that were hindered by low, thorny, interlacing bushes. These, too, at last almost came to an end; and she seemed to be climbing, slipping, and falling over rocks that sloped rapidly down to the river. Sometimes she had to clamber right away, because the rocks towered up above her head and became impassable.

Then once more she would be slipping and falling lower and lower towards where the river foamed, and flashed, and gurgled, plashing over stones, rushing over masses of rock, but ever singing a pleasant kind of music to her ear, for it seemed to be her friend and guide.

It never seemed to occur to her confused brain that in place of going down the river towards civilisation, she was painfully climbing up towards the mountains, where the river had its rise in the wildest parts, in a district only inhabited by the Sakais—the aborigines of the country—or as they were generally called, the hill-men.

This was nothing to her, for her blind instinct led her to struggle on till, as in a dream, she saw the help that she had believed would come.

Her brain was more beclouded than ever, but she had some instinct of what she ought to do, and that was to make signals.

Then she blindly struggled on towards that help, grew faint, and her power left her. She fell, and lay moaning on the rocky earth; struggled up once more to continue her efforts to reach friends, but in vain; her power seemed to leave her now for good, and she sank down unable to rise again, her next recollection being that she was lying back upon a rough couch, with a familiar face bending over her, and then all was mist.

Then she was back at the old school, and in trouble with her instructresses for insisting upon going out upon a hot day with insufficient protection to her head. She was feverish and slightly delirious, and the doctor had been sent for. How familiar his voice sounded and how cool and pleasant his hands were to her heated brow; and she lay back there wondering why Grey Stuart did not come; why it was so long before a letter came from her father in the Malay peninsula; and then her head began to throb, for she had had, she felt, a terrible dream about having joined him there and been seized and carried off, as she had read in books of hapless maidens being abducted from their homes. It seemed so real that terrible dream, that she could picture the face of the man who had dragged her away.