Perhaps the young woman that I’m coming to presently in this story—story it isn’t, because it’s true, but you know what I mean—had the same sort of feeling,—vertigo, I think they call it. At any rate, one evening when the Reverend Tommy was out with his hammer and his coil of rope and things that he used, right on the highest and loneliest part of the cliff, he saw a young woman looking over. It was a summer evening, and quite light and quite still. There wasn’t a soul in sight but this young woman, and the Reverend Tommy wondered what she was doing there all alone. As he got close to her he saw she was quite a young woman, and very nicely dressed, and that she was very pretty.
But before he could get right up to her—she hadn’t heard him coming, as he was walking on the turf of the Downs—this young woman gave a little cry, swung forward, and in a second had disappeared over the edge of that awful cliff.
The young clergyman rushed to the spot, knelt on the edge and peered over, and then he saw this poor girl hanging half-way between life and death. As she had fallen, one of the rugged juts I told you of had caught under the bottom of a short tight-fitting cloth kind of jacket she wore, and there it held her. It made my blood run cold when the landlady described it to me, as she had heard it of a lady Mr. Lloyd had told it to.
He shouted out to her, but he got no answer; so he made up his mind she had fainted. He looked about and shouted, but he could see nobody near. Then he looked over the cliff again, and it seemed to him that the girl’s jacket was giving way under the strain, and that in a minute she would be hurled to an awful death on the rocks below.
I don’t know how he did it, because the landlady couldn’t tell me, not knowing about ropes and things, but in some way Mr. Lloyd made his rope fast. I think he drove a big stake or wooden peg into the turf, and piled stones on it—at any rate, he made his rope fast, as he thought, and then, with his hammer in his pocket, he swung himself over and went down bit by bit, steadying himself every now and then by digging his foot into holes in the side of the cliff.
He managed to swing himself right down by the side of the poor girl, and spoke to her and told her to have courage; but she was senseless.
He lowered himself a bit more, and then with his hammer beat out a place in the cliff where it was hard, just room enough for him to put his two feet in and take the strain off the rope.
Then he looked above him and below him to see if there was any place that was safe to stand on without the rope, as he wanted to tie that round the poor girl’s body.
He found a place just on the other side where he could stand and hold on by a jutting piece of cliff, and he got there somehow—he never remembered himself quite how—but his hands were fearfully bruised in doing it, and it was as much as he could do to hold on when he got there.
The girl had come to a little, but it was getting darker, and he could only just see her face by the time he had made himself quite firm on the little ledge.