“Well, it’s the only chance,” said the parson; “we must be careful, and go slow.”
They were careful, and they went slow—so slow that when they at last dragged the poor girl up she was in a dead swoon, and she never spoke or opened her eyes, but lay there like a dead thing. They saw that she was cut and injured, too, for blood was on her face, and when they touched her arm she groaned and shuddered.
Of course, something must be done, so the parson picked her up in his arms and carried her, senseless as she was, across the Downs to the place where he lodged.
Luckily, it wasn’t far, and he had told the coastguard to go at once into the village and knock up the doctor and send him.
The young clergyman’s landlady stared, you may be sure, when she saw her lodger coming home at that time of night carrying a young woman; but he explained what had happened, and the landlady gave up her room, and laid the poor girl on her bed, and got brandy and bathed her face with cold water, and at last brought her to.
It was a month before the girl could be moved, she was so injured, and all that time, when he could, the clergyman, would sit with her and read to her—for none of her friends came to see her.
She said she had no friends, when they asked her—that she was an orphan and a shop-girl in London; that she had been ill, and left her situation to come to the seaside, and had gone out in the evening, and turned giddy, and fallen over the edge of the cliff. They sent to her lodgings in Eastbourne and got her boxes for her, but no letters came for her, and she never offered to write any. And—well, you can guess what would happen under such circumstances—the young clergyman fell head over heels in love with the beautiful girl he had saved.
She was very beautiful. The landlady told me she had once seen a photograph of her that the Reverend Tommy kept in his room, and that it was an angel’s face.
The end of it was the Reverend Tommy proposed to the girl—Annie Ewen, she said her name was; and, without stopping to think how little he knew of her or her antecedents, they were married the month after the rescue from the cliff.
They were happy for a month—very happy. The girl seemed grateful to the young clergyman, and tried all she could to deserve his affection; but the cloud soon came into the sky, and a big, black cloud it was.