“Grace,” I said huskily, “I want you to listen while I answer a question which, without speaking, you asked me—Why should I, a rough railroad contractor, esteem it an inestimable privilege to freely lay down my life for you? 178 It is only because I love you, and have done so from the day we talked together on Starcross Moor—it seems so long ago. Listen yet. I meant never to have told you until I had won the right to do so, and had something to offer the heiress of Carrington, and I fought hard for it, toiling late and early, with a dead weight of adverse fortune against me; but all that was little when every blow was struck for your sweet sake. And, if you had chosen another, I should have kept my secret, and prayed that you might be happy. Now when, so far as worldly rank goes, we stand as equals in the valley of death, I dare open all my heart to you; and, if it must be, I should ask no better end than to enter eternity here holding your hand.”
She trembled a little, great tears were brimming in her eyes, but again I read more than pity or sorrow in their liquid depths, and the next moment I had spread my wet arms about her and her head rested on my shoulder. There are some things that concern but two souls among all those on earth, and the low answer that came for the first time falteringly through her lips is to be numbered among them; but a little later, with my arm still about her, Grace smiled up at me wistfully as the remorseless waters lapped nearer.
“I loved you because you were steadfast and fearless,” she said. “Sweetheart, it will not be so hard to die together now. Do you know this is all a part of the strange memories, as though I had learned somewhere and somehow what was to be. Either in dreams or a mental phantasy I saw you riding across the prairie through the whirling snow. When you strode with bronzed face, and hard hand on my bridle through the forest, that was familiar too, and—you remember the passage about Lancelot—I knew you were my own true knight. But this is not the last of the dream forecasts or memories, and there was something brighter beyond it I could not grasp. Perhaps it may be the glories 179 of the hereafter. I wonder whether the thought was born when that sunset flamed and flashed?”
I listened, tightening my grasp about her and shivering a little. This may have been due to physical cold, or a suggestion of the supernatural; but Grace spoke without terror, reverently, and ended:
“Ralph, have you ever thought about that other world? Shall we be permitted to walk hand in hand through the first thick darkness, darling?”
“Don’t!” I cried, choking. “You shall not die. Wait here while I try to climb round those boulders; there might be a branch that would float us, or a log of driftwood in a lower eddy,” and leaving her I managed with much difficulty to scale a few great water-worn masses that had fallen from above and shut out the view of the lower river. Still, though I eagerly scanned the boulders scattered here and there along the opposite bank, there was only foam and battered stone, and at last I flung myself down dejectedly on a ledge. I dare not go back just then and tell her that the search was quite hopeless, and it may have been inherited obstinacy, but I would not own myself quite beaten yet. So I lay watching the cruel water slide past, while a host of impossible schemes flashed through my bewildered brain. They all needed at least a rope, or a few logs, though one might have been rendered feasible by a small crowbar. But I had none of these things.
Meantime a few white cloudlets drifted across the rift of blue above, and a cool breadth of shadow darkened the pine on the great rocks. Something suggested a fringe of smaller firs along the edge of a moor in Lancashire, and for a moment my thoughts sped back to the little gray-stone church under the Ling Fell. Then a slow stately droning swelled into a measured boom and I wondered what it was, until it flashed on me that this was a funeral 180 march I had once heard there on just such a day; and it was followed by a voice reading something faint and far away, snatches of which reached me brokenly, “In the sure and certain hope,” and again, “Blessed are the dead.”
There was, perhaps, a reason for such fancies, though I did not know it at that time, for, as I found afterward by the deep score across the scalp, my head must have been driven against the stone with sufficient violence to destroy forever the balance of a less thickly covered brain. However, it could not have lasted more than a few moments before I knew that the funeral march was only the boom of the river, and if I would not have it as sole requiem for one who was dearer far than life to me I must summon all my powers of invention. The waters had risen several inches since I first flung myself down. Great events hang on very small ones, and we might well have left our bones in the cañon, but that when crawling over a boulder I slipped and fell heavily, and, when for a moment I lay with my head almost in the river, I could see from that level something in the eddy behind a rock on the further shore which had remained unnoticed before.
It was a dark object, half-hidden among grinding fragments of driftwood and great flakes of spume, but I caught hard at my breath when a careful scrutiny showed that beyond all doubt it was the overturned canoe. Still, at first sight, it seemed beyond the power of flesh and blood to reach it. The rapid would apparently sweep the strongest swimmer down the cañon, while the revolving pool span suggestively in narrowing circles toward the deadly vortex where the main rush from the fall went down. Second thought, however, suggested there might be a very small chance that when swept round toward the opposite shore one could by a frantic struggle draw clear of the rotary swirl into the downward flow, which ran more slackly close 181 under the bank. I came back and explained this to Grace, and then for the first time her courage gave way.
“You must not go,” she said. “No one could swim through that awful pool, and—I am only a woman, weak after all—I could not stay here and see you drown. Ralph, it was the thought of having you beside me that gave me courage—you must not leave me alone to the river.”