The strong mind of Sir John was prostrated before the fearfully excited feelings of his nephew, as a massy barrier of iron may be beaten down by a cannon-ball; and he descended the turret stair rebuked and humbled by an energy more potent than his own—as if, for the time, he and the young man had exchanged characters. Next morning Dallas was nowhere to be found.
He was seen about sunrise, by a farmer of the parish, passing hurriedly along the ridge of the hill. The man, a staid Presbyterian, with whom he had once loved to converse, had saluted him as he passed, and then paused for half a second in the expectation that, as usual, he would address him in turn; but he seemed wholly unconscious of his presence. His face, he said, was of a deadly paleness, and his pace, though hurried, seemed strangely unequal, as if he were exhausted by indisposition or fatigue. The day wore on; and towards evening, Sir John, who could no longer conceal the anxiety which he felt, ordered out all his domestics in quest of him. But the night soon fell dark and rainy, and the party was on the eve of relinquishing the search, when, in passing along the edge of the Look-out, one of the servants observed something white lying on the little grassy bank which surmounts the precipice. It was an open Bible—the gift, as the title-page intimated, of Mary Anderson to Dallas Urquhart. Sir John struck his clenched fist against his forehead.
“Gracious heaven!” he exclaimed, “he has destroyed himself—to the foot of the rock—to the foot of the rock;—and haste! for the tide is fast rising. But stay—let me forward—I will lead the way myself.”
And, passing through his terrified attendants, he began to descend by a path nearly invisible in the darkness, and which, winding along the narrow shelves of the precipice, seemed barely accessible even by day to the light foot of the schoolboy. There was only one of the many who now thronged the rock edge who had courage enough to follow him—a tall spare man, wrapped up in a dark-coloured cloak. As the path became narrower and more broken, and overhung still more and more fearfully the dizzy descent, the stranger, who passed lightly and steadily along, repeatedly extended his arm to the assistance of the knight, who, through agitation and the stiffness incident to a period of life considerably advanced, stumbled frightfully as he hurried down. They reached the shore in safety together. All was dismally solitary. They could see only the dark rock towering over them, and the line of white waves which were tumbling over the beach, and had now begun to lash the base of the precipice.
“Alas! my poor lost friend!” ejaculated the stranger—“lost, alas! for ever, when I had hoped most for thy return. Wretched, unfortunate creature! with little care of thine own for the things of this world, and yet ever led away by those who worshipped them as their only god—alas! alas! how hast thou perished!”
“Spare me, Hugh Anderson!” said Sir John, “spare me!—do not, I implore you, add to the anguish of this miserable night!”
They walked together in silence to where the waves barred their further progress, and then returned to the top of the precipice. The search was renewed in the morning, but as ineffectually as on the preceding night—there was no trace of the body. Seasons passed away; Sir John, as has been already related, perished by his own act; Episcopacy fell; and Hugh Anderson, now a greyheaded elderly man, was reappointed, after the lapse of more than thirty years, to his old charge, the parish of Cromarty.
He had quitted it amid the snow-wreaths of a severe and boisterous winter; he returned to it after a storm of wind and snow from the sea had heaped the beach with wrack and tangle, and torn their mantles of ivy from some of the higher precipices. He revisited with anxious solicitude the well-remembered haunts endeared to him by so many fond, yet mournful recollections—Mary’s favourite walks—the cliffs which he had so often scaled with Dallas—and the path which he had descended in the darkness with the hapless Sir John. He paused at the foot of the precipice—the storm had swept fiercely over its iron forehead, and an immense bush of ivy, that had fallen from the ledge of the apple-yardie, lay withering at its base. His eye caught something of unusual appearance amid the torn and broken foliage—it was a human skull, bleached white by the rains and the sunshine of many seasons, and a few disjointed and fractured bones lay scattered near it. Painfully did he gather them up, and painfully scooping out with his pointed stick a hollow in the neighbouring bank, he shed, as he covered them up from the sight, the last tears that have fallen to the memory of the lost Dallas Urquhart.
CHAPTER X.
“A mighty good sort of man.”