How long he lay there he knew not. After a time consciousness returned, but he felt himself incapable of action—of motion—almost of thinking.
The ledge or shelf of rock, which was covered by soft turf, had first received him, and thus broken the fall, which ended, we have said, in the bed of the stream, in which he was partially immersed from the waist downwards; but whether his limbs were broken or dislocated he knew not then, and there he lay helpless, with the cold current trickling past and partly over him, the rocks towering sharply and steeply up on either side of him to where their summits were hidden in the masses of eddying mist, that now began to rise and sink as the wind increased and the afternoon began to close.
How long might he lie there undiscovered in that desolate spot, which he knew so few approached? How long would he last, suffering as he did then? And was a miserable death, such as this—there and amid such surroundings—to be the end of his young life, with all its bright hopes and loving aspirations for the future?
Cold though he began to feel—icy cold—hot bead drops suffused his temples at the idea, and at all his fancy began to picture, and more than once a weak cry for aid escaped him.
The Cleugh became more gloomy; he heard the bellowing of the wind, and felt the falling rain, the torrents of which were certain to swell and flood this tributary of the Eden, and the terror of being drowned helplessly, as the darkness fell and the water rose, impelled him to exertion, and by efforts that seemed almost superhuman he contrived to drag his bruised body and—as he felt assured—broken limbs somewhat more out of the bed of the stream; but the agony of this was so great that he nearly fainted.
With all his constitutional strength and hardihood, he was certain that he could never survive the night; and even if he did, the coming morning and day might bring him no succour, for save when in search of a lost sheep or lamb in winter, what shepherd ever sought the recesses of the Kelpie's Cleugh?
As he lay there, with prayer in his heart and on his lips, his whole past life—and then indeed did he thank God that it had been well-nigh a blameless one—seemed to revolve again and again as in a panorama before him; while a thousand forgotten and minute details came floating back rapidly and vividly to memory.
His boyhood, his dead brother, his mother's face, as he had seen it bending over him tenderly in his little cot, while she whispered the prayer she was wont to give over him every night, till it became woven up with the life of his infancy and riper years; his roystering, fox-hunting father; his regiment—the jovial mess—the gallant parade, with familiar faces seen amid the gleam of arms; his service in Egypt—Tel-el-Kebir, with its frowning earthworks towering through the star-lit gloom and dust of the night-march, till the red artillery and musketry flashed over them in garlands of fire, as the columns swept on and the Highland pipes sent up their pæan of victory!
Then came memories of Kashgate—its bloody and ghastly massacre—the flight therefrom into the desert; and then sweet Merlwood and Hester Maule, and Annot with her fair and goddess-like loveliness.
Then came the realities of the present again in all their misery, power, and sway—the ceaseless rush of the cold stream, the pouring rain upon his upturned face, the drifting clouds, the occasional glinting of the stars, the rustle of the wet leaves torn from the trees by the gusty wind, and the too probable chances of the coming death through pain, chill, exposure, and utter exhaustion.