Again, exerting all his powers, a despairing cry escaped him, and this time a sound responded. It was only a heron, however, that, full of terror, seemed to flash out from its nest in the rocks, and winged its way out of sight in a moment.
As he lay there it seemed to him as if time had a torturing power of spinning out its seconds, minutes, and hours that he had never known it to have before.
But to lie there perishing within almost rifle-shot of the roof under which he was born—so near his friends and so many who loved him—Annot more than all—was a terrible conviction—one apparently unnatural, unrealizable!
The mist had gone now, and the dark rocks between which he lay began to assume strange and gruesome forms in the weird light of the occasional stars, still more so when once or twice a weird glimpse of the stormy moon penetrated into the Cleugh.
'Oh, God!' cried he imploringly, 'to perish—to perish thus!'
At that moment, in a swiftly passing gleam of moonshine, he saw a face—a human face—peering over the rocks above as if seeking to penetrate the watery gloom below, and again a cry for help—help for the sake of mercy, for the sake of Heaven, escaped him.
For a moment, we say, the face was there; the next it vanished, as a dark mass of cloud swept over the silver disc of the moon, and a sound, painfully and unmistakably like a mocking laugh, reached the ears of the sufferer.
The face—if face it actually was—and not that of the fabled fiend, the Kelpie of the Cleugh, appeared no more; the hours went by; no succour came, and Roland, as he now resigned himself to the worst, believed that what he had seen, or thought he had seen, was but the creation of his own fevered and over-excited fancy.