'It will perhaps be appeased,' he answered, 'when it finds itself once more with you. Poor wretch! its hunger must be frightful. Yet--yet--how else to kill it? And killed it must be.'
'I wish,' she said again, as she had so often said before, 'that I had never asked to have it saved. It would have been better to have let it die in the sea.'
'Perhaps,' he answered. 'Perhaps. We can, however, leave it here when we get taken off, and then it must take its chance.'
They were now upon the last ridge of the spur beneath which he had left Gilbert, and he told her that, in another moment, she would see him by looking down. 'Indeed,' he said, 'if you glance over now you can see him, I imagine.'
Then he bade her hold his hand and lean over the lip of the precipice, and trace the run of the hill seawards. Following his instructions, she did so, when suddenly, below, they heard a rattling, a sliding as of a mass of earth and stones slipping, and he felt a slight withdrawal, a sinking of the ground, beneath their feet. He felt it and understood its significance in an instant, while recalling the masses of fallen chalk and earth which he had observed lying at the foot of this and other cliffs earlier in the day.
'Back,' he cried, 'Back!' while, as he did so, he seized Bella with his other hand as well as the one she already held, and sprang away from the ridge, the violence of his action causing her to fall on her knees. Yet, still knowing her danger--their danger--he dragged her back and saved her. Though not a moment too soon--not an instant!--for, as he clutched at her, the earth for a foot or so in front of them--the very portion of it on which they had been standing! the very portion, indeed, across which he had but now drawn her--gave way. It gave way, broke off in a long line, and fell with a crash to the depths below, leaving an abyss above the spot over which he had drawn her.
'My God!' she gasped, 'you have saved my life again! Again--ah!'
That last exclamation was, in truth, a shriek of dismay, of awful agony, of terror in the extreme. For she, whose face was towards the way they had come, as his back was towards it, saw that which he had no knowledge of; that which paralysed her, struck her an instant after dumb with horror.
She saw the tiger-cub close behind him and crouching for a spring, she saw its devilish eyes gleaming like topazes, and she saw its body hurled with tremendous force towards Charke as he stood looking down on her.
Full at him it sprang, its savage jaws open and its forelegs extended. And it partly missed him through passing on his left side, yet not doing so altogether. Instead, it struck his left shoulder, spinning him round like a drunken, reeling man, and causing him to stagger backwards towards the chasm and, with a gasp, to fall over it and disappear.