"The yacht!"
"Good God, yes, it must be!" cried Henry Fowler in horror.
In a moment they were down in the thick of it all, seizing the arm of one of the weatherbeaten fellows present, and asking what was amiss?
It was the yacht, as Claud had divined, and, when her exact situation had been explained to him, he felt his heart fail at the thought of her deadly peril, at the (to him) new sensation of standing within a few yards of a band of living human beings hovering over the wide spread jaws of death.
Brent lay in a break of the chalk cliffs which was more then half-a-mile in width. Through this tunnel the unbroken might of the wind rushed with terrific force, sweeping vehemently inland up the flat river-valley, and seeming to carry the whole sea in its train. The very violence of each wave, as it broke, made the bystanders stagger back a few paces; the tide was rolling in with a rapidity which seemed miraculous; already it had driven them back almost as far as the market-place, and it was not yet high water.
There was but one hope for the strange vessel. Change of tide had been known to bring change of wind; therein lay her solitary chance. If, with the ebb, the wind shifted its quarter and kept her off shore, the sea was not too heavy for her to live in; but if no change took place—if the waves continued to roll in for another hour as they were rolling now, with that screaming blast lashing them on as though the Eumenides were behind them, no change of tide could avail—no ebb could save the cutter from being driven on the sunken coast-rocks, and from being steadily beaten to pieces.
Was there a chance? Would it happen, this change of wind for which everyone was waiting in such an agony of expectation? In breathless horror the young man watched, parting, as he did so, with a few delusions he had previously cherished respecting the Devonshire climate. He had held a vague belief that storm and tempest were the portion only of "wild Tintagel on the Cornish coast," and that here, among the warm red cliffs, no roaring billows lifted their heads. He had now to hear how, once upon a time, the inhabitants of Brent built themselves a harbor and a pier, and how in one night the sea tore them up, dashed them to pieces, and bore the fragments far inland; and of how the Spanish wrecks were hurled so frequently on the coast that the fisher-folk intermarried with the refugees, which union resulted in the lovely, dark-haired, blue-eyed race whose beauty had so struck Lady Mabel Wynch-Frère.
Meanwhile, the lifeboat's crew stood with their boat all ready to launch, if they could see the smallest hope of making any way in such a sea. One old mariner watched the scarcely discernible movements of the yacht with a telescope. She was under jib and trysail only, the intention of the crew being evidently, if it were possible, to work her to windward, and so keep her off shore.
"Them aboard of her knows what to dû," said the old salt, with approbation. "They ain't going daown without showing a bit o' fight first."
"Why on earth don't they take in all their canvas?" cried the inexperienced Claud.