To the dazed and terrified girl hours seemed to pass, and still the horses did not stop. At last Kate could feel, by the uneven falling of the hoofs and by the slower pace of the beasts, that they had reached rougher country, where the roads were less densely compacted than in the neighborhood of the traffic of a city.
Then, after a little, the iron of the horseshoes grated sharply on the pebbles of the sea-shore. Men's voices cried harshly back and forth, lanterns flashed, snorting horses checked themselves, spraying the pebbles every way from their forefeet—and presently Kate felt herself being lifted down from the saddle. So stiff was she with the constraint of her position that, but for the support of the man who helped her down, she would have fallen among the stones.
The lightning still gleamed fitfully along the horizon. The wind was blowing off shore, but steadily and with a level persistence which one might lean against. The wild gustiness of the first burst of the storm had passed away, and as the pale lightning flared up along the rough edges of the sea, which appeared to rise above her like a wall, Kate could momentarily see the slanting masts of a small vessel lying-to just outside the bar, her bowsprit pointing this way and that, as she heaved and labored in the swell.
"You are monstrously late!" a voice exclaimed, in English, and a dark figure stood between them and the white tops of the nearer waves.
Kate's conductor grunted surlily, but made no audible reply. The man in whose arms she had travelled, as in bands of iron, now dismounted and began to swear at the speaker in strange, guttural, unintelligible oaths.
"We are here to wait for my lord!" cried the man who had lifted Kate from the saddle. He stood by her, still holding her arm securely.
His voice had a curious metallic ring in it, and an odd upward intonation at the close of a sentence which remained in the memory.
"Indeed!" replied the voice which had first spoken; "then we, for our part, can stop neither for my lord nor any other lord in heaven or on earth. For Captain Smith of Poole has weighed his anchor, and waits now only the boat's return to run for Branksea, with the wind and the white horses at his tail. Nor is he the man to play pitch-and-toss out there very long, even for his own long-boat and shipmates, with such a spanking blow astern of the Sea Unicorn."
"My lord will doubtless be here directly. His horse was at the door ere we left," again answered the metallic voice with the quirk in the tail of it.
"We will e'en give him other ten minutes," quoth the sailor, imperturbably.