For this reason he was in no hurry to finish and put out the light; but it had to be done at last. And then with his head on the pillow Nathan Monypenny bethought himself with small satisfaction of his wasted life. Of what use was his house, his money in the bank, his eldership, the praise of men, the satisfactory state of his ledger? After all, he was a lonely man, and out there in the rain, dank and dripping, leafless and forlorn, shivered the hedge over which in golden weather he had lifted Dahlia Ogilvy. At the rose-bush in the corner she had once let him kiss her. Ah! but he must not think of that. She was Dahlia Carnochan, and her drunken husband had just reeled home to her. Yet as he sat and stared at the red peats on the hearth Nathan Monypenny could think of nothing else, and how her hair had had a flower-like scent as he drew her to him that night when (for once in his grey and barren life) the roses bloomed red and smelled sweet.
But there was something else which kept Nathan's nerves on the stretch, something that was not summed up in his thoughts of Dahlia—an apprehension of impending disaster. Even after he had gone to bed he lifted his head more than once from the pillow, for his heart, stounding and rushing in his ears, shut out all other noises. Then he sat up and listened. He seemed to hear a cry above the roar and swelter of the storm—a man's cry for help in mortal need.
Nathan rose and drew on his clothes hurriedly, yet buttoning with his accustomed carefulness an overcoat closely about him. Then, leaving a lighted candle on the table, he opened the door and stepped out into the darkness. The wind met him like a wall. The rain assailed his cheeks and stunned his ears like a volley of bullets. For a full minute he stood exposed to the broad fury of the tempest, slashed by the driving sleet, beaten and deafened into bewilderment by a turmoil of buffeting gusts. Then, recovering himself a little, he turned aside the lee of the gable of his cottage, which looked towards the north-east. Here he was more sheltered, and though the winds still sang stridently overhead, and the swirls of lashing rain occasionally beat upon him like "hale water," he could listen with some composure for a repetition of the sound which had disturbed him.
There—there it was again! A hoarse cry, ending in a curious gasp and gurgle of extinction. Nathan almost thought that he could distinguish his own name.
He put his hands to his mouth funnel-wise, to form a sort of rough-speaking trumpet. "Haloo!" he shouted. "Where are you?"
But it was an appreciable interval before any voice replied, and then it seemed more like a dying man's moan of anguish than any human tones.
"It's somebody in the water!" Nathan cried, and rushed down the little strip of garden which separated his cottage from the Whinnyliggate Burn. This was ordinarily a clear little rivulet, running lucidly brown and pleasantly at prattle over a pebbly bed. Boys fished for "bairdies" in its three-foot-deep pools. Iris and water-lily fringed the swamps where it expanded into broad sedgy ponds. But in spite of its apparent innocence, Whinnyliggate Lane was a stream of a dangerous reputation. Its ultimate source was a deep mountain lake high among the bosoming hills of Girthon, and when the rains descended and the floods came, it sometimes chanced that the inhabitants of the village awoke to find that their prattling babe had become a giant, and that the burn, which the night before had scarce covered the pebbles in its bed, was now roaring wide and strong, thirty feet from bank to bank, crumbling their garden walls, and even threatening with destruction the sacred Midtoon Brig itself, from time immemorial the Palladium of the liberties and the Parliament House of the gossip of the village.
The part of the bank down which Nathan ran was used by the village smith for the important work of "hooping wheels," or shrinking the iron "shods" on the wheels of the red farm carts. There were always a few rusty spare "hoops" of solid iron scattered about, while a general débris of blacksmithery, outcast and decrepit, cumbered the burnside.
Before Nathan had gone far he found himself splashing in the rising water.
"Loch Girthon has broken its dam!" he murmured; "God help the puir soul that fa's intil Whinnyliggate Lane this nicht!"