Of High Descent Part 86

But as he turned he hesitated. There were the police waiting for him when he landed, and his people were on the sh.o.r.e waiting to see him disgraced--for he was, of course, in utter ignorance of the efforts that had been made to enable him to escape. And even as he hesitated he knew that such a proceeding was impossible. Had he been tenfold the swimmer he could not have reached that point, for the current, after coming from the west and striking full against the rocks, was bearing him seaward at a tremendous rate. The voices that had been in a clamour of excitement and the shouts and orders were growing distant; the lights that were flashing over the water seemed minute by minute more faint, and as, almost without effort, he floated on he wondered at the feeling of calm, matter-of-fact reasoning which the cold plunge seemed to have aroused.

Always a clever swimmer from the days when the st.u.r.dy fisherman Perrow had tied a stout hake-line about his waist, and bid him leap into the sea from the lugger's side, and taught him to feel confidence in the water, he had never felt so much at home as now. He was clothed, but the strong current bore him along, and the slightest movement of his limbs kept him with his nostrils clear of the golden-spangled water.

What should he do?

He looked seaward, and there, right off the harbour mouth, was a lantern. He could not make out the shape of the boat; but his guilty conscience suggested that it was one placed there by the police for his capture; sh.o.r.eward he could see other moving lights, and he knew as well as if he were there that they were boat lanterns, and that people were putting off in pursuit.

It did not seem to occur to him that they would be essaying to save him; he had committed an offence against the law, and in his then frame of mind he could only admit one thought in connection with them into his brain, and that was that any boat's crew which pushed off would have but one idea--to make every effort to capture him, and so he swam, letting the swift tide carry him where it would.

Shouts arose, sounding faint and strange as they came from where the lanterns gleamed faintly; and there was an answering hail from the light off the harbour--the light toward which he was being borne.

"They'll see me," he thought, and he made a few vigorous strokes to turn aside, but gave up directly, as he felt it possible that he might be carried by in the darkness.

To his horror, he found that he would be taken so close, that he could easily swim to and touch the boat. For one moment fear swayed him of another kind, and he felt that he must give up.

"Better be taken aboard to prison than drown," he muttered; and he swam toward the boat.

"Better be drowned than taken off to prison," he said the next moment; and then, "Why should I drown?"

His confidence returned as he was borne nearer and nearer to the lugger riding here to its buoy; and he could hear the voices of the men on board talking eagerly as they gazed sh.o.r.eward.

"Keep a bright look-out," said a rough voice; and Harry ceased swimming after turning over on his back, and let the current bear him swiftly and silently along.

The spangled water seemed hardly disturbed by his presence as he neared the light, then saw it eclipsed by the boat's hull, just as he felt that he must be seen. Then he was past the boat, and in a few seconds the light reappeared from the other side, shining full upon his white face, but the men were looking in the other direction and he was not seen.

Once more the horror of drowning came upon him, and he turned on his face to swim back. It was only a momentary sensation, and as he swam and felt his power in the water he closed the lips firmly that had parted to hail, and swam on.

The shouts came and were answered from time to time, he could hear the regular rattle and beat of an oar, and then the blue light flashed out brilliantly, and as he raised himself at each long steady stroke he could see quite a crowd of figures had gathered on the pier, and he was startled to see how far he was from the sh.o.r.e. And all this time there upon his left was the bright red harbour-light, glaring at him like an eye, which seemed to be watching him and waiting to see him drown. At times it looked to be so lifelike that it appeared to blink at him, and as he swam on he ceased to gaze at the dull yellow light of the moving lanterns, and kept on watching that redder eye-like lamp.

The blue light blazed for a time like a brilliant star and then died out; the shouts of the men in the boat floated to him, and the lights of the town grew farther away as he still swam steadily on with a sea of stars above him, and another concave of stars apparently below; on his right the open sea, and on his left, where the dull land was, arose a jagged black line against the starry sky showing the surface of the cliff.

"What shall I do?" he said to himself, as he looked back at light after light moving slowly on the water, but all far behind him, for he was, as he well knew, in one of the swiftest currents running due east of the quay, and for a distance from that point due south. It was a hard question to answer. He might swim on for an hour--he felt as if he could swim for two--and what then?

He could not tell, but all the time the tide was bearing him beyond the reach of pursuit so fast that the hails grew more faint, and every minute now the roar of the surf grew plainer.

Should he swim ash.o.r.e--land--and escape?

Where to?

"Hah!"

He uttered a faint cry, for just then his hand touched something cold and slimy, and for the moment he felt paralysed, as he recalled how often a shark had come in with the tide. For the object he had touched seemed to glide by him, and what felt like a slimy moving fin swept over his hand. He struck out now with all his strength, blindly, and moved solely by one impulse--that of escaping from a death so hideous--a chill of horror ran through him, and for the moment he felt half paralysed.

The sensation was agonising, and the strokes he gave were quick, spasmodic, and of the kind given by a drowning man; but as he swam on and the moments pa.s.sed without his being seized, the waning courage began to return strongly once more, he recovered his nerve, and ceasing his frantic efforts swam slowly on.

The efforts he had made had exhausted him, however, and he turned over on his back to rest and lie paddling gently, gazing straight up at the glorious stars which burned so brilliantly overhead. The change was restful, and conscious that the current swept him still swiftly along, he turned once more and began to swim.

That fit of excitement, probably from touching some old weed-grown piece of timber, must have lasted longer than he thought, for he had toiled on heedless of which direction he took, and this direction had been sh.o.r.eward, the current had done the rest; and now that he swam it was into one of the back tidal eddies, and the regular dull roar and rush and the darkness ahead taught him that he was only a few hundred yards from the cliffs. He rose up as he swam and looked sharply from side to side, to see a faint lambent light where the phosph.o.r.escent waves broke, and before him the black jagged line which seemed to terminate the golden-spangled heavens, where the stars dipped down behind the sh.o.r.e.

He hesitated for a few moments--not for long. It was madness to strike out again into the swift current, when in a short time he could land or, if not, reach one of the detached ma.s.ses of rock, and rest there till the tide went down. But what to do then? Those who searched for him would be certain to hunt along the sh.o.r.e, and to land and strike inland was, in his drenched condition, to invite capture.

He shuddered at the thought, and awaking now to the fact that he was rapidly growing exhausted, he swam on into the black band that seemed to stretch beneath the cliffs.

He was weaker than he realised, and, familiar as he was with this part of the coast, it now in the darkness a.s.sumed a weird, horrifying aspect; the sounds grew, in his strangely excited state, appalling, and there were moments when he felt as if the end had come. For as he swam on it was every now and then into some moving ma.s.s of anch.o.r.ed wrack, whose slimy fronds wrapped round and clung to his limbs, hampering his movements and calling forth a desperate struggle before he could get clear.

Then, as he reached the broken water, in spite of the lambent glare he struck himself severely again and again upon some piece of jagged rock, once so heavily that he uttered a moan of pain, and floated helplessly and half unnerved listening to the hissing rush and hollow gasping of the waves as they plunged in and out among the cavities and hollows of the rocks. A hundred yards out the sea was perfectly smooth, but here in-sh.o.r.e, as the tidal swell encountered the cliffs, the tide raced in and out through the chaos of fallen blocks like some shoal of mad creatures checked in their career and frightened in their frantic efforts to escape.

Then every now and then came a low hollow moan like a faint and distant explosion, followed by the rattling of stones, and a strange whispering, more than enough to appal the stoutest swimmer cast there in the darkness of the night.

Three times over was the fugitive thrown across a ma.s.s of slimy rock, to which, losing heart now, he frantically clung, but only to be swept off again, confused, blinded by the spray and with the water thundering in his ears. Once his feet touched bottom, and he essayed to stand for a moment to try and wade across, but he only stepped directly into a deep chasm, plunging over his head, to rise beating the waves wildly, half strangled; and in the strange numbed feeling of confusion which came over him, his efforts grew more feeble, his strokes more aimless, and as once more he went under and rose with the clinging weeds about his neck the fight seemed to be over, and he threw back his head gasping for breath.

Rush! A wave curled right over, swept him from among the clammy weed, and the next moment his head was driven against a ma.s.s of rock.

What followed seemed to take place in a feverish dream. He had some recollection afterward of trying to clamber up the rough limpet-bossed rock, and of sinking down with the water plunging about his eyes and leaping at intervals light up his chest, but some time elapsed before he thoroughly realised his position, and dazed and half helpless climbed higher up to lie where the rock was dry, listening with a shudder to the strange sounds of the hurrying tide, and gazing up from time to time at the watching stars.

Volume 3, Chapter II.

A PLACE OF REFUGE.

If ever miserable wretch prayed for the light of returning day that wretch was Harry Vine. It seemed hours of agony, during which the water hissed and surged all round him as if in search of the victim who had escaped, before the faint light in the east began to give promise of the morn.

Two or three times over he had noted a lantern far out toward the distant harbour, but to all appearances the search had ceased for the night, and he was too cold and mentally stunned to heed that now.

He had some idea of where he must be--some three miles from the little harbour, but he could not be sure, and the curve outward of the land hid the distant light.

Once or twice he must have slept and dreamed in a fevered way, for he started into wakefulness with a cry of horror, to sit chilled and helpless for the rest of the night, trying to think out his future, but in a confused, dreamy way that left him where he had started at the first.

As day broke he knew exactly where he was, recollecting the rock as one to which he had before now rowed with one of the fishermen, the deep chasms at its base being a favourite resort of conger. Hard by were the two zorns to which they had made the excursion that day, and searched for specimens for his father's hobby--that day when he had overbalanced himself and fallen in.

Those zorns! either of those caves would form a hiding-place.

"That is certain to be seen," he said bitterly; and with the feeling upon him that even then some gla.s.s might be directed toward the isolated rock on which he sat, a hundred yards from the cliff, in a part where the sh.o.r.e was never bared even at the lowest tides, he began to lower himself into the deep water to swim ash.o.r.e and climb up the face of the cliff in search of some hiding-place.

He was bitterly cold and longing for the sunshine, so that he might gain a little warmth for his chilled limbs; and under the circ.u.mstances it seemed in his half-dried condition painful in the extreme to plunge into the water again.

Half in he held on by the side of the barnacle-covered rock, and scanned the face of the cliff, nearly perpendicular facing there, and seeming to offer poor foothold unless he were daring in the extreme.

He was too weak and weary to attempt it, and he turned his eyes to the right with no better success.

"Better give up," he said bitterly. "I couldn't do it now."

As he gazed to his left the rock, however, seemed more practicable.

There was a chasm there, up which it would certainly be possible to climb, and, feeling more hopeful, he was about to make the attempt, when a flush of excitement ran through him. There in full view, not fifty yards to the left, was the zigzag water-way up which they had sent the boat that day toward the narrow hole at the foot of the cliff, the little entrance to the cavern into which he had swum, and there sat for his own amus.e.m.e.nt, startling the occupants of the boat.

"The very place!" he thought. "No one would find me there."

His heart began to throb, and a warm glow seemed to run through his chilled limbs as, carefully picking his time, he swam amongst the waving seaweed to the narrow channel, and then in and out, as he had gone on that bright sunny day which seemed to him now as if it was far away in the past, when he was a careless, thoughtless boy, before he had become a wretched, hunted man.

The sun, little by little, rose above the sea and flooded the face of the rocks; the black water became amethystine and golden, and the mysterious gasping and moaning sounds of the current were once more the playful splashings of the waves as they leaped up the empurpled rocks and fell in glittering cascades. It was morning, glorious morning once again, and the black, frowning cliffs of the terrible night were now hope-inspiring in their hanging wreaths of cl.u.s.tering ivy and golden stars.