CHAPTER XIII.

ACTON CHINE.

More than three weeks have now elapsed since that eventful evening which saw Hawkshaw and Morley Ashton ascending the steep pathway that leads to Acton Chine, and which, moreover, saw the first-named personage traversing the same path homeward--but _alone_.

Though Morley was flung over the cliff, and though the turf which he grasped gave way, so that he actually fell into the yawning gulf below, he was not fated to perish.

But before the turf parted in his despairing grasp, poor Morley lived a lifetime, as it were, of keen agony.

He knew the profundity of the awful abyss that yawned in blackness far down beneath him, and he heard the roaring of the fierce waves, that leaped and boiled as if impatient of their prey.

The chine we have stated as being about 400 feet in height; its depth, to the bottom of the sea, we have no means of knowing, the foundation of its rocks being far below where mortal eye can fathom.

After the name of Ethel escaped him, he had no power to utter another cry, for the terrible expression which he read in the malignant face of Hawkshaw, while standing safely on the brink above, paralysed him, and he remained silent--but silently desperate, in his wild and despairing attempts to raise himself up, and to regain a footing on the cliff; but he had no purchase (to use a mechanical term); thus, while clinging by his hands, his feet and knees scraped fruitlessly on the hard face of the basaltic rocks.

Mechanically, too, he moved his body, as one who, in sleep, dreams, and is afraid of falling.

He felt the turf rending, the last clutch of life parting, by the very efforts he made to save it. Then a blindness seemed to come upon him--a mist, through which the form of Hawkshaw seemed dilated to colossal proportions, towering between him and the sky like a destroying angel, while the roaring of the sea beneath seemed to fill all space, as with the roll of thunder.

Bead-drops of agony oozed upon his icy brow, while despair and the terror of death were in his heart, and though the whole episode lasted little more, perhaps, than a single minute, Morley Ashton lived, as we have stated, _a lifetime of agony_!

The turf gave way! a sigh--it seemed his parting soul--escaped him; _he fell_, and vanished from the eyes of Hawkshaw.

But Heaven had ordained that the poor lad was not to perish. About thirty-five, perhaps forty feet below the verge of the chine, there extends a ledge or abutting piece of rock, about five feet broad, and eight or ten feet long, so far as the eye may judge of it from the seaward, as mortal hand has never measured it; and on this natural shelf he fell heavily, and almost senseless by emotion and the shock.

A thick coarse moss, of a kind that has grown there for ages, mingled with a species of guano deposited by the sea-birds, received him softly, and broke the force of his fall, which, had the face of the basalt been bare, must have produced the most fatal injuries.

For some time Morley thought all was over, and he lay still--half stunned alike by the shock and by the suddenness of the whole event. Then his heart filled with a gush of gratitude to Heaven that he was saved, till reflection brought a thrill of horror that he was now utterly lost.

He heard still the ceaseless roaring and bellowing of the breakers, gurgling, sucking, and surging in the chine; he heard also the wild screaming of the sea-birds above and below him, as the astonished gulls and cormorants wheeled in circles, or alighted on the shelf of rock beside him, and flapped their wings with a sharp and at times booming sound.

The evening passed away, and night came on before Morley dared to stir, to move, or look about him. In all its starry splendour, he could see the Plough and the glorious stream of the Milky Way.

Then the moon, that whilom rose as we have said, red and round as a crimson shield, at the far verge of the watery horizon, had gradually reached almost to the zenith, when her disc, small and sharply defined, shone like a ball of glowing silver amid the sparkling ether.

A broad flake of her glorious sheen poured aslant into the gaping chine, increasing, perhaps, its weird and ghastly aspect; but this broad stream of light enabled poor Morley to examine the place of his fall, and he soon saw in all their details the horrors of his hopeless situation.

Above, the rock ascended sheer as a wall to the height we have stated--a wall up which it was hopeless to think of climbing.

Below, the cliff receded from the ledge on which he lay, so that in reality the sea was foaming completely beneath him.

From the land-side his position could neither be seen nor even discovered in any way whatever; and even if it were so, in what way were the finders to succour him?

How many ships might pass before even a sailor's ready eye might detect a human figure perched so far up, among the hungry cormorants and shrieking sea-mews?

Without shelter, food, or water, how long could he survive on the giddy shelf of that storm-beaten sea-cliff, where he dared not close an eye lest he might roll into eternity below?

To ascend was impracticable; to descend was to die!

How awful it was to see the white sea-birds skimming the ocean with wings outspread, or floating in the air, and know that they were more than 300 feet below him!

If descried by the crew of a fisher-boat, the idea occurred to him of risking a plunge into the water: but from this desperate thought his heart recoiled at once. To fall whizzing through the air from such a height would insure his falling breathless into the sea, so that its waves would close over him when his lungs were empty, and he would never rise again.

Days might pass, and nights would certainly pass, during which no eye could see him, save those of the sea-birds that wheeled in circles round him, as if impatient of their repast, from which his apparent life and power of action--as he "who-whooped" from time to time to scare them--as yet denied their craving beaks and bills, but only as yet, for he anticipated with horror a time when, faint and expiring, they might pounce down in one voracious flock and rend him piecemeal.

And thus Ethel, life, hope, and the world, were all cut off from him at one fell swoop, by a single blow of Hawkshaw's felon hand.

Conquered, powerless, and crushed by the united horrors of his situation; unseen, unknown, left to die within a pistol-shot of help, within forty feet of safety, he cowered his face between his knees, and murmuring, "Oh, villain! villain!" he wept like a child.

So the breakers continued to boom, so sickening in their monotony, far down below, and the night passed on. Morley strove to pray, but his mind was a chaos; he could neither thank Heaven for his first escape, nor implore aid for the future. For a time he was stupefied.

So the wild sea-birds--the black-billed auk, the mouse-coloured guillemot, the huge white gull, the rank, coarse cormorant, whose shape Milton describes Satan as assuming, when devising death, he perched upon the Tree of Life--continued to wheel and scream around the miserable Morley, who remained on his lofty perch in an agony of spirit.

The sea ebbed and flowed again; the moon paled and waned; the clouds gathered in heaven and divided again. Day stole over the brightening ocean, and gradually a bright May morning--the same morning when, creeping from Rose's side, the weeping Ethel drew the curtains of her window, and looked forth upon the upland path that led to this fatal spot.

The morning star twinkled brightly and propitiously above the edge of the chine, and then its light faded into radiance of the growing dawn.

And with day came hope, that if he was doomed to die it might not be unseen. Morley wiped his damp brow and eyes with his handkerchief, for though the season was summer, the atmosphere was damp and chill upon the cliff above the sea.

He heard once the voice of a lark, but it was high above him.

From the place where he sat, Morley's eye could command a range of about eight miles of sea, and as the day dawned he anxiously swept the offing, but in vain; nothing was visible, but what the Ancient Mariner saw, "the sea and sky, the sea and sky," till about sunrise, when a white sail and the smoke of a steamer, both hull down, could be seen at the horizon, some thirty miles off; thus, so far as succour was concerned, they might as well have been beyond the equator.

Fourteen hours had he now been missing.

What would be the emotions, the bewilderment, the grief of Ethel?--what the specious, the artful, it might be the villainous story framed by Hawkshaw to account for his disappearance? It might be one that would blast his character, blacken his memory, and sever even her love from him.

Was not a murderer capable of anything?

Now a fisher-boat, brown and tarry, with a patched lugsail, of no particular hue, bellying out in the fresh morning breeze, with the snow-white foam bubbling under her sharp prow, shot into sight about two miles off.

Morley shouted, though he might have saved himself the trouble, for the two men who formed her crew could no more have heard him than if he had been in the moon; but he could not repress the impulse that made him halloo to them again and again.

He waved his white handkerchief frantically. If observed, it would seem but a sea-bird's wing at such a distance; but the two black specks in the fishing-boat were seated with their backs to the shore, one intent upon handling his tiller, the other grasped the sheet, and both were enjoying their pipes and gazing seaward; so the boat, with her bellying sail, and foam-dripping prow, passed on, and Morley remained still unseen and alone.

Other three boats passed, under a press of sail, towards the fishing ground; but they were far off--so far that he scarcely made any attempt to signal them.

He felt no hunger; but now a thirst, which he had no means of allaying, and which the saline property of the atmosphere tended to increase, came upon him to add to his troubles and misery of mind and body.

Now a steamer passed, bound for Ireland, or the Isle of Man.

She was nearly ten miles off; but in the hope some idling tourist or passenger might be scanning the coast with a telescope or lorgnette, he continued, with anxious vigour, to wave his handkerchief, but waved it in vain, for she sped on her course and rapidly disappeared, though the long, smoky pennant, emitted by her funnel, lingered for hours across the sky before it melted into thin air and passed away.

And still the angry waves boomed below, and the greedy sea-birds wheeled and screamed around him. How he longed for wings like the latter!

"Oh, Heaven!" he exclaimed, "aid, inspire, and sustain me for a little time, or let me perish at once, and end this day of horror!"

More than once, he actually conceived the idea of endeavouring to lure a couple of gulls within his grasp, and then to plunge into the sea, in the hope that their flapping and outspread pinions might break the force of his descent; and once safely in the ocean, he knew that he could swim round the chine, and reach the level beach that lies about a quarter of a mile to the westward of it.

But he might as well have hoped to catch the distant clouds or the hues of the rainbow, as those wild gulls and gannets.

So the weary day passed on, and, with horror, he contemplated the prospects of another night of hopeless watching, of sleeplessness and thirst, for he dared not close his eyes, even for a moment, lest drowsiness should come upon him, when he might topple from his perch into the eternity that yawned below.

The rising wind moaned in the chine, and waved the tufts of samphire below, and those of the grass forty feet above his head.

The sun was verging to the westward. The breeze, which had been soft and mild all day, changed, and blew keenly against the cliff, rolling the sea in billows before it; and now, about six o'clock in the evening, so far as Morley could judge--as his watch had been broken in his fall--a smart, square-rigged vessel--a ship, as he soon perceived--lying as near the wind as she could, on a long starboard tack, came gradually near the shore.

When she first hove in sight she might have been six miles off, but was running steadily towards the chine.

Morley knew that she would come within half a mile, or less, of the coast, without going about or shortening sail, as the water was so deep; so he resolved not to miss this chance of life and rescue!

To have a larger signal than his handkerchief, he drew off his white shirt, and, holding it by the sleeves, permitted the whole garment to wave out like a banner on the wind.