Part 8 (1/2)
”Something went with a snap, and I'm afraid to move.”
”But you cannot lie here,” she said, ”for the tide is coming in. Oh! let me help you to get up. Do try your best.”
”I will, for your sake,” he answered, and he smiled at her in a way she never forgot.
”Oh, I shall never forgive myself,” she said, chokingly, and the tears filled her eyes, and rolled down her cheeks. ”All this comes of my stupid folly!”
”No, you must not blame yourself,” he insisted. ”You could not help the stone giving way. Now give me your hand. How strong you are! There, I'm in a perpendicular position once more,” but while he spoke he became deathly pale, and the perspiration stood in big drops on his brow.
”Lean on me,” she said; ”lean all your weight on me.”
He smiled pitifully, but he could not trust himself to speak.
He put his right arm about her neck, and used her as a crutch. This was no time to stand on ceremony. But the pain was too intolerable to move more than a few steps. With a groan he fell against the sloping foot of the cliff. ”You must leave me here,” he said, with a gasp.
”Leave you here?” she cried. ”Why you will drown.”
”We shall both drown if you stay,” he answered.
”It doesn't matter about me a bit,” she wailed, and she brushed away the blinding tears with her hand. ”But you--you--oh! you must be saved at all costs.”
”Perhaps, if you make haste you will be able to get help before it is too late,” he said.
”But how? Oh! I will do anything for you. Tell me what I can do for the best.”
”Make your way into town as fast as you can. Tell the first man you meet how I am situated. Let one party come round here with a boat, and another party come over the cliffs with a stretcher. Everything depends on the time it takes.”
”Oh! I will fly all the distance,” she said, with liquid eyes; ”but who shall I say is hurt? I do not even know your name.”
”Rufus Sterne,” he answered. ”Everybody in St. Gaved knows me.”
She looked at him for a moment, pityingly, pleadingly, then rushed away over the level sand in the direction of Penwith Cove. She forgot her bruises and stiffness, and did not heed that every step was a stab of pain.
Rufus Sterne was lying helpless--helpless because he had risked his life to save her from the consequences of her folly. And all the while the tide was coming in, and he would be watching it rising higher and higher, and if help did not reach him before the cold salt water swept over his face, he would be drowned, and she would be the cause of his death.
How she climbed the zig-zag path out of Penwith Cove she never knew. She ran and ran until she felt as though she could not go a step farther even to save her life, and if her own life only had been at stake she would have lain down on the cliffs and taken her chance.
But it was _his_ life that was in jeopardy, and to her excited imagination his life seemed of more value than the lives of a hundred ordinary people.
She had read of heroes in her girlhood days, and thrilled over the story of their exploits, but no hero of fact or fiction had ever so touched her heart as this lonely man who was lying helpless at the foot of the cliffs, watching with patient and suffering eyes the inflowing of the tide.
”Oh! he must be saved,” she kept saying to herself, ”for he deserves to live. And I must be the means of saving him.”
She stumbled into St. Gaved rather than ran. Her hat had disappeared, her glorious hair fell in billows on her shoulders and down her back, her eyes were wild and tearless, her lips wide apart, her breath came and went in painful gasps. She nearly stumbled over one or two children, and then she pulled up suddenly in front of a policeman.
Constable Greensplat stared at her as though she had escaped from Bodmin lunatic asylum.
”There's--not--a--moment--to--be--lost,” she began, and she brought out the words in jerks. ”Rufus Sterne is lying with a broken leg at the foot of the cliffs half-way between here and Penwith Cove.”
Then she staggered to a lamp-post and put her arm round it. A small group of people gathered in a moment.