THE KELPIE'S CLEUGH.
On the extreme flank of his party, and rather farther out or off than usual, Roland, intent on following his game, took no heed at first of the swiftly down-coming mist, till it fell like a curtain between him and his companions, who had drawn their cartridges and ceased firing. Even the sound of their voices was muffled by the density of the atmosphere and he knew not where they were; but, thinking the cloud would lift, he felt not the least concern, but went forward, as he conceived, in the direction of home, and that which led towards the field where the last beat of the day had been made; but as he proceeded the ground seemed less and less familiar to him.
Over a high bank, slippery with dead leaves and the thawed rime of the past morning, he went, a nasty place to get across, and in doing so he prudently removed the cartridges from his gun, lest he might slip, trip, or stumble to the detriment of himself or some adjacent companion.
Pausing at times, he uttered a hallo, but got no response. He could see nothing of the belts of firs before referred to; but he came upon clumps of hazel, nearly destitute of leaves, growing thickly about the roots, and expanding as they rose some nine feet or so above the ground.
There was a dense undergrowth of bracken and intertwisted brambles here, a tangle of dead leaves, stems, and thorns, most perplexing to find one's self among in a dense mist. From amid these a rabbit or hare scudded forth; but he took no heed of it.
Suddenly a bird—a fine golden pheasant—whirred up, and settled down again in the covert very near him. He remembered the request of Annot. Never had the latter seemed brighter, dearer, or sweeter too, than that morning when she playfully asked him to bring a golden pheasant's wing, and secretly returned his farewell caress with such joy and warmth.
Dropping a charge into one of his barrels, he fired, but failed to kill the bird, which, hit somewhere, beat the earth with its wings and rolled or ran forward into the mist. Dropping his gun, Roland darted forward after it—the tendril of a bramble caught his feet, and a gasping cry escaped him as he fell heavily on his face and then downward—he knew not where!
Instinctively and desperately he clutched something; it was turf on a rocky edge. He felt it yielding; a small tree, a silver birch, grew near, and wildly he caught a branch thereof; and swung out over some profundity, he knew not what or where, till like a flash of lightning there came upon his memory the Burn Cleugh, a deep, rocky chasm, which had been the mysterious terror of his boyhood—as the fabled shade of a treacherous kelpie, a hairy fiend with red eyes and red claws—a rent or rift in the low hills some miles from his home, and at the bottom of which, about sixty feet and more below, the burn referred to as passing through the Earl's Haugh, and near the hamlet of the same name, flowed towards Eden.
'Save me—God save me!' rose to his lips, and with each respiration as he clung to the branch and the bead-drops started to his forehead, he lived a lifetime—a lifetime as it were of keenest agony.
He knew well the profoundity of the rocky abyss that yawned in obscurity below him, and he heard the slow gurgle of the burn as it chafed against the stones that barred its downward passage, and, mechanically, as one in a dream who fears to fall, he strove to sway his body upward, but could find no rest for his footsteps, and felt that the birch branch to which he clung was gradually but surely—rending! He had no terror of death in itself—none of death in the battlefield, as we have shown; but from such a fate as this he shrank; his soul seemed to die within him, and with every respiration there seemed to come the agony of a whole lifetime.
His nerve was gone, and no marvel that it was so. He might escape instant death; but not the most dreadful mutilation; and, sooth to say, he dreaded that a thousand times more than death.
One glance downward into that dark and misty chasm was in itself a summons to death, and he knew well the terrible bed of stones and boulders that lay below.
He became paralyzed—paralyzed with a great and stunning fear. The rending of the branch continued; his arms were waxing faint and strained; his fingers feeble; and it was only a question of moments between time and eternity—fall—fall he must—how far—how deep down—the depth he had forgotten.
The suspense was horrible; yet it was full of the dire certainty of a dreadful end.
Every act and scene of his past life came surging up to memory—the memory of less than a minute, now.
The branch parted; but, still grasping it, down he went whizzing through the mist—there was a stunning crash as he fell first on a ledge of rock and then into the stream's stony bed below, and then sight and sense and sound passed away from him!
How long he lay there he knew not. After a time consciousness returned, but he felt himself incapable of action—of motion—almost of thinking.
The ledge or shelf of rock, which was covered by soft turf, had first received him, and thus broken the fall, which ended, we have said, in the bed of the stream, in which he was partially immersed from the waist downwards; but whether his limbs were broken or dislocated he knew not then, and there he lay helpless, with the cold current trickling past and partly over him, the rocks towering sharply and steeply up on either side of him to where their summits were hidden in the masses of eddying mist, that now began to rise and sink as the wind increased and the afternoon began to close.
How long might he lie there undiscovered in that desolate spot, which he knew so few approached? How long would he last, suffering as he did then? And was a miserable death, such as this—there and amid such surroundings—to be the end of his young life, with all its bright hopes and loving aspirations for the future?
Cold though he began to feel—icy cold—hot bead drops suffused his temples at the idea, and at all his fancy began to picture, and more than once a weak cry for aid escaped him.
The Cleugh became more gloomy; he heard the bellowing of the wind, and felt the falling rain, the torrents of which were certain to swell and flood this tributary of the Eden, and the terror of being drowned helplessly, as the darkness fell and the water rose, impelled him to exertion, and by efforts that seemed almost superhuman he contrived to drag his bruised body and—as he felt assured—broken limbs somewhat more out of the bed of the stream; but the agony of this was so great that he nearly fainted.
With all his constitutional strength and hardihood, he was certain that he could never survive the night; and even if he did, the coming morning and day might bring him no succour, for save when in search of a lost sheep or lamb in winter, what shepherd ever sought the recesses of the Kelpie's Cleugh?
As he lay there, with prayer in his heart and on his lips, his whole past life—and then indeed did he thank God that it had been well-nigh a blameless one—seemed to revolve again and again as in a panorama before him; while a thousand forgotten and minute details came floating back rapidly and vividly to memory.
His boyhood, his dead brother, his mother's face, as he had seen it bending over him tenderly in his little cot, while she whispered the prayer she was wont to give over him every night, till it became woven up with the life of his infancy and riper years; his roystering, fox-hunting father; his regiment—the jovial mess—the gallant parade, with familiar faces seen amid the gleam of arms; his service in Egypt—Tel-el-Kebir, with its frowning earthworks towering through the star-lit gloom and dust of the night-march, till the red artillery and musketry flashed over them in garlands of fire, as the columns swept on and the Highland pipes sent up their pæan of victory!
Then came memories of Kashgate—its bloody and ghastly massacre—the flight therefrom into the desert; and then sweet Merlwood and Hester Maule, and Annot with her fair and goddess-like loveliness.
Then came the realities of the present again in all their misery, power, and sway—the ceaseless rush of the cold stream, the pouring rain upon his upturned face, the drifting clouds, the occasional glinting of the stars, the rustle of the wet leaves torn from the trees by the gusty wind, and the too probable chances of the coming death through pain, chill, exposure, and utter exhaustion.
Again, exerting all his powers, a despairing cry escaped him, and this time a sound responded. It was only a heron, however, that, full of terror, seemed to flash out from its nest in the rocks, and winged its way out of sight in a moment.
As he lay there it seemed to him as if time had a torturing power of spinning out its seconds, minutes, and hours that he had never known it to have before.
But to lie there perishing within almost rifle-shot of the roof under which he was born—so near his friends and so many who loved him—Annot more than all—was a terrible conviction—one apparently unnatural, unrealizable!
The mist had gone now, and the dark rocks between which he lay began to assume strange and gruesome forms in the weird light of the occasional stars, still more so when once or twice a weird glimpse of the stormy moon penetrated into the Cleugh.
'Oh, God!' cried he imploringly, 'to perish—to perish thus!'
At that moment, in a swiftly passing gleam of moonshine, he saw a face—a human face—peering over the rocks above as if seeking to penetrate the watery gloom below, and again a cry for help—help for the sake of mercy, for the sake of Heaven, escaped him.
For a moment, we say, the face was there; the next it vanished, as a dark mass of cloud swept over the silver disc of the moon, and a sound, painfully and unmistakably like a mocking laugh, reached the ears of the sufferer.
The face—if face it actually was—and not that of the fabled fiend, the Kelpie of the Cleugh, appeared no more; the hours went by; no succour came, and Roland, as he now resigned himself to the worst, believed that what he had seen, or thought he had seen, was but the creation of his own fevered and over-excited fancy.