The Tidal Wave - Ethel May Dell (top books to read TXT) 📗

was true. He was hanging on to a bit of rock half-way up the Spear Point, and t'other chap was lying across his shoulder. They've both been washed away by this, for the water's still coming up. There's not the ghost of a chance for 'em. I say it 'cos I know--not the ghost of a chance!"
A wild cry broke from the girl's lips. She wrenched her hands free and beat them upon her breast. Then suddenly a burst of wild tears came to her. She leaned against the cottage wall and sobbed in an agony that possessed her, soul and body.
Adam stood and looked at her. There was something terrible about the abandonment of her grief. It made him feel that his own was almost insignificant beside it. He had never seen any woman weep like that before. The anguish of it went through his heart.
He moved at length, laid a very gentle hand upon her shaking shoulder.
"My girl--my girl!" he said. "Don't take on so! I never thought as you cared a ha'p'orth for poor Rufus, though o' course I always knew as he loved you like mad."
She bowed herself lower under his hand. "And now I've killed him!" she gasped forth inarticulately. "I've killed him!"
"No, no, no!" protested Adam. "That ain't reasonable. Come, now--you're distraught! You don't know what you're saying. My Rufus is a fine chap. He'd take most any risk to save a life. He's got a big heart in him, and he don't stop to count the cost."
She uncovered her face sharply and looked at him, so that he clearly saw the ravages that her distress had wrought. "That wasn't what made him go," she said. "He wouldn't have gone but for me. It was I as made him go. But I thought he'd be in time. I hoped he'd be in time." Her voice rose wildly; she wrung her hands. "Oh, can't you do anything? Can't you take out the lifeboat? There must be some way--surely there must be some way--of saving them!"
But Adam shook his head. "He's past our help," he said. "There's no boat could live among them rocks in such a tide as this. We couldn't get anywhere near. No--no, there's nothing we can do. The lad's gone--my Rufus--finest chap along the shore, if he was my son. Never thought as he'd go before me--never thought--never thought!"
The loud roll of the waves filled the bitter silence that followed, but the battering of the rain upon the cottage roof was decreasing. The storm was no longer overhead.
Adam leaned on the back of a chair with his head in his hands. All the wiry activity seemed to have gone out of him. He looked old and broken.
The girl stood motionless behind him. A strange impassivity had succeeded her last fruitless appeal, as though through excess of suffering her faculties were numbed, animation itself were suspended. She leaned against the wall, staring with wide, tragic eyes at the flame of the lamp that stood in the window. Her arms hung stiffly at her sides, and the hands were clenched. She seemed to be gazing upon unutterable things.
There was nothing to be done--nothing to be done! Till the waves had spent their fury, till that raging sea went down, they were as helpless as babes to stay the hand of Fate. No boat could live in that fearful turmoil of water. Adam had said it, and she knew that what he said was true, knew by the utter dejection of his attitude, the completeness of his despair. She had never seen Adam in despair before; probably no one had ever seen him as he was now. He was a man to strain every nerve while the faintest ray of hope remained. He had faced many a furious storm, saved many a life that had been given up for lost by other men. But now he could do nothing, and he crouched there--an old and broken man--for the first time realising his helplessness.
A long time passed. The only sound within the cottage was the ticking of a grandfather-clock in a corner, while without the great sound of the breaking seas filled all the world. The storm above had passed. Now the thunder-blast no longer shook the cottage. A faint greyness had begun to show beyond the lamp in the window. The dawn was drawing near.
As one awaking from a trance of terrible visions, the girl drew a deep breath and spoke:
"Adam!"
He did not stir. He had not stirred for the greater part of an hour.
She made a curiously jerky movement, as if she wrenched herself free from some constricting hold. She went to the bowed, despairing figure.
"Adam, the day is breaking. The tide must be on the turn. Shan't we go?"
He stood up with the gesture of an old man. "What's the good?" he said. "Do you think I want to see my boy's dead body left behind by the sea?"
She shivered at the question. "But we can't stay here," she urged. "Aunt Liza, you know--she'll be wondering."
"Ah!" He passed his hand over his eyes. He was swaying a little as he stood. She supported his elbow, for he seemed to have lost control of his limbs. He stared at her in a dazed way. "You'd better go and tell your Aunt Liza," he said. "I think I'll stay here a bit longer. Maybe my boy'll come and talk to me if I'm alone. We're partners, you know, and we lived here a good many years alone together. He wouldn't leave me--not for the long voyage--without a word. Yes, you go, my dear, you go! I'll stay here and wait for him."
She saw that no persuasion of hers would move him, and it seemed useless to remain. An intolerable restlessness urged her, moreover, to be gone. The awful inertia of the past two hours had turned into a fevered desire for action. It was the swing of the pendulum, and she felt that if she did not respond to it she would go mad.
Her knees were still trembling under her, but she controlled them and turned to the door. As she lifted the latch she looked back and saw Adam drop heavily into the chair upon which he had leaned for so long. His attitude was one of almost stubborn patience, but it was evident that her presence had ceased to count with him. He was waiting--she saw it clearly in every line of him--waiting to bid his boy Godspeed ere he fared forth finally on the long voyage from which there is no return.
A sharp sob rose in her throat. She caught her hand to it, forcing it back. Then, barefooted, she stepped out into the grey dimness that veiled all things, and left the door of Rufus's cottage open behind her.


CHAPTER X
THE LONG VOYAGE

She never remembered afterwards how she accomplished the homeward journey. The rough stones cut her feet again and again, but she never felt the pain. She went as one who has an urgent mission to perform, though what that mission was she scarcely knew.
The night--that night of dreadful tragedy--had changed her. Columbine, the passionate, the impulsive had turned into a being that was foreign to herself. All the happy girlhood had been stamped out of her as by the cruel pressure of a hot iron. She had ceased to feel the agony of it; somehow she did not think that she ever could feel pain again. The nerve tissues had been destroyed and all vitality was gone. The creature that passed like a swift shadow through the twilight of the dawn was an old and withered woman who had lived beyond her allotted time.
She reached the old Ship Inn, meeting no one. She entered by the door of the conservatory through which she had flitted aeons and aeons before to meet her lover. She went to her room and changed into her own clothes. The suit that had belonged to Rufus so long ago she laid away with an odd reverence, still scarcely knowing what she did, driven as it were by a mechanism that worked without any volition of hers.
Then she went to the glass and began to coil up her hair. It was dank and heavy yet with the seawater, but she wound it about her head without noticing. The light was growing, and she peered at herself with a detached sort of curiosity, till something in her own eyes frightened her, and she turned away.
She went to the window and opened it wide. The sound of the sea yet filled the world, but it was not so insistent as it had been. The waves, though mountainous still, were gradually receding from the shore. It was as though the dawn had come just in time to prevent the powers of darkness from triumphing.
She heard someone moving in the house and turned back into the room. Aunt Liza must be told.
Through the spectral dawnlight she went down the stairs and took her way to the kitchen. The door stood half open; she heard the cheery crackling of the newly lighted fire before she entered. And hearing it, she was aware of a great coldness that clung like a chain, fettering her every movement.
Someone moved as she pushed open the door. An enormous shadow leaped upon the wall like a fantastic monster of the deep. She recoiled for a second, then, as if drawn against her will, she entered.
By the ruddy glow of the fire she saw a man's broad-chested figure, she saw the gleam of tawny hair above a thick bull-neck. He was bending slightly over the fire at her entrance, but, hearing her, he turned. And in that moment every numbed nerve in Columbine's body was pierced into quivering life.
She stood as one transfixed, and he stood motionless also in the flickering light of the flames, gazing at her with eyes of awful blue that were as burning spirit. But he spoke not a word--not a word. How could a dead man speak?
And as they stood thus, facing each other, the floor between them began suddenly to heave, became a mass of seething billows that rocked her, caught her, engulfed her. She went down into them, and as the tossing darkness received her, her last thought was that Rufus had come back indeed--not to say farewell, but to take her with him on the long voyage from which there is no return....


CHAPTER XI
DEEP WATERS

Wild white roses that grew in the sandy stubble above the shore, little orange-scented roses that straggled through the grass--they called to something that ran in Columbine's blood, they spoke to her of the South. She was sure that she would find those roses all about her feet when she came to the end of the long voyage. She would see their golden hearts wide open to the sun. For their fragrance haunted her day by day as she floated down the long glassy stretches and rocked on the waveless swells.
Sometimes she had a curious fancy that she was lying dead, and they had strewn the sweet flowers all about her. She hoped that they might not be buried with her; they were too beautiful for that.
At other times she thought of them as a bridal wreath, purer than the purest orange-blossom that ever decked a bride. Once, too--this was when she was nearing the end of the voyage--there came to her a magic whiff of wet bog-myrtle that made her fancy that she must be a bride indeed.
At last, just when it seemed to her that her boat was gently grounding upon the sand where the little white roses grew, she opened her eyes widely,