第81章

To those musing weather-beaten West-country folk who pass the greater part of their days and nights out of doors,Nature seems to have moods in other than a poetical sense:predilections for certain deeds at certain times,without any apparent law to govern or season to account for them.She is read as a person with a curious temper;as one who does not scatter kindnesses and cruelties alternately,impartially,and in order,but heartless severities or overwhelming generosities in lawless caprice.Mans case is always that of the prodigals favourite or the misers pensioner.In her unfriendly moments there seems a feline fun in her tricks,begotten by a foretaste of her pleasure in swallowing the victim.

Such a way of thinking had been absurd to Knight,but he began to adopt it now.He was first spitted on to a rock.New tortures followed.The rain increased,and persecuted him with an exceptional persistency which he was moved to believe owed its cause to the fact that he was in such a wretched state already.

An entirely new order of things could be observed in this introduction of rain upon the scene.It rained upwards instead of down.The strong ascending air carried the rain-drops with it in its race up the escarpment,coming to him with such velocity that they stuck into his flesh like cold needles.Each drop was virtually a shaft,and it pierced him to his skin.The water-shafts seemed to lift him on their points:no downward rain ever had such a torturing effect.In a brief space he was drenched,except in two places.These were on the top of his shoulders and on the crown of his hat.

The wind,though not intense in other situations was strong here.

It tugged at his coat and lifted it.We are mostly accustomed to look upon all opposition which is not animate,as that of the stolid,inexorable hand of indifference,which wears out the patience more than the strength.Here,at any rate,hostility did not assume that slow and sickening form.It was a cosmic agency,active,lashing,eager for conquest:determination;not an insensate standing in the way.

Knight had over-estimated the strength of his hands.They were getting weak already.She will never come again;she has been gone ten minutes,he said to himself.

This mistake arose from the unusual compression of his experiences just now:she had really been gone but three.

As many more minutes will be my end,he thought.

Next came another instance of the incapacity of the mind to make comparisons at such times.

This is a summer afternoon,he said,and there can never have been such a heavy and cold rain on a summer day in my life before.

He was again mistaken.The rain was quite ordinary in quantity;the air in temperature.It was,as is usual,the menacing attitude in which they approached him that magnified their powers.

He again looked straight downwards,the wind and the water-dashes lifting his moustache,scudding up his cheeks,under his eyelids,and into his eyes.This is what he saw down there:the surface of the sea--visually just past his toes,and under his feet;actually one-eighth of a mile,or more than two hundred yards,below them.

We colour according to our moods the objects we survey.The sea would have been a deep neutral blue,had happier auspices attended the gazer it was now no otherwise than distinctly black to his vision.That narrow white border was foam,he knew well;but its boisterous tosses were so distant as to appear a pulsation only,and its plashing was barely audible.A white border to a black sea--his funeral pall and its edging.

The world was to some extent turned upside down for him.Rain descended from below.Beneath his feet was aerial space and the unknown;above him was the firm,familiar ground,and upon it all that he loved best.

Pitiless nature had then two voices,and two only.The nearer was the voice of the wind in his ears rising and falling as it mauled and thrust him hard or softly.The second and distant one was the moan of that unplummetted ocean below and afar--rubbing its restless flank against the Cliff without a Name.

Knight perseveringly held fast.Had he any faith in Elfride?

Perhaps.Love is faith,and faith,like a gathered flower,will rootlessly live on.

Nobody would have expected the sun to shine on such an evening as this.Yet it appeared,low down upon the sea.Not with its natural golden fringe,sweeping the furthest ends of the landscape,not with the strange glare of whiteness which it sometimes puts on as an alternative to colour,but as a splotch of vermilion red upon a leaden ground--a red face looking on with a drunken leer.

Most men who have brains know it,and few are so foolish as to disguise this fact from themselves or others,even though an ostentatious display may be called self-conceit.Knight,without showing it much,knew that his intellect was above the average.

And he thought--he could not help thinking--that his death would be a deliberate loss to earth of good material;that such an experiment in killing might have been practised upon some less developed life.

A fancy some people hold,when in a bitter mood,is that inexorable circumstance only tries to prevent what intelligence attempts.Renounce a desire for a long-contested position,and go on another tack,and after a while the prize is thrown at you,seemingly in disappointment that no more tantalizing is possible.

Knight gave up thoughts of life utterly and entirely,and turned to contemplate the Dark Valley and the unknown future beyond.

Into the shadowy depths of these speculations we will not follow him.Let it suffice to state what ensued.

At that moment of taking no more thought for this life,something disturbed the outline of the bank above him.A spot appeared.It was the head of Elfride.

Knight immediately prepared to welcome life again.