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.
The expression of a face consigned to utter loneliness, when a friend first looks in upon it, is moving in the extreme. In rowing seaward to a lightship or seagirt lighthouse, where, without any immediate terror of death, the inmates experience the gloom of monotonous seclusion, the grateful eloquence of their countenances at the greeting, expressive of thankfulness for the visit, is enough to stir the emotions of the most careless observer.
Knight’s upward look at Elfride was of a nature with, but far transcending, such an instance as this. The lines of his face had deepened to furrows, and every one of them thanked her visibly. His lips moved to the word “Elfride,” though the emotion evolved no sound. His eyes passed all description in their combination of the whole diapason of eloquence, from lover’s deep love to fellow-man’s gratitude for a token of remembrance from one of his kind.
Elfride had come back. What she had come to do he did not know. She could only look on at his death, perhaps. Still, she had come back, and not deserted him utterly, and it was much.
It was a novelty in the extreme to see Henry Knight, to whom Elfride was but a child, who had swayed her as a tree sways a bird’s nest, who mastered her and made her weep most bitterly at her own insignificance, thus thankful for a sight of her face. She looked down upon him, her face glistening with rain and tears. He smiled faintly.
“How calm he is!” she thought. “How great and noble he is to be so calm!” She would have died ten times for him then.
The gliding form of the steamboat caught her eye: she heeded it no longer.
“How much longer can you wait?” came from her pale lips and along the wind to his position.
“Four minutes,” said Knight in a weaker voice than her own.
“But with a good hope of being saved?”
“Seven or eight.”
He now noticed that in her arms she bore a bundle of white linen, and that her form was singularly attenuated. So preternaturally thin and flexible was Elfride at this moment, that she appeared to bend under the light blows of the rain-shafts, as they struck into her sides and bosom, and splintered into spray on her face. There is nothing like a thorough drenching for reducing the protuberances of clothes, but Elfride’s seemed to cling to her like a glove.
Without heeding the attack of the clouds further than by raising her hand and wiping away the spurts of rain when they went more particularly into her eyes, she sat down and hurriedly began rending the linen into strips. These she knotted end to end, and afterwards twisted them like the strands of a cord. In a short space of time she had formed a perfect rope by this means, six or seven yards long.
“Can you wait while I bind it?” she said, anxiously extending her gaze down to him.
“Yes, if not very long. Hope has given me a wonderful instalment of strength.”
Elfride dropped her eyes again, tore the remaining material into narrow tape-like ligaments, knotted each to each as before, but on a smaller scale, and wound the lengthy string she had thus formed round and round the linen rope, which, without this binding, had a tendency to spread abroad.
“Now,” said Knight, who, watching the proceedings intently, had by this time not only grasped her scheme, but reasoned further on, “I can hold three minutes longer yet. And do you use the time in testing the strength of the knots, one by one.”
She at once obeyed, tested each singly by putting her foot on the rope between each knot, and pulling with her hands. One of the knots slipped.
“Oh, think! It would have broken but for your forethought,” Elfride exclaimed apprehensively.
She retied the two ends. The rope was now firm in every part.
“When you have let it down,” said Knight, already resuming his position of ruling power, “go back from the edge of the slope, and over the bank as far as the rope will allow you. Then lean down, and hold the end with both hands.”
He had first thought of a safer plan for his own deliverance, but it involved the disadvantage of possibly endangering her life.
“I have tied it round my waist,” she cried, “and I will lean directly upon the bank, holding with my hands as well.”
It was the arrangement he had thought of, but would not suggest.
“I will raise and drop it three times when I am behind the bank,” she continued, “to signify that I am ready. Take care, oh, take the greatest care, I beg you!”
She dropped the rope over him, to learn how much of its length it would be necessary to expend on that side of the bank, went back, and disappeared as she had done before.
The rope was trailing by Knight’s shoulders. In a few moments it twitched three times.
He waited yet a second or two, then laid hold.
The incline of this upper portion of the precipice, to the length only of a few feet, useless to a climber empty-handed, was invaluable now. Not more than half his weight depended entirely on the linen rope. Half a dozen extensions of the arms, alternating with half a dozen seizures of the rope with his feet, brought him up to the level of the soil.
He was saved, and by Elfride.
He extended his cramped limbs like an awakened sleeper, and sprang over the bank.
At sight of
