Under the Red Dragon: A Novel
rules laid down by such matrons as the Countess of Naseby--looked so
like a scheme, that I felt we were in a thorough scrape, and knew
there was not a moment to be lost in making our appearance at the
Court. By a stone I smashed the padlock, and casting loose the boat,
brought it to where Lady Estelle stood, beating the rock impatiently
with her foot; and, handing her on board, seated her in the
stern-sheets, but with some difficulty, as the west wind was rolling
the waves with no small fury now past the headland, in which the black
Bôd Mynach gaped.
"Pull with all your strength, Mr. Hardinge. Dear Mr. Hardinge, let us
only be back in time, and I shall ever thank you!" she exclaimed.
"All that man can do I shall," was my enthusiastic reply.
I could pull a good stroke-oar, and had done so steadily in many a
regimental and college boat-race and regatta; but now there ensued
what I never could have calculated upon. Excited by the desire of
pleasing Lady Estelle by landing her on the opposite side of the tiny
bay with all speed--desirous, when seated opposite to her, face to
face, of appearing to some advantage by an exhibition of strength and
skill--at each successive stroke, as I shot the light boat seaward, I
almost lifted it out of the water. I had to clear a rock, over which
the water was foaming and gleaming in green and gold amid the sinking
sunshine, ere I headed her due westward, and in doing so I cleared
also the headland, which rose like a tower of rock from the sea,
crowned by a clump of old elms, wherein some rooks had taken up their
quarters in times long past.
"O, Mr. Hardinge," said Lady Estelle, while grasping the gunwale with
both hands, and looking up, "how had I ever the courage to come down
such a place? It looks fearful from this!"
Ere I could reply, the oar in my right hand broke in the iron rowlock
with a crash. The wood had been faulty. By this mishap I lost my
balance, and was nearly thrown into the sea, as the boat careered over
on a wave. Thus the _other_ was torn from my grasp, and swept far
beyond my reach. I was powerless now--powerless to aid either her or
myself. The tide was ebbing fast. The strong west wind, and the
current running eastward, influenced by the flow of the Clwyde, and
even of the Dee, ten miles distant, swept the now useless boat past
the abutting headland, and along the front of those cliffs which rise
like a wall of rock from the sea, and where, as the mist gathered
round us, our fate would be unseen, whether we were dashed against the
iron shore or swept out into the ocean.
The red sunset was fading fast on distant Orme's Head, where myriads
of sea-birds are ever revolving, like gnats in the light amid its
grand and inaccessible crags. It was dying, too, though tipping them
with flame, on Snowdon's peaks, the eyrie of the golden eagle and the
peregrine falcon, and on the smaller range of Carneydd Llewellyn.
Purple darkness was gathering in the grassy vales between, and blue
and denser grew those shadows as the cold gray mist came on, and the
sombre glow of a stormy sunset passed away. Soon the haze of the
twilight blurred, softened, and blended land and sea to the eastward.
The sharp edge of the new moon was rising from a dark and trembling
horizon, whence the mist was coming faster and more fast, and the
evening star, pale Hesperus, shone like a tiny lamp amid the opal
tints of a sky that was turning fast to dun and darkness. The rolling
mist soon hid the star and the land, too, and I only knew that we were
drifting helplessly away.
CHAPTER XV.--WHAT THE MOON SAW.
The absence of the boat from its mooring-place was soon observed, and
surmises were rife that we must infallibly have gone seaward. But why?
It seemed unaccountable--and at such a time, too! The idea that Lady
Estelle's heart should fail her in attempting to return by the cliff
never occurred to any save Winifred, who knew more of her friend's
temperament than the rest, and for a time, with others, the ardent and
courageous girl searched the shore, and several boats were put forth
into the mist; but in vain, and ere long the strength and violence of
the wind drove even Sir Madoc and all his startled guests to the
shelter of the house. Muffled in silk cloaks and warm shawls or
otter-skin jackets, the ladies had lingered long on the terraces, on
the lawn and avenues, while the lights of the searchers were visible,
and while their hallooing could be heard at times from the rocks and
ravines, where they swung their lanterns as signals, in hopes that the
lost ones might see them.
Lord Pottersleigh snuffed and ejaculated from time to time, and ere
long had betaken himself to his room. Caradoc, Guilfoyle--who seemed
considerably bewildered by the affair--young Clavel of the 19th, and
other gentlemen, with Gwyllim the butler, Morgan Roots the gardener,
Bob Spurrit, and the whole male staff of the household, manfully
continued their search by the shore. There the scene was wild and
impressive. Before the violence of the bellowing wind, the mist was
giving place to the pall-like masses of dark clouds, which rolled
swiftly past the pale face of the new moon, imparting a weird-like
aspect to the rocky coast, against which the sea was foaming in white
and hurrying waves, while the sea-birds, scared alike by the shouts
and the light of the searchers, quite as much as by the storm,
screamed and wheeled in wild flights about their eyries. Moments there
were when Caradoc thought the search was prosecuted in the wrong
direction, and that, as there had probably been an elopement, this
prowling along the seashore was absurd.
"Can it be," said he, inaudibly, "that the little boy who cried for
the moon has made off with it bodily? If so, this will be rather a
'swell' affair for the mess of the Royal Welsh."
Slowly passed the time, and more anxious than all the rest--Lady
Naseby of course excepted--the soft-hearted Winifred was full of
dismay that any catastrophe should occur to two guests at Craigaderyn,
and she listened like a startled fawn to every passing sound.
Dora, as deeming herself the authoress of the whole calamity, was
completely crushed, and sat on a low stool with her head bowed on Lady
Naseby's knee, sobbing bitterly ever and anon, when the storm-gusts
howled among the trees of the chase, shook the oriels of the old
mansion, and made the ivy leaves patter on the panes, or shuddering as
she heard the knell-like ding-dong of the house-bell occasionally. The
masses of her golden hair had been dishevelled by the wind without;
but she forgot all about that, as well as about her two solemn
engagements made with Tom Clavell for the morrow; one, the mild
excitement of fishing for sticklebacks in the horse-pond, and the
other, a gallop to the Marine Parade of Llandudno, attended by old Bob
Spurrit; for the little sub of the 1st York North Riding was, _pro
tem_., the bondsman of a girl who was at once charming and childish,
petulant and more than pretty. Heavily and anxiously were passed the
minutes, the quarters, and the hours. Messenger after messenger to the
searchers by the shore went forth and returned. Their tidings were all
the same; nothing had been seen or heard of the boat, of Lady Estelle,
or of her companion. Nine o'clock was struck by the great old clock in
the stable court, and then every one instinctively looked at his or
her watch. Half-past nine, ten, and even midnight struck, without
tidings of the lost. By that time the mist had cleared away, the tide
had turned, and the west wind was rolling the incoming sea with
mightier fury on the rock-bound shore.
The first hours of the morning passed without intelligence, and alarm,
dismay, and grief reigned supreme among the pallid group at
Craigaderyn Court. All could but hope that with the coming day a
revelation might come for weal or woe; and as if to involve the
disappearance of the missing ones in greater mystery, if it did not
point to a terrible conclusion, the lost pleasure-boat was discovered
by a coastguardsman, high and dry, and bottom up, on a strip of sandy
beach, some miles from Craigaderyn; but of its supposed occupants not
a trace could be found, save a lace cuff, recognised as Lady
Estelle's, wedged or washed into the framework of the little craft,
thus linking her fate with it. Ours was, indeed, a perilous situation.
We were helplessly adrift on a stormy sea, off a rock-bound coast, in
a tiny boat, liable to swamping at any moment, without oars or
covering, the wind rising fast, while the darkness and the mist were
coming down together. I had no words to express my anxiety for what
one so delicately nurtured as Estelle might suffer. My annoyance at
the surmises and wonder naturally excited by our protracted absence;
quizzical, it might be equivocal, inferences drawn from it--I thought
nothing of these. I was beyond all such minor considerations, and felt
only solicitude for her safety and a terror of what her fate might be.
All other ideas, even love itself--though that very solicitude was
born of love--were merged for the time in the tenderest anxiety. If
her situation with me was perilous, what had it been if with Lord
Pottersleigh? But had she been with him, no such event as a descent to
that unlucky pleasure grotto could have been thought of. Though pale
and terrified, not a tear escaped her now; but her white and beautiful
face was turned, with a haggard aspect, to mine. A life-buoy happened
to be in the boat, and without a word I tied it to her securely.
"Is there not one for you?" she asked, piteously, laying a hand on
mine.
"Think not of me, Lady Estelle; if you are saved, what care I for
myself?"
"You swim, then?"
"A little, a very little; scarcely at all."
"You are generous and noble, Mr. Hardinge! O, if kind God permits me
to reach the land safely, I shall never be guilty of an act of folly
like this again. Mamma says--poor mamma!--that it is birth, or blood,
which carries people through great emergencies; but who could have
foreseen such a calamitous contretemps as this? And who could have
been a greater coward than I? I should have made a steady attempt at
yonder pitiful cliff; to fail was most childish, and I have involved
you in this most fatal peril."
She sobbed as she spoke, and her eyes were full of light; but her lips
were compressed, and all her soft and aristocratic loveliness seemed
for a time to grow different in expression; to gather sternness, as a
courage now possessed her, of which she had seemed deficient before,
or it might be an obstinacy born of despair; for the light boat was
swept hither and thither helplessly, by stem and stern alternately, on
each successive wave; tossed upward on the crest of one watery ridge,
or sunk downward between two that heaved up on each side as if to
engulf us; while the spoondrift, salt and bitter, torn from their
tops, flew over us, as she clung with one hand to the gunwale of the
tiny craft, and with the other to me.
That we were not being drifted landward was evident, for we could no
longer hear the voices of the sea-birds among the rocks; and to be
drifted seaward by ebb tide or current was only another phase of
peril. The voice of Lady Estelle came in painful gasps as she said,
"O, Mr. Hardinge, Mr. Hardinge, we shall perish most miserably; we
shall certainly be drowned! Mamma, my poor mamma, I shall never see
her more!"
Though striving to reassure her I was, for a time, completely
bewildered by anxiety for what she must suffer by a terror of the
sudden fate that might come upon her; and I was haunted by morbid
visions of her, the brilliant Estelle, a drowned and sodden corpse,
the sport of the waves--of myself I never thought--tossing unburied in