Chapter XII · THE LAST OF THE BAY HUNTER.

"He is rightly named Rooke Chesters," muttered Cyril, as his horse began to caracole sideways along the high road, "for he has rooked me to some purpose. By Jove! I can never confess my folly to my father, after all his warnings too. Halloa, old nag, what is the matter with you?"

He now became sensible that his horse was becoming extremely restive; something was wrong with the bridle he knew, but the conduct of the animal rapidly became so outrageous that he feared to dismount lest it should kick him or run away, in which case he felt that he would cut a ridiculous figure before his own household, by arriving on foot and whip in hand without his nag. His father and brother he knew would quiz him unmercifully. Dismount! Pshaw! the idea was not to be thought of. So being a good horseman he kept his saddle, and endeavoured by every means, first to soothe, and then by the whip to control, the growing fury of the bay hunter, but strove in vain.

It was swelling, trembling, and panting with rage; its quivering ears lay backward flat, its head was outstretched, and its bloodshot eyes turned back, till at times he could see the white of them in the darkness.

After plunging and rearing, and endeavouring by every means to throw the rider, and after twice attempting to crush him against the park wall of Chesterhaugh, he suddenly flung out his forefeet, and with a fierce snort of rage, galloped at a terrible pace along the high road. The beautiful bay of which Cyril was so proud, as showing all the best points of a fine English hunter, seemed now changed into a tearing devil!

The curb chain was loose, the bit was clenched between its teeth, the reins were powerless, and Cyril Wedderburn could no more control its actions than he could rule a whirlwind.

Ploughed fields and gates, stackyards and farm steadings, houses and cottages, all sunk in darkness, even as their inmates in sleep, were all passed with frightful speed, and seeking only to keep his seat till the animal became exhausted, Cyril trusted to his skill as a rider, and let the hunter take its way.

The open waste of Lonewoodlee, the dark thicket, and the quaint old Tower with its corner tourelles, were quickly at hand. As he swept past, Cyril saw the light in Mary's window: nay more, he saw her figure for an instant, and then it was that the irrepressible cry which Mary heard escaped him; for he had begun to fear that there was more than the warm mash fermenting in the interior of his maddened nag; that the animal had been drugged, as there were few "horsey" tricks of which Ralph Rooke Chesters, and his man Bill Trayner, were ignorant.

As this exasperating conviction forced itself upon him, he conceived the idea of stunning the horse by a blow between the ears.

His riding whip had a ponderous silver handle, and with the thong twisted round his right hand, he dealt upon the hunter's head a downward stroke that might have felled an ox; but instead of finding it sink beneath him, as he confidently expected, so that he might leap from the saddle, a fresh gust of rage seemed to inspire the horse, which actually bounded from the earth, and snorting, panting, and quivering afresh, it went blindly and madly thundering onward in its fierce career.

This was at Falaknowe, where the whip which had dropped from his hand was afterwards found.

For a time he had thought that the horse might know its way home, and stop at the park-gate of Willowdean; but gate and lodge had long been left behind, the woods and house of Renton too; the rising ground beyond was soon devoured by the rapid hoofs, and Cyril might have said, with Mazeppa, as alarm gathered in his heart—

for before him were the impending bluffs of a rocky shore, and the dashing billows of the German Sea!

By stern use of his spurs, burying the sharp rowels in blood, he had forced the animal to clear by a flying leap more than one closed toll-gate; but the idea pressed upon him, that if he lost his seat or was dashed on the hard road, to be found a bleeding mass of broken bones, of what the emotions of the mother who doted on him, of his tender Mary, of his ambitious father, and of all his friends would be, if he were brought home to Willowdean an unsightly corpse; and now, as death seemed close and nigh, innumerable episodes of his past life—good, bad, and foolish—came thronging fast upon him, as he rode this terrible race. With these came a longing for vengeance upon Chesters, and a loathing of the infuriated brute that bore him. How he longed for a loaded pistol, that he might put a bullet through its head.

Cyril was an excellent horseman, and had always been a little vain of his riding; but now he was becoming worn out.

After a twenty miles run, the horse had now left the highway, and was traversing one of those large fields (of some forty Scottish acres or so) that are peculiar to the Merse and West Lothian. It had been recently ploughed, and as the hunter's small hoofs and slender fetlocks sank deep amid the soft and loamy soil, while its panting and breathing grew harder, Cyril hoped that it was weary and would soon stop; but the hope was vain.

Cyril's fingers were powerless with grasping the twisted reins of the useless bridle, and his arms ached and tingled to the shoulders with the long strain upon them; his whole body trembled, and he felt that little now would dismount him, so fast and furious had been the career of his runaway steed, so many the leaps he had made over gates and walls of turf and stone, over high hedges and deep water-courses; a regular steeplechase over everything that came in his way. The roughest hurdle-race was as nothing compared with it; and now, we have said, before him lay the sea.

He knew the ground well, and the whole locality; he had too often rambled there birdnesting when a happy, heedless boy, and while hunting or shooting in manhood; and he knew also every foot of that terrible shore from Eymouth to the Bridge of Dunglass; and he was aware that at the end of the field he traversed there was no enclosure, no wall or hedge, no boundary but the giddy verge which overhung the sea that foamed some forty feet below. So now the time had come when he must cast himself from his saddle or perish.

He released his right foot from the stirrup-iron, but somehow omitted to clear the left so readily. In a moment he was on his back among the soft loamy furrows, and dragged furiously along; the next, he felt himself shot fearfully through the air, which seemed to whiz upward past him.

"God—oh, God save me!" escaped him, while his mother's face, and Mary's too, flashed on his memory, with Mary's gentle voice and tender eyes, as he fell through space; and ere he could again respire he found himself headlong in the midnight sea, with the black water closed above his head.

Panting he rose to the surface, but to sink again and again, for he was weak, powerless, and breathless; yet being a good swimmer, when he rose the third time he kept himself afloat and looked around.

He was free from the fatal bay hunter now.

High over him towered a ridge of those black, beetling rocks which bound the shore and culminate in the cliffs of Fast Castle and those of St. Abb, covered with sea fowl, and with the foam of the German Ocean rolling against them. The moon, which had been hitherto veiled by a mass of clouds, now emerged from them, and as she was waning from amid the ragged edges of the floating vapour, her light, cold, pale, and ghastly, shone along the tossing sea.

Even if he could have protracted his existence by swimming, in the end he must perish; for all along that shore no footing place or sandy beach was nigh, and the waves, he feared too surely, would dash him on the bluffs a battered corpse.

Already his horse, with true instinct, had turned to the shore and swam through the billows, which dashed it again and again upon the wall of rock, the slippery face of which it beat and pawed with its hoofs in vain to find a footing.

A mass of weedy and isolated rock some yards from that perilous shore caught the eye of Cyril in the moonlight. The waves boiled and seethed around but not over it. There he would find footing he hoped for a time, till daylight broke and his situation might be seen from the land or the sea; and with a prayer of thankfulness to Heaven in his heart and on his lips, he swam boldly and reached its slippery apex by grasping the seaweed that covered it.

Cold and drenched he sat there with the white waves seething round him; and he could remember that many a time when a boy he had striven, by tossing stones from the cliff above, to hit this identical rock which now afforded him a temporary place of safety.

Ere long he felt sensible that the water was rising, that the tide was flowing inshore, and might in time, perhaps, cover the rock, in which case he was certain to be washed off and drowned.

The moon soon disappeared behind that stupendous rock which is crowned by the ruins of Fast Castle, and is inaccessible on all sides, save by a narrow neck of land, and then a double gloom seemed to fall upon the sea. About a mile off he could see a solitary light in the window of a house upon the shore, the light too probably of some watcher by a sick bed; and wistfully and yearningly he regarded it, as he sat, or crouched rather, on that isolated rock, perishing miserably within a few miles of his splendid home.

There he knew that by this time all would be a-bed, after his father, his brother, and Horace Ramornie had had a few amicable strokes at billiards, and after his mother had grown weary of weaving out the future of the coming heiress; and he knew that Gervase Asloane, the old butler, would be sleepily awaiting his return from Chesterhaugh.

One other light was visible for a time; it was on board a large steamer about eight miles distant in the offing, where gradually it passed out of sight as she sped on her way to England or Holland.

To shout, Cyril knew was worse than useless; few craft ever ventured near that iron shore, and there his voice would be heard by sea birds only.

Poor Cyril Wedderburn! He had not been much given to prayer since he became a man of the world, or since he had last lisped his childish orisons at his mother's knee; but now, in his hour of desperate need, he invoked God earnestly for deliverance from a death so early and so terrible as that which menaced him: and by some strange idiosyncrasy of the human mind, amid these pious thoughts, and amid the bewildering horrors of his situation, there occurred to his ear and his memory scraps of mess-room songs, of frivolous banter, and operatic airs, as if in grotesque mockery, till he feared he was growing mad!

Suddenly a terrible cry—a cry that seemed to belong neither to Heaven nor earth—a cry altogether dissimilar to any other sound he had ever heard before, pierced his ears. Its singularity of tone made the pulses of his heart stand still. Were the tales he had heard of the water kelpy, and his shrieks of triumph over the drowning, true after all?

No other sound followed but the monotonous dashing of the waves, the hiss of the surf upon the rocks, and the voices of the now startled sea birds as they were roused from their nests by that unearthly yell.

It was the death scream of his drowning horse; for a horse, when in extremity of terror, can utter a dreadful cry at times; and now its body floated passively in the eddy round a wave-beaten promontory, the sport of the billows, and Cyril, with little regret certainly, saw it tossed to and fro in the starlight, till it disappeared, and that was the last he saw of his fatal bay hunter!

And now another deep invocation of God escaped him, for he became assured that slowly, but steadily and terribly, the rising tide was closing round him!