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 the deep, or, it might be, cast mutilated on the shore; and she looked so beautiful and helpless as she clung to me now, clasping my right arm with all her energy, her head half reclined upon my shoulder, and the passing spray mingling with her tears upon her cheek. "The drowning man is said to be confronted by a ghostly panorama of his whole life." It may be so generally; but then I had only the horror of losing Estelle, whom I loved so tenderly. We were now together and alone, so completely, suddenly, and terribly alone, it might be for life or for death--the former short indeed, and the latter swift and sudden, if the boat upset, or we were washed out of it into the sea; and yet in that time of peril she possessed more than ever for me that wondrous and undefinable charm and allurement which every man finds in the woman he loves, and in her only.

"God spare us and help us!" she exclaimed. "Mr. Hardinge, I am filled with unutterable fear;" and then she added, unconsciously quoting some poet, "I find the thought of death, to one near death, most dreadful!"

"With you, Estelle, love might make it indeed a joy to die!" I exclaimed, with a gush of enthusiasm and tenderness that, but for the terrible situation, had been melodramatic.

"I did not think that you loved me so," said she, after a little pause; and my arm now encircled her waist, while something of an invocation to heaven rose to my lips, and I repeated,

"Not think that I loved you! Do not be coquettishly unwilling to admit what you must know, that since that last happy night in London you have never been absent from my thoughts; and here, Estelle, dear, dear Estelle, when menaced by a grave amid these waters, I tell you that I loved you from the first moment that I knew you! Death stares us in the face, but tell me truly that you--that you--"

"Love you in return? I do, indeed, dear Harry!" she sobbed, and then her beloved face, chilled and damp with tears and spray, came close to mine.

"God bless you, O my darling, for this avowal!" said I in a thick voice, and even the terrors of our position could not damp the glow of my joy.

In all my waking dreams of her had Estelle seemed beautiful; but never so much so as now, when I seemed on the eve of losing her for ever, and my own life, too; when each successive wave that rolled in inky blackness towards us might tear her from my clasp! How easily under some circumstances do we learn the language of passion! and now, while clasping her fast with one arm, as with both of hers she clung to me, I pressed her to my breast, and told her again and again how fondly I loved her, while--as it were in a dream, a portion of a nightmare--our boat, now filling fast with water, was tossed madly to and fro. And like a dream, too, it seemed, the fact that I had her all to myself--for life or death, as it were--this brilliant creature so loved by many, so prized by all, and hitherto apparently so unattainable; she who, by a look, a glance, a smile, by a flirt of her fan, by the dropping of a glove, or the gift of a flower, selected with point from her bouquet, had held my soul in thrall by all the delicious trifles that make up the sum and glory of love to the lover who is young. And where were we now? Alone on the dark, and ere long it was the midnight, sea! Alone, and with me; I who had so long eyed her lovingly and longingly, even as Sch?n Rohtrant, the German king's daughter, was gazed at and loved by the handsome page, who dared not to touch or kiss her till he gathered courage one day, as the ballad tells us, when they were under a shady old oak.

"If God spares us to see her," said Lady Estelle, "what will mamma think of this terrible fiasco of ours?"

While Estelle loved me, I felt that I did not care very much for the dowager's views of the matter, especially at that precise moment. When on terra firma there would be sufficient time to consider them.

"And you are mine, darling?" said I, tenderly.

"I am yours, Harry, and yours only."

"Never shall I weary of hearing this admission; but the rumour of an engagement to Lord Pottersleigh?'

"Absurd! It has grown out of his dangling after me and mamma's wish, as I won't have my cousin Naseby."

"And you do not hold yourself engaged--"

"Save to you, Harry, and you alone."

And as her head again sank upon my shoulder, her pride and my doubts fled together; but now a half-stifled shriek escaped her, as the frail boat was nearly overturned by a larger wave than usual, which struck it on the counter. We were drenched and chilled, so ours was, indeed, love-making under difficulties; and the time, even with her reclining in my arms, passed slowly. How many a prayer and invocation, all too deep for utterance, rose to my lips for her! The hours drew on. Would day never dawn? With all the sweet but now terrible companionship of love--for it was love combined with gloomy danger--this was our utmost craving.

The new moon, as she rose pale and sharp, like a silver sickle, from the Irish Sea, when the fog began to disperse, tipped for a little time with light the wave-tops as they rose or sank around us; but clouds soon enveloped her again; and when the tide turned, the sea ran inward, and broke wildly on the tremendous headlands of the coast. That our boat was not swamped seemed miraculous; but it was very buoyant, being entirely lined with cork, and had air-tight compartments under the seats. A gray streak at the far horizon had spread across a gap of pale green, announcing that the short August night was past, and rapidly it broadened and brightened into day, while crimson and gold began to tip the wave-tops with a fiery hue, the whole ocean seeming to be mottled, as it were; and I could see the coast-line, as we were not quite a mile from it. In the distance were plainly visible the little town of Abergele, and those hills where Castell Cawr and the Cefn Ogo are, tinged with pink, as they rose above the white vapour that rolled along the shore.

The more distant mountain ranges seemed blue and purple against a sky where clouds of pearly-pink were floating. Estelle was exhausted now. Her pallor added to my misery. So many hours of pitiless exposure had proved too much for her strength, and with her eyes closed she lay helpless in my arms, while wave after wave was now impelling us shoreward, and, most happily it would seem, towards a point where the rocks opened and the water shoaled. One enormous breaker, white-crested and overarching, came rolling upon us. A gasp, a mutual cry to heaven, half-stifled by the bitter spray, and then the mighty volume of it engulfed us and our boat. We had a momentary sense of darkness and blindness, a sound as of booming thunder mingled with the clangour of bells in our ears, and something of the feeling of being swept by an express train through a tunnel filled with water, for we were fairly under the latter; but I clung to the boat with one hand and arm, while the other went round Estelle with a death-like embrace, that prevented her from being swept or torn from me.

For some moments I knew not whether we were on the land or in the sea; but, though stunned by the shock, I acted mechanically. Then I remember becoming conscious of rising through the pale-green water, of inhaling a long breath, a gasping respiration, and of seeing the sunshine on the waves. Another shock came, and we were flung on the flat or sloping beach, to be there left by the receding sea. Instead of in that place, had we been dashed against the impending rocks elsewhere, all had then been over with us. I still felt that my right arm was clasped around Estelle; but she was motionless, breathless, and still; and though a terror that she was dead oppressed me, a torpor that I could not resist spread over all my faculties, and I sank into a state of perfect unconsciousness.