"If only she is no weaker--if only she has slept right through!" Denis went on, and repeated himself all the way down; but at the base he button-holed his guide.
"Do I look very awful, sir? Is my face as bad as my hands? Wait a bit, then--stay where you are."
And his injured feet could still dance him down to the water's edge; but he came stealing back, one index finger to his lips, signing with the other to Mr. Kitto to let him go first; and the smile on the cleansed face told that good man a tale.
The mouth of the greater cave was just as Denis had left it. He crept on all fours between the table legs, and listened. There was no sound. He leaped up and looked over.
The cave was empty.
CHAPTER IV
LOST AND FOUND
Mr. Kitto saw the ragged figure shoot from the cave as though propelled by some unseen power within; and for one second he imagined the worst.
He was relieved when the shipwrecked sailor raised his voice.
"Nan! Nan!" he yelled. "Miss Merridew! Miss Merridew! Nan! Nan! Nan!"
The squatter, running up, alone interrupted him.
"She's gone!" cried Denis in terrible excitement. "Gone clean away--God knows where! Look for yourself, if you like; with the sun pouring in you can see to the very end. Do you think I would miss her if it were ten times the size? See, there's where I left her lying; that was all the pillow I could give her; you can almost see the shape of her head!"
And the hoarse voice broke piteously; but such a firm, kind hand had him by the arm, that Denis bit his lips and blinked the tears back to their source.
"Come, now," said Kitto, "there's nothing wonderful in this; the only wonder is that we didn't expect it. Why should she have slept so much longer than you? She had done far less; and they are tougher than you think. She would wake up and find you flown----"
"Poor Nan! Poor Nan!"
"And having the vitality she must have, to say nothing of the pluck, you wouldn't expect her to sit still and wait, would you?"
"I suppose not," said Denis, gloomily. "I only know I would have died to save her what she must have gone through alone--alone."
"You have done your best to die for her," retorted Mr. Kitto, with his kind smile. "Were her people on board with her?"
"Her father, yes; she has no one else."
"Then you may have to live for her," the older man said gravely. "So don't commit any more of your follies, and above all don't make yourself ill without a cause. She is probably trying to find her own way to the station, and it's safe to be the wrong way."
"But you said no one had been up those stairs."
Mr. Kitto stood confounded in the sun.
"She may be about the beach somewhere," he said hurriedly. "After all, it's not so little that you take in every cranny at a glance. Come and let's look. There are all sorts of holes and corners under the cliffs,"
he added as they went, "where my children play hide-and-seek at picnics.
It's our favourite place for them; in fact, that's why I cut those steps. No harm could come to her here."
But his voice had lost something of its cheery confidence, and in spite of him it lost more as they sought together, but sought in vain. As for Denis, there was an end to his lamentations; he was past that stage; but his dumb eyes plumbed the pit.
"Can you cooey?" asked the squatter. "No, you're too hoarse; don't try.
But I can, like a blackfellow, thank God!" And he arched his sun-burned hands about his mouth.
"Cooooooooo----eeeey!"
It was long enough and loud to reach the one top-gallant mast of the _North Foreland_ that they descried between the heads, at a certain stage of their wanderings, standing out of the waves for a monument to those beneath: had a single sailor been clinging to it, he must have heard so penetrating and so sustained a call: but from the lost one on shore, as from the drowned multitude without the gateway of sparking blue, not a sound, not a sign.
Doherty and another arrived with blankets, clothes, coffee, mutton, damper, billy-can, everything that kind thought could send, with a sweet message from her who sent them; but this fell on deaf ears. Denis would touch nothing till she whom he had lost was found again; so the squatter thrust him down into the sand, and between them they forced him to make a meal. And being at last in a more reasonable frame, he would have ended by putting on the shoes which he had cast off in the morning, and forgotten or despised ever since; but now his feet were so swollen, he could not get them on. But as for letting them send him back to the station in the buggy, and leaving the search to them, as Mr. Kitto had now the temerity to suggest, it was as much as Denis could do to hear him out civilly.
The survivor went his own way after this, and it led him first to the summit of the cliffs, to see for himself whether there was no trace up there; for he had been incredulous on that point all along; but now so many had been up and down that he had still only one man's word for the absence of foot-marks in the beginning, and he roamed far afield in vigilant circles. He had been lost himself but for a fire they made on top of the cliff; and when he came shambling back to the brink, down below there was quite a galaxy of lanterns moving in different directions, a constellation of creeping stars. So they had not found her yet; and now it was black night.
In the utter heart-break of the hour, and the last stage of physical distress, Denis had half a mind to fling himself over and be done with it all; but only half a mind, and not a hundredth part of the heart.
Instead, as he went down gingerly in the dusk, one painful step at a time, he reviled himself from top to bottom for the unnecessary climb which is not wholly credited to this day. It was already at the root of everything in the climber's mind. Had he only explored the smaller cavern, he had been back with succour in one hour instead of three.
Mr. Kitto meanwhile had made up his mind. "We shall never find her alive," he whispered to his overseer, who arrived upon the scene a little before Denis's return. "But for that poor fellow's sake we must keep up the pretence a bit longer. I can see there was something between them; and when we find her body it will probably kill him; and after all every soul will have been lost. Did you know the bodies were beginning to come ashore? There's a little chap I take to be the skipper: last to leave and first to land."
"But you aren't looking for this girl among them?" the overseer exclaimed aghast.
"Not yet; but it will come to that," whispered Kitto. "I cooeyed till I was hoarse; that's why I can't raise my voice above a whisper now; and all the rest of us are in the same box. Mark my words, it's a case of suicide, and a fearful case: the poor thing was so terrified at her position when she awoke and found herself deserted on this desert coast, that it drove her clean out of her mind. I almost hope he won't live to realize it was that--though he's the sort we want in this colony--if he gave up the sea."
"Was there no tracking her?"
"Scarcely a yard from the mouth of the cave, and he doesn't know I did that; the sand is so heavy outside. But the tracks I did find pointed straight to the sea. I grant you there were not enough of them to mean anything in themselves."
They chanced to be passing close to the ti-tree clump as they conversed.
Suddenly the overseer stood still.
"You've looked in there, I suppose?"
"In there? What would be the good? It's not above a dozen yards thick, though so dense; if she were alive in there she'd have heard us long ago; if she's dead she's in the sea. Why do you ask?"
"I thought I heard something. That was all."
They moved on a few yards.
"I say, Mr. Kitto, I do hear something! Listen, sir--listen to that!"
They heard the voice distinctly, faint and feeble though it was.
"I am dying!" it moaned. "_Oh, Denis, where are you?_"
Mr. Kitto almost choked.
"Thank God--but if she does die!" he croaked and whispered in one breath. "We're coming! We're coming, my dear, dear young lady! But," in his whisper, "who's that hobbling toward us--dot-and-carry-one? It's Dent, man, it's Dent himself; go and tell him like a good fellow--only don't raise too much hope." And deeply agitated, the squatter thrust his lantern among the outer branches of the thicket.
In an instant came the faint voice, immeasurably stronger, and poignant with a nameless agony: