His Unknown Wife

Nina Forbes uttered a quaint little laugh as she threw the last empty shell on to the rocks beneath.

“Now,” she said, “I am quite ready for the soup and a joint.”

“Oh, don’t be horrid!” cried Madge. “You’ve gone and made me feel ravenous again.”

“He, or she, who would eat must first labor,” said Maseden. “Thanks to friend Sturgess, we’ve enjoyed a first-rate snack. I’ve never sampled manna, but I’ll back the proteids in three fat oysters against those in a pound of manna any day. Now, let’s get to business. If I’m not mistaken we’re going to tackle a stiff proposition.”

He knotted some stout cord around his own waist and that of each of the others, and slung the longest available coil over his shoulders. Then the mast was fixed in its place across the ravine, and he climbed to the opposite crest by straddling the pole, putting his feet in the loops, and pulling himself up by both hands.

Throwing back the rope, he told Sturgess to see that it was fastened securely to one of the girls on the belt already in position. He purposely refrained from specifying which one. By chance, Madge Forbes stood nearest, and it was she who came.

The crossing was awkward rather than dangerous, and rendered far more difficult by the fact that the unwilling acrobat was compelled to expose her naked limbs. But after the first shock common sense came to her aid, and she straightway abandoned any useless effort to observe the conventions.

Still, she blushed furiously, and was trembling when Maseden caught her hands and helped her to land.

“Thank Heaven we’ve kept our boots,” he said, unfastening the rope. “Just look at the ground we have to cover, and think what it would mean if our feet were bare.”

The comment was merely one of those matter-of-fact bits of philosophy which are most effective in the major crises of life. It was so true that a display of leg or ankle mattered little afterwards. Nevertheless, a similar ordeal caused Nina to blush, too, but she laughed when Madge cried ruefully:

“What in the world has happened to my ankles? They are scrubbed and bruised dreadfully.”

“That was last night’s treatment, my dear,” said her sister. “I escaped more lightly than you.”

“But what do you mean? I felt some soreness, but imagined I knocked myself in coming from the wreck.”

“You were in a dead faint, so Mr. Maseden and Mr. Sturgess massaged you unmercifully.”

Madge surveyed damages again.

“I must have been very bad if I stood that,” she said.

“You’ll be worse before we see the other side of this cliff,” murmured Nina, casting a critical eye over the precipitous ground in front.

It is not to be wondered at if the girls’ hearts quailed at the sight. They were standing on a sloping terrace, of no great depth, which ended abruptly at the foot of a towering cliff. A little to the right ran the line of the cleft, but so forbidding was its appearance, and so apparently unscalable its broken ledges, that the same thought occurred to each – what if they had but left a narrow, sheltered prison for a wider and more exposed one?

Maseden, however, allowed no time for reflection. He and Sturgess had already dragged the foremast after them, and were shouldering it in the direction of the first hump of rock which seemed to offer a way into the cleft. Any other route was absolutely impossible.

After one last glance at the reef which had slain a gallant ship and so many lives, they quitted the ledge which had proved their salvation. It was then five o’clock in the morning. At four o’clock that afternoon they flung themselves, utterly spent, on a carpet of thick moss which coated the landward slope of the most westerly point of Hanover Island.

Their hands and knees were torn and bleeding, their fingernails broken, their bones aching and their eyes bloodshot. But they had triumphed, though many a time it had seemed that if Providence meant to be kind, an avalanche of loose stones or a slip on treacherous shale would have hurled them to speedy death on the rocks beneath.

On five separate occasions they had found themselves strung out on a narrow ledge which merged to nothingness in the sheer wall of a precipice. Five times had they to go back and essay a different path, often beginning again fifty or even a hundred feet below the point they had reached. They were obliged to drag or carry the heavy topmast every inch of the way, because, without its aid, either as a bridge or a ladder, they could never have surmounted a tithe of the obstacles encountered.

In those eleven awful hours they had climbed not two, but five hundred feet, a distance which, on the level, a good runner would traverse in about twenty seconds, whereas it took them an average of a minute to climb one foot.

The marvel was that the women could have done it at all, even with the help which both men gave unstintedly. During the last weary hours no one uttered an unnecessary word. Each of the four was determined to go on, not for his or her own sake, but for the sake of the others. They were roped together. If one fell, it meant disaster to all. So, with splendid grit, each resolved not to fall so long as hand would hold or foot lodge on the tiniest projection.

But, with final success, came utter collapse. Even Maseden, far stronger physically than Sturgess, fell like a log. True, he had borne far more than his share of the day’s toil. No matter what his inmost thoughts, he had never, to outward seeming, lost heart. It was he who always found the new line, he who earliest decided to turn back and try again.

It was he, too, who called now for renewed exertion after some minutes of complete and blissful repose.

“Sorry to disturb your siesta,” he cried, with a woful assumption of cheery confidence, “but we must reach the shore, if possible, before night falls. Oysters and Chablis await us there. En avant, messieurs et ’dames!”

Nina Forbes sat up and brushed the hair from her eyes.

“I don’t think I can walk another yard. Won’t you leave me here?” she demanded.

“No.”

“Are we to carry that mast with us?”

“Why not? We may need it.”

Her eyes followed Maseden’s down the slope. Compared with the sullen, frowning realm of rock they had quitted, this eastern side of the island resembled a Paradise. The moss on which they were resting was thick and wiry. A hundred feet beneath were fir-trees, sparse and stunted at first, but soon growing luxuriantly, yet promising, to Maseden’s weighing eye, a barrier nearly as formidable as the fearsome wall of rock they had just surmounted.

He knew that which was happily hidden from the others. In this wild land, seldom, if ever, trodden by the foot of man, the forests throve on the bones of their own dead progenitors. Aged trees fell and rotted where they lay, and the roots of newcomers found substance among the heaped-up logs. Gales and landslides helped to swell the mad jumble of decaying trunks, which formed an impassable layer hardly ever less than fifteen feet in depth and often going beyond thirty feet.

Of the two, Maseden believed he would sooner tackle another wall of rock rather than essay to cross that belt of fantastic growths.

But, down there was water – perhaps food – certainly shelter. He guessed that at an altitude where hardy Alpine mosses alone flourished the cold would be intense at night. Already there was a shrewd nip in the breeze. They must not dawdle another instant.

He made up his mind to head for a gap in the trees which seemed to mark a recent land-slip, and trust to fortune that the gradient might not be too steep. Better any open risk than the fall of perhaps the whole party into a pit of dead wood choked with fœtid and noisome fungus growths. Once caught in such a trap, they might never emerge.

And now they met with their greatest among many pieces of luck that day. The opening Maseden had noticed was not the track of an avalanche, but a rough water-course, through which the torrential rain-storms of the coast tumbled headlong to the sea.

Notwithstanding the long-continued gale, the descent was so steep that only a vestige of a stream trickled down the main gully. Here and there lay a pool. Though the water was brackish, it was strongly pigmented with iron, and the roots of vigorous young trees seemed to find sustenance in it.

At any rate, they must drink or die, so they drank, though Maseden warned them to be moderate. They laved their wounds, which were intensely sore at first, owing to the encrustation of salt on their skins. But here, again, nature’s surgery, if painful, was effective. Salt is a rough and ready antiseptic. None of them owned any real medical knowledge. In their hard case ignorance was surely bliss, because they must have had the narrowest of escapes from tetanus.

The descent, though trying, was not specially perilous. Three times did the mast bring them down small cataracts, and many times across extraordinarily ingenious log barriers, set up against the stress of falling water by nature’s own engineering methods.

Once, indeed, a heavy boulder, poised in unexpected balance, toppled over just as they had reached the base of a waterfall. It would have crushed Nina Forbes to a pulp had not Maseden seen the stone move. As it was, he snatched her aside, and a ton of rock crashed harmlessly on to the very spot where she had been standing the fifth part of a second earlier.

Such an incident, happening in civilized surroundings, would have been regarded as phenomenal, something akin to an escape from a train wreck. Here it passed as a mere item in the day’s trials. It did not even shake the girl’s nerve.

“I suppose I ought to say ‘thank you,’ but I’m not quite sure you have done me a service,” she murmured wearily.

Hitherto both she and her sister had been so brave, so uncomplaining, that Maseden took warning from the words. The two girls were at the extreme limit of their powers of endurance, mentally and physically. It was five o’clock in the evening. After a day and a night of passive misery they had been subjected to every sort of muscular strain during nearly twelve hours, and might collapse at any moment now.

“Courage!” he said, with a gentleness curiously in contrast with the rather gruff and hectoring manner he had adopted all day. “You haven’t noticed how near the sea is. We shall be on shore in a few minutes.”

The girl’s lips parted in a wan smile.

“You are wonderful,” was all she said, but the pathos underlying the tribute wrung his heart.

Somehow, anyhow, they slithered and dropped down the remaining steps of their Calvary. During the last few feet they were able to leave behind the friendly topmast, but the shadows were falling when they stood, forlornly triumphant, on the flat rocks which served as the beach of the estuary.

The two girls sank at once to a moss-covered boulder. They looked so deathly white beneath the tan of exposure and the crust of dirt and blood not altogether removed when they bathed their faces in the pool, that Maseden unstrapped the poncho which he carried slung to his shoulders and produced from its folds that thrice-precious bottle of brandy.