"Father!" I cried. "Father!"
There was no reply, and I stood there for what seemed a long time
waiting one. I called again and again in vain.
"It is weakness," I said to myself at last, and turned.
At once the voice was wailing, with some wild terror as it seemed,
at my very shoulder, with its cry of my name, and I must needs turn
once more sharply:
"Oswald, Oswald!"
My foot struck a stone as I wheeled round, and it grated on others
and seemed to stop. But as I listened for the voice I heard a
crash, and yet another, and at last a far-off rumble that was below
my very feet, and I sprang with a cry away from the sound, for I
knew that I stood on the very brink of some gulf. And then the snow
ceased for a moment and the moon shone out from the break in the
clouds, and I saw that my last footprint whence the voice had made
me turn was on the edge of an awesome rift that cleft the level
surface on the downland, clean cut as by a sword stroke, right
athwart my path. Even in clear daylight I had hardly seen that gulf
until I was on its very brink, for I could almost have leapt it,
and nought marked its edge. And in its depths I heard the crash and
thunder of prisoned waves.
I do not know that I ever felt such terror as fell on me then. It
was the terror that comes of thinking what might have been, after
the danger is past, and that is the worst of all.
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