The World's Greatest Books - Volume 5 Part 44

Some three hundred yards out at sea lies a long, curved, black line, amid the white, wild leaping hills of water. A murmur from the crowd.

"A Liverpool clipper, by the lines of her."

"G.o.d help the poor pa.s.sengers, then!" sobs a woman. "They're past our help."

A quarter of an hour pa.s.ses.

"G.o.d have mercy!" shouts Brown. "She's going!"

The black curve coils up, and then all melts away into the white seething waste.

The coastguard lieutenant settles down in his macintoshes, knowing that his duty is not to leave as long as there is a chance of saving--not a life, for that was past all hope, but a chest of clothes or a stick of timber.

And with the coastguardsmen many sailors stayed. Old Captain Willis stays because Grace Harvey, the village schoolmistress, is there, sitting upon a flat slope of rock, a little apart from the rest, with her face resting on her hands, gazing intently out into the wild waste.

"She's not one of us," says old Willis. "There's no saying what's going on there in her. Maybe she's praying; maybe she sees more than we do, over the sea there."

"Look at her now! What's she after?" Brown replies.

The girl had raised her head, and was pointing toward the sea. Then she sprang to her feet with a scream.

"A man! A man! Save him!"

As she spoke a huge wave rolled in, and out of it struggled, on hands and knees, a human figure. He looked wildly up and around, and lay clinging with outstretched arms over the edge of the rock.

"Save him!" she shrieked again, as twenty men rushed forward--and stopped short. The man was fully thirty yards from them, but between them and him stretched a long, ghastly crack, some ten feet wide, with seething cauldrons within.

Ere they could nerve themselves for action, the wave had come, half-burying the wretched mariner, and tearing across the chasm.

The schoolmistress took one long look, and as the wave retired, rushed after it to the very brink of the chasm, and flung herself on her knees.

"The wave has carried him across the crack, and she's got him!" screamed old Willis. And he sprang upon her, and caught her round the waist.

"Now, if you be men!" shouted he, as the rest hurried down.

"Now, if you be men; before the next wave comes!" shouted big Jan, the fisherman. "Hands together, and make a line!" And he took a grip with one hand of the old man's waistband, and held out the other for who would to seize.

Strong hand after hand was clasped, and strong knee after knee dropped almost to the rock, to meet the coming rush of water.

It came, and surged over the man and the girl, and up to old Willis's throat, and round the knees of Jan and his neighbour; and then followed the returning out-draught, and every limb quivered under the strain; but when the cataract had disappeared, the chain was still unbroken.

"Saved!" and a cheer broke from all lips save those of the girl herself--she was as senseless as he whom she had saved.

Gently they lifted each, and laid them on the rock; and presently the schoolmistress was safe in bed at her mother's house. And the man, weak, but alive, had been carried triumphantly up to the door of Dr. Heale, which having been kicked open, the sailors insisted on carrying him right upstairs, and depositing him on the best spare bed, saying, "If you won't come to your patients, doctor, your patients shall come to you."

The man grumbled when he awoke next morning at being thrown ash.o.r.e with nothing in the world but an old jersey and a bag of tobacco, two hundred miles short of the port where he hoped to land with 1,500 in his pocket.

To Dr. Heale, and to the Rev. Frank Headley, the curate, who called upon him, he mentioned that his name was Tom Thurnall, F.R.C.S.

Later in the day Tom met the coastguard lieutenant and old Captain Willis on the sh.o.r.e, and the latter introduced him to "Miss Harvey, the young person who saved your life last night."

Tom was struck by the beauty of the girl at once, but after thanking her, said gently, "I wish to tell you something which I do not want publicly talked of, but in which you may help me. I had nearly 1,500 about me when I came ash.o.r.e last night, sewed in a belt round my waist.

It is gone."

Grace turned pale, and her lips quivered. She turned to her mother and Captain Willis.

"Belt! Mother! Uncle! What is this? The gentleman has lost a belt!"

"Dear me! A belt! Well, child, that's not much to grieve over, when the Lord has spared his life," said her mother, somewhat testily.

Grace declared the money should be found, and Tom vowed to himself he would stay in that little Cornish village of Aberalva until he had recovered it.

So after writing to some old friends at St. Mumpsimus's Hospital to send him down some new drugs, and to his father, he settled down as Dr.

Heale's a.s.sistant; and Dr. Heale being addicted to brandy and water, there was plenty of room for a.s.sistance.

_III.--The Cholera_

Tom Thurnall had made up his mind in June 1854, that the cholera ought to visit Aberalva in the course of the summer, and, of course, tried his best to persuade people to get ready for their ugly visitor; but in vain. The collective ignorance, pride, laziness, and superst.i.tion of the little town showed a terrible front to the newcomer.

"Does he think we was all fools afore he came here?"

That was the rallying cry of the enemy, and sanitary reform was thrust out of sight.

But Lord Minchampstead, who owned the neighbouring estates of Pentremochyn, on Mark Armsworth's advice, got Tom to make a report on the sanitary state of his cottages, and then acted on the information.

Frank Headley backed up Tom in his sanitary crusade, the coastguard lieutenant proved an unexpected ally, and Grace Harvey promised that she would do all she could.

Tom wrote up to London and detailed the condition of the place to the General Board of Health, and the Board returned, for answer, that, as soon as cholera broke out in Aberalva, they would send down an inspector.

Then in August it came, and Tom Beer, the fisherman, and one of the finest fellows in the town, was dead after two hours' illness.

Up and down the town the foul fiend sported, now here, now there, fles.h.i.+ng his teeth on every kind of prey. He has taken old Beer's second son, and now clutches at the old man himself; then across the street to Jan Beer, his eldest; but he is driven out from both houses by chloride of lime, and the colony of the Beers has peace awhile. The drunken cobbler dies, of course; but spotless cleanliness and sobriety do not save the mother of seven children, who has been soaking her brick floor daily with water from a poisoned well, defiling where she meant to clean. Youth does not save the buxom la.s.s who has been filling herself with unripe fruit.

And yet sots and fools escape where wise men fall; weakly women, living amid all wretchedness, nurse, unharmed, strong men who have breathed fresh air all day.

Headley and Grace and old Willis, and last, but not least, Tom Thurnall, these and three or four brave women, organised themselves into a band, and commenced at once a visitation from house to house, saving thereby many a life. But within eight-and-forty hours it was as much as they could do to attend to the acute cases.

Grace often longed to die, but knew that she should not die till she had found Tom's belt, and was content to wait.

Tom just thought nothing about death and danger at all, but, always cheerful, always busy, yet never in a hurry, went up and down, seemingly ubiquitous. Sleep he got when he could, and food as often as he could; into the sea he leapt, morning and night, and came out fresher every time; the only person in the town who seemed to grow healthier, and actually happier, as the work went on, in that fearful week.

The battle is over at last, and Tom is in London at the end of September, ready to go to war as medical officer to the Turks. The news of Alma has just arrived.

But he pays a visit to Whitbury first, and there Lord Minchampstead sees him, and his lords.h.i.+p expresses satisfaction at the way Tom conducted the business at Pentremochyn, and offers him a post of queen's messenger in the Crimea, which Tom accepts with profuse thanks.

Before Tom left for the East old Mark Armsworth took him aside, and said, "What do you think of the man who marries my daughter?"