Portent and Other Stories, The | Page 7

came in sight of his brother on the ledge before him. With a
suppressed scream of rage, he rode head-long at him, and ere he had
time to make the least defence, hurled him over the precipice. The
helplessness of the strong man was uttered in one single despairing cry
as he shot into the abyss. Then all was still. The sound of his fall could
not reach the edge of the gulf. Divining in a moment that the lady,
whose name was Elsie, must have fled in the opposite direction, he
reined his steed on his haunches. He could touch the precipice with his
bridle-hand half outstretched; his sword-hand half outstretched would
have dropped a stone to the bottom of the ravine. There was no room to
wheel. One desperate practicability alone remained. Turning his horse's
head towards the edge, he compelled him, by means of the powerful bit,
to rear till he stood almost erect; and so, his body swaying over the gulf,
with quivering and straining muscles, to turn on his hind-legs. Having
completed the half-circle, he let him drop, and urged him furiously in
the opposite direction. It must have been by the devil's own care that he
was able to continue his gallop along that ledge of rock.
"He soon caught sight of the maiden. She was leaning, half fainting,
against the precipice. She had heard her lover's last cry, and although it
had conveyed no suggestion of his voice to her ear, she trembled from
head to foot, and her limbs would bear her no farther. He checked his
speed, rode gently up to her, lifted her unresisting, laid her across the
shoulders of his horse, and, riding carefully till he reached a more open
path, dashed again wildly along the mountain-side. The lady's long hair
was shaken loose, and dropped trailing on the ground. The horse
trampled upon it, and stumbled, half dragging her from the saddle-bow.
He caught her, lifted her up, and looked at her face. She was dead. I
suppose he went mad. He laid her again across the saddle before him,
and rode on, reckless whither. Horse, and man, and maiden were found
the next day, lying at the foot of a cliff, dashed to pieces. It was
observed that a hind-shoe of the horse was loose and broken. Whether

this had been the cause of his fall, could not be told; but ever when he
races, as race he will, till the day of doom, along that mountain-side,
his gallop is mingled with the clank of the loose and broken shoe. For,
like the sin, the punishment is awful: he shall carry about for ages the
phantom-body of the girl, knowing that her soul is away, sitting with
the soul of his brother, down in the deep ravine, or scaling with him the
topmost crags of the towering mountain-peaks. There are some who,
from time to time, see the doomed man careering along the face of the
mountain, with the lady hanging across the steed; and they say it
always betokens a storm, such as this which is now raving around us."
I had not noticed till now, so absorbed had I been in her tale, that the
storm had risen to a very ecstasy of fury.
"They say, likewise, that the lady's hair is still growing; for, every time
they see her, it is longer than before; and that now such is its length and
the head-long speed of the horse, that it floats and streams out behind,
like one of those curved clouds, like a comet's tail, far up in the sky;
only the cloud is white, and the hair dark as night. And they say it will
go on growing till the Last Day, when the horse will falter and her hair
will gather in; and the horse will fall, and the hair will twist, and twine,
and wreathe itself like a mist of threads about him, and blind him to
everything but her. Then the body will rise up within it, face to face
with him, animated by a fiend, who, twining her arms around him, will
drag him down to the bottomless pit."
I may mention something which now occurred, and which had a
strange effect on my old nurse. It illustrates the assertion that we see
around us only what is within us: marvellous things enough will show
themselves to the marvellous mood.--During a short lull in the storm,
just as she had finished her story, we heard the sound of iron-shod
hoofs approaching the cottage. There was no bridle-way into the glen.
A knock came to the door, and, on opening it, we saw an old man
seated on a horse, with a long slenderly-filled sack lying across the
saddle before him.