Page:Edgar Huntly, or The Sleep Walker.djvu/107

 anxiously around when I again spoke:—"Look hither—it is I who called!"

He looked. Astonishment was now mingled with every other dreadful meaning in his visage. He clasped his hands together and bent forward, as if to satisfy himself that his summoner was real: at the next moment he drew back, placed his hands upon his breast, and fixed his eyes on the ground.

This pause was not likely to be broken but by me. I was preparing again to speak: to be more distinctly heard, I advanced closer to the brink: during this action, my eye was necessarily withdrawn from him: having gained a somewhat nearer station, I looked again, but—he was gone!

The seat which he so lately occupied was empty. I was not forewarned of his disappearance, or directed to the course of his flight by any rustling among leaves: these indeed would have been overpowered by the noise of the cataract. The place where he sat was the bottom of a cavity, one side of which terminated in the verge of the abyss, but the other sides were perpendicular or overhanging: surely he had not leaped into this gulf; and yet that he had so speedily scaled the steep was impossible.

I looked into the gulf, but the depth and the gloom allowed me to see nothing with distinctness: his cries or groans could not be overheard amidst the uproar of the waters: this fall must have instantly destroyed him; and that he had fallen, was the only conclusion I could draw.

My sensations on this incident cannot be easily described: the image of this man's despair, and of the sudden catastrophe to which my inauspicious interference had led, filled me with compunction and terror. Some of my fears were relieved by the new conjecture, that, behind the rock on which he had lain, there might be some aperture or pit into which he had descended, or in which he might be concealed.

I derived consolation from this conjecture. Not Only the evil which I dreaded might not have happened, but some alleviation of his misery was possible: could I arrest his footsteps and win his attention, I might be able to