She's All the World to Me/Chapter 15
CHAPTER XV.
A RESURRECTION INDEED.
"The night is long that never finds the day."—Macbeth
The shaft of the old lead-mine down which Christian leaped was forty-five feet deep, yet he was not killed; he was not even hurt. At the bottom were fifteen feet of water, and this had broken his dreadful fall. On coming to the surface, one stroke in the first instant of dazed consciousness had landed him on a narrow ledge of rock that raked downward with the seam. But what was his position when he realized it? It seemed to be worse than death itself; it was a living death; it was life in the arms of death; it was burial in an open grave. He heard steps overhead, and in the agony of fear he shouted. But the steps went by like a swift breath of wind, and no one answered. Then he reflected that these must have been the footsteps of the police. Thank God they had not heard his voice. To be rescued by them must have been ruin more terrible than all. Doubtless they knew of his share in to-night's attempted crime. Knowing this they must know by what fatality he was buried here. Christian now realized that death encircled him on every side. To remain in this pit was death; to be lifted out of it was death no less surely. To escape was hopeless. He looked up at the sky. It was a small square patch of leaden gray against the impenetrable blackness of his prison walls.
Standing on the ledge of rock, and steadying himself with one hand, he lifted the other stealthily upward to feel the sides of the shaft. They were of rock and were precipitous, but had rugged projecting pieces on which it was possible to lay hold. As he grasped one of these, a sickening pang of hope shot through him and wounded him worse than despair. But it was swift; it was gone in an instant. The piece of rock gave way in his hand and tumbled into the water below him with a hollow splash! The sides of the shaft were of a crumbling stone.
Now, indeed, he knew how hopeless was his plight. He dare not cry for help. He must stand still as death in this deep tomb. To attract attention would of itself be death. To remain down the shaft would also be certain death. To climb to the surface was impossible. Christian's heart sank. His position was terrible. This conflict of soul did not last long. The heart soon clung to the nearest hope. Cry for help he must; be dragged out of this grave he should, let the issue be what it could or would. To lie here and die was not human. To live in the living present was the first duty, the first necessity, be the price of life no less than future death.
Christian reflected that the police, when he heard their footsteps, had been running to Lockjaw Creek. It would take them five minutes to reach it. When they got there and saw the boats on the shingle they would know that their men had escaped them. Then they would hasten back. In ten minutes they would pass the mouth of the shaft again. Five of these ten minutes must have gone already. If he were to be rescued he must know nearabouts when they ought to return, so that he might shout when they were within hail. He remembered that their footsteps had gone from him like the wind. The long shaft and sixty feet of dull dead rock and earth had carried them off in an instant.
Christian began to reckon the moments. His thoughts came too fast. He knew they must deceive him as to time. Minutes in this perilous position might count with him for hours. He took out his watch, meaning to listen for the beat of its seconds. The watch had stopped. No doubt it was full of water. Christian's heart beat loud enough. Then he began to count—one, two, three. But his mind was in a whirl. He lost his reckoning. He found that he had stopped counting and forgotten the number. Whether five minutes or fifty had passed he could not be sure. Hark! He heard something overhead. Were they footsteps, those thuds that fell on the ear like the first rumble of a distant thunder-cloud? Yes, some one was near him. Now was his time to call, but his tongue was cleaving to his mouth. Then he heard words spoken at the mouth of the shaft. They rumbled down to him like words shouted through a hollow black pillar.
"Here, men," said one, "let's tumble him into the lead mine. No harm will it do him now, poor craythur."
But another voice, laden with the note of fearful agony, cried, "No, no, no!"
"We must do something. No time to lose now. The fac's is agen us. Let's make a slant for it, anyway. Lift again—up!"
Christian shuddered at the sound of human voices. Buried, as he was, sixty feet beneath the earth, they came to him like the voice that the wind might make on a tempestuous night if, as it reached your ear, it whispered words and fled away.
The men were gone. Christian's blood was chilled. What had happened? Was some one dead? Who was it? Christian shuddered at the thought of what might have occurred if the dead body had been tossed over him into the pit. Had the police overstepped their duty? Were they the police? Did he not remember one of the voices—or both? Christian's entempest soul was overwhelmed with agony. He could not be sure that in very truth he was conscious of anything that occurred.
Time passed—he knew not how long or short—and again he heard voices overhead. They were not the voices that he had heard before.
"They have escaped us," said one. "Their boats are gone from the creek now."
These, then, were the police; and, with a fresh flood of agony, Christian realized that the other men had been his friends. What fatality had prevented him from crying aloud to the only persons on earth who could, in very truth, have rescued and saved him?
The voices above were dying away. "Stop!" cried Christian. Despair made him brave; fear made him fearless. But none answered. Then he was conscious that a footstep approached the top of the shaft. Had he been heard? Now he prayed to God that he had not.
"What a gulf," said one. "Lucky we didn't tumble down. The young woman warned us, you remember."
There was a short laugh at the mouth of Christian's open grave. He did not call again. The voices ceased, the footsteps died off.
He was alone once more; but death was with him. The police had gone. Kisseck and his men had gone. They were no doubt out at sea by this time if, as the police said, the boats had been taken from the creek. Christian remembered now that the voices he had heard first were those of Corteen and Danny Fayle. This recovered consciousness enabled him to recall the fearful memory of what had been said. Cold as he was, the sweat stood in big drops on Christian's forehead. One of their own men was dead; one of the companions in this night's black adventure. A bad man perhaps, or perhaps merely a weak victim, but his own associate, whatever else he had been.
Now, if he were to escape from his death in life it must be by his own unaided energies alone. It was best so; best that he should climb to the top without help, or be lost without detection. After all, it was a superior Power that had governed this dread eventuality and silenced his impotent tongue.
An hour passed. The wind began to rise. At first Christian felt nothing of it as he stood in his deep tomb. He could hear its thin hiss over the mouth of the shaft, and that was all. But presently the hiss deepened to a sough. Christian had often heard of the wind's sob. It was a reality, and no metaphor, as he listened to the wind now. The wind began to descend. With a great swoop it came down the shaft, licked the walls, gathered voice from the echoing water at the bottom, struggled for escape, roared like a caged beast and was once more sucked up to the surface with a noise like the breaking of a huge wave over a reef. The tumult of the wind in the shaft was hard to bear, but when it was gone it was the silence that seemed to be deafening.
Sometimes the gusts were laden with the smoke of burning gorse. It came from the fire that Danny had kindled on the head of the Poolvash. Would the fire reach the pit, encircle it, descend in it?
Then the rain began to fall. Christian knew this by the quick monotonous patter overhead. But no rain touched him. It was being driven aslant by the wind, and fell only against the uppermost part of the walls of the shaft. Sometimes a soft thin shower fell over him. It was like the spray from a cataract except that the volume of water from which it came was above and not beneath him.
Christian had begun to contemplate measures for escape. That unexpected softness of the rock which had at first appalled him began now to give him some painful glimmerings of hope. If the sides of the shaft had been uniformly of the gray slate rock of the district, the ledge he had laid hold of would not have crumbled in his hand. Being soft, there must be a vein of sandstone running across the shaft. Christian's bewildered memory recalled what he must have heard many times of the rift of redstone which lay under the headland south of Peel. If this vein were but deep enough, his safety was assured. He could cut niches into it with a knife, and so, perhaps, after infinite pain and labor, reach the surface. Steadying himself with one hand, Christian felt in his pockets for his knife. It was not there! Now death indeed was certain. Despair began to take hold of him.
He was icy cold and feverishly hot at intervals. His clothes were wet; the water still dripped from them, and fell at intervals into the hidden tarn beneath in hollow drops.
But not so soon is hope conquered, when it is hope of life. Not to hope now would have been not to fear. Christian remembered that he had a pair of small scissors attached to a button-hook. When searching for his knife he had felt it in his pocket, and spurned it for resembling the knife to the touch of his nervous fingers. Now it was his sole instrument. He found it again, opened it, and with this paltry help he set himself to his work of escape from this dark, deep tunnel that stood upright.
The night twas wearing on; hour after hour passed. The wind dropped; the rain ceased to patter overhead. Christian toiled on step over step; resting sometimes on the largest and firmest of the projecting ledges, he looked up at the sky. Its leaden gray had changed to a dark blue studded with stars. The moon arose and shone a little way down his prison, lighting all the rest. He knew it must be early morning. One star, a large, full globe of light, twinkled directly above him. His eye was fascinated by that star. He sat long and watched it. He turned again and again in his toilsome journey to look at it. Was it a symbol of hope? Pshaw! Christian twisted back to his work. When he looked for the star again it was gone. It had moved beyond his ken; it had passed out of range of his narrow spot of heaven. Somehow it had been a mute companion. Christian's heart sank yet lower in his cheerless solitude.
Still he toiled on. His strength was far spent. The moon died off, and the stars went out one after one. Then a deep, impenetrable cloud of darkness overspread the little sky above. Christian knew it must be the darkness that precedes the dawn. He had reached a ledge of rock wider than any that were beneath it. Clearly enough a wooden rafter had lain along it.
Christian rested and looked up. At that moment he heard the light patter of four little feet overhead, and a poor stray sheep, a lamb of last spring's flock, bleated down the shaft. The melancholy call of the lost creature in that dismal place touched Christian deeply. What was it that made the tears start to his eyes and his whole soul shake with a new agony? The outcast lamb wandering over this trackless waste in the night had touched an old scar in Christian's heart, and made the wound bleed afresh. Was it strange that in that hour his thoughts turned involuntarily to little Ruby Cregeen? The darling child, caressed by the salt breath of the sea, and with the sunlight dancing in her eyes and glistening on her ruby lips, had she then anything in common with the little wanderer that sent up her pitiful cry into the night? Too much, too much, for the man who heard it, and he was buried in a living grave, with the tombstones of dead joys rising everywhere around, with the fire that had for years been kept close burning now most of all. Oh, these dead joys, they want the deepest grave.
Christian turned again to his weary task. To live was a duty, and live he must. His fingers were chilled to the bone. His clothes still clung like damp cerements to his body. The meagre blades of the scissors were worn short. They could not last long. Christian rose to his feet on the ledge of rock and plunged the scissors into the blank wall above him. Ah! what fresh disaster was this? His hand went deep into soft earth; the vein of rock had finished, and all that was above it must be loose, uncertain mould!
He gasped at the discovery. A minute since life had looked very dear. Must he abandon his hope of it after all? He paused and reflected. As nearly as he could remember, he had made twenty niches in the rock. Hence he must be fully thirty-five feet from the water, and ten from the surface. Only ten feet, and then—freedom! Yet these ten seemed to represent an impossibility. To ascend by holes dug deep in the soft earth was a perilous enterprise. A great clod of soil might at any moment give way above or beneath him, and then he would be plunged once more into the pit. If he fell from the side of the shaft, he would be more likely than at first to strike one of the projecting ledges, and be killed before he reached the water. There was nothing left but to wait for the dawn. Perhaps the daylight would reveal some less hazardous method of escape.
Slowly the dull, dead, impenetrable blackness above him was lifted off. It was as though a spirit breathed on the night and it fled away. When the woolly hue of morning dappled his larger sky, Christian could hear the slow beat of the waves on the shore. The coast rose up before his vision then, silent, solemn, alone with the dawn. The light crept into his prison-house. He looked down at the deep black tarn.
And now hope rose in his heart again. Overhead he saw timbers running around and across the shaft. These had been used to bank up the earth and to make two grooves in which the ascending and descending cages had once worked. Christian lifted up his soul in thankfulness. The world was once more full of grace, even for him. He could climb from stay to stay, and so reach the surface.
Catching one of the stays in his uplifted hands, he swung his knees on to another. One stage was accomplished, but how stiff were his joints and how sinewless his fingers! Another and another stage was reached, and then four feet and no more were between him and the gorse that waved in the light of the risen sun across the mouth of his night-long tomb.
But the rain of years had eaten into these timbers. In some places they crumbled and were rotten. God! how the one on which he rested creaked under him at that instant. Another minute, and then the toilsome journey would be over. Another minute, and his dead self would be left behind him, buried forever in this grave! Then there would be a resurrection in very truth! Yes, truly, God helping him.
Christian had swimming eyes and a big heart as he raised himself on to the topmost stay that crossed the shaft, and clutched the long tussacs of the clinging gorse. Then, at the last spring, he heard a creak—another—louder—the timbers were breaking beneath his feet. At the same moment he heard a half-stifled cry—saw a face—it was Mona's face—there was a breathless instant of bewildered consciousness.
In another moment Christian was standing on the hillside, close locked in Mona's arms.