Part 30 (1/2)
”Yes,” said Julia, ”I am sure it did. Do come away. I hate being here.”
And indeed she was s.h.i.+vering from head to foot, and not Juliet herself seemed more anxious to leave the place.
”Just one more shot,” said Mark. ”Here, Julia, stoop down, and roll that bit of stone slowly down the slope, while I hold on to our prisoner. We shall hear better that way. Give me your lamp.”
Anxious to satisfy him, Julia picked up the fragment he had knocked from the rough wall, and stooping down stretched out her hand to set the stone in motion. But, as she did so, Mark loosened his grip on Juliet, and bending quickly behind this poor girl who loved him seized her by the shoulders and threw her forward on to her face. The steep pitch of the floor finished what the impetus given by his onslaught had begun. Julia shot head first down the slope, and disappeared into the black chasm of the well.
One long agonized scream came up to them out of the darkness, and rolled its echoes through the lonely pa.s.sages.
Then the distant sound of a splash; and silence.
Back against the wall, Juliet cowered, her whole body shaken by great sobs. She was petrified with terror of this fiendish man, but her fears for herself gave way before the horror of what she had seen.
”Oh, what have you done, what have you done?” she wept.
Mark tried to summon up a jeering smile. The lantern threw no light upon his white and twitching face.
”You don't suppose I meant to let her go free, after the taste she gave me of her temper?” he asked, in a voice he could not keep from shaking a little. ”Do you suppose I like having to do these things? You women have never the slightest sense of common justice. The whole thing is perfectly beastly to me. But how could I live with a girl who would be ready to threaten me with the gallows every time she got out of bed wrong foot first? It's not fair to blame me for other people's faults.”
He spoke querulously, with the air of a much-injured man. Though Juliet was beyond any coherent reply, he seemed afraid of meeting her eyes, and looked resolutely away from her, his glance s.h.i.+fting and wavering from the walls to the floor, from the floor to the stones of the low roof; up, down, and sideways, but never resting on her. At last, as if drawn there irresistibly and against his will, they fell once more on the dark circle of the mouth of the pit, and he started back, shuddering violently.
”As if I hadn't enough to bear without being saddled with hideous memories for the rest of my life!” he cried with bitter irritability. ”If you had an ounce of common fairness in your composition you would admit I could do no less. Why, any day she might have got jealous, or something, and flown into a pa.s.sion again, and denounced me to the police. Besides, I have no wish to be obliged to fly the country. Why should I? She was the only person who knew the truth; except you. That is why you must follow her.”
”No, no!” cried Juliet despairingly, but without avail, for her feeble strength could offer him no effective opposition, and he thrust her easily on to the slope. She felt instinctively that at that angle the merest push would make her lose her balance, and sank quickly to her knees, catching him round the ankle with one hand, and clinging desperately.
He swore furiously, and bent down to unclasp her fingers from his leg. Then he flung her hand away from him; and cut off from all a.s.sistance she began instantly to slide backwards, slowly but irresistibly.
CHAPTER XXI
Juliet dug her nails into the cracks of the stone floor with all the energy of despair, but in a moment her feet were over the edge of the pit and she was falling. Her fingers gripped the edge with a fierce tenacity, and for some minutes she hung there, minutes that seemed longer than all the rest of her life put together.
And so she hung, her knees drawn up in a frantic effort to pull herself out of the depths, till her muscles refused any longer to contract, and she felt herself gradually straightening out and growing, it seemed, heavier and heavier, till she knew that in one more second her fingers would slip from their hold, and all would be over.
But as she dropped into a straight position, and wearily abandoned her efforts to raise herself, one of her feet suddenly touched some firm substance beneath it. Something narrow it was, for the other foot as yet still hung in s.p.a.ce, but some blessed solid thing on which it was possible to stand. As, with a feeling of thankfulness and relief such as she had never before experienced, she allowed her weight to rest on it and found that it did not give, she felt a sharp blow on the knuckles of her left hand, which made her withdraw it quickly and lean against the wall to steady herself. Mark was throwing stones at her fingers to make her leave go sooner. Another missed her narrowly, and shot over her head.
She drew down her right hand, and still leaning against the wall felt about with her other foot for a support.
She soon found it, a little farther back it seemed than the first foothold; but more experimental investigation showed that it was really part of the same object. There appeared, indeed, to be several of them about, all near to the wall, so that it was plain that poor Julia, as she shot over the brink, had fallen outside, and beyond them. What the bars were that she seemed to be standing on, Juliet could not at first imagine, and it was not till Mark, growing tired of waiting for a splash that never came, reached the conclusion that his ears had deceived him, and took himself and Julia's lantern off to other spheres of usefulness, that she perceived that a faint light penetrated into the upper part of the pit. When her eyes had become accustomed to it, she was able to make out that she was perched upon a portion of the roots of a tree, which had grown in through holes in the wall.
Three great roots there were, curling into and across the shaft of the pit and disappearing down into the darkness below, where Juliet did not dare to look.
She managed, with great caution, to stoop down and catch hold of the highest of the roots, and so to settle herself in a fairly comfortable position, sitting on the middle root of the three, with her feet on the lowest, and her back against the top one.
”They might have been made on purpose,” she told herself, her naturally high spirits and brave young optimism coming n.o.bly to her rescue again.
And she set herself to try and enlarge one of the holes in the wall; but she could not make much perceptible difference there. What it had taken centuries, and the growth of a great tree to effect, could not be much improved on in an hour by one young girl, however strong the necessity that urged her.
By the time she had exhausted her efforts and must needs lean back and rest awhile, the biggest hole was just wide enough to put her hand through, and she saw no prospect of enlarging it further.