LX
She woke and it was so dark she could not believe her eyes were open until she felt the lids. There was no sound. She was lying on the hard, uneven floor where she had fallen, she thought, but when she put out her hand to feel for the air hole, her fingers touched rough rock. Groping round for the flash lamp, she found nothing. Presently, however, she touched a smooth, cold surface. It was Harry’s knife, a long-bladed clasp knife.
And then she remembered clearly. Dick was in the water, drowning. She struggled to her feet, trembling in every limb.
Dead perhaps.… She staggered blindly forward and came in contact with the wall. Gripping her hands till the nails cut the palm, she strove to regain her self-control. He would be rescued; there were men with him, she told herself, and became calmer and again sat down, so her back was to the wall, and waited, the open knife on her lap. Feeling in her pocket for a handkerchief, her hand touched the matchbox, and she took it out with a sense of gratitude.
She was weary to the point of exhaustion. The rough flooring had slashed the soles of her silk stockings to ribbons and her feet were terribly sore. She waited for some time before she struck her first match, for the box was already half empty. She saw that she was in a part of this underground system which was unfamiliar to her. The roof was higher; the walls bulged in like the sides of an hourglass, and the floor had been roughly paved. At intervals there seemed to be niches, alcoves in the wall, and again she thought of the Swiss tunnels with their safety niches. There was no sign of the lamp; evidently Harry had carried that with him when he had gone off. It was not like him to leave her; even in his delirium he would not have done that, she thought.
As the match burnt out she heard halting footsteps re-echoing down the passage, and, closing the knife, she slipped it into her jacket pocket and waited. He must have been a long way from her when she first heard him; the passage acting as a huge speaking-tube.
“Are you all right, Leslie?” He was normal again. “I’m sorry I had to leave you, but this place rather rattles me, and I had to go along and see if I could find an exit.”
“Where are we?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I carried you down that wretched circular arrangement and you were fearfully heavy,” he added, so naïvely that the girl laughed for the first time in that period of horror. “Do you know, Leslie,” he squatted down on the floor by her side—“I have an idea. Do you remember those holes we looked through?”
“Yes, I remember them,” she said, wondering what was coming next.
“Do you know that they are placed in the side of a well of some kind?”
Not a word about Dick. He had forgotten the rope cutting and the horror that followed.
“Has it occurred to you,” he went on, “that the treasure may be at the bottom of that well? It only struck me a few minutes ago. If we could get out and have a talk with Dick, he’s such an ingenious devil that I’m sure he would find the opening of the well, which may be inside the old Abbey itself. Most of these mediæval buildings have a well in the centre and kept their water supply enclosed.”
“You didn’t find an exit?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I got into a sort of labyrinth and I thought I should never get out again. Good heavens! Look at your feet!”
They were indeed in a sorry plight, swollen and bleeding. In an instant he had pulled off his own shoes.
“Put them on,” he said authoritatively, and when she demurred, he seized her foot and slipped her toes into the shoe. “I was a great runner in my day,” he said, with a hint of pride, “and barefooted running was my specialty—to use a horrible theatrical word.”
The shoes were much too big for her, but the comfort of them after walking barefooted on that rough floor!
“There’s one place I haven’t explored, and that is the little side passage to the left. There has been some sort of a fall there and the rock looks rotten. I don’t like to attempt an exploration. By the way, what made you faint?” he asked suddenly.
“I don’t know—nerves, I suppose,” she said.
It was useless and even dangerous to tell him of what had happened by the wall of the well.
“I thought it might be that,” he said. “If you feel fitter now we’ll go along.”
He walked ahead, switching his lamp on and off at intervals. He wanted to save his batteries, he told her, which had shown signs of running down. All the time he kept up an incessant chatter. He had plans about the future of the Abbey and grew enthusiastic when he expounded his scheme.
“This is not even a Saxon-English burrow, but probably goes back to the days of the original inhabitants of Britain,” he said. “We are walking in paths that were originally cut by cavemen. Doesn’t that thrill you, Leslie?”
“Terribly,” she said, with unconscious irony.
“I’ll have the place wired and lit; it will be necessary to increase the electric supply, but Dick will see to that. I may present it to the nation or to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners—I’m not certain which. There is no doubt from an archæological point of view.…”
So he talked on and she followed him, sometimes listening, sometimes her mind occupied with the agony of thought. Was Dick safe? She was sure that he was not alone; there were men at the top of the well and they would save him. It was not possible that Dick Alford should die in that dark place, that his splendid life should be ended so tragically. The walking was tiring, for they were climbing all the time.
They must have covered about a quarter of a mile when he stopped.
“Here is the side passage,” he said, and warned her: “Don’t go into it; the stones are still falling.”
He put his light into the hole—it was no more—and she saw a great heap of fallen rock in the middle of the path. There was just room between the top of the heap and the roof to crawl through. But what she noticed instantly was the strong current of air that fanned her cheeks when she stopped to look through the aperture.
“This must be the way, Harry,” she said instantly. “Can’t you feel the air?”
“I noticed that,” he agreed, but was reluctant to enter this unpromising byway.
“We must go, Harry. There’s no other way out,” she said. “We are getting farther and farther down, away from the Abbey, and, as you say, beyond here is only a labyrinth that brings you back to the place from where you started.”
“All right,” he agreed, with evident distaste. “I had better go first.”
He crawled gingerly over the pile of stones and slid down on the other side.
She heard his voice.
“It is all right here,” he said, and then the light of his lamp showed and she followed him.
The passage was very high; it was a natural fissure in the rock. Yet the hand of man must have been here, for the floor had been levelled, and there was evidence of animal life. A long black shape scudded across the path and disappeared through a hole. The girl gave a little scream and shrank back.
“It is only a weasel,” said Harry calmly. “Where a weasel can get, we can get.”
The passage had widened and now the work of man became evident. They were in a square chamber with two entrances on either side. The roof was of vaulted stone that seemed to bulge downward as if it supported a weight beyond its capacity, but this was hidden by the long stalactites that flashed in the light of the lantern. And she shivered. It was extraordinarily cold, almost as if they had come into an ice house.
“No door. I wonder what the idea of this place was.”
It was the first man-made chamber they had seen. The walls were running with water; wet and shining; the roof dripped incessantly, but only one small pool of water gathered on the floor; the rest ran off in a central chamber and apparently into the solid rock.
“The dripping of water wears away stone,” quoted Harry, and pointed to the floor with its tiny saucer-shaped depression.
There was no sign of door at either entrance and he went ahead of her through the farther entrance, covered a few yards, and stopped, looking upward.
“Daylight!” he said.
The first thing of which she was conscious was that, away from the little room, she was warm again.
The shaft that worked upward was a natural fissure. They could see the rough edges of rock jutting out at intervals. In some places it was wide enough to hold a full-sized man; in other places it was so narrow that only an arm could have reached through. But there it was, the clear, uninterrupted view of the sky, and the girl beheld a phenomenon with which miners are familiar, the view of a white, winking star in broad daylight.
“That is where the air comes from,” said Harry. “Now we’ll try where this passage leads.”
It led to a blank wall of solid rock, he found. They stared at each other in the darkness.
“We must try back,” said Harry.
Hardly were the words out of his mouth than there was a distant rumble and roar, the ground beneath their feet shook, and down the passageway through which they had reached the Cold Room swept a cloud of flying dust.
“Wait,” he said, and flew along the passage.
He was gone a few minutes before he returned. She could not see his face except from the reflected light he threw upon the floor to guide him on his way.
“The roof has fallen in,” he said, and there was a tremor in his voice. “I am afraid, Leslie, we are finished!”