CHAPTER IX.
The rain continued to fall in torrents all day long after Rees Pennant’s discovery of the mysterious drain. He took Sep Jocelyn home with him, and they waited in fiery impatience for the evening, unable to settle to any occupation or amusement but that of speculating on the marvels they might find. Godwin was away; Hervey was reading in his own room; Deborah was, if the truth must be known, cooking in the kitchen before dinner, brushing Rees’s macintosh afterwards. The only person, therefore, who interfered with their excited tête à tête was Mrs. Pennant, who noticed her darling son’s restlessness, and was curious as to the cause.
“Well, my little mother,” said Rees, throwing his arms around her and giving her a more affectionate hug than he had bestowed upon her of late, “and supposing I tell you that I see a prospect of helping you, of doing more for you than either Godwin the grumpy or Hervey the heroic! What would you say then, mother?”
“My dear boy, I should only say that you were doing what I always expected of you,” said she, too much delighted by this welcome change in his manner towards her to be very curious as to the precise meaning of these large promises.
“And without becoming any man’s servant, either,” continued Rees, whose strong point was not prudence.
Sep twitched his friend’s sleeve warningly unseen by Mrs. Pennant.
“Rees only means,” he put in with his quiet little mincing voice, “that he thinks he has a chance of a berth in London at a good salary.”
“Yes, yes; in London, that’s it,” assented Rees quickly.
“In London,” cried Mrs. Pennant. “Oh, I should like to live in London again; nothing would please me better.”
Rees and Sep both grew suddenly subdued and reticent.
“I—I don’t know whether that could be managed, mother dear, until my position was more secure. You see I—I—in fact, I’m not sure at all about it yet, you know.”
“I don’t want to force your confidence, my son, since I see there is some little surprise intended for me. But if it is any situation which depends on talent and a good appearance,” she went on proudly, “I have no fear for you.”
Rees turned the subject in a tremulous voice. He loved his mother, and thought of her continually throughout this enterprise, now congratulating himself that he might be able to support her in the comfort and luxury which he considered to be the only suitable surrounding for her, now trying to stifle the knowledge that she would look upon this secret search with the most violent disapproval.
So he took Sep off to the stable-yard to hunt for a second spade, a piece of rope, and for an old lantern which Rees knew to be lying about there. They found it, rubbed it up, and put a piece of candle in it. Unfortunately, one of the glass sides was broken, but they thought that this would not matter.
At tea, Rees was preternaturally gay, Sep unusually silent. Soon afterwards, on pretence of going to Mrs. Kemp’s, they left the drawing-room; and taking with them the spade, the rope, and the lantern, slipped through a little door in the wall at the bottom of the garden, and made for the ruins.
It was unusually dark, for the grey clouds were thick in the sky and the rain was still falling. Outside the castle walls, under the trees on the west side, Amos Goodhare, a gaunt figure shivering in the damp, was waiting. Very few words were exchanged between them, for their plan of action was already settled. Then Rees left the other two, and going round to the castle gates, pulled the bell which summoned the custodian.
Mrs. Crow was rather cross, not having expected to be disturbed so late.
“Really, Master Rees,” she said, using, as most people did, his boyish name, “I can’t think what you’re up to, a-wandering about them ruins at all hours of the day and night. And if it’s to meet Lady Marion, who came in here after you last night, I can tell you I’ll not be a party to it, that I won’t.”
“My dear old soul,” said Rees, throwing his arm round her in his fascinatingly affectionate way, “there’s nothing I want less than to have Lady Marion always at my heels. So, if she turns up while I’m inside, you just tell her I’m not there. Why, I come here so that I may study in peace away from the girls, they pester one so.”
And, with a light air of all-conqueror, he tossed up into the air a book which he had taken care to bring as evidence of his veracity.
Mrs. Crow shook her head and began to chuckle indulgently.
“Oh, what a lad you are, with your carneying ways. I suppose it’s poor Miss Deborah you mean, since everybody knows she’s dying for ye. Well, well, some hearts are made to be broken, and others made to break them, I suppose. But it’s a pity, for sure, that you don’t make it up together, for you’d make a handsome couple!”
Rees laughed, and passed in not ill-pleased. His was not a nature with any great depth of passion to bestow on any woman. But he knew that Deborah was the handsomest and altogether the nicest girl in the neighborhood. So it pleased him to hear that she was in love with him. In his way, too, he loved her, and would most probably have proposed to her on his father’s death but for the influences which had lately been brought to bear upon him. At present, however, no woman held any but the most insignificant place in his heart or mind, and as he hurried to the vaulted chamber all thought of Deborah went out of his head.
Everything was secure. After one glance in the dusk, he returned to the inner court, and climbing to the outer western wall of the castle by the help of a broken turret staircase and the branches of one of the trees which had sprung up in what once were rooms, he leaned over the broken battlements and whistled softly. The trees grew tall and thick outside the walls on this side, and the ivy clung to the ruins with the strong clasp of a couple of centuries. Amid the mass of foliage Rees could not for several minutes distinguish the two men’s figures in the obscurity far below him, though he could hear their voices softly answering him.
Assured that all was safe, and that they were ready, he made one end of the rope he carried fast to one of the iron bars used in the building of the castle, which time and weather had laid bare, and threw the other end over the wall.
“All right!” said Sep’s voice in a husky whisper.
The strong, gnarled branches of the ivy afforded such a firm support to the feet that Sep, who, like most ne’er-do-weels, had had a short spell of the sea, found no difficulty in climbing up, by the aid of the rope, very quickly.
Then they hissed out “All right!” to Amos, watching below, and taking the rope with them descended to the scene of their search.
“Why doesn’t Goodhare come too?” asked Rees, in a low voice. “He could get up quite as well as you, and we shall want all the help we can.”
Sep uttered his mincing little laugh.
“Because our friend prefers leaving the risk to us, and doesn’t consider that sharing terms need begin until the profits roll in,” said he.
Sep had the blessing of shrewdness and the curse of never being able to profit by it.
“What risk?”
“The risk of being found out, and the risk of losing our limbs or our lives. If Lord Hugh really did lose his life down there, you know, why shouldn’t we?”
“And supposing you and I choose to say—‘No risk, no profit’?”
“Then he would choose to tell the earl all about it, and you and I would look very small.”
Rees walked on in silence. He was beginning to see some of the disadvantages of having a rogue for a partner. At sight of the grating, however, when they had removed the covering, everything but the excitement of the search went out of his head. Not heeding Sep’s admonitions to be careful, he lighted the lantern, and went down the steps with so much haste that at the bottom he slipped, and found himself sitting in the mud on the floor of the little chamber, close to the mouth of the drain-pipe.
Luckily, all the water had by this time drained off down the pipe, and he was able to make a thorough examination of the walls and floor. The little chamber was about six feet square, rough-hewn in the rock. The walls were wet and slimy, and the floor was deep in malodorous mud. As he slipped into the slush, his heels fell with a dull thud on something which was not rock. Not heeding the mud, nor the whispered cries of his friend above, who was afraid he had hurt himself, Rees groped about with his hands in the slime which covered the floor.
Suddenly Sep was startled by a wild cry. Half beside himself with fear for his companion, he began to descend the steps himself. He saw the light of the lantern moving about below him; the worst had not happened therefore: Rees was alive. As he put his foot on the bottom step, Sep found himself suddenly seized by a strange figure with wild eyes and face bespattered with mud, coated from head to foot with slime. Being a particularly neat and dapper little man in his appearance, Sep rather resented this embrace.
“I’ve found something!” stammered Rees hoarsely.
“Yes, I see you have; and you may keep it, and welcome,” answered Sep, trying ruefully to brush the mud off his own coat-sleeves.
“But listen, Sep, listen, you don’t understand,” went on Rees, at a white heat of excitement. “I’ve found a trap-door in the floor. What do you think of that?”
“Perhaps it’s another drain,” suggested Sep, who was inclined to be sceptical about the whole business, knowing by experience that fortunes are more easily lost than found.
“Nonsense! We’ve got to open it. Hold the lantern and give me the spade.”
Sep obeyed, and stood on the bottom step, a pitiful figure, holding the lantern aloft while he shivered with the damp, grew sick with the smells, and gazed at his coat-sleeves with ever-increasing annoyance to think that he had let himself be drawn into such a crack-brained enterprise.
Meanwhile, Rees, with feverish energy, was cleaning the mud in spadefuls from a space on the floor about two feet square. When this was done, down he went on his knees again, and after several futile efforts, lifted, not a trap-door, but a heavy square piece of wood, like a box lid, which had evidently been sawn out of the trunk of a tree in the roughest manner, and chopped into an uneven square. This was about five inches thick. When it was dragged away, the light of the lantern showed an abyss of blackness underneath, at which both men instinctively drew back a little. After a few seconds, Rees knelt down again beside the hole and peered into it with keen eyes.
“There are steps down cut into the rock, Sep,” he whispered at last hoarsely. “Quite straight down they are, only just notches for the feet,” he went on. “And there’s an iron rail fixed close to the wall at the side of them, like those in locks on a river.”
Sep stooped gingerly, and looked down too.
“Stand back,” said Rees impatiently, “I’m going down.”
But Sep, one of whose qualities was an absolutely unselfish power of self-sacrifice, prevented him.
“Don’t be absurd, Rees,” he said quietly. “I can climb better than you, and it may come to be a climbing matter. Give me the lantern.”
He took it from his companion’s unwilling hand, and began the descent. But when he had gone ten or twelve steps it seemed to Rees that the lantern swung from side to side, and that Sep was going down very slowly.
“Are you all right, old man?” he asked anxiously.
No answer. At that moment the light in the lantern went suddenly out, and there came up to his ears a dull sound like the fall of some heavy body.
“Sep, Sep, are you all right?” again he shouted, in a voice that rang in the hollow space.
Again no answer. The truth flashed upon him. The cavernous abyss below him was full of foul poisonous gases, such as he had often heard of at the bottom of old wells. There was not a moment to lose. Already poor Sep, stupefied by the noxious vapors, might be beyond the reach of help. Fastening the rope they had brought with them to the top of the perpendicular iron railing in such a manner that the knots, wedged in on the top step, kept it firm, he fastened the other end round his waist, and half-climbed, half-slid down into the blackness below.
He had not gone down far, however, before he began to feel the influence of the vapors which had overcome his friend. He found himself growing giddy, and then for a moment, which seemed to him an hour, he partly lost consciousness of what he was doing. But he struggled with this creeping paralysis, and by a strong effort of will recovered command of himself and remembered his errand. The length of the rope just enabled him to get to the bottom of the steps. The darkness was absolute. He held his breath to avoid inhaling any more of the foul, heavy air than he could help, and, stooping down with outstretched hands, touched the insensible body of his friend. He gathered him up with the support of the rope, and being lucky enough to find the iron handrail at once, he dragged himself and Sep up the rugged steps as quickly as the heavy burden would permit.
Rees’s movements had been so rapid that the whole proceeding of descent and ascent had not occupied more than a minute. Short as the time was, however, it had been long enough for the poisonous gas to take effect. By the time they got to the little chamber which contained the opening of the drain, Rees felt that he was succumbing to its influence, and that the only chance, not only for Sep, but for himself, lay in reaching the purer air above. He staggered across the muddy floor, and with efforts which grew every moment more frantic as again he felt a dizziness like approaching death come over him, he dragged his companion, whether dead or alive he did not know, up—up to the floor of the vaulted room.
“Thank God! thank God!” he cried deliriously; and then he turned, thinking the voice was that of some one else.
Then again for an instant he remembered where he was, and staggering about on the rocky floor, called, “Where are you, Sep?” in a husky, weak whisper. He felt his limbs give way under him, and, sinking on the floor, he had just strength left to reach his friend’s motionless body, when his senses left him.