"If Youth but Knew!"

by Agnes Castle; Egerton Castle

The night progressed with lengthening hours. He had begun to make out some kind of bearings for himself in the dark; to find, by the cold airs that occasionally blew in upon him from one direction, by the guidance of the sounds that grew in the night's stillness—the gusty increases, the placid subsidence of the rain, the rustle of leaves and twigs—in which quarter of their prison lay that opening to the outer world by which they should escape.

Sometimes his mind wandered far away. Now and again he almost lost himself in a vague dream; but ever he came back with a shock to the present peril and his responsibility.

And the child still slept!

He began to grow weary and cold. His arm became stiff, then numb. The burden that had seemed so light upon it grew almost intolerable. Sometimes drowsiness pressed upon him, he thought himself in a nightmare, from which he must wake to find himself huddled in a corner of his travelling chaise. But he would have died sooner than disturb the sleeper.

Then, at the moment when the tension of enforced immobility brought such a feeling of exasperation and oppression that he almost felt as if his wits were leaving him, he turned his head instinctively in the direction of the air current, and relief came. The rain was over. The clouds had cleared away and a patch of sapphire sky looked in upon him, framed by jagged rocks: it held two or three faint stars. He could see a branch outlined dimly against the translucence, and leaves trembling in outer freedom.

Nothing more than this, and yet it was balm. The torture that gripped him subsided. He gazed and forgot the cramping of his limbs. The first stars passed slowly and vanished; others swam into his vision and formed new shapes in the peep of sky. Some were brighter, some more dim; some twinkled, one burned with a steady glow. They varied in colour, too. He had had no idea that, even through such a miserable hole, the heavens had a pageant to offer of such absorbing interest. And the passing of this pageant gave him a comforting sense of the flow of night towards morn.

Once Sidonia woke with a start and a cry.

"I am here," he quickly said.

She reared herself from his arm. It was numbed to uselessness; he caught her with the other fiercely. That pit, gaping so close by in the night, had come, during the long hours, to be to him as an unknown monster, watching, waiting for its prey. She, but half awake, gropingly passed her soft hands over his face and breast. "I dreamed you had fallen," she murmured. And then, so secure in his hold, stretched herself like a weary child, and slid a little further from him so that her head rested on his knee.

His eyes had grown more accustomed to the darkness; or, perhaps, there was already a raising of the deepest veils of night, for he could almost distinguish her form as she lay. He bent over her. She was speaking dreamily: "When you were hurt in the forest, this was how your head rested on my lap." In another moment she was asleep again. His arms were free—the sense of constraint was gone. And now the time went by almost as quickly as before it had lagged. He saw with surprise that the stars were extinguished, that his patch of sky had grown pearl-grey. Rapid stirrings in the leafage without spoke of an awakening world. A bird piped. The walls of their prison began to take shape.... He saw the white glimmer of her hand in the folds of the cloak.... And then he must, after all, have slept at his post; for the next thing he knew was coming to himself, with a great spasm and seeing, in a shaft of yellow sunlight, grey rock, brown earth, and Sidonia's golden head upon his knee. And, but a yard from her little sandalled foot, the horrible black chasm. Oh, shame! he had slept, and death lurking for her! The sweat started on his forehead.