Crying, frenzied words came back to him—a woman’s voice, but inarticulate. Guided by it, however, he ran round by way of a little tangled garden that brought him to the rear of the low building.
Nothing was to be seen; but here the voice appealed to him in agony from out the very ground. He fell upon his knees by a sunk heap of rubbish—saw in a moment, and snapped vigorously at two gloved hands, that wavered up at him from a ruin of weeds and broken earth.
As he held on, frantically hauling, with his jaw set square, the matted ground shook and crumbled under his feet. He saw what was happening, and, throwing himself back with a mighty effort of resolution, drew slowly from the bowels of the earth, as it were, the collapsed and almost senseless form of a young woman. Then, scarcely might he stagger with her to a place of security, when a rent opened in the spot whence he had struggled, and a great pad of undergrowth went down with a roar and hollow splash of water to ugly depths.
Mr. Tuke laid his dainty salvage on the débris of a bench, and looked down upon it all amazed. It presented the form of a girl, of nineteen or twenty perhaps, with a quantity of pale golden hair dragged and tumbled over her very white face, and her dress and velvet spencer—both rich and fashionable—torn and stained in twenty places. Her eyes were closed, and her gloved hands daubed with mud and roots of grass.
He was quite at a loss as to what to do; and could only stand helplessly above her, wondering who she could be, and what the chance that had brought her into so perilous a position. Vaguely he recalled certain specifics for faintness, that seemed scrawled illegibly in the commonplace-book of his mind. Wringing her ears, or her nose—he could not remember which—suggested itself as a remedy dimly familiar. Burnt feathers, also—but whether for in- or external application, he had no recollection—fluttered faintly in the background of his fancy. Now he thought he would lay her flat, and now seat her upright like a limp Eastern idol, in the hope that the position most favourable to Nature’s purpose would induce recovery.
While he was speculating in great embarrassment, the young lady solved the problem for herself by opening her eyes, and giving out a little tremulous sigh, like the flutter of a scorched moth.
“Oh!” she whimpered—a line of pain coming across her brow—“where is my saltier?”
It was her chain, ending in a little medallion called a bréviaire—at that time fashionable—that she missed. Life devoid of this trinket was a petty possession.
“It must have gone whither you nearly followed, into a disused well,” said Mr. Tuke, becomingly grave.
He added with some humour of impertinence: