Still I clung to the rope and crawled upward. Then suddenly I saw why night had fallen upon me in one palpable curtain when the lantern was extinguished; for the door of the cupboard was closed.
Had it only swung to? But what air was there in the close room beyond to move it?
Hanging there, like a lost and fated fiend, a bubble of wild, ugly merriment rose in me and burst in a clap of laughter. I writhed and shrieked in the convulsion of it; the dead vault rung with my hysterical cries.
It ceased suddenly, as it had begun, and, grinding my teeth in a frenzy of rage over the thought of how I had been trapped and snared, I swung myself violently against the door, and, letting go my hold at the same instant, burst it open with the force of my onset and rolled bleeding and struggling on the floor of the room beyond.
After a minute or two I rose into a sitting posture, leaning on one hand, half-stunned and half-blinded. A dense and deadly silence about me; but this was penetrated presently by a fantastic low whispering sound at my back, as if there were those there that discussed my fate. I turned myself sharply about. Dull emptiness only of rotting floor and striding rafter, and the gathered darkness of wall corners.
The sense of fanciful murmuring left me, and in its place was born a sound as of something stealthily crossing the floor away from me. At the same instant the door of the room, which I had left open, swung softly to on its hinges, and I was shut in.
Then, with a fear that I cannot describe, I knew that the question was to be put to me once more, and that I was destined to die under the torture of it.
I had no hope of escape—no thought that the passion that prompted me to self-effacement might, diverted, carry me to the door in one hard dash for light and liberty. The single direction in which my mind moved unfettered was that bearing upon the readiest means to my purpose—to die, and thereto what offered itself more insistently than the black pit I had but now risen from? A run—a leap—a shattering dive—and the murmuring water and oblivion would have me forevermore.
I turned and faced the dark gulf. I pressed my hands to my bursting temples to still the throb of the arteries that was blinding me. Then, spasmodically, my feet moved forward a pace or two; I gave a long, quivering sigh; my arms dropped inert, and a blessed warmth of security gushed over all my being.
Pale; luminous; most dear and pitiful, an angel stood before the opening and barred my way. A shadow only—but an angel; a spirit come from the sorrowful past to save me, as I, alas! had never saved her.