Lucia, hurrying along beside Frank as he sturdily strode through the gloom, swinging the lantern to and fro to apprise the explorers, waiting in the darkness, of his approach, felt that wings could hardly be swift enough to convey to Lloyd the warning of his peculiar and imminent danger. And, yet, it might be even now too late! She was appalled at the thought of his risks alone in the depths of an unexplored cavern, without a light, without a landmark, without a clue to his station in the subterranean labyrinth, his only companion a strange, half-civilised man, who had once already, at great jeopardy to himself, slyly and treacherously attempted his life. She marvelled at Lloyd's foolhardy temerity, and then—and the thought redoubled her speed—she realised that he had no vague intuition of the secret of his peril, she was sure that he had not for a moment recognised or distrusted his guide.
She hardly felt the chill of the rare air; she cared naught for the rough footing; now and again she stumbled and clutched at Frank for support, but instantly pressed on, unwearied, fevered, alert.
Naught so sinister as the unutterable blackness was ever presented to her imagination. She stared wide-eyed at the palpable-seeming glooms of the vast halls, made visible by the dim glister of the little lantern. Things of evil omen, winged, unseen, whisked by her head; once a bat struck her full in the face. The place seemed alive with these creatures, and, now and again, as she heard their strange, uncanny squeak, she started violently, all her nerves jarring.
"We shall soon be beyond the bat zone, Lucia," said Frank kindly, remembering the universal feminine horror of the genus.
His voice, so hearty and cheery in the outdoor world, seemed strangely hollow, unnatural in this environment, echoing far away, and coming anew in a different key, and startling her with the conviction of terrible, unseen beings, conferring apart in the unimagined distance, speaking her name.
"Oh, not a word—" she whispered, "on your life, not another word," and she clung to him terrified.
He burst out with his boyish, rollicking laughter, and all the cavern was filled with mocking merriment, raucous, horrible, as if the cachinnation of invisible fiends repeated his tones, resounding anew, now here, now there, now far in advance, now close behind them, and, even at last, when all seemed still, again an elfin mimicry.
Frank checked himself; he saw that her terrors were genuine. The feminine ideal had always figured in his unsentimental appraisement as a marplot; he was beginning to be afraid, from Lucia's heavier drag on his arm, the dilation of her eyes, the tremor in her voice, that such courage as she had summoned for the enterprise was already failing her, and that he would shortly be adjured to turn about and retrace their way, and restore her to the glad outer air and the pleasant surface of the earth. He said naught further, and when she had begun to fear that they had missed the trace, although he had told her that for a certain distance there was no break in the right-hand wall, and they could not go amiss as long as they kept in touch with it, she heard a faint halloo in the night, as one might hear in a dream. When Frank responded vociferously, it came anew, and stronger still.
Suddenly she saw, across a vast expanse of utter darkness, like the face of the deep when the earth was without form and void, the outline, as it were, of a promontory growing slowly into being; a faint flicker of light—it seemed star-like in contrast with the deep gloom—revealed two moving creatures poised there, which she presently recognised as human beings. One, she was sure that it was Lloyd, had struck a match, and from it had kindled a bit of wood—it was his forlorn little cigar-case of imitation lacquer, which he extravagantly sacrificed; he expected to have better things after this! While the stolid mountaineer looked on, Lloyd once more called out blithely to his approaching acquaintances, and distinguishing the voice which she had feared would never sound again, she burst into tears.
Frank, all tingling with the ardour of adventure, with the excitements of extreme jeopardy, with the interest of novelty, felt a surge of resentment toward her as an inopportune spoil-sport. The spirit of discipline was strong within him.