He knew that she was thinking of the pool’s occupant, was dreading its return. One hand still held his fowling-piece above the wet. The other closed on hers with a grip quiet and resolute.
“A few yards would bring us to the end.”
He humoured her, and they crept forward slowly round the bend that Hardcastle remembered from the far-off day when he had travelled the cave’s length. Then he had had candlelight to help. Now he had none; and from the very lack, hope came to him.
As he turned the bend, the darkness seemed to grow less heavy. He crept on, feeling the way with his one free hand, till a gentle glow began to steal between the rocks that hemmed them in; and with a bound his mind returned, as Storm’s had done, to the free moor’s overhead. So it had been when he set out on stark, mid-winter nights to cross the heath on foot—nothing at all to see in front at the start, but presently a gleam of grey that showed a filmy track ahead.
His grip on Causleen’s hand tightened till she winced.
“What is it, Dick?”
“I do not know,” he said, harsh in this moment of swift, unlooked for hope. He had had many such, and feared to lose it.
The track brought them soon to the rock-wall that had seemed impenetrable when Hardcastle, as a lad, had held his candle-flare to its wet face. The candle’s flame had been stronger than the grey-blue gleams that broke now into the blank and utter darkness.
Down the wall’s face they ran, these gleams, in soft, ever-moving rivulets that were narrow and broad by turns, criss-crossing like the hurry of a water-slide.
Fearing almost to put hope to the test, Hardcastle stretched out his hand into the grey-blue gleam where it ran widest. His hand passed through it. His eager fingers reached beyond the wall’s fancied thickness and closed on it. He dragged an inch or two of rotted stone away, and turned with guarded triumph.