CHAPTER XV.
THE SEARCH.
"He's a braave booy, sartainly!" said old Michael Treherne, admiringly, in his queer Cornish accent, "it is like him and like his family—the Trevelyans of Rhoscadzhel.
By Tre, Pol and Pen,
We know the Cornish men.
He'd face Tregeagle himself—lower away gently, lads. His ancestors existed hundreds of years ago; and for the matter o' that, I spose so did mine; we be all old Cornish keth."*
* People.
Audley Trevelyan would freely have risked his life to save anyone—of course a woman more than all; but how glorious was this! The peril he risked—for no ordinary amount of nerve was requisite for him who swung thus over the profundity of the ancient mine—was for his lovely little friend of the sketch-book; the Naiad of the moorland tarn—she who seemed not indisposed to love him, and whose heart he might yet make his own.
"But Heaven!" thought he; "that impulsive little heart may be—alas—still enough by this time!"
And even as this disastrous fear occurred to him, the roar of the falling water was heard on the lower level of the empty mine, more than a thousand feet below him, while the lantern he carried cast strange gleams on the damp, slimy, and discoloured masonry of the shaft, after he left behind, or rather above him, the fringe of weeds and gorse, that grew about the mouth; yet in less than a minute he was assured that the water he heard falling, proceeded, not from the flow of the tide, as he and his companions foreboded, but from some subterranean spring falling into the shaft, far below the upper entrance of the Pixies' Hole; and anything more weird, dreary, and ghastly than that cavernous fissure which now opened off it on one side, and which he was preparing cautiously to explore, it would be difficult to conceive.
From its rocky and ragged mouth, which was covered with white and pendant stalactites and hideous fungi, on which the light of his lantern fell with fitful rays, its interior receded away into dark and gloomy blackness and uncertainty.