Much money, chiefly that of others, had passed through Sharkley's hands in his time, and much of it, as a matter of course, was never accounted for by him; but he had never before possessed so large a sum at once, and certainly seldom one so easily won, as that presented to him by the titular Lord Lamorna. All the exultation that avarice, covetousness, and successful roguery can inspire glowed in his arid heart, and he walked slowly onward, immersed in thoughts peculiarly his own, as to the mode in which he would invest it, and foresaw how it must and should double, treble, and quadruple itself ere long; how lands, and houses, messuages and tenements, mills and meadows, should all become his; and so he wove his golden visions, even as Alnaschar in the Arabian fable wove his over the basket of frail and brittle glass; and as he proceeded, ever and anon he felt, with a grimace of satisfaction, for the pocket-book containing his beloved cheques.
Some miles of country lay between Rhoscadzhel and Penzance, where he meant to take the railway for his own place. As his penurious spirit had prevented him from hiring a vehicle, he pursued the way on foot; but he sometimes lost it, darkness having set in, and yet he saw nothing of the lights of the town. He had, in his mental abstraction, walked, or wandered on, he scarcely knew whither, and he only paused from time to time to uplift his clenched hands, to mutter and sigh in angry bitterness of spirit that he had not extracted more from Downie Trevelyan, when he had it in his power to put on the screw with vigour, and anon he would ponder as to whether he had not been too precipitate, and whether he had done a wise thing in selling to him the interests of young Denzil, as these might have proved pecuniarily more valuable; but then poor Denzil was so far away, and from all Sharkley could hear and read in the newspapers, he might never see England more. For the first time in his life, Mr. Sharkley found himself taking an interest in our Indian military affairs.
Some of the deep lanes bordered by those high stone walls peculiar to Cornwall, were left behind, and also many a pretty cottage, in the gardens of which, the fragrant myrtle, the gay fuchsia with its drooping petals, and the hydrangea, flourish all the year round; and now he was roused by the sound of the sea breaking at a distance round the promontory from which Penzance takes its name—the holy headland of the ancient Cornish men. From a slight eminence which he was traversing, he could see, but at a distance also, the lights of the town twinkling amid the moorland haze, and that at the harbour head, sending long rays of tremulous radiance far across Mount's Bay; then as the pathway dipped down into a furzy hollow, he lost sight of them. He was still within half a mile of the shore, but was traversing a bleak and uneven moorland, and on his right lay a scene of peculiar desolation, encumbered by masses of vast granite rock, here and there tipped by the cold green light of a pale crescent moon, that rose from the wild waste of the vast Atlantic.
Suddenly something like a black hole yawned before him; a gasping, half-stifled cry escaped him; he stumbled and fell—where?
Mechanically and involuntarily, acting more like a machine than a human being, he had in falling grasped something, he knew not what, and clutching at it madly, tenaciously, yea desperately, he clung thereto, swinging he knew not where or how, over space; but soon the conviction that forced itself upon him, was sufficient to make the hairs of his scalp bristle up, and a perspiration, cold as snow, to start from the pores of his skin.
Old mines may seem somehow to have a certain connection with the story or destiny of Sybil Devereaux, if not of her brother Denzil, and the betrayer of both their interests, who now found himself swinging by the branch of a frail gorsebush, over the mouth of the ancient shaft of an abandoned one—a shaft, the depth of which he knew not, and dared not to contemplate! He only knew that in Cornwall they were usually the deepest in the known world.
If few persons who are uninitiated, descend the shaft of an ordinary coal-pit, amid all the careful appliances of engineering, without a keen sense of vague danger, what must have been the emotions of the wretch who, with arms perpendicularly above his head, and legs outspread, wildly and vainly seeking to catch some footing, swung pendent over the black profundity that vanished away into the bowels of the earth below, perhaps, for all he knew, nearly a mile in depth!
It was beneath him he knew; the quiet stars were above; no aid was near; there was no sound in the air, and none near him, save the dreadful beating of his heart, and a roaring, hissing sound in his ears.
In this awful situation, after his first exclamation of deadly and palsied fear, not a word, not a whisper—only sighs—escaped him. He had never prayed in his life, and knew not how to do so now. The blessed name of God had been often on his cruel lips, in many a matter-of-fact affidavit, and in many an affirmation, made falsely, but never in his heart; so now, he never thought of God or devil, of heaven nor hell, his only fear was death—extinction!
And there he swung, every respiration a gasping, sobbing sigh, every pulsation a sharp pang; he had not the power to groan; as yet his long, lean, bony hands were not weary; but the branch might rend, the gorse bush uproot, and then——