Nevertheless he made wild and desperate efforts to escape the dreadful peril, by writhing his body upward, as his head was only some four feet below the edge of the upper rim or course of crumbling brickwork, which lined the circular shaft, and often he felt his toes scratch the wall, and heard the fragments detached thereby pass whizzing downwards; but he never heard the ascending sound of the fall below—because below was far, far down indeed!
The silence was dreary—awful: he dared not look beneath, for nothing was to be seen there but the blackness of utter profundity; he could only gaze upward to where the placid stars that sparkled in the blue dome of heaven, seemed to be winking at him. He dared not cry, lest he should waste his breath and failing strength; and had he attempted to do so the sound would have died on his parched and quivering lips.
In every pulsation he lived his lifetime over again, and all the secret crimes of that lifetime were, perhaps, being atoned for now.
The widows who, without avail or winning pity, had wept, (in that inquisitorial camera de los tormentos, his "office,"), for the loss of the hard-won savings of dead husbands, their children's bread; wretches from under whose emaciated forms he had dragged the bare pallet, leaving them to die on a bed of cinders, and all in form and process of law; the strong and brave spirited men, who had lifted up their hard hands and hoarsely cursed him, ere they betook them to the parish union or worse; the starvelings who had perhaps gained their suits, but only in their last coats; the crimes that some had committed through the poverty and despair he had brought upon them; the unsuspecting, into whose private and monetary matters he had wormed himself by specious offers of gratuitous assistance and advice—a special legal snare—by the open and too often secret appropriation of valuable papers; and by the thousand wiles and crooks of policy known only to that curse of society, the low legal practitioner, seemed all to rise before him like a black cloud now; and out of that cloud, the faces of his pale victims seemed to mock, jibe, and jabber at him.
And there, too, were the handwritings he had imitated, the signatures he had forged, the sham accounts he had fabricated against the wealthy or the needy, the ignorant and the wary alike; but Sharkley felt no real penitence, for he knew not that he had committed any sin. Had he not always kept the shady side of the law? and, if rescued, would he not return to his sharp practice thereof as usual? Yet he felt, as the moments sped on, a strange agony creeping into his soul:
"So writhes the mind Remorse hath riven,
Unfit for earth, undoomed for heaven,
Darkness above, despair beneath,
Around it flame, within it death!"
The bush bending under his weight, hung more perpendicularly now, and thus Sharkley's knees, for the first time, grazed till they were skinned and bloody against the rough brickwork. Was the root yielding? Oh no, no; forbid it fate! He must live—live—live; he was not fit to die—and thus, too! The cold, salt perspiration, wrung by agony, flowed from the roots of his hair, till it well nigh blinded him, and tears, for even a creature such as he can weep, began to mingle with them. They were perfectly genuine, however, as Master William S. Sharkley wept the probabilities of his own untimely demise.
He had once been on a coroner's inquest. It sat in the principal room of a village inn, upon some human bones—nearly an entire skeleton—found in an old, disused, and partially filled-up pit. He remembered their aspect, so like a few white, bleached winter branches, as they lay on a sheet on the dining-table. He could recall the surmises of the jurors. Did the person fall? Had he, or she—for even sex was doubtful then—been murdered? or had it been a case of suicide? None might say.
The poor bones of the dead alone could have told, and they were voiceless. All was mystery, and yet the story of some forgotten life, of some unknown crime, or hidden sorrow, lay there; the story that man could never, never know.
This episode had long since been forgotten by Sharkley; and now, in an instant, it flashed vividly before him, adding poignancy to the keen horrors of his situation. Was such a fate to be his?