The dog wagged his tail, capered about in front of Annie, and then with a wonderful shrewdness ran before her to the broken wall, where he stood with his head bent downwards and his eyes fixed on the ground.
Annie pulled and tugged at the loose stones; they were so heavy and so cunningly arranged that she wondered how the little maid, who was smaller than herself, had managed to remove them. She saw quickly, however, that they were arranged with a certain leverage, and that the largest stone that which formed the real entrance to the underground passage, was balanced in its place in such a fashion that when she leant on a certain portion of it, it moved aside, and allowed plenty of room for her to go down into the earth.
Very dark and dismal and uninviting did the rude steps, which led nobody knew where, appear. For one moment Annie hesitated; but the thought of Nan hidden somewhere in this awful wretchedness nerved her courage.
“Go first, Tiger, please,” she said, and the dog scampered down, sniffing the earth as he went. Annie followed him, but she had scarcely got her head below the level of the ground before she found herself in total and absolute darkness; she had unwittingly touched the heavy stone, which had swung back into its place. She heard Tiger sniffing below, and, calling to him to keep by her side, she went very carefully down and down and down, until at last she knew by the increase of air that she must have come to the end of the narrow entrance passage.
She was now able to stand upright, and raising her hand, she tried in vain to find a roof. The room where she stood, then, must be lofty. She went forward in the utter darkness very, very slowly; suddenly her head again came in contact with the roof; she made a few steps farther on, and then found that to proceed at all she must go on her hands and knees. She bent down and peered through the darkness.
“We’ll go on, Tiger,” she said, and, holding the dog’s collar and clinging to him for protection, she crept along the narrow passage.
Suddenly she gave an exclamation of joy—at the other end of this gloomy passage was light—faint twilight surely, but still undoubted light, which came down from some chink in the outer world. Annie came to the end of the passage, and, standing upright, found herself suddenly in a room; a very small and miserable room, certainly, but with the twilight shining through it, which revealed not only that it was a room, but a room which contained a heap of straw, a three-legged stool, and two or three cracked cups and saucers. Here, then, was Mother Rachel’s lair, and here she must look for Nan.
The darkness had been so intense that even the faint twilight of this little chamber had dazzled Annie’s eyes for a moment; the next, however, her vision became clear. She saw that the straw bed contained a bundle; she went near—out of the wrapped-up bundle of shawls appeared the head of a child. The child slept, and moaned in its slumbers.
Annie bent over it and said, “Thank God!” in a tone of rapture, and then, stooping down, she passionately kissed the lips of little Nan.
Nan’s skin had been dyed with the walnut-juice, her pretty soft hair had been cut short, her dainty clothes had been changed for the most ragged gipsy garments, but still she was undoubtedly Nan, the child whom Annie had come to save.