“I daren't mam,” said Troke.
“Loose him, I say! Hailey!—you, sir, there!” The noise had brought several warders to the spot. “Do you hear me? Do you know who I am? Loose him, I say!” In her eagerness and compassion she was on her knees by the side of the infernal machine, plucking at the ropes with her delicate fingers. “Wretches, you have cut his flesh! He is dying! Help! You have killed him!” The prisoner, in fact, seeing this angel of mercy stooping over him, and hearing close to him the tones of a voice that for seven years he had heard but in his dreams, had fainted. Troke and Hailey, alarmed by her vehemence, dragged the stretcher out into the light, and hastily cut the lashings. Dawes rolled off like a log, and his head fell against Mrs. Frere. Troke roughly pulled him aside, and called for water. Sylvia, trembling with sympathy and pale with passion, turned upon the crew. “How long has he been like this?”
“An hour,” said Troke.
“A lie!” said a stern voice at the door. “He has been there nine hours!”
“Wretches!” cried Sylvia, “you shall hear more of this. Oh, oh! I am sick!”—she felt for the wall—“I—I—” North watched her with agony on his face, but did not move. “I faint. I—“—she uttered a despairing cry that was not without a touch of anger. “Mr. North! do you not see? Oh! Take me home—take me home!” and she would have fallen across the body of the tortured prisoner had not North caught her in his arms.
Rufus Dawes, awaking from his stupor, saw, in the midst of a sunbeam which penetrated a window in the corridor, the woman who came to save his body supported by the priest who came to save his soul; and staggering to his knees, he stretched out his hands with a hoarse cry. Perhaps something in the action brought back to the dimmed remembrance of the Commandant's wife the image of a similar figure stretching forth its hands to a frightened child in the mysterious far-off time. She started, and pushing back her hair, bent a wistful, terrified gaze upon the face of the kneeling man, as though she would fain read there an explanation of the shadowy memory which haunted her. It is possible that she would have spoken, but North—thinking the excitement had produced one of those hysterical crises which were common to her—gently drew her, still gazing, back towards the gate. The convict's arms fell, and an undefinable presentiment of evil chilled him as he beheld the priest—emotion pallid in his cheeks—slowly draw the fair young creature from out the sunlight into the grim shadow of the heavy archway. For an instant the gloom swallowed them, and it seemed to Dawes that the strange wild man of God had in that instant become a man of Evil—blighting the brightness and the beauty of the innocence that clung to him. For an instant—and then they passed out of the prison archway into the free air of heaven—and the sunlight glowed golden on their faces.
“You are ill,” said North. “You will faint. Why do you look so wildly?”
“What is it?” she whispered, more in answer to her own thoughts than to his question—“what is it that links me to that man? What deed—what terror—what memory? I tremble with crowding thoughts, that die ere they can whisper to me. Oh, that prison!”
“Look up; we are in the sunshine.”
She passed her hand across her brow, sighing heavily, as one awaking from a disturbed slumber—shuddered, and withdrew her arm from his. North interpreted the action correctly, and the blood rushed to his face. “Pardon me, you cannot walk alone; you will fall. I will leave you at the gate.”