"Perhaps, I cannot tell you. What is the good of ideals in this twentieth century? We have learned to scoff at simple things, faith, honesty, even courage. Rich men try to believe that they were never poor and the poor believe that they are rich—and go through the Bankruptcy Court accordingly. I could do great work in the world, but my enemy is an estimate. A man no longer builds a temple to the glory of God; he builds it to the memory of John Snooks, hog-merchant. Most of our ailments are the penalty of soullessness. If we lived and strived toward an end, the mind would not smart so often as the body. That saps our courage as well. I can work upon a scaffold like this because I have the past all round about me. But directly I cease to work I become a coward. Time is dangerous because Time is truth; one of the few truths our modern life permits us to recognize."
"Then you do really believe that the old glory of achievement lingers somewhere?"
"In the imagination of men who would be artists but remain the servants of Mammon. Let me interrupt you to beg a favor. Your arm is shifting the rope and if it gave way——"
"The rope—the one I am leaning against? Does that go down to your scaffolding? I never noticed it."
"There is no damage done," he said quietly; "please pull it down over the stone-work. No, hardly that way. Let me come up and show you."
A short ladder led up from the scaffold to the roof of the clock tower. The foothold of planks was held up by stout ropes wound about the embrasures of the parapets. Unconsciously as she talked to him, Evelyn had shifted the right-hand rope from its place and Gavin's heart leaped when he perceived that in another instant boards and man and ladder must go headlong to the stone terrace below. In truth, the climax came while the light words were still upon his lips, and the rope, slipping away from the girl's weak hand, the scaffold swung out in an instant and Gavin was left above the abyss, his fingers twined about the second rope and his feet vainly seeking a hold against the time-worn stone.
Men fight for their lives in many ways—the cowards desperately and without reason, brave men with a quick apprehension of the circumstances and a bold course from which fear does not divert them. Desperate as Gavin's situation had become, he realized the whole truth of it in an instant. Forty feet below him was the square flagged pavement built about the belfry door. Above him a single rope swayed and strained against the stone of the parapet, here bulging outward and difficult to climb. If the rope held, Gavin believed that he might touch the parapet, but to mount it would be an acrobat's task. Other help seemed impossible to bring. His assistants had gone down to the outer stables to load up the permanent scaffold. His quick eye could not detect the presence of a single human being in the vicinity of the gardens. Evelyn herself stood as one petrified by the battlements, afraid for the instant to lift a hand or utter a word lest the spell of his momentary safety would be broken. She had never possessed that particular courage which stands upon a height unflinchingly, and this dreadful accident found all her nervous impulse paralyzed and shattered. She listened, as in a trance of terror beyond all words to describe, for the broken cry which would speak of death; for the sound of a body falling upon the flags below. Infinitely beyond Gavin Ord's, her imagination added its darkest picture to her handiwork. She clinched her hands, fearing their clumsiness, and with eyes half-closed drew back from the battlements. Never until this day had she seen a man die; never had she been asked to take an instantaneous resolution wherein the measure of her own peril might be the measure of another man's safety. If for the briefest instant she failed to answer the call, cowardice had no part in her irresolution. Few would have acted otherwise.
Gavin climbed the rope almost inch by inch, seeking as he did so a foothold upon the rotting stone and careful always to bring no sudden jerk upon the trembling cord. It seemed an eternity before he reached the forbidding parapet where the graver danger must be faced; but when he did so and tried to put an arm over the bulging stone, then he understood that if none came to his assistance, he was most certainly doomed. Beneath him, the crumbling cornice became so much powdered dust whenever his feet touched it—he could find no foothold there, nor so much as feel a single projection upon the buttress by which he might pull himself up to safety. And his wrists now ached with a pain which threatened to become intolerable, the rope cut his hands until drops of blood trickled from them to his face. Salvation depended upon that which he could do while a man might count twenty, and with death looking up at him exultingly, he made a last effort to surmount the bulging parapet and in the same instant told himself that it was impossible.
"My God," he cried aloud; "I cannot do it—I cannot do it!"
Perhaps he no longer feared death. There is this merit of exhaustion in danger that it blinds the imagination and leaves indifference to the ultimate issue. Gavin was just at that point when a man is incapable of further effort, even in the cause of his own safety, when, looking up, he perceived Evelyn at the balustrade, her face deathly white, her eyes shining terror; but her acts were as cool and collected as they had been when first he met her in the long gallery of Melbourne Hall. Waked from the trance of fear by the words he had spoken, she cast one quick glance at the figure swaying upon the rope; then turned about her and, stooping, she picked up the long rope which her own maladroitness had displaced from the battlements. Methodically and without a blunder, she made a noose in this and passed it over the parapet.