She's All the World to Me

by Sir Hall Caine

Still he toiled on. His strength was far spent. The moon died off, and the stars went out one after one. Then a deep, impenetrable cloud of darkness overspread the little sky above. Christian knew it must be the darkness that precedes the dawn. He had reached a ledge of rock wider than any that were beneath it. Clearly enough a wooden rafter had lain along it.

Christian rested and looked up. At that moment he heard the light patter of four little feet overhead, and a poor stray sheep, a lamb of last spring's flock, bleated down the shaft. The melancholy call of the lost creature in that dismal place touched Christian deeply. What was it that made the tears start to his eyes and his whole soul shake with a new agony? The outcast lamb wandering over this trackless waste in the night had touched an old scar in Christian's heart, and made the wound bleed afresh. Was it strange that in that hour his thoughts turned involuntarily to little Ruby Cregeen? The darling child, caressed by the salt breath of the sea, and with the sunlight dancing in her eyes and glistening on her ruby lips, had she then anything in common with the little wanderer that sent up her pitiful cry into the night? Too much, too much, for the man who heard it, and he was buried in a living grave, with the tombstones of dead joys rising everywhere around, with the fire that had for years been kept close burning now most of all. Oh, these dead joys, they want the deepest grave.

Christian turned again to his weary task. To live was a duty, and live he must. His fingers were chilled to the bone. His clothes still clung like damp cerements to his body. The meagre blades of the scissors were worn short. They could not last long. Christian rose to his feet on the ledge of rock and plunged the scissors into the blank wall above him. Ah! what fresh disaster was this? His hand went deep into soft earth; the vein of rock had finished, and all that was above it must be loose, uncertain mold!

He gasped at the discovery. A minute since life had looked very dear. Must he abandon his hope of it after all? He paused and reflected. As nearly as he could remember, he had made twenty niches in the rock. Hence he must be fully thirty-five feet from the water, and ten from the surface. Only ten feet, and then—freedom! Yet these ten seemed to represent an impossibility. To ascend by holes dug deep in the soft earth was a perilous enterprise. A great clod of soil might at any moment give way above or beneath him, and then he would be plunged once more into the pit. If he fell from the side of the shaft, he would be more likely than at first to strike one of the projecting ledges, and be killed before he reached the water. There was nothing left but to wait for the dawn. Perhaps the daylight would reveal some less hazardous method of escape.

Slowly the dull, dead, impenetrable blackness above him was lifted off. It was as though a spirit breathed on the night and it fled away. When the woolly hue of morning dappled his larger sky, Christian could hear the slow beat of the waves on the shore. The coast rose up before his vision then, silent, solemn, alone with the dawn. The light crept into his prison-house. He looked down at the deep black tarn.

And now hope rose in his heart again. Overhead he saw timbers running around and across the shaft. These had been used to bank up the earth and to make two grooves in which the ascending and descending cages had once worked. Christian lifted up his soul in thankfulness. The world was once more full of grace, even for him. He could climb from stay to stay, and so reach the surface.

Catching one of the stays in his uplifted hands, he swung his knees on to another. One stage was accomplished, but how stiff were his joints and how sinewless his fingers! Another and another stage was reached, and then four feet and no more were between him and the gorse that waved in the light of the risen sun across the mouth of his night-long tomb.

But the rain of years had eaten into these timbers. In some places they crumbled and were rotten. God! how the one on which he rested creaked under him at that instant. Another minute, and then the toilsome journey would be over. Another minute, and his dead self would be left behind him, buried forever in this grave! Then there would be a resurrection in very truth! Yes, truly, God helping him.

Christian had swimming eyes and a big heart as he raised himself on to the topmost stay that crossed the shaft, and clutched the long tussacs of the clinging gorse. Then, at the last spring, he heard a creak—another—louder—the timbers were breaking beneath his feet. At the same moment he heard a half-stifled cry—saw a face—it was Mona's face—there was a breathless instant of bewildered consciousness.