Dan's spirit sank in his cheerless solitude, but he toiled on. His strength was far spent. The moon died off, and the stars went out one after one. Then a deep cloud of darkness overspread the little sky above. Dan knew it must be the darkness that precedes the dawn. He had reached a ledge of rock that was wider than any of the ledges that were beneath it. Clearly enough a wooden rafter had lain along it. Dan rested and looked up. At that moment he heard the light patter of little feet overhead. It was a stray sheep, a lamb of last year's flock, wandering and lost. Though he could not see it, he knew it was there, and it bleated down the shaft. The melancholy cry of the lost creature in that dismal place touched a seared place on Dan's heart, and made the tears which he had not shed until now to start from his eyes. What old memory did it awaken? He could not recall it at first, but then he remembered the beautiful story which he had heard many times of the lost lamb that came to the church porch at the christening of Ewan. Was it strange that there and then his thoughts turned to Ewan's child, the babe that was innocent of its great sorrows to come? He began to wish himself a little child again, walking by his father's hand, with all the years rolled back, and all the transgressions of the years blotted out as a cloud, and with a new spirit sweet and fresh, where now was a spirit seared and old, and one great aching wound. In a moment the outcast lamb went off, sending up, as it went, its pitiful cry into the night. Dan was alone once more, but that visitation had sweetly refreshed his spirit.
Then it came back to him to think that of a surety it was not all one whether he died where he was, never coming alive from his open tomb, or died for his crime before the faces of all men. He must live, he must live, though not for life's sake, but to rob death of its worst terrors. And as for the impediments that had arisen to prevent the atonement on which his mind was set, they were not from God to lay his soul outside the reach of mercy, but from the devil to beset him and keep him back from the washing away of his sin. This thought revived him, and he turned to his task with a new resolve.
His fingers were chilled to the bone, and his clothes clung like damp cerements to his body. The meagre blades of the scissors were worn short; they could not last long. He rose to his feet on the ledge of rock, and plunged the scissors into the blank wall above him, and at that a fresh disaster seemed to overwhelm him. His hand went into soft earth; the vein of rock had finished, and above it must be loose, uncertain mold!
He gasped at the discovery. A minute since life had looked very dear. Must he abandon his hopes after all? He might have been longer vexed with this new fear, but that he recalled at that moment the words spoken by Jarvis Kerruish as he went by on the road that ran near the mouth of the shaft. Was it not clear that Quilleash and the fisher-fellows were being pursued as his associates? Without his evidence to clear them, would they not surely suffer, innocent though they might be, and even though he himself lay dead in this place? Now, indeed, he saw that he must of a certainty escape from this death in life, no difficulties conquering him.
Dan 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 away 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, when he fell from the top, to strike on one of the projecting ledges and be killed before reaching 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 was lifted off. It was as though a spirit had breathed on the night, and it fled away. When the woolly hue of morning dappled his larger sky, Dan 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, and he looked down at the deep black tarn beneath him.
And now hope rose in his hearth 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. Dan 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 knee on to another. One stage he accomplished, and then how stiff were his joints, and how sinewless his fingers! Another and another stage he 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 his 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.
Half an hour later Dan Mylrea, with swimming eyes and a big heart, was walking toward the Deemster at Ballamona. The flush of the sun newly risen, and the brighter glory of a great hope newly born, was on his worn and pallid cheek. What terrors had life for him now? It had none. And very soon death also would lose its sting. Atonement! atonement! It was even as he had thought: a wasted life for a life well spent, the life of a bad man for the life of a good one, but all he had to give—all, all!
And when he came to lay his offering at the merciful Father's feet it would not be spurned.