She succeeded—for the moment. But as she sat, dozing a little at intervals, with the child pressed closely to her, she fell from time to time into fits of trembling. And she prayed for light—only for light! And then again for some sound, some change in the cold, dead stillness that made her seem like a thing apart, aloof, removed from other things. And she was very thirsty. She knew that presently the child would grow thirsty again. And she would have nothing to give him.
The thought was torture, and she seemed to have borne it an age already; supported by the fear of rousing the boy and hastening the moment she dreaded. She would have broken down, she must have broken down, but for one thought; that, long as the hours seemed to her, and far distant as the moment of her entrance appeared, she might be a great way out in her reckoning of time. She might not have been shut up there so very long. The wretches who had put her there might not have fled. They might not have abandoned her. If she knew all she might be rid in an instant of her fears. All the time she might be torturing herself for nothing.
She clung passionately to that thought and to the child. But the prolonged uncertainty, the suspense, the waiting, tried her to the utmost of her endurance. Her ears ached with the pain of listening; her senses hungered for the sound of the footstep on which all depended. Would that sound never come? Once or twice she fancied that she heard it; and mocked by hope she stilled the very beating of her heart, that she might hear more keenly. But nothing followed, nothing. Nothing happened, and her heart sickened.
“Presently,” she thought, “I shall begin to see things. I shall grow weak and fancy things. The horror of being buried alive will master me, and I shall shriek and shout and go mad. But that shall not be until the child’s trouble is over—God helping me!”
And then, dazzling her with its brightness, a sudden thought flashed through her brain. Fool! Fool! She had succumbed in despair when a cry might release her! She had laid herself down to die, when she had but to lift up her voice, and the odds were that she would be heard. Ay, and be freed! For had not the girl threatened her with the man’s coarse gallantries if she screamed? And to what purpose, if she were buried so deep that her complaints could not be heard?
The thought lifted a weight from her. It revived her hopes, almost her confidence. Immediately a current of vigour and courage coursed through her veins. But she did not shout at once. The child was asleep; she would await his awakening, and in the meantime she would listen diligently. For if she could be heard by those who approached the place, it was possible that she could hear them.
She had barely conceived the thought, when the thing for which she had waited so long happened. The silence was broken. A sound struck her ear. A grating noise followed. Then a shaft of light, so faint that only eyes long used to utter darkness could detect it, darted in and lay across the brickwork of the vault. In a twinkling she was on her knees and scrambling with the child in her arms towards the hatch. She had reached it and was touching it, when the bolts that held up the door slid clear, and with a sharp report the hatch fell. A burst of light poured in and blinded her. But what was sight to her? She, who had borne up against fear so bravely had now only one thought, only one idea in her mind—to escape from the vault. She tumbled out recklessly, fell against something, and only through the support of an unseen hand kept on her feet as she alighted in the well-head.
A man whom her haste had pushed aside, slapped her on the shoulder.
“Lord, you’re in a hurry!” he said. “You’ve had enough of bed for once!”
“So would you,” came the answer—in Bess’s voice—“if you’d had twenty-four hours of it, my lad. All the same, she’ll have to go back.”