“Oh, dearest madam, do I behold you at last?” he said.
“Dear, dear sir,” I murmured, shaking from head to foot, for his warmth deprived me of all my self-command, “pray—oh, pray—this kind, this obliging behaviour—indeed I can’t support it—I had given up all hope—I fear I shall swoon.”
“No, that you must not do,” said Mr Fraser, rising and supporting me in his arms. “Forgive me, dear madam, for agitating you to such a degree with my transports of joy. But I know my dear Miss Freyne won’t endanger the lives of those that are come to save her by yielding to a feminine weakness at this moment. Compose yourself, madam, and let me bring you across the gulf.”
Drawing me to the parapet as he spoke, he clambered up it with an extraordinary agility, and having seated himself at the top, turned and held out his hands to me. I don’t know whether I climbed or whether the gentleman pulled me up, but I reached the ledge of the parapet in some way, only to shrink aghast from the next stage of the journey. The means of accomplishing this was nothing more nor less than a basket, Amelia—a shallow sort of car made of wickerwork, hung on the rope by its handles, and swinging at the side of the house over the black chasm of the street. Do you wonder that I shuddered?
“Oh, dear sir, I can’t,” I cried; if it be possible to cry out in a whisper.
“Oh, pardon me, madam, you must,” says Mr Fraser. “Only permit me to lower you into the basket, and if you remain perfectly still you’ll be drawn across in absolute safety. I worked myself across with my hands on the rope.”
Was this said to remind me what danger he was braving for my sake? I don’t know, but if it was so I had deserved the rebuke. I thought of Sinzaun and of my desperate resolves of the night before, and took shame to myself for my cowardice. Mr Fraser was holding the basket steady with his left hand, and, extending the right to me, I found myself somehow or other in the machine, but how I don’t know, for I was not sensible of having moved—indeed I felt powerless to do so.
“Keep quite still,” says Mr Fraser with a cheerful air, perceiving, perhaps, that my trembling imparted a rocking motion to the basket; and making a low hissing sound, I found myself drawn along the rope by a cord attached to one of the sides, while Mr Fraser moderated the speed by means of one that he held. I suppose I was not left swinging in this way between heaven and earth for more than a minute, but it might have been a life-time, and when I reached the parapet of the house opposite, the Tartar who stood there was forced to lift me out of the basket as though I had been an infant, before he sent it spinning along the rope back to Mr Fraser.
“Why don’t the young Saeb come?” I heard him murmur to himself in Moors, when he had placed me safely on the roof itself, and stood waiting, as I guessed, for the signal to pull the basket across again. Still he waited, and still no signal came, and in a prodigious agitation I clutched at the man’s foot.
“Why does he delay? Have they killed him?” I gasped out.