The Ashiel mystery Part 30

"Yes," said Julia, "I am sure it did. Do come away. I hate being here."

And indeed she was shivering from head to foot, and not Juliet herself seemed more anxious to leave the place.

"Just one more shot," said Mark. "Here, Julia, stoop down, and roll that bit of stone slowly down the slope, while I hold on to our prisoner. We shall hear better that way. Give me your lamp."

Anxious to satisfy him, Julia picked up the fragment he had knocked from the rough wall, and stooping down stretched out her hand to set the stone in motion. But, as she did so, Mark loosened his grip on Juliet, and bending quickly behind this poor girl who loved him seized her by the shoulders and threw her forward on to her face. The steep pitch of the floor finished what the impetus given by his onslaught had begun. Julia shot head first down the slope, and disappeared into the black chasm of the well.

One long agonized scream came up to them out of the darkness, and rolled its echoes through the lonely pa.s.sages.

Then the distant sound of a splash; and silence.

Back against the wall, Juliet cowered, her whole body shaken by great sobs. She was petrified with terror of this fiendish man, but her fears for herself gave way before the horror of what she had seen.

"Oh, what have you done, what have you done?" she wept.

Mark tried to summon up a jeering smile. The lantern threw no light upon his white and twitching face.

"You don't suppose I meant to let her go free, after the taste she gave me of her temper?" he asked, in a voice he could not keep from shaking a little. "Do you suppose I like having to do these things? You women have never the slightest sense of common justice. The whole thing is perfectly beastly to me. But how could I live with a girl who would be ready to threaten me with the gallows every time she got out of bed wrong foot first? It's not fair to blame me for other people's faults."

He spoke querulously, with the air of a much-injured man. Though Juliet was beyond any coherent reply, he seemed afraid of meeting her eyes, and looked resolutely away from her, his glance shifting and wavering from the walls to the floor, from the floor to the stones of the low roof; up, down, and sideways, but never resting on her. At last, as if drawn there irresistibly and against his will, they fell once more on the dark circle of the mouth of the pit, and he started back, shuddering violently.

"As if I hadn't enough to bear without being saddled with hideous memories for the rest of my life!" he cried with bitter irritability. "If you had an ounce of common fairness in your composition you would admit I could do no less. Why, any day she might have got jealous, or something, and flown into a pa.s.sion again, and denounced me to the police. Besides, I have no wish to be obliged to fly the country. Why should I? She was the only person who knew the truth; except you. That is why you must follow her."

"No, no!" cried Juliet despairingly, but without avail, for her feeble strength could offer him no effective opposition, and he thrust her easily on to the slope. She felt instinctively that at that angle the merest push would make her lose her balance, and sank quickly to her knees, catching him round the ankle with one hand, and clinging desperately.

He swore furiously, and bent down to unclasp her fingers from his leg. Then he flung her hand away from him; and cut off from all a.s.sistance she began instantly to slide backwards, slowly but irresistibly.

CHAPTER XXI

Juliet dug her nails into the cracks of the stone floor with all the energy of despair, but in a moment her feet were over the edge of the pit and she was falling. Her fingers gripped the edge with a fierce tenacity, and for some minutes she hung there, minutes that seemed longer than all the rest of her life put together.

And so she hung, her knees drawn up in a frantic effort to pull herself out of the depths, till her muscles refused any longer to contract, and she felt herself gradually straightening out and growing, it seemed, heavier and heavier, till she knew that in one more second her fingers would slip from their hold, and all would be over.

But as she dropped into a straight position, and wearily abandoned her efforts to raise herself, one of her feet suddenly touched some firm substance beneath it. Something narrow it was, for the other foot as yet still hung in s.p.a.ce, but some blessed solid thing on which it was possible to stand. As, with a feeling of thankfulness and relief such as she had never before experienced, she allowed her weight to rest on it and found that it did not give, she felt a sharp blow on the knuckles of her left hand, which made her withdraw it quickly and lean against the wall to steady herself. Mark was throwing stones at her fingers to make her leave go sooner. Another missed her narrowly, and shot over her head.

She drew down her right hand, and still leaning against the wall felt about with her other foot for a support.

She soon found it, a little farther back it seemed than the first foothold; but more experimental investigation showed that it was really part of the same object. There appeared, indeed, to be several of them about, all near to the wall, so that it was plain that poor Julia, as she shot over the brink, had fallen outside, and beyond them. What the bars were that she seemed to be standing on, Juliet could not at first imagine, and it was not till Mark, growing tired of waiting for a splash that never came, reached the conclusion that his ears had deceived him, and took himself and Julia's lantern off to other spheres of usefulness, that she perceived that a faint light penetrated into the upper part of the pit. When her eyes had become accustomed to it, she was able to make out that she was perched upon a portion of the roots of a tree, which had grown in through holes in the wall.

Three great roots there were, curling into and across the shaft of the pit and disappearing down into the darkness below, where Juliet did not dare to look.

She managed, with great caution, to stoop down and catch hold of the highest of the roots, and so to settle herself in a fairly comfortable position, sitting on the middle root of the three, with her feet on the lowest, and her back against the top one.

"They might have been made on purpose," she told herself, her naturally high spirits and brave young optimism coming n.o.bly to her rescue again.

And she set herself to try and enlarge one of the holes in the wall; but she could not make much perceptible difference there. What it had taken centuries, and the growth of a great tree to effect, could not be much improved on in an hour by one young girl, however strong the necessity that urged her.

By the time she had exhausted her efforts and must needs lean back and rest awhile, the biggest hole was just wide enough to put her hand through, and she saw no prospect of enlarging it further.

Through it she could see a corner of the loch and the grey foot of Ben Ghusy, but that was all. It showed, however, on which side of the tower she was, and she remembered the great beech that clung to the precipice below the place where the foundations of the castle sprang from the rock. At least she had always imagined it was below the foundations, but now she knew better.

She thrust her hand out and waved it, but did not dare leave it there. The terror Mark had instilled in her was too recent and too real If she put out her hand, he would see it, and perhaps shoot it off; or at least know that he had failed to kill her as yet. Better he should think her dead, like poor Julia. But was Julia really dead?

She leant over and called down into the darkness:

"Julia! Julia!"

But no answer came, although she waited, holding her breath, and called again and again.

Then she had fallen into the water? She must be drowned even if the fall did not kill her. Poor, misguided Julia. Better dead, after all, thought Juliet, with eyes full of tears, than alive, and at the mercy of that terrible man. What disillusionments must have come to her sooner or later; final disillusionings that could not be explained away. How horrible to find that the man you loved was like that. Nothing else in the world could be so appalling. Yes, Julia was better dead. As Juliet thought of the dreadful manner in which death had come to the unfortunate girl, she forgot her faults, forgot her strange views upon the justifiability of taking human life, forgot even that she had approved of Lord Ashiel's a.s.sa.s.sination and contemplated bringing about his death herself, and remembered only the frightful nature of her punishment.

And while she sat there, clinging precariously to the twisted roots of the beech tree, Juliet's tears streamed down into the watery grave.

Hours pa.s.sed, and darkness fell upon the world without. In the patch of loch that was visible to her, she could see a star mirrored; it cheered her somehow. What there was comforting about it she could not have said, but in some way it seemed to be an emblem of her hopes. She wedged herself tightly between the roots, laid her head down upon the uppermost of them, and, such is the adaptability of youth and health, slept on her dangerous perch like a bird upon a bough.

With the day she awoke, stiff and hungry. How long would it be before she was found? She felt braver under this new stimulus of hunger and more ready to risk detection by Mark. After all, he could hardly get at her here, and someone else might see her if she signalled. She took off her shoes and stockings and pushed them through the hole in the wall, then her handkerchief, and finally the white blouse she wore was taken off and thrust out between the stones. She kept her hold upon one of the sleeves, and wedged it down between the wall and the beech root, so that the blouse might hang out on the face of the rock like a flag and catch the attention of some pa.s.ser-by. From time to time, too, she squeezed her hand through the gap and fluttered her fingers backward and forward. She knew that the path by the burn ran below, and it was used constantly by the ghillies and by the household. Only of course so early in the morning there was not likely to be anyone about. And she remembered with a sinking heart that people seldom look up as they walk.

Yet in the course of the day some one would surely see it. She sternly refused to allow herself to expect an immediate rescue. She would not, she told herself, begin to get really anxious about it till evening. It would be long to wait, of course. She looked at the little watch which Sir Arthur had given her on her last birthday. It was six o'clock. She must be patient.

But in spite of all her forced cheerfulness the time pa.s.sed terribly slowly. She found an old letter in her pocket, and a pencil, with which she scrawled painstaking directions for her rescue. She would push it through the hole, she thought, if she heard any sound of voices above the clamour of the burn. After that there remained nothing more to do, and the hours seemed to creep along more and more slowly, till each second seemed like a minute and each minute an hour. She tried to divert herself by repeating poetry, and doing imaginary sums; and it was about eleven o'clock, when she was in the middle of the dates of the Kings of England, that she heard Gimblet's voice hailing her in a shout from below.

It was not till after her rescue, not till after she was given safely over to the affectionate ministrations of Lady Ruth, that Juliet gave way under the strain to which she had been subjected, and broke down altogether.

Up till that moment, the urgency of her own danger had prevented her from feeling as acutely as she would have in other circ.u.mstances the terrible fate of the Russian girl; but, as soon as she herself was safe, the full horror of it settled upon her mind till thought became an agony. She was shaken by alternate fits of shuddering and weeping, until Lady Ruth, who had a scathing contempt for doctors, was on the point of sending for one.

The arrival of Sir Arthur, an hour or so after her release, did much to calm her. He had started post haste from Belgium as soon as he heard of the tragedy, which was not till three days after it had occurred, and had spent the long journey in incessant self-reproach that he had ever allowed Juliet to go alone among these murderous strangers. The sight of his familiar face was full of comfort to the distracted girl; and the knowledge that Mark was arrested and powerless to harm her, with the gladsome news that David was free again, combined to soothe her nerves and restore her self-control.

The fear of one cousin began to give place insensibly to the dread lest the other should find her red-eyed and woe-begone; and soon the importance of looking her best when David should return occupied her mind almost to the exclusion of the terrors she had experienced. Thus does the emotion of love monopolize the attention of those it possesses, so that individuals may fall thick around him and the surface of the earth be convulsed with the strife of nations, and still your lover will walk almost unconscious among such catastrophes, except in so much as they affect himself or the object of his affections.

But not yet was Juliet to see David. His mother's health had broken down under the distress and worry of the accusation brought against him, and it was to her side that he hurried as soon as he was released from prison.

While Lady Ruth carried Juliet off at once to the cottage, there to be comforted, fed, made much of and put to bed, Gimblet and the men who had a.s.sisted him in the work of rescue stayed behind in the walls of the tower, to rig up, with ropes and buckets, an apparatus by which to descend to that lowest depth of the oubliette where poor Julia's body must be lying.

They had little hope of finding her alive; nor did they do so. She was floating, face downwards, in the water at the bottom of the pit.

In a grim, wrathful silence the men raised the poor lifeless body, and with some difficulty brought it back to the light of day. When the gruesome business was done, Gimblet returned to the cottage, tired out with his night's work; for, like all the men on the place, he had been scouring the moors since the previous evening, when Mark's derisive words had first sent them, hot foot, to a.s.sure themselves of Juliet's whereabouts. As he reached the cottage, the daily post bag was being handed in, and among his letters was one from the colonel of Mark's regiment:

"MY DEAR SIR," it ran, "I have sent you a wire in answer to your letter received to-day, since in view of what you say I see that it is necessary to disclose what I hoped, for the sake of the regiment, to continue to keep secret. But if, as you tell me, the innocence and even the life of Sir David Southern is involved, and you have such good reason to consider McConachan the man guilty of his uncle's death, it becomes my duty to put aside my private feelings and to confess to you that I am unable to look upon Mark McConachan as entirely above suspicion. When he was a subaltern in the regiment I have the honour to command, he was a source of grave worry and trouble to me.

"From the day he joined I had misgivings, and, though his good looks, lively spirits, and recklessness with money made him popular with others of his age, I soon discovered that his moral sense was practically nonexistent, and considered him a very undesirable addition to our ranks. Still, I hoped he might improve, and for a year or two nothing occurred to force me to take serious notice of his behaviour. Unknown to me, however, he took to gambling very heavily, and must have lost a great deal more than he could afford, for he appears to have got deep in the clutches of moneylenders long before I heard anything about it. So desperate did his financial affairs become, that shortly before he left the regiment he was actually driven to forging the name of a brother officer, a rich young man, with whom he was on very friendly terms. The large amount for which the cheque was drawn drew the attention of the bankers to it, and in spite of the extreme skill with which, I am told, the signature had been counterfeited, the forgery was detected, and the matter was brought before me.

"The victim of the fraud was as anxious as myself to avoid a public scandal, and it was arranged that nothing should be done for a year, to give time to McConachan to refund the money; if, however, he failed to do so within that time, there would be nothing for it but to make the matter public. These terms were agreed on and McConachan was told to send in his papers at once.

"The year allowed is now drawing to a close, and the money has not been forthcoming, so that there is no doubt that Mark McConachan's need of obtaining a large amount is extremely pressing. My knowledge of his character obliges me to add that I consider him one of the few men I ever knew whom I could imagine going to almost any length to provide himself with what he so urgently requires.

"Please consider this letter confidential unless you obtain actual proof of his guilt.-I am, sir, yours faithfully,