The Ashiel mystery: A Detective Story by Mrs. Charles Bryce (read out loud books TXT) 📖

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 passages.

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 passion 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 assistance 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 space, 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 nobly 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 assassination 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 passed, 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 passer-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 passed 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 circumstances 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