The Pursuit Part 54

He put his hand up weakly to his temple.

"It's--it's queer--and--and hurty," he whispered. "Muhammed? He would make it well."

She pulled him to her tenderly.

"Does it hurt badly?" she asked. "Muhammed hasn't come to us--yet."

He looked wonderingly around him.

"The house--opened--and let us right in," he mused. "We came up on the sea--right up--as fast as a train. And Dad? Dad was with us then."

She looked up questioningly at Aylmer. And he had gathered up the dead Carbineer's cloak and was arranging it against the stern. He made a motion towards it.

"Sleep is all the medicine we can give him," he advised. "Let him rest.

Meanwhile we must use the light while we have it."

She nodded quickly and laid the child gently down. He smiled at her drowsily again, whispered a half-distinguishable appeal to be told when the Moor "came back," and then nature's healing hand closed over his eyes. He slept--the deep, dead sleep of exhaustion.

Aylmer raised the lamp. Together they paced the length of their prison.

The gray flags were bare except where the Carbineer's body lay. With a little gesture of compa.s.sion, Aylmer straightened the stiffening limbs, and covered the stern, unfaltering face with the dead man's handkerchief. And then they pa.s.sed on, to confront the hill of rubble which closed the cloister's end. And here they halted, as they looked down.

Claire shuddered.

A gray sleeve emerged from the stones and an open hand seemed to appeal for the help which came all too late. Aylmer dragged fiercely at the ruined wall. A block or two became unseated. These shouldered out others to rumble at their feet.

A gray-clad body became exposed. They looked at it, instinct preparing them to recognize what they saw. Battered and disfigured though it was, they knew it for Miller's face.

For a moment they kept silence, looking at it fixedly. The eyes were open, but death had wiped out from them the imperturbability which they had held through life. Fear had gripped the gray man at the last. Horror had been with him--even panic.

Aylmer leaned down and covered the fear-haunted eyes.

"He has gone, and taken his mystery with him," he said. "What his life was we shall never ascertain. What led him to betray us? That is beyond our learning. It may have been no more than fear and the desire to save himself. I think there was something behind it all that has escaped us, but"--he shrugged his shoulders as he looked about him--"what does it matter now?"

He held the lantern at arm's length as he spoke, and looked searchingly round. The gray stone ringed them in relentlessly. Was there any expedient in which they could find a challenge to the arbitrary decree of Fate? He saw none.

The girl at his side watched him. And then her eyes met his. And as he spoke his voice was strangely gentle.

"G.o.d interfered between Landon and his evil purpose, as you said He would. Perhaps, who knows, He may have other mercies reserved for us.

But in any case we must teach each other to be strong."

She nodded gravely.

"We are in His hands," she said, "and nothing can be as terrible as what was threatened us by that vile man. The boy is safe. I have the help of your presence. We must kill imagination with work."

He looked about him again, doubtfully.

"Work?" he questioned. "Have we the chance to work?"

"Isn't it obvious," she said. "That is a courtyard. Above the ruins which brim it is the sky. If we use our strength and time to pluck a way through that to life again, we shall, at least, not think."

He paced forward a yard or two and examined the heaped wreckage of plaster, wooden beams, and stones. He hesitated.

"If we disturb it, there is just a chance of making our situation worse," he hazarded.

She shook her head.

"No," she said significantly. "Not worse. G.o.d might answer us that way, and save us suspense. And we shall, at any rate, have defied Fate to the end."

"Yes," he said. "In that I am with you; we will do our best--to the last. And if G.o.d's purpose falls upon us quickly, Claire, I thank Him here and now that He has permitted me to share this bitter cup with you, instead of draining that more bitter one which threatened an hour ago.

At least I am not leaving you in Landon's hands, alone."

"And I am not helpless while they work their vile wills upon you," she answered. "Fate has been cruel enough, but she has spared us that. The end? That is still her mystery. Let us forget it."

He smiled.

"There is much I can remember which will spare me that. What you have been and done for me these last wild days--my memory will occupy itself with that and hope--while I work to make hope true."

And then, still smiling as if he had plumbed the eyes of Hope and found in them an answering smile, he laid the lantern on the flags and put his hands upon the barrier of ruin which faced him.

He toiled vigorously but with caution. As he rolled the larger blocks from their resting-place, he was quick to notice and to support the beams or flagstones which they had b.u.t.tressed with their weight. And he used the first plank which tumbled out of the chaos as a lever upon its fellows. At his feet Claire worked vigorously, sweeping out the plaster which filled the openings as he made them, rolling aside the unseated stones to give him room, lending her lesser strength to aid his, when some task was trying his powers to the utmost.

For a couple of hours they toiled silently, and a gap had been hewn into the debris--a gap which seemed to be ceaselessly filled as the acc.u.mulations rolled into it from above, but an opening, nevertheless, which spoke of progress, which showed a reward for effort, which even pictured, faintly and indistinctly, a vision of hope. If their strength lasted? Was there not a chance, a tiny, elusive, but possible chance?

It was the remembrance that uninterrupted effort would fatigue them to a point where their strength would be taxed beyond recovery which made Aylmer at last call a halt. They went and sat beside the sleeping child.

To economize the light, they extinguished the lamp.

And then--they rubbed their eyes.

A tiny beam of light, dim, faint, gray but distinguishable, was filtered down into their prison at the point where one of the cloister pillars reached an arch. It fell upon the flags in a little circle.

Aylmer reached it in two strides. He gave an exclamation.

"It is a pipe from the spouting of the roof," he cried. "I see the sky.

I see the sky!"

She was at his side in an instant. In her turn she looked up into the hollow of the tube, to see light. She gave a little gasp.

"It's wonderful--wonderful!" she breathed. "Only that little way up--ten feet, twelve, perhaps, and freedom. And we are here!"

"It means two things of infinite importance!" he rejoined. "Air and, in all probability, water. If the gutter which discharges into this is still intact, we shall receive the rain when it comes. And after earthquake it comes, invariably."

She was not paying him attention. Her eye was still fixed below the tiny opening; she continued to look up as if the tiny disc of brightness fascinated her, as if she would drink draughts of the outer air thus delivered to them as if from an immense cistern.

And then the emotion of sudden discovery illuminated her face.

"We can signal!" she cried. "We can attract attention! We have only to thrust a rod up through that, and it will tell our tale. Surely there are rescuers at work by now; a whole city cannot be left to its fate!"