Oliver said, “We’ve got to go on. We’re not away yet, Rose Anne.”
She sighed.
“I suppose we must. I do hope there aren’t any more waterfalls.”
The cave was low. Their voices echoed. It narrowed, widened out, and then narrowed again. A stream ran through it, and they followed the water. Presently the roof came down and met the floor. The water went on under an arch which stood a bare handsbreadth above the flow. Rose Anne looked at it, and looked at Oliver.
Oliver got on to his knees and sounded the stream. His arm went down into it to an inch or two over the elbow. He shone the torch into the gap, lying on the bank and getting his head level with the water. Then he scrambled up again.
“Look here, darling, I’m going to see if I can get through. It’s a tight squeeze, but I don’t think there’s more than about a yard of it. I think there’s another cave.”
Rose Anne said, “You think—”
“Well, I’m practically sure.”
She looked at the low arch and sickened. Six inches above the surface—eight inches—and the rock to keep your head down so that you couldn’t reach the little air there was. She said in a muffled voice,
“Oliver—don’t! Let’s try and find—some other way.”
“Darling, there isn’t any other way—I’ve been looking all along. And we must stick to the water—water’s bound to come out somewhere. But if we lose it we might just wander round in circles and never get anywhere at all. You’ll see it’ll be quite all right. I’ll go first and prospect.” He spoke in an assured and cheerful tone.
Rose Anne tried to keep her mind on that, but when she saw him go down into the water and disappear, terror came on her again. Suppose there wasn’t a cave beyond the arch at all. Suppose the stream went on, and on, and on, with just its own channel to run in and no more. Suppose it fell sharply into some dreadful chasm in the darkness. Suppose—Her mind stopped.
She had the torch in her hand. Oliver had put it there, and what she had to do was to hold it low down over the water so that the beam might follow him and show him the way back. She watched the arch and the water, but she did not think. Her mind had stopped.
And then something round and dark came into the beam, and it was the back of Oliver’s head. He put up a hand to feel whether he had head-room and lifted his face clear of the water, blinking, and gasping, and drawing long, deep breaths. Then he pulled himself up beside her and sat there dripping.
“It’s all right—about six feet of passage and a fairly tight fit—plenty of head-room on the other side—the feel of a biggish place. Come along, we’d better get on before you get cold feet.”
“They can’t be any colder than they are.”
Oliver said, “Nonsense!” And then, “I’m afraid you’ll just have to get wet. Fortunately it’s warm down here. Now look here, darling—it’s quite easy, but you’ll have to do exactly what I say. You see, we’ve got to make it in the dark. We can’t afford to let the torch get wet. It will be all right done up in the oiled silk, and I think I’d better have it and go first. I want you to get down into the stream behind me, follow me right up to the arch, and then wait there until you can see the light shining through from the other side—you’ll be able to see it all right. And as soon as you see it you can take a long breath and start pushing yourself through the arch. I’ll be there to pull you out at the other side. Now come along.”
The torch changed hands, the torch went out. They were both in the water. Rose Anne was about six or seven feet from the arch, because she had to leave room for Oliver to get down on his hands and knees and then straighten out before he began to worm his way along the channel. She moved up behind him, the stream knee-high and running fast. It was very cold. Her teeth chattered.
Oliver was down under the water now. She took a few more steps and touched the rock with her outstretched hands. Then she knelt down in the water and stared at the arch which she could not see. If Oliver got through, there would be a light. She couldn’t see anything now, but if Oliver got through, there would be a light and she would see the arch.
She began to count to herself, “One, two, three, four, five …” She got up to fifty, and there was no light, so she made herself go on counting. There was no light at a hundred, or at a hundred and fifty, or at two hundred. It was very difficult to go on counting. It was like rolling heavy stones up a very steep hill. She had the feeling that she mustn’t stop, that something dreadful would happen if she were to stop.
She got to three hundred, and then all in a moment there was the arch—a bright arch painted on the darkness, and the stream flickering with little points of light. She thought Oliver called to her, but she couldn’t be sure, the water made such a noise in its narrow bed. She filled her lungs with air, ducked down where the arch spanned the stream, and pushed herself forward, thrusting with her feet against the rock, reaching out with her hands to feel for any projection which would help her.
It was not as bad as the waiting had been, but it was bad enough. She was a good swimmer, but she did not like diving and had never learned to swim under water. She just shut her eyes and fought her way through. Oliver’s hand touched hers and she was clear.
He pulled her up, and when she had got the water out of her eyes she saw the torch jammed in a crevice, and its ray very faint and small in the great dark cave to which they had come. They sat and dripped, and turned the torch here and there.
The cave was very large. The stream ran down into a lake. On this side there was a wide rocky shore, but on the farther side the water lay against the wall, and both were as black as ink. It came to Oliver that this was the place which Harold Spenlow had reached, and as soon as he thought of it he wished he hadn’t. Marks on a bare arm—marks that looked as if they had been made by the teeth of a rake.… Much better not think about Spenlow and what he had heard in the dark. He said, suddenly and aloud,
“If Spenlow got as far as this, how did they get him back? By his own account he was more dead than alive.”
“I expect there’s another way,” said Rose Anne comfortably. She didn’t care in the least how they had got Dr Spenlow back. As long as she wasn’t expected to crawl through any more tunnels, she didn’t really care much about anything. Her teeth still chattered, but only from cold, and that hardly seemed to matter.
They wrung the worst of the wet out of their clothes and went on. Very bad going, as Harold Spenlow had said. Close down by the edge of the lake was easiest, because there the rock was smooth with the endless lapping of the water. The cave receded before them—black walls, black roof, black water, black rock beneath their feet. If they stood still they could hear the stream flowing in from under the arch. There was no other sound. When they spoke their voices made strange echoes.
The cave went on, and on, and on. And then, just when it seemed as if it would go on for ever, it came to an end. The black rock barred their way.
Oliver sent the beam of his torch to and fro, but this time there was no arch, no movement of the water to show whether it flowed on through some channel which they could not see. He thought, “If there were no outlet, the cave would fill. There must be an outlet.” He thought again, “There must be an outlet, but if it were of any size, we should see the current setting that way.”
He had a box of matches in his pocket. He went back fifty yards, tossed half a dozen of them out into the lake, and kept the beam on them. They clustered together and moved slowly away from the shore. They moved very slowly indeed. Sometimes they hardly seemed to move at all. Yet in the end it was clear that they were setting for the opposite side, where the rock rose sheer from the water’s edge. He thought, “There’s a current, but there’s no strength in it. That means that there is an outlet, but not a big one. Anything big enough for us to get through would set up a much stronger current than that.”
He turned from the lake with an overwhelming sense of relief. If this were indeed Spenlow’s cave, there must certainly be anot
her and an easier way out of it. Spenlow, bitten to the bone and in the last stages of exhaustion, could never have been brought back by the way that he and Rose Anne had come. Besides, who would have taken such a way to find him? No, they must look for an exit somewhere above water level, amongst these piled and tumbled rocks. If they had more light—The ray seemed only to make the darkness visible. They slipped and scrambled, climbed, and fell back again, and all the time were hampered by the drag of their wet clothes.
They came back to where they had started. Rose Anne looked at the arch. Would they have to crawl through that dreadful place again with the water against them? She supposed they would if Oliver said so, and if there were no other way. She turned with a shudder. The torch was in her hand, and as she turned, the beam turned too and ran slanting to the roof. Rose Anne cried out,
“Oliver, look—there’s a hole!”
They both looked with all their eyes. The hole was half way up the wall, like a window with a blunted corner. If it had been anywhere else, they might have seen it before, but they had come up from the water blind and dripping, and when they could see again their eyes were all for the lake and its rocky shore. The opening was in the wall of the cave, but so close into the corner that it had been behind them and the beam had never touched it at all. The rock fell from it ledge by ledge to where they stood.
They climbed, and found a passage running on the level—a passage, not a cave. The sides were rough, but they had been shaped by men. For the first time hope really entered Oliver’s heart.
The passage went on a long way. Twice it forked. Each time they took the right-hand fork, because it was in Oliver’s mind to get back to the water. If they could strike it again they would have something to follow, and they would at least not have to be afraid of thirst.
Rose Anne walked wearily. She was very tired. The immediate excitement of the escape had died down. She thought the black passage would never end.
CHAPTER XXXIV
It was hours later that they heard faintly the sound of flowing water. It was the most blessed sound in the world. They had been wandering, with all sense of direction lost, from passage to cave and from cave to passage again. Sometimes the roof came down and they had to crawl, sometimes it rose in gloomy arches far above their heads. There was a cave that was full of stalactites, shining white in the beam of the torch like pillars of salt. Rose Anne thought dimly about Lot’s wife. There was a cave that was full of strange echoes. Their very breathing came whispering back from its dark hollow sides. There was a cave where the air was so heavy that it was hard to breathe at all. There was a place where they were hemmed between narrow walls and the torch failed.
Oliver replaced the battery, but that interval of darkness was most dreadful to Rose Anne. She tried very hard not to think of what would happen when they had used this battery—and the next.
Now they stood in a cleft, and heard water lapping. It was below them. Oliver thrust the torch forward, swinging it this way and that. The beam showed them a tumbled, rocky shore, black water lapping it and stretching away to a black wall beyond. His heart went cold in him. He turned his head and said in a dry, steady voice,
“We’ve come back.”
Rose Anne looked over his shoulder. It was true. The sound in their ears was the sound of the stream flowing out from under the arch through which they had crawled. Their cleft was the window with the blunted corner. She was too tired to care very much.
They climbed down the ledges to the lake and drank.
It was whilst she was filling her cupped hands for the second time that she heard the sound. It came to her through the sound of the running water. She lifted her head and said in a surprised voice,
“There’s something in the lake—something swimming.”
Oliver lifted his head too. The torch was behind them on a shelf in the rock. There was a sound. It might be the sound of something swimming—it might be.… He reached for the torch and sent the beam across the lake. The surface was unbroken, but there was a place where it heaved as if it had been broken, or as if it were very near to breaking. A swell moved upon it, a long, dark ripple that set towards the shore.
“Drink what you want and come,” he said, and for all that he had just been drinking, his mouth was dry.
Rose Anne, kneeling by the stream, looked up at him bewildered and said,
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. Be quick!”
She drank, and they climbed back into the passage, moved wearily along it, and sat down. Oliver put out the torch. They leaned against one another and against the rocky wall, and slept a dim, uneasy sleep in which they wandered endlessly and lost one another, and met again only to part and wander on, and on, and on.
In Oliver’s dream he was straining to lift a weight of stone which was crushing him. He knew that he could not lift it, because it was the roof that had fallen in with the weight of Oakham Hill behind it. But he had to go on trying, because you have to go on trying even when it isn’t any good.
In Rose Anne’s dream she had come into a place which was full of pillars of salt, and every pillar a woman who had tried to escape. She stared at them, and they said with one wailing voice, “You’ll never get out.” Then she looked down, and she was wearing the silver dress which Louise had made for her wedding with Philip. It was so heavy that she couldn’t run, and it got heavier every minute, heavy and hard, and she knew that she too was turning into a pillar of salt.
And Philip said, “Journeys end in lovers’ meetings.”
She opened her eyes in a glare of light. Philip Rennard stood above them. He held an electric lamp high up so that the light fell on her, and on Oliver, and on himself. In his other hand he had an automatic pistol. He said,
“Wake up, Rose—I’ve come for you. I hope you’re pleased to see me.”
Rose Anne stared at him. If this was part of the dream, she hoped she was going to wake up. When a dream got too bad you generally did wake up. She was very stiff. She felt Oliver move, and saw that his eyes were open. He was looking at Philip’s pistol, and Philip was pointing it at him.
Oliver said, “You’ve found us. What are you going to do about it?”
Philip Rennard laughed.
“I’m going to take Rose back. I have a very forgiving nature.”
Rose Anne got up.
“What are you going to do with Oliver?”
Philip laughed again.
“Well, I didn’t think of taking him back. I’m not quite so forgiving as that.”
A confusion of thoughts rushed into Rose Anne’s mind. “He’s going to shoot—Oliver will be shot—I can’t bear it—if he moves, he’ll shoot.”
She made a snatch at the pistol, and at the same time Oliver flung himself forward on the ground and caught Philip by the ankle. It was a desperate clutch, but there was no strength in it. His right arm was numb and the hand without feeling.
Philip kicked out and swung Rose Anne aside. Something broke in her, and she ran screaming down the passage to the cleft. There was a moment when Philip’s will swung between his enemy and the woman he wanted. If she went down over the rocks in the dark, there was hardly a chance in a hundred that she would not crash. There were other chances too. He kicked out to free himself and, lamp in hand, ran down the passage after Rose Anne.
Rose Anne saw the light coming up behind, throwing her shadow before her—the black shadow of her own terror that ran as she ran, and would presently go down over the ledges into the lake as she must go, because she couldn’t stop herself now, and Philip was behind her—Philip, and the light, and Philip’s shadow. It came up dark and menacing—the shadow that had killed Oliver and would kill her too.
“Rose—Rose—Rose!” She heard him calling her with entreaty, with passion, with despair.
And then the light showed her the fall, the ledges, and the lake beyond. She could not stop, but she would not have stopped if she could. The extremity of fear drove her on—and down. Her foot
touched the first ledge. She would have slipped if her flight had been less headlong. There was no time for slipping. The descent was a fall checked as her foot just touched one ledge after another, and the impetus carried her across the narrow belt of shore and into the lake. She went down into it and came up gasping for breath in about three feet of water. There was light all round her. Philip’s lamp was shining into her eyes as she blinked the blinding drops away, and Philip was on the bottom ledge, quite near, quite dreadfully near. She looked past him and saw Oliver in the cleft. If he came down, Philip would shoot him. She saw the pistol in his hand and shuddered and backed away from the shore. The lake water was cold. It came up about her waist in an icy ring. It came up under her breast, under her armpits, very cold—like death.
Philip called to her in a striving voice.
“Rose—come back! I won’t hurt you—I swear it. Rose—for God’s sake—it’s not safe!”
Safe—when they were all come here to their death! She went a step deeper, and felt the water touch her chin.
Philip turned, saw Oliver behind him, and fired. It vexed him to waste an enemy. Oliver should have died at leisure—by and by. But he must get him out of the way before he went into the lake after Rose Anne. He fired and Oliver fell. Rose Anne cried out, and the cave was full of echoes—dreadful echoes of violence, and pain, and the mockery of Philip’s laughter.
He set the lamp on the last ledge and the pistol beside it, and came wading out into the lake.
“Rose—my darling Rose—why do you fight me like this? It’s no good, you know—it’s no good at all. Loddon’s dead, and you’re mine. You’ve always been mine, and there’s nothing in the world that can come between us now.”
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