第126章

"There may be nothing. But if there is such a room, you may be sure it has some relation with terrible wrong--what, we may never find out, or even the traces of it."

"I shall not be afraid," she said, as if speaking with herself. "It is the terrible dreaming that makes me weak. In the morning I tremble as if I had been in the hands of some evil power."

Donal turned his eyes upon her. How thin she looked in the last of the sunlight! A pang went through him at the thought that one day he might be alone with Davie in the huge castle, untended by the consciousness that a living light and loveliness flitted somewhere about its gloomy and ungenial walls. But he would not think the thought! How that dismal Miss Carmichael must have worried her! When the very hope of the creature in his creator is attacked in the name of religion; when his longing after a living God is met with the offer of a paltry escape from hell, how is the creature to live! It is God we want, not heaven; his righteousness, not an imputed one, for our own possession; remission, not letting off; love, not endurance for the sake of another, even if that other be the one loveliest of all.

They turned from the sunset and made their way to the chimney-stack.

There once more Donal set up his ladder. He tied the clock-weight to the end of his cord, dropped it in, and with a little management got it through the wires. It went down and down, gently lowered, till the cord was all out, and still it would go.

"Do run and get some more," said Arctura.

"You do not mind being left alone?"

"No--if you will not be long."

"I will run," he said--and run he did, for she had scarcely begun to feel the loneliness when he returned panting.

He took the end she had been holding, tied on the fresh cord he had brought, and again lowered away. As he was beginning to fear that after all he had not brought enough, the weight stopped, resting, and drew no more.

"If only we had eyes in that weight," said Arctura, "like the snails at the end of their horns!"

"We might have greased the bottom of the weight," said Donal, "as they do the lead when they want to know what kind of bottom there is to the sea: it might have brought up ashes. If it will not go any farther, I will mark the string at the mouth, and draw it up."

He moved the weight up and down a little; it rested still, and he drew it up.

"Now we must mark off it the height of the chimney above the parapet wall," he said; "and then I will lower the weight towards the court below, until this last knot comes to the wall: the weight will then show us on the outside how far down the house it went inside.--Ah, I thought so!" he went on, looking over after the weight; "--only to the first floor, or thereabouts!--No, I think it is lower!--But anyhow, my lady, as you can see, the place with which the chimney, if chimney it be, communicates, must be somewhere about the middle of the house, and perhaps is on the first floor; we can't judge very well looking down from here, and against a spot where are no windows. Can you imagine what place it might be?"

"I cannot," answered Arctura; "but I could go into every room on that floor without anyone seeing me."

"Then I will let the weight down the chimney again, and leave it for you to see, if you can, below. If you find it, we must do something else."

It was done, and they descended together. Donal went back to the schoolroom, not expecting to see her again till the next day. But in half an hour she came to him, saying she had been into every room on that floor, both where she thought it might be, and where she knew it could not be, and had not seen the weight.

"The probability then is," replied Donal, "that thereabout somewhere--there, or farther down in that neighbourhood--lies the secret; but we cannot be sure, for the weight may not have reached the bottom of the shaft. Let us think what we shall do next.

He placed a chair for her by the fire. They had the room to themselves.