The Ashiel mystery : $b a detective storyBryce, Marion
General
The Ashiel mystery : $b a detective story
Bryce, Marion
Detective and mystery stories; Fiction
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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