Sara drew close to Garth"s side.
"_Must_ you go, Garth?" she asked. "Wouldn"t it be safe to wait till help comes?"
"Tim isn"t _safe_ there, actually five minutes. The floors may hold--or they mayn"t! I must go, sweet."
She caught his hand and held it an instant against her cheek. Then--
"Go, dear," she whispered. "Go quickly. And oh!--G.o.d keep you!"
He was gone, picking his way gingerly, treading as lightly as a cat, so that the wrenched stairway hardly creaked beneath his swift, lithe steps.
Once there came the sudden rattle of some falling sc.r.a.p of broken plaster, and Sara, leaning with closed eyes and white, set face, against the framework of a doorway, shivered soundlessly.
Soon he had disappeared round the distorted head of the staircase, and those who were watching could only discern the bobbing glimmer of the light he carried mounting higher and higher.
Then--after an interminable time, it seemed--there came the sound of voices . . . he had found Tim . . . a pause . . . then again a short, quick speech and the word "Right?" drifted faintly down to the strained ears below.
Unconsciously Sara"s hands had clenched themselves, and the nails were biting into the flesh of her palms. But she felt no pain. Her whole being seemed concentrated into the single sense of hearing as she waited there in the candle-lit gloom, listening for every tiny sound, each creak of a board, each scattering of loosened plaster, which might herald danger.
Another eternity crawled by before, at length, Garth reappeared once more round the last bend of the staircase. Tim was lying across his shoulder, his injured leg hanging stiffly down, and in his hand he grasped the lantern, while both Garth"s arms supported him.
Sara"s eyes had opened now and fixed themselves intently on the burdened figure of the man she loved, as, with infinite caution, he began the descent of the last flight of stairs.
There was a double strain now upon the dislocated boards and joists--the weight of two men where one had climbed before with lithe, light, unimpeded limbs--and it seemed to Sara"s tense, set vision as if a slight tremor ran throughout the whole stairway.
In an agony of terror she watched Garth"s steady, downward progress. She felt as though she must scream out to him to hurry--_hurry_! Yet she bit back the scream lest it should startle him, every muscle of her body rigid with the effort that her silence cost her.
Seven stairs more! Six!
Sara"s lips were moving voicelessly. She was whispering rapidly over and over again--
"G.o.d! G.o.d! G.o.d! Keep him safe! . . . You can do it. . . . Don"t let him fall. . . ."
Five! Only five steps more!
"Hold up the stairs! . . . G.o.d! _Don"t_ let them give way! . . .
Don"t----"
Again there came the familiar thudding sound of an explosion. Somewhere another bomb, hurled from the cavernous dark that hid the enemy, had fallen, and almost simultaneously, it seemed, a warning thunder rumbled overhead like the menacing growl of a wild beast suddenly let loose.
At the first low mutter of that threat of imminent disaster, Garth sprang.
Gripping Tim firmly in his arms, he leaped from the quaking staircase, falling awkwardly, p.r.o.ne beneath the burden of the other"s helpless body, as he landed.
And even as he reached the ground, the upper story of the house, with a roar that shook the whole remaining fabric of the building, crashed to earth in an avalanche of stone and brick and flying slates, whilst the stairway upon which he had been standing gave a sickening lurch, rocked, and fell out sideways into the hall in a smother of dust and plaster.
Stumblingly, those who had been watching groped their way through the powdery cloud, as it swirled and eddied, towards the dark blotch at the foot of the stairs which was all that could be distinguished of Trent and his burden.
To Sara, the momentary silence that ensued was in infinity of nameless dread. Then--
"We"re all right," gasped Trent rea.s.suringly, and choked violently as he inhaled a mouthful of grit-laden air.
In the same instant, across the murk shot a broad beam of light from the open doorway. Behind it Sara could discern white faces peering anxiously--Audrey"s and Miles"s, and, behind them again, loomed the heads and shoulders of others who had hurried to the scene of the catastrophe.
Then Herrick"s voice rang out, high-pitched with gathering apprehension.
"Are you all safe?"
And when the rea.s.suring answer reached the little throng upon the threshold, a murmur of relief went up, culminating in a ringing cheer as the news percolated through to the crowd which had collected in the roadway.
In an amazingly short time, so it seemed to Sara, she found herself comfortably tucked into the back seat of Garth"s car, between him and Molly. Judson, with Jane beside him, took the wheel, and they were soon speeding swiftly away towards Greenacres, where Audrey had insisted that the homeless household must take refuge--the remainder of the party following in the Herricks" limousine.
It had been a night of adventure, but it was over at last, and, as Jane Crab remarked with stolid conviction--
"The doctor--blessed saint!--was never intended to be killed by one of they "Uns, so they might as well have saved theirselves the trouble of trying it--and we"d all have slept the easier in our beds!"
CHAPTER x.x.xVII
THE RECKONING
Elisabeth came slowly out of the room where her son was lying.
She had reached Greenacres--in response to Sara"s letter, posted on the eve of the raid--late in the afternoon of the following day, and Audrey had at once taken her upstairs to see Tim and left them together.
And now, as she closed the door of his room behind her, she leaned helplessly against the wall and her lips moved in a whispered cry of poignant misery.
"Maurice! . . . Maurice saved him! . . . Oh, my G.o.d!"
Her eyes--the beautiful, hyacinth eyes--stared strickenly in front of her, wide and horrified like the eyes of a hunted thing, and her hands were twisted and wrung beneath the stress of the overwhelming knowledge which Tim had so joyously prattled out to her. She could hear him now, boyishly enthusiastic, extolling Garth with the eager, unstinted hero-worship of youth, and every word he said had pierced her like the stab of a knife.
"If ever a chap deserved the V.C., Trent does, by Jove! It was the bravest thing I"ve ever known, mother mine, for he told me afterwards, he never expected that the top story would hold out till he got me away.
He"d seen it from the outside first, you know! And there was I, held up with this confounded ankle, _and_ with a whole heap of plaster and a brick or two sitting on my chest I thought I"d gone west that time, for a certainty!"
And Tim chuckled delightedly, blissfully unconscious that with each word he spoke he was binding upon his mother"s shoulders an insuperable burden of remorse.
It was Garth Trent who had saved her son--Garth Trent, to whom she owed all the garnered happiness of her married life, yet whose own life"s fabric she had pulled down about his ears! And now, to the already overwhelming magnitude of her debt to him, he had added this--this final act of sacrifice.
With an almost superhuman effort, Elisabeth had forced herself to listen quietly to Tim"s account of his rescue from the shattered upper story of the Selwyn"s house--to listen precisely as though Garth"s share in the matter held no particular significance for her beyond the splendid one it must inevitably hold for any mother.
But now, safe from the clear-sighted glance of Tim"s blue eyes, she let the mask slip from her and crouched against his door in uncontrollable agony of spirit.
The sin which she had sinned in secret--which, sometimes, she had almost come to believe was not a sin, so beautiful had been its fruit--revealed itself to her now in all its naked ugliness.
Looking backward, down the vista of years, the whole structure of her happiness appeared in its true perspective, reared upon a lie--upon that same lie which had blasted Garth Trent"s career and sent him out, dishonoured, from the company of his fellows.
And this man from whom she had taken faith, and hope, and good repute--everything, in fact, that makes a man"s life worth having--had given her the life of her son!