As soon as he started to walk she followed him, pushing through heavy brushwood and crawling along the ground where she could not be seen;--and now,--with dishevelled hair, and staring, terrified eyes she leaned over the edge of the precipice, baffled and desperate. Tearless sobs convulsed her throat,-"Oh, God of mercy!" she moaned in suffocated accents--"How can I follow him down there! Oh, help me, Mary mother! Help me! I must--I must be with him!"
She gathered up her hair in a close coil and wound her skirts tightly about her, looking everywhere for a footing. She saw a deep cranny which had been hollowed out by some torrent of water--it cut sharply through the rock like a path,--she could risk that perhaps, she thought,--and yet her brain reeled--she felt sick and giddy--would it not be wiser to stay where she was and wait for the return of the reckless creature who had ventured all alone into one of the deepest canons of the whole country? While she hesitated she caught a sudden glimpse of him, stepping with apparent ease over huge heaps of stones and fallen pieces of rock at the bottom of the declivity,--she watched his movements in breathless suspense. On he went towards a vast aperture, shaped arch-wise like the entrance to a cavern--he paused a moment--then entered it. This was enough for Manella--her wild love and wilder terror gave her an almost supernatural strength and daring,--and all heedless now of results she sprang boldly towards the deep cutting in the rock, swinging herself from jagged point to point till--reaching the bottom of the declivity at last, bruised and bleeding, but undaunted,--she stopped, checked by a rushing stream which tumbled over great boulders and dashed its cold spray in her face. Looking about her she saw to her dismay that the vaulted cavern wherein Seaton had disappeared was on the other side of this stream--she stood almost opposite to it--but how to get across? Gazing despairingly in every direction she suddenly perceived the fallen trunk of a tree lying half in and half out of the brawling torrent--it was green with slippery moss and offered but a dangerous foothold,--nevertheless she resolved to attempt it.
"I said I would die for him!" she thought--"and I will!"
Getting astride the tree, it swayed under her,--but she found she could push one of the larger boughs forward to lengthen the extemporary bridge,--and so, as it were, riding the waters, which surged noisily around her, she managed by dint of super-human effort to reach the projection of pebbly shore where the entrance to the cavern yawned open before her, black and desolate. The sun in its full morning glory blazed slanting down upon the darkness of the canon, and as she stood shivering, wet through and utterly exhausted, wondering what next she should do, she caught sight of a form moving within the cave like a moving shadow, and ascending a steep natural stairway of columnar rocks piled one on top of the other. Affrighted as she was by the tomb-like aspect of the deep vault, she had not ventured so far that she should now shrink from further dangers or fail in her quest;--the cherished object of her constant watchful care was within that subterranean blackness,--for what purpose?--she did not dare to think! But there was an instinctive sense of dread foreknowledge upon her,--a warning of impending evil,--and had she not sworn to him--"If God struck you down to hell I would be there!" The entrance to the cavern looked like the mouth of hell itself, as she had seen it depicted in one of her Catholic early lesson books. There were serpents and dragons in the picture ready to devour the impenitent sinner,--there might be serpents and dragons in this cave, for all she knew! But what matter? If the man she loved were actually in hell she "would be there"--as she had said!--and would surely find it Heaven! And so,--seeing the mere outline of his form moving ghost-like in the gloom, it was to her a guiding presence,--a light amid darkness,--and when,--after a minute or two--her straining eyes perceived him climbing steadily up the steep and perilous rocks, seeming about to disappear altogether,--she mastered the tremor of her nerves and crept cautiously step by step into the sombre vault, blindly feeling her way through the damp, thick murkiness, reckless of all danger, and only bent on following him.