MY RIVAL DON CARLOS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 11823, 28 November 1901, Page 3

MY RIVAL DON CARLOS.

I had just bidden my wife good-night—my little Spanish wife— I had heard her footsteps retreating up the stairs of what she called "our strange English home." I had won her in Spain, and had wedded her against her father's wishes. In faot, she had eloped with me, and we had hastened to England, where I led her to the altar. She was very beautiful even for a Spanish senorita, and had broken many a don's heart before I won her real affection and brought her to my little estate in England. She had all the hot, impulsive nature of her country, and the romance of the "runaway match" suited her, and for a year we had been perfectly happy.

She loved "mo with an ardour and passion seldom or never met with in an English wife, and I reciprocated the feeling in a real if not so demonstrative a manner. If there was a little cloud to ma:- the glorious sunshine of our lives it was the dread she had of a Spaniard by the name of Don Carlos, who had been the accepted suitoi for her hand. He was rich, and had been promised her hand by her father, and it was the continual pressure that he brought upon her to marry him—whom she hatedthat had induced her to fly with me.

Sometimes she would tell me of him, her frame shaking with fear and her dark eyes flashing with hate, and what he would do when he learned of hei marriage. "He will go mad," she said, " and search all over the world for you, and if ever he sees you he will kill you."

I assured her that the English law would protect me, and that she need have no fear on my account, but every now and then the fear would return, and she would pray me to be always on my guard. She described his features to me, and told me, in her impulsivo Spanish manner, if ever I met him to shoot him at once. "Kill him," she would say, setting her little white teeth, " before he hae a chance to kill you." After a year had gone by I began to hear less of Don Carlos, end hoped that I should soon hear of. him no more. But I did not then fully understand the true nature of a disappointed and baulked Spaniard; I did not know with what tenacity he pursues the object of his hate and the bloodthirsty manner in which he delights to take his revenge. As it was, I never thought of him save when my wife mentioned his name, and never di earned that I should ever see him, much less under the terrible circumstances that are here related.

On the night that I referred to at first I heard my wife close her door. Then I lit a cigar, and was soon lost again in the novel I was reading. I should think that I had been sitting thus for about half-an-hour, when suddenly the French windows, which looked on to a. little lawn in front of the house, opened, and I saw a man standing in front of me with a revolver in each hand-

I recognised him at once: the high cheekbones, the black, glittering eyes, and the dark waxed moustaches told me at once that this was the mar whom my wife dreaded so much Spaniard, Don Carlos. Directly I saw him I read murder in his eyes. Without him telling me so I knew that if I moved ho would fire. Presently he spoke in fairly good English. "Listen," said he, "and if you move so much as an inch you are a dead man. I loved a maiden once, the prettiest maiden in Spain. She did not then love me, but she would have done so. Her father had given her to me, and she was looked upon as my future »ife by everyone who knew us. Then an Englishman came and stole her, won her by his lying tongue, took her away with him and married her. When I learnt of it J took an oath to find and murder him, kill him a? he had killed my hopes. I have found him. You are the man, and I intend to have my revenge." I was cool at the commencement of his discourse; but as he went on, and I pictured my little Antonetta the wife or that villain, my blood boiled, and I answered that I would die with the consciousness that I had rescued a woman from a fate worse than death. I told him that Antonetta hated the mention of his name.

Whilst he was still covering me with his revolvers he made a motion to a confederate. A man came forward, and before I could clearly discern his intention struck me a violent blow on the head, and I remembered no more.

When I came to myself and collected my thoughts I found myself lying on the floor of a good-sized room. How long I had been unconscious oi in what part of the world I was I could not say, but I could see at a glance that I was not in a room in my own house. I was not bound either hand or foot, and after a few moments I sat up and looked around me. The room was about 14ft square and the walls appeared to be made of some hard black wood, ebony, I think, and were quite smooth and unpapered. In vain I looked around for a door, but there was not even a crease apparent in those smooth, black walls. For a time I sat thus and collected my scattered thoughts; my head was throbbing and my pulse beating at a runaway speed. The first thing that my thoughts flew to was my little Antone-tta. Had they molested her? Was she also to suffer for having married me? Poor little girl, how she would worry at my absence; and the thought, ever uppermost in her mind, that I should get into the hands of Don Carlos, was fulfilled at last. But what was the end to be? I was evidently not to be starved "to death, for by my side was a plate of bread and meat and some water in a glass. Then I remembered the horrors of the Inquisition. Was I to be tortured to death? The room was not dark, and I looked round to see from whence the light proceeded, and discovered that it • came from several slits in the coiling about 2ft in length and a couple of inches wide. I then rose to my feet and looked round the room for some loophole of escape, but I might as well have tried to escape from a jewel safe. Then I felt drowsiness creeping over me again, and I lay down and slept. It was a troubled, broken sleep, interrupted by rude dreams and alarms. When I awoke I thought that the room seemed darker, and I imagined that night was coming on. It was not by any moans dark, but the light certainly seemed less than when I had gone to sleep. I lay in a kind of semi-stupor for some time, my mind first wandering to my wife tnd then to my mother and my old home. After a time I felt cramped and rose to a sitting posture, and, looking round, I thought that the room appeared smaller than when I had first looked round it; the black walls appeared to be closer, and, glancing up at the slits in the ceiling, I saw that they were not so long; they were partly covered by the walls. Then I noticed with awful horror that not only were the walls closing in upon me, but in the centre of the room was an opening like a small well, which seemed to be getting larger as the room was decreasing in size. In a flash the awful truth was upon me; the walls would close in towards the hole and I should be gradually forced inch by inch to an awful death, down" into that unknown depth. When I discovered this I was like a madman: I cursed and prayed in the same breath and rushed round the room shrieking and tearing at the ebony walls, and finally fell to the floor exhausted, and lay within a few feet of that yawning black hole. Then I crawled on my hands and knees towards it and looked down, but saw nothing but inky darkness. I discovered that the hole was now nearly as large as it would get. Two of the centre slabs of the stone floor had been made to recede, leaving a yawning abyss about 6ft in diameter, and these slabs had now receded their limit, but the walls were still moving slowly, very slowly, towards the centre pit. I resigned myself as calmly as I could to my awful late. What was it to be, I wondered—death by drowning? Was it water at the bottom of this pit, or should I be dashed to pieces on some huge boulders, or impaled upon some iron spikes? I had read of all these in stories of the Inquisition, and wondered which was to be my fate. With the idea of ascertaining if it were water I took off my gold watch (I should not require it again), and dropped it clown the black hole and listened. It teemed some seconds before I heard it crash on to seme hard substance below. It was not water—l had prayed that it might have been. After I had dropped my watch I noticed that the inside of the hole was bricked with ordinary red bricks, . but so closely built that to get; a foothold would be impossible; my case seemed absolutely hopeless. Then thoughts of my wife came over me. I pictured her weeping, and searching for me in vain. Heavens! was there no means of escape from those pitiless, closing walls? Then a strange thought suggested itself to me, only to be put aside as impossible, but a drowning man clutches at a straw, and I determined to try it. It was to remove with my penknife the mortar of four bricks —two in which to put my feet and two for my hands; and to wait thus clinging to the inside of the well until the walls had again retreated. Then Don Carlos, thinking I was dead at the bottom of the hole, might relax his vigilance, and I might perchance escape. It was a wild hope and desperate in the extreme, but it was better than dying without making an effort to save my life. The

room was now only about 10ft square, and I had I reckoned,. about four hours to do my work which would give me, if I were successful in removing the bricks, about 15 minutes to rest myselt before getting into the black I lay down flat and commenced in a wild frenzy at a brick as far down as i coum reach. The mortar was terribly hard, but bit by bit, I chipped it out until in less than an hour I had removed the first brick:, and away it went crashing down to the bottom of the hole. Then I commenced on another about; a foot to the right ol the one I had already removed. Oh! the torture of working in that posture. The Wood rushed to my head and the veins stood out en my forehead like whipcord. But 1 thought of Antonetta and home, and I went at it with the frenzy of despair. The room was now almost dark. The slits in the ceiling had almost entirely disappeared; but I managed to remove the second brick just a3 the last glimmer of light disappeared, and now I was left in total darkness. The horror of my situation was now great increased. I could not see now how quickly the walls were Hearing the centre, so I worked away at the other two bricks like a madman, for I thought that every moment I should feel the wall behind me pushing rne to my awful doom. Oh, the awful horroi of that terrible fight against time in the darkness! I had long been unable to do my work lying down, for the ebony walls only left a space of about 2ft all round the inky hole. I had worn away almost the entire blade of my knife, and still there remained a brick to be removed. Nearer and nearer came the walls, and I now had only a foot of space in whieh to sit and finish my work, and the brick seemed to be in as tight as ever, the perspiration running off my fevered brow dropping: on the stone floor. At last the brick was loosened, and a moment latjr went dashing down the well. I paused to wipe my wet face and rest a few minutes. Then an awful thought flashed upon me. When the walls receded would not the stone slabs again cover the we'd, and my only chance of escape be cut off? It was reasonable to suppose so, for the same machinery that was driving the walls towards the centre was most likely responsible for the opening of the pit's mouth. I was in despair and abandoned all hope, and made up my mind to end it all by springing into the yawning hole. Then again I remembered that the slabs had reached their limit before the walls had reached to within a couple of yards of the pit. so I concluded that they would recede to that limit before the hole began to close. This did not take so long to think as to write, and before I had properly reasoned it out I felt the hard wall touching my back. Still I did not get into the pit, as I knew I should require all my strength to hold on until I could climb out when the walls had receded.

At last the moment arrived when I could no longer sit on the small and ever-decreas-ing and tremblingly I got into the mouth of the pit, hanging on to the top until I got my feet into the holes I had made for them.

I am not a coward, but I confess that I was frightened— frightened—as I was feeling about with my feet for those holes. For some minutes I kept my hands on the edge of the pit, but soon the cold, pitiless walls touched my hot finger-tips, and I had to loose my hold and clutch the back of the bricks from whence I had removed the others. I had scraped out some of the mortar behind the bricks under the two I had removed, so that this afforded a hold.

Then commenced that terrible struggle of endurance, the horrors of which almost drove ,me mad. It could not have been many minutes before the walls began to recede, but to me it seemed hours. Every few seconds I would put up one of my hands to feel the walls. They came to the extreme edge of the pit, and seemed to stay there for some time.

At, last, when I put up my hand I could not f«fel the walls, and I knew that they were really receding. They went back much more rapidly than they had closed in, so much sOj in fact, that in a few minutes the light was again streaming in through the slits in the ceiling. I had just got my hands on the ledge to lift myself from my perilous position when I became suddenly aware of a great flood of light coming in from a space like a door in one of the walls.

Thinking that someone was entering, I hastily got back into my former position so as to be free from observation. Then I heard footsteps on the stone floor, but could see nothing, as the person had entered on the side of the room corresponding to the side of the pit to which I was clinging. Then I heard a loud burst of laughter, which I at once recognised as proceeding fiom that villain, Don Carlos. Then' he murmured to himself in Spanish something that I could not understand, but I knew that he was gloating over my supposed fate. Presently he stepped to the edge of the pit, and I knew that I should be discovered, but, rather than undergo fresh tortures, I determined to realease my hold and drop down the well. Then, like a lightning flush came another thought, and almost as quickly I acted on it. He had just reached the mouth of the pit. and before he had time to discover me I loosed one hand, and with a strength born of madness I clutched one of his legs. To my dying day I shall remember the cry he gave as ho went crashing down to the awful doom he had prepared for me. Then with a feeling of horror at wflat I had done I got out of the pit and walked out of the ebony room and out of the house of horrors unmolested. I found myself in Spain, as I had partly supposed, and I lost no time in getting back to England. I found my wife terribly upset at my prolonged absence. She had quite given up all hope of ever seeing mo again, but when I told her of the fate of Don Carlos a glad light came into her eyes. She knew that we could now rest in peace.