Volume Ii Part 42 (1/2)

”Cheer up!” said George, faintly. ”I can't last--but they'll find you.”

”What chance for either of us,” said Burrows, groaning. ”The return must be blocked, too, or they'd have got round to us by now.”

”How long--”

”G.o.d knows! To judge by the time I've been sitting--since I got you here--it's night long ago.”

”Since you got me here?” repeated George, with feeble interrogation.

”When I came to I was lying with my face in a dampish sort of hollow, and I suppose the afterdamp had lifted a bit, for I could raise my head. I felt you close by. Then I dragged myself on a bit, till I felt some brattice. I got past that, found a dip where the air was better, came back for you, and dragged you here. I thought you were dead at first; then I felt your heart. And since we got here I've found an air-pipe up here along the wall, and broken it.”

George was silent. But the better atmosphere was affecting him somewhat, and consciousness was becoming clearer. Only, what seemed to him a loud noise disturbed him--tortured the wound in his head. Then, gradually, as he bent his mind upon it, he made out what it was--a slow drip or trickle of water from the face of the wall. The contrast between his imagination and the reality supplied him with a kind of measure of the silence that enwrapped them--silence that seemed in itself a living thing, charged with the brooding vengeance of the earth upon the creatures that had been delving at her heart.

”Burrows!--that water--maddens me.” He moved his head miserably. ”Could you get some? The brandy-flask has a cup.”

”There is a little pool by the brattice. I put my cap in as we got there, and dashed it over you. I'll go again.”

George heard the long limbs drag themselves painfully along. Then he lost count again of time, and all impressions on the ear, till he was roused by the water at his lips and a hand das.h.i.+ng some on his brow.

He drank greedily.

”Thanks! Put it by me--there; that's safe. Now, Burrows, I'm dying. Leave me. You can't do anything--and you--you might still try for it. There are one or two ways that might be worth trying. Take these keys. I could explain--”

But the little thread of life wavered terribly as he spoke. Burrows had to put his ear close to the scorched lips.

”No,” he said gloomily, ”I don't leave a man while there's any life in him. Besides, there's no chance--I don't know the mine.”

Suddenly, as though answering to the other's despair, a throb of such agony rose in George it seemed to rive body and soul asunder. His poor Letty!--his child that was to be!--his own energy of life, he had been so conscious of at the very moment of descending to this hideous death--all gone, all done!--his little moment of being torn from him by the inexorable force that restores nothing and explains nothing.

A picture flashed into his mind, an etching that he had seen in Paris in a shop window--had seen and pondered over. ”Entombed” was written underneath it, and it showed a solitary miner, on whom the awful trap has fallen, lifting his arms to his face in a last cry against the universe that has brought him into being, that has given him nerve and brain--for this!

Wherever he turned his eyes in the blackness he saw it--the lifted arms, the bare torso of the man, writhing under the agony of realisation--the tools, symbols of a life's toil, lying as they had dropped for ever from the hands that should work no more. It had sent a shudder through him, even amid the gaiety of a Paris street.

Then this first image was swept away by a second. It seemed to him that he was on the pit bank again. It was night, but the crowd was still there, and big fires lighted for warmth threw a glow upon the faces.

There were stars, and a pale light of snow upon the hills. He looked into the engine-house. There she was--his poor Letty! O G.o.d! He tried to get through to her, to speak to her. Impossible!

A sound disturbed his dream.

His ear and brain struggled with it--trying to give it a name. A man's long, painful breaths--half sobs. Burrows, no doubt--thinking of the woman he loved--of the poor emaciated soul George had seen him tending in the cottage garden on that April day.

He put out his hand and touched his companion.

”Don't despair,” he whispered; ”you will see her again. How strange--we two--we enemies--but this is the end. Tell me about her.”

”I took her from a ruffian who had nearly murdered her and the child,”

said the hoa.r.s.e voice after a pause. ”She was happy--in spite of the drink, in spite of everything--she would have been happy, till she died.

To think of her alone is too cruel. If people turned their backs on her, I made up.”

”You will see her again,” George repeated, but hardly knowing what the words were he said.