“Oh, it’s nothing much, I think. My head feels rather queer; but I’ve no bones broken. A collision, I suppose. Oughtn’t we to get out at once and see what’s happened to the other people?”
Cyril Waring moved hastily to the door, and, letting down the window, tried with a violent effort to turn the handle from the outside. But the door wouldn’t open. As often happens in such accidents, the jar had jammed it. He tried the other side, and with some difficulty at last succeeded in forcing it open. Then he descended cautiously on to the six-foot-way, and held out his hand to help Elma from the carriage.
It was no collision, he saw at once, but a far more curious and unusual accident.
Looking ahead through the tunnel, all was black as night. A dense wall of earth seemed to block and fill in the whole space in front of them. Part of one broken and shattered carriage lay tossed about in wild confusion on the ground close by. Their own had escaped. All the rest was darkness.
In a moment, Cyril rightly divined what must have happened to the train. The roof of the tunnel had caved in on top of it. At least one carriage—the one immediately in front of them—had been crushed and shattered by the force of its fall. Their own was the last, and it had been saved as if by a miracle. It lay just outside the scene of the subsidence.
One thought rose instinctively at once in the young man’s mind. They must first see if any one was injured in the other compartments, or among the débris of the broken carriage; and then they must make for the open mouth of the tunnel, through which the light of day still gleamed bright behind them.
He peered in hastily at the other three windows. Not a soul in any one of the remaining compartments! It was a very empty train, he had noticed himself, when he had got in at Tilgate; the one solitary occupant of the front compartment of their carriage, a fat old lady with a big black bag, had bundled out at Chetwood. They were alone in the tunnel—at this end of the train at least; their sole duty now was to make haste and save themselves.
He gazed overhead. The tunnel was bricked in with an arch on top. The way through in front was blocked, of course, by the fallen mass of water-logged sandstone. He glanced back towards the open mouth. A curious circumstance, half-way down to the opening, attracted at once his keen and practised eye.
Strange to say, the roof at one spot was not a true arc of a circle. It bulged slightly downwards, in a flattened arch, as if some superincumbent weight were pressing hard upon it. Great heavens, what was this? Another trouble in store! He looked again, still more earnestly, and started with horror.
In the twinkling of an eye, his reason told him, beyond the shadow of a doubt, what was happening at the bulge. A second fall was just about to take place close by them. Clearly there were TWO weak points m the roof of the tunnel. One had already given way in front; the other was on the very eve of giving way behind them. If it fell, they were imprisoned between two impassable walls of sand and earth. Without one instant’s delay, he turned and seized his companion’s hand hastily.
“Quick! quick!” he cried, in a voice of eager warning. “Run, run for your life to the mouth of the tunnel! Here, come! You’ve only just time! It’s going, it’s going!”
But Elma’s feminine instinct worked quicker and truer than even Cyril Waring’s manly reason. She didn’t know why; she couldn’t say how; but in that one indivisible moment of time she had taken in and grasped to the full all the varying terrors of the situation. Instead of running, however, she held back her companion with a nervous force she could never before have imagined herself capable of exerting.
“Stop here,” she cried authoritatively, wrenching his arm in her haste. “If you go you’ll be killed. There’s no time to run past. It’ll be down before you’re there. See, see, it’s falling.”
Even before the words were well out of her mouth, another great crash shook the ground behind them. With a deafening roar, the tunnel gave way in a second place beyond. Dust and sand filled the air confusedly. For a minute or two all was noise and smoke and darkness. What exactly had happened neither of them could see. But now the mouth of the tunnel was blocked at either end alike, and no daylight was visible. So far as Cyril could judge, they two stood alone, in the dark and gloom, as in a narrow cell, shut in with their carriage between two solid walls of fallen earth and crumbling sandstone.
At this fresh misfortune, Elma sat down on the footboard with her face in her hands, and began to sob bitterly. The artist leaned over her and let her cry for a while in quiet despair. The poor girl’s nerves, it was clear, were now wholly unstrung. She was brave, as women go, undoubtedly brave; but the shock and the terror of such a position as this were more than enough to terrify the bravest. At last Cyril ventured on a single remark.
“How lucky,” he said, in an undertone, “I didn’t get out at Warnworth after all. It would have been dreadful if you’d been left all alone in this position.”
Elma glanced up at him with a sudden rush of gratitude. By the dim light of the oil lamp that still flickered feebly in the carriage overhead, she could see his face; and she knew by the look in those truthful eyes that he really meant it. He really meant he was glad he’d come on and exposed himself to this risk, which he might otherwise have avoided, because he would be sorry to think a helpless woman should be left alone by herself in the dark to face it. And, frightened as she was, she was glad of it too. To be alone would be awful. This was pre-eminently one of those many positions in life in which a woman prefers to have a man beside her.
And yet most men, she knew, would have thought to themselves at once, “What a fool I was to come on beyond my proper station, and let myself in for this beastly scrape, just because I’d go a few miles further with a pretty girl I never saw in my life before, and will probably never see in my life again, if I once get well out of this precious predicament.”
But that they would ever get out of it at all seemed to both of them now in the highest degree improbable. Cyril, by reason, Elma, by instinct, argued out the whole situation at once, and correctly. There had been much rain lately. The sandstone was water-logged. It had caved in bodily, before them and behind them. A little isthmus of archway still held out in isolation just above their heads. At any moment that isthmus might give way too, and, falling on their carriage, might crush them beneath its weight. Their lives depended upon the continued resisting power of some fifteen yards or so of dislocated masonry.
Appalled at the thought, Cyril moved from his place for a minute, and went forward to examine the fallen block in front. Then he paced his way back with groping steps to the equally ruinous mass behind them. Elma’s eyes, growing gradually accustomed to the darkness and the faint glimmer of the oil lamps, followed his action with vague and tearful interest.
“If the roof doesn’t give way,” he said calmly at last, when he returned once more to her, “and if we can only let them know we’re alive in the tunnel, they may possibly dig us out before we choke. There’s air enough here for eighteen hours for us.”
He spoke very quietly and reassuringly, as if being shut up in a fallen tunnel between two masses of earth were a matter that needn’t cause one the slightest uneasiness; but his words suggested to Elma’s mind a fresh and hitherto unthought-of danger.
“Eighteen hours,” she cried, horror-struck. “Do you mean to say we may have to stop here, all alone, for eighteen hours together? Oh, how very dreadful! How long! How frightening! And if they don’t dig us out before eighteen hours are over, do you mean to say we shall die of choking?”
Cyril gazed down at her with a very regretful and sympathetic face.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said; “at least, not more than you’re frightened already; but, of course, there’s only a certain amount of oxygen in the space that’s left us; and as we’re using it up at every breath, it’ll naturally hold out for a limited time only. It can’t be much more than eighteen hours. Still, I don’t doubt they’ll begin digging us out at once; and if they dig through fast, they may yet be in time, even so, to save us.”
Elma