"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 dashing 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.
When he next spoke it was with an added strength that astonished his companion.
"Burrows, promise me something. Take a message from me to my wife.
Come nearer."
Then, as he felt his companion"s breath on his cheek, he roused himself to speak plainly:
"Tell her--I sent her my dear love--that I thanked her with all my heart and soul for her love--that it was very hard to leave her--and our child.
Write the words for her, Burrows. Tell her it was impossible for me to write, but I dictated this." He paused for a long time, then resumed: "And tell her, too--my last wish was--that she should ask Lord and Lady Maxwell--can you hear plainly?"--he repeated the names--"to be her friends and guardians. And bid her ask them--from me--not to forsake her.
Have you understood? Will you repeat it?"
Burrows, in the mood of one humouring the whim of the dying, repeated what had been said to him word by word, his own sensuous nature swept the while by the terrors of a death which seemed but one little step further from himself than from Tressady. Yet he did his best to understand, and recollect; and to the message so printed on his shrinking brain a woman"s misery owed its only comfort in the days that followed.
"Thank you," said Tressady, painfully listening for the last word. "Give me your hand. Good-bye. You and I--The world"s a queer place--I wish I"d turned you back at the pit"s mouth. I wanted to show I bore no malice.
Well--at least I know--"
The words broke off incoherently. Burrows caught the word "suffering,"
and some phrase about "the men," then Tressady"s head slipped back against the wall, and he spoke no more.
But the mind was active long afterwards. Again and again he seemed to himself standing in a bright light, alive and free. Innumerable illusions played about him. In one of the most persistent he was climbing the slope of a Swiss meadow in May. Oh! the scent of the narcissus, heavy still with the morning dew--the brush of the wet gra.s.s against his ankles--those yellow anemones shining there beneath the pines--the roar of the river in the gorge below--and beyond, far above, the grey peak, sharp and tall against that unmatched brilliance of the blue. In another he was riding alone in a gorge aflame with rhododendrons, and far down in the plain--the burnt-up Indian plain--some great fortified town, grave on its hill-top, broke the level lines--"A rose-red city, half as old as time." Or, again, it was the sea in some glow of sunset, the white reflections of the sails slipping down and down through the translucent pinks and blues, till the eye lost itself in the infinity of shades and tints, which the breeze--oh, the freshness of it!--was painting each moment anew at its caprice--painting and blotting, over and over again, as the water swung under the ship.
But all through these freaks of memory some strange thing seemed to have happened to him. He carried something in his arms--on his breast. The anguish of his inner pity for Letty, piercing through all else, expressed itself so.
But sometimes, as the brain grew momentarily clearer, he would wonder, almost in his old cynical way, at his own pity. She seemed to have come to love him. But was it not altogether for her good that his flawed, contradictory life should be cut violently from hers? Could their marriage, ill-planted, ill-grown, have come in the end to any tolerable fruit? His mind pa.s.sed back, with bitterness, over the nine months of it; not bitterness towards her--he seemed to be talking to her all the time, as she lay hidden on his shoulder--bitterness towards himself, towards the futility of his own life and efforts and desires.
But why his more than any other? The futility, the insignificance of all that man desires, all that waits on him--that old self-scorn, which began with the race, tormented him none the less, in dying, for the myriads it had haunted so before. An image of human fate, which had struck him in some book, recurred to him now--an image of daisied gra.s.s, alive one moment in the evening light--a quivering world of blades and dew, insects and petals, a forest of innumerable lines, crossed by the innumerable movements of living things--the next withdrawn into the night, all silenced, all effaced.
So life. Except, perhaps, for pain! His own pain never ceased. The only eternity that seemed conceivable, therefore, was an eternity of pain. It had become to him the last reality. What a horrible quickening had come to him of that sense for misery, that intolerable compa.s.sion, which in life he had always held to be the death of a man"s natural energy! Again and again, as consciousness still fought against the last surrender, it seemed to him that he heard voices and hammerings in the mine. And while he painfully listened, from the eternal darkness about him, dim tragic forms would break in a faltering procession--men or young boys, burnt and marred and slain like himself--turning to him faces he remembered. It was as though the scorn for pity he had once flung at Marcella Maxwell had been but the fruit of some obscure and shrinking foresight that he himself should die drowned and lost in pity; for as he waited for death his soul seemed to sink into the suffering of the world, as a spent swimmer sinks into the wave.
One perception, indeed, that was not a perception of pain, this piteous submission to the human lot brought with it. The accusing looks of hungry men, the puzzles of his own wavering heart, all social qualms and compunctions--these things troubled him no more. In the wanderings of death he was not without the solemn sense that, after all, he, George Tressady, a man of no professions, and no enthusiasms, had yet paid his share and done his part.
Was there something in this thought that softened the dolorous way?
Once--nearly at the last--he opened his eyes with a start.
"What is it? Something watches me. There is a sense of something that supports--that reconciles. If--_if_--how little would it all matter! _Oh!
what is this that knows the road I came_--_the flame turned cloud, the cloud returned to flame_--_the lifted, shifted steeps, and all the way!_"
His dying thought clung to words long familiar, as that of other men might have clung to a prayer. There was a momentary sense of ecstasy, of something ineffable.
And with that sense came a rending of all barriers, a breaking of long tension, a flooding of the soul with joy. Was it a pa.s.sing under new laws, into a new spiritual polity? He knew not; but as he lifted his sightless eyes he saw the dark roadway of the mine expand, and a woman, stepping with an exquisite lightness and freedom, came towards him.
Neither shrank nor hesitated. She came to him, knelt by him, and took his hands. He saw the pity in her dark eyes. "_Is it so bad, my friend?
Have courage--the end is near." "Care for her--and keep me, too, in your heart_," he cried to her, piteously. She smiled. Then light--blinding, featureless light--poured over the vision, and George Tressady had ceased to live.