XXVIIThe Terror
WHEN Virginia opened her eyes, after a troubled sleep which seemed to her to have lasted only a few moments, it was with a start, and out of the depths of a nightmare in which she had dreamed that some one was smothering her.
“David!” she called softly; and he answered at once out of the enveloping darkness.
“I am here—sitting beside you. Have you had a good sleep?”
“It was dreadful!” she shuddered. “I dreamed that a big man like—like my father—had his hand over my face and was stifling me. What time is it?”
“It is another day. It was a little past eight o’clock when I struck a match about an hour ago. You have slept all night.”
“And you?” she inquired quickly.
“I couldn’t sleep very much—naturally. Besides, I didn’t wish to. I was afraid you might waken and call me, and I shouldn’t hear.”
“There is no news?”
“A little. Regnier reports that the digging has gone on steadily all night. He knows the Morse alphabet, and he contrived to get into communication with Plegg during the night by tapping on the crushed air-pipe; so they know on the outside that we are here and alive.”
She pressed her hands to her forehead. Though he could not see the movement, he knew she made it.
“Does your head ache?” he asked.
“Some. The air is much worse, isn’t it?”
“It isn’t any better,” he conceded. “Once, in the night, they tried shooting the slide from the other side—blasting it with dynamite, you know. That was what made Regnier try the pipe-tapping. The fumes of the dynamite were blown through the loose stuff and that made it worse for us. Now they are trying to force a large pipe through the mass of the slide to give us air and food.”
“Will they succeed?” she queried.
“I promised, last night, to talk straight to you. If the slide is made up entirely of broken rock in small pieces, as it seems to be from our side, it should be comparatively easy to drive through it. But if the mass happens to contain large bowlders——”
“Then they will drill and blast them,” she put in quickly.
“Yes; but it may prove to be a long job; and I must be plain again. Every move they make seems to bring down more of the stuff from above. The water is not rising much, but the air is growing worse every hour.”
“All of which means that you think we should be prepared for the worst?”
“Yes; always continuing to hope for the best, of course. Are you very hungry?”
“Not yet. But you must be.”
“I can stand it better than the workmen. They have had nothing since they came in yesterday at ten o’clock. Very few of them carry a dinner bucket on an eight-hour shift.”
“How are they enduring it?”
“Each after his kind. Three of the Welshmen wanted to sing a while ago, but I wouldn’t let them. I knew it would waken you, and I thought you ought to sleep as long as you could.”
“Go right away and tell them to sing all they wish to!” she commanded instantly; and a little time after he had gone and returned, a Welsh melody rose on the stagnant air, lifted by voices that were strangely deadened by the stifling closeness of the dank cavern.
This was the beginning of a day of creeping horrors. Steadily, hour by hour, the vitiated air grew worse. All day long the rescuers were apparently fighting madly with the difficulties encountered in the pipe-driving attempt, but the buried ones could form no estimate of the progress made, or, indeed, if there were any progress at all.
As the hours wore on, the imprisoned workmen began to react to the torturings of the foul air and the despairing situation, each after his kind, as David had said. One man, a huge-muscled Cornish miner, went stark mad and it took the united strength of all the others to conquer and tie him. Another, a north-of-England coal miner, by his burring speech, was the next to break; he was not violent, but he babbled incessantly of green fields and sunshine—of running brooks, and the fresh, keen air of the north.
David Vallory tried to shield the woman he loved from as much of this as he could, and Regnier seconded him loyally. But at the last the heroic heart refused to be sheltered longer and kept away from the abyss into which the men were slipping one by one.
“No; you must let me do what I can, while I can!” she cried; and then she went about among the men and talked to them, bidding them be ofgood cheer, and telling them that they must be men to the very end—that God was good and merciful and He would not let them suffer more than they could bear. And once she persuaded the Welshmen to sing a hymn with her, her woman’s voice rising clear above the deeper tones of the men, and never faltering even on the last heart-moving stanza:
“Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes;Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies;Heaven’s morning breaks and earth’s vain shadows flee;In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.”
“Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes;Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies;Heaven’s morning breaks and earth’s vain shadows flee;In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.”
“Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes;
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies;
Heaven’s morning breaks and earth’s vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.”
It was then that Patrick Connolly, drill foreman and the leader in many a brutal pay-day brawl, made husky confession.
“’Tis your father’s blame, this, and well do we know it,” he grated. “’Twas in the back of me mind all night and all day that if we ever got out o’ this I’d take me two hands and choke him to hell, as we’re chokin’ this minut’. But ’tis all past and gone now, what wid the blessed love an’ nerve of you, little gyerl; an’ here’s hopin’ that the Gawd you believe in ’ll let you die quiet-like an’ peaceable, as I’d want my own little gyerl to go if I had wan.”
Through all this, David Vallory lived as one inhideous dream. But when the flare of another of the precious matches, a tiny flame that was scarcely visible in its brief and futile struggle with the heavy air, showed him that a second night was far advanced, he drew Virginia away to the heading and made her lie down on the coat-covered pallet, which he had remade, propping it as high as he could on the broken stone to escape the lower stratum of air.
For a long time she was silent, and when she spoke it was to ask if he were still beside her.
“Yes, Vinnie; I am here—and I shall be here when they find us.”
“You think it is all over, then?”
“I know that in a few more hours, a very few, the end must come. We can’t go on breathing this air indefinitely.”
She sat up again at that, and again he knew that she was holding her head in her hands.
“Have you ever wondered how the end would come to you, David?—how you would feel, and what you would do?”
“Not as often as I ought perhaps. There was a time last year, when I was in a caisson with Shubrick at Coulee du Sac. The bottom blew out under the air pressure, and we all thought we were gone. I don’t remember much about what Ithought—only that Shubrick and I owed it to the ‘sand-hogs’ to get them into the air-lock first.”
“Once I saw a woman die,” she said, her voice thrilling with suppressed emotion. “She was horribly frightened at the last, and—and I’ve always prayed since then that when my time should come I might not go that way.”
“You won’t,” he made himself say; “there isn’t a drop of craven blood in you, Vinnie—dear.”
Again the brooding silence fell, and, as before, it was the young woman who broke it.
“If we are going to be stifled in a little while—as I suppose we are—it doesn’t matter much what we say to each other, does it, David? I mean that we needn’t consider any future, so far as we usually count futures in a conventional way?”
“No; we are only a man and a woman, naked before the God who created us, Vinnie—and we are about to die.”
“Then—David, dear—I love you!”
“I know it,” he returned gently; “I have known it for a night and a day,” and he took her in his arms and kissed her almost solemnly. “You are giving your life because you tried to save mine.”
She made no effort to free herself. She was weary and weak to the point of collapse, and the supporting arms were grateful and comforting.
“I had ambitions,” she murmured; “such splendid ambitions! Ever since I have been old enough to understand, I have known how dis—dishonestly much of the money was made in the contracting, and it has hurt me—oh, you don’t know how it has hurt me! Father doesn’t see; he simply can’t see. And then my ambition came. A year ago I saw how father felt toward you; first because you were Adam Vallory’s son, and afterward because you were yourself—just such a son as he would have given worlds to have for his own. I whispered to myself then that I would make you love me and marry me; and then there would be two of us to fight for honesty and fair-dealing and the—the righteousness that cares for something more than merely keeping clear of the law. You would have helped me, wouldn’t you, David?”
He bent and kissed the pulse in the throbbing temple.
“You could have made of me anything that you wished, dear. You know that.”
“I didn’t wish to make anything of you but what you were; what you had always been until father tied you hand and foot with that horrible debt of gratitude. Then he sent you out here, and I knew what would happen—what simplymusthappen; how your gratitude to him would break you down,first in the little things, and then in the terrible ones. And that was why I persuaded him to come, and to bring me. Was it all very—unwomanly, David?”
“It was the finest thing a woman ever did for the man she loved. But you have always done the fine things.”
“Even when I made you fall in love with me when you didn’t want to?”
“I outdistanced you by many miles in that,” he said with sober gravity. “I think it went back to the kiddie days in old Middleboro.”
“In spite of Judith?”
He held her closer. “That is the one thing that I have to confess, Vinnie. I did go about a good bit with Judith, in my college years and before. We were just good chums, and I never thought for a moment——”
“Of course you didn’t! But I don’t blame Judith, either; I can’t, when I’ve done the same thing myself. But you were saying it went back to the kiddie days with—with me.”
“Yes; but I didn’t realize it until we met in Florida. I was full of hope then: I meant to make a success of myself so that I might go to your father like a man and say, ‘I want to marry your daughter.’ Then the big debt fell on me, andI couldn’t say anything while I owed your father more than I could ever hope to repay.”
“If you hadn’t died—we are both just the same as dead, aren’t we?—if you hadn’t died, you were going to pay him in the best possible way; by making ‘the apple of his eye’ deliriously happy, and by showing him the honest way out of all the little crookednesses and the big ones, too. Oh, yes; that was what was going to happen. After we were married he would have taken you into the company, and in just a little while you and I together would have been setting the pace; the good old-fashioned, honest pace. Isn’t it the pity of all pities that we had to go and die and spoil it all?—that we couldn’t have lived to make it come true, David, dear?”
“God!” he said under his breath, but for other reply there were no words.
After a time she spoke again.
“I—I think I’m going now, David. You said I’d outlast you and the men, but I shouldn’t want that. No, dear; there isn’t any pain, except in my head. I’m just—tired—and—sleepy.”
“You mustn’t give up, Vinnie!” he pleaded passionately. “We must live—both of us—to make it all come true! Listen! Isn’t that the men trying to cheer?O my God, I thank thee!”
A roaring blast of clean, fresh air, driven strongly enough to penetrate even to their distant retreat at the heading, fanned their faces. “The pipe!” he shouted; “they’ve got the pipe through and they’ve turned the air on. Vinnie—Vinnie!—we shall live, and itshallcome true!”
But the sudden reversal from despair to hope had been too much for the strong heart. The yielding body David was clasping in his arms had become limp and unresponsive, and the lips were silent.