The Splendid Folly | Page 9

up the neglected writing-pad and began scribbling in a rather desultory fashion.
Very soon her even breathing told him that she slept, and he laid aside the pad and sat quietly watching her. She looked very young and childish as she lay there, with the faint shadows of fatigue beneath her closed eyes--there was something appealing about her very helplessness. Presently the rug slipped a little, and he saw her hand groping vaguely for it. Quietly he tiptoed across the compartment and drew it more closely about her.
"Thank you--so much," she murmured drowsily, and the man looking down at her caught his breath sharply betwixt his teeth. Then, with an almost imperceptible shrug of his shoulders, he stepped back and resumed his seat.
The express sped on through the night, the little twin globes of light high up in the carriage ceiling jumping and flickering as it swung along the metals.
Down the track it flew like a living thing, a red glow marking its passage as it cleft the darkness, its freight of human souls contentedly sleeping, or smoking, or reading, as the fancy took them. And half a mile ahead on the permanent way, Death stood watching--watching and waiting where, by some hideous accident of fate, a faulty coupling-rod had snapped asunder in the process of shunting, leaving a solitary coal-truck to slide slowly back into the shadows of the night, unseen, the while its fellows were safely drawn on to a aiding.
CHAPTER III
AN ENCOUNTER WITH DEATH
One moment the even throbbing of the engine as the train slipped along through the silence of the country-side--the next, and the silence was split by a shattering roar and the shock of riven plates, the clash of iron driven against iron, and of solid woodwork grinding and grating as it splintered into wreckage.
Diana, suddenly--horribly--awake, found herself hurled from her seat. Absolute darkness lapped her round; it was as though a thick black curtain had descended, blotting out the whole world, while from behind it, immeasurably hideous in that utter night, uprose an inferno of cries and shrieks--the clamour of panic-stricken humanity.
Her hands, stretched stiffly out in front of her to ward off she knew not what impending horror hidden by the dark, came in contact with the framework of the window, and in an instant she was clinging to it, pressing up against it with her body, her fingers gripping and clutching at it as a rat, trapped in a well, claws madly at a projecting bit of stonework. It was at least something solid out of that awful void.
"What's happened? What's happened? What's happened?"
She was whispering the question over and over again in a queer, whimpering voice without the remotest idea of what she was saying. When a stinging pain shot through her arm, as a jagged point of broken glass bit into the flesh, and with a scream of utter, unreasoning terror she let go her hold.
The next moment she felt herself grasped and held by a pair of arms, and a voice spoke to her out of the darkness.
"Are you hurt? . . . My God, are you hurt?"
With a sob of relief she realised that it was the voice of her fellow-traveller. He was here, close to her, something alive and human in the midst of this nightmare of awful, unspeakable fear, and she clung to him, shuddering.
"Speak, can't you?" His utterance sounded hoarse and distorted. "You're hurt--?" And she felt his hands slide searchingly along her limbs, feeling and groping.
"No--no."
"Thank God!" He spoke under his breath. Then, giving her a shake: "Come, pull yourself together. We must get out of this."
He fumbled in his pocket and she heard the rattle of a matchbox, and an instant later a flame spurted out in the gloom as he lit a bundle of matches together. In the brief illumination she could see the floor of the compartment steeply tilted up and at its further end what looked like a huge, black cavity. The whole side of the carriage had been wrenched away.
"Come on!" exclaimed the man, catching her by the hand and pulling her forward towards that yawning space. "We must jump for it. It'll be a big drop. I'll catch you."
At the edge of the gulf he paused. Below, with eyes grown accustomed to the darkness, she could discern figures running to and fro, and lanterns flashing, while shouts and cries rose piercingly above a continuous low undertone of moaning.
"Stand here," he directed her. "I'll let myself down, and when I call to you--jump."
She caught at him frantically.
"Don't go--don't leave me."
He disengaged himself roughly from her clinging hands.
"It only wants a moment's pluck," he said, "and then you'll be safe."
The next minute he was over the side, hanging by his hands from the edge of the bent and twisted flooring of