Whats Bred In The Bone | Page 6

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