Nevitt stroked his moustache with a reflective air. This was almost miraculous. “Well, I should think,” he said at last, after close reflection, “where such sympathy as that exists between two brothers, if Cyril had really been hurt in this accident, you must surely in some way have been dimly conscious of it.”
Guy Waring, standing there, telegram in hand, looked down at his companion with a somewhat contemptuous smile.
“Oh dear, no,” he answered, with common-sense confidence; for he loved not mysteries. “You don’t believe any nonsense of that sort, do you? There’s nothing in the least mystical in the kind of sympathy that exists between Cyril and myself. It’s all purely physical. We’re very like one another. But that’s all. There’s none of the Corsican Brothers sort of hocus-pocus about us in any way. The whole thing is a simple caste of natural causation.”
“Then you don’t believe in brain-waves?” Nevitt suggested, with a gracefully appropriate undulation of his small white hand.
Guy laughed incredulously. “All rubbish, my dear fellow,” he answered, “all utter rubbish. If any man knows, it’s myself and Cyril. We’re as near one another as any two men on earth could possibly be; but when we want to communicate our ideas, each to each, we have to speak or write, just like the rest of you. Every man is like a clock wound up to strike certain hours. Accidents may happen, events may intervene, the clock may get smashed, and all may be prevented. But, bar accidents, it’ll strike all right, under ordinary circumstances, when the hour arrives for it. Well, Cyril and I, as I always say, are like two clocks wound up at the same time to strike together, and we strike with very unusual regularity. But that’s the whole mystery. If I get smashed by accident, there’s no reason on earth why Cyril shouldn’t run on for years yet as usual; and if Cyril got smashed, there’s no reason on earth why I should ever know anything about it except from the newspapers.”
CHAPTER IV. — INSIDE THE TUNNEL.
And, indeed, if brain-waves had been in question at all, they ought, without a doubt, to have informed Guy Waring that at the very moment when he was going out to send off his telegram, his brother Cyril was sitting disconsolate, with dark blue lips and swollen eyelids, on the footboard of the railway carriage in the Lavington tunnel. Cyril was worn out with digging by this time, for he had done his best once more to clear away the sand towards the front of the train in the vague hope that he might succeed in letting in a little more air to their narrow prison through the chinks and interstices of the fallen sandstone. Besides, a man in an emergency must do something, if only to justify his claim to manliness—especially when a lady is looking on at his efforts.
So Cyril Waring had toiled and moiled in that deadly atmosphere for some hours in vain, and now sat, wearied out and faint from foul vapours, by Elma’s side on the damp, cold footboard. By this time the air had almost failed them. They gasped for breath, their heads swam vaguely. A terrible weight seemed to oppress their bosoms. Even the lamps in the carriages flickered low and burned blue. The atmosphere of the tunnel, loaded from the very beginning with sulphurous smoke, was now all but exhausted. Death stared them in the face without hope of respite—a ghastly, slow death by gradual stifling.