“I think,” the rector answered, “that there may be cases in which you can do little and I much. Mr. Walker, the vicar of Baerton, is ill in bed, I know; and as the news has come to me first, I think I ought to go.”
“Right you are!” said Mr. Keogh gruffly. “Let go!”
In another moment the fast trotting cob was whirling the two men down the street. They turned the corner sharply, and as the breeze met them on the bridge, compelling Lindo to turn up the collar of his coat and draw the rug more closely round him, the church clock in the town behind them struck the half-hour. “Half-past five,” said the rector. The surgeon did not answer. They were in the open country now, the hedges speeding swiftly by them in the light of the lamps, and the long outline of Bear Hill, a huge misshapen hump which rose into a point at one end, lying dim and black before them. A night drive is always impressive. In the gloom, in the sough of the wind, in the sky serenely star-lit, in a tumult of hurrying clouds, in the rattle of the wheels, in the monotonous fall of the hoofs, there is an appeal to the sombre side of a man. How much more when the sough of the wind seems to the imagination a cry of pain, and the night is a dark background on which the fancy paints dying faces! At such a time the cares of life, which day by day rise one beyond another and prevent us dwelling over-much on the end, sink into pettiness, leaving us face to face with weightier issues.
“There have been accidents here before?” the clergyman asked, after a long silence.
“Thirty-five years ago there was one!” his companion answered, with a groan which betrayed his apprehensions. “Good heavens, sir, I remember it now! I was young then and fresh from the hospitals; but it was almost too much for me!”
“I hope that this one has been exaggerated,” Lindo replied, entering fully into the other’s feelings. “I did not quite understand the man’s account; but, as far as I could follow it, one of the two shafts—the downcast shaft I think it was—-was jammed full of rubbish and rendered quite useless.”
“Just what I expected!” ejaculated his companion.
“And they could now communicate with the workings only through the upcast shaft, in which they had rigged up some temporary lifting gear.”
“Ay, and it is the deepest pit here,” the surgeon chimed in, as the horse began to breast the steeper part of the ascent, and the furnace fires, before and above them, began to flicker and glow, now sinking into darkness, now flaming up like beacon-fires. “The workings are two thousand feet below the surface, man!”
“Stop!” Lindo said. “Here is some one looking for us, I think.”