by Grant Allen
Three minutes, perhaps, to Mentone still. On those three minutes hung all his future and Elsie’s happiness.
In the midst of the confused sea of images that surged up in endless waves upon his mind, one definite thought alone now plainly shaped itself in clear-cut mental outline before him. He must save Elsie he must save Elsie: at all hazards, no matter how great let him live or die he must save Elsie. Through the mist of horror and agony and despair that dimmed his sight, that thought alone loomed clear and certain. Save Elsie the anguish of that awful discovery: save Elsie the inexpressible pain of knowing that the man she now loved and the man who once pretended to love her, had closed together in deadly conflict, and that Warren had only preserved Hugh from a murderer’s guilt by himself becoming, in a moment of despair, perhaps Hugh’s unwilling and unwitting executioner.
He glanced once more at the senseless mass that lay huddled in blood upon the floor of the carriage. Alu-e or dead? What hope of recovery? What chance of restitution? What room for repentance? If Hugh lived, would he clear Warren? or would he die in some hospital with a lie on his lips, condemning his enemy for the very assault he had himself so madly yet deliberately committed? What matter to Warren? Whichever way things happened to turn, the pain would be almost the same for Elsie. Concealment was now the only possible plan. He must conceal it all all, all, from Elsie.
The train was slowing round a dangerpus curve a curve where the line makes a sharp angle round a projecting point a triumph of engineering, experts consider it with the sheer rock, rising straight above, and the blue sea dimpling itself into ripples below. He moved to the door, and gazed anxiously out. No room to jump just there; the rock and sea hemmed him in too closely. But beyond, by the torrent, a loose bank of earth on the farther side might break his fall, if he chose to risk it. Madness, no doubt, ay, almost suicide; but with only two minutes more to Mentone, he had no time to think if it were madness or wisdom: time only to act, to act for the best, on the spur of the moment, while action of some sort still was possible. At such times, indeed, men do not reason: they follow only the strongest and deepest impulse. Warren Relf did not wait to argue out the results of his conduct with himself. If he leaped from the train, he must almost certainly be stunned or maimed, perhaps even killed outright by the concussion. At best, he must soon be taken by the myrmidons of justice and accused of the murder..To get away unperceived, along that single track of open coast, backed up in the rear by high mountains, was simply impossible. Had he stopped to reason, he might have remained where he was and lost all. But he did not stop to reason; he only felt and felt profoundly. His instincts urged him to leap while there was still time. He opened the door as he reached th torrent and looking out upon the bank with caut deliberation, prepared to jump for it at the proper moment, The train was slowing much more distinctly now thought the brake must be put on hard. He could s jump as he reached the corner without serious danger He stepped with one foot on to the open footboard wasn’t much to risk for Elsie. A single plunge, and all would be settled.
CHAPTER L.
THE CAP MARTIN CATASTROPHE.
As he paused there one second, before he jumped, he wad dimly aware of a curious fact that caught his attention, sideways, even at that special moment of doubt and danger: many other doors on the landward side of the train stood also open, and other passengers beside himself, with fear and surprise depicted visibly on their pale faces were stepping out, irresolute, just as he himself had donn, upon the narrow footboard. Could they have heard the struggle? he wondered vaguely to himself. Could they have gained some hasty inkling of the tragic event that had taken place, so secretly, all unknown as he supposed, in his own compartment? Had some neighboring traveler caught faintly the muffled sounds of a desperate fight? Had he suspected an attack upon some innocent passenger? Had he signalled the guard to stop the train? for it was slowing still, slowing yet more sensibly and certainly each moment. More and more pale faces now appeared at the doors; and a Frenchman standing on the footboard of the next compartment, a burly person of military appearance, with au authoritative air, cried aloud in a voice of quick command, “Sautez, done! Sautez!” At the word, Warren leaped, he knew not why, from the doomed carriage. The Frenchma’n leaped at the selfsame moment. All down the train, a dozen or two of passengers followed suit as if by a concerted order. Warren had no idea in his own mind what was really happening, but he knew the train had slackened speed immensely, and that he had landed on his feet and hands on the rubbly bank with no more result, so far as he himself could see just then, than a sprained ankle and some few bleeding wounds on his knees and elbows.
Next instant a horrible crash resounded through the air, and bellowed and echoed with loud reverberation from the rocky walls of those sheer precipices. Thud, thud, thud followed close on the crash, as carriage after carriage shocked fiercely against the engine and the compartments in front of it Then a terrible sight met his eyes. The train had just reached the ledge of cliff beyond, and with a wild rocking disappeared all at once over the steep side down into the sea below. Nothing inlife is more awful in its unexpectedness than a great railway accident. Before Warren had even time to know what was taking place by his side, it was all over. The train had fallen in one huge mass over the edge of the cliff, and Hugh Massinger, with his eleven thousand pounds safe in his pocket, was hurried away without warning or reprieve into ten fathoms deep of blue Mediterranean.
Everybody remembers the main features of that terrific accident, famous in the history of French railway disasters as the Cap Martin catastrophe. Shortly after passing Roquebrune station (where the through-trains do not stop), one of the engine-wheels became loosened by a violent shock against a badly-laid sleeper, and, thus acting as a natural brake, brought the train almost to a standstill for a few seconds, just opposite the very dangerous ledge known locally as the Borrigo escarpment. The engine there left the rails with a jerk, and many of the passengers, seeing something serious was likely to take place, seized the opportunity, just before the crash, of opening the doors on the landward side, and leaping from the train while it had reached its slowest rate of motion, on the very eve of its final disaster. One instant later, the engine oscillated violently and stopped altogether; the other carriages telescoped against it; and the entire train, thrown off its balance with a terrible wrench, toppled over the sheer precipice at the side into the deep water that skirts the foot of the neighboring mountains. That was the whole familiar story as the public at large came, bit by bit, to learn it afterwards. But for a moment, the stunned and horrified passengers on the bank of the torrent only knew that a frightful accident had taken place with incredible rapidity, and that the train itself, with many of their fellow travelers seated within, had sunk like lead in the twinkling of an eye to the bottom of the bay, leaving the few survivors there on dry land aghast at the inexpressible suddenness and awfulness of this appalling calamity.
As for Warren Relf, amid the horror of his absorbing life-and-death struggle with Hugh Massinger, and the abiding awe of its terrible consummation, he had never even noticed the angry jerking of the loosened wheel, the whirr that jarred through the shaken carriages, the growing oscillation from side to side, the evident imjninence of some alarming accident. Sudden as the catastrophe was to all, to him it was more sudden and unexpected than to any one. Till the actual crash itself came, indeed, he did not realize why the other passengers were hanging on so strangely to the narrow footboard. The whole episode happened in so short a space of time thirty seconds at best that he had no opportunity to collect and recover his scattered senses. He merely recognized at first in some stunned and shattered fashion that he was well out of the fatal train, and that a dozen sufferers lay stretched in evident pain and danger on the low bank of earth beside him.
For all the passengers had not fared so well in their escape as he himself had done. Many of them had suffered serious hurt in their mad jump from the open doorway, alighting on jagged points of broken stone, or roll
ing down the sides of the steep ravine into the dry bed of the winter torrent. The least injured turned with one accord to help and tend their wounded companions. But as for the train itself, it had simply disappeared. It was as though it had never been. Scarcely a sign of it showed on the unruffled water. Falling sheer from the edge of that precipitous crag into the deep bay, it had sunk like a stone at once to the very bottom. Only a few fragments of broken wreckage appeared here and there floating loose upon the surface. Hardly a token remained beside to show the outer world where that long line of laden carriages had toppled over bodily into the profound green depths that still smiled so sweetly between Roquebrune and Mentone.
For a while, distracted by this fresh horror, Warren could only think of the dead and wounded. His ow r n torn and blood-stained condition excited no more attention or curiosity now on the part of the bystanders than that of many others among his less fortunate fellow-passengers. Nor did he even reflect with any serious realization that Elsie was saved and his own character practically vindicated. The new shock had deadened the sense and vividness of the old one. In the face of so awful and general a calamity as this, his own private fears and doubts and anxieties seemed to shrink for the moment into absolute insignificance.
In time, however, it began slowly to dawn upon his bewildered mind that other trains might come up from Monaco or Mentone and dash madly among the broken debris of the shattered carriages. Whatever caused their own accident might cause accidents also to approaching engines. Moreover, the wounded lay scattered about on all sides upon the track, some of them in a condition in which it might indeed be difficult or even dangerous to remove them. Somebody must certainly go forward to Mentone to warn the chef de gare and to fetch up assistance. After a hurried consultation with his nearest neighbors, Warren took upon himself the task of messenger. He started off at once on this needful errand, and plunged with a heart now strangely aroused into the deep darkness of the last remaining tunnel.
His sprained ankle caused him terrible pain at every step; but the pain itself, joined with the consciousness of performing an imperative duty, kept his mind from dwelling too much for the moment on his own altered yet perilous situation. As he dragged one foot wearily after the other through that long tunnel, his thoughts concentrated themselves for the time being on but one object to reach Mentone and prevent any further serious accident When he arrived at the station, however, and dispatched help along the line to the other sufferers from the terrible disaster, he had time to reflect in peace for a while upon the sudden change this great public calamity had wrought in his own private position. The danger of misapprehension had been removed by the accident as if by magic. Unless he himself chose to reveal the facts, n soul on earth need ever know a word of that desperate struggle with mad Hugh Massinger in the wrecked railway carriage. Even supposing the bodies were ultimately dredged up or recovered by divers, no suspicion could now possibly attach to his own conduct. The wound on Hugh’s head would doubtless be attributed to the fall alone; though the chance of the body being recognizable at all after so horrible a catastrophe would indeed be slight considering the way the carriages had doubled up like so much trestle-work upon one another before finally falling. Elsie was saved; that much at least was now secured. She need know nothing. Unless he himself were ever tempted to tell her the ghastly truth, that terrible episode of the death-struggle in the doomed train might remain forever a sealed book to the woman for whose sake it had all been enacted.
Warren’s mind, therefore, was made up at once. All things considered, it had become a sacred duty for him now to hold his tongue forever and ever about the entire incident. No man is bound to criminate himself; above all, no man is bound to expose himself when innocent to an unjust yet overwhelming suspicion of murder. But that was not all. Elsie’s happiness depended entirely upon his rigorous silence. To tell the whole truth, even to her, would be to expose her shrinking and delicate nature to a painful shock, as profound as it was unnecessary, and as lasting as it was cruel. The more he thought upon it, the more plain and clear did his duty shine forth before him. Chance had supplied him with a strange means of honorable escape from what had seemed at first sight an insoluble dilemma. It would be folly and worse, under his present conditions, for him to refuse to profit by its unconscious suggestion.
Yet more: he must decide at once without delay upon his line of action. News of the catastrophe would be telegraphed, of course, immediately to England. Elsie would most likely learn the whole awful episode that very evening at her hotel in London: he could hear the very cries of the street boys ringing in his ears: “Speshul Edition. Appalling Railway Accident on the Riviayrer! Great Loss of Life! A Train precipitated into the Mediterranean!” If not, she would at any rate read the alarming news in an agony of terror in the morning papers. She knew Warren himself w r as returning to San Remo by that very train. She did not know that Hugh was likely to be one of his fellow-passengers. She must not hear of the accident for the first time from the columns of the “Times” or the ‘Tall Mall Gazette.” He must telegraph over at once and relieve beforehand her natural anxiety for her future husband’s safety. But Hugh’s name and fate need not be mentioned, at least for the present; he could reserve that revelation for a more convenient season. To publish it, indeed, would be in part to incriminate himself, or at least to arouse unjust suspicion.
He drove to the telegraph office, worn out as he was with pain and excitement, and dispatched a hasty message that moment to Elsie: “There has been a terrible accident to the train near Mentone, but I am not hurt, at least to speak of only a few slight sprains and bruises. Particulars in papers. Affectionately, Warren.” And then he drove back to the scene of the catastrophe.
It was a week before all the bodies were dredged up by relays of divers from the wreck of that ill-fated and submerged train. Hugh Massinger’s was one of the last to be recovered. It was found, minus a large part of the clothing. The sea had torn off his coat and shirt. The eleven thousand pounds in French bank-notes never turned up at all again. His money indeed had perished with him.
They buried all that remained of that volcank life on the sweet and laughing hillside at Mentone. A plain marble cross marks the spot where he rests. On the plinth stand graven those prophetic lines from the plaintive proem to “A Life’s Philosophy “-
“Here, by the haven with the hoary trees, O fiery poet’s heart, lie still:
No longer strive amid tempestuous seas To curb wild waters to thy lurid will.
Above thy grave Wan olives wave, And oleanders court deep-laden bees.”
That nought of fulfilment might be wanting to his prayer, Warren Relf with his own hand planted a blushing oleander above the mound where that fiery poet’s heart lay still forever. He had nothing but pity in his soul for Hugh’s wasted powers. A splendid life, marred in the making by its own headstrong folly. And Winifred, who loved him, and whose heart he broke, lay silent in the self-same grave beside him.
CHAPTER LI.
NEXT OF KIN WANTED.
The recovery of Hugh’s body from the shattered train gave Warren Relf one needful grain of internal comfort. He identified that pale and wounded corpse with reverent care, and waited in solemn suspense and unspoken anxiety for the result of the customary post-mortem examination. The doctor’s report reassured his soul. Death had resulted, so the medical evidence conclusively proved, not from the violent injuries observed on the skull, and apparently produced, they said, by a blow against the carriage door, but from asphyxiation, due to drowning. Hugh was still alive then, when the train went over! His heart still beat and his breath still came and went feebly till the actual moment of the final catastrophe. It was the accident, not Warren’s hand, that killed him. Innocent as Warren knew himself to be, he was glad to learn from this authoritative source that even unintentionally he had not made himself Hugh Massinger’s accidental executioner.
But in any case they must break the news gently to Elsie. Warren’s presence wa
s needed in the south for the time being, to see after Winifred’s funeral and other necessary domestic arrangements. So Edie went over to England on the very first day after the fact of Hugh’s disappearance in the missing train had become generally known to the little world of San Remo, to soften the shock for her with sisterly tenderness. By a piece of rare good fortune, Hugh Massinger’s name was not mentioned at all in the earlier telegrams, even after it was fairly well known at Mentone and Monte Carlo that the lucky winner whose success was in everybody’s mouth just then, had perished in one of the lost carriages. The dispatches only spoke in vague terms of “an English gentleman lately arrived on the Riviera, who had all but succeeded in breaking the bank that day at Monte Carlo, and was returning to San Remo, elated by success, with eleven thousand pounds of winnings in his pocket.” It was not in the least likely that Elsie would dream of recognizing her newly bereaved cousin under this highly improbable and generalized description especially when Winifred, as she well knew, was lying dead meanwhile, the victim of his cold and selfish cruelty, at the pension at San Remo. Edie would be the first to bring her the strange and terrible news of Hugh’s sudden death. Warren himself stopped behind at Mentone, as in duty bound, to identify the body formally at the legal inquiry.
He had another reason, too, for wishing to break the news to Elsie through Edie’s mouth rather than personally. For Edie knew nothing, of course, of the deadly struggle in the doomed train, of that hand-to-hand battle for life and honor; and she could therefore with truth unfold the whole story exactly as Warren wished Elsie first to learn it. For her, there was nothing more to tell than that Hugh, with incredible levity and brutal want of feeling, had gone over to Monte Carlo to gamble openly at the public tables, on the very days while his poor young wife, killed inch by inch by his settled neglect, lay dead in her lonely lodging at San Remo: that he had returned a couple of evenings later with his ill-gotten gains upon the fated train: and that, falling over into the sea with the carriages from which Warren just barely escaped with dear life, he was drowned in his place in one of the shattered and sunken compartments. That was all; and that was bad enough in all conscience. What need to burden Elsie’s gentle soul any further with the more hideous concomitants of that unspeakable tragedy?
