Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 5).djvu/377

"God!" he exclaimed, as he drained a glass of brandy and water and rose to go. "A life like this would kill me. Well, this shall be the last risk. If it turns out all right—as it must—I shall give this kind of business up. I shall have plenty then, and old Charlie will go off and live quietly and comfortably."

The rear guard of the seven o'clock Continental finished his last cup of tea, put on his thick winter coat, kissed his wife and baby girl, and took up his lantern preparatory to joining his train. He reached the station as the great engine was being coupled and gave the driver a cheery salute, which that official acknowledged with a surly growl.

"Something put Jimmy out to-night," he laughed to the fireman, a young, inexperienced fellow, making his trial trip, and passed on to make his inspection of things in general before starting.

At the last moment a richly-dressed gentleman, wearing a long fur coat, and carrying a large travelling rug, entered a first-class smoking compartment. This gentleman, whom numerous people on the platform recognised as he passed and saluted respectfully, was Eustace Margraf, Lsq. The carriage he got into was an empty one, and, lying full length on the seat, covered with his rug, he lit a cigar and composed himself to make the best of a long and tiresome railway journey. The guard blew his whistle, the great engine reproduced it in a loud, deep tone, and the train steamed slowly out of the station, twenty minutes late starting.

Left to his own reflections, which were none of the liveliest, and lulled by the motion of the train, our traveller soon fell into a fitful sleep, wherein he was haunted by dreams that wrought upon his brain until he was almost as nervous as he had been in his own room some hours before.

He awoke suddenly, with a vague sense that the train was travelling at a most unusual and unaccountable speed; and, as he leapt to his feet in half-dazed fright, they shot through Tunbridge—a place at which they were timed to make a ten minutes' stop—and he was conscious of seeing, as in a flash, a crowd of frightened and awe-struck faces looking at the train from the platform. He sank back on the cushioned seat, seized with a nameless terror. Time and space seemed to his overwrought nerves to be filled with tokens of some approaching calamity which he was powerless to prevent; the terrific speed and violent swaying of the train, the shrill howl of the ceaseless whistle, the terrible darkness and silence of everything outside his immediate surroundings, and the recollection of that crowd of terrified faces, all seemed to thrill him with a sense of impending horror, and the wretched man sat terror-stricken on his seat, a mere mass of highly-strung and delicate nerves.

"Suddenly a face passed the window."

Suddenly, as he looked into the black night, a face passed the window, as of someone walking the footboard to the engine; a stern-set face, as of one going to certain danger and needing all the pluck he possessed to carry him through; and at the apparition the traveller fairly shrieked aloud; but the face passed on and was gone.