CYRIL WARING'S BROTHER.
It was nine o'clock that self-same night, and two men sat together
in a comfortable sitting-room under the gabled roofs of Staple
Inn, Holborn. It was as cosy a nook as any to be found within the
four-mile radius, and artistic withal in its furniture and decorations.
In the biggest arm-chair by the empty grate, a young man with a
flute paused for a moment, irresolute. He was a handsome young man,
expressive eyes, and a neatly-cut brown beard--for all the world
like Cyril Waring's. Indeed, if Elma Clifford could that moment have
been transported from her gloomy prison in the Lavington tunnel to
that cosy room at Staple Inn, Holborn, she would have started with
surprise to find the young man who sat in the arm-chair was to all
outer appearance the self-same person as the painter she had just
left at the scene of the accident. For the two Warings were truly
"as like as two peas"; a photograph of one might almost have done
duty for the photograph of the other.
The other occupant of the room, who leaned carelessly against the
mantelshelf, was taller and older; though he, too, was handsome,
but with the somewhat cynical and unprepossessing handsomeness of
a man of the world. His forehead was high; his lips were thin; his
nose inclined toward the Roman pattern; his black moustache was
carefully curled and twisted at the extremities. Moreover, he was
musical; for he held in one hand the bow of a violin, having just
laid down the instrument itself on the sofa after a plaintive duet
with Guy Waring.
"Seen this evening's paper, by the way, Guy?" he asked, after
a pause, in a voice that was all honeyed charm and seductiveness.
"I brought the St. James's Gazette for you, but forgot to give you
it; I was so full of this new piece of mine. Been an accident this
morning, I see, on the Great Southern line. Somewhere down Cyril's
way, too; he's painting near Chetwood; wonder whether he could
possibly, by any chance, have been in it?"
He drew the paper carelessly from his pocket as he spoke, and handed
it with a graceful air of inborn courtesy to his younger companion.
Everything that Montague Nevitt did, indeed, was naturally graceful
and courteous.
Guy Waring took the printed sheet from his hands without attaching
much importance to his words, and glanced over it lightly.
"At ten o'clock this morning," the telegram said, "a singular
catastrophe occurred in a portion of the Lavington tunnel on the
Great Southern Railway. As the 9.15 way-train from Tilgate Junction
to Guildford was passing through, a segment of the roof of the
tunnel collapsed, under pressure of the dislocated rock on top,
and bore down with enormous weight upon the carriages beneath it.
The engine, tender, and four front waggons escaped unhurt; but the
two hindmost, it is feared, were crushed by the falling mass of
earth. It is not yet known how many passengers, if any, may have
been occupying the wrecked compartments; but every effort is now
being made to dig out the debris."
Guy read the paragraph through unmoved, to the outer eye, though
with a whitening face, and then took up the dog-eared "Bradshaw"
that lay close by upon the little oak writing-table. His hand
trembled. One glance at the map, however, set his mind at rest.
"I thought so," he said quietly. "Cyril wouldn't be there. It's
beyond his beat. Lavington's the fourth station this way on the
up-line from Chetwood. Cyril's stopping at Tilgate town, you know--I
heard from him on Saturday--and the bit he's now working at's in
Chetwood Forest. He couldn't get lodgings at Chetwood itself, so
he's put up for the present at the White Lion, at Tilgate, and runs
over by train every day to Warnworth. It's three stations away--four
off Lavington. He'd have been daubing for an hour in the wood by
that time."
"Well, I didn't attach any great importance to it myself," Nevitt
went on, unconcerned. "I thought most likely Cyril wouldn't be
there. But still I felt you'd like, at any rate, to know about it."
"Oh, of course," Guy answered, still scanning the map in "Bradshaw"
close. "He couldn't have been there; but one likes to know. I think,
indeed, to make sure, I'll telegraph to Tilgate. Naturally, when a
man's got only one relation in the whole wide world--without being
a sentimentalist--that one relation means a good deal in life to
him. And Cyril and I are more to one another, of course, than most
ordinary brothers." He bit his thumb. "Still, I can't imagine how
he could possibly be there," he went on, glancing at "Bradshaw" once
more. "You see, if he went to work, he'd have got out at Warnworth;
and if he meant to come to town to consult his dentist, he'd have
taken the 9.30 express straight through from Tilgate, which gets
up to London twenty-five minutes earlier."
"Well, but why to consult his dentist in particular?" Nevitt asked
with a smile. He had very white teeth, and he smiled accordingly
perhaps a little oftener than was quite inevitable. "You Warings
are so absolute. I never knew any such fellows in my life as you
are. You decide things so beforehand. Why mightn't he have been
coming up to town, for example, to see a friend, or get himself
fresh colours?"
"Oh, I said 'to consult his dentist,'" Guy answered, in the most
matter-of-fact voice on earth, suppressing a tremor, "because you
know I've had toothache off and on myself, one day with another,
for the whole last fortnight. And it's a tooth that never ached
with either of us before-this one, you see"--he lifted his lip with
his forefinger--"the second on the left after the one we've lost.
If Cyril was coming up to town at all, I'm pretty sure it'd be his
tooth he was coming up to see about. I went to Eskell about mine
myself last Wednesday."
The elder man seated himself and leaned back in his chair, with
his violin in his lap; then he surveyed his friend long and curiously.
"It must be awfully odd, Guy," he said at last, after a good hard
stare, "to lead such a queer sort of duplicate life as Cyril and
you do! Just fancy being the counterfoil to some other man's cheque!
Just fancy being bound to do, and think, and speak, and wish as he
does! Just fancy having to get a toothache, in the very same tooth
and on the very same day! Just fancy having to consult the identical
dentist that he consults simultaneously! It'd drive ME mad. Why,
it's clean rideeklous!"
Guy Waring looked up hastily from the telegraph form he was already
filling in, and answered, with some warmth--
"No, no; not quite so. It isn't like that. You mistake the situation.
We're both cheques equally, and neither is a counterfoil. Cyril
and I depend for our characters, as everybody else does, upon our
father and mother and our remoter progenitors. Only being twins,
and twins cast in very much the same sort of mould, we're naturally
the product of the same two parents, at the same precise point in
their joint life history; and therefore we're practically all but
identical."
As he rose from his desk, with the telegram in his hand, the porter
appeared at the door with letters. Guy seized them at once, with
some little impatience. The first was from Cyril. He tore it open
in haste, and skimmed it through rapidly. Montague Nevitt meanwhile
sat languid in his chair, striking a pensive note now and again
on his violin, with his eyes half closed and his lips parted. Guy
drew a sigh of relief as he skimmed his note.
"Just what I expected," he said slowly. "Cyril couldn't have
been there. He writes last night--the letter's marked 'Delayed in
transmission'; no doubt by the accident--'I shall come up to town
on Friday or Saturday morning to see the dentist. One of my teeth
is troublesome; I suppose you've had the same; the second on the
left from the one we've lost; been aching a fortnight. I want it
stopped. But to-morrow I really CAN'T leave work. I've got well
into the swing of such a lovely bit of fern, with Sardanapalus
just gleaming like gold in the foreground.' So that settles matters
somewhat. He can't have been there. Though, I think, even so, I'll
just telegraph for safety's sake and make things certain."
Nevitt struck a chord twice with a sweep of his hand, listened to
it dreamily for a minute with far-away eyes, and then remarked once
more, without even looking up, "The same tooth lost, he says? You
both had it drawn! And now another one aches in both of you alike!
How very remarkable! How very, very curious!"
"Well, that WAS queer," Guy replied, relaxing into a smile, "queer
even for us; I won't deny it; for it happened this way. I was over
in Brussels at the time, as correspondent for the Sphere at the
International Workmen's Congress, and Cyril was away by himself
just then on his holiday in the Orkneys. We both got toothache in
the self-same tooth on the self-same night; and we both lay awake
for hours in misery. Early in the morning we each of us got up--five
hundred miles away from one another, remember--and as soon as we
were dressed _I_ went into a dentist's in the Montagne de la Cour,
and Cyril to a local doctor's at Larwick; and we each of us had
it out, instanter. The dentists both declared they could save them
if we wished; but we each preferred the loss of a tooth to another
such night of abject misery."
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."