hours, and it’s clane disthracted I am. I’ve got ‘chainless’ twice
on one page, and so sure as I put down that blessed word I know I’ll
have to tear up the lot. There it goes!” He tore the sheets across and
across and flung them at the paper-basket. “There was rather a sweet
girl in it, too; I’ll use her up some day for a three-thousander. You
were saying—”
“Will you come round the works with me and Charlesworth?”
“What, again? I’ve done it once this day.”
“I want to go round in the dinner-hour, while the men are out. There’s
something up, I’d swear it, and Charlesworth says the same.”
“If it’s anything exciting, I’m your man,” said Lucian, completing his
costume with a pair of carpet slippers and a white pith helmet, in
which he looked as swarthy as a Hindoo. “Anyway, this is the last time.
Come on, and I’ll post my letter to her on the way.”
He looked at Farquhar, gleefully anticipating a flash of jealousy,
and he had his wish. He laughed, tossed up the letter and caught it,
and smote Farquhar on the shoulder as they went down-stairs. “Only a
fortnight more, sonny, and then we shall know!”
But Farquhar did not find an answer. Prudence and friendship combined
to keep his wild-beast jealousy in order, but he never even tried to
cast it out.
In the porch they found Charlesworth waiting impassive, drawn back
into the shade. Summer had come suddenly upon them with a burning
heat; the roads were padded with dust, herbs drooped as if they were
broken, brick walls fumed like the outposts of Hades. Creeping up from
the south, certain blue, hazy clouds, their scrolled rims tinged with
amber and saffron, were surely invading the sky. In the quarry not a
man was left; the intense heat, radiated and reflected from the granite
walls, made the place a purgatory. Mica crystals scintillated in the
grey dust. The noonday sun was shining straight down into the pit; the
shrunken river, like a strip of blue satin, crept without coolness
below along the cliffs; only under the great rock, which stood out
now like a wen on the face of the hill, was any shadow to be found.
Towards that shade Lucian promptly made his way, and there sat down on
a wheelbarrow.
All the preliminaries were over, and the rock was ready to be blasted.
On three sides it stood free, and across the fourth, at the back of
the block, ranged the drilled holes following the line of fracture
between the fine stone and the coarser. With what care Charlesworth
had assigned and executed the boring and the tamping Lucian knew; yet
the quarry-master was now prepared to examine it all again, patiently
testing what could be tested, rigorously fulfilling his duty according
to the laws of a pride which forbade imperfections. Farquhar helped
him; Lucian, who was really a superfluous person, sat on his barrow and
gibed at both.
A steam-whistle called the men back to work at one o’clock. Hidden
behind the rock, Lucian had a good view of them as they trooped in,
and he was surprised by their behaviour. The Belgians are by nature
friendly and polite; as many as knew Lucian (and nine-tenths of them
did) had always for him a smile, a wave of the hat, a word of kind
greeting; but Charlesworth was severely ignored. One youth went to
the length of a long nose behind the manager’s back. An English lad
of his own age forthwith fell upon him, and after a brief and silent
struggle proceeded to wipe the ground with his prostrate enemy until
he craved for mercy; but the boy had merely expressed the feelings of
his elders. Another point which perplexed Lucian was the silence of the
men; a few were whispering together and glancing between their words at
Charlesworth, but the usual lively chatter was not to be heard.
“Not much of the peace-on-earth business here, is there?” Charlesworth
remarked to the philosopher on the wheelbarrow. “I don’t go around in
these lanes after sundown without my revolver.”
“Think they’d go as far as that?”
“Don’t know; they hate me like poison, anyway. I can put up with that
now we’ve got this business through; I guess we’ll pretty soon see
who’s master here.”
Lucian nodded. He was not so sure as Charlesworth that force is the
best preventive of rebellion; in fact, he held the heretical idea that
he could have managed the men better himself.
“You going to stay here till the thing’s going to pop?”
“I mean to stay right here till Mr. Farquhar’s lighted the fuse.
There’ll be time then to clear out; it’ll take ten minutes before it
explodes. I don’t want any one meddling with these cartridges.”
Lucian had no wish to face the sun before he was forced to; he waited
with Charlesworth under the rock. Both were excited. Farquhar, standing
beside the igniter thirty feet away, was noticeably nonchalant. The
warning whistle sounded at five minutes to two; and, as so often
before, the workers swarmed away to places of shelter, some to the
summit of the pit, others into chambers cut in the rock where no
shock of explosion could reach them. Farquhar gave them five minutes’
grace. A bell sounded; and the watchers saw him stoop and fire the
fuse. Immediately Charlesworth uncrossed his legs and stepped towards
the gate; and immediately after came a terrific detonation, a terrific
eruption of rock, black smoke, and flame and fumes and flying crags;
and then the collapse, as it were, of the firmament itself; and,
lastly, darkness.
* * * * *
Those who saw it said that at the moment of explosion a huge ball of
smoke puffed out and immediately came rolling over and over in black
convolutions, rent by ghastly chasms and caverns of sulphurous gloom.
They said that the fire flashed out starwise, radiating in a dozen
spokes of gold from one common centre; and that the second detonation
(for there were two) was more violent than the first. Farquhar saw
nothing of this. He was hurled to the earth by the first shock and
pinned down there under the fragments during the second; and when
he found his senses and sat up he came near fainting again, for the
pit was poisoned with fumes. He fell back, and, lying face downward,
breathed in the less polluted lower air until the inrushing wind had
time to sweeten that above. Then he made another effort, and began to
shake off the rocks which had fallen on him. He was horribly bruised;
another man would have been disabled. But Farquhar was by nature
insensitive to suffering, and, besides, his will scorned to submit to
the weakness of his body; he refused to be fettered by pain. This man
of many sins was not planning for his own safety; he was remembering
only that Lucian had been standing under the rock destroyed, and he
swore at the impediments that delayed him as though he could wither
them up by the fire of his curses. He struggled free, and saw lying
under him the fragments of the detonator, with a length of fuse
attached. The appearance of the fuse surprised him, and he took it up.
Crossed threads of orange worsted ran over it. By that mark he knew
it for what it was: not the ordinary slow fuse which should have been
used, but the other, instantaneous kind, where gunpowder is replaced by
a quick match, which burns at the rate of thirty feet per second. Now
the cause of the catastrophe was clear. Some one had substituted this
for the proper fuse, and, to conceal the change, had picked out the
distinctive orange threads. Only this piece, hidden in the body of the
detonator, had escaped notice to show the manner of their treachery.
Farquhar dismissed the authors of the crime to perdition, along with
their instrument. Now he was standing up and could see the ruin that
had been wrought; the beautiful stone, destined for such fine purposes,
was shattered, almost pulverized. It was not till afterwards, when the
evidence came to be weighed, that he realised how this had come about;
for the substitution of the quick fuse should have made a difference in
the time of the explosion but not in its results. The truth was that
only half the strands had been changed; the rest were left as slow
fuse; so that instead of one there were two explosions, which, acting
separately, broke the rock to pieces. But Farquhar cared little for his
ruined enterprise. He looked round the smoking amphitheatre, he saw the
faces of the men who had come with him from England, who were of one
blood with those entombed; he lifted his arm, from which the sleeve had
been wrenched together with part of the flesh, and called out to them
in their native tongue:
“Men, there are two Englishmen buried under these rocks; it’s our
business to get them out.”
The strange acoustic properties of the quarry carried his words to
every man there. He put a point to them by himself lifting a pick,
which the explosion had cast at his feet, and beginning to work. In
two minutes a dozen men were working at his side; in ten, every soul,
native or foreign, was taking his part. To do the men justice, murder
had not been in their thoughts; they had aimed only to spoil the rock.
If the manager, who usually fired the mines, should happen to get hurt,
it would be a lamentable incident; but the presence of Charlesworth and
Lucian immediately under the rock they had not foreseen, and, indeed,
had not known of till Farquhar spoke. Now they could only hope to atone
by willing labour.
Through all that long hot summer afternoon they toiled and toiled and
toiled. Men from the village of Petit-Fays volunteered to relieve
those who were spent, and took their turn with the pick in rotation,
but Farquhar refused to leave work. He tied a strip of linen round his
wounded arm, which grew more painful when the muscles contracted; but
he went on digging. He knew that his immense and disciplined strength
had a special value. Mentally he could not rest and physically he would
not, though the men began to look at one another as the hours passed
in vain. Sunset found them still working; and the gracious coolness of
night with its million stars. At last, at midnight, one of the English
workmen (the same whom Lucian had liked so much) came to Farquhar and
said, very respectfully:
“Beg pardon, sir, but is it any use going on?”
“Use? I should hope so,” said Farquhar, straightening his shoulders and
pushing back his fair hair. “What do you mean?”
“Me and my mates would be willing to work on any time if there was any
chance of getting either of them out alive—”
“D’you mean to say you think there’s _no_ chance?”
“We’re afraid not, sir,” said the first man; and a murmur of assent
went up from the others, who had left work and clustered round.
Farquhar’s brows came together, and he stared at them as though he
could not understand their speech.
“You say there’s no chance? I say that’s nonsense. I’d never have
thought that Englishmen would shirk.”
“We ain’t shirking,” said the spokesman, rather proudly. “I’d lay there
isn’t one of us as wouldn’t be ready to work his hands off if there
was any chanst at all; but there ain’t, not a mite. I seen a good many
blow-ups in my time, and I say there’s no man could be living now after
all that mess had fallen on him. If they wasn’t killed outright they’d
have been stifled. Anybody as knows’ll say the same.”
Again the murmured assent followed his words.
Farquhar still stood staring, but his face changed, cleared, hardened.
Fever was running riot in his veins, and he was not wholly master of
his words, else he would not have laid such a charge against them; for
he knew it was not true. They had worked till they were spent; the pose
of their figures as they waited showed it more plainly than words. And
against that mass of granite all their toil seemed futile. Of what use
to continue?
“You’re quite right, and I beg your pardon, men. Knock off to-night,
then; we’ll take a fresh spell at it to-morrow, for I mean my friends
to have Christian burial. I shall see that all you’ve done to-day is
not forgotten.”
As he had first begun work, so now he was first to leave off; he leaned
his pick against a stone and turned homeward. In ten minutes the
deserted quarry was left to the dews and the night.
XVIII
THE OTHER LEFT
Farquhar went home in a mood of black, resentful anger, which he aimed,
since his creed disallowed a personal deity, at the callous rocks and
the soulless forces of nature. He forgot grief as he had forgotten
pain. He walked on, swinging his injured arm and cursing as he went;
and in this temper he came to the hotel, and received the sympathy of
a number of uninteresting people without betraying a vestige of his
actual sentiments. They thought him magnanimous, heroic, oppressed with
bitter grief; and with the good taste of their nation they left him
alone with his sorrow.
In the salon place was laid for one, and the sight sickened Farquhar;
it was like the turning of a screw in his breast. He paced the room for
five minutes before he could bring himself even to sit down. There were
two letters for him on his plate, blue on the thick white china. Bills
they seemed, enclosed in thin blue envelopes of the ordinary oblong
business shape; he took them up idly and glanced at the address. One
was for him and one for Lucian: both in Dolly Fane’s handwriting.
Farquhar tore the envelope open and read:
“DEAR MR. FARQUHAR,—I have now made up my mind upon the question which
you asked me. If you are still interested, and care to come and see me
next time you are in England, I will tell you my decision.
“Sincerely yours,
“MIRABELLE FANE.”
The ink was bluish instead of black; the postmark Dove Green instead
of Monkswell; the paper unlike Dolly’s stationery; but the handwriting
was unmistakable. Farquhar crushed up the note in his strong fingers,
as though to weld it into a solid mass. That she meant to reject him
he could not doubt. He took up Lucian’s letter; he saw with fierce joy
that she had omitted to seal it. Now at last, then, had come the chance
which he had coveted, the chance of reading one of her letters; and
of them all he would most dearly have desired to read this, wherein
without doubt she opened her heart to her lover. To intrude into that
sanctuary was the prime wish of his heart.
He called to Laurette for a basin of hot water. If this last
love-letter of his dead friend were found torn open, he thought it
might seem strange; and he wished to keep up to the end the fiction of
his frank and honourable nature. Laurette had been surprised by his
request for hot water; the smile with which he thanked her sent her
away wondering whether he had gone mad. Farquhar took care to lock her
out before beginning his delightful task. The water was steaming hot.
He held the flap of the envelope low down in the vapour, intending to
loosen the gum; the thought that Lucian was dead and buried beyond
interference under several tons of granite was sweeter than honey,
though he would have liked to bestow immortality upon Lucian’s spirit,
that he might see this desecration and be powerless to protest. The
paper turned grey and began to curl up from the edges; it detached
itself from the underleaf with a small distinct sound. Farquhar drew
out the enclosure and opened it with insolent triumph.
Long he sat there, motionless, the letter in his hand; but he did not
read one word of it. After ten minutes he refolded it and replaced it
and resealed the envelope and laid it down. He unlocked the door and
called to Laurette: “I’m going back to the quarry.”
“But, monsieur, wherefore?”
“To find Mr. de Saumarez. Whether he’s alive or dead, I’ll not rest
till I have him. Tell your brothers, if you like; I shall work, whether
I’m helped or no.” He passed her by in the hall with a look so fierce
and fell that the girl shrank out of his way.
One o’clock. The sweet plaintive tone of the church clock came down the
valley from Vresse as Farquhar began to work. That mountain of granite,
could he ever hope to remove it? He could not hope, but he could do
it. He had gone through incredible exertions on that day, he was
brought into pain by every stroke of the pick, he had neither hope to
strengthen him, nor that excitement kin to delirium which had exalted
him before to exalt him now; but the strength of his single will kept
him unremittingly at the vain labour. And the force at the back of his
will was the prime force of his life: devotion. All evil passions in
his nature had in turn ranged themselves against that nobler quality,
and been defeated. If a man ever was the slave of love, that was Noel
Farquhar. He had purpose and lust and will to leave Lucian stifling
under the granite, and to pry into his letter, and to marry Dolly
in triumph over his grave; but that purpose and lust and will were
bound by one stronger than he, and Noel Farquhar was labouring under
incalculable difficulties to get for his friend the joy which he
coveted for himself.
Laurette’s three brothers presently joined him, beginning to work in
silence just over the spot where Farquhar judged that the victims
were buried. The explosion had so greatly altered the configuration
of the hill that certainty was not possible. Not one of the three had
handled a pick before, and at first they damaged their own ankles more
often than they removed any granite. There was a gruesome comicality
in the scene; for Farquhar’s silent fury of work seemed to hallow the
place like a church so that they dared not speak, and the three young
Belgians hopping about and suppressing curses would have made Lucian
laugh in his grave could he have seen them. Towards dawn a blood-red
oval moon rose above the pines and dropped a tremulous ladder of
crimson across the stream; white mists spun ghost-dances over it. A
cold change and a strange wind heralded the day’s birth; the dawn
itself quickened its white pulse in an empty sky. Virgin light came
first, then warmth and colour, like the pink flutings of a shell, and
the first timorous love-notes of the birds; and the three brothers
looked at one another, and thought of _déjeuner_, and wondered how
long the Englishman would continue to work. They themselves did not
pause; and presently the youngest found his pick striking against solid
rock amid the shale. He tried to work round it, but could not find the
edge. The others came to help him, and soon they guessed that they
had come on a large block of granite, expelled from the cliff by the
first explosion, but hidden under the splinters from the second. So
massive was it that to split it up by hand and cart it away seemed an
impossibly slow process; yet they dared not use the blasting-powder,
for the sake of what might lie beneath. In this perplexity they leaned
on their picks and looked to Farquhar for directions, Félix, the
soft-handed _pâtissier_, surreptitiously wrapping his handkerchief
round his blistered fingers. Farquhar’s answer came briefly: “Dig round
it.”
They fell to work, and before long discovered that, though the
superficies of the block was large, its depth was small; it was, as
it were, a scale split off the face of the cliff. Consequently, they
might hope to raise it by levers; and again they turned to Farquhar for
permission to fetch them. But a sombre fire dwelt in his eyes, and his
answer came sternly: “Dig deeper.”
Wondering at first, then themselves infected by his deep excitement,
they obeyed him; and suddenly little Gustave, with an involuntary
“Sacré!” fell flat on his face. The point of his pick had gone through,
under the slab, to some cavity beneath. As Félix stooped to examine
it, Farquhar thrust him sans ceremony out of the way and himself knelt
down to explore. He could not find bottom, and he sprang up again, his
excitement flaming out as he called to them to widen the hole.
Now the toil went apace and the stones flew ringing aside. A gap
appeared, and widened. Farquhar dropped on his knees and called,
“Lucian! Lucian!” No answer. Up again and on with the work, and
presently the gap was wide enough to admit a man’s head. Farquhar tried
to crawl through, failed, and set the youngest of the boys to try; but
it could not be done. Farquhar’s impatience would not wait till the
stone was uncovered. He knelt again, and thrust his head and the upper
part of his shoulders under the slab; then, resting his palms flat on
the ground, he put all his colossal strength forth into the effort to
raise it. It weighed—how much? Two tons, the eldest youth hazarded:
a guess certainly exaggerated; for, as they watched, fascinated by
the display of a power such as they had never imagined, fearing
each moment to see him fail and faint, as they gazed and listened
they heard the creakings of rending rocks and saw the gap grinning
wider and Farquhar slowly raising himself on his hands and his bent
arms straightening out till they stood firm as columns upbearing the
architrave of a temple—until Farquhar stopped, and paused to see if
the slab would subside, and then rose to his feet, white as ashes, his
face seamed with grim lines and streaming with sweat. “Get a light,” he
said. “I’m going in.”
One of them had a box of the odious little sulphur-matches so common
abroad, which kindle with difficulty and burn at first with a blue
light and an inexpressible smell, but are not easily extinguished.
Neither had a candle, and neither was in the mood to go and fetch
one. Farquhar struck several matches at once, and so soon as they
burned steadily stepped down into the darkness. They could see the
flame illumining his hair and reddening the side of his face, but of
the aspect of the vault, nothing. Then they went out, or, rather,
he dropped them. Sick with excitement, they heard him saying, in
commonplace tones:
“Lend a hand, will you? I can’t get them up over the edge.”
He had Lucian’s body in his arms then, and, leaning downward into
the dark, the three boys succeeded in dragging him into the air.
Charlesworth’s huge frame was extricated with more difficulty; after,
came Farquhar himself, who needed no help. He left Charlesworth to live
or die as fate decreed, and went straight to Lucian.
Neither was dead, though Lucian was near it; long after Charlesworth
was able to speak and walk, and even help to revive his companion in
suffocation, he still lay deeply unconscious. His frail life was so
easily imperilled; and they had first been half poisoned by fumes and
afterwards half stifled by their own breath. At the first explosion
the slab had split off and fallen like a roof above them; the second
blast piled rocks upon it and made it the roof of a tomb. All this
Charlesworth narrated as he sat fanning Lucian’s face, himself deathly
white, with a jagged gash under his ear. Lucian looked like death
itself, but still he breathed; and with the aid of copious douches
of fresh water they brought him at last to consciousness. Farquhar
straightway threw him over his shoulder and carried him to the hotel,
leaving Charlesworth to follow as he might. Sad to say, the first use
which Lucian made of his recovered speech was to murmur feebly at
intervals, “I’m drunk—I’m drunk—O take me home to ma!”
At the hotel they received something like an ovation; and before ten
minutes had passed Laurette had told her aunt in the village, and the
aunt her husband, and half the men in Vresse were hurrying out to give
welcome. Nothing would content them but that Farquhar should make an
oration; and when he came out on the balcony, a ghastly figure with
his bloodless face and the blood-stained bandage stained afresh on
his arm, they cheered him like a king. Never was any one in Vresse so
popular as the unpopular English master; they adored him for purging
them from the guilt of blood. Even Charlesworth came in for a share
of the glorification, because he had not let himself be murdered; and
when they had shouted themselves hoarse, and trampled down all the
tobacco growing in Laurette’s garden, and drunk six glasses apiece
of Laurette’s most innocent beer, they went home wildly enthusiastic
and perfectly sober. Farquhar, having displayed his scars for their
edification with his usual ironical smile, went to his room to wash and
change before visiting Lucian. He conceived that for the present he
would have no more trouble with his workmen. Then, at last, he took the
two blue letters and went to Lucian’s room.