SOLOMON'S REMINISCENCES.
There are wild places yet in the world, and primitive folk. Even in
England there are localities of which the phrase, "It is a hundred years
behindhand," still holds good; and so it was with Gethin. Its wind-swept
moors, its rock-bound coast, had inhabitants altogether differing from
the men of fields and farms; to Richard, a man of pleasure from the
town, they seemed a foreign race. They were rough in externals, but
kindly and genial at heart; given to hospitality, and, though good at a
bargain, by no means greedy of gain. Above all there were no beggars.
The poorest Gethin man would open a gate for you, or walk a hundred
yards out of his way to show you your road, without asking for, or even
expecting, a coin. They were, however, as delighted as surprised to get
it; and before the open-handed young artist had been a week in the place
he had demoralized it by his largesses. As, however, his smile and his
thanks always accompanied these presents, he was served more for love's
sake than the money's, and enjoyed a popularity which can not be
purchased, and which yet is impossible to be won by one who has nothing
to give. He had the reputation among these simple folks, who knew how to
be frugal themselves, of having a superfluity of wealth; his air and
manner showed he had been always used to be lavish (as indeed he had),
and nourished this delusion, which extended, though upon other grounds,
to the tenants of the little inn.
John Trevethick and his friend Solomon would not have been much
impressed with the expenditure of a few pounds by an improvident youth;
but the former was well aware that the guests of Carew of Crompton were
almost without exception very wealthy men, and he judged of Richard's
social position accordingly. He had no idea that his landscape-painting
was any thing else than an amusement--as it was practiced by half the
young ladies and gentlemen who visited Gethin in the summer months; he
took him for an amateur; and if he had seen his sketches, and been a
judge of art, he would have been only fortified in his conclusion. He
liked the young fellow upon his own account, though not so much as his
handsome face and pleasant manners, combined with his desire to please,
caused others to do; for Mr. Trevethick was not at all impressionable in
such matters. Richard hated him in his heart for the scanty crop of
regard he seemed to get out of him, notwithstanding all his pains; he
had never made so continued an effort to make himself agreeable and with
so small a result; but his self-love would have been more deeply wounded
had he known that his own exertions would not have even gained him what
they did, had they not been seconded by a hidden ally in the landlord's
breast. Richard's desire to conciliate was fully reciprocated by
Trevethick, who wished above all things to make friends with the friend
of Parson Whymper; only conciliation was so much out of his line. The
old man and the young had absolutely nothing in common except their love
for Harry.
Upon the other hand, John Trevethick and Solomon Coe were cast almost in
the same mould. Notwithstanding the former's superstition he was
intelligent and shrewd enough in practical matters, and had, indeed,
quite a genius for mechanics. Deprived of his underground occupation by
the catastrophe with which we are acquainted, he had set his wits to
work at home on the matters with which he had hitherto but physically
concerned himself; and the labor of his head had proved more lucrative
than that of his hand. He had invented several improvements in the
working machinery of the mine which had so nearly proved his tomb; these
had been adopted, with considerable profit to himself, in other places;
and the money thus acquired he had not frittered away (as is usual in
such cases) in speculative investments. In the interim between his
giving up his trade and his reaping the fruits of his inventions he had
tasted the bitterness of poverty, and that had made him very cautious.
But he had a small share in Dunloppel, which seemed likely to turn out
very profitable; and he had built the inn, the returns from which were
more than sufficient to support him--indeed, it was rumored that John
Trevethick had been laying by a pretty penny, and could hold his head
much higher if he pleased. His pleasures were certainly not expensive,
for they consisted in fancy iron-working, the results of which brought
him in a considerable sum; and in occasionally getting drunk, which,
being a publican, he could accomplish at the most reasonable figure. He
was a hard unlovable man, and interesting only as statistics may be said
to be as compared with literature--in a hard, practical way. If
superstitious, he was by no means religious; and, though honest, he was
grasping. He took time to resolve upon a matter; but, when once his
resolution was fixed, his will was iron, and his heart was stone. It was
certainly curious that one of Trevethick's character should have
entertained so long and freshly his sentiment of gratitude even to a man
that had saved his life at the expense of his own; but even this may
have had its roots in egotism. Had the person saved been his wife or his
daughter the feeling would not perhaps have been so enduring; and in
carrying it out, as he fully purposed to do, by bestowing Harry's hand
upon Solomon, he was certainly not uninfluenced by the fact that the
latter was, pecuniarily speaking, an excellent match.
Like himself, his intended son-in-law was the architect of his own
fortunes; but he had built them up in a different way. His youth had
been spent in the coal-mines of the north; and, though no lucky stroke
of the pick can there make one rich, as it can in other underground
localities, his strength and skill had met with their full reward. And
what he had gained he had not wasted. Pound after pound he had laid by,
until enough had been saved for investment; and it was Solomon's boast
in after-years that he had never got less than ten per cent. for any of
it. It was all ventured on underground speculations, some of them
hazardous enough--but all had prospered; and here John Trevethick's
judgment, though the old man himself had not the courage to follow it,
had been of great advantage to him. Every thing he touched turned, if
not to gold, at least to tin or copper; and before the lode ceased to
yield Solomon had sold his shares at a good premium, and placed the
proceeds in another pit. He had sown, as it were, his money in the
earth, and reaped a golden harvest. And now Dunloppel, his last
venture, seemed likely to prove his best: and it was another strand in
the strong bond between himself and Trevethick that the latter had also
a share in that undertaking. There are some men with whom a common
pecuniary interest is the most binding tie of sympathy of which their
nature is capable; and never had the landlord of the _Gethin Castle_
been more closely attached to his guest and son-in-law elect than at
this time, when Richard Yorke proposed to himself to part them; as
though a gilded summer skiff should thrust itself between two laden
coal-barges, and bid them budge.
It was at least a week before Solomon Coe could be induced to open his
lips before Richard, beyond the utterance of a few pithy sentences; not
that the smouldering embers of jealousy had been fanned in the mean
time--for Richard had been prudence itself in his behavior to Harry--but
because the miner could not comprehend the young fellow, and therefore
distrusted him. The light and airy manners, which were as natural to
Richard as was John Trevethick's ponderous cunning or his own
self-satisfied reticence, seemed to Solomon mere affectation, and even
his appearance effeminate and dandified; but when he saw that he wore no
other air when conversing with the pitmen of Dunloppel--an expedition
undertaken with himself at Richard's special invitation--and marked how
actively he climbed the tall, steep ladders, and how fearlessly he
trusted himself to the rope, he acquitted him of such artful fopperies.
Of Richard's intelligence he had formed a good opinion from the time
when the latter had enlisted himself upon his side in the argument
concerning superstition; and it flattered his vanity to find so sensible
and accomplished a young fellow deferring to his opinion upon all
practical points, and apparently desirous of obtaining his views upon
them.
There was one subject, the experience of his early years, upon which
Solomon was never averse to descant, could he once be got to talk at
all; and it was a certain token--as one, at least, of the company well
knew--that his prejudice against Richard was quite surmounted when
Solomon began to unfold to him, over their punch in the bar parlor, the
annals of his underground career. Often had he done so to Harry--like
another Othello (and almost as swarthy) narrating his adventures to his
Desdemona--but never had she been so pleased to listen as now, when she
needed but to seem to hear, and, without the penalty of reply, could
feed her eyes upon young Richard's listening face. It is hard when, in
the race for woman's favor, one has to waste one's breath in making the
running for one's rival.
And yet the talk of Solomon Coe was well worth listening to. He told of
the great war which is always being waged by man beneath the earth
against the powers of Water, and Fire, and Foul Air, and of the daring
deeds he had seen wrought against them. He told of coal-pits that had
been on fire from time immemorial, above which no snow would lie, by
reason of the heat beneath, and where the grass of the meadows was
always green. He told of others which had been suddenly inundated by a
neighboring river, or by the waters from old workings, let in by a
single unlucky blow, whereby scores and scores of strong men were
overwhelmed, whose corpses floated about for months in the dark drowned
pit before their fellows above-ground could get at them.
His speech was somewhat sullen and hesitating, and what he said was
interrupted by whiffs of smoke and sips of liquor; but the nature of the
subject was so absorbing that it needed no gifts of eloquence. It
interested Richard in spite of himself; and Solomon was not indifferent
to the flattery which the young artist's attention conveyed, and
scarcely needed the entreaties of Trevethick to persuade him to throw
off his native reticence. What he forgot, and had mentioned in former
narrations, the landlord supplemented; and when "Sol" became technical
and obscure the other performed the part of chorus or explainer. If the
former had been some gifted animal, and the latter its proprietor, he
could not have taken a greater pride in the exhibition of its talent
than did the landlord in these narrations. Now he would look at Richard,
and nod and wink, as though to bespeak his special attention to what was
coming; and now he would wave his pipe, like a dumb orchestra playing
slow music, to express the tremendous nature of a situation. Perhaps he
was genuinely impressed by these thrice-told tales--perhaps he was
endeavoring, by a feigned admiration for Sol's experiences and exploits,
to justify his choice of a son-in-law not altogether suited to his
Harry. To do the _raconteur_ justice, he was by no means so egotistic as
his aider and abettor, and Trevethick would express his regrets to
Richard that it was so hard to get Sol to dismiss generalities and talk
about himself. "It's on account of Harry being here, you see," explained
he behind his horny hand, but in a tone perfectly audible to the other
tenants of the bar parlor; "or else he would tell you how the timbering
of the pit once fell upon him, so as nothing was free but his head and
his left hand; and yet he never lost his wits in all his agony, but told
the men where to saw and what to do; but he don't like to boast before
the 'gal.'"
Then Richard, taking the hint, inquired of Solomon whether any incident
particularly striking had ever happened to himself during his
underground experience; and Solomon replied, with affected carelessness;
"No, not as I know on; nothing particular."
Then Trevethick broke in with, "What! not when you was shut up in the
seam at Dunston?"
"Oh yes, to be sure," said Sol, as though the recollection of the
circumstance had only just occurred to him; "there was _that_,
certainly; but it was when I was quite a boy. I was not quite seventeen
when Dunston Colliery was drowned. The Gatton poured right in upon it,
and they have not got the water out of it in places to this day. It was
always said that the pit was being worked too near the river; but that
was little thought about by those as was most concerned, and it never
disturbed the head of a lad like me, of course. It was in the afternoon
of the 12th of December, a date as I am not likely to forget, when the
thing happened. Two mates--one old man and a middle-aged one--and myself
were at work in a heading together, when suddenly we heard a noise like
thunder. 'That's never blasting,' says one. 'The Lord have mercy on us,'
cries the other; 'it's the river come in at last!' For, as I say, the
risk was quite well known, though it was considered small, and made a
frequent jest of. Nothing that ever I heard was equal to that noise; the
waves in Gethin caverns here, during storm, are a whisper to it; the
whole pit seemed to be roaring in upon us. We all ran up the gallery,
which, fortunately for us, had a great slope, and crouched down at the
end of it. We heard the water pouring in and filling all the workings
beneath us, and then pouring in and filling ours. It reached our feet,
and left us but a very limited space, in which the air was compressed,
when the noise of the inundation ceased. There was a singing in our
ears, so that we could scarcely hear one another speak. We knew that the
whole mine had become a lake by that time, and that it would take months
to drain her, if she was ever drained. We knew that we were buried alive
hundreds of feet beneath the earth; and yet we did not quite lose heart.
There was this gleam of hope: supposing that the next gallery, which was
on a higher level than our own, was not also flooded, we could be got at
through the seam. We did not know the fact that it was more than sixty
feet of solid coal, and would have taken under ordinary circumstances at
least four weeks to dig through; we only knew that, if a door of escape
was to open any where, it must open there. We kept tapping with the
heels of our boots at equal intervals against this wall."
"The miner's signal," explained the landlord, with a wave of his pipe.
"We felt that if we were once heard, and if hard work could do it, that
our mates would save us yet; and we encouraged one another as well as we
could. But presently the oil in our lamps gave out, and we were left in
darkness; and then our hope grew faint indeed. We had knocked for
four-and-twenty hours unintermittingly without any reply. We did not
cease, however, to discuss the possibilities of escape. We knew that all
was being done for us above-ground that could be done; that the surveys
of the mine were well executed; and that it was known exactly where we
were, if we were alive at all. There were more than a hundred men
employed in the lower workings, and it was a certainty that not one of
them could have escaped death; the attention, therefore, of the
engineers would be concentrated upon those parts of the mine that might
possibly be left above water."
"On the second night of our imprisonment we heard a distinct reply to
our signal; the old man who was of our company began to weep for joy,
though he was doomed, as it turned out, poor soul! never to see the
light. 'We shall be saved,' he said; 'do not fear.' We knocked again,
and again the reply was heard--they had found us out, and would never
relax their efforts to save us. 'God bless them!' said we all. We laid
our ears close to the rock, and presently heard the strokes of the pick,
but not very distinctly. When the other said he was afraid the rock was
thick, the old man cried out: 'No, it was not that; it was because we
were dull of hearing.' The fact was, that the seam was not only thick,
but very hard. It was strange, indeed, though sounds are easily
transmitted through rocks of considerable thickness, how our feeble taps
had been heard at all. Day after day, and each day a black night, went
on; every hour was to be the last of our captivity, according to the old
man; as for me, I was almost worn out, and heavy with sleep, but he was
in constant motion, knocking and listening. Then suddenly we heard a
splash in the water beneath us--he had lost his balance, slid down the
inclined plane, and been drowned. He never stirred a limb nor uttered a
cry. His fate discouraged and alarmed us two survivors exceedingly. If
help was coming, we now felt it would never come in time. We dug into
the shale with the handles of our lamps and with our fingers, to make
our position more secure. We did not venture to speak of our late
companion's fate to one another. Horror overwhelmed us, so enfeebled had
we become through famine and fatigue. We had devoured our leather belts,
and even crumbled the rotten wood of the timber-props in water, and
eaten that; but we were now consumed by thirst, which we dared no longer
quench. We were afraid to venture down as before for the water in which
the old man had sunk to death; and it was that which had kept us alive."
"Don't forget about how you made a bucket of your boots, Sol," suggested
Trevethick, gravely.
"Yes, at last we tied a string to a boot, and got the water up that
way," continued Solomon; "but our stomachs turned against it."
"It was not so good as my punch," observed the landlord,
parenthetically, and emptying his steaming glass.
"More dark days came and went, though, of course, we could not tell how
many; then, all of a sudden, we heard a human voice, inquiring: 'How
many are you?' 'We are three,' was our reply. We had not the courage
even then to own that one of us had already been taken; death seemed
still so near to us. The aperture which had thus let in the world upon
us was also very small."
"And what was it you asked for first?" interrupted the landlord, with a
nod at Richard, as much as to say: "Listen now; this is curious."
"What we wanted was light. 'Light above all things!' was our cry. But
our deliverers could give us but little of that, for they had scarcely
any themselves. They had been working in a narrow gallery, by means of
five inclined driftways, at each of which only one man could ply his
pick at a time, and where light and air could only be procured
artificially. The coal was carried out in baskets as fast as it was hewn
out: the atmosphere in which they thus toiled like giants, naked to the
waist, was almost suffocating; yet, under these conditions, they had
literally effected in four days, to save our lives, what it would have
taken them four weeks to do, had they been working by the piece for
wages. They had even been compelled to put up ventilators, and their
lamps would only burn when close to these. They gave us broth through a
tin pipe; but almost another day elapsed before the hole was large
enough for them to carry us through it in their arms."
"And there was nobody else saved, was there?" inquired the landlord,
with a triumphant look.
"There was not," said Solomon, expressing his tobacco smoke very slowly.
"Out of a hundred and thirteen men who had been caught by the flood in
Dunston, we two were the sole survivors."
Many other stories of the like sort had Solomon to tell, and for not
one of them, was he indebted to his imagination. His experience of life
had been remarkable, and it had impressed itself upon his character. His
will was as strong as that of Trevethick, but he had less of caution;
and he was at the same time both plodding and audacious.
It would not be well, thought Richard occasionally, to have either of
these men for an enemy; and he was right. Unhappily, it was impossible
to win Harry without a quarrel with, at least, one of them, and rather
than lose her he was prepared to defy them both. If he could but have
lifted a corner of the curtain that veils the future--well, even then,
so mad was he by this time with the love of her, that he would almost
have defied them still.