CHAPTER XV.
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.