"There is no arguing with you, father," he said coldly. "I have known that a long while. You are satisfied if you can eat your bit of dry bread in peace, and anything beyond that seems foolishness or a crime to you. I have staked everything on a throw. I thought to succeed, and I should have succeeded if that Berkow had not stood up all at once and shown us a front of iron. If we fail--well, Karl says, I am sure still of half the men, and with them I will let him see what it costs to get the better of us. He shall pay dearly enough for his victory."
The Manager looked at Lawrence, who was standing by with bowed head taking no part in the discussion, and then again at his son.
"Look to it first whether the half will remain true to you, if the master interferes in the matter again as he did this morning. That lost you the other half, Ulric. Do you think it has no effect upon them that he should behave as he has from the very first day you began to threaten him? Do you think they don't feel, all of them, that he is their match and yours too, and that he is able to hold them in hand himself, if ever it should chance that you cease to be their master? The first set took to work again this morning; they would have done it three weeks ago if they had dared. Now that they have made a beginning, there will be no stopping them any more."
"You may be right, father," said Ulric in a low hollow voice, "there may be no stopping them now. I have built on them as on a rock, and they are but thin sand running through my fingers. Berkow has learnt how to draw the cowards to him with his fine speeches and cursed way of stepping in among them, as if there were no stones to fly at his head and no mallets to be used, if necessary, on the person of our respected lord and master. That is just why they dare not attack him. I know why he carried his head so high to-day all of a sudden, why he came into the midst of all the uproar, looking as if success and happiness could never fail him more, and I know too that they are coming back to him. I myself guided them to his arms this morning."
The last words were lost in the banging to of the door which he had opened while speaking, and no one present understood them. Ulric stepped out into the open air and threw himself down on a bench.
The unnatural calm, which to-day pervaded his whole being, was almost alarming in a man accustomed to give the reins to his wild passionate nature. Whether the defection of his comrades had wounded him to the core, or whether some other feeling had been at work within him since the morning, it seemed that the proud certainty of victory, which he had shown even in those hours, was paralysed now, if not destroyed.
Past the little garden flowed the broad brook which, farther on in its course, served to turn the wheels now standing idle. It was a mischievous ill-regulated stream, this brook, it had nothing of the murmuring and silver-clear twinkling of its companions up in the hills, yet it too came from out of the mountain depths, close to where the shafts were situated. How often had it tried to draw harmless little children at play into its eddying course, so as, at least, to frighten and torment, though it dared not injure or kill, and so to revenge itself for having been made to lend its aid to man's machinery and labour.
The dark rapid flood looked weird in the last glimmer of the evening light, and still more uncanny was the brawling of its waters as it flowed by, hissing at times and babbling, full of scoff and of mischief, as though down below in the depths of the mountains it had learnt the tricks of the earth-gnome, how he weaves his toils round the men who are ever trying to drag his treasures from him, and how he has claimed as his due many a young warm life and buried it down in the regions of endless night.
There was nothing holy in its murmuring flow, and this was no holy hour in which its sound ascended to the young miner's ear as he sat there motionless, staring down before him as though harkening to some mysterious voice.
He had sat there for some time when he heard a step approaching, and directly afterwards Martha stood before him.