“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.