It was nervous work for the master and the men who were tending the molten ore to conceal their anxiety. The beautiful white iron, flowing like etherealized lava, rushing out from the dark, oven-like furnaces and spreading into the little canals made ready for it, gave one a better idea of pure light than anything could do. The heat was intense, and the men opened the doors with immense long poles tipped with iron; the gradual darkening of the evening threw shadows about the place, and the streams of living light, that looked as the atmosphere of God’s throne might look, settled into their moulds, hardening and darkening into long, heavy, unlovely bars. A suppressed excitement was at work; groups of men came up every minute with contradictory reports as to the accident; women and children met them with wild questions or equally wild recognition; and the master repeatedly sent messages to the mouth of the shaft. At last, throwing by all pretence, he begged his guests to wait for news, and with Lawrence went back to the mine. More men were coming up—the last but five, he was told—and Mr. Carpeggio had said he thought he and his four mates could do all that was needed and come up before any mischief happened to them. The soil was loosening under the action of water, and to save the ore accumulated below, and which could not be hauled up in time, they had built a sort of wall across the gallery as well as the circumstances and the time would allow; Mr. Carpeggio had sent the men away as fast as he could spare them, and kept only four with him to finish, which was the most dangerous part of the business, as the water threatened them more and more.
“He sent all the married men up first, and asked the rest to volunteer as to who among them should stay, as he only wanted four,” said one of the men; “and I thought they would all have insisted upon staying, but he grew angry and said there was no time; so they agreed to draw lots.”
Another quarter of an hour’s suspense, and then a low, muttering sound that spread horror among the whispering multitude gathered at the mouth of the shaft. Some men went down to the first level, and soon came up with blank faces and whispered to the master: no sound but that of water was to be heard below, and fears for the safety of the workers were too confidently expressed. Nothing remained but to give orders for affording relief; the only comfort was that there had been no sign of the air becoming vitiated. Here the master’s experience was at fault, and he had to rely on that of some of the older men. “If Carpeggio had been here, he would have got the men out in two hours,” he asserted confidently; “but he must go and get himself mewed up there, and leave me no one to direct things—though I believe he can get himself out as quick as any of us can dig him out,” he said, with a half-laugh; and one of the men whispered to his neighbor:
“I do not wonder he sets such store by him; I had rather be down there myself than have him killed.”
At last it became certain, by signs which this faithful chronicler is not competent to explain technically, that the five men had been cut off behind a mass of rock and ore, and that it would take two days or more to get them out. Work was vigorously begun at once; relays of men went down to search, by making calls and rapping on the echoing walls, in which direction lay the least impenetrable of the obstacles between them and the sufferers; the pumps were set going and every one worked with a will. The news was received by the party at the works in a silence that marked their interest well, and the young men eagerly asked their host if they could be made of any service personally, while the marquis offered to send down some of his men to help, if more were wanted, and promised to send all he and his daughters could think of as useful to the imprisoned men when they should be brought out of their dangerous predicament. But as this accident refers only, so far as our tale is concerned, to the links between Emilio and Kate, we must pass over the hourly exciting work, the reports, the surmises, the visits and inspections of newspaper men and others, the telegrams and sympathy of people in high places, the details which accompany all such accidents, and which it takes a skilled hand to describe in words that would only make the expert laugh at the ambitious story-teller. Space also, and mercy on the feelings of practised novel-readers, make us hesitate to do more than hint at the state of mind of the girl whose dream of love and happiness hung in the balance for nearly five days. Only her sister guessed the whole, and skilfully managed to shield her from inconvenient notice and inquiry; and, indeed, the excitement of the time helped her in her work. The fifth day, towards evening, a messenger on horseback brought word of the safety of the men—all but one, who had died of exhaustion and hunger. Carpeggio and the rest had narrowly escaped drowning as well as starvation, but had nevertheless managed to help on his deliverers by working on his own side of the bed of earth and clearing away no small part (considering his disadvantages) of the embankment. The men had declared that but for him and his indomitable spirit, their suspense, and even their danger, would have increased tenfold; and, besides, he had contrived, by his efforts previous to the final falling in of earth and rushing in of water, to save a large portion of valuable ore which must otherwise have been either lost or much spoilt. He had been taken to his employer’s house, where the greatest care was bestowed on him, and the other men to their respective homes. The marquis resolved to go over the next day and inquire after him, and showed the greatest interest and anxiety about him; but Lady Anne shook her head as she said to her sister:
“He will do anything, Kate, for Mr. Carpeggio” (the young man had tacitly dropped his proper title for the time being), “except the one thing you want; and you know that, with me, the wish is far from being father to the thought in this matter.”
There was nothing to do but to wait, and then came the overseer’s recovery and first visit to the house of his love as a cherished guest, his silent look of longing and uncertainty, the gradual and still silent knitting together of a new and happier understanding than before, and finally the offer of the father to make him manager and part owner of the new mine on his own estate. The ownership he at once refused; but, as he could well manage the overseeing of the marquis’ colliery without prejudice to his first employer’s interests, he joyfully accepted the first part of the proposal. Then a cottage was pressed upon him, and this also he accepted, provided it was understood to form part of his salary. The old man was both pleased and nettled at his stiff independence; but when Anne reminded him that the circumstances of the case made this the only proper course, he forgot his vexation and heartily praised the manliness of his new employé.
Carpeggio was often at the house, and in fact grew to be as familiar a presence there as that of the inmates themselves, and still the silent bond went on, seemingly no nearer an outward solution, though the marquis’ favor visibly increased. The colliery prospered and brought in money, and the overseer carefully put by his salary and studied hard at night, till his name got to be first known, then respected, in the scientific world; and one day an official intimation was made to him that the third place on a mining survey expedition to South America was at his disposal. He had written to Schlichter constantly, and at last had made a clean breast of what he called his unspoken but not the less sealed engagement. The two girls had gone through two London seasons; Lord Ashley and Mr. Lawrence had become brothers-in-law by each marrying one of the trio who had so long expected to make a conquest of the overseer himself; and Carpeggio had enough to buy a large share in the concern of either of his two employers. Such was the state of affairs when the proposal of an American trip was made to him; if the survey was satisfactory, and a company formed in consequence, he would be out at least three years, with the chance of a permanent settlement as director of the works and sharer in the company. Both pecuniarily and scientifically a career was open to him, while at home there was success in all but love—nearly as certain. Schlichter strongly advised him to go; the marquis himself saw the thing as a thorough Englishman, and was willing to lose his right-hand man, as he called him, for the sake of this opening; Carpeggio saw the alluring chance of travel, adventure, the prestige of his possible return in a different character, the enlarged field which he could not help looking on as more tempting than success—equally solid, perhaps, but more humdrum—at his very elbow, and the glorious southern climate, like to, and yet more radiant than, the old home one to which he had been used as a boy among the vineyards of Umbria. He knew that Kate would follow him there gladly, as she would had he gone to the North Pole; but there was the intangible yet terribly real barrier. In everything but the weighty affair of mating he was held as Kate’s equal, and the equal of all whom he met at the marquis’ house; even in London, where he had once stayed with them a week, and gone into that society which was “their world,” he had been received in a way unexceptionally satisfactory; he was put on more than an equal footing with young Englishmen of good standing, but he knew that he shared with them the cruel, tacit exclusion from competition for first-class prizes. He was good enough to dance with, ride with, flirt with, and escort to her carriage the daughter of a duke; so were the many young fellows who made the bulk of the young society of the day; but there were preserves within preserves. The second sons, the young lawyers, the men in “marching” regiments, the naval cadets, the government clerks, and even the sons of admirals, clergymen, and men who had made their mark in the literary and scientific as well as the social world—all these were tacitly, courteously, but inexorably tabooed as regards marriage with their partners, friends, and entertainers. In fact, society had bound these youths over to “keep the peace,” while it encouraged every intimacy that was likely to lead to a breach of it. Carpeggio had lived long enough in England to be quite aware of this and to “know his own place” in the world; but he trusted to time and Kate’s faithfulness. He at last made up his mind to go to South America, and that without saying anything that would weigh Kate down with the knowledge of a secret to be withheld from her father; but he had likewise made up his mind to speak to the marquis on his return. He would be true to his employer, but could not afford to be false to himself; his own rights as a man were as present to his mind as the position and prejudices which he appreciated and tolerated in the person of a man so thoroughly gentlemanlike as his patron; and this compromise of a three years’ absence and silence seemed to him to honorably fulfil all the expectations that could be formed of him. He said good-by to the girls together in their father’s library, and the old man blessed him and bade him Godspeed in the heartiest fashion, almost with tears in his eyes; but of more tender and definite speech there was none. Who is there, however, but knows the delicate, intangible farewell, the firm promise conveyed by a pressure of the hand, and one long, frank, brave look, and all that true love knows how to say without breaking any other allegiance and without incurring the blame of secrecy?
So Emilio Carpeggio went and prospered, while Kate remained a beauty and a moderate heiress (she had half of her mother’s small fortune), courted and loved, and going through the weary old treadmill of London seasons and country “parties.” People wondered why she did not marry. Her sister did, and made a love-match, though there was no violent obstacle in the way, and the lover was perfectly acceptable as to station and fortune. She was lucky, also, in loving a man who had some brains to boast of. This unknown brother-in-law in after-times became a powerful lever in favor of Carpeggio’s suit; but long before the young engineer came back the kind, tender-hearted old marquis had found out his daughter’s secret, and after some time overcame his natural prejudices, and as generously agreed to Kate’s hopes as he had before vigorously opposed them. And yet all this was done while hardly a word was spoken; for if any courtship was emphatically a silent one, it was this. Everything came to be tacitly understood, and a few hand-pressures, a kiss, a smile, or a long look expressed the changes and chances of this simple love-story. At the end of three years the young man came home on a holiday, which he meant to employ in determining his fate. He had promised the new company to go back permanently and take charge of their interests as a resident, and many of the native members had shown themselves willing and eager to make him a countryman and a son-in-law. He went home, and saw the marquis the first evening of his stay, two hours after he got off the train. To his surprise, he found his request granted before he made it and his road made plain before him. The old man did not even ask him not to return to America. It is of little use to descant on his meeting with Kate and on his (literally) first spoken words of love. They told each other the truth—that is, that the moment they met in the mine, five years before, was the beginning of their love. They were married with all the pretty pastoral-feudal accessories of a country wedding in England, and spent their honeymoon in the old tower of Carpeggio, where the bride explored the library-room with great curiosity, and was charmed with the old-fashioned figures of the principal people of the town, whom she entertained in what was now again her husband’s own house.
Signor Salviani had built a pretty, villa-like hotel half a mile further, and was as proud on the day when his young master again took possession of the old tower as the bridegroom himself. From there Carpeggio went to his German friends, presented the famous Schlichter to his wife, and got his rough and fatherly congratulations on his choice, his perseverance, and his success. In three months the young couple set sail for their new home, where Carpeggio had sent the last orders needed to set up quickly the nest he had half-prepared already in anticipation of his visit to England. When they arrived, Kate found a lovely, fragile-looking, cool house, half-southern, half-northern, covered with vines which the natives still looked upon with distrust, but beautiful and luxuriant beyond measure (this was the oldest part of the house, the original lodge which the overseer had lived in when he first came), some rooms with white tile floors, and some partially covered with fancy mats of grass, while one or two rejoiced in small Turkey rugs, suggestive of home, yet not oppressively hot to look at. All his wife’s tastes had been remembered and gratified, and Carpeggio was rewarded by her telling him that if she had built and furnished the house herself, she could not have satisfied her own liking so thoroughly as he had done. One room was fitted up as their den (or, as the world called it, the library), and was as much as possible the exact counterpart of the room in Torre Carpeggio where the books and curiosities had been found. Of course the collection had been carefully transferred here. Years afterwards this place was the rallying-point of English and American society; travellers came to see it and its owners; its hospitality was the most perfect, generous, and delicate for a hundred miles around; no jealousies arose between its household and those of the natives; the mining company prospered, Carpeggio grew to be an authority even in German scientific circles, and a sort of paradise was once more realized. True, this kind of thing only happens once or twice in a century; but then it really does, so it is pardonable for a story-teller to choose the thousand-and-first couple for the hero and heroine of his tale.