Читать книгу The Vicar's People - Fenn George Manville - Страница 13

“Well, boy!”

“Well, old gentleman!”

The old gentleman, to wit, Uncle Paul, very yellow, very clean-shaven, and carefully got up, seemed disposed to resent this bluff manner of address; but he swallowed his annoyance with a gulp, thumped his cane on the gravel, and went on, —

“Up early, then. The early bird gets the first pick of the worms.”

“Yes, and stands the best chance of being caught by a prowling cat,” said Geoffrey.

“Never mind; get up early and work. Be industrious, and save your money. That’s the way to get on. Take care of the pennies; the pounds will take care of themselves.”

“Nonsense!” replied Geoffrey. “While you are scraping for pennies, you are missing your pounds.”

“Rubbish!” said the old man, sharply. “Get up early, sir, and work. Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, and wealthy, and wise.”

“Which is duly proved, as Punch says,” laughed Geoffrey, “by the enormous fortunes accumulated, the health enjoyed, and the wisdom displayed by chimney-sweeps, and other people who rise before the lark.”

“Why, you’re a sceptic, sir,” said the old man, showing his yellow teeth. “Do you know that’s a time-honoured proverb?”

“Yes; but I don’t believe in time-honoured proverbs,” replied Geoffrey. “Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, and wealthy, and wise, indeed!”

“And you are neither of the two last,” chuckled Uncle Paul, “even if you are the first.”

“Quite right, old gentleman,” said Geoffrey, good-humouredly; “but I get up early on principle.”

“Well, then, you didn’t have too much wine last night?”

“No.”

“Dine with Penwynn?”

“I did.”

“Any one else there?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“A Mr Tregenna. Like to know what we had for dinner?”

“No?” roared Uncle Paul. “Hang the dinner, sir. Any one else there?”

“The new vicar.”

“Hang the new vicar. The other fellow had some sense. He never asked me why I didn’t go to church.”

“Don’t you go?”

“I? no. It’s very odd,” said the old man, grimly; “but I always have a fit of bile coming on about Saturday night, and it lasts all Sunday. So you saw Tregenna?”

“Yes, I saw Mr Tregenna.”

“Slimy serpent. Hang him.”

“By all means, if you like,” said Geoffrey, laughing, for the choleric ways and speeches of the old man amused him.

“What did you think of the daughter, eh?” said the old fellow, with a croak that was evidently intended to do duty for a chuckle.

“Very nice, sensible girl.”

“Oh! you think so, do you?”

“I do certainly.”

“Marry her,” said Uncle Paul, giving him a poke with his cane. “Plenty of money. Couldn’t do better.”

“But she could,” replied Geoffrey, laughing. “No, old gentleman, I’m not a marrying man.”

“Or look here,” chuckled the old man, “I can find you a wife. No need though, she’ll fall in love with you herself without asking. Lovely woman, sir. Martha – Martha Pavey. Patty you know, but she’s not plump. He! he! he! Well matured and has a little income of her own. She isn’t above forty-four. Good-looking once. Nice shaped mouth till she set up in it a couple of rows of enamelled tombstones to the memory of so many departed teeth. Looks hard and unkissable now. I laughed at ’em when I saw ’em first. Never forgiven me since, and she always looks at me as if she would bite. Poor thing! Thinks I didn’t detect ’em, and goes about complaining of toothache.”

“Poor woman,” said Geoffrey.

“Poor fool!” snarled the other. “She thinks of nothing else but men.”

“Woman’s nature,” said Geoffrey, “but I suppose it is the privilege of the old to be severe. You are old, you know.”

“Devilish,” said the other. “Ah, boy, when you lean your face on your hand, and can feel your skull easily through your skin, you may take it for granted that you are pretty old.”

“Suppose so,” said Geoffrey. “Going my way? No, I suppose not.”

“How the devil d’you know where I’m going?” cried the old fellow, fiercely. “I am going your way, sir; I am.”

“Come along, then,” said Geoffrey, coolly.

“Where?” said Uncle Paul, who was thrown off his guard.

“I’m going underground.”

“Bah! That’s very clever, I suppose you think. That’s modern sharp, fast wit, is it? I’m going underground when my time comes, sir, like a man, and perhaps that won’t be till after you, sir.”

The old man wiped his face upon his orange bandanna here, and looked fiercer than ever.

“Why, what a jolly old pepperbox you are!” cried Geoffrey, laughing outright. “You are all cayenne and gunpowder. Wit be hanged! I said I was going underground, and so I am. I’m going down Horton Friendship mine. Mr Tregenna gave me his card for the manager.”

“Ho!” ejaculated the old gentleman, calming down. “Nice man, Tregenna. Smooth and polished. Make a great friend of him; I would if I were you. He’ll show you how to go to the devil faster than any man I know.”

“I’m afraid I want no teaching, Mr Paul,” said Geoffrey, gravely. “I say, by the way, whose cottage is that down in the cove about a couple of miles along the cliff?”

“Oh! you’ve been there, have you,” said the old man, chuckling. “You are making some nice acquaintances, boy! Did you see pretty Bess?”

“I saw a fine, handsome-looking lass.”

“That’s she. Did she ill-wish you?”

“Not that I know of. Does she do that sort of thing?” said Geoffrey, smiling.

“Oh, yes!” sneered the old gentleman. “They say she’s a witch, and her father’s as scoundrelly an old wrecker and smuggler as ever breathed. He’s one of your kidney, too. Been a miner.”

“A nice character to give a neighbour,” said Geoffrey.

“Confound him! He’s no neighbour of mine, sir. You’d better get your new friend to go down Horton mine with you.”

“What – Tregenna?”

“No, no; Smuggler Prawle. He knows more about the mines than any one here.”

“Does he?” said Geoffrey, eagerly. “Well, perhaps I may ask him some day.”

They were standing just in front of the cottage, and as he spoke Geoffrey glanced upward, to see that Madge Mullion was at the upper window, standing back, but evidently gazing intently down upon him, ready to dart back, though, the moment he raised his eyes; and he went away thinking of his little adventure at Wheal Carnac the previous day, and of how strangely he had become possessed of a secret that might, if it were known, raise him up one, two, if not three, bitter enemies during his stay.

It was a great nuisance, he thought, this bit of knowledge, for his conscience pricked him, and he asked himself whether he ought not to make some communication to Uncle Paul or Mrs Mullion.

“And be called a meddlesome fool for my pains!” he exclaimed angrily. “No; I will not interfere with other people’s business. I have my hands full enough as it is.”

His way out of the little town was over a rough granite-strewn hill, where the wind blew briskly, and the grass and heather seemed to be kept cut down close by the sharp Atlantic gales. His goal was a gaunt-looking building, perched on the highest point of the eminence, and of the customary Cornish mining type – a square, granite engine-house, with tall chimney, and a great beam projecting from the side, rising and falling at slow intervals as it pumped the water from the depths below, to send it flowing in a dirty stream towards the sea.

Geoffrey went swinging along as if he had all the work in the world upon his shoulders, till he became aware of a figure coming in his direction by another track – one which evidently joined his a little on ahead – and he noted that the figure carried a fly-rod over his shoulder.

“Why, it’s the doctor off fishing!” said Geoffrey to himself, as he recognised the fresh-coloured face surmounting the light tweeds. “What a horribly healthy place this must be. Morning, doctor!”

“Good-morning. Did you get your lodgings all right?” said the new-comer, scanning Geoffrey’s face as if in search of the seeds of disease, and looking disappointed.

“Yes, thanks.”

“Well, don’t fall in love with Madge Mullion, or old Mr Paul will be setting me to work to poison you.”

“Confound it all!” cried Geoffrey, facing round as he stopped short. “Do you people here think of nothing else but falling in love?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the doctor, dreamily, as he pushed his soft hat on one side, and gave his head a rub. “Fortunately for me they do think a great deal of that sort of thing.”

“So it seems. I’ve heard enough of it during the past four-and-twenty hours to make it seem as if your people thought young women were gunpowder, and I was a match.”

“Ah, yes!” said the doctor, sadly. “It’s the old story, you know – marrying and giving in marriage. What should we do for our population without?”

“Population don’t seem to keep you very busy, doctor.”

“Pretty well,” he said quietly: “pretty well; people have very large families about here, but they emigrate.”

“Do they?” said Geoffrey.

“Yes, the mining trade has been bad. But people have very large families about here,” said the doctor, with a sigh. “I’ve got ten of them.”

“Fruitful vine and olive branches round the table, eh?” said Geoffrey.

“Ye-es,” said the doctor, making an imaginary cast with his fly-rod over the heather; “but when the vine is too fruitful it rather shades the table, you know.”

“So I should suppose,” replied Geoffrey, with a slight grimace. “Have you good fishing here?”

“No – oh no! Nothing but small trout in the little streams, and they are getting poisoned by the mining refuse.”

“I’ll try them some day,” said Geoffrey.

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” said the doctor, nervously. “It isn’t worth your while, and it’s very hard work to get a dish now-a-days,” and he glanced with anxious eyes at his companion. For, on non-busy mornings, Mr James Rumsey, MRCSE – the “doctor” being a local degree – found it useful to take his rod and capture a dish of trout for the home dinner, if he did not go out in the bay, in a borrowed boat, in search of something more substantial.

“Ah well, we’ll see,” said Geoffrey. “Yonder’s Horton Friendship, is it not?”

“Yes, that’s it,” said the doctor, who seemed relieved. “That’s the manager’s office close by. They’ve got a manager there.”

“Oh! have they?” said Geoffrey, who was amused by the doctor’s subdued, weary way. “All right; I’m going to see it, though. Good-morning.”

“Good-morning,” said the doctor, and making dreamy casts with his rod, he went on over the heather.

“Looks dull, and as if he had lived too much in the shade – of the vine and olive branches,” said Geoffrey, as he strode along. “Well, ten branches would keep off a good deal of the sun of a man’s life. What a row those stamps make!”

The rattling noise was caused by a row of iron-faced piles, which were being raised and let fall by a great cogged barrel upon a quantity of pieces of tin ore, with which they were fed, and as he drew nearer to watch them, the noise was almost deafening; but all the same he stopped to watch them curiously, and evidently dissatisfied with the primitive nature of the machine.

Farther on he paused to watch where a dozen women and boys were busy directing the flow of a stream of muddy water over a series of sloping boards, so as to wash the crushed ore free from earthy particles and powdered stone, till it fell of its own gravity into a trough prepared for its reception, where it looked like so much coffee-grounds waiting to be taken out and dried.

“Very, very primitive, and full of waste,” muttered Geoffrey then, as he noted the ruddy, healthy look of the people who ceased working to stare at the stranger, an example followed by a couple of men whose clothes seemed reddened by some mineral.

The manager welcomed the visitor in the most civil manner, and furnished him with a rough suit of flannel for the descent, as well as a stiff, solid kind of hat, which did duty for helmet, to protect his head from falling stones, and also for holder of a large tallow candle, which was stuck in front, so as to leave his hands at liberty.

The necessity for this was shown as soon as they reached the great square shaft, which was divided by a stout wooden partition into two. Up one of these came and went, by means of a rusty iron chain running over a wheel, a couple of long iron skeps or buckets, one of which, full of tin ore mingled with quartz rock and the ruddy mineral which Geoffrey had noted, came to the surface as they reached the pit.

“We go down here,” said Geoffrey’s companion, as a man lifted a heavy trap-door in a framework of planks, worn by many feet, and disclosing a dark hole up which came a hot, steaming vapour, which floated away in a thin cloud.

Geoffrey was as brave as most men, but he could not avoid a feeling of shrinking, as he saw what he had undertaken to do. He had expected to step into a cage such as was in use at coalpits, or perhaps have had to make use of the peculiar machine which lowered the miners from platform to platform ten or a dozen feet at a time; but here, as he gazed down into the dark, misty heat, he found that he would have to trust entirely to his own nerve and strength, for the descent was by a series of wet, greasy, nearly perpendicular ladders, placed zigzag from platform to platform, and with very little to save him from a fall too awful to contemplate.

The manager watched him narrowly before asking if he was ready, and on receiving an answer in the affirmative, he went down to the first wet, rotten-looking platform, where he stopped, and on being joined by Geoffrey he struck a match, and lit the candles in their caps.

“How deep is the mine?” asked Geoffrey.

“Two hundred fathom,” was the reply.

“Twelve hundred feet!” said Geoffrey. “A good long descent by ladders. How is it you have no chain and cage?”

“Money!” was the abrupt reply, and after a warning to him to hold tight, the manager, a rough-spoken Cornishman, continued the descent, Geoffrey following, and finding every thing of the most primitive character. The ladders were clumsily made, splashed with candle grease, and terribly worn; the platforms so old and rotten that they seemed unsafe; and yet down for twelve hundred feet stretched these ladders, one after the other, in apparently interminable length.

Geoffrey Trethick’s nerves were strong, but they were well put to the test, for every now and then a step of the ladder gave, or rattled beneath his weight. Now he would find a round so greasy that his foot would slip, while his candle sputtered, and several times nearly became extinguished, as they passed some shower of water that forced itself out of a vein in the rock.

“Rather rough work,” said the manager, and his voice sounded echoing and strange in the gloomy shaft, seeming to whisper past him, and die away amidst the maze of ladders overhead.

“Rather!” replied Geoffrey, who was beginning to be drenched with perspiration. “How much farther?” he continued.

“Farther! Oh, we are not half-way down yet, sir – nothing like it,” was the reply. “Like to rest?”

“No. Go on.”

Down – down – down – lower and lower, in one apparently endless descent, with the noise of the trickling water growing louder and louder, and ever and again a hoarse, rattling, clanging noise as the chain bore buckets up and buckets down, and the great pump worked its mighty piston to free the mine from the water collected in the sump.

At times it was impossible not to feel that the bucket coming rushing through the darkness was descending upon the heads of those who laboriously climbed down, or that the enormous piston-rod would crush them to death at its next movement, instead of working steadily on the other side of the stout dividing boards. But the rod worked on, and the chain rattled as the buckets rose and fell, and with the trickling and plashing of the water growing louder, the ladders more wet and coated with grease, the platforms more slippery and rotten, Geoffrey sturdily kept on descending, but with the thought always forcing itself upon his brain that every ladder would have to be climbed before he could see the light of day.

But Geoffrey possessed all the stubborn determination of a true Englishman. He was truly one of those who did not know when he was beaten, and he was ready to go on with a task he had begun until brain and muscle completely gave way, and then only would he have paused and waited for strength before beginning again.

They had stopped on one of the platforms to snuff the flaring candles, a supply of which the manager carried in a tin box slung from his shoulder, when once more from the other part of the shaft came the rushing noise of the ascending and descending buckets, and so close did they sound that Geoffrey involuntarily shrank, feeling that they must strike against him and crush him on the narrow platform where he stood. But after this his ears grew more accustomed to the sound, and he began again plodding steadily downward, the frantic desire to cling tightly to the ladder and ask for help growing weaker as he became more used to the task.

At last the manager stopped, and pointed to a black opening before him like a little arch in the side of the shaft.

“Here’s one of the old galleries,” he said. “Would you like to see it?”

“Are the men at work here?”

“Work? No! Nor haven’t been these fifty years. But there’s enough to see there to give you an idea of the mine, and it would save you from going down farther if you are sick of it.”

“I’m not sick of it,” said Geoffrey, stoutly. “I’m only warm. Go on down to the bottom, and let’s see the workings.”

“All right!” said the manager, smiling, as he gave Geoffrey a peculiar look; and a fresh start was made.

“That fellow Tregenna has done this to try me,” thought Geoffrey. “He could have given me an introduction to some mine where there was a regular cage. Never mind: I’m not chicken enough to give it up!” and, regardless of the rotten, wet ladders, he steadily went on, his spirits rising and his confidence increasing – for as he kept on noting the primitive way in which every thing was done, he felt more and more satisfied that if science were brought to bear in such a mine as this the profits must be largely increased.

For instance, he reasoned, here were the miners forced to undergo a long and arduous piece of toil before they could reach their work, and when their spell was over they had a fresh task to climb patiently up at a time when they were exhausted with toil, thus spending fruitlessly many hours every week.

“I’ve come to the right place,” he thought, with a feeling of exultation coming over him, “and if I don’t make my way it is my own fault.”

“Tired?” said the manager, from below.

“No,” was the sturdy answer. “Are you?”

A low, chuckling laugh came up to Geoffrey as he glanced down at the descending-light in the manager’s hat.

“Well, if you put it in that way, sir, I am; and we’ll get a little wind here by this old lode.”

He stopped on the next platform, and, Geoffrey joining him, he once more snuffed the candles. There was another opening going horizontally into the bowels of the earth, where a lode of tin had been followed until it had become worthless. The roof glistened with huge crystals, which flashed in the light of the candles as they were held inside what looked like a subterranean passage into a castle, the abode of some giant of the nether world.

“I suppose the workings below are just like this?” said Geoffrey.

“Just the same, sir,” was the eager reply; “and if you’d like to give up now, we could inspect this drive for a few hundred yards, and then go back. It’s rather dangerous, though, for there have been some falls from the roof, and the galleries are like a net.”

“But I don’t want to give up,” said Geoffrey, laughing, “and am ready as soon as ever you like.”

“I never got any one to get down farther than this,” said the manager, who started again, descending in silence, broken only by the occasional echoing whirr of the ascending and descending buckets, and the hiss and splash of the falling water. The heat seemed to increase, and the depth might have been miles, so endless seemed the ladders, and so tedious the descent.

“Give me a word if you feel likely to let go,” said Geoffrey’s guide just when they were on one of the wettest, weakest, and most slippery ladders of the descent. “There was a man once fell off this very ladder, and knocked off the man below him as well.”

“Were they hurt?” said Geoffrey.

“Don’t suppose as they were,” was the cool reply. “They broke through platform after platform, for the woodwork was very rotten just then. They couldn’t have known any thing after they fell, for they were quite dead when they got them up. It was a gashly job.”

“Pleasant incident to relate now,” thought Geoffrey. Then aloud – “You don’t often have accidents?”

“Well, not very. We get a fall of rock sometimes, or a ladder breaks, or a man falls down the shaft. Now and then, too, there’s a bit of an accident with the powder when they are blasting. But we do pretty well. We’re not like your coal-mining folks, with their safety-lamps and gas.”

“The mines are, of course, free from foul air?”

“Oh, yes; sweet as a nut.”

“But how much farther is it?” said Geoffrey. “Surely we’ve come down a thousand feet.”

“Well, yes; I suppose we have,” said the man, coolly. “I don’t think there’s more than a half-dozen more ladders. Yes, seven,” he said.

These were steadily climbed down, but seemed the longest of them all. At last, however, they stood beside the great sump or water-cistern, which received the end of the vast pumping apparatus, all of which Geoffrey carefully examined with a look of disgust at its primitive character and clumsiness.