Читать книгу In the Wake of fortune - Ivan Dexter - Страница 8

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For a few moments Trenoweth could not speak. He stood with his left hand pressed to his forehead, looking about in a bewildered sort of way, and as his full senses returned he realised what had happened.

"How many are below?" he gasped to the engine-driver.

"Sixteen I lowered this morning, sir, and may God help them, for we can't," answered the man with a sort of sob.

"Could—could they not get up to the old workings?" cried Edward, almost at the top of his voice.

"They be mostly working in the west, sir, and I'm frightened that's where the burst has been," returned the driver.

Trenoweth by this time well knew where the burst had taken place, and he realised the full force of the calamity which had overtaken himself and the village.

By this time a wildly excited crowd had begun to gather at the mouth of the now useless shaft. The dread explosion caused by the forcing of the air up the shaft before the inrush of water had been heard all over the place, and it had as much significance to the people as those worse explosions which sometimes appal the dwellers in colliery districts.

Men, women, and children made their affrighted way to the spot where their hearts told them sorrow and pain awaited them.

The scene which followed was awful and almost indescribable, and, fortunately, not often witnessed.

Those who had relatives below were frantic with grief, and in some cases hysterical wives and mothers had to be restrained from throwing themselves down the shaft. Fatherless children looked wonderingly at the scene, which was almost incomprehensible to them, and then joined their mothers in wailing, wailing more out of sympathetic contagion than from any knowledge of the loss they had just sustained.

The broken poppet-heads accentuated the disaster and the helplessness which had stricken the would-be rescuers.

"The pumps," Trenoweth curtly said, turning to the engine-driver, who still stood near him.

"Yes, sir," answered the man as he turned towards the engine-house. In a few minutes he came back and said, "They won't work, sir. I thought the cage would injure the pipes." Then as he turned back to look after the engine he muttered, "and little good it would do if they did work, I couldn't pump the ocean dry."

And he was right.

The sea had poured into the Wheal Merlin and all the pumping plants in Great Britain could not have lowered the water a foot.

After the first frantic and tumultuous rush to the mine an organised attempt was made by the experienced miners to afford rescue to those below.

The men well knew that nothing short of a miracle from heaven could possibly save the doomed ones in the mine, but nevertheless they set about to work with a will. It was just possible, they thought, that a few of the miners might have been able to reach the high levels in the eastern workings and get above the water level. Even then the compressed air would be so great as to render it almost, if not quite, impossible for a human being to live.

Moreover, the main body of men were employed in the west drive, which it was certain had been flooded.

As the winding gear was disabled one of the most intrepid of the men volunteered to be lowered by a rope and ascertain if possible the full amount of the disaster.

A windlass was improvised, and young Penfold allowed himself to be lowered into the fated mine.

With breathless interest, the agitated crowd watched the rope gradually pay out.

The hundred feet mark passed out of sight into the dark depths, and soon after the two hundred feet line on the rope also went down.

With strained eyes those on the surface still watched the descending rope, but their suspense was not of long duration. Scarce another ten feet had gone down when a signal from below told the men at the windlass to stop.

A wild cry from the watchers went up as the signal was given, for they well knew that the sea-level in the Cove at half-tide was about two hundred feet from the surface of the main shaft of the Wheal Merlin. Penfold's signal evidently meant that the rope had reached the water in the shaft, and this view was verified a few minutes after as he was hauled to the surface.

With a set face he told the crowd that the water was up the shaft to within a couple of hundred feet of the surface, and moreover he stated that it was sea water, for he had tasted it.

This intelligence supported the worst forebodings of the villagers.

About two hundred yards from the coast was the old shaft and the would-be rescuers immediately went in that direction.

The shaft had not been used for a couple of years, but it was in good order, and a second descent was made in it.

The same result followed.

With marvellous rapidity the sea waters had penetrated the most distant workings and filled drives and shafts alike.

The lowest levels of the famous old mine were seven hundred feet below the surface, so that the water had risen five hundred feet above them.

This fact made it certain that not one of the unfortunate miners below at the time of the flooding could possibly have escaped with their lives.

Of the sixteen men thus overwhelmed nine of them were married, with families, whilst the remaining seven were young single fellows with few dependent on them.

In a small hamlet like St. Columb's Cove such a catastrophe was of enormous magnitude and made a serious inroad upon the population of the place.

Almost every family was related to the victims.

For generations the practice of intermarrying had been adopted in the remote place and there was scarcely one in the village on that sad Christmas of 1869 who had not to mourn a relative taken from them by death.

The Trenoweth family had indeed met with no such bereavement, but it was the saddest family in the hamlet. Edward Trenoweth knew full well that the disaster meant absolute ruin to him.

Not only would he be compelled to prosecute a hopeless and expensive search for the bodies of the lost miners, but his rigid sense of equity and justice impelled him to make some provision for the widows, orphans, and others who were dependent on those who were lost. During the past three years Edward had managed to win a considerable profit from the Wheal Merlin, and in a few more months he regarded it as certain that he would have acquired a competence.

He had already dreamt golden dreams of the future and built many a bright castle of the coming days with Inez at his side.

He would take her to see the great world outside of which he had some conception but which she had never known, and together they would go down the vale of life.

His home would always be in St. Columb's Cove, where he would be a kindly squire to the poor villagers who had helped him to build his fortune. He had fondly imagined himself walking in the vanguard of the fickle goddess, but he now found he was far in her wake.

In a single instant, where his prospects appeared brightest, his cherished hopes had been ruthlessly blasted, and gloomy misfortune was hovering over him. He had meant to celebrate the Christmas time in a manner never before done in the village, and now his feast of joy was turned into one of sorrow.

These gloomy thoughts filled his mind as he stood near the old shaft watching the forlorn efforts of the miners to effect a rescue. From the outset he well knew what had happened and how in a few moments the men below had been swallowed up by the inrushing waters.

The strange sounds which he had heard at the end of the western drive were now made somewhat plain to him. Evidently a great body or reservoir of water was not far away from the face and must have gradually worked its way through. The uncanny spring on the floor of the drive was a warning of some danger ahead.

The strata of the district was of a most peculiar nature. Interspersed with rock almost hard as flint were soft strata of sandstone. In some places these soft veins were only an inch or two in width, whilst in others they were several feet across and ran for many hundreds of yards.

Without doubt one of these great soft veins had been tapped by the west drive. It must have come from the main ocean and ended where it was struck.

The noises he heard were caused by the booming action of the rollers outside striking the cliffs, and the small leak on the floor of the drive was no doubt a thin vein running from the large one.

A submarine drive, formed by the ceaseless action of the restless ocean in long ages, had been met by the artificial drive and a catastrophe brought about.

The wearing action of the ocean in this manner is no uncommon thing on exposed coasts like that of Cornwall.

On the south and west coasts of Tasmania, parts of the southern coasts of Australia, and many other places the strangest phenomena is thus produced.

The Devil's Blowhole of Tasman's Peninsula is a most notable instance of the erosive action of the ocean acting on soft strata in both a horizontal and a perpendicular direction.

Indeed, the average reader can readily understand how the ceaseless action of the ocean on such coasts will act.

These thoughts did not occur to Trenoweth as he stood with folded arms, like one paralysed, watching the weeping women and the hopeless-looking miners.

Everyone present instinctively knew how profound was his grief, not only for his own great loss but also for the bereaved ones, and they respected his grief.

He was interrupted suddenly in his gloomy reverie by a light hand laid on his shoulder, and, turning, he saw the face of Inez regarding him with a wistful gaze.

"What is the matter, Edward?" she asked, with a pathos in her rich voice that touched his heart.

For a moment he could not find courage to answer, and, as he hesitated, she again spoke.

"Let me know the worst, Edward. I hear the mine is flooded and all below are lost."

"You have heard truly, Inez dear. Sixteen honest fellows are gone from our little village, and I fear that I, too, am ruined and must leave too; but not by the road of death," he answered.

"What do you mean?" she quickly asked looking up strangely at him.

"Nothing, dear. I think the shock has unnerved me, and I scarcely know what I am saying."

"Can you do any good by remaining here? If not, you had better come home," she said.

"No! I don't suppose I can do anything of avail here," he answered; and then he beckoned to a man who was taking a foremost part in the hopeless rescue work.

When the man came up the young man said, "Pengelly, I can do no good here, nor, for that matter, can you. Will you bring all the poor people concerned in this—this trouble to my place at four o'clock. I want to see them all and speak to them."

"Yes, sir; I will indeed, sir. No one but God can do anything for Morris Jones and our comrades below," he added.

Without another word Edward Trenoweth and Inez turned away from the grief-stricken group and went home.

As they entered the house the preparations for the village feast were seen in active progress, and bitterly the young man turned to his companion and said.

"This is a changeful world. We bade our guests to a marriage feast, and now funeral meats must be served up."

Trenoweth had good grounds for his remark, for no such disaster had fallen upon the hamlet of St. Columb ever since it was founded. For seven hundred years the Wheal Merlin had been worked, and now its end had come in gloom and death. Not only were a number of gallant men and youths buried deep down in the watery depths of the mine, but those who depended upon them for food and raiment were left to mourn their absence.

No more would the bright, homecoming smile of fathers and brothers cheer the hearts of those desolate ones. And, worst of all—to people reared as those simple Cornish miners were—the mournful satisfaction of giving their loved ones Christian burial; of visiting Sunday after Sunday their quiet resting place in the old churchyard; and of planting and tending flowers on their graves, was denied them.