Works of Ellen Wood, page 584
Whether consternation deadened his physical suffering, or his ankle, from the rest it had had, was really less painful, Mr. Chattaway contrived to get pretty comfortably to the scene of action. The crowd had increased; people were coming up from far and near. Medical men had arrived, ready to give their services in case any sufferers were brought up alive. One of them examined Mr. Chattaway’s ankle, and bound it up; the hurt, he said, was only a temporary one.
He, the owner of that pit, sat down on the side of a hand-barrow, for he could not stand, and issued his orders in sharp, concise tones; and the bodies began to be brought to the surface. One of the first to appear was that of the unfortunate man, Bean, to whom he had sent the message by Rupert. Chattaway looked on, half-dazed. Would Rupert’s body be the next? He could not realise the fact that he, from whom he had dreaded he knew not what, should soon be laid at his feet, cold and lifeless. Was he glad or sorry? Did grief for Rupert predominate? Or did the intense relief the death must bring overpower any warmer feeling? Perhaps Mr. Chattaway could not yet tell.
They were being brought up pretty quickly now, and were laid on the ground beside him, to be recognised by the unhappy relatives. The men to whom Chattaway had spoken that morning were amongst them: he had ordered them down as he rode off, and one and all had obeyed the mandate. Did he regret their fate? Did he compassionate the weeping wives and children? In a degree, perhaps, yes; but not as most men would have done.
A tall form interposed between him and the mouth of the pit — that of Meg Pennet. She had been watching for a body which had not yet been brought up. Suddenly she turned to Mr. Chattaway.
“You have killed him, master; you have made my children orphans. But for your coming in your hardness to drive him out when he warn’t fit to go, we should ha’ had somebody still to work for us. Happen you may have heered of a curse? I’d like to give ye one now.”
“Somebody take this woman away,” cried Chattaway. “She’ll be better at home.”
“Ay, take her away,” retorted Meg; “don’t let her plaints be heered, lest folk might say they be just. Send her home to her fatherless children, and send her dead man after her to lie among ’em till his burial. Happen, when you come to your death, Mr. Chattaway, you’ll have us all afore your mind, to comfort you!”
She stopped. Another ill-fated man was being drawn up, and she turned to wait for it, her hands clenched, her face white and haggard in its intensity. The burden came, and was laid near the rest; but it was not the one for which she waited. Another woman darted forward; she knew it too well; and she clasped her hands round it, and sobbed in agony. Meg Pennet turned resolutely to the mouth of the pit again, watching still.
“Be they all dead? How many was down?”
The voice came from behind Meg Pennet, and she screamed and started. There stood her husband. How had he escaped from the pit?
“I haven’t been a-nigh it,” he answered. “I couldn’t get down to the pit, try as I would, without a rest, and I halted at Green’s. Who’s dead among ‘em, and who’s alive?”
“God be thanked!” exclaimed Meg Pennet, with a sob of emotion.
All Mr. Chattaway’s faculties were strained on the mouth of that yawning pit, and what it might yield up. As body after body was brought to the surface — seven of them were up now — he cast his anxious looks upon it, expecting to recognise the fair face of Rupert Trevlyn. Expecting and yet dreading — don’t think him worse than he was; with the frightened, half-shrinking dread ordinarily experienced by women, or by men of nervous and timid temperament. So utterly did this suspense absorb him as to make him almost oblivious to the painful features of the scene, the wails of woe and bursts of lamentation.
Happening for a minute to turn his eyes from the pit, he saw in the distance a pony-carriage approaching, which looked uncommonly like that of Miss Diana Trevlyn. Instinct told him that the two figures seated in it were his wife and Miss Diana, although as yet he could not see whether they were women or men. It was slowly winding down a distant hill, and would have to ascend another and come over the flat stretch of country ere it could reach them. He beckoned his clerk Ford to him in a sort of terror.
“Run, Ford! Make all speed. I think I see Miss Trevlyn’s pony-carriage yonder with the ladies in it. Don’t let them approach. Tell them to turn aside, to the office, and I’ll come to them. Anywhere; anywhere but here.”
Ford ran with all his might. He met the carriage just at the top of the nearest hill, and unceremoniously laid his hand upon the pony, giving Mr. Chattaway’s message as well as his breathless state would allow — begging they would turn aside and not approach the pit.
It was evident that they were strangers as yet to the news, but the crowd and excitement round the pit had been causing them apprehension and a foreshadowing of the truth. Miss Diana, paying, as it appeared, little heed to the message, extended her whip in the direction of the scene.
“I see what it is, Ford. Don’t beat about the bush. How many were down the shaft?”
“A great many, ma’am,” was Ford’s reply. “The pit was in full work to-day.”
“Was it fire-damp?”
“I believe so.”
“Mr. Chattaway’s safe, you say? He was not down? I suppose he was not likely to be down?”
“No,” answered Ford. But the thought of Mr. Chattaway’s accident from another source, which he did not know whether to disclose or not, and the consciousness of a worse calamity, caused him to speak hesitatingly. Miss Diana was quick of apprehension, and awoke it.
“Was any one down the shaft besides the men? Was — where’s Rupert Trevlyn?”
Ford looked as if he dared not answer.
Mrs. Chattaway caught the alarm. She half rose in the low carriage, and stretched out her hands in a pleading attitude; as though Ford held the issues of life and death.
“Oh, speak, speak! He was not down the shaft! Surely Rupert was not down the shaft!”
“He had gone down but a short time before,” said the young man in a whisper — for where was the use of denying the fact, now that they had guessed it? “We shall all mourn him, ma’am. I had almost as soon it had been me.”
“Gone down the shaft but a short time before!” mechanically repeated Miss Diana in her horror. But she was interrupted by a cry from Ford. Mrs. Chattaway had fallen back on her seat in a fainting-fit.
CHAPTER XXXII
A SHOCK FOR MR. CHATTAWAY
The brightness of the day was turning to gloom, as if the heavens sympathised with the melancholy scene upon earth. Quietly pushing his way through the confusion, moans and lamentations, the mass of human beings surrounding the mouth of the pit, was a tall individual whose acquaintance you have made before. It was Mr. Daw with his red umbrella: the latter an unvarying appendage, whether the sun was shining or the clouds dropped rain. He went straight up to certain pale faces lying there in a row, and glanced at them one by one.
“They are saying that Rupert Trevlyn is amongst the sufferers,” he observed to those nearest to him.
“So he is, master.”
“I do not see him here.”
“No; he ain’t up yet.”
“Is there no hope that he may be brought to the surface alive?”
They shook their heads. “Not now. He have been down too long. There’s not a chance for him.”
Something like emotion passed over Mr. Daw’s features.
“How came he to be down the pit?” he asked. “Was it his business to go down?”
“Not in ord’nary. No: ‘tworn’t once in six months as there was aught to take him there.”
“Then what took him there to-day?” was Mr. Daw’s next question.
“The master sent him,” replied the man, pointing towards Chattaway.
Apparently Mr. Daw had not observed Chattaway before, and he turned and walked towards him. Vexation at the loss of Rupert — it may surely be called vexation rather than grief, since he had not known Rupert sufficiently long to love him — a loss so sudden and terrible, was rendering Mr. Daw unjust. Chattaway’s worst enemy could not fairly blame him with reference to the fate of Rupert: but Mr. Daw was in a hasty mood.
“Is it true that you sent Rupert Trevlyn down the shaft only a few minutes before this calamity occurred?”
The address and the speaker equally took Mr. Chattaway by surprise. His attention was riveted on something then being raised from the shaft, and he had not noticed the stranger. Hastily turning his head, he saw, first the conspicuous red umbrella, next its obnoxious and dangerous owner.
Ah, but no longer dangerous now. That terrible fear was over for ever. With the first glimpse, Mr. Chattaway’s face had turned to a white heat, from the force of habit; but the next moment’s reflection reassured him, and he retained his equanimity.
“What did you say, sir?”
“Was there no one else, Mr. Chattaway, to serve your turn, but you must send down your wronged and unhappy nephew?” reiterated Mr. Daw, in tones that penetrated to every ear. “I have heard it said, since I came into this neighbourhood, that Mr. Chattaway would be glad, if by some lucky chance Squire Trevlyn’s grandson and legal heir could be put out of his path. It seems he has succeeded in accomplishing it.”
Mr. Chattaway’s face grew dark and frowning. “Take care what you say, sir, or you shall answer for your words. I ask you what you mean.”
“And I ask you — Was there no one you could despatch this morning into that dangerous mine, then on the very eve of exploding, but that helpless boy, Rupert, who might not resist your authority, and so went to his death? Was there no one, I ask?”
Mr. Daw’s zeal was decidedly outrunning his discretion. It is the province of exaggeration to destroy its cause, and the unfounded charge — which, temperately put, might have inflicted its sting — fell comparatively harmless on the ear of Mr. Chattaway. He could only stare and wonder — as if a proposition had been put to him in some foreign language.
“Why — bless my heart! — are you mad?” he presently exclaimed. His tone was sufficiently equable. “Could I tell the mine was going to explode? Had but the faintest warning reached me, do you suppose I should not have emptied the pit of all human souls? I am as sorry for Rupert as you can be: but the blame is not mine. It is not any one’s — unless it be his own. There was plenty of time to leave the pit after he had delivered the message I sent him down with, had he chosen to do so. But I suppose he stopped gossiping with the men. This land belongs to me, sir. Unless you have any business here, I must request you to leave it.”
There was so much truth in what Mr. Chattaway urged that the stranger began to be a little ashamed of his heat. “Nevertheless, it is a thorn removed from your path,” he cried aloud. “And you would have removed him from it yourself long ago, could you have done it without sin.”
A half murmur of assent arose from the crowd. The stranger had hit the exact facts. Could the master of Trevlyn Hold have removed Rupert Trevlyn from his path without “sin,” without danger or trouble, it had been done long ago. In short, were it as easy to put some obnoxious individual out of life, as it is to stow away an offending piece of furniture, Mr. Chattaway had most assuredly not waited until now to rid himself of Rupert: and those listeners knew it.
Mr. Chattaway turned his frowning face on the murmurers; but before more could be said by any one, the circle was penetrated by some new-comers, one of them in distress of mind that could not be hidden or controlled. Mrs. Chattaway having recovered from her apparent fainting-fit — though in reality she had not lost consciousness, and her closed eyes and intense pallor had led to the mistake — the pony-carriage had been urged with all speed to the scene of action. In vain the clerk Ford reiterated Mr. Chattaway’s protest against their approach. Miss Diana Trevlyn was not one to attend against her will to the protests of Mr. Chattaway.
“I would have saved his life with my own; I would have gone down in his place had it been possible,” wailed poor Mrs. Chattaway, wringing her hands, and wholly forgetting the reticence usually imparted by the presence of her husband.
Her grief was genuine; and the crowd sympathised with her almost as it did with those despairing women, weeping in their new widowhood. But the neighbours had not now to learn that Madame Chattaway loved her dead brother’s children, if her husband did not.
“For Heaven’s sake don’t make a scene here!” growled Mr. Chattaway, in impotent anger. “Have you no sense of the fitness of things?”
But his wife, however meekly submissive at other times, was not in a state for submission then. Unable to define the sensations that oppressed her, she only felt that all was over; the unhappy boy had gone from them for ever; the cruel wrongs inflicted on him throughout life were now irreparable.
“He has gone with all our unkindness on his head,” she wailed, partially unconscious, no doubt, of what she said; “gone to meet his father, my poor lost brother, bearing to him the tale of his wrongs! Oh, if — —”
“Be silent, will you?” shrieked Chattaway. “Are you going mad?”
Mrs. Chattaway covered her face with her hands, and leaned against the barrow on which her husband was sitting. Miss Diana Trevlyn, who had been gathering various particulars from the crowd, who had said a word of comfort — though it was little comfort they could listen to yet — to the miserable women, came up at this moment to Chattaway.
“It was a very unhappy thing that you should have sent Rupert into the pit this morning,” she said, her face wearing its most haughty expression.
“Yes,” he answered. “But I could not foresee what was about to happen. It — it might have been Cris. Had Cris been in the way at the time, and not Rupert, I should have despatched him.”
“Chattaway, I would give all my fortune to have him back again. I — —”
A strange commotion on the outskirts of the crowd attracted their attention, and Miss Diana brought her sentence to an abrupt conclusion, and turned sharply towards it, for the shouts bore the sound of triumph; and a few voices were half breaking into hurrahs. Strange sounds, in that awful death-scene!
Who was this advancing towards them? The crowd had parted to give him place, and he came leaping to the centre, all haste and excitement — a fair, gentlemanly young man, his silken hair uncovered, his cheeks hectic with excitement. Mrs. Chattaway cried aloud with a joyful cry, and her husband’s eyes and mouth slowly opened as though he saw a spectre.
It was Rupert Trevlyn. Rupert, it appeared, had not been down the pit at all. Sufficiently obedient to Mr. Chattaway, but not obedient to the letter, Rupert, when he reached the pit’s mouth, had seen the last of those men descending whom Chattaway had imperiously ordered down, and sent the message to Bean by him. His chief inducement was that he had just met an acquaintance who had come to tell him of a pony for sale — for Rupert, commissioned by Miss Trevlyn, had been making inquiries for one. It required little pressing to induce Rupert to abandon the office and Blackstone for some hours, and start off to see this pony. And that was where he had been. Mrs. Chattaway clasped her arms around his neck, in utter defiance of her husband’s prejudices, unremembered then, and sobbed forth her emotion.
“Why, Aunt Edith, you never thought I was one of them, did you? Bless you! I am never down the pit. I should not be likely to fall into such a calamity as that. Poor fellows! I must go and ascertain who was there.”
The crowd, finding Rupert safe, broke into a cheer, and a voice shouted — could it have been Mr. Daw’s?— “Long live the heir! long live young Squire Trevlyn!” and the words were taken up and echoed in the air.
And Mr. Chattaway? If you want me to describe his emotions to you, I cannot do it. They were of a mixed nature. We must not go so far as to say he regretted to see Rupert back in life; felt no satisfaction at his escape; but with his reappearance all the old fears returned. They returned tenfold from the very fact of his short immunity from them, and the audacious words of the crowd turned his face livid. In conjunction with the yet more audacious words previously spoken by the stranger and the demonstrative behaviour of his wife, they were as a sudden blow to Mr. Chattaway.
Those shouters saw his falling countenance, his changed look, and drew their own conclusions. “Ah! he’d put away the young heir if he could,” they whispered one to another. “But he haven’t got shut of him this time.”
No; Mr. Chattaway certainly had not.
“God has been merciful to your nephew,” interposed the peaceful voice of Mr. Lloyd, drawing near. “He has been pleased to save him, though He has seen fit to take others. We know not why it should be — some struck down, others spared. His ways are not as our ways.”
They lay there, a long line of them, and the minister pointed with his finger as he spoke. Most of the faces looked calm and peaceful. Oh! were they ready? Had they lived to make God their friend? Trusting in Christ their Saviour? My friends, this sudden call comes to others as well as to miners: it behoves us all to be ready for it.
As the day drew on, the excitement did not lessen; and Mr. Chattaway almost forgot the hurt, which he would have made a great deal of at another time. But the ankle was considerably swollen and inflamed, giving him pain still, and it caused him to quit the scene for home earlier than he might otherwise have done.
He left Cris to superintend. Cris was not incompetent for the task; but he might have displayed a little more sympathy with the sufferers without compromising his dignity. Cris had arrived in much bustle and excitement at the scene of action: putting eager questions about Rupert, as to how he came to be down the shaft, and whether he was really dead. The report that he was dead had reached Cris Chattaway’s ears at some miles’ distance, as it had reached those of many others.
It reached Maude Trevlyn’s. The servants at the Hold heard it, and foolishly went to her. “There had been an explosion in the pit, and Master Rupert was amongst the killed.” Maude was as one stricken with horror. She did not faint or cry; putting on a shawl and bonnet mechanically, as she would for any ordinary walk, she left the house on her way to Blackstone. “Don’t go, Maude; it will only be more painful to you,” Octave had said in kindly tones, as she saw her departing; but Maude, as though she heard not, bore swiftly on with a dry eye and burning brow. Turning from the fields into the road, she met George Ryle.
