On the day after the meeting at Swanborough, Noel Farquhar walked in upon Lucian in his room and found him sitting in his shirt and trousers trying to write. It was intensely hot, and he had cast off his coat and his waistcoat and his collar, his tie and his boots, had posted open the door and flung wide the window, and hung across a string of dripping towels to keep out the sun. Nevertheless, he was mopping his brow with a dirty old penwiper-handkerchief, and his face was colourless but for its tan.
“Sit down,” he said; “sit down and let me swear at you for a bit; I’m tired of haranguing a condemned desk that doesn’t respond. What’s the matter, sonny? You look as blue as a thunder-cloud with cholera-morbus.”
“Can you listen to business or can you not?”
“Ou ay, my trusty frien’; I’ve been chasing my plot for two solid hours, and it’s clane disthracted I am. I’ve got ‘chainless’ twiceon one page, and so sure as I put down that blessed word I know I’ll have to tear up the lot. There it goes!” He tore the sheets across and across and flung them at the paper-basket. “There was rather a sweet girl in it, too; I’ll use her up some day for a three-thousander. You were saying—”
“Will you come round the works with me and Charlesworth?”
“What, again? I’ve done it once this day.”
“I want to go round in the dinner-hour, while the men are out. There’s something up, I’d swear it, and Charlesworth says the same.”
“If it’s anything exciting, I’m your man,” said Lucian, completing his costume with a pair of carpet slippers and a white pith helmet, in which he looked as swarthy as a Hindoo. “Anyway, this is the last time. Come on, and I’ll post my letter to her on the way.”
He looked at Farquhar, gleefully anticipating a flash of jealousy, and he had his wish. He laughed, tossed up the letter and caught it, and smote Farquhar on the shoulder as they went down-stairs. “Only a fortnight more, sonny, and then we shall know!”
But Farquhar did not find an answer. Prudence and friendship combined to keep his wild-beast jealousy in order, but he never even tried to cast it out.
In the porch they found Charlesworth waiting impassive, drawn back into the shade. Summer had come suddenly upon them with a burning heat; the roads were padded with dust, herbs drooped as if they were broken, brick walls fumed like the outposts of Hades. Creeping up from the south, certain blue, hazy clouds, their scrolled rims tinged with amber and saffron, were surely invading the sky. In the quarry not a man was left; the intense heat, radiated and reflected from the granite walls, made the place a purgatory. Mica crystals scintillated in the grey dust. The noonday sun was shining straight down into the pit; the shrunken river, like a strip of blue satin, crept without coolness below along the cliffs; only under the great rock, which stood out now like a wen on the face of the hill, was any shadow to be found. Towards that shade Lucian promptly made his way, and there sat down on a wheelbarrow.
All the preliminaries were over, and the rock was ready to be blasted. On three sides it stood free, and across the fourth, at the back of the block, ranged the drilled holes following the line of fracture between the fine stone and the coarser. With what care Charlesworth had assigned and executed the boring and the tamping Lucian knew; yet the quarry-masterwas now prepared to examine it all again, patiently testing what could be tested, rigorously fulfilling his duty according to the laws of a pride which forbade imperfections. Farquhar helped him; Lucian, who was really a superfluous person, sat on his barrow and gibed at both.
A steam-whistle called the men back to work at one o’clock. Hidden behind the rock, Lucian had a good view of them as they trooped in, and he was surprised by their behaviour. The Belgians are by nature friendly and polite; as many as knew Lucian (and nine-tenths of them did) had always for him a smile, a wave of the hat, a word of kind greeting; but Charlesworth was severely ignored. One youth went to the length of a long nose behind the manager’s back. An English lad of his own age forthwith fell upon him, and after a brief and silent struggle proceeded to wipe the ground with his prostrate enemy until he craved for mercy; but the boy had merely expressed the feelings of his elders. Another point which perplexed Lucian was the silence of the men; a few were whispering together and glancing between their words at Charlesworth, but the usual lively chatter was not to be heard.
“Not much of the peace-on-earth business here, is there?” Charlesworth remarked to thephilosopher on the wheelbarrow. “I don’t go around in these lanes after sundown without my revolver.”
“Think they’d go as far as that?”
“Don’t know; they hate me like poison, anyway. I can put up with that now we’ve got this business through; I guess we’ll pretty soon see who’s master here.”
Lucian nodded. He was not so sure as Charlesworth that force is the best preventive of rebellion; in fact, he held the heretical idea that he could have managed the men better himself.
“You going to stay here till the thing’s going to pop?”
“I mean to stay right here till Mr. Farquhar’s lighted the fuse. There’ll be time then to clear out; it’ll take ten minutes before it explodes. I don’t want any one meddling with these cartridges.”
Lucian had no wish to face the sun before he was forced to; he waited with Charlesworth under the rock. Both were excited. Farquhar, standing beside the igniter thirty feet away, was noticeably nonchalant. The warning whistle sounded at five minutes to two; and, as so often before, the workers swarmed away to places of shelter, some to the summit of the pit, others into chambers cut in therock where no shock of explosion could reach them. Farquhar gave them five minutes’ grace. A bell sounded; and the watchers saw him stoop and fire the fuse. Immediately Charlesworth uncrossed his legs and stepped towards the gate; and immediately after came a terrific detonation, a terrific eruption of rock, black smoke, and flame and fumes and flying crags; and then the collapse, as it were, of the firmament itself; and, lastly, darkness.
Those who saw it said that at the moment of explosion a huge ball of smoke puffed out and immediately came rolling over and over in black convolutions, rent by ghastly chasms and caverns of sulphurous gloom. They said that the fire flashed out starwise, radiating in a dozen spokes of gold from one common centre; and that the second detonation (for there were two) was more violent than the first. Farquhar saw nothing of this. He was hurled to the earth by the first shock and pinned down there under the fragments during the second; and when he found his senses and sat up he came near fainting again, for the pit was poisoned with fumes. He fell back, and, lying face downward, breathed in the less polluted lower air until the inrushing wind had time to sweeten that above. Then hemade another effort, and began to shake off the rocks which had fallen on him. He was horribly bruised; another man would have been disabled. But Farquhar was by nature insensitive to suffering, and, besides, his will scorned to submit to the weakness of his body; he refused to be fettered by pain. This man of many sins was not planning for his own safety; he was remembering only that Lucian had been standing under the rock destroyed, and he swore at the impediments that delayed him as though he could wither them up by the fire of his curses. He struggled free, and saw lying under him the fragments of the detonator, with a length of fuse attached. The appearance of the fuse surprised him, and he took it up. Crossed threads of orange worsted ran over it. By that mark he knew it for what it was: not the ordinary slow fuse which should have been used, but the other, instantaneous kind, where gunpowder is replaced by a quick match, which burns at the rate of thirty feet per second. Now the cause of the catastrophe was clear. Some one had substituted this for the proper fuse, and, to conceal the change, had picked out the distinctive orange threads. Only this piece, hidden in the body of the detonator, had escaped notice to show the manner of their treachery.
Farquhar dismissed the authors of the crime to perdition, along with their instrument. Now he was standing up and could see the ruin that had been wrought; the beautiful stone, destined for such fine purposes, was shattered, almost pulverized. It was not till afterwards, when the evidence came to be weighed, that he realised how this had come about; for the substitution of the quick fuse should have made a difference in the time of the explosion but not in its results. The truth was that only half the strands had been changed; the rest were left as slow fuse; so that instead of one there were two explosions, which, acting separately, broke the rock to pieces. But Farquhar cared little for his ruined enterprise. He looked round the smoking amphitheatre, he saw the faces of the men who had come with him from England, who were of one blood with those entombed; he lifted his arm, from which the sleeve had been wrenched together with part of the flesh, and called out to them in their native tongue:
“Men, there are two Englishmen buried under these rocks; it’s our business to get them out.”
The strange acoustic properties of the quarry carried his words to every man there. He put a point to them by himself lifting a pick, whichthe explosion had cast at his feet, and beginning to work. In two minutes a dozen men were working at his side; in ten, every soul, native or foreign, was taking his part. To do the men justice, murder had not been in their thoughts; they had aimed only to spoil the rock. If the manager, who usually fired the mines, should happen to get hurt, it would be a lamentable incident; but the presence of Charlesworth and Lucian immediately under the rock they had not foreseen, and, indeed, had not known of till Farquhar spoke. Now they could only hope to atone by willing labour.
Through all that long hot summer afternoon they toiled and toiled and toiled. Men from the village of Petit-Fays volunteered to relieve those who were spent, and took their turn with the pick in rotation, but Farquhar refused to leave work. He tied a strip of linen round his wounded arm, which grew more painful when the muscles contracted; but he went on digging. He knew that his immense and disciplined strength had a special value. Mentally he could not rest and physically he would not, though the men began to look at one another as the hours passed in vain. Sunset found them still working; and the gracious coolness of night with its million stars. At last, at midnight, one of the Englishworkmen (the same whom Lucian had liked so much) came to Farquhar and said, very respectfully:
“Beg pardon, sir, but is it any use going on?”
“Use? I should hope so,” said Farquhar, straightening his shoulders and pushing back his fair hair. “What do you mean?”
“Me and my mates would be willing to work on any time if there was any chance of getting either of them out alive—”
“D’you mean to say you think there’snochance?”
“We’re afraid not, sir,” said the first man; and a murmur of assent went up from the others, who had left work and clustered round. Farquhar’s brows came together, and he stared at them as though he could not understand their speech.
“You say there’s no chance? I say that’s nonsense. I’d never have thought that Englishmen would shirk.”
“We ain’t shirking,” said the spokesman, rather proudly. “I’d lay there isn’t one of us as wouldn’t be ready to work his hands off if there was any chanst at all; but there ain’t, not a mite. I seen a good many blow-ups in my time, and I say there’s no man could be living now after all that mess had fallen on him. If they wasn’t killed outright they’dhave been stifled. Anybody as knows’ll say the same.”
Again the murmured assent followed his words.
Farquhar still stood staring, but his face changed, cleared, hardened. Fever was running riot in his veins, and he was not wholly master of his words, else he would not have laid such a charge against them; for he knew it was not true. They had worked till they were spent; the pose of their figures as they waited showed it more plainly than words. And against that mass of granite all their toil seemed futile. Of what use to continue?
“You’re quite right, and I beg your pardon, men. Knock off to-night, then; we’ll take a fresh spell at it to-morrow, for I mean my friends to have Christian burial. I shall see that all you’ve done to-day is not forgotten.”
As he had first begun work, so now he was first to leave off; he leaned his pick against a stone and turned homeward. In ten minutes the deserted quarry was left to the dews and the night.