It was eight o'clock, and the crowd that had come and gone during the afternoon had now gathered again in force. It was known all round that the critical moment had arrived. Everything was ready; the supreme act of bringing the men to the surface alone remained to be accomplished. The rope was carefully lowered, and the watchers held their breath.
For some minutes the rope dangled, now and then becoming taut for a moment, and then hanging limp again. It was evident that something was wrong.
"What is it?" the foreman shouted anxiously.
"We can't do it," came a voice from the bottom.
"We're too stiff; we can't get hold."
There was a silence for what seemed an interminable space after these words.
"Some one must go down to them," said the foreman slowly, his own face growing very white. He knew that whoever went down might be passing to instant death; for though everything that could be done had been done to render the passage safe, yet he had hoped against hope that the necessity of a passagedownwould be avoided. He was a great stout fellow himself, and not so active as Hayes, who he had trusted, would squeeze himself through.
During that pause the workmen looked questioningly at each other, and no one read in his mate's face any desire to try the dangerous experiment. The crowd listened again breathlessly. The foreman cast an imploring look around.
"Won't anybody volunteer?" he asked.
"I will."
It was Geo Lummis who spoke, and a burst of approbation broke from the bystanders.
It was as well the men below were in ignorance of the immediate and extreme danger they were suddenly exposed to by the lowering of a third person into the abyss; for their position was this:—The woodwork which had fallen over the mouth of the cylinder had held up the fallen earth when the wall caved in. This mould was now removed, and by the extraordinary skill and care of those engaged in the difficult task the woodwork had not shifted; but it remained to be seen whether the bad passage of a man working his way down with practically no light go guide him, and with the chance of dislodging odd pieces that had stuck fast in their fall, would not bring the whole thing upon their heads and his own, and, as Hayes put it, "finish the job and have done with them."
Geo was fully alive to the danger as he adjusted the rope round his body, put his foot into the loop, and gave the command to "lower away." At first he went down very slowly, and then came the order to "lower faster," and the crowd grasped the welcome fact that there was no insuperable obstruction in the cylinder.
For a short space of time there was an ominous silence, and then a closed lamp was let down, and the foreman's face cleared. One part of the difficulty had been surmounted; he began to feel more confident of success.
---
In the meantime Geo had reached the bottom, and found the men supporting each other as best they could, but stiff and chilled with their long immersion in three feet of water.
Hayes tried to raise a feeble cheer, but Chapman was past any attempt at cheerfulness. He had sunk into a sort of sullen apathy. Neither of them was capable of helping himself. At first both men wanted to come up at once, and Geo found himself suddenly confronted with an unforeseen difficulty. Chapman was obviously delirious, and Hayes was showing signs of losing his temper.
"One at a time,"said Geo decidedly. "Can't you see there's no room for two?"
"Well," said Hayes at last, "you can send up him; he's pretty nigh done for, and he've got a missus and little 'uns. Only hurry up and due it."
Geo lost no time in securing Chapman as best he could, and with a stern command to him (for he seemed to have completely lost his nerve) to hold on tight and keep his body straight, he chucked at the rope to show all was right, and with a beating heart watched him being drawn higher and higher, till he had passed safely through the aperture. Then he turned to Hayes. This was no time for sentiment, and neither of the men indulged in it.
Hayes had his pipe between his teeth. It had long ago been guiltless of tobacco, but it was comforting, all the same. He did not remove it, and he said nothing to Geo, but signified his gratitude by a nod, and what under happier circumstances might have been a wink.
When the rope reappeared he seized it, with Geo's assistance, made himself fast, and gave the signal for going up.
Geo saw the soles of Hayes's big boots rise over his own head with eyes that dilated with something like fear, and a heart that thumped audibly against his ribs, as for a few moments his own fate hung in the balance. Hayes's broad shoulders, even with the greatest care, might refuse to pass through the aperture without dislodging some of the fallen timber; such a little would send it down on his head. It would be a horrible death, for he would see it coming—coming—coming before it fell, and Geo didn't want to die. The possible nearness of death flashed into his mind, and he scarcely dared look when Hayes reached the hole, and a few broken straws, loosened by his passage through it, floated down on to his upturned face. The ominous words, "You'll cover us up and ha' done with us," occurred to him again with terrible persistence. Minute after minute passed, and the rope did not reappear. Impossible but horrible thought, were they so much taken up with Chapman and Hayes that they had forgotten him?
Geo had stepped on to one of the turned-over pails on which the other men had been standing, and the water had reached up to his knees when he had given Hayes his parting shove. He now noticed with surprise that it had suddenly reached considerably over them. He glanced apprehensively to the sides of the well. It was perfectly evident that the water had risen. Higher, higher it crept, till it nearly reached his waist, and then the awful truth flashed on him.The springs had begun to work!
It was perhaps just as well that Geo was an inexperienced well-sinker, and that he did not know the horrible danger he was in, or with what fearful rapidity a long-dry spring sometimes rises when once it has begun to move; but he shuddered with apprehension as the cold water crept up to his arm-pits, and as it touched his shoulders flesh and blood could stand no more, and he lifted up his voice and shouted with a shout that shook the frail supports above him till he trembled once more for their endurance.
It is said that a drowning man sees all his life pass in review before his mental vision, and a wave of remorse for lost opportunities and wasted days swept over him as he stood on the brink, as it were, of eternity. And all the time those ominous words of Hayes were ringing—ringing—ringing in his ears—those ears that soon would be covered with the creeping icy flood. At last! at last! After an eternity of agony the aperture was once more was once more darkened; something was coming down—quick, quicker, the rope was running out from the windlass. Thank God, it had a bucket on the end of it. Splash it went in the water, and filling, sank immediately. Geo shouted as he grasped the rope with his strong hands, twisted his legs round it below, and as they drew him up slid his half-numbed feet into the bucket.
---
I don't think that any one who was present will ever forget the moments when Geo's white face appeared above the brickwork, and his dripping garments told the tale of his terrible predicament; for Geo for the moment was past speech, and there went up from the crowd such a roar of admiration and delight as Willowton had never heard before. And there was such a rush of the foremost bystanders to shake their hero by the hand that the policemen had their work cut out for them with a vengeance, for the enthusiasm had passed all bounds.
The foreman had said, "Don't make a fuss when they come up," when the other men had been drawn to the surface; for he had seen similar accidents before, and he knew that the men's nerves would not be in a state to stand much excitement. The crowd had behaved in an exemplary manner, and except for the summarily-squashed cheering of a few thoughtless boys, they had been allowed to pass quietly to the conveyances that awaited them, assisted by the parish doctor and a couple more medical men from Ipswich. But it was not to be expected or desired that they would treat Geo in the same way. Martin and Cadger managed the rope, and as he reached the surface Mr. Barlow and the vicar were there to greet him.
"You're a brave fellow, Geo," said the vicar, grasping his hand, while the farmer patted him kindly on the back.—"Now, then," he shouted, waving his hat to the crowd, "three cheers for the gallant rescuer. Hip, hip, hip, hur-rah-h!" and once more the ringing cheers rang out.
Geo began to feel shy and looked about for a chance of escape, but there was none. He found himself standing with a little group in a clear space into which the vigilant police allowed no one to intrude. Just then a diversion occurred. Over the cheers came the strident discordant sound of a motor horn, and across the common flashed a car, which pulled up sharply, and a gentleman sprang out. The police recognized him, the crowd made way, and he hurried up to the group round the well. It was the dowser. His arrival was well-timed, and among the crowd there were some who knew him before, and without much difficulty he pushed his way through to the enclosure, and in obedience to a signal from Mr Rutland the policeman allowed him to pass under the rope. He looked pale and anxious.
"Is it all right?" he shouted when the car stopped.
A welcome "Yis, yis, master," allayed his fears.
He had followed the movements of the rescuers eagerly since his daily paper had given him news of the catastrophe; but being a busy man, it was not till this morning that he had been able to get away from his work, and had left his home in Gloucestershire almost at break of dawn. Motors are not infallible, and his car had broken down at Swindon; and it being Sunday, there had been great difficulties and consequent delay in getting it repaired.
Mr Wilman's eye fell naturally on the central figure of the group, Geo Lummis.
"Ah!" he exclaimed, "I was right: thereiswater in your well!" for Geo was dripping, and the water was running off his clothes and trickling slowly away on the dry soil.
"Indeed there is sir, and more'n I cared about!" said Geo dubiously.
"I recognize you," said the dowser, smiling. "You are the young man who followed me with Mr. Barlow on the search."
"Yes, sir," said Geo quietly, and shivering as he spoke.
"You're cold, boy," said Martin. "Hev some a' th' doctor's stuff," and he handed a glass of the egg-flip to him. Geo drank it off, and wrung out his trousers.
"Can't we disperse the crowd now?" said Mr. Rutland to the constables; "I should like to get him away."
"Not yet awhile, sir," said the constable, with a knowing look. "They're taking round the hat for him, and he deserve it, that he do," he added emphatically. "Best leave 'em a few minutes, if you've no objection sir."
Mr. Rutland had no objection, but Geo himselfhad.
As a rule, Geo was, as we know, easy-going to a fault, and fell in too readily with anything and everything that his friends liked to suggest; but to his own surprise as much as that of any of the bystanders at these words, which he could not help overhearing, all his pride rose in revolt. His face flushed with sudden red, and his voice rang out with a loud and peremptory"Stop that!"
The men who were collecting turned and stared. They were not accustomed to refusals on occasions of this kind, and Geo's sudden bursting into notice astounded them.
"I take it very kind of you all," roared Geo, as if he had been accustomed to address a constituency, "but I'd rather you didn't give me nothin'. What I've done any on you would ha' done if I hain't a-been by, and I've liked myself wonderful all this last week, and I find I'm gettin' 'mazin' partial to work." (Cheers and laughter.) "Yes, you may laugh; there do 'pear a bit funny, I'll own, but that's the truth, and nothin' but the truth, and I—I—I mean towork like a good 'un!"
He ended rather lamely, but the crowd took up the cheers again, and, police or no police, half a dozen strong young fellows broke through the barrier, hoisted Geo on their shoulders, and carried him right away up the village to the tramp of many feet and the tune of "For he's a jolly good fellow," and nobody raised a protest even in the sacred cause of order.
Milly Greenacre stood at her garden gate as the stream went by; old Jimmy looked out of his bedroom window in his cotton night-cap, and cheered in his cracked old voice.
All his life long Geo will remember the dim outline of Milly's figure, white against the background of the lilac bushes, and the quaint, whimsical face of the old man peering into the darkness, and looking at him, for the first time of his life, with approval. It was only an instantaneous snapshot from the lanterns carried by some of the party that revealed the picture to him, but it was photographed for ever on his brain, and it was not one of the least among the pleasurable things Geo looked back to when all the excitement was over, and he had settled down to steady work as he said he would.
It is often said that no great work can be accomplished without some correspondingly great sacrifice, and the fever was not stamped out and the water supply made pure without the suffering of an innocent victim in the good cause. And scarcely had the excitement over the accident at the well abated, when Willowton learned that one of the chief directors of the movement—their vicar—was dangerously ill. The long strain, physical and mental, of his resolute fight for the right, the senseless opposition his flock had met him with all through those weary months of work and disappointment, had told on him at last, and when the moment of victory came he succumbed, and three days later he was raging in the delirium of fever. And then, but only then, the wiseacres of the village remarked to each other that they had "minded he looked wonderful quare the last few Sundays—kind a' dazed like;" and the old women had noticed his thin cheeks and restless eye. Yet none of them had ever thought of saying a kind word to him when he called at their cottages, and all had greeted him with the sullen manner they had adopted, as if by common consent, since he had begun his crusade against dirt and insanitariness.
On the evening of that day the doctor's dogcart stopped at Mrs. Lummis's door. He had been such a frequent visitor there during her illness that nobody attached any importance to his visit; though Mrs. Lummis was up and about again, but not yet able to do entirely for herself. But the neighbours did stare when, a quarter of an hour later, Geo came out with a bundle and climbed into the cart alongside him, and drove away up the village with him. And they would have stared harder if they had known whither Geo was bound.
Geo and his mother were sitting at their evening meal when the doctor had knocked at their door. And they were not alone; Milly Greenacre was with them. The three were laughing merrily over the old lady's reminiscences of her "courting" days, and there was a pleasant sense of comfort and happiness in the air.
"I am sorry to interrupt you, Mrs. Lummis," said the doctor, putting his kindly face in at the door, "but I have come to ask you for your nurse."
"Come in, sir, come in," said Mrs. Lummis, rising; and the doctor complied, Geo closing the door behind him.
"But nurse have been gone these two days, sir," she said wonderingly.
"Ah yes. It's not Nurse Blunt I want; it is this good fellow here," looking at Geo, who got very red and looked extremely uncomfortable. "The truth is," went on the doctor, "it is not a woman I want, but aman, for the vicar; he is desperately ill, you know."
"Yes, sir, we've heard," said Mrs. Lummis sympathetically. "That's a bad job, poor gentleman, I'm sure; but—-"
"Now, look here," said the doctor, cutting short any possible objections, "this is a matter of life or death; there is no time to lose.—Will you or will you not come?" turning to Geo.
"Me, sir! I am sure I don't know. I don't know nothin' about nursing. I—-"
"You know quite enough. Nurse Blunt will be there when she can, and Mrs. Crowe will do her best. But the truth is, the poor man is violent. It is a strong man I want, with a steady nerve and a good temper. You, I think can answer to this description, and I think, after the pluck and ability you showed during the past week, that I can trust you."
Geo's eyes gleamed for a moment under their downcast lids, and he looked at his mother and Milly for inspiration; and the doctor's keen eye noticed with amusement that he sought Milly's counsel first.
"Oh, you must go," said Milly warmly, answering the look. "That would be a shame not to go to him. If only I was a man—-"
"Which you need not wish at all, Milly," said the doctor, laughing, for he had known Milly all her life. "You had better come and help Mrs. Lummis a bit every day, and let her son go.—Come along, Geo; put your night things together and let us be off." And so, as Mrs. Lummis expressed it afterwards, "the doctor was so terrible masterful he took him off before my own eyes as if he'd a-been no more'n a child!"
But Geo proved no child, and, indeed, it was no child's work he had to perform. For several nights he and Mrs. Crowe sat up with the sick man, who, until the fever had spent itself, was so strong that Geo had to put forth all his strength at times to hold him when the fits of delirium came on. Then came the inevitable weakness that follows fever, and so for a fortnight the vicar of Willowton lay between life and death.
"Quiet, nothing but absolute quiet, can save him," the doctor said. And so the bells were not rung for service; the carts and other vehicles that generally came rattling past the vicarage gate were now turned back at the top of the street, for a faithful guard was always set there to stop all traffic that way.
It was old Greenacre's idea. "That there rattlin' is 'mazin' bad for the 'hid,'" he said—"I mind that whin I was ill threugh bein' thrown off a wagon when I was a booy—and they didn't ought ter pass this way." So he established himself on a chair under the shadow of the garden wall, and sat patiently watching the egress through many a long hour, keeping the street. "Jest like a beggar with a tin mug and a paper pinned on his chist," said Corkam, who couldn't resist a sneer. But old Jimmy was not there all day, for there were grateful convalescents in the persons of Tom Chapman and his friends, who took their turn as sentry.
So the sick man, so carefully tended within and so guarded without, still hung on between life and death. And as he lay there powerless and speechless, that fickle jade Popularity stole back to his side. Shyly, shamefacedly, almost fearfully, people began to speak well of the man who was in all probability going to give his life for their well-being. He had had the grace to "ketch th' faver" just like one of themselves, and it was going as hard with him as it had gone with many of their own flesh and blood.
"He warn't so bad after all," they allowed. "'Twarn't so much his fault that there well fell in." They even remembered how he had watched and prayed by the sick-beds. They went so far as to hope he "wouldn't be took." And the doctor, who read them like a book, smiled to himself as he watched the poison of prejudice gradually dying in their hearts, and common sense and a small measure of justice stealing back into their perverted minds.
At last came a day when the good man came gaily down the staircase and opened the door with the welcome words, "A decided change for the better. Please God, we'll pull him through now." And a subdued murmur of joy arose from the little crowd of women and children that gathered every morning round the house to see the doctor go away and hear the latest news.
Foremost among these was Annie Chapman—hard working, untidy, cheery Annie. She has improved very little in any respect except in her household arrangements; but though no power on earth could ever succeed in making her tidy, cleanliness has become her ruling passion. She scrubs, and rubs, and washes everything she can lay her hands on, and no future outbreak of fever or any other disease shall ever, she declares, be laid to her door. So out of evil will come good, and the Willowton of the future promises to be a very different place from the fever haunt it has been for the past half-century, if the doctor and the vicar and Annie Chapman can make it so.
And now there only remains for us to see how things fared with Geo Lummis, who so suddenly found himself acting so important a part in the annals of the village. Dr. Davies was anxious to keep him under his eye as a professional man-nurse; but Geo struck at that. He was very glad, he said, to have been of use to the gentlemen, both of them, but sick-nursing was no work for him. He pined for the fresh air and the open fields, and, if the truth must be known, for the ripple of the water under the bridge. Not that he meant to return either to his old ways or his old companions, for he has done with Corkam for ever; and Milly Greenacre and he have made their minds to be married as soon as the vicar is well enough to marry them. And as if wonders would never cease, Milly's scruples about leaving her old grandfather alone have all been removed in the most unexpected manner. While Geo has been nursing the vicar all the past month, old Jimmy had been spending all his odd moments with Mrs. Lummis, with the result that he and Geo are going to play at "puss in the corner," and there are going to be two weddings instead of one! Geo is coming to live in the Greenacres' pretty cottage, and old Jimmy is going to hang up his hat on Geo's old peg in his mother's house. A more satisfactory arrangement of all parties could not be imagined: for Jimmy has saved quite a little hoard of money, enough to keep him comfortable, he hopes, for the rest of his life; and Geo has been taken on as a farm labourer by Mr. Barlow, with the promise of an extra teamster's place, and he is looking forward to getting his seven pounds for the harvest which is now about to begin, after which he and Milly are to be made man and wife.
THE END