Part 12

“I—beg your pardon,” said Angela, breathless and confused. Maud gave her a sharp look. She turned on her companion. “Mr. Merton, you can run away now and play; I’m going to talk to Angela. Mind, the bet stands.”

“All right, Mrs. Prideaux,” Merton answered, laughing as he went away. Maud scanned Angela’s discomposed countenance with a sparkling eye.

“What have you been doing?” she asked, in her usual drawl.

Angela did not reply.

“Dear, dear! Refusing Bernard Fane, upon my honour! Really, Angela, it’s too bad to lead the poor man on as you did and then throw him over.”

“I did _not_ lead him on.”

Maud shrugged her shoulders. “You’re a shocking little flirt, my dear, but I really think you might have let the poor barbarian go. I shouldn’t wonder if the gardener swept him up to-morrow, with his throat cut. There’s poor Lal, too, ready to shoot himself. The way you young people behave is quite dreadful; I should have been ashamed to do so.”

As Mrs. Prideaux before her marriage had been the most open and shameless flirt, Angela could not but resent this remark. “I _never_ flirted with Mr. Fane,” she said.

“How about his roses? I see you’ve given them back to him.”

This was purely a guess, based on an observation of glances during dinner and the absence of the flowers from Angela’s corsage. Miss Laurenson grew warmly red, and said nothing. Maud’s kindly inquisitive eyes searched her; she tapped her on the shoulder with her fan. “Come, tell me all about it. My dear child, what have you been doing? You’re like Lot’s wife, all tears.”

“Thank you, I’m not salt yet,” said Angela, whose eyes were still quite dry.

“Wasn’t it Lot’s wife? I don’t pretend to be clever; it wasn’t the fashion for girls to know anything in my day. What have you been saying to Bernard Fane?”

Sure of an interested listener, Angela told her tale. At its close she got a surprising shock. “Do you know what you ought to do now?” said Mrs. Prideaux.

“What?”

“Go right back and beg his pardon.”

“Maud! I’d rather die!”

“Yes, and to-morrow you’ll be dying—dying to go and do it, but it’ll be too late then. You’re simply desperately in love with him, can’t say his name without blushing—yes, there she goes, the colour of a poppy! The child says she’s not in love with him! Well, well!”

“I hate him!” Angela declared, hiding her crimson cheeks in her hands.

“My dear child, hatred’s the back door into love. Think of him, lying on the damp ground with his throat cut!—such a nice throat, too! He’s adorably handsome, for a barbarian. Of course, he drops an h or so now and then—”

“He never does.”

“Doesn’t he? Well, no doubt you know better than I do. I wouldn’t have your conscience, Angela.”

“He was very rude to me.”

“Asked you to marry him, didn’t he? Shockin’ presumption!”

“I only told him the truth.”

“When I refused a man, I always did it nicely and tried to spare his feelings. I don’t see why you are so angry with the poor man; I’m sure it was very brave of him to fall in love with you.”

Silence for a little while. Angela said at last: “Maud, do you really think I ought to beg his pardon?”

“Haven’t the slightest doubt of it, my dear.”

“It will look as though I wanted—”

“Exactly what you do want. You’ve been talking a great deal about the rights of women all your life; haven’t you found out yet that a woman’s best right is to obey her husband?”

“No, I haven’t, and I don’t think it is.”

“Then it’s time you learned that it is. We aren’t made for anything else, my dear, you and I; we’re ordinary women, and we must make the best of it. You can’t imitate Dolly Fane, so don’t try to.”

“It’s the very last thing I should do!”

“Well, go and beg the barbarian’s pardon, then; she would never do that.” Maud had a grudge against Dolly because she disliked gossip.

“I _can’t_!”

“Nonsense, my dear child! You’re going to. There’s your path; run along, like a good little girl, and be sure you don’t tumble on your nose.—And there’s half my bet won!”

Maud had sent her off with a maternal pat, and Angela found herself going obediently. Instinct led truer than reason. Down the shadowy path she came blindly hurrying, and ran full against Bernard, leaning motionless against a tree.

“Angela!”

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” Angela said, with a sob.

Thus was peace established; but Angela soon found that in yielding she had stooped to conquer: her bear was transformed into a lamb. She might live at Timbuctoo, if it pleased her; she might wander through London alone till one in the morning, though plainly Bernard did not like the prospect.

“But, Bernard, why shouldn’t I?” Angela cried.

“Because you’re so awfully pretty,” was the surprising answer.

“Bernard! I thought you said I wasn’t pretty!”

“I don’t know where you got that idea from.”

“You said you didn’t want me for my looks.”

“Neither do I; I should want you just the same if you were like a gorilla.”

“But _do_ you think me pretty?”

“I should hope so!”

“As pretty as Dolly?”

“Dolly? Dolly’s a milkmaid and you’re a princess. Any one can see there’s no comparison. Dolly’s well enough, barring her carroty hair; but you’re so awfully distinguished-looking. I don’t see why you want me to tell you this; you must know it already.”

“I like compliments—I expect compliments; that’s one of the things you have to learn.”

“It’ll come pretty easy. I shall only have to say out what I think.”

“If you talk like that,” said Angela, “perhaps I’ll let you take me about London, after all. Now we must go back to the house; it’s getting shamefully late.”

“I don’t want to go up yet.”

“I do.”

Bernard looked down at her and laughed. “All right,” he said; “I guess you mean to have your own way.”

They came together slowly up the garden. The gold rectangle of the uncurtained window shone out in the dusk; the figures of Dolly and of Mrs. Merton appeared on the balcony, silhouetted against the light. Ella soon went in, but Dolly lingered, gazing at the dusky woods and the diamond gleam of the lake. Suddenly another figure came swiftly up the steps. Dolly turned at once towards the window; the lamplight fell on her face. Lal laid his hand on her arm and spoke in her ear: a single sentence, no more. Bernard saw his sister turn crimson. She answered briefly, broke away, went into the house. Lal fell back into the shadow.

“Did you see that?” whispered Angela.

“M’yes. I rather think I did.”

“Oh, Bernard! What did she say?”

“I haven’t the least idea.”

“Let’s go in directly,” said Angela, in high excitement.

On the balcony they passed Lal; but Lal’s face was never the index of his feelings, and it baffled curiosity. From the threshold Angela looked round for Dolly, to discover that, whatever had happened a minute ago, Dolly was not thinking of it now. She stood, one of a group surrounding Norman Merton, who had the evening paper and was reading aloud from it. Pretty little Mrs. Merton was very grave, her eyes soft with pity and distress; Maud Prideaux looked horrified. Dolly’s face Angela could not decipher; it was held by some thought more powerful than pity or horror.

“‘... Had the explosion taken place five minutes earlier the carnage must have been frightful, and many families deprived of their breadwinners. As it is, we regret to announce the death of Mr. Lucian de Saumarez, the well-known author, who was a partner in the business, and of the manager, Mr. Smith Charlesworth. Both were standing too close to the scene of destruction to be able to escape. It is feared that the bodies, which are buried under a huge accumulation of débris, will never be recovered. Much sympathy is felt for Mr. Farquhar, who has been deprived at one blow of his friend and his fortune—’”

“Is Mr. Farquhar hurt?”

Dolly spoke out, careless who might hear.

“No, Miss Fane, Farquhar’s perfectly safe.”

“Not hurt! How did it happen?”

“No one knows at present, but they seem to think there was foul play.”

White as death, she turned away, listening to no more. Lal, who had just come in, was standing by the window; Dolly’s eyes sought his. “Will you go out to Petit-Fays for me?” Angela heard her say. And: “I will go wherever you wish,” Lal answered without hesitation.

XVII

THE ONE SHALL BE TAKEN

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’ twice on 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-master was 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 the philosopher 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 the rock 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 he made 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, which the 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 English workmen (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’s _no_ chance?”

“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’d have 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.

XVIII

THE OTHER LEFT

Farquhar went home in a mood of black, resentful anger, which he aimed, since his creed disallowed a personal deity, at the callous rocks and the soulless forces of nature. He forgot grief as he had forgotten pain. He walked on, swinging his injured arm and cursing as he went; and in this temper he came to the hotel, and received the sympathy of a number of uninteresting people without betraying a vestige of his actual sentiments. They thought him magnanimous, heroic, oppressed with bitter grief; and with the good taste of their nation they left him alone with his sorrow.

In the salon place was laid for one, and the sight sickened Farquhar; it was like the turning of a screw in his breast. He paced the room for five minutes before he could bring himself even to sit down. There were two letters for him on his plate, blue on the thick white china. Bills they seemed, enclosed in thin blue envelopes of the ordinary oblong business shape; he took them up idly and glanced at the address. One was for him and one for Lucian: both in Dolly Fane’s handwriting.

Farquhar tore the envelope open and read:

“DEAR MR. FARQUHAR,—I have now made up my mind upon the question which you asked me. If you are still interested, and care to come and see me next time you are in England, I will tell you my decision.

“Sincerely yours,

“MIRABELLE FANE.”

The ink was bluish instead of black; the postmark Dove Green instead of Monkswell; the paper unlike Dolly’s stationery; but the handwriting was unmistakable. Farquhar crushed up the note in his strong fingers, as though to weld it into a solid mass. That she meant to reject him he could not doubt. He took up Lucian’s letter; he saw with fierce joy that she had omitted to seal it. Now at last, then, had come the chance which he had coveted, the chance of reading one of her letters; and of them all he would most dearly have desired to read this, wherein without doubt she opened her heart to her lover. To intrude into that sanctuary was the prime wish of his heart.