Part 47

“No!” cried Christian, kissing the letter of his generous friend; “I understand better than he thinks how limited the resources of this country are, and what great sacrifices such an association would condemn this noble man to make. And then it would take years to study law, and, during all that time, I should have to be supported--young and strong as I am--by one who, after a laborious and anxious life, deserves now to enjoy comfort and repose! No no! I have my hands, and I shall use them, until destiny shows me some better way than this of making my talents available.”

While thus reflecting, he returned to the gallery where it was his duty to excavate one of the veins of copper distributed through the rocks, by the light of a little lamp, and amid the sulphureous emanations rising from the mine.

But after a few days Christian’s position was materially improved. The superintendent of the mines noticed him, and put him at the head of certain works, which he was fitted by education and capacity to direct, as he had shown, without any pretence or affectation, when an opportunity occurred. Learned, modest, and industrious, he spent his leisure hours in instructing the miners. In the evenings he delivered a course of gratuitous lectures on elementary mineralogy, and was listened to by these rude men, who respected him as an industrious comrade, and looked up to him as an original and cultivated thinker. His lecture-room was one of the great metallic caverns to which miners love to give high-sounding names. His chair was a block of naked copper.

Christian tried to make himself happy by working hard, and doing good to others; for happiness is what man always seeks, even when he sacrifices himself. He took care of the sick and wounded in the mine. When accidents occurred, he, with heroic courage, was always the first to hasten to the spot, and he taught the workmen, moreover, to guard against these terrible dangers by exerting ordinary common sense and prudence. He tried to refine their manners, and to cure them of their fatal passion for brandy, the too fruitful source of quarrels and fights that often terminated in the terrific duel with knives in vogue in this part of the country. They both loved and esteemed him; but, since he devoted all his wages to helping cripples, orphans and widows, he remained poor.

“Decidedly,” he often said to himself, as he stepped into the bucket to descend to the bottom of the immeasurable shaft, “I was born a seigneur--that is to say, as I understand it, the protector of the feeble--and for that reason I am not permitted to live in the light of the sun.”

“Christian,” cried the inspector, one day, through the speaking-tube at the frightful mouth of the mine, “stop working for a while, and go to the bottom of the inclines, to receive some visitors, who want to see the large halls. Show them round in my place--I have no time to come down.”

As usual, Christian lighted the great resinous torches which are kept ready in all parts of the excavations, and went to meet the visitors. But when he recognized Minister Akerstrom and his family, and Lieutenant Osburn with his young bride Martina leaning upon his arm, Christian handed his torch to an old miner whom he knew, and, saying that he had been seized with cramp, begged him to conduct the visitors in his stead. Pulling down his tarred cap over his eyes, he stepped back, rejoicing in his inmost heart to see his friends happy, but unwilling to be recognized, lest they should be distressed about him, and should make known his situation to Margaret.

He was about to withdraw, after having listened for a moment to their cheerful and animated conversation, when Madame Osburn turned, saying:

“Why does not Margaret come? The little coward will never dare cross that plank bridge!”

“Oh, you were very much afraid yourself, my dear Martina!” replied the lieutenant. “But you need not be anxious; M. Stangstadius is with her.”

Christian, forgetting all about his cramp, ran swiftly along the steep, vaulted passage that led to the plank-bridge, which was really very dangerous, and which Margaret was to cross in company with M. Stangstadius, the man of all the world who knew best himself how to fall to advantage, but not, perhaps, the most capable person in the world of protecting others.

Margaret was really there, hesitating and dizzy, together with Mademoiselle Potin, who, hoping to encourage her young friend, had already crossed the planks quite bravely, with the assistance of M. Stangstadius. The lieutenant returned to assist them, and to quiet his wife; but, before he could reach the spot, Christian stepped up, took Margaret in his arms, and crossed the subterranean torrent in silence.

Certainly Margaret did not recognize him, for she shut her eyes tightly to avoid beholding the chasm beneath. He put her down near her friends, intending to make his escape as quickly as possible, but Margaret, who was still frightened, tottered, and he was obliged to take her hand, and to draw her away from the precipice. His fingers, blackened by his work, left a mark upon the young girl’s delicate green gloves, and he saw her, a moment afterwards, wipe it off carefully with her handkerchief, while saying to her governess:

“Give some money quickly to that poor man who carried me.”

The poor man had run away with his heart a little swollen; he was not angry with the young countess for liking clean gloves, but he said to himself that it was quite impossible for him, for his part, to have white hands.

He returned to the forge, where he was having some tools made after an improved pattern, suggested by himself and approved of by the inspectors; but after an hour’s labor, for he often lent a hand himself to help on his men, he heard the visitors returning, and could not resist his desire of again seeing the young countess. She had seemed to him a little taller, and greatly improved; beautiful enough, indeed, to madden the blindest and sulkiest of the cyclops.

As the voices again became more distant, he entered, without any precaution, a gallery through which the party would be obliged to pass, when suddenly, in a brightly-lighted hall, he met Margaret face to face. Now that she had become a little accustomed to the terrific noises and gloomily sublime aspect of this subterranean world, she had recovered her courage, and was coming forward alone, in advance of the others. She trembled on seeing him; she thought that she recognized him. He pulled his cap quickly over his forehead, and she knew him then, beyond a doubt, by the care he took to hide his face.

“Christian!” she cried; “it is you, I am sure of it!” And she held out her hand.

“Do not touch me!” said Christian. “I am all black with powder and smoke.”

“Ah! what do I care for that,” she replied, “since it is you? I know all now. The miners who have been showing us about have been talking all the while of a certain Christian, a very learned man and a famous workman, who would not tell his family name, but who has the strength of a peasant and the dignity of an iarl, who is courageous for all and devoted to all. Our friends did not suppose for a moment that it could be you, there are so many Christians in this Scandinavian land! But, for my part, I said to myself: ‘There is only one answering to that description; it is he!’ Come, then, shake hands! Are we not still brother and sister, as at Stollborg?”

How could Christian help forgetting the little offence of the wiped glove? Margaret held out her hand to him ungloved.

“You do not blush, then, to see me here?” he said; “you know that I have not been driven to come here by bad conduct, and that if I am working to-day, it is not to make up for days of idleness and folly?”

“I do not know anything about you,” replied Margaret, “except that you have kept your word given formerly to Major Larrson, to be a miner, or a hunter of bears, rather than continue an occupation of which I did not approve.”

“And I, Margaret, do not know anything about you either,” he replied, “except that your aunt intends to have you marry the Baron de Lindenwald, my suit against whom it appears is lost.”

“It is true,” said Margaret, laughing. “My aunt hopes, in that way, to console me for the death of Baron Olaus. But since you guess so well what is going on, you ought to know, also, that I do not intend to marry at all.”

Christian understood this resolution, which left him free to hope, and he vowed in his heart that he would make a fortune, even if he should have to become an egotist. In spite of all he could say, Margaret would not consent to hide the fact of his being there from the lieutenant and the minister’s family, who drew near in the midst of their tête-à-tête.

“It is he!” she cried, running to meet them; “it is our Stollborg friend--you know who I mean! This Christian, this friend of the poor, the hero of the mine, is the baron without a barony, but not without honor and heart, and if you are not as happy as I am to see him again--”

“We are, we are!” cried the minister, shaking hands with Christian. “He is setting a grand example of true nobility and religious faith.”

Christian, overwhelmed with caresses, praise, and questions, was obliged to promise to go and take supper in the village with his friends, who intended to pass the night there before returning to Waldemora, where Margaret was spending a fortnight at the parsonage.

They wanted to carry him away with them immediately; but, on the one hand, Christian could not dispose of his time so freely as they supposed, and, on the other, he was more anxious, than was quite appropriate for such a reasonable man, to dress himself in clothes, which, however coarse, should at least be irreproachably clean. They made an appointment to meet in the evening, and Christian, aroused and happy, returned to his work.

There, however, he was agitated by tumultuous and conflicting thoughts. Ought he to persist in cherishing the chimerical hope that he was loved? Margaret expressed her affection for him with too much warmth, too much frankness; it might be that she regarded him merely with a peaceful friendship, bringing no trouble to her soul, no blush to her forehead! Could love be so spontaneous, so courageous, so expansive? He accused himself of presumption and folly; and then, a moment afterwards, he accused himself of ingratitude; an inner voice told him that, whatever his fate might be, he would always find Margaret resolved to share it.

He left his work at last, when the hour came for quitting the mine, and as he greatly preferred being pulled up in the bucket, in which he never felt dizzy, to making the long ascent over the ladders and inclines, he got ready to mount, in a moment, to the entrance of the gloomy shaft, through which he could catch a glimpse of a scrap of blue sky framed with branches of the mountain-ash and lilacs. Just then a miner came up, whom he had already met on the previous evening within his limits, although he did not belong to the brigade that he had joined at first, and which he was now directing.

None of the miners with whom Christian was associated knew this man. Excessively begrimed with smoke and dirt, either through negligence or design, and wearing a rag of a hat that flapped about his ears, it was not easy to form any idea of his face. Christian had not tried to see him. He might be one of those who were called humble workmen; as we sometimes say the humble poor, in speaking of persons whose apparent humility is perhaps a mere mask concealing their silent pride. Christian respected the evident desire of the unknown to avoid observation; and after having given the customary whistle to warn those who worked the pulley, he contented himself with pointing to a seat by his side in the bucket; for he supposed that he also wished to ascend. The unknown hesitated. Laying his hands upon the edge of the bucket, he seemed about to jump in, but paused, and looked around, apparently to seek for something.

“You have lost a tool, perhaps?” said Christian, who noticed that he was quite stout and heavy, and had nothing of the freedom and ease which is usual with miners accustomed to the use of the bucket.

Scarcely had he spoken, when the unknown, who seemed to have been waiting to hear his voice before coming to some decision, took the seat by his side with more resolution than agility, and waited in silence for the second whistle.

Christian supposed that he did not understand Norwegian, and being familiar by this time with almost all the dialects of the north, he tried to enter into conversation with him; but all his efforts were useless. The man remained perfectly silent, as if fright at seeing himself suspended directly over the abyss had paralyzed his faculties. The bucket, as it is called, employed in mines, is made, as the reader knows, of stout staves, bound with iron, and requires to be steered in its passage up and down the tremendous shaft. Christian, who was already accustomed to this mode of transportation, worked it very skilfully. Standing on the edge, with one arm thrown around a rope, he lightly struck the sides of the shaft with his foot, to prevent the rocking bucket from being broken against them, and, having given up getting anything out of his companion, he began quietly to sing a Venetian barcarolle, when his foot--the only one that happened to be on the edge of the conveyance at the moment--was treacherously pushed with sufficient force to make him lose his balance, and send him swinging off into the void.

Fortunately, Christian, who was habitually no less prudent than bold, had grasped the rope firmly with his left arm, and he slipped down somewhat as a basket would have done by the handle, without loosening his hold. The unknown lifted his sharp-edged hammer with the intention of striking off his right hand, with which Christian had saved himself by seizing the edge of the bucket. He would inevitably have lost one of his hands, and probably his life as well, had it not been for the swinging and sudden dip of the bucket, jerked down by the weight of his body. At the same time his feet, as they hung in the air, struck a second bucket, which had been let down from above, and he was able to give the first one such a push that the assassin was obliged to take to the ropes himself, in order to keep from being thrown out.

This moment was sufficient to enable Christian to cling to the second rope, and jump into the second bucket, which ascended rapidly, while the one in which the assassin remained alone, disappeared from sight with even greater rapidity. Just as Christian reached the top of the shaft, and jumped out on the platform around it, a dull crash ascended from its depths, while, at that very moment, Stangstadius, with his fantastic face all radiant with smiles, came up to him.

“Come, my dear baron,” he cried, “make haste! They will not have supper over yonder in the village until you arrive, and I am dying of inanition.”

“What has happened?” cried Christian to the miners who were working the pulley, without answering Stangstadius; “where is the other bucket? Where is the man?--”

“The rope broke,” replied one of them, with a tremendous oath, and pretending to deplore the accident, while the other whispered in Christian’s ear:

“Not a word! We let him fall!”

“What! you have precipitated this unfortunate--this madman--?”

“This unfortunate was not a madman,” replied the workman. “He has been looking out for an opportunity to be alone with you for three days. We watched him, and saw what he wanted to do. We let down another bucket at a venture; and as for the one he is in, it is a bucket spoiled, that is all about it!”

Christian knew that these rough miners were in the habit of taking the law into their own hands, and that they dealt out to criminals summary and terrible justice.

He felt the more regret and anxiety about what had happened, because he knew, also, that people who enter this subterranean world when rather advanced in years, are sometimes seized with fits of involuntary and ungovernable fury. He descended into the mine again with Stangstadius, who claimed, with good reason, to have a professional knowledge of such accidents. Two of the miners went down with them, to investigate, they said, but in reality to remove the corpse, so as to avoid being obliged to give any explanation to the inspectors of the mine.

“Faith,” said Stangstadius, when they had examined the miserable body by the light of their torches, “he is done for! He was not so lucky as I! By heavens! I declare I must draw up a report on the use of ropes in descending buckets in mines. These accidents are too frequent--when I think that even I myself--”

“Monsieur Stangstadius!” cried Christian, “look at this man. Do you not know him?”

“By heavens, it is a fact!” replied Stangstadius; “it is Master Johan, the ex-major-domo of Waldemora. Oh then, there is no great harm done! He confessed in prison; it was this very fellow who assassinated poor Baron Adelstan, in former years--_à propos!_ yes, your father, my dear Christian. This Johan was once a miner in Falun, and he was a great scoundrel. It appears that he made his escape from his last prison, but it was written in his destiny that he was to perish by the rope.”

Delighted with this bon-mot, M. Stangstadius returned with Christian to the upper world, while the workmen, after having thrown the corpse into a deserted pit, well known to them, in the deepest part of the works, set quietly to work to mend the bucket. Christian, who had a room in a little house in the village, ran thither to change his dress. He found a letter awaiting him that had just been brought by a courier; it was from M. Goefle.

“All is saved!” he wrote; “the king is good, as I told you, but not weak, as I thought. He is a gallant fellow, who--but you will have time enough to hear about that. Make all speed! Be at Waldemora on the twelfth; you will find one of your friends there, and hear some good news.

“Until a speedy meeting, I am, my dear baron,” etc.

Christian did not say a word about this letter to his friends, with whom he took supper at the parsonage of the minister of Roraas, where the minister of Waldemora and his party had been entertained with cordial hospitality. After supper, he found an opportunity of being alone with Margaret and her governess. He was bolder than he had ever been. He dared to speak of love. Mademoiselle Potin wanted to interrupt him, but Margaret, in her turn, interrupted her friend.

“Christian,” she said, “I do not well know what love is, or what distinction there can be between that sentiment and the feeling with which I regard you. But one thing I do know, and that is, that I respect and esteem you, and that if I am ever free, and you are the same, I will share your fortune, whatever it may be. I have worked very hard since we parted, and I shall be able now to give lessons or keep accounts, like so many other poor young girls who support themselves, and who have too much good sense to blush upon that account;--like Mademoiselle Potin herself, whose family is noble, and who has not lost in the opinion of any one, but, on the other hand, who has been elevated in the eyes of all persons of real feeling, by having the courage to make use of her talents. To prove it,” she added, glancing tenderly and archly at her governess, “I need only tell you that she is betrothed secretly to the excellent Major Larrson, and is only waiting until my affairs are a little more settled, to celebrate her marriage.”

It was impossible for Mademoiselle Potin to contradict Margaret, but she was none the less angry with Christian for speaking to her of love at the very moment when his suit was lost, and she felt still more indignant on the following morning, when he joined their little party to cross the mountains, and return to Sweden by the Idre, and the mountains of Blaakdal. On the next day, the twelfth of June, 1772, Christian saw the friend to whom M. Goefle had referred, coming to meet him on the mountain-road over which they were travelling; it was no other than M. Goefle himself, escorted by Major Larrson. They embraced each other, and after briefly exchanging joyful and affectionate greetings, hastened forward, and arrived by dinner-time at the danneman’s chalet, which they found gayly adorned with wild flowers. Karine was at the door, only partly comprehending what was passing, and finding it difficult to recognize the child of the lake in the features of the handsome young iarl.

The dinner was served in the open air, under a bower of foliage, in sight of the magnificent prospect of mountains, with whose wild and melancholy beauty Christian had been so deeply impressed on a day in December. The summer is short in these elevated regions, but it is magnificent. The verdure is as dazzling as the snows; the vegetation grows with such rapidity, and is so luxuriant, that Christian imagined he was beholding a different locality and a different country.

They remained upon the mountain until six o’clock. But no one thought now of hunting bears; instead, they plucked flowers sentimentally from beside running streams, and listened to their sweet murmuring or impetuous rolling--so eager, as all of them seemed, with their various voices, to sing and to live to the utmost, before the return of the frost, when they must all be changed into crystal again by the elfs of the gloomy autumn.

Christian was very happy, and yet he was longing to see Stenson once more; but M. Stenson would not consent to leave the chalet, on account of the heat. The sun, at this season, does not set until ten o’clock, and it rises three hours afterwards, in a starry twilight that softly veils the sky; for, during the summer, the darkness of a genuine night is unknown. In fact, the good lawyer had prepared a surprise for Christian. As soon as the cool evening breeze began to be felt, old Stenson drove up in a carriage, triumphant and rejuvenated. Thanks to the heat of the season, and perhaps also to his returning joy and confidence, his deafness was almost entirely cured. He brought the decree of the committee of the Diet, recognizing Christian’s rights, and a letter from Countess Elveda to M. Goefle, authorizing him privately to dispose of the hand of her niece in favor of the new Baron of Waldemora.

Christian returned to the chateau with _his uncle_ Goefle, while the rest of the party followed in their various carriages over the winding and picturesque road; but, in the midst of the young man’s joy, as he anticipated the reunion of all his beloved friends, he was seized with a sudden fit of melancholy.

“I am too happy,” he said to the lawyer; “I should like to die to-day. It seems to me that the life into which I am about to enter will be in constant conflict with the simple and pure happiness I have dreamed about.”

“It is quite possible, my friend,” replied M. Goefle; “for it is only novels that end with the eternal formula: ‘They died in old age, after a long and happy life.’ You cannot come into contact with the world as a public man without suffering; for society is terribly convulsed in these days, and above all in the aristocratic circles where you will take your place. I do not know what strange events are preparing; and yet I had a sort of revelation of the future in the last interview which the king granted me. On that day, he seemed to me both grand and terrible. I believe he is meditating a movement which will send a good many people back where they belong; but can he keep them there, and will he? Can revolutions establish a permanent condition of things, when they come in advance of the slow labor of time and ideas?”

“Not always,” said Christian, “but they form landmarks in history; even when an effort at reformation is premature, something is always gained.”