University of Virginia Library

5. V.
THE RINGS.

THE next day, Miriam told St. Denys of her
experience in the cellar, and asked him if
what Redruth had told her concerning Sir Rohan
were true.

“You should not attend the gossip of servants,”
was his response.

“But Mr. Redruth assumed such a quiet patronage,
that he seemed to have lost that capacity.”

“He is old, and generally faithful; but perhaps
his heart was warmed with the wines over
which he was, as you say, so enthusiastic, when
he spoke too freely of his master. Forget it,
my dear.”

“I suppose every one has his faculties concentrated
on some particular point,” said Miriam,
after a little while; “and so with this man, every
other beautiful thing only tends to illustrate and

adorn his wines. He was something like a poet,
only, papa, I don't think I like poets. And Sir
Rohan — his point is his painting.”

“Just now it is, but he 's as good at anything,
as the melancholy Jaques has it.”

“I wonder, after all, if he knows so much about
any of his businesses as Redruth does about his
one. Well, I 'm glad, papa, you 're not a poet,
nor artist, nor any of those disagreeable things.
You neither run nor halt, but do you know, I
think you have an even gait, something too princely
to stoop for trifles. There 's a compliment from
your big baby!” and she twined her arms coaxingly
round his neck.

“Compliment, indeed! Who gave you leave to
flatter me?” he said, fondly putting back her disordered
hair.

“Why, you see if you 've so fine a gait, the best
thing you can do with it is to walk home! I want
to be at home. Only think, it is ever and ever so
long since we saw the Castle!”

“Ah, Miss Miriam!” said Sir Rohan, entering
just then, “are you so impatient to get away?”

“Not impatient, sir,” she answered, rearranging
herself. “Only when one has been three

years away, home has gained a kind of enchantment.”

“I revolved various schemes for your entertainment,
during my illness yesterday evening,” said
Sir Rohan; “but so lonely is the vicinity that
society is impossible. My only neighbor is Marc
Arundel — at least he was —”

“Marc Arundel! God bless me! have I escaped
that man abroad, to hear of him first at home?”
exclaimed St. Denys.

“Ah? He is your heir? I had quite forgotten.
Yes, his estate is about twenty miles away, — a
small one. I have no doubt that there are other
families between us, but unfortunately I do not
know them.”

“Pshaw! what matter? We did not come to see
them, Rohan.”

“Thank you. But, lest too much even of so
good a thing as your humble servant should tire,
the monotony must be varied. There are a thousand
curiosities in the county which might interest
Miss Miriam: cromlechs, old British fortresses,
fabled abodes of Gog-Magog, and even some available
mines —”

“O, a mine! a mine! I should delight, of all

things, in going down a mine!” exclaimed Miriam.

“Perhaps you would not find it so delightful in
practice as in fancy,” said St. Denys.

“O, Sir Rohan!” cried Miriam, “is there one
near here?”

“There was,” he replied; “but it may be forsaken
now; I will ask Redruth.”

In a few moments, during which Miriam beat
impatient tattoos with her foot, Mr. Redruth
answered his summons.

“Yes, sir,” he replied; “they work a lode of
the great mine still, and that is on your own land.
The other veins took a start some years ago, and
are quite dead now.”

“Can we enter it, Mr. Redruth?” cried Miriam.

“Why, Miss, I do not know as to yourself; but
the gentlemen can, if —”

“O, then, we will certainly go. I will get
ready at once. Is it far?”

“Seven or eight miles, Miss.”

“Then we had best have the coach, Miriam;
your riding-dress might embarrass you.”

“You will have to dress differently, for convenience

in climbing,” said Sir Rohan. “Perhaps
Mrs. Redruth can accommodate you.”

“Yes, papa. Thank you, Sir Rohan, I will
ask her. I will be back in a minute,” and she
ran quickly from the room.

“Order the coach, Redruth,” said Sir Rohan,
“and accompany us, if you like.”

“I will drive you with pleasure, sir,” he
replied, disappearing.

“How comes it, Rohan,” asked St. Denys,
while they waited alone, “that you dropped your
acquaintances so entirely?”

“You refer to Arundel? O, I never knew
him at all. Some time ago Redruth told me he
had come into his property, by which I judged
his father, whom I once knew, to be dead; but
for himself, — he is little more than a boy.”

“A very troublesome boy, — a scoundrel of
some thirty years' growth, thoroughly possessed
of evil. He has given me infinite trouble for
Miriam. She is only eighteen now, but three
years ago I had to take her abroad to avoid
his pertinacity. It is best that it was so, for I
had always found it impossible to have Miriam
taught. She has learned little or nothing from

books, nothing of use, yet adapted herself surprisingly
to the languages of such countries as
we lived in, and by a continual companionship
with me has gained, orally, what all the types
of Europe would have failed to impart.”

“Did you free yourselves from Arundel?”

“Marc? O no; he followed us for a time so
closely as to seem ubiquitous. But at last we
escaped him. You know the greater part of my
possessions are entailed on him.”

“And yet I believe he is not of your blood.”

“I wish I could say no drop, and thank God!
But he is my only relative in the male line,
though distant.”

“Ah, — I thought it had been some indirect
way, or unforeseen chance, that made him inherit
from an uncle who was father and heir to your
dead sister's child.”

“To be sure. He has some small sum in the
funds through that luck, and he knew that
Miriam will have more there, — all the personal
property. I would give half my remaining years
to break that entail. Unless I should lose it,
though, which is unlikely, Miriam will have a
fortune fair enough; I hasten to reach home and

lawyers, that my will and these settlements may
be made.”

“Why hasten? You are young yet.”

“I am young, truly, but have no elixir for
remaining so.”

Redruth and Miriam returned now together;
Miriam, with her travelling-cloak wrapped closely
round her, revealing, notwithstanding, the well-booted
foot and handsomely turned ankle, and
with a singular cap tied over her ears, looking in
the odd disguise, amid her pretty blushes and
laughter, like the ladies on the stage who become
pages as circumstance and the author command,
or like some bashful impersonation of Rosalind.
Lifting her hand to knock the cap jauntily on one
side, she displayed, with a quaint coquetry, the
neat miner's suit which she adorned.

“Mrs. Redruth has lent me some flannel clothes
of her son's, who sometimes works in the mine,”
she said. “Do you mind, papa? You two will
look infinitely worse when lost in the corners of
some burly stone-cutter's raiment!” And they
were soon bowling forward to the mine.

After an hour's drive, the road, which had been
sheltered and pleasant, opened on a bleak level

bordering the sea and exhibiting few signs of cultivation.
Here the coach stopped, and having
alighted, they followed Redruth through one of
the various footpaths that tracked the moor. At
no great distance the smoke of the blowing-house
rolled up continual volumes, staining the faultless
blue of the sky, and poisoning all the sunny air
beyond; old shafts, that had been sunk and abandoned
years since, lay on either side, — deserted
pits, round whose black abysses long grasses bent
with their own coarse weight; tall rushes, planted
to impede the progress of the sand inland from
along the coast, edged the horizon and tipped
themselves with the sparkle of the sea; and at the
root of a single tall and ragged pine-tree, the great
shaft yawned amidst heaps of rubble, long lines of
conduits and gigantic whirling wheels, enormous
frames of scaffolding and cables through which
the wind whistled hoarse tunes, and all its black,
terrible enginery and uncouth paraphernalia.
Miriam left her cloak in the coach, when St.
Denys returned for her, already arrayed for the
descent.

“Is 't a lass going down?” asked one of the
winze-men.

“As good wenches,” replied his sullen companion,
“have stayed down.”

St. Denys was the first to enter the shaft, and
having been safely lowered through the close, wet
sides of the hewn rock to the first platform, the
kibbul reascended for Miriam, Sir Rohan and
Redruth speedily following. Then came the cautious
clambering down steep, ruinous ladders,
flight after flight, with dim perspectives into
black galleries winding away like inquisitorial
vaults, — far above, the fair sky now dark and
blue as twilight, — far below, the twinkle of lanterns
on yet lower platforms. The broken slats
that might precipitate their lifeless bodies a thousand
feet, the great, half-rotten beams that partially
upheld the roofs, the monstrous gaps of the
landing-places, just made visible by the candles
they carried, filled Miriam with no manner of
dread; she experienced, instead, a wild exhilaration.
To Sir Rohan it was neither pleasure nor
pain. All things aroused in him only the sentiment
of endurance, and he went along with the
same silent stoicism that he would have manifested
if eternity had been a treadmill.

“How easy it is!” said Miriam.

“In the winter,” replied the man who led them,
“the ladders are so covered with ice, rain and
sleet beating in with sharp flaws of the storm, that
the way is full enough of dangers. Poor Dick fell
down from here, a dozen years ago, when his hands
were numbed and his feet slipped from the rundle.”

“Dick who?” asked Miriam.

“Roy, ma'am. He 'd been night-watch for a
long time below, and one day he took a notion to
see the world above, and there was an end; he 's
never been up since.”

“It killed him, of course?” said St. Denys.

“No, sir, not that; but it broke more bones
than I 'd 'a' thought he had. We patched him up
and kept him like a lady till he was healed; and
he seldom comes near the shaft now, nor will he
come up to the daylight. He says, being put down
so strong, it 's but fair he should stay. Will you
go down further, Masters? There 's little below
but water and deads. Yonder 's the lode we
work.”

Pausing on the platform, they glanced into the
profound again. One or two torches, small and
bright as fireflies, flickered about the face of the

blackness. There was a murmur, broken now and
then by a dash and gurgle, that told of running
waters; and the clang of the workmen's hammers
came to them with only a deadened reverberation.

“It is as great a mystery down there as it was
when we started,” said Miriam. “Can't we go
where they are at work, papa?”

The man who accompanied them was one of
authority, being an underground captain; and
making her will his law, he stepped from the landing,
and conducted them along a tortuous way, —
now on single planks that bridged pits suddenly
sunk to murk, dizzy, and never-sounded depths;
and now crawling through passages precipitous on
one hand, and the three remaining sides all within
reach of the other, while to the flare of their candles
displaying in a glittering profusion bright
sheets of vivid green and rusty red, and singularly
white, pellucid oozes, — till the narrow sides spread
into the wide halls of the explored vein. The roof
that they could have touched before, supported, as
it was, by great pillars of ore left unwrought,
stretched suddenly upward, without brace or buttress
of any kind, higher than they could see, and

shrouded in completest gloom. A natural cavern,
a vast hall flanked by vaster galleries with a thousand
avenues, all like as many mouths gaping for
darkness, was rendered only obscurer and more
awful by dim, scattered lights fixed in the wall,
the walls themselves giving back countless reflections,
and glistening in rolls of gorgeous colors, as
the mundic sprinkled its lustrous facets over the
unhewn metal. Great barrows, piled with rocks
whose rough resplendent angles told of the treasure
in their bosoms, passed them; and heaps of the
earthy matrix lay waiting to be conveyed in their
turn, with giant crystals of quartz and shining
slabs already split away from them, through whose
transparency the metal branched off and wandered
along with all the delicate arborescent intricacy of
a fern or a sea-moss. The clash and clatter as of
Thor with a thousand hammers, resounded and
beat about their ears in a deafening clangor,
and all the air was hot and oppressive. At one
moment the black distance of some far-extending
galleries would be powdered with showers of tiny
sparks, followed by quick explosions that echoed
like the multitudinous rattle of musketry, as small
fragments fell, loosened by force of some detonating
blast; and already so suggestive of terror had
the gloom become, with its wild hints of greater
depths and darker precipices where the miners
were already kindling the Saturday fires, that
Miriam clung to Sir Rohan's arm in a strange kind
of fascinated dread, while the Captain explained to
St. Denys all the difficulties and attractions of the
works. “It was pleasant,” said St. Denys, afterward,
“to observe the affection which this man
entertained for the mine, always using the feminine
appellative, and glorying in her wealth as if
it were a personal attribute.”

Advancing down the cavernous mazes, they
stood upon a brink, deep in the heart of whose
chasms firemen were piling fagots and logs under
a hundred arches and beside every hanging wall,
feeding the hungry flames that licked the vaults
with long tongues, and as they passed to and fro
across the ruddy glare, waving their torches at
unlighted piles, seeming more like the gnomes
who turn the crystal sluices of hidden streams
and cook the gems and metals of the earth's
bowels, than like men who ever breathed in the
atmosphere above.

“Perhaps,” said Miriam, “those things, those

imps down there, hold the strings of the earth's
motion and keep her even in her orbit. If I
should hit one of them with a stone, I wonder
would she fly off like a comet or not. We are
in a sort of fairy-land.”

“Stranger things have happened,” said Sir
Rohan. “Throw your stone and see.” And
they both delayed, looking at the masses of metal
which ran molten in the blaze, — prismatic copper,
and here and there delicate drops of silver.

“How that heavier metal plashes down! Compared
to it those silver sprays and plumes,” said
Miriam, “seem rather to rise than fall, like feathers
in the air.”

A frequent movement of Sir Rohan's, a sharp,
alert survey, had annoyed Miriam ever since their
entrance.

“Sir Rohan, how nervous you make me! you
positively frighten me!” she exclaimed. “What
is it you see with your rapid glance at either
hand? Is there any danger?”

It half seemed to him when she spoke, as if
his secret were discovered, and he realized what
he had always doubted, the relief that could be
afforded by a disburdened conscience.

“No danger, Miss Miriam,” he replied; “there
are no fire-damps here, I believe, though we
should not linger too long in so vile an atmosphere.
The firemen will have spread their labors
through the mine soon, and then all leave it till
Monday morning, unless poor Dick stays down.”

“There it is again!” cried Miriam. “What
did you see?”

“I saw, Miriam, a figure such as the witch
saw when Samuel came to Saul,” he replied, after
an instant's pause.

“Gods ascending out of the earth?” quoted
Miriam.

“I did not mean that exactly. A figure such
as when Anne came to Richard, very pale and
faint and wild, that glides between those distant
columns, out of one concave into another, and
always over the shoulder throws a dreadful glance
at me.”

“In other words, a ghost?”

“In other words, a Ghost.”

But when Sir Rohan had said so much, a great
fear seized him lest he had revealed himself. He
knew, when he spoke, that she would not believe
him, and he felt himself to have trifled with something

too sacred for approach. Could he smile at
the Fates? And would not the curse fall with
greater burden that he had raised it a moment
by a jest? Yet here it was fitting for the Ghost
to reassume her function, if every place which she
had once filled with the dazzle of her youthful
beauty might be haunted by its phantom now,
for here she had once been, on as fair a day as
this, not twenty years ago. But as if some spell
bound a portion of her influence, she, who not
long since would have confronted him in her
direst mood, could now exert no more authority,
nor spread a wider van of horror than the wan
glimmer fading away from arch to arch in a perpetual
pursuit, and he could laugh at his Ghost.

Turning hastily, as he spoke, they wound
through other alleys after St. Denys and the
guide, till they again reached the great hall, where,
having seen quite enough of the mine, Miriam,
in answer to St. Denys, expressed a wish to reascend,
and they slowly crossed, listening to the
remarks of the garrulous Captain. Several of the
miners were haling an immense boulder down one
gallery; above them, known by its faint breaths
of air, flared a forsaken shaft, looking up to which,

Miriam, half expecting to find the blue, found
only a sphere of crystal darkness; and down an
opposite aisle a torch advanced, rapidly swinging
from side to side, while its bearer sung a rough-voiced
recitative of some only half-remembered
ballad. Either they had become accustomed to
the din, or a large portion of it had ceased; for
they heard his words distinctly enough, and his
rude salutation to the Captain. He was a tall
man, properly, but so gaunt and haggard as to
add an unnatural length to his stature; clothed in
leathern nether garments, a red shirt falling open
from his tawny bosom, and a small skull-cap above
the matted rusty locks that mingled with his long
and scanty beard unkempt and unshorn. So sallow
and hollow were the cheeks with their parched
skin clinging to the bone, so toothless the jaws, so
sunken and deep and glittering were the eyes, so
racked and ruined the whole distorted frame, that
it was evident he had long breathed the fumes of
arsenic which the burning mundic evolved, and
had been drained of health by the profuse sweat
of the furnaces above.

“O Heavens!” whispered Miriam, “it is an
automaton that will drop in pieces before it has
passed.”

“It is Dick Roy,” said the Captain. “He is
tough, ma'am, or he 'd died long ago.”

“I thought your arsenic burners lived but a
short time,” said St. Denys.

“Well — we don't look for them to trouble us
long; they are in the houses above. But Dick
is only exposed to the poison once a week, — when
we kindle the fires over Sunday, — and then he 's
out under the old open shafts; so he lasts, and he
likes it; but we may find him dead some Monday
morning.”

Touching his cap with a mechanical deference,
the man was shuffling by, when he paused, looked
round with a wild hesitation, lost all his stupefaction
on the instant, and suddenly turning, tossed
and flared his flambeau repeatedly in the face of
Sir Rohan, and then of Miriam. Passing his hand
quickly across his supernatural eyes, again he
peered into their faces.

“Ha' I dreamt?” he cried sharply. “Ha' I
been dreaming? Is it no score o' year sin I came
into the heart of earth? Is it no score o' year sin
I saw the blessed daylight, or a star, save it
glinted as yon now in the bal above ye? sin I
snuffed a wind creeping in fro' the sea, or heard

aught but its roaring, — for ye 're under the sea
now, d' ye ken? and there 's no white godolcans
on high, with their steel eyne snappin on the gale,
an shrilling an shriking as yon o'er the moor!
God! han ye never gone yeself, ye and the bonnibel
beside ye? Then I 've no broided bones, nor did
I fall. I ha' been in a swound. Sure, it 's the
glaze on my eye that makes your face so old and
deadlike, — but the lass is young as I kent her.
No, no, ye must han a drug up above to keep
beauty and life, but ye 've not drunk it yourself.”

Sir Rohan made a movement to pass, and the
Captain motioned Dick away. He obeyed, but in
an instant shouted across the distance, “Wait a
bit, I 've something for ye!” and was soon lost in
the obscurity. Before long, his light was again to
be seen, and shortly he waylaid them.

“Look at this!” he cried, extending something
that glittered in his hand. “Ye don't mind it,
Miss, when ye wor down before? How the master
gave ye the siller, and ye turned and gave it me,
sin it wor so like the ring ye wore on your third
finger? Ye 've no ring there now.”

“I don't know what he means,” said Miriam.
“I was never here before.”

“Hoot! so fair and lie? O lissom lass, mind
ye!” and he laid what he held, in her hand.

It was a piece of silver, as it is sometimes found
in mines, crystallized in a slender stem and some
singular inflorescence that in shape resembled a
violet or the plant called heart's-ease. As she
looked at it, he snatched her hand, twisted the
supple stem round her finger: “God give ye
good-den,” said he, and vanished.

A deadly pallor had overspread Sir Rohan's
face; he had dropped Miriam's hand, and standing
apart, was surveying her with fierce, fixed
eyes. The dreadful thought crossed him, if it
were indeed his Ghost; the words faltered on his
lips, but he strode away quickly without speaking,
and led them to the foot of the ladders. Soon
the white glare of the opening blinded them, and
in a few moments the fresh breath of the upper
world illustrated the horrors of the atmosphere
below, and with the cool winds blowing in and
out the open windows of the coach, they were
rapidly proceeding homeward.