Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor
“Well,” I replied; “all men are wicked, more or less, to some extent;
and no man may say otherwise.”
For I did not wish to commit myself to an opinion about Simon, lest I
might be wrong, and Lorna think less of my judgment.
But being resolved to see this out, and do a good turn, if I could, to
Gwenny, who had done me many a good one, I begged my Lorna to say not a
word of this matter to the handmaiden, until I had further searched
it out. And to carry out this resolve, I went again to the place of
business where they were grinding gold as freely as an apothecary at his
pills.
Having now true right of entrance, and being known to the watchman, and
regarded (since I cracked the boulder) as one who could pay his footing,
and perhaps would be the master, when Uncle Ben should be choked with
money, I found the corb sent up for me rather sooner than I wished it.
For the smell of the places underground, and the way men's eyes came out
of them, with links, and brands, and flambeaux, instead of God's light
to look at, were to me a point of caution, rather than of pleasure.
No doubt but what some men enjoy it, being born, like worms, to dig, and
to live in their own scoopings. Yet even the worms come up sometimes,
after a good soft shower of rain, and hold discourse with one another;
whereas these men, and the horses let down, come above ground never.
And the changing of the sky is half the change our nature calls for.
Earth we have, and all its produce (moving from the first appearance,
and the hope with infants' eyes, through the bloom of beauty's promise,
to the rich and ripe fulfilment, and the falling back to rest); sea we
have (with all its wonder shed on eyes, and ears, and heart; and the
thought of something more)--but without the sky to look at, what would
earth, and sea, and even our own selves, be to us?
Do we look at earth with hope? Yes, for victuals only. Do we look at
sea with hope? Yes, that we may escape it. At the sky alone (though
questioned with the doubts of sunshine, or scattered with uncertain
stars), at the sky alone we look with pure hope and with memory.
Hence it always hurt my feelings when I got into that bucket, with my
small-clothes turned up over, and a kerchief round my hat. But knowing
that my purpose was sound, and my motives pure, I let the sky grow to
a little blue hole, and then to nothing over me. At the bottom Master
Carfax met me, being captain of the mine, and desirous to know my
business. He wore a loose sack round his shoulders, and his beard was
two feet long.
“My business is to speak with you,” I answered rather sternly; for
this man, who was nothing more than Uncle Reuben's servant, had carried
things too far with me, showing no respect whatever; and though I did
not care for much, I liked to receive a little, even in my early days.
“Coom into the muck-hole, then,” was his gracious answer; and he led me
into a filthy cell, where the miners changed their jackets.
“Simon Carfax,” I began, with a manner to discourage him; “I fear you are
a shallow fellow, and not worth my trouble.”
“Then don't take it,” he replied; “I want no man's trouble.”
“For your sake I would not,” I answered; “but for your daughter's sake
I will; the daughter whom you left to starve so pitifully in the
wilderness.”
The man stared at me with his pale gray eyes, whose colour was lost from
candle light; and his voice as well as his body shook, while he cried,--
“It is a lie, man. No daughter, and no son have I. Nor was ever child of
mine left to starve in the wilderness. You are too big for me to tackle,
and that makes you a coward for saying it.” His hands were playing with
a pickaxe helve, as if he longed to have me under it.
“Perhaps I have wronged you, Simon,” I answered very softly; for the
sweat upon his forehead shone in the smoky torchlight; “if I have, I
crave your pardon. But did you not bring up from Cornwall a little maid
named 'Gwenny,' and supposed to be your daughter?”
“Ay, and she was my daughter, my last and only child of five; and for
her I would give this mine, and all the gold will ever come from it.”
“You shall have her, without either mine or gold; if you only prove to
me that you did not abandon her.”
“Abandon her! I abandon Gwenny!” He cried with such a rage of scorn,
that I at once believed him. “They told me she was dead, and crushed,
and buried in the drift here; and half my heart died with her. The
Almighty blast their mining-work, if the scoundrels lied to me!”
“The scoundrels must have lied to you,” I answered, with a spirit fired
by his heat of fury: “the maid is living and with us. Come up; and you
shall see her.”
“Rig the bucket,” he shouted out along the echoing gallery; and then he
fell against the wall, and through the grimy sack I saw the heaving of
his breast, as I have seen my opponent's chest, in a long hard bout of
wrestling. For my part, I could do no more than hold my tongue and look
at him.
Without another word we rose to the level of the moors and mires;
neither would Master Carfax speak, as I led him across the barrows. In
this he was welcome to his own way, for I do love silence; so little
harm can come of it. And though Gwenny was no beauty, her father might
be fond of her.
So I put him in the cow-house (not to frighten the little maid), and
the folding shutters over him, such as we used at the beestings; and he
listened to my voice outside, and held on, and preserved himself. For
now he would have scooped the earth, as cattle do at yearning-time, and
as meekly and as patiently, to have his child restored to him. Not to
make long tale of it--for this thing is beyond me, through want of true
experience--I went and fetched his Gwenny forth from the back kitchen,
where she was fighting, as usual, with our Betty.
“Come along, you little Vick,” I said, for so we called her; “I have a
message to you, Gwenny, from the Lord in heaven.”
“Don't 'ee talk about He,” she answered; “Her have long forgatten me.”
“That He has never done, you stupid. Come, and see who is in the
cowhouse.”
Gwenny knew; she knew in a moment. Looking into my eyes, she knew; and
hanging back from me to sigh, she knew it even better.
She had not much elegance of emotion, being flat and square all over;
but none the less for that her heart came quick, and her words came
slowly.
“Oh, Jan, you are too good to cheat me. Is it joke you are putting upon
me?”
I answered her with a gaze alone; and she tucked up her clothes and
followed me because the road was dirty. Then I opened the door just wide
enough for the child to go to her father, and left those two to have it
out, as might be most natural. And they took a long time about it.
Meanwhile I needs must go and tell my Lorna all the matter; and her joy
was almost as great as if she herself had found a father. And the
wonder of the whole was this, that I got all the credit; of which not
a thousandth part belonged by right and reason to me. Yet so it almost
always is. If I work for good desert, and slave, and lie awake at night,
and spend my unborn life in dreams, not a blink, nor wink, nor inkling
of my labour ever tells. It would have been better to leave unburned,
and to keep undevoured, the fuel and the food of life. But if I have
laboured not, only acted by some impulse, whim, caprice, or anything;
or even acting not at all, only letting things float by; piled upon me
commendations, bravoes, and applauses, almost work me up to tempt once
again (though sick of it) the ill luck of deserving.
Without intending any harm, and meaning only good indeed, I had now done
serious wrong to Uncle Reuben's prospects. For Captain Carfax was full
as angry at the trick played on him as he was happy in discovering the
falsehood and the fraud of it. Nor could I help agreeing with him, when
he told me all of it, as with tears in his eyes he did, and ready to be
my slave henceforth; I could not forbear from owning that it was a low
and heartless trick, unworthy of men who had families; and the recoil
whereof was well deserved, whatever it might end in.
For when this poor man left his daughter, asleep as he supposed, and
having his food, and change of clothes, and Sunday hat to see to, he
meant to return in an hour or so, and settle about her sustenance in
some house of the neighbourhood. But this was the very thing of all
things which the leaders of the enterprise, who had brought him up from
Cornwall, for his noted skill in metals, were determined, whether by
fair means or foul, to stop at the very outset. Secrecy being their main
object, what chance could there be of it, if the miners were allowed to
keep their children in the neighbourhood? Hence, on the plea of feasting
Simon, they kept him drunk for three days and three nights, assuring him
(whenever he had gleams enough to ask for her) that his daughter was as
well as could be, and enjoying herself with the children. Not wishing
the maid to see him tipsy, he pressed the matter no further; but applied
himself to the bottle again, and drank her health with pleasure.
However, after three days of this, his constitution rose against it, and
he became quite sober; with a certain lowness of heart moreover, and a
sense of error. And his first desire to right himself, and easiest way
to do it, was by exerting parental authority upon Gwenny. Possessed with
this intention (for he was not a sweet tempered man, and his head was
aching sadly) he sought for Gwenny high and low; first with threats, and
then with fears, and then with tears and wailing. And so he became to
the other men a warning and a great annoyance. Therefore they combined
to swear what seemed a very likely thing, and might be true for all
they knew, to wit, that Gwenny had come to seek for her father down the
shaft-hole, and peering too eagerly into the dark, had toppled forward,
and gone down, and lain at the bottom as dead as a stone.
“And thou being so happy with drink,” the villains finished up to him,
“and getting drunker every day, we thought it shame to trouble thee; and
we buried the wench in the lower drift; and no use to think more of her;
but come and have a glass, Sim.”
But Simon Carfax swore that drink had lost him his wife, and now had
lost him the last of his five children, and would lose him his own soul,
if further he went on with it; and from that day to his death he never
touched strong drink again. Nor only this; but being soon appointed
captain of the mine, he allowed no man on any pretext to bring cordials
thither; and to this and his stern hard rule and stealthy secret
management (as much as to good luck and place) might it be attributed
that scarcely any but themselves had dreamed about this Exmoor mine.
As for me, I had no ambition to become a miner; and the state to which
gold-seeking had brought poor Uncle Ben was not at all encouraging. My
business was to till the ground, and tend the growth that came of it,
and store the fruit in Heaven's good time, rather than to scoop and
burrow like a weasel or a rat for the yellow root of evil. Moreover, I
was led from home, between the hay and corn harvests (when we often have
a week to spare), by a call there was no resisting; unless I gave up all
regard for wrestling, and for my county.
Now here many persons may take me amiss, and there always has been some
confusion; which people who ought to have known better have wrought into
subject of quarrelling. By birth it is true, and cannot be denied,
that I am a man of Somerset; nevertheless by breed I am, as well as by
education, a son of Devon also. And just as both of our two counties
vowed that Glen Doone was none of theirs, but belonged to the other
one; so now, each with hot claim and jangling (leading even to blows