IN A MINE.

Eve had no sooner consented to take Mr. Coyshe, just to save herself the inconvenience of being questioned about the lost ring, than she ran out of the room, and to escape further importunity ran over the fields towards the wood. She had scarcely gone three steps from the house before she regretted what she had done. She did not care for Mr. Coyshe. She laughed at his peculiarities. She did not believe, like her father and sister, in his cleverness. But she saw that his ears and eyes were unduly prominent, and she was alive to the ridiculous. Mr. Coyshe was more to her fancy than most of the young men of the neighbourhood, who talked of nothing but sport, and who would grow with advancing age to talk of sport and rates, and beyond rates would not grow. Eve was not fond of hunting. Barbara rarely went after the hounds, Eve never. She did not love horse exercise; she preferred sauntering in the woods and lanes, gathering autumn-tinted blackberry leaves, to a run over the downs after a fox. Perhaps hunting required too much exertion for her: Eve did not care for exertion. She made dolls’ clothes still, at the age of seventeen; she played on the piano and sang; she collected leaves and flowers for posies. That was all Eve cared to do. Whatever she did she did it listlessly, because nothing thoroughly interested her. Yet she felt that there might be things which were not to be encountered at Morwell that would stir her heart and make her pulses bound. In a word, she had an artistic nature, and the world in which she moved was a narrow and inartistic world. Her proper faculties were unevoked. Her true nature slept.

The hoot of an owl, followed by a queer little face peeping at her from behind a pine. She did not at once recognise Watt, as her mind was occupied with her engagement to Mr. Coyshe.

Now at the very moment Watt showed himself her freakish mind had swerved from a position of disgust at her engagement, into one of semi-content with it. Mr. Coyshe was going to London, and there she would be free to enjoy herself after her own fashion, in seeing plays, hearing operas, going to all the sights of the great town, in a life of restless pleasure-seeking, and that was exactly what Eve desired.

Watt looked woe-begone. He crept from behind the tree. His impudence and merriment had deserted him. Tears came into his eyes as he spoke.

‘Are they all gone?’ he asked, looking cautiously about.

‘Whom do you mean?’

‘The police.’

‘Yes, they have left Morwell. I do not know whither. Whether they are searching for your brother or have given up the search I cannot say. What keeps you here?’

‘O Miss Eve! poor Martin is not far off. It would not do for him to run far. He is in hiding at no great distance, and—he has nothing to eat.’

‘Where is he? What can I do?’ asked Eve, frightened.

‘He is in an old mine. He will not be discovered there. Even if the constables found the entrance, which is improbable, they would not take him, for he would retreat into one of the side passages and escape by an airhole in another part of the wood.’

‘I will try what I can do. I dare say I might smuggle some food away from the house and put it behind the hedge, whence you could fetch it.’

‘That is not enough. He must get away.’

‘There is Jasper’s horse still with us. I will ask Jasper, and you can have that.’

‘No,’ answered the boy, ‘that will not do. We must not take the road this time. We must try the water.’

‘We have a boat,’ said Eve, ‘but papa would never allow it to be used.’

‘Your papa will know nothing about it, nor the prudent Barbara, nor the solemn Jasper. You can get the key and let us have the boat.’

‘I will do what I can, but’—as a sudden thought struck her—’Martin must let me have my ring again. I want it so much. My father has been asking for it.’

‘How selfish you are!’ exclaimed the boy reproachfully. ‘Thinking of your own little troubles when a vast danger menaces our dear Martin. Come with me. You must see Martin and ask him yourself for that ring. I dare not speak of it; he values that ring above everything. You must plead for it yourself with that pretty mouth and those speaking eyes.’

‘I must not; indeed I must not!’

‘Why not? You will not be missed. No one will harm you. You should see the poor fellow, to what he is reduced by love for you. Yes, come and see him. He would never have been here, he would have been far away in safety, but he had the desire to see you again.’

‘Indeed, I cannot accompany you.’

‘Then you must do without the ring.’

‘I want my ring again vastly. My father is cross because I have not got it, and I have promised to show it him. How can I keep my promise unless it be restored to me?’

‘Come, come!’ said the boy impatiently. ‘Whilst you are talking you might have got half-way to his den.’

‘I will only just speak to him,’ said Eve, ‘two words, and then run home.’

‘To be sure. That will be ample—two words,’ sneered the boy, and led the way.

The old mine adit was below the rocks near the river, and at no great distance from the old landing-place, where Jasper had recently constructed a boathouse. The ground about the entrance was thickly strewn with dead leaves, mixed with greenish shale thrown out of the copper mine, and so poisonous that no grass had been able to grow over it, though the mine had probably not been worked for a century or even more. But the mouth of the adit was now completely overgrown with brambles and fringed with ferns. The dogwood, now in flower, had thickly clambered near the entrance wherever the earth was not impregnated with copper and arsenic.

Eve shrank from the black entrance and hung back, but the boy caught her by the arm and insisted on her coming with him. She surmounted some broken masses of rock that had fallen before the entrance, and brushed aside the dogwood and briars. The air struck chill and damp against her brow as she passed out of the sun under the stony arch.

The rock was lichened. White-green fungoid growths hung down in streamers; the floor was dry, though water dripped from the sides and nourished beds of velvet moss as far in as the light penetrated. So much rubble covered the bottom of the adit, that the water filtered through it and passed by a subterranean channel to the river.

After taking a few steps forward, Eve saw Martin half sitting, half lying on a bed of fern and heather; the grey light from the entrance fell on his face. It was pale and drawn; but he brightened up when he saw Eve, and he started to his knee to salute her.

‘I cannot stand upright in this cursed hole,’ he said, ‘but at this moment it matters not. On my knee I do homage to my queen.’ He seized her hand and pressed his lips to it.

‘Here you see me,’ he said, ‘doomed to shiver in this pit, catching my death of rheumatism.’

‘You will surely soon get away,’ said Eve. ‘I am very sorry for you. I must go home, I may not stay.’

‘What! leave me now that you have appeared as a sunbeam, shining into this abyss to glorify it! Oh, no—stay a few minutes, and then I shall remain and dream of the time you were here. Look at my companions.’ He pointed to the roof, where curious lumps like compacted cobwebs hung down. ‘These are bats, asleep during the day. When night falls they will begin to stir and shake their wings, and scream, and fly out. Shall I have to sleep in this den, with the hideous creatures crying and flapping about my head?’

‘Oh, that will be dreadful! But surely you will leave this when night comes on?’

‘Yes, if you will help me to get away.’

‘I will furnish you with the key to the boathouse. I will hide it somewhere, and then your brother can find it.’

‘That will not satisfy me. You must bring the key here.’

‘Why? I cannot do that.’

‘Indeed you must; I cannot live without another glimpse of your sweet face. Peter was released by an angel. It shall be the same with Martin.’

‘I will bring you the key,’ said Eve nervously, ‘if you will give me back my ring.’

‘Your ring!’ exclaimed Martin; ‘never! Go—call the myrmidons of justice and deliver me into their hands.’

‘I would not do that for the world,’ said Eve with tears in her eyes; ‘I will do everything that I can to help you. Indeed, last night, I got into dreadful trouble by dressing up and playing my tambourine and dancing to attract the attention of the men, whilst you were escaping from the corn-chamber. Papa was very angry and excited, and Barbara was simply—dreadful. I have been scolded and made most unhappy. Do, in pity, give me up the ring. My papa has asked for it. You have already got me into another trouble, because I had not the ring. I was obliged to promise to marry Doctor Coyshe just to pacify papa, he was so excited about the ring.’

‘What! engaged yourself to another?’

‘I was forced into it, to-day, I tell you—because I had not got the ring. Give it me. I want to get out of my engagement, and I cannot without that.’

‘And I—it is not enough that I should be hunted as a hare—my heart must be broken! Walter! where are you? Come here and listen to me. Never trust a woman. Curse the whole sex for its falseness and its selfishness. There is no constancy in this world.’ And he sighed and looked reproachfully at Eve. ‘After all I have endured and suffered—for you.’

Eve’s tears flowed. Martin’s attitude, tone of voice, were pathetic and moved her. ‘I am very sorry,’ she said, ‘but—I never gave you the ring. You snatched it from me. You are unknown to me, I am nothing to you, and you are—you are——’

‘Yes, speak out the bitter truth. I am a thief, a runaway convict, a murderer. Use every offensive epithet that occurs in your vocabulary. Give a dog a bad name and hang him. I ought to have known the sex better than to have trusted you. But I loved, I was blinded by passion. I saw an angel face, and blue eyes that promised a heaven of tenderness and truth. I saw, I loved, I trusted—and here I am, a poor castaway ship, lying ready to be broken up and plundered by wreckers. O the cruel, faithless sex! We men, with our royal trust, our splendid self-sacrifice, become a ready prey; and when we are down, the laughing heartless tyrants dance over us. When the lion was sick the ass came and kicked him. It was the last indignity the royal beast could endure, he laid his head between his paws and his heart brake. Leave me—leave me to die.’

‘O Martin!’ said Eve, quite overcome by his greatness, and the vastness of his devotion, ‘I have never hurt you, never offended you. You are like my papa, and have fancies.’

‘I have fancies. Yes, you are right, terribly right. I have had my fancies. I have lived in a delusion. I believed in the honesty of those eyes. I trusted your word——’

‘I never gave you a word.’

‘Do not interrupt me. I did suppose that your heart had surrendered to me. The delusion is over. The heart belongs to a vulgar village apothecary. That heart which I so treasured——’ his voice shook and broke, and Eve sobbed. ‘Who brought the police upon me?’ he went on. ‘It was you, whom I loved and trusted, you who possess an innocent face and a heart full of guile. And here I lie, your victim, in a living grave your cruel hands have scooped out for me in the rock.’

‘O—indeed, this mine was dug hundreds of years ago.’

He turned a reproachful look at her. ‘Why do you interrupt me? I speak metaphorically. You brought me to this, and if you have a spark of good feeling in your breast you will get me away from here.’

‘I will bring you the key as soon as the sun sets.’

‘That is right. I accept the token of penitence with gladness, and hope for day in the heart where the light dawns.’

‘I must go—I really must go,’ she said.

He bowed grandly to her, with his hand on his heart.

‘Come,’ said Watt. ‘I will help you over these rubbish heaps. You have had your two words.’

‘O stay!’ exclaimed Eve, ‘my ring! I came for that and I have not got it. I must indeed, indeed have it.’

‘Eve,’ said Martin, ‘I have been disappointed, and have spoken sharply of the sex. But I am not the man to harbour mistrust. Deceived I have been, and perhaps am now laying myself open to fresh disappointment. I cannot say. I cannot go against my nature, which is frank and trustful. There—take your ring. Come back to me this evening with it and the key, and prove to me that all women are not false, that all confidence placed in them is not misplaced.’