Under the Waves: Diving in Deep Waters

“Mr Berrington,” exclaimed the old gentleman, who was roused by this hit, “you mistake me. My opinions in regard to wealth have been considerably changed of late. But my daughter does not love you, and if you were as rich as Croesus, sir, you should not have her hand without her heart.”

Mr Hazlit said this stoutly, and, just as stoutly, Edgar replied:—

“If I were as rich as Croesus, sir, I would not accept her hand without her heart; but, Mr Hazlit, I am richer than Croesus!”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“I mean that I am rich in the possession of that which a world’s wealth could not purchase—your daughter’s affections.”

“Impossible! Mr Berrington, your passion urges you to deceive yourself.”

“You will believe what she herself says, I suppose?” asked Edgar, plunging his hand into a breast-pocket.

“Of course I will.”

“Well then, listen,” said the youth, drawing out a small three-cornered note. “A good many months ago, when I found my business to be in a somewhat flourishing condition, I ventured to write to Aileen, telling her of my circumstances, of my unalterable love, and expressing a wish that she would write me at least one letter to give me hope that the love, which she, allowed me to understand was in her breast before you forbade our intercourse, still continued. This,” he added, handing the three-cornered note to the old gentleman, “is her reply.”

Mr Hazlit took the note, and, with a troubled countenance, read:—

“Dear Mr Berrington,—I am not sure that I am right in replying to you without my father’s knowledge, and only prevail on myself to do so because I intend that our correspondence shall go no further, and what I shall say will, I know, be in accordance with his sentiments. My feelings towards you remain unchanged. We cannot command feelings, but I consider the duty I owe to my dear father to be superior to my feelings, and I am resolved to be guided by his expressed wishes as long as I remain under his roof. He has forbidden me to have any intercourse with you: I will therefore obey until he sanctions a change of conduct. Even this brief note should not have been written were it not that it would be worse than rude to take no notice of a letter from one who has rendered us such signal service, and whom I shall never forget.—Yours sincerely, Aileen Hazlit.”

The last sentence—“and whom I shall never forget”—had been carefully scribbled out, but Edgar had set himself to work, with the care and earnest application of an engineer and a lover, to decipher the words.

“Dear child!” exclaimed Mr Hazlit, in a fit of abstraction, kissing the note; “this accounts for her never mentioning him;” then, recovering himself, and turning abruptly and sternly to Edgar, he said:– “How did you dare, sir, to write to her after my express prohibition?”

“Well,” replied Edgar, “some allowance ought to be made for a lover’s anxiety to know how matters stood, and I fully intended to follow up my letter to her with one to you; but I confess that I did wrong—”

“No, sir, no,” cried Mr Hazlit, abruptly starting up and grasping Edgar’s hand, which he shook violently, “you did not do wrong. You did quite right, sir. I would have done the same myself in similar circumstances.”

So saying, Mr Hazlit, feeling that he was compromising his dignity, shook Edgar’s hand again, and hastened from the room. He met Aileen descending the staircase. Brushing past her, he went into his bed-room, and shut and locked the door.

Much alarmed by such an unwonted display of haste and feeling, Aileen ran into the library.

“Oh! Mr Berrington, what is the matter with papa?”

“If you will sit down beside me, Aileen,” said Edgar, earnestly, tenderly, and firmly, taking her hand, “I will tell you.”

Aileen blushed, stammered, attempted to draw back, but was constrained to comply. Edgar, on the contrary, was as cool as a cucumber. He had evidently availed himself of his engineering knowledge, and fitted extra weights of at least seven thousand tons to the various safety-valves of his feelings.

“Your father,” he began, looking earnestly into the girl’s down-cast face, “is—”

But hold! Reader; we must not go on. If you are a boy, you won’t mind what followed; if a girl, you have no right to pry into such matters. We therefore beg leave at this point to shut the lids of our dexter eye, and drop the curtain.

Chapter Twenty Seven.

The last

One day Joe Baldwin, assisted by his old friend, Rooney Machowl, was busily engaged down at the bottom of the sea, off the Irish coast, slinging a box of gold specie. He had given the signal to haul up, and Rooney had moved away to put slings round another box, when the chain to which the gold was suspended snapt, and the box descended on Joe. If it had hit him on the back in its descent it would certainly have killed him, but it only hit his collar-bone and broke it.

Joe had just time to give four pulls on his lines, and then fainted. He was instantly hauled up, carefully unrobed, and put to bed.

This was a turning-point in our diver’s career. The collar-bone was all right in the course of a month or two, but Mrs Baldwin positively refused to allow her goodman to go under water again.

“The little fortin’ you made out in Chiny,” she said one evening while seated with her husband at supper in company with Rooney and his wife, “pays for our rent, an’ somethin’ over. You’re a handy man, and can do a-many things to earn a penny, and I can wash enough myself to keep us both. You’ve bin a ’ard workin’ man, Joe, for many a year. You’ve bin long enough under water. You’ll git rheumatiz, or somethin’ o’ that sort, if you go on longer, so I’m resolved that you shan’t do it—there!”

“Molly, cushla!” said Machowl, in a modest tone, “I hope you won’t clap a stopper on my goin’ under water for some time yit—plaze.”

Molly laughed.

“Oh! It’s all very well for you to poke fun at me, Mister Machowl,” said Mrs Baldwin, “but you’re young yet, an’ my Joe’s past his prime. When you’ve done as much work as he’s done—there now, you’ve done it at last. I told you so.”

This last remark had reference to the fact that young Teddy Machowl, having been over-fed by his father, had gone into a stiff blue-in-the-face condition that was alarming to say the least of it. Mrs Machowl dashed at her offspring, and, giving him an unmerciful thump on the back, effected the ejection of a mass of beef which had been the cause of the phenomena.

“What a bu’ster it is—the spalpeen,” observed Rooney, with a smile, as he resumed the feeding process, much to Teddy’s delight; “you’ll niver do for a diver if you give way to appleplectic tendencies o’ that sort. Here—open your mouth wide and shut your eyes.”

“Well, well, it’ll only be brought in manslaughter, so he won’t swing for it,” remarked Mrs Baldwin, with a shrug of her shoulders. “Now, Joe,” she continued, turning to her husband, “you’ll begin at once to look out for a situation above water. David Maxwell can finish the job you had in hand,—speakin’ of that, does any one know where David is just now?”

“He’s down at the bottom of a gasometer,” answered Joe; “leastwise he was there this afternoon—an’ a dirty place it is.”

“A bad-smellin’ job that, I should think,” observed Rooney.

“Well, it ain’t a sweet-smellin’ one,” returned Joe. “He’s an adventurous man is David. I don’t believe there’s any hole of dirty water or mud on the face o’ this earth that he wouldn’t go down to the bottom of if he was dared to it. He’s fond of speculatin’ too, ever since that trip to the China seas. You must know, Mrs Rooney, if your husband hasn’t told you already, that we divers, many of us, have our pet schemes for makin’ fortunes, and some of us have tried to come across the Spanish dubloons that are said to lie on the sea-bottom off many parts of our coast where the Armada was lost.”

“It’s jokin’ ye are,” said Mrs Machowl, looking at Joe with a sly twinkle in her pretty eyes.

“Jokin’! No, indeed, I ain’t,” rejoined the diver. “Did Rooney never tell ye about the Spanish Armada?”

“Och! He’s bin sayin’ somethin’ about it now an’ again, but he’s such a man for blarney that I never belave more nor half he says.”

“Sure ain’t that the very raison I tell ye always at laste twice as much as I know?” said Rooney, lighting his pipe.

“Well, my dear,” continued Joe, “the short an’ the long of it is, that about the year 1588, the Spaniards sent off a huge fleet of big ships to take Great Britain and Ireland by storm—once for all—and have done with it, but Providence had work for Britain to do, and sent a series o’ storms that wrecked nearly the whole Spanish fleet on our shores. Many of these vessels had plenty of gold dubloons on board, so when divin’ bells and dresses were invented, men began to try their hands at fishin’ it up, and, sure enough, some of it was actually found and brought up—especially off the shores of the island of Mull, in Scotland. They even went the length of forming companies in this country, and in Holland, for the purpose of recovering treasure from wrecks. Well, ever since then, up to the present time, there have been speculative men among divers, who have kept on tryin’ their hands at it. Some have succeeded; others have failed. David Maxwell is one of the lucky ones for the most part, and even when luck fails, he never comes by any loss, for he’s a hard-workin’ man, an’ keeps a tight hold of whatever he makes, whether by luck or by labour.”

“But what about the bad-smellin’ job he’s got on hand just now?” asked Rooney.

“Why, he’s repairin’ the bottom of a gas tank. He got the job through recoverin’ some gold watches that were thrown into the Thames by some thieves, as they were bein’ chased over London Bridge. David found ten of ’em—one bein’ worth fifty pounds. Well, just at that time an experienced and hardy fellow was wanted for the gas-work business, so David was recommended. You know a gas tank, as to look an’ smell, is horrible enough to frighten a hippopotamus, but David went up to the edge of this tank by a ladder, and jumped in as cool as if he’d bin jumpin’ into a bed with clean sheets. He stopped down five hours. Of course, in such filthy water, a light would have been useless. He had to do it all by feelin’, nevertheless, they say, he made a splendid job of it,—the bed of clay and puddle, at the bottom, bein’ smoothed as flat a’most as a billiard table,—besides fixin’ sixteen iron-plates for the gas-holder to rest on. He was to finish the job this afternoon, I believe.”[4 - Something similar to the “job” above mentioned was accomplished by G. Smith, a diver on the staff of Messrs Heinke and Davis, of London.]

“Ah, he’s a cute feller is David,” observed Rooney, reflectively, as he watched a ring of smoke that rose from his pipe towards the ceiling. “What d’ee intind to turn your hand to if you give up divin’, Joe?”

“If!” said Mrs Baldwin, with a peculiar intonation.

“Well, when you give it up,” said Rooney, with a bland smile.

“I’m not rightly sure,” replied Joe. “In the first place, I’ll watch for the leadings of Providence, for without that, I cannot expect success. Then I’ll go and see Mr Berrington, who has just returned, they say, from his wedding trip. My own wish is to become a sort of missionary among the poor people hereabouts.”

“Why, Joe,” said his friend, “you’ve bin that, more or less, for years past.”

“Ay, at odd times,” returned Joe, “but I should like to devote all my time to it now.”