Autumn passed into winter, and spring at last came round. The
dream-estate was a garden of delight and loveliness, fresh green upon
the larches and heather all abloom. The routine of the little household
was established, and seemed as if it could never have been otherwise.
The relationship between the elderly uncle and his little charge was
perfect now, like that between a father and his only daughter, spoilt
daughter, perhaps a little, who, knowing her power, yet never took
advantage of it. He loved her as his own child; and that evasive
‘something’ in her which had won his respect from the first still
continued to elude him. He never caught it up. It had increased, too,
in the long, dark months. Now, with the lengthening days, it came still
more to the front, grown bolder, as though ‘spring’s sweet trouble in
the ground’ summoned it forth. This sympathy between her being and
the Place had strengthened underground. The disentangling had gone on
apace. With the first warm softness of the April days he woke abruptly
to the fact, and faced it. The older memories had been replaced. It
seemed to him almost as though his hold upon the Place had weakened.
He loved it still, but loved it in some new way. And his conscience
pricked him, for conscience had become identified with the trust of
guardianship thus self-imposed. He had let something in, and though
it was not the taint of outside country _she_ had said would ‘dirty’
it, it yet was alien. It was somehow hostile to the conditions of his
original Deed of Trust.
Then, into this little world, dropping like some stray bullet from a
distant battle, came with a bang the person of John C. Murdoch. He came
for a self-proposed visit of one day, being too ‘rushed’ to stay an
hour longer. Chance had put him ‘on the trail’ of his old-time ‘pard of
a hundred camps,’ and he couldn’t miss looking him up, not ‘for all the
money you could shake a stick at.’ More like a shell than mere bullet
he came--explosively and with a kind of tempestuous energy. For his
vitality and speed of action were terrific, and he was making money now
‘dead easy’--so easy, in fact, that it was ‘like picking it up in the
street.’
‘Then you’ve done well for yourself since those old days in Arizona,’
said Eliot, really pleased to see him, for a truer ‘partner’ in
difficult times he had never known; ‘and I’m glad to hear it.’
‘That’s so, Boss’--he had always called the ‘Englisher’ thus because
of his refined speech and manners--‘God ain’t forgot me, and I’ve got
grub-stakes now all over Yurrup. Just raking it in, and if you want
a bit, why, name the figger and it’s yours.’ He glanced round at the
modest old-fashioned establishment, judging it evidence of unsuccess.
‘What line?’ asked Eliot, dropping into the long-forgotten lingo.
‘Why, patents, bless your heart,’ was the reply. ‘They come to me as
easy as mother’s milk to baby, and if the heart don’t wither in me
first, I’ll patent everything in sight. I’ll patent the earth itself
before I’m done.’
And for a whole hour, smoking one strong green cigar upon another, he
gave brief and picturesque descriptions of his various enterprises,
with such energy and gusto, moreover, that there woke in Eliot
something of the lust of battle he had known in the wild, early days,
something of his zest for making a fortune, something too of the old
bitter grievance--in a word, the spirit of action, eager strife and
keen achievement, which never had quite gone to sleep....
‘And now,’ said Murdoch at length, ‘tell me about yerself. You look
fit and lively. You’ve had enough of my chin-music. Made yer pile and
retired too? Isn’t that it? Only you still like things kind o’ modest
and camp-like. Is that so?’
But Eliot found it difficult to tell. This side of him that life in
England had revived, to the almost complete burial of the other, was
one that Murdoch would not understand. For one thing, Murdoch had never
seen it in his friend; the Arizona days had kept it deeply hidden. He
listened with a kind of tolerant pity, while Eliot found himself giving
the desired information almost in a tone of apology.
‘Every man to his liking,’ the Westerner cut him short when he had
heard less than half of the stammering tale, ‘and your line ain’t
mine, I see. I’m no shadow-chaser--never was. You’ve changed a lot.
Why’--looking round at the little pine-clad valley--‘I should think
you’d rot to death in this place. There’s not room to pitch a camp or
feed a horse. I’d choke for want of air.’ And he lit another cigar and
spat neatly across ten feet of lawn.
John Casanova Murdoch--in the West he was called ‘John Cass,’ or just
‘John C.,’ but had resurrected the middle name for the benefit of
Yurrup--was a man of parts and character, tried courage, and unfailing
in his friendship. ‘Straight as you make ’em’ was the verdict of
the primitive country where a man’s essential qualities are soon
recognised, ‘and without no frills.’ And Eliot, whatever he may have
thought, felt no resentment. He remembered the rough man’s kindness
to him when he had been a tenderfoot in more than one awkward place.
John C. might ‘rot to death’ in this place, and might think the vulgar
country round it ‘great stuff,’ but for all that his host liked to see
and hear him. He remembered his skill as a mining prospector and an
engineer; he was not surprised that he had at last ‘struck oil.’
They talked of many things, but the visitor always brought the
conversations round to his two great healthy ambitions, now on the way
to full satisfaction: money and power. Upon some chance mention of
religion, he waved his hand impatiently with enough vigour to knock a
man down, and said, ‘Religion! Hell! I only discuss facts.’ And his
definition of a ‘fact’ would no doubt have been a dollar bill, a mining
‘proposition,’ or a food-problem--some scheme by which John C. could
make a bit. Yet though he placed religion among the fantasies, he lived
it in his way. He ranked the Pope with Barnum, each of them ‘biggest in
his own line of goods,’ and ‘Shakespeare was right enough, but might
have made it shorter.’
And Eliot, listening, felt the buried portion of his nature waken and
revive. It caused him acute discomfort.
‘Now show me round the little hole a bit,’ said Murdoch just before he
left. ‘I’d like to see the damage, just for old times’ sake. It won’t
take above ten minutes if we hustle along.’
They hustled along. Eliot led the way with a curious deep uneasiness
he could not quite explain. His heart sank within him. Gladly he
would have escaped the painful duty, but Murdoch’s vigorous energy
constrained him. The whole way he felt ashamed, yet would have felt
still more ashamed to have refused. He ‘faced the music’ as John
Casanova Murdoch phrased it, and while doing so, that other music of
his visitor’s villainous nasal twang cut across the deep-noted murmur
of the wind and water like a buzz-saw with a bit of wire trailing
against its teeth.
The entire journey occupied but half an hour, for Eliot made
short-cuts, instinctively avoiding certain places, and the whole time
Murdoch talked. His business, practical soul expanded with good nature.
‘The place ain’t so bad, if you worked it up a bit,’ he said, striking
a match on the wall of the mill, and spitting into the clear water,
‘but it’s not much bigger than a chicken-run at present. If I was
you, Boss, I’d have it cleaned up first.’ Again he offered a cheque,
thinking the unkempt appearance due to want of means. His uninvited
opinions were freely offered, as willingly as he would have given money
if his old ‘pard’ had needed it; given kindly too, without the least
desire to wound. He picked out the prettiest ‘building sites,’ and
explained where an artificial lake could be made ‘as easy as rolling
off a log.’ His patent wire would fence the gardens off ‘and no one
ever see it’; and his special concrete paving, from waste material
that yielded a hundred per cent profit, would make paths ‘so neat and
pretty you could dance to heaven on ’em.’ The place might be developed
so as to ‘knock the stuffing’ out of the country round about, and the
estate become a ‘puffect picture-book.’
‘You’ve got a gold mine here, and God never meant a gold mine to lie
unnoticed like a roadside ditch. Only you’ll need to gladden it up a
bit first. You could make it hum as a picnic or amusement resort for
the town people. Take it from me, Boss. It’s so.’
And the effect upon Eliot as he listened was curious; it was twofold.
For while at first the chatter wounded him like insults aimed directly
at the dead, at the same time, to his deep disgust, it stirred all his
former love of practical, energetic action. The old lust and fever to
be up and doing, helping the world go round, making money and worldly
position, woke more and more, as Murdoch’s vigorous, crude personality
stung his will, stung also desires he thought for ever dead. It made
him angry to find that they were not dead, and yet he felt that he was
feeble not to resent the gross invasion, even cowardly not to resist
the coarse attack and kick the vulgar intruder out. It was like a
breach of trust to take it all so meekly without protesting, or at
least without stating forcibly his position, as though he were not
sufficiently sure of himself to protect his memories and his dead. But
this was the truth: he was not sure of himself. The blinding light of
this simple fellow’s mind showed up the hidden inequalities to himself.
Another discovered his essential instability to himself. This other
side of him had existed all the time; and his attachment to the Place
was partly artificial, built up largely by the vigorous assertion of
the departed. His love had coloured it wonderfully all these years,
but--it was a love that had undergone a change. It had not faded, but
grown otherwise. Another kind of love had to some extent replaced and
weakened it. He felt mortified, ashamed, but more, he felt uneasy too.
The wrench was pain. ‘If only she were here and I could explain it to
her,’ ran his thought over and over again, followed by the feeling that
perhaps she _was_ there, listening to it all--and judging him.
Behind the trees, a little distance away, he saw the flitting figure
of Mánya, watching them as they passed noisily along the pathways of
her secret playground. Her attitude even at this distance expressed
resentment. He imagined her indignant eyes. But, closer than that,
another watched and followed, listened and disapproved--that other whom
she knew yet never spoke about, who was in league with her, and seemed
more and more to him, like a phantom risen from the dead.
With difficulty, and with an uneasiness growing every minute now,
he gave his attention to his talkative, well-meaning, though almost
offensive guest, at once insufferable yet welcome. One moment he saw
him in his camping-kit of twenty years ago, with big sombrero and
pistols in his belt, and the next as he was to-day, reeking of luxury
and money, in a London black tail-coat, white Homburg hat, diamonds
shining on his fingers and in his gaudy speckled tie, his pointed
patent-leather boots gleaming insolently through the bracken and
heather.
And through his silence crashed a noise of battle that he thought the
entire Place must hear. But clear issue to the battle there was none.
The opposing sides were matched with such deadly equality. Which was
his real self lay in the balance, until at the last John Casanova
unwittingly turned the scales.
It came about so quickly, with such calculated precision, as it were,
that Eliot almost felt it had all been prepared beforehand and Murdoch
had come down on purpose. It was like a sudden flank attack that swept
him from his last defences. Help that could not reach him in the form
of Mánya signalled from the distance with her shining eyes, her red
tam-o’-shanter the banner of reinforcements that arrived too late.
For John C. stood triumphantly before him, a conqueror in his last
dismantled fortress. His face alight with enthusiasm that was all
excitement, he held his hands out towards him, cup-wise.
‘See here,’ he said with excitement, but in a hard, dry tone that
reminded Eliot of prospecting days in Arizona, ‘Boss, will you take a
look at this, please?’
He had been rooting about in the heather by the edge of the sand-pits.
And he thrust his joined hands beneath the other’s nose. Something
the size of a hen’s egg, something that shone a dirty white, lay in
them against the thick gold rings. ‘Didn’t I tell you the place was
a gol-darned gold mine? But what’s the use o’ talking? Will you look
at this, now?’ He repeated it with the air of a man who has suddenly
discovered the secret of the world. The voice was quiet with intense
excitement kept hard under.
And Eliot obeyed and looked. He saw his visitor, his Bond Street
trousers turned up high enough to show the great muscles of his calves,
the Homburg hat tilted across one eye, coat-sleeves pulled up and
smeared with a whitish mud. There was perspiration on his forehead. It
only needed the sombrero and the pistols to complete the picture of
twenty years ago when Cass Murdoch, after weeks of heavy labour, found
the first gold-dust in his pan. For John C. _had_ found gold. It lay, a
dirty lump of white earth, in his large spread hands. Those hands were
the pan. The breeze that murmured through the pine trees came, sweet
and keen, from leagues of open plain and virgin mountains far away....
Eliot smelt the wood-fire smoke of camp ... heard the crack of the
rifle as some one killed the dinner....
‘Well, John C.,’ he gasped, as he dropped back likewise into the
vanished pocket of the years, ‘what’s your luck? Out with it, man, out
with it!’
‘A fortune,’ replied his visitor. ‘Put yer finger on it right now,
an’ don’t tell mother or burst out crying unless yer forced to!’ High
pleasure was in his voice.
He stepped closer, transferring the lump of dirt into the hand his host
unconsciously stretched open to receive it. It lay there a moment,
looking even dirtier than before against the more delicate skin. Eliot
felt it with finger and thumb. It was soft and sticky and a little
moist. It stained the flesh.
Then he looked up and stared into his companion’s eyes--blankly. A
horrible excitement worked underground in him. But he did not even yet
understand.
‘You’ve got it,’ observed John C, with dry finality.
‘Got what?’ asked Eliot.
‘Got it right there in yer westkit pocket,’ said the other, with an
air of supreme satisfaction. His cigar had gone out. He lit it again
in leisurely fashion, spat accurately at a distant frond of bracken,
eyed the lump of dirt again with inimitable pride, and added, ‘Got
it without asking; the working soft and easy too; water-power on the
spot, and the sea all close and handy for shipping it away.’ He made a
gesture to indicate the tumbling stream and the sea-coast a few miles
beyond.
Then, seeing that his host still stared with blank incomprehension,
holding the little lump at arm’s length as though it might bite or burn
him, he deigned to explain, but with a note of condescending pity in
his voice, as of a man explaining to a stupid child.
‘Clay,’ he said calmly, ‘and good stuff at that.’
‘Clay,’ repeated Eliot, still a little dazed, though light was breaking
on him. ‘Bricks...?’ he asked, with a dull sinking of the heart.
‘Bricks, nothing!’ snapped the other with impatient scorn, as though
his friend were still a tenderfoot in Arizona. ‘Good, white pottery
clay, and soft as a baby’s tongue. The best God ever laid down for man.
Worth twice its weight in dust. And all to be had for the trouble of
shovelling it out. Old pard, you’ve struck it good and hot this time;
and here’s my blessing on yer both.’
Eliot dropped the lump his fingers held so long and took half-heartedly
the giant hand that squeezed his own. Across his brain ran visions of
slender vases, exquisite white cups and bowls and pitchers, plates
and sweet-rimmed basins, all fashioned in delicate-toned shades of
glaze--beautifully finished pottery--‘worth twice their weight in dust.’
X
And half an hour later, when John Casanova Murdoch had boomed away in
his luxurious motor-car like a departing thunderstorm, Eliot, coming
back by the pinewood that led from the high road, heard a step behind
him, and turned to find Mánya’s face looking over his very shoulder.
‘Uncle, who was that?’ There was a touch of indignation in her voice
that was almost contempt.
‘Man I knew in America--years ago,’ he said shortly. He still felt
dazed, bewildered. But shame and uneasiness came creeping up as well.
‘He won’t come again, will he?’
‘Not again, Mánya.’
The child took his arm, apparently only half relieved.
‘He was like a bit of the dirty country,’ she said, and when he
interrupted with ‘Not quite so bad as that, Mánya,’ she asked abruptly
with her usual intuition, ‘Did he want to buy, or build, or something
horrid like that?’
‘We haven’t met for twenty years,’ he said evasively. ‘Used to hunt
and camp together in America. He went to the goldfields with me.’ He
was debating all the while whether he should tell her all. He hardly
knew what he thought. Like a powerful undertow there drove through the
storm of strange emotions the tide of a decision he had already come
to. It swept him from all his moorings, though as yet he would not
acknowledge it even to himself.
‘Uncle,’ she cried suddenly, stepping across the path, and looking
anxiously into his face, ‘tell me one thing: will anything be
different?’
And the simple question, or perhaps the eager, wistful expression in
her voice and eyes, showed him the truth that there was no evading. He
must tell her sometime. Why not now?
He decided to make a clean sweep of it.
‘Mánya,’ he began gently, ‘this Place one day--when I am gone, you
know--will be your own. But there’ll be no money with it. You’ll have
very little to live on.’
She said nothing, just listening with a little air of boredom, as
though she knew this already, yet felt no special interest in it. It
belonged to the world of things she could not realise much. She nodded.
They still stood there, face to face.
‘I’ve been anxious, child, for a long time about your future,’ he went
on, meeting her dark eyes with a distinct effort, for they seemed to
read the shame he felt rising in his heart; ‘and wondering what I could
do to make you safe----’
‘I’m safe enough,’ she interrupted, tossing her hair back and raising
her chin a little.
‘But when I’m gone,’ he said gravely, ‘and Mrs. Coove has gone, and
there’s no one to look after you. Money’s your only friend then.’
She seemed to reflect. She moved aside, and they walked on slowly
towards the house.
‘That’s a long way off, Uncle. I’m not afraid.’
‘But it’s my duty to provide for you as well as possible,’ he said
firmly.
And then he told her bluntly and in as few words as possible of the
discovery of the clay.
The excitement at first in the child was so great that nothing would
satisfy her but that they should at once turn back and see the place
together. They did so, while he explained how ‘Mr. Murdoch,’ who was
learned in strata, their depth and dip and outcrop, had declared that
this deposit of fine white clay was very large. Its spread below the
heather-roots might be tremendous. ‘My aunt,’ he said, ‘your great-aunt
Julia, lived all her life upon a gold mine here without knowing it,
poor as a church mouse.’
This particularly thrilled her. ‘How funny that she never _felt_ it!’
was her curious verdict. ‘Was she _very_ deaf?’
‘Stone deaf, yes,’ he replied, laughing, ‘and short-sighted too.’
‘Ah!’ said the child, as though things were thus explained. ‘But she
might have digged!’
She ran among the heather when he showed her the place, found lumps of
clay, played ball with them and was wildly delighted. She treated the
great discovery as a game; then as a splendid secret ‘just between us
two.’ Mr. Murdoch wouldn’t tell, would he? That seemed the only danger
that she saw--at first.
But her uncle knew quite well that this excitement was all false; and
far from reassuring him, it merely delayed the deeper verdict that
was bound to come with full comprehension. All the discovery involved
had not reached her brain. As yet she realised only the novelty, the
mystery, the wonder. The spot, moreover, where the great deposit
showed its lip was beside the loveliest part of all the wood, and just
where the child most loved to play.
At last, then, as her body grew tired and the excitement brought the
natural physical reaction, he saw the change begin. She paused and
looked about her half suspiciously, like an animal that suspects a
trap. Her glance ran questioningly to where her uncle leaned, watching
her, against a tree. She eyed him. He thought she suddenly looked
different, though wherein the difference lay escaped him. He felt as
if he were watching a wild animal, only half tamed, that distrusts its
owner, and would next deny his mastership and wait its opportunity to
spring. The simile, he knew, was exaggerated, but the picture rose
within him none the less. Misgiving and uneasiness grew apace.
Abruptly Mánya stopped her wild playing and with the movement of a
little panther ran towards him. She took up a position, as usual,
directly opposite. With the strange air of dignity that sometimes
clothed her, the figure of the child stood there among the darkening
trees and asked him questions, keen, searching questions. He was
grateful for the shadows, though he felt they did not screen his face
from her piercing sight; but it was her imperious manner above all
that made his defence seem so clumsily insincere, and the questions a
veritable inquisition.
Before the flood of them, as before their pitiless scrutiny, he
certainly quailed. Their keen directness convicted him almost of
treachery, and he was hard put to it to persuade her and himself that
it really _was_ a sense of duty he obeyed in this decision to work
the clay. ‘I’m doing it all for her,’ he repeated again and again to
himself, and loathed, with a dash of terror, that curious sudden drive,
as of a blow from outside, that sent his tongue into his cheek. But the
terror, he dimly divined, was due to another feeling as well, equally
vague yet equally persistent. For it seemed that while she listened to
his explanations, another listened in the darkness too. Her resentment
and distress he realised vividly; but he felt also the resentment and
distress--of another. And more than once, during this strange dialogue
in the darkening wood, he knew the horrible sensation that this ‘other’
had come very close, so close as to slip between himself and the child.
Almost--that the child was being used as the instrument to express the
vehement protest...!
But he faced the music, to use the lingo of John C., and spared himself
nothing. He told Mánya, though briefly, that workmen must swarm all
through her secret playground, that machinery must grind and boom
across the haunted valleys, that the water of her little stream must
yield the power to turn great ugly wheels, and that perhaps even a
little railway might be built to convey the loads of precious clay down
to the sea where steamers would call for them. Acres of trees, too,
would be swept away, and heather-land marred and scarred with pits and
ditches and quarries. But the benefits in time would all be hers. He
put it purposely at its worst, while emphasising as best he could the
interest and excitement that must accompany the developments. The dream
of many years was nevertheless shattered into bits in half an hour.
The child listened and understood. He was relieved, if puzzled at
the same time, that she betrayed no emotion of disappointment or
indignation. What she felt she dealt with in her own way--inside. At
the stream, however, on her way home, she paused a moment, watching it
slip through the darkness underneath the old mill-wheel.
‘It won’t run any more--for itself,’ she said in a low, trembling
little voice, that was infinitely pathetic.
‘No; but it will run for you, Mánya,’ he answered, though the words had
not been addressed really to him; ‘working away busily for your future.’
And then she burst into tears and hid her face against his coat. He
found no further thing to say. He walked beside her, feeling like a
criminal found out.
But at the end, as they neared the house side by side, she suddenly
turned and asked another question that caused him a thrill of vivid
surprise and discomfort--so vivid, in fact, that it was fear.
They were standing just beneath _her_ bedroom window then. Memory
rushed back upon him with overwhelming force, and he glanced up
instinctively at the empty panes of glass. It was almost as though he
expected to see a face looking reproachfully down upon him. Through
him like spears of ice, as he heard the words, there shot again the
atrocious sensation that it was not Mánya, the child, who asked the
question, but that Other who had recently moved so close. For behind
the tone, with no great effort to conceal it either, trailed a new
accent that Mánya never used. Greater than resentment, it was anger,
and within the anger lay the touch of a yet stronger note--the note of
judgment.
‘But, tell me one thing, Uncle,’ she asked in a whispering voice: ‘will
the Place let you?’