LIGHT AND SHADOW
By the end of the following May, Great St. Goram Mine was in full
working order. Ralph was installed as managing director; William was
made a director and secretary to the company. Lord St. Goram was in
Scotland at the time, and when he applied for shares he was too late.
His chagrin knew no bounds. He had imagined that he had Ralph and
William in the hollow of his hand. That two country bumpkins, as he was
pleased to call them, would be able to float a company had not occurred
to him. He knew the project that first occupied their thoughts. He knew
that he could make it impossible for them to carry their ideas into
effect.
His agent had hinted to William that his lordship would be willing to
take the farm off their hands at a price; hence, he believed that by
applying gentle pressure, and waiting, he would be able in a very short
time to get the whole thing into his hands.
For a few weeks he threatened the company with all sorts of pains and
penalties, but the company was not to be bluffed. Private interest had
to give way before public convenience. Where the welfare of a whole
community was at stake, no petty and niggling contention about right of
way was allowed to stand. The company made its own right of way, and was
prepared to pay any reasonable damage.
With the company at his back, Ralph laughed in the consciousness of his
strength. He had never felt strong before. It was a new experience, and
a most delightful sensation. He had never lacked courage or will power,
but he had been made to feel that environment or destiny--or whatever
name people liked to give it--was too strong for him. Strength is
relative, and in comparison with the forces arrayed against him, he had
felt weaker than an infant.
When his father was driven from his home, he had bowed his head with the
rest in helpless submission. When he was arrested on a false and
ridiculous charge, he submitted without protest. When he saw his mother
dying in a workhouse hospital, he could only groan in bitterness of
spirit. When the Brick, Tile, and Clay Company gave him notice to
suspend operations, he had tamely to submit. In fact, submission had
been the order of his life. It had been given to others to rule; it had
been his to obey.
This would not have been irksome if the rule of the strong had been wise
and just. But when justice was thrust aside or trampled under foot, as
if it had no place in the social order, when equity was only the
shuttlecock and plaything of interested people, when the weak were
denied their rights simply because they were weak, and the reward of
merit was to be cuffed by the tyrant, then his soul revolted and he grew
bitter and cynical in spite of himself.
Now, however, the tables had been turned. For the first time in his life
he felt himself among the strong. He need no longer sit down tamely
under an injustice, or submit to insults in silence. Success was power.
Money was power. Combination was power.
He pulled himself up suddenly at length with a feeling almost of terror.
He was in danger of becoming what he had condemned so much in others.
The force and subtlety of the temptation stood revealed as in a blinding
flash. It was so splendid to have strength, to be able to stalk across
the land like a giant, to do just what pleased him to do, to consult no
one in the doing of it. It was just in that the temptation and the
danger lay. It was so easy to forget the weak, to overlook the
insignificant, to treat the feeble as of no account. Strength did not
constitute right.
That was a truth that tyrants never learned and that Governments too
frequently shut their eyes to. God would hold him responsible for his
strength. If he had the strength of ten thousand men, he still had no
right to do wrong.
So at length he got to see things in their true proportion and
perspective. The strength that had come to him was only an adventitious
kind of strength, after all. Unless he had another and a better kind of
strength to balance it, it might prove his destruction. What he needed
most was moral strength, strength to use wisely and justly his
opportunities, strength to hold the balance evenly, strength to do the
right, whatever it might cost him, to suffer loss for conscience' sake,
to do to others what he would they should do to him.
If he ever forgot the pit out of which he had been digged, success would
be a failure in the most direful sense.
He trembled when he saw the danger, and prayed God to help him. He was
walking on the edge of a precipice and knew it; a precipice over which
thousands of so-called successful men had fallen.
"Ruth," he said to his sister one evening, with a grave look in his
eyes, "if you ever see me growing proud, remind me that my mother died
in a workhouse."
"Ralph?" she questioned, with a look of surprise on her face.
"I am not joking," he said solemnly. "I was never in more sober earnest.
I have stood in slippery places many times before, but never in one so
slippery as this."
"Are not things going well at the mine?" she asked, in alarm.
"Too well," he answered. "The shareholders will get twenty per cent. on
their money the first year."
"And you are a large shareholder," she said, with a look of elation in
her eyes.
"Besides which, there are the dues to the landlord, as well as the
salary of the manager. Do you not see, Ruth, that this sudden change of
fortune is a perilous thing?"
"To some people it might be, Ralph."
"It is to me. It came to me this afternoon as I walked across the
'floors' and men touched their caps to me."
"But you can never forget the past," she said.
"But men do forget the past," he answered. "Would you ever imagine for a
moment that Lord Probus, for instance, was not to the manner born?"
"I have seen him only two or three times," she answered; "but it seems
to me that he is always trying to be a lord, which proves----"
"Which proves what?"
"Well, you see, a man who is really a gentleman does not try to be one.
He is one, and there's an end of it; he hasn't to try."
"Oh, I see. Then forgetting the past is all a pretence?"
"A man may forget his poverty, but I do not think he can forget his
parents. You need not remember where mother died, but how she and father
lived; their goodness is our greatest fortune."
He did not make any further reply then, and a little later he put on his
hat and said--
"I am going along to see William. He went home poorly this morning."
"Poorly?"
"Caught a chill, I fancy. The weather has been very changeable, you
know."
Ruth felt a sudden tightening of the strings about her heart, and when
Ralph had disappeared she sat down by the window and looked with
unseeing eyes out across the garden.
She was back again in the old home, the home in which she had spent so
many happy and peaceful years, and from which she had been exiled so
long. She was very happy, on the whole, and yet she realised in a very
poignant sense that Hillside could never be again what it had been.
It was bound to be something more or something less. Nothing could
restore the past, nothing could give back what had been taken away.
The twilight was deepening rapidly across the landscape, the tender
green of spring was vanishing into a sombre black. From over the low
hill came fitfully the rattle of stamps which had been erected in
Dingley Bottom, and occasionally the creak of winding gear could be
faintly heard.
From the front windows of the house there was no change in the
landscape, but from the kitchen and dairy windows the engine-house, with
its tall, clumsy stack, loomed painfully near. Ralph had planted a
double line of young trees along the ridge, which in time would shut off
that part of the farm given over to mining operations, but at present
they were only just breaking into leaf.
It was at first a very real grief to Ruth that the mine so disfigured
the farm. She recalled the years of ungrudging toil given by her father
to bring the waste land under cultivation, and now the fields were being
turned into a desert once more. She soon, however, got reconciled to the
change. The best of the fields remained unharmed, and the man and boy
who looked after the farm had quite as much as they could attend to.
Ralph did not mind so long as there was a bowl of clotted cream on the
table at every meal. Beyond that his interest in the farm ceased.
But the mine was a never-failing source of pleasure to him. Tin was not
the only product of those mysterious veins that threaded their way
through the solid earth. There were nameless ores that hitherto had been
treated as of no account because no use had been found for them.
Ralph began making experiments at once. His laboratory grew more rapidly
than any other department. His early passion for chemistry received
fresh stimulus, and had room for full play, with the result that he made
his salary twice over by what he saved out of the waste.
William Menire's interest in the mine was purely commercial, and in that
respect he was of great value. He laboured quietly and unceasingly,
finding in work the best antidote to loneliness and disappointment. His
mother was no longer with him. She had joined the silent procession of
the dead. He was thankful for some things that she did not live to see
the winding up of his little business--for it seemed little to him now
in contrast with the wider and vaster interests of the company with
which he was connected. She had been very proud of the shop,
particularly proud of the great plate-glass window her son had put in at
his own expense.
The edict of Lord St. Goram to restore the house to its original
position had been a great blow to her. She had adored the
aristocracy--they were not as other men, mean and petty and
revengeful--hence the demand of his lordship shattered into fragments
one of her most cherished illusions.
She did not live to hear the click and ring of the trowel, telling her
that a brick wall was taking the place of the plate glass. On the very
last day of her life she heard as usual the tinkle of the shop bell and
the murmur of voices below.
When William had laid her to rest in the churchyard he disposed of his
stock as rapidly as possible, restored the house to its original
condition as far as it was possible to do it, and then turned his back
upon St. Goram.
The little village of Veryan was much nearer the mine, much nearer the
Penlogans, and just then seemed much nearer heaven. So he got rooms with
a garrulous but godly old couple, and settled down to bachelordom with
as much cheerfulness as possible.
That he felt lonely--shockingly lonely at times--it was of no use
denying. He missed the late customers, the "siding up" when the shutters
were closed, the final entries in his day-book and ledger. Big and
wealthy and important as the Great St. Goram Tin Mining Company was, and
exacting as his labour was in the daytime, he was left with little or
nothing to do after nightfall. The evenings hung on his hands. Books
were scarce and entertainments few, and sometimes he smoked more than
was good for him.
He went to see Ralph as often as he could find a reasonable excuse, and
always received the heartiest welcome, but for some reason the cloud of
Ruth's reserve never lifted. She was sweet and gentle and hospitable,
but the old light had gone out of her eyes and the old warmth from her
speech. She rarely looked straight into his face, and rarely remained
long in his company.
He puzzled himself constantly to find out the reason, and had not the
courage to ask. He wanted to be her friend, to be taken into her
confidence, to be treated as a second brother. Anything more than that
he never dared hope for. That she might love him was a dream too foolish
to be entertained. He was getting old--at any rate he was much nearer
forty than thirty, while she was in the very flower of her youth. So he
wondered and speculated, and got no nearer a solution of the problem.
Ralph was so engrossed in his own affairs that he never noticed any
change, and never guessed that Ruth was the light of William's eyes.
The idea that William Menire might be in love occurred to no one. He was
looked upon as a confirmed bachelor, and when the public has assigned a
man to that position he may be as free with the girls as he likes
without awaking the least suspicion.
Ruth sat by the window until it had grown quite dark, and then a maid
came in and lighted the lamp. She took up her work when the maid had
gone, and tried to centre her thoughts on the pattern she was working;
but her eyes quickly caught a far-away expression, and she found herself
listening for the footfall of her brother, while her hands lay
listlessly in her lap.
Several times she shook herself--metaphorically--and plied her needle
afresh, but the effort never lasted very long. An unaccountable sense of
fear or misgiving stole into her heart. She grew restless and
apprehensive, and yet she had no tangible reason for anxiety.
William Menire was more her brother's friend than hers, and the fact
that he had caught cold was not a matter of any particular moment. Of
course a cold might develop into something serious. He might be
ill--very ill. He might die. She caught her breath suddenly, and went
and opened the door. The stars were burning brightly in the clear sky
above, and the wind blew fresh and strong from the direction of
Treliskey Plantation. She listened intently for the sound of footsteps,
but the only noise that broke the silence was the rattle of the stamps
in Dingley Bottom.
Somehow she hated the sound to-night. It grated harshly on her ears. It
had no human tone, no note of sympathy. The stamps were grinding out
wealth for greedy people, careless of who might suffer or die.
She came in and shut the door after a few moments, and looked
apprehensively at the clock. Ralph was making a long call.
The house grew very still at length. The servant went to bed. The clock
ticked loudly on the mantelpiece; the wind rumbled occasionally in the
chimney.
Suddenly the door opened, and her brother stood before her. His face was
flushed, and there was a troubled look in his eyes.
"You are late, Ralph," she said, scarcely daring to look at him.
"William is very ill," he said, as if he had not heard her words,
"dangerously ill."
"No!"
"Pneumonia, the doctor fears. He is terribly anxious."
"Who--the doctor?"
"Yes. If William dies I shall lose my best friend."