A Sovereign Remedy Part 29

Ned laughed derisively and shrugged his shoulders.

"You won't understand what I mean, but there is a general election due next year. The men have had other employment offered them; if they won't accept it, that is their own fault."

"But I don't understand your objection----" began Ted.

"Don't you?" interrupted Lord Blackborough. "I think that must be because you don't know good slate from bad."

They had pa.s.sed on by this time into that most desolate of all places on G.o.d's earth, a valley of unworked slate quarries, a valley desecrated by man's needs, yet needed not by man. Seamed, scarred, riven until scarcely a blade of gracious gra.s.s remained on what had once been soft, sweet sheep-bite set with heather, shadowed by dense bracken thickets. Great moraines of debris, not rounded by long aeons of slow yet certain grinding in the mill of G.o.d, but fresh, crude, angled, from the hand of man, usurped the valley now on this side, now on that, turning the very roadway, bordered by rusty rails, to their pleasure. A mountain stream, released from long slavery, sped--exultantly free--past the low congeries of differently pitched roofs supported by iron pilasters, beneath which cogwheels and bands, levers and distributors stood immovable, rusted into silence. Hanging halfway up a stiff incline of shale, an empty truck hung rusted to the rails. Another, full of split slate squared, holed, ready for homestead or granary, stood in the wide stacking-yard where thousands and thousands of these same leaves of slate, looking like huge books, were ranged in orderly piles. How many homes, how many churches, how many barns and factories might not have been roofed in by these piles waiting idly?

For what? For money.

Ned Blackborough stooped down and picked up a slate which had fallen on the truck-way. It snapped between his fingers, and with a laugh he flung it aside.

"Bad stuff!" he said, "and that is better than most. I tell you that this valley, which is a valley of desolation now, has been a valley of dishonesty from the very beginning."

His eyes seemed to catch fire, and he turned to Ted almost threateningly, "And you don't understand! Will you understand, I wonder, when I tell you that these quarries, like many another, have been in the hands of speculators from the very beginning? Some one who knew the slate was bad took to himself others who knew it also, and between them they floated a company. When the money had gone, some other rascal bought the bankrupt stock and started another company, and another, and another. And all the time, these workmen whom you commiserate were hewing and splitting and taking their wages, for what? For money, only for money! What was it to them that the slate was bad, that their labour was wasted and vain? They got their money.

And now they wonder because, when the lease of the last company was up, I stepped in and said 'No.' This sham shan't go on. I claim my right, and I won't be bribed by anybody." He spoke almost pa.s.sionately, then laughed, and, with a brief "I beg your pardon; these things irritate me," struck up a shady footpath which led over the hill.

"I don't exactly see how it could have been done," remarked Ted argumentatively. "If they went bankrupt they must have had a valuator, and then----"

"I've no doubt they had," broke in Ned impatiently, "but what I tell you is the long and short of it."

"Besides, I don't consider the workman is to be blamed at all," argued Ted. "So long as he does his work fairly and gets his pay for doing that work, no one has a right to find fault with him. Then think of the women and children."

Aura, whose face had grown keen over the discussion, looked swiftly at Ned, awaiting his answer. He, in one of his worst moods, gave it unhesitatingly: "My dear fellow, what is the use of breeding up a race of thieves and swindlers?"

With that he bent himself to take the hill at a gallop, leaving those two agreeing as to the women and children, agreeing also in a thousand superficial likings and dislikings born of youth, high spirits, and no small lack of thought.

But at a sharp turn amid the tumbled debris, they overtook Lord Blackborough opposed to a small boy seated disconsolately on the ground in a puddle of fresh milk, dotted with the remains of a broken jug, while an ill-looking collie dog yapped from the shelter of a more than usually large block of worthless slate.

"It wasn't my fault," explained Ned ruefully. "That brute of a dog upset him, trying to bark and run away at the same time."

The small boy, having now realised his misfortune, was blubbering in Welsh.

"I don't understand what he is saying," said Aura, looking up at Ted, after bending over the urchin with English consolation. "Do you?"

He shook his head. "That is the worst of wild Wales; one can't be compa.s.sionate."

Ned looked at them a trifle contemptuously.

"He's afraid. A boy never blubbers like that without cause, and he isn't hurt. Here, you!" he continued, hauling the child up incontinently, "don't howl. I go with you home--_catre_--do you understand?--_catre_--_mam_."

With which Welsh smattering, he dragged up the unwilling boy, still blubbering, towards a group of slate cottages which showed a few hundred yards away. Such desolate-looking cottages, only to be differentiated by their straight lines from the ma.s.ses of debris about them.

"You go on," he called back. "It's straight over the brow of the hill, and then you can see. I'll pick you up in no time."

But when they looked back from the summit, there was no trace of him on the upward path.

"There is no use waiting," said Ted oracularly. "By George! what a relief this is."

He spoke in glad confidence as his eye travelled over G.o.d's good world untouched, undefiled, and yet in his heart of hearts he would not have scrupled at any desecration of Nature, provided it were in pursuit of gold.

Nevertheless, he responded at once to the fresh, bright breeze on the wide, undulating hill-tops, and the free, glad joy in life itself as life, came to him as they pa.s.sed with springy step over gra.s.s-land and bog-land, all a-crackle with faint frost. What did they talk about?

Not love, certainly--he was too wise for that--though love lay at the bottom of all his thoughts.

"How your hand trembles," she said laughingly, as he held hers in crossing a brook.

He flushed a little. "We've been going such a rate," he replied.

"You're the best walker I know, for a girl."

There was something in the qualification which set her at her ease.

"I wonder what has become of Ned?" she said once, as they finally turned into the home valley and saw beneath them, spread out like a map, the familiar fields, the sloping lawn, the straight walks of the garden, the cosy, comfortable-looking chimneys all asmoke.

Ted pointed to the sky-line above them, where for an instant a dark something, which might have been a sheep, and might have been a man, showed, then disappeared.

"Up in the clouds, as usual," he laughed. "Ned is an awfully good chap, but I wish he wasn't quite so balloony."

Aura looked at him distastefully. "I like him best when he is in the clouds," she said firmly. "Of course," here she became slightly reflective, "I dare say his being so--so erratic, might put one out a good deal, and people like you would be more satisfactory to deal with; still--" here she dimpled all over--"come! let us race down the hill, and then we can be waiting tea for him when he turns up."

But there was no tea ready when Ned, whose ill humour had pa.s.sed with his solitary walk, arrived.

"Thank Heaven!" cried Ted, who met him at the door. "Will you, like a good fellow, fetch the doctor; he lives beyond the hill? Mr. Smith is ill, as he was before. You can take the motor, can't you, from Dinas?"

"No need; Ramsay will be there. I'll be back in no time," was the reply.

So while Ted helped Martha with his experience and comforted Aura as best he could, thereinafter remaining to give Peter Ramsay a hand in getting the old man to bed, Ned kicked his heels in the drawing-room.

Sickness, with its possibility of death, always made him a little disdainful, and he had but a few stereotyped words of regret when, the crisis having pa.s.sed, the three came in, Aura looking pale and troubled.

"Was he as ill before?" she asked, her eyes seeking Ted's almost reproachfully.

Ted's sought the doctor's. "Not quite," replied the latter. "These attacks--it is as well to be prepared for them, Miss Graham--tend to become more serious. He may not, I hope he will not, have another for a long time, but you must try and avoid any excitement." He held out his hand to say good-bye. "There's no reason to be alarmed, I a.s.sure you; with care, he may not have another for--for months."

He clasped the girl's hand with strong, steady grip and smiled, but poor Aura, facing the one great reality for the first time, stood white and silent. Only when they had gone, she turned to Ted.

"I don't know what I should have done without you," she said gratefully.

Outside, as the motor disappeared in the darkness, Dr. Ramsay was saying nearly the same thing.

"It is lucky Cruttenden was there and had an idea of what to do; lucky too that I didn't give you up and go home."

"Sorry," responded Ned shortly. "Hope you had a good walk."

"Excellent," replied Peter Ramsay with a little laugh. "I satisfied myself that hills and dales, and the round world generally, were mere manifestations of matter, and the Providence didn't shape my steps anyhow."

CHAPTER XV