The Squire's Daughter Part 68

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 shuttlec.o.c.k 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 const.i.tute right.

That was a truth that tyrants never learned and that Governments too frequently shut their eyes to. G.o.d 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 advent.i.tious 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sion 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-gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s. 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 G.o.dly 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.