“By George, Clive, old fellow, you have good taste,” he said, with an unpleasant little laugh and a peculiar look.
“You said that you had business with me, which brought you down. What is it?” cried Clive sternly.
“Oh, come, that will do,” said Jessop. “Recollect that we’re brothers. What’s the good of your cutting up rough?”
“What is your business?”
“I’ll tell you directly. But look here, old fellow, aren’t you a bit greedy? You can’t have everything, you know. You’ve got all the old man’s money, and I knew that you were to have it, so wasn’t it natural that I should play for Janet?”
“Will you state your business, sir?”
“Sir? Oh, come, I say, isn’t it time to forget and forgive? I wanted Janet, and I won. You didn’t care much, or you wouldn’t have so jolly soon consoled yourself with another girl. I say, though, do they grow many wenches like that here?”
Clive’s eyes blazed, and he felt as if he could strike his brother down where he stood; for he fancied him going back to his young wife, and sneeringly telling her of what he had seen. The thought of this made Clive’s blood boil; and his looks were so ominous that Jessop glanced covertly toward the door where the Major had entered.
“Now, sir, if you please,” said Clive, in low and angry tones, “your business – what is it?”
“Why, you know, old fellow,” cried Jessop, “Janet and I have been talking it over, and she is upset and shocked that we two, with our father only just cold in his grave, should be at enmity. She agreed that I ought to come down and make it up with you, so that we could meet like brothers again.”
“Leave Janet’s name out of everything which you have to say to me,” said Clive, in a husky voice which betrayed how he was moved. “Man, have you no respect for your wife?”
“Respect! Of course I have. Come, I say, when a fellow acts like a brother and comes down on purpose to make it up – ”
“You lie, sir,” said Clive, in a hoarse whisper, as he moved closer to his brother. “I have known you from a boy, Jessop, and I never found you suffer from pangs of fraternal affection. You have come down here for some purpose of your own – as a spy; but you will get no information from me, and under pain of dismissal no man will give you the information you seek.”
“Well, of all – ” began Jessop in an injured tone; but he said no more.
“That will do, and I warn you that if you get speculating in any way over the shares of this company, it will be on your own knowledge. Take my advice, Jessop: leave me and my affairs alone, and, above all, leave this place to-morrow. If you do not, I shall be compelled to tell Major Gurdon that he is harbouring a treacherous scoundrel beneath his roof.”
“Two can play at that game, Master Clive. What if I give the Major a few words of warning concerning his daughter?”
“As many as you please, sir. He will choose between us,” said Clive sternly.
“Not gammoning the poor old man into taking shares, are you?”
Clive, gave so sudden a look that his brother laughed.
“All right! I thought as much, my lad. Then you won’t shake hands?”
Clive turned his back and walked into the cottage, gazing at Dinah with a newly awakened interest aroused by his brother’s words.
Yes, she was very beautiful – it was the sad, pensive beauty of one who had known trouble, and a curious sensation attacked Clive as he listened to the Major, and then felt angry and ready to oppose. For the Major said —
“Go and talk to our visitor, my dear. Show him the garden while Mr Clive Reed and I settle a little business.”
Dinah smiled and went out. The next minute she walked by the window with Jessop, making the blood flush up into Clive’s face, as he now felt a shrinking regarding the taking of the money for the shares.
It was all like a dream. The Major kept on talking, and Clive took the cheque given to him and placed it dreamily in his pocket, wondering the while whether his brother would try to depreciate the mine in his new friend’s eyes.
And all the time he was listening for voices in the garden, and suffering agony at his brother’s presence near Dinah, till, making a savage effort over self, he forced himself to finish the business, and mastered the intense desire to go and watch the pair.
“From what?” he asked himself. “Her father can protect her, and she is nothing to me.”
Then he was seated, as if in a continuance of his dream, at the pleasant evening meal, noting his brother’s conversation as he tried to make himself agreeable, Dinah listening the while. But she met his eyes from time to time with a sweet, pleasant look of innocency; and it was only after making a fresh effort that he said good-night, and then suffered from a fresh pang. For the Major said he would walk half a mile with him, and did.
“Dinah alone with my brother!” thought Clive, as he tried to grasp what the Major said, but did not comprehend a word.
Then at parting —
“I have been very rude to your brother,” said the Major. “Let me have my shares as soon as you can.”
“Yes; he shall have his shares, and they shall double his income,” thought Clive.
Walking as swiftly as he could, he soon reached the mine, and found Sturgess standing by the new cottage he occupied in his capacity of foreman and guardian of the place.
The man seemed to be scowling savagely at him, or else it was the shadow cast by the porch as he stood listening to his chief’s words, nodding from time to time.
“You understand: no one is to inspect the mine without my permission. No one is to have any information given to him whatever.”
“Yes, I understand,” growled Sturgess.
“I shall hold you accountable.”
The man made no reply, and Clive continued his walk of two miles more over the hills, to the farmhouse where he lodged temporarily.
“Hold me accountable, eh?” muttered Sturgess; and he went in and shut the door, to throw himself into a chair and sit gnawing portions of his thick beard.
That night, when the mine gap was dark and still, a lanthorn was visible swinging here and there as it was borne towards the mouth of the pit, where it disappeared in the cage, and a dark shadowy figure followed it.
“Sit fast!”
“Stop!” came in a husky whisper; “how are we to get back?”
“I can manage that. Not afraid, are you?”
“Afraid!” was the scornful reply.
“All right, then. Now, down.”
The ingenious mechanism was started, and the two men, with their lanthorn, descended swiftly into the bowels of the earth, while a perfectly-balanced empty cage rose to take its fellow’s place.
“Any one likely to come and surprise us?” said the man who had been told to sit fast.
“Not likely. There! you shall see for yourself. But that’s it. You can’t better it. A blind lead.”
Chapter Nineteen.
Jessop and Co. at Home
“No, my dear, I’m not going to play the tragedy parent and talk about cursing and all that sort of thing. I’m only a plain matter-of-fact Englishman, leading too busy a life to be bothered. You write to me, and call me my dear father and talk of affection – my affectionate daughter; but how do I know that you are not still under the influence of the man whom you have chosen for your husband? How do I know that he has not said to you that you had better try and make it up with the old man, because the old man’s money may be useful one of these days? Mind, I don’t say that you have so base and sordid an idea; but I give him the credit of being moved in this spirit. I am glad to hear that you are well, and of course I wish you to be perfectly happy; but you proved to me that you thought you could run alone, so I feel that my responsibility as a father has ceased. I can’t reproach myself with any lapses. I did my duty by you; with your liking to the front. I chose you a husband – a good fellow, who would have made you happy; but you chose to flirt with a scoundrel and let him delude you even to making a disgraceful elopement, so you must take your course. Let him see this letter by all means, and thoroughly gauge my opinion of him. If he amends, and behaves well to you, perhaps some day I may accede to what you propose, and receive you both here. But he will have to alter a good deal first. I have no enmity against you, Heaven forbid! for I do not forget that you are my child; but, once for all, I will not have him here, and you may let him know at once that, as to what little money I have, that goes to my hospital, unless Clive Reed happens to want it, and that will alter the case.
“There; this is a very long letter, but as it is the first I have written to you since your marriage, I may as well say in it all I have to say, and this is one very particular part, so keep it in mind. If in the future Jessop Reed behaves badly to you – that is to say, more badly than you can bear, come home. There is your bedroom, and your little drawing-room, too, just as you left them. They shall be kept so, ready for you, and I shall cut all the past out of our lives again as of old; but mind this, Jessop Reed does not have you back again, lord or no lord. I’ll buy a yacht first and live upon the high seas.
“There! that is all I have to say as your father.”
Janet let the letter fall in her lap, and sat in her commonly-furnished room at Norwood, hot and red of eye. No tears came to her relief, for their source seemed to have long been dried-up. Every word had combined with its fellows to form for her the old saying in the ballad: “As you have made your bed, so on it you must lie.”
Her father had been correct enough. She had fought against making any advances in her great despair; but Jessop had insisted, and actually brutally used the very words about the old man’s money, with the addition that he had been trapped into marrying a beggar, and he must make the best of it.
“I must have been mad,” she sighed, as she laid the letter on the table and looked at the clock on the chimney-piece; but it was a cheap French affair under a glass shade, and one which doubtless considered that so long as it looked attractive its duty was done. The hour hand pointed to six, and the minute hand to three.
Janet sighed, and looked at her watch, but she had not wound it up.
At that moment a sleepy-looking servant-girl entered the room.
“Want me to sit up any longer, ma’am?”
“No; you can go to bed.”
“I don’t think master means to come home to-night, ma’am, again. He took his best clothes with him o’ Chewsday.”
“I’m afraid not,” said Janet quietly. “He is very busy now.”
“I’ll sit up if you like, mum. I don’t think it’s no use for both to sit up again to-night.”
“No. Go and get a good long night’s rest, Mary.”
“Yes, mum, thankye, mum,” said the girl, with a yawn. “But won’t you come, too?”
“Presently. I’ll sit up till twelve.”
“Twelve, mum?” said the girl, staring. “Why, it’s ’most one now.”
“Then go to bed. I’ll come soon.”
“Don’t ketch me gettin’ married and settin’ up for no husbands,” muttered the girl. “I’d soon let my gentleman know what the key of the street meant.”
Left alone, Janet again read the letter she had received from her father, though she hardly needed this, for she pretty well knew it by heart. Then, laying it on the table again for her husband to see, she sat thinking of what might have been, and contrasted the brothers, her brow wrinkling up as she felt that day by day she was sounding some deeper depth, and finding but a fresh meanness in Jessop’s nature.
“But it was only right after all,” she told herself; and she went over again the scene in Guildford Street, the hot jealous blood rising to her cheeks, as she thought of Lyddy and her acts and words.
“I could never have forgiven that. Poor father does not believe he was guilty, or else looks upon the offence with the eyes of a man.”
She started up listening, for a cab had stopped at the gate, and her first impulse was to go to the door; but she sank back wearily, and listened for the clang of the gate and the rattle of the latch-key in the door.
She had not long to wait, and she was preparing herself for her husband’s coming, when the door was shut loudly. There was a scuffling sound in the little hall, and as she turned pale with alarm, dreading some new trouble, there was a strange voice. The door was flung open, and, supported by his friend Wrigley, Jessop Reed staggered into the room.
Both men were in evening dress, Wrigley’s faultless, his glass in his eye, and the flower in his button-hole unfaded, while Jessop’s shirt front was crumpled and wine-stained, and his flushed face told of the number of times the glass had been raised to his lips. As he entered the little drawing-room he made a staggering lurch towards a chair, and would have fallen, as his hat did, but for the tight hold which Wrigley kept of his arm.
“Now, then,” he cried resentfully; “what’s the matter? Don’t get hauling a man all over the room like that.”
“Really I am very sorry,” said Wrigley, guiding Jessop into the chair and taking off his hat, “but the fact is, Mrs Reed, Jessop here was quite out of order when I met him this evening to attend a dinner at the Crystal Palace.”
“Yes. Dinner at Crystal Palace. But that’ll do. You leave my wife alone, Mr Solicitor.”
“Yes, yes, dear boy. Let me get you up to bed.”
“What for? I’m all right.”
“You will be after a night’s rest, my dear Jessop. There’s nothing much the matter, Mrs Reed. Pray don’t be alarmed. The wine was rather bad, too. I really think I drank more of it than he did.”
Janet was standing looking from one to the other with her eyes full of the misery and despair in her breast. Miserable as her life had been, full of bickering and quarrel, reproach and neglect, she had never yet seen her husband like this; and for a few moments she was ready to believe in his companion’s words.
“Have you a little soda-water in the house?” said Wrigley.
“Yes; bring some soda-water and the brandy,” cried Jessop, with an idiotic laugh which contradicted all that his friend had said.
Janet’s anger was rising now.
“We have no soda-water or brandy,” she replied.
“Never mind, Mrs Reed. Let me get him up to his room.”
“You sit down and hold your tongue,” cried Jessop, with tipsy sternness. “I’m master of my own house.”
“Of course, dear boy. I beg your pardon, I’m sure.”
“Granted! I’ll let you see I’m not going to be dictated to by haughty, ill-tempered women. Madam, my friend wants some soda and brandy. Get it at once.”
Wrigley gave Janet a nod and a smile, as if to say, “Better humour him.”
“All right, dear boy,” he said; “I won’t have any now.”
“I say you shall, sir. Sit down. Think I’m going to let her show her airs to you.”
“Oh, nonsense, nonsense!”
“Hold your tongue. I know what I’m talking about. She’s got Clive on the brain. Always throwing my brother at me. Scoundrel about poor Lyddy Milsom, but she can’t let him drop.”
“Mr Wrigley, I will see to my husband,” said Janet coldly. “You will excuse me; it is getting late.”
“Really, I beg your pardon,” said Wrigley, speaking with gentlemanly deference. “Yes, it will be better. Good-night, Mrs Reed. I am very sorry he should have been so affected, but it is really nothing. Believe me.”
“Hold your tongue, will you? Mind your own business,” cried Jessop sharply. “I know what you’re saying.”
“All right, old fellow. Get up to bed now. Good-night.”
Jessop made a dash at his wrist and held it fast.
“Sit down. Not going yet. I’m master here. Won’t go and fetch the soda and brandy, won’t she? Very well; then she shall hear something she won’t like. Look here, madam, what do you say to our dear brother now? On the stilts, is he? Well, then, he has got to come down.”
“Here, that will do, my dear Jessop,” said Wrigley, with a hurried laugh. “Don’t take any notice, Mrs Reed.”
“You hold your tongue, I say again,” cried Jessop, gripping Wrigley’s wrist so tightly that, without a struggle, there was no escape. “She has to hear it.”
“Nonsense, nonsense!”
“Is it?” cried Jessop, sitting bolt upright now.
“We shall see about that. She’s always at me about him.”
“Now, my dear old Jessop, friend of all these years, do you think I want you to insult Mrs Reed before me?”
“Insult, is it? You should hear how she insults me.”
“And I daresay you deserve it, just as you do now.”
“No, you don’t. Want to make friends at court, do you?”
“There, there! let me help you to bed, old fellow.”
“I’m going up to bed when I like, and when you’re gone.”
“All right, then, I’ll go now. I should have been rattling off to town in the cab if you hadn’t stopped me. There! good-night.”
“Sit down. She’s got to hear it. Do you hear, you Janet? He’s a fine boy, our Clive. Sort of Abel, he is, and I’m a kind of Cain, am I? But we shall see. Cries about him, she does, and before her lawful husband. Jealous of him. Do you hear, Janet?”
“Mr Wrigley, pray go,” she cried indignantly.
“My dear madam, I really am trying to go, but you see.”
“A blackguard with his pretty mistress down in Derbyshire. Nice saint!”
Janet turned and her eyes flashed, while Jessop burst into a jeering laugh.
“That bites her. Nobody must look at a pretty girl. She’s everybody, Wrigley. Do you hear? Old Bob Wrigley – I say, wasn’t it Ridley, though?”
“Yes, all the same; but come now, be a good boy, and go to bed. You’re hurting my wrist.”
“Serve you right.”
“But you’re driving the sleeve-links into the flesh.”
“Serve you right. You’ve driven sleeve-links into plenty of people’s flesh. Sit still. And you, Madam Janet, do you hear? We’re going to ruin him.”
“Reed! Don’t make an ass of yourself. He doesn’t know what he is saying, Mrs Reed.”
“Ha, ha! Don’t I? Ruined, I tell you. Play Jacob to me, would he? Down upon his knees he comes.”
Janet looked sharply from one to the other, and Wrigley, who made no effort to go now, uttered an uneasy laugh.
“I’ve been down and found out all about him and his nice little ways. Do you hear, madam? Pretty mistress. Beats you all to fits. Dark. Large eyes. Juno sort of a girl. He’s got fine taste, our Clive. He knows a pretty girl when he sees one. This isn’t a white-faced Lyddy, but dark, I tell you; skin like cream, teeth of pearls, and a red, full, upturned lip. A beauty!”
“’Pon my word, my dear Jessop, you ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Wrigley.
“I am, to be here, and not down there, trying – bah! it wouldn’t want any trying – cutting the blackguard out.”
“Really, Mrs Reed, I feel quite ashamed to be here listening to such nonsense, but pray don’t take any notice; it is all said in a teasing spirit, and to-morrow morning he will not know what occurred.”
Janet looked at him searchingly, but she made no reply. In fact, she had no time, for Jessop chuckled.
“Won’t I?” he cried. “Don’t you make any mistake, lawyer. Sharper fellow than you think for. I’m drunk, am I? Only my legs, old man. Head’s sober as a judge. You think you are making me your tool, do you? All right: perhaps so; but I’m a very sharp tool, old man, and if you don’t use me properly I may cut your fingers.” Wrigley coughed.
“There!” he said; “you have had a good long talk, and you can let me go.”
“Wait a minute. You hear, madam – bring him to the dogs if I like. Schemed against me. Time I schemed against him.”
“So you shall, my dear boy,” said Wrigley. “Now am I to see you to bed?”
“I don’t want you for a valet,” said Jessop. “I want you to do my dirty work.”
Wrigley gave him an angry look, but turned the spiteful remark off with a laugh.
“All right, old fellow; you shall. Now may I go?”
“Yes, be off.”
“Good-night, then.”
“No: stop and help me up to bed.”
“I will, with pleasure,” said Wrigley, giving Janet an encouraging look. “Now then.”
Jessop rose, took his friend’s arm, offered with a smile, and suffered himself to be led to the door.
“Which room, Mrs Reed?” said Wrigley.
“Come along, I know,” snarled Jessop.
“All right, dear boy. You shall show me, then. Good-night, Mrs Reed. The cabman is waiting; and as soon as I’ve seen him in bed, I’ll slip off.”
“Thank you,” said Janet coldly, as she gazed searchingly at the smooth, well-dressed, polished man, and felt a strong repellent force at work.
Then the door closed, and she sank in a chair, helpless, hopeless, listening to the steps upon the stairs, and thinking of her husband’s words.
“And I let myself be led to believe that this man loved me,” she thought, in her bitterness, – “this man, who could degrade me as he has to-night before his companion.”
But her thoughts changed from her own misery to Jessop’s threats against his brother.
“What does he mean?” she asked herself. “Ruin him?”
She sat gazing before her wildly, her heart throbbing at the thought of the man she had told herself she loved coming to harm; but directly after Jessop’s other utterances flooded her mind, and swept the thought of trouble befalling Clive right away.
For was this true? So soon after his fathers death! Was there some one whom he had met, some one beautiful – fair to see?
“What is it to me?” she said scornfully. “He is not worthy of a second thought. Better Jessop’s wife, even if he sinks lower still.”
She listened and heard steps, then the front door closed, and lastly the sound of wheels. Then lying back in the chair, she prepared to rest there for the night, while Jessop sat up in bed, waiting for her to come, thoroughly sobered now.
For as soon as Wrigley had helped him up to and across the chamber, Jessop had felt two nervous hands seize him by the throat, and he was flung quickly and silently back on the bed.
“Look here, you miserable, brainless idiot!” whispered Wrigley savagely, as he held him down.
“Here, what are you doing?”
“Silence, fool! or I’ll choke the miserable life out of you. Now are you sober enough to understand? Mind this; if by any words of yours – any of your cursed blabbings, this business comes to grief, I warn you to run for your life.”
“What?”
“For there are those in it now who would not scruple much about making you pay.”
“Pay?” faltered Jessop, as he gazed in the fierce face so close to his.
“Yes, my dear friend, and so that the world would be none the wiser when you were dead.”
Chapter Twenty.
Dinah Seeks Safety
Clive Reed crossed the spoil bank one evening after a busy day at the mine, leaving a black cloud of smoke still rising where the furnaces were hard at work, turning the grey stone ore into light silvery metal, which was run off into the moulds ready for stamping there as ordinary soft lead; then, after several purifyings, as hard solid ingots of silver.
For the place had rapidly developed, gang after gang of men had been set on, miners, artificers, smelters; and in the eyes of the mining world the far-seeing man now sleeping calmly in his grave was loudly praised, and his son and the shareholders envied for their good fortune over a property that a couple of years before no one would have touched; even when Grantham Reed had acquired it, they had been ready to ask whether he was mad.
And now, day by day, the new lode which Clive had discovered was giving up such great wealth that the shares were of almost fabulous value, and not to be had at any price.
For the original scheme of continuing the old working and profiting by the clumsy way of production in the past, with its immense waste, had as yet not been touched. The “White Virgin” was rendering up her hidden treasures contained in the new lode, and it looked as if these were inexhaustible.
It had been a long, harassing experience for Clive to get everything in perfect going order, for the work – administrative and executive – had all fallen upon his shoulders. But it had been a labour which had brought him rest and ease of mind. When the hours of toil, too, were over, a sweet feeling of peace had gradually grown up, till the wild moorland had become to him a place of beauty; the river deep down in its narrow valley a home of enchantment, from which he tore himself at the rare times when he was compelled to visit London and attend the board meetings of his company.
At first he did not know why it was that his father’s death and the discovery of Janet’s weakness had grown to seem so far back in the past. When he first came down to the ruined mine, he felt old and careworn; he walked with his head bent, his eyes fixed upon the ground, but their mental gaze turned inward upon the misery in his heart. Now, after these few months, he was himself again, and Janet, his brother, and all that agony and despair, were misty and fading fast away.
