VC -- A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea | Page 6

sort of aspect which seemed to lift its bearer to a superior social height. James had many irons in the fire, and seemed to be prosperously busy at the commercial anvil all day long. Amongst the business enterprises he had in hand, there was but one which at any time had appeared to yield him no return for his labours. He had lent money on the strength of the security afforded by a brine pit in the neighbourhood of Droitwich; and his creditor having failed in the stipulated payments, James had foreclosed upon this property and had undertaken to work it for himself. He found this enterprise a failure, but since he could induce nobody to take it off his hands, he worked the property for what it was worth from time to time. There were seasons in which the pit was almost dry, and when it was impossible to work it at a profit. There were other seasons when the underground sources treated him more favourably. A more decided man than Mr. Knock Jervoyce would probably have decided to abandon the property altogether, and to let one loss stand for everything. There was a considerable cost incurred in the upkeep of machinery which was much oftener idle than engaged; and the occasional employment of the plant was, of course, on the average much more expensive than its constant use would have been. James was on the point, after two or three years of indecision, of relinquishing the working altogether, when Cousin John came home. There was a conference between the two, and following on that conference a very strange thing happened. The worthless mine became a property, and one of the best of its kind in England. Five men knew how this result was brought about, and three of them had been for a good many years in the enjoyment of a pension--one in Australia, one in Canada, and one in the United States. These pensions were paid by Cousins John and James, and paid by no means willingly. Not to boggle at this matter, the two cousins, at John's instigation, had contrived a simple villainy. Very near to the unproductive salt pit was a noble property of the same kind, and John's device had been to tap the wealthy neighbour's store by running a little adit from the worthless shaft into the rich one. It was not an unheard-of thing for the value of such properties to fluctuate. A rich mine would pay out, and a poor one at a distance would become suddenly enriched; and these changes were, no doubt rightly, in the common instance attributed to the capricious operations of Nature. If the owner of the tapped sources of the cousins' wealth suspected anything to begin with nobody ever knew. The only fact with which we need concern ourselves is that the fraud went on without exposure for many years, and that James and John alike grew fat on it.
A certain hulking ruffian, with an Australian digger's beard, had turned up of late to disturb the tranquillity of the partners. He had been asking what they regarded as an exorbitant price for his silence in respect to the construction of that adit which has just been mentioned, and had been fobbed off from time to time with five or ten pounds, as the case might be, and with promises of more. Young Polson Jervase had caught this person slinking about the house on the Beacon Hill in what looked to him like a suspicious fashion, and an interview between the two had resulted in a stand-up fight in which the blackmailer had got very much the worst of it. But as he rose from the last round, and spat out the fragments of one or two broken teeth, he said things which filled the honourable and manly spirit of young Jervase with a terror to which he hardly dared to give a name. The terror would have named itself loudly enough if he had dared but to let it; but next to being an honourable man himself, the young fellow wanted to believe that he came of honest people, and the rascal's threats and innuendoes had left him with a dreadful doubt upon his mind.
The combat had taken place at the very gate of the grey-stone house, and the old lady in the black satin and the costly yellow lace had flown out at the finish of it in time to hear the threats and innuendoes which had brought such trouble to her boy. It was a hundred to one that young Polson Jervase would have been less disturbed if his mother, hearing these things, had not fallen to trembling and weeping and wringing her hands; for he argued, naturally, that she would not have been