The White Virgin Part 23

"The most aromatic of our plants, Mr Reed," he said. "I'm sorry I disturbed you in the night, but it was no false alarm. Look! I would not rake them out till you had seen them."

He pointed to the couple of heavy footprints in the soft soil, and to one of his carnations crushed by a boot heel.

"Nothing missing," continued the Major. "Our friend was startled; but don't say anything about the footprints at breakfast."

"Certainly not. But are you much troubled in this way?"

"Well, no," replied the Major, smiling grimly.

"The fact is, never. I'm afraid the news of the reopening of the mine has brought some roughs down into the neighbourhood. When you get your men all at work, they'll be too tired of a night to go wandering about."

"I am very sorry," said Reed.

"Oh, don't say a word about it, my dear sir. I am not blaming you. I cannot expect to have Derbys.h.i.+re reserved to me. There! those are smoothed out, and a man who finds that there are firearms upon premises, with people who mean to use them, will think twice before he comes again."

"Yes, of course," said Reed, looking thoughtfully at the fine old soldierly fellow as he ceased raking his bed. "How will Mademoiselle look this morning? Paler and more startled. A deceitful little minx!"

"We've ten minutes yet," said the Major. "Care to walk up to the top of the garden? I can show you where my boundary runs, and yours touches it. Fair play, Mr Engineer. Keep your own side, and don't come burrowing under me. Hang your rooting and mining! I don't want to have my garden under-drained and my cottage come toppling about my ears."

"Don't be alarmed, sir. I shall keep rigorously within the limits of the mapped-out estate."

"Of course you will, my dear sir. I have no fear. It is fascinating work, that mining, though. If I were a young man I might be tempted to begin myself. As you saw indoors, I do dabble a bit in mineralogy and metallurgy. Dinah, too, is quite an expert."

"Indeed! I was noticing your collection of ores. Some of them very rich."

"Yes; bits I have chipped here and there during the long years of my stay. There we are. Your estate runs--"

A shrill whistle arrested him as he stood on the top of a rugged ma.s.s of stone, high above the cottage, where luxuriant ferns cl.u.s.tered in every niche; and placing a little silver call which hung by his watch-chain to his lips, he blew an answer.

"One is obliged to have something of this kind," he said smilingly, "to keep our Martha from going mad. That was the breakfast-bell, or answers for it. Fine place this for your appet.i.te, Mr Reed."

"Yes, one does get ready for one's meals," replied the guest, as he walked slowly back down the glen-like garden, toward the open window of the room in which they had been seated on the previous evening, and from which Dinah, simply dressed, but looking, with her large eyes and pale creamy cheeks, ten times as interesting as on the previous night, came out to meet them.

"A guilty conscience needs no accuser," thought Reed, as they drew near, but to his intense surprise she held out her hand to him with a sweet, winning frankness, and bade him good morning. Then turning to the Major, a sensation as of a sob rising in his throat affected Reed at the tender affection that seemed to exist between the pair, as Dinah raised her lips to her father's while he embraced her.

"What a brute I am!" thought Clive; and in spite of the sharp rattle of the shot seeming to ring in his ears, he told himself that he must have been wrong.

"A girl like that could not be deceitful," he thought; and when a few minutes later they were seated at the table, and Martha came in, bearing a dish of fried ham, he looked hard at the stern robust woman, and wondered whether she was responsible for the nocturnal visitor.

"Impossible!" he said to himself one moment, and the next he owned that it might be so. "Fifty if she's a day," he said mentally. "Well, perhaps so, and the lover has come at last."

Two hours later Clive Reed was back in the great shallow gap, where a couple of teams of horses had just dragged up heavy loads of machinery and materials, Sturgess looking morose and speaking in a surly voice, busy ordering the men about the shaft to look sharp and help to unload.

The click of hammer and pick was making the place echo. Masons were busy erecting a stone building; and already the place was beginning to look business-like, and as if waking up from its long, long sleep of years.

The cottage and its occupants were soon as if they were non-existent to Clive, who went at once into the temporary office which he had had erected, wrote and sent off two telegrams to the nearest town for despatch, several letters, and then, after changing his clothes, went out to descend the mine.

He had accidentally arranged his time so that he met Sturgess, who had just ascended.

"Ah! Sturgess," he said, "I wanted to see you. Those rails ought to have been taken down first thing this morning, so that a line might be begun for the small trucks."

"Oh, yes, I know," said the man roughly.

The engineer looked at him wonderingly.

"Then see about it at once."

"Plenty of time, sir; plenty of time," said Sturgess insolently.

"There is not plenty of time, sir," said Clive, in a tone of voice which rather startled the man; "and have the goodness to understand this:--My late father engaged you on the strength of your recommendations, but I am in supreme authority here, and I submit to insolence from no person in my employ."

"I didn't mean to be insolent," grumbled the man.

"Then please understand that you were, and don't venture upon it again, or we part at once. Now go and see that those rails are taken down directly, and that a gang of men begin to lay them at once toward the opening to the great cavern where the water flows."

"No use to lay 'em down there," grumbled Sturgess.

"You heard my orders, sir. I shall be in that direction before long."

Sturgess went out without a word, but with an ugly look upon his countenance.

"All right!" he muttered. "Make much of it. People who get up very high have the farther to fall. Curse him! I'll let him see."

"He must have been drinking," thought Clive, as soon as he was alone.

The next minute he was wrapt in the management of the mine, and giving orders to different men, ending by going to the bucket to be let down, and noting that Sturgess was looking at him searchingly as he rose from bending over the labourers who were lifting the rails.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

MAJOR GURDON'S VENTURE.

"My dear boy, you are quite a glutton at work," said the Major one day when a miner had shown him into Clive's office.

"Ah! Major," cried the engineer, looking up from a plan he was making, "glad to see you;" and he shook hands. "Hope Miss Gurdon is better."

"Who is to believe that, when you never come near us. Eh? My daughter!

Yes, thank heaven, I think that she is a little better. She is gradually losing that scared, frightened look. Nerves growing stronger."

"I am very glad, sir. You must forgive my neglect. You know what calls are made upon my time. If I am absent, the work stands still, and I have been forced to run up to town four times since I saw you, to hunt up the machinists. I am coming some day for a few hours' rest and a bit of trout-fis.h.i.+ng."

"Do. Pray come. I shall be delighted. But, my dear sir, what a change you have made here in a month. It is wonderful. You have turned a desert into a beehive."

"Well, we are progressing," said Clive, with a smile of pride, as he let his eyes follow the Major's over engine and boiler houses, furnace, and smelting sheds; tramway and lifting machinery finished and in progress.

"We shall begin raising ore very shortly."

"And making money for your shareholders, I hope."

"Oh, yes, I hope so," said Clive, with a confident smile.