THE ADVANCE OF THE ENEMY.

All the same these fields contained buried treasure for John Prior, long known to him and to none else in the same degree, pondered over and reckoned on as far as it could be reckoned without actual contact. It had been the object of his ambition ever since he had succeeded his father in the Redcot acres to buy this neighbouring farm--his only method of securing the ground which held the pearl of great price. But when he could have made the purchase the farm did not come into the market. Later, when the necessity of getting the land into his own possession, or at least of keeping it out of dangerous hands, had become a thousand times more pressing--even in common prudence, Prior was cruelly crippled in funds, and he had grown to entertain a fatal, overweening confidence in Ladslove’s remaining with its original owner till a more convenient season. When this was to be, only a man of John Prior’s peculiar temperament, with a warp of sanguine rashness thrown up broadly against a melancholy woof of doubt and despair, could have imagined. It was plainer and plainer, not only that the Redcot estate--in these bad days for agriculture--was of small account without its mines, but that the Redcot coal-field on its present level was nearly worked out. It had become so difficult and costly in the working that it could only be carried on at an outlay which barely paid its expenses, and left hardly a margin of profit. Side by side with the diminished gains was the unwelcome knowledge that the scale of the family living--simple enough in truth, and the income, not a great one, drawn by John Prior’s only son, in place of being reduced in proportion, must, as a matter of necessity, continue very much what they were, with a tendency rather to increase than decrease.

At last, when the squire of Redcot was well aware that the sole chance for him and his, since he had not the money to sink the Redcot pits deeper, lay in the supineness of an old-fashioned, ignorant yeoman, who cared more for the blooming surface of his fields than for the fire which might be in their breast--the security crumbled into dust. The yeoman, who held that blood was thicker than water, signed a bill for a tradesman brother-in-law. The brother-in-law broke; the bill came due; the surety could not meet it; indeed, had other bills hanging heavily round his honest bull neck. Lambert Crabtree, the principal partner and manager of Crabtree’s Bank in Newton--the next market town--took the farm with the consent of the panic-stricken desperate debtor, in payment of the bad debt to the bank, and handed over the small amount of purchase money which exceeded the banking transactions, just enough to set up the dispossessed yeoman as a coal-agent, whom Crabtree might favour by his and the bank’s patronage in Newton. The farm of Ladslove, in the ‘lie’ of the Redcot coal-fields, according to mining statistics and traditions, in place of being John Prior’s purchase, was first the property of Crabtree’s Bank, and next, by some private arrangement, the personal possession of Lambert Crabtree.

But all is not lost that a friend gets, and if blood is thicker than water, it might have been a consolation to the proposed buyer who had lost his opportunity that the prize had not gone to an entire stranger, but to an old county neighbour, an acquaintance of long standing, more than that to John Prior’s own son-in-law, Lambert Crabtree having married Susie Prior, the second daughter, at Redcot, eight years before.

John Prior knew better. The marriage had been none of his making. He had disliked it from first to last, though he had no tangible excuse for opposing the match. He was sensible that neither ties of kindred nor personal feeling would hinder his son-in-law from hastening to make the best of his bargain. He was the last man likely to propose a compromise, as John Prior would have been the last to suggest one, though his silence had robbed him of his sole remaining chance. There was no hope of Lambert Crabtree’s re-selling his recent acquisition, even if the squire of Redcot had been able to buy it--none of his (Crabtree’s) dallying generously with his good fortune, or lingering with tender reluctance till a hoary head was laid under the turf.

Accordingly, it was no surprise to the elder man to find the younger figuring without loss of time as a public benefactor and a man of the world, above private considerations. A party of experienced miners--one or two of them John Prior’s former servants, supposed to hold the secrets of his mines, began to bore on Ladslove in search of the Redcot coal-seam, which had been hewn into and demolished in its original thickness and straightness, till its tapering and shallow point, full of ‘hitches’ and ‘dykes,’ was all that was left in the old ground. But there was plenty of scientific presumption that the opposite run of the seam under the lands of Ladslove carried it on in its pristine solidity and uniformity, a mine of black diamonds--hard as ebony in its jetty hue, rich in gas, perhaps cropping up near the surface, so as to be worked with little trouble or expense--a fortune to its happy finder.

It was the boring party that John Prior watched, day after day, from Redcot Quarry, which commanded the Ladslove meadows, especially those fields accounted the most promising for the quest.

The squire had been an enthusiastic geologist in his day--perhaps all the more so that, though he was a coalowner, he was not a practical coalmaster; that is, his pits were in the hands of an efficient manager. John Prior had felt the fascination of the science of the solid rocks which, to the eager student, is as full of charm as that of the vaulted sky. The one promises to lay bare the colossal history of past ages, the other allures with the dim glories of coming cycles of time. But this student could not have explained why mining rumour and geological data had failed so far, only he was convinced that he, and he alone, knew the very spot which would yield the treasure. It was not the point indicated either by popular belief or by scientific demonstration. The borers had boldly charged both spots without any results worth mentioning, for common tradition, like common rumour, is apt to lie, and mineralogy, like other sciences, sometimes argues without its host. The rocks of the earth, whether deposited by floods or volcanoes, seem occasionally as if they took a perverse pleasure in appearing and disappearing at will, tilting up and sliding down, coming to a dead halt when least expected to stop, vanishing as if they were as transitory as the flowers of the field.

Nevertheless, the master of Redcot was satisfied of the reality of his conviction. Away in the Dutch clover meadow to the right, as he looked down from the quarry, by the Rats’ Ditch--an unusually deep ditch, almost as deep as the Redcot Well, the sides of which, when cautiously laid bare and narrowly examined, betrayed certain unmistakable traces--the lost coal was hidden. It might be elsewhere, radiating from the centre. John Prior was not prepared to affirm or deny the possibility, but the one hope that remained to him was that there was but a single seam in this bed, and that the borers might miss it. Such narrow chances had been before now in the annals of mining.

The ordeal had been already prolonged over a period of months, since the harvest had cleared away the corn. Every day it seemed to the man, isolated and desperate in what was at once his torturing knowledge and his equally torturing ignorance, that the crisis approached nearer, that the busy matter-of-fact unconscious group of labouring men, with their shovels and picks, and their rods like divining rods, had more certainly the fortunes of the Priors of Redcot in a horny grip.

Yet John Prior need not have contented himself with stalking in a stealthy fashion to his quarry of observation, and watching from afar the operations of the borers. He might have gone down among them openly, and looked for himself at what was drawn from the recesses of the rocks. He need not have scrupled to do so, even though, as had often happened, Lambert Crabtree, after his morning in the bank, took his afternoon ride to Ladslove, and stayed ten or twenty minutes hearing the report and examining the pile of ‘rubbish.’ There was no actual quarrel between the relations by marriage. There had never been any close friendship to be cruelly, if foolishly, wounded by the course Lambert Crabtree was pursuing. His conduct had been simply what might have been looked for in the man. John Prior was too proud to resent it actively, while Crabtree himself was too plausible to provoke such resentment. There had been a little gratuitous bluster on the delinquent’s part, ignored by his father-in-law. The coolness between the men, who were naturally antagonistic, deepened a shade or two; but there was no open breach between the families; they continued on visiting terms.

It was John Prior’s free choice that he should look on from a distance at the decision of his fate. He had been doing it with few intermissions for a long time, and he felt he had become almost accustomed to the proceeding, though at intervals it struck him still as maddening. After a little experience he had selected the period of the day when the men were in the habit of testing their success or failure, and of changing their stations, sinking or withdrawing the boring rods, as the case might be. Sometimes, as had happened on the day referred to, the working party were delayed by officious advice and interference, or by an orgie the previous night and a corresponding fit of laziness the following morning, such as colliers of all men are prone to, and the gang had barely got time to put up their gear, when darkness had intervened and set them free. On other days the men would work diligently, as with a private impulse of confidence and alacrity; for if there were pits at Ladslove as well as at Redcot, competition would force the masters’ hands, and the colliers would be able to name their own wages. Their good time would have come.

Every now and then the borers approached perilously near the Dutch clover meadow and the Rats’ Ditch. Once they were actually within a few yards of the former, and John Prior’s eyes grew dim and his heart stood still. There was no dinner for him that evening, no sleep that night. But nothing came of the accidental hit, and the next planting of the apparatus was further than ever from the goal. It was like a game which children play when one of them hides some article fixed upon, and the others, who have been shut out of the room, troop in and seek, the hider looking on, his eyes sparkling with the pride of power, and shouting ‘hot’ or ‘cold,’ to encourage or deter the seekers as they approach or recede from the object of their search. The master of Redcot had seen his grandchildren, full of glee, playing at the game on one of these last evenings. It had faintly recalled similar sport among his children almost a generation back, in which he, still a young man, had been inclined to join on occasions--on a birthday or on Christmas Eve. This conversion of the game into grim earnest was like a ghastly travesty of the children’s gambols, and he was not without a crazy impulse to complete the similitude by hoarsely calling ‘hot as fire, my men;’ ‘nay, lukewarm,’ ‘cold as stone, you idiots,’ as an appropriate chorus to the workmen’s uncertain steps.

At times, when John Prior’s mind was not at full stretch, it relieved its oppression by straying a little from the purpose of his standing there, and from the November aspect of the quarry. He remembered former visits to the place at more genial seasons. He had a fancy that he had brought his young wife here just when the quarry had been deserted for a sufficient space to permit the first fine sprouting of vegetation which had resulted in the tangled over-growth before him. He had stopped her from pricking her fingers by gathering the wild rose, which she stuck in the belt that women wore then, the belt to a white muslin gown--another old-fashion. He had come here with little Jack after the rabbits, and he rather thought the boy’s first shot had reverberated from the rocks there. He had brought the little girls to show them the chaffinches’ and whin sparrows’ nests among the bushes. Susie had always been the most forward, the most meddlesome. He had held the small hand tightly in his to prevent her snatching at the contents of the nests while she chattered. Once she had slipped away on the road home, run back and clambered over the stones, well nigh at the risk of the child’s life, in order to pilfer to her heart’s content. She had dropped the eggs and fledglings from her frock, breaking and bruising them, so as to leave behind her a murderous track that infallibly condemned her. Jane, and even Jack, had cried at the wanton, wholesale destruction which Susie had wrought for her petty delectation, but the culprit herself had not been particularly penitent, in spite of strong representations and sharp chastisement.

John Prior groaned inwardly over these earlier recollections before he dismissed them, pulled himself together, got rid with an effort of the stiffness produced by his long continuance in one constrained position, scrambled down to the opening into the quarry, issued from it, and took his way by the offices and the stables to the house of Redcot. He walked wearily, notwithstanding his struggle to the contrary. His gaunt figure drooped, his strongly-marked face had a set harshness, a grey tint was stealing through the ruddy brown of his country complexion. Indelible signs of his vigils in the quarry were beginning to be imprinted on the malleable iron of John Prior’s outward man, and would never leave it till it fell away in the blurred colourlessness and shapelessness of death, after its first hard, cold seal had been pressed down, had settled for a time, and then yielded to the decay of all mortal things.