WHAT CAME OF THE BORE AT THE RATS’ DITCH.

John Prior was standing in the Dutch clover-field looking down at the Rats’ Ditch. It had undergone a considerable transformation since the spring day when Lambert Crabtree had found his father-in law apparently contemplating the gambols of Tommy and Fly, as they plunged and struggled after imaginary rats in their happy hunting ground.

It was autumn--the second autumn--and there was the usual October wealth of withering sedges and bulrushes. Occasionally a single tuft of the blue flower of the chicory contrasted with a double row of the red berries of lords-and-ladies. These again were but dull crimson reflections of the purer scarlet of the big berries of the bryony; its leaves were already russet and shrunken, festooning the hedges, and blending inextricably with the long green garlands and downy white seed of old-man’s-beard.

There were greater alterations than those made by the annual round of the seasons. The borers had been here at last. They were not at work, for they had done their task, but their gear--windlass, ropes, rods--still stood or lay about among the heaps of rubbish and the trampled down, dug into sides of the ditch.

John Prior had a perfect right to stand there. He was under no inducement to make a feint of being drawn aside by his four-footed companion. For Ladslove had been bought with Bennet Prior’s money, and was her property, to be united with Redcot as the inheritance of John Prior’s grandchildren.

It was by John Prior’s orders, and under his personal supervision, that the dream of his life had been realised, and coal bored for on the spot where he had been assured that the buried diamonds lay waiting for their finder. Every indication of the strata had been attended to, every obligation fulfilled, and the result was--nothing.

After all his proofs and convictions, his sleepless dread, his sacrifices to the secret he held, his late grasp on the coveted possession; by some baffling counter-operation of the primeval forces which had been at work, some mocking freak of Nature in her irony, expectation, fear, remorse, the final attainment of his goal had all proved groundless, needless, and in vain. There was not an ounce of coal under the earth by the Rats’ Ditch any more than in the other Ladslove meadows. It was only yesterday that John Prior had been driven to acquiesce in the fallacy of the belief which had coloured the greater part of his life, and moved the man to the centre of his being. He stood and gazed blankly at the blank before him as at the grave--the empty grave, for it had never contained a body--of his visions, apprehensions, and reviving hopes. It was as if his loves and his hates had been alike wasted, as if one were to awake in another world and find that the chief desire and dread which had shaped the life of the past had been a mere chimera. As he stood and looked, the soft autumn day, full of the pensiveness of over-ripeness, the _morbidezza_ dropping to decay, which precedes the chill of the fall, he was again interrupted, but it was by a gentler intruder on his meditations this time. Instead of Lambert Crabtree, swaggering on his vicious bay ‘Roosian,’ Bennet Prior came quietly walking along the field-path, followed by Tommy, picking his steps gingerly, for there had been a touch of hoar frost in the early morning, melted by the midday sun, and Tommy had as great an objection to wetting his paws unnecessarily as a cat feels to wetting hers.

Bennet put her arm softly within the arm of the man, who stood with his hands crossed behind him, and was silent for a moment before she began to speak with wistful persuasion. ‘They are all gone except me. Jack has got his mother to let him drive her over with Mary Burton to see Jane. He thought she--the mother--would be the better for a drive. We were too late up last night,’ Bennet confessed, with a look of happy content in place of penitence. ‘It was all the fault of the new book and the last group in the quilt.’

‘And why did you not go with the rest?’ he inquired.

‘I?’ a little nervously; ‘oh! I stayed behind because I wished to be with you, if you would let me.’

‘Thanks, my dear,’ he said, a little absently. ‘Have you anything you wish to say to me?’

She stopped to take breath and to clasp his arm more tightly. ‘Jack is afraid you are terribly disappointed, sir,’ she began courageously; ‘and of course it is a surprise--a shock--I suppose I must say a great disappointment. But there is another resource--to “dig deeper” at Kershaw. Jack tells me, what no doubt you know very well, that this is the colliers’ motto. He has got that bit of valuable information, along with a great deal more of their experience, since he took an active interest in the pits. You have been pleased that he should do so. You do not mind that he--that I should be able to help you in other ways, as we are glad and proud to do--that we should seek to furnish the money necessary to put the pits in better working order, when they will pay back every farthing laid out on them?’

‘They will pay back in time,’ he said; ‘there can be no mistake here. The coal is known to be at a lower level, and fuel is not likely to go out of fashion, unless there be some extraordinary convulsion in the planetary system, when naturally most fashions will come to an end.’ He finished with a slight shrug of his shoulders. ‘But what about the purchase of Ladslove at a fancy price, and all the fine plans based on it?’ he struck in presently, with a nervous twitch of his long upper lip.

‘Why, there is not a word to be said against the purchase,’ she assured him with cheerful confidence, opening her eyes wider at the bare idea. ‘The farm is a most desirable addition to your property; and are not these nice fields good grazing land,’ glancing round admiringly on the rather sodden meadows. ‘Jack says it would have been a pity to convert them into a black country. Besides, it would have spoilt the view from Redcot Spinney; though, as we are colliers, I daresay we ought to be above, or beneath, caring for views. Then, without the purchase, you could never have known the truth--never have been freed from the fear of a successful rival here. You would have had no heart to go on sinking more money at Kershaw.’

‘You are a good special pleader, child,’ he said, patting her hand.

But she wanted to say more, only it was the most difficult of all to say. ‘And if you had found coal here you would never have been quite able to forget what it had cost you, what you had been brought to believe--though nobody dared blame you--that you had been made to pay for it. You spoke of it once to me; don’t you remember? On one of those miserable days. Forgive me, sir, for reminding you of them. The penalty would have lingered in your memory, on your conscience, and marred everything. It would have spoilt every success, and risen up afresh to embitter disaster as if it were a just retribution. I often thought of that. Father, you are not so vexed as Jack and the mother imagine? For their sakes and mine, you will not mind very much that you are spared all these _arrières pensées_? The smart of an unhealed wound in the background has been at once and for ever prevented. Now, you can have nothing in this light to accuse yourself of. Is not that alone an incalculable blessing?’

His answer was to put his bony fingers on the soft hand which held his arm, and ask her, with one of the rare unclouded smiles that lit up his grey, gaunt, hard-featured face like sunshine on the rugged uplands of Kershaw Moor, ‘My dear, what do they say is the meaning of your name?’

‘My name!’ she repeated, looking at him in a puzzled way.

‘Yes, your name. Don’t they pretend it is a contraction for Benedicta--Blessed? There are women of whom it is counted the greatest honour to say that their children will rise up and call them blessed. Do you think it ought to be reckoned less praise when it is the father, and not the children, who from the bottom of his heart calls his good daughter blessed?’

THE END.

_Spottiswoode & Co., Printers, New Street Square, London._

Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious punctuation errors and omissions have been corrected.

Page 76: “it sole claim” changed to “its sole claim”

Page 210: “it it was a much” changed to “it was a much”

Page 253: “mother, Mr. Crabtreee” changed to “mother, Mr. Crabtree”