Hungry Hill (22 page)

There was a great burst of laughter from the miners, and one after the other they smote at the rocks and stones, plunging along the galley with no fear now that the flood-water had found its outlet, and John and Doctor Armstrong were caught with the same excitement, the same fury. They too seized crowbars and joined in the confusion of sound, breaking away the crumbling rock, while the black, slimy water sank from their knees to their ankles, evil-smelling, frothing, sucking its way in one black stream down the gully in the rock-face.

“Your father is unbeatable,” said Captain Nicholson. “I would never have attempted this if he had not been here.”

And Copper John, hearing his words, turned and laughed shortly.

“Would you stand by, then, and see some thousands of pounds lost beyond recovery? Come on, man, and put your back into this business.”

It was getting on for seven in the evening when the little party returned above ground, weary, begrimed, but triumphant, with the news that the water had now sunk below the level, and because of the channels blasted in the hillside, would not rise again.

“Once we have the new engine erected,” declared Copper John, when he made his short speech to the miners assembled at the entrance to the shaft, “we shall be able to keep the water down permanently, and any further flooding will be out of the question. I want to thank every one of you for your work and loyalty this day, and I can promise you that I shall not forget it.”

He looked round upon the great crowd of men, and something striking and undaunted in his bearing, the keen eyes in the smoke-blackened face, the grizzled hair, the square, determined jaw, and the bleeding scratch at the corner of his eye, drew forth a shout of appreciation from the weary men before him. “Three cheers for Copper John,” shouted someone, and a roar went up from the crowd about him, a roar half hysterical in its sudden release from fear, and they began to press forward to shake hands with him, forgetting their fear in him as a master because he had proved himself a leader, and Copper John, laughing and protesting, found himself borne on the shoulders of the miners to see the havoc he had created on the hill.

“Your father is a very lucky man,” said Doctor Armstrong. “He has won popularity for himself, and has saved his copper into the bargain. Shall we go and look at the damage?”

The sun was setting over Mundy Bay, and John, blinking his eyes after the darkness of underground, saw the first cloud of evening forming in the western sky.

It was later than he thought.

The servant, who had been waiting all the afternoon with the horses, came towards him now, with a grin on his face.

“You ought to see the road, sir,” he said; “there’s a cataract falling down over it, and they tell me it’s destroyed entirely. The banks have given way in all directions, and the whole road is falling into the sea. It’s a good thing Doonhaven lies in the other direction.”

Suddenly John saw Doctor Armstrong’s face stiffen, and even as he watched it the same fear clutched at his heart and he felt the blood drain from his face.

“Good God, Fanny-Rosa…” he cried.

He began to run down the side of the hill towards the road, but even as he did so he knew it was useless-the flood-water was pouring out of the side of the hill in a great bubbling cascade, and the torrent of water, let loose, was crashing down on to the road beneath, bearing with it earth, and rocks, and stones. Already wide, ugly cracks were appearing in the ground not far from him, and the crowd of miners, pointing and laughing, were throwing stones and sticks into the cauldron, making game of the disaster, betting one another how long the road itself would stand the strain.

“Call my father,” shouted John to Doctor Armstrong; “tell him that the pony and trap are out on the road, returning from Andriff…” and without waiting for a reply, he began to plunge waist-deep across the stream, to gain the road the other side of the fall, that might as yet have escaped the worst of the flood. Before his eyes rose the ghastly picture of what might be. The pony and trap coming along the road, the two girls chatting, with no knowledge of what lay before them, and then round the bend of Hungry Hill the sudden avalanche of earth and stones from the breaking banks of the road, and the mighty crash of the released flood-waters.

He stumbled down the side of the hill, his breath sobbing, and his mind black with fear. Once he looked over his shoulder, and saw his father and the doctor following him, and some of the miners, Captain Nicholson amongst them, aware suddenly of what might be. As John ran he prayed, who had said no prayer since childhood, and he kept calling her by name: “Fanny-Rosa… Fanny-Rosa.”

He came now to the edge of the hill, and there was the road, littered with great rocks and boulders and loose earth, more devastated even than he had feared, and a channel of water seeping through it all from the torrent beyond, and God in heaven!-was that an overturned trap lying there amongst the rocks, and a horse kicking feebly, and someone standing in the midst of the road calling and crying for help…

“Fanny-Rosa… Fanny-Rosa…”

Fanny-Rosa… Fanny-Rosa…”

He held her against his heart, he lifted her in his arms, he carried her away from the water and the rocks to the side of the road, to the banks as yet untouched, to the soft, wet grass, kissing her hands, and her lips, and her hair, as she clung to him, weeping.

“I am safe,” she cried, “no harm has come to me, I am safe, but Jane, tell them to find Jane, where is Jane ‘

And down upon the road came the earth, and the stones, and the angry flood-waters of the mine on Hungry Hill.

That night at Clonmere John Simon Brodrick was born, he who was to be known in the family as “Wild Johnnie,” but there was no fairy godmother to wish blessings upon his dark head and to wave a magic wand; she had forsaken him, and stolen away into the shadows after her brother Henry.

When the baby was three months old Fanny-Rosa said that a change of air would be good for him. He was not putting on the weight that he should, and although Doctor Armstrong insisted that he had seldom seen a more robust infant or one with greater lung-power, Fanny-Rosa retorted that doctors knew very little about babies, and anyway the instinct of a mother was the strongest thing in the world. So John and his wife and son and all the greyhounds took themselves across the water, and settled down in Lletharrog for several months.

There was a calm, happy atmosphere about the farm-house, and at night-time, with the boy safely asleep upstairs in charge of old Martha, the nursery-parlour would have something of peace and quiet about it, the curtains drawn, the candles lit, a small fire burning in the grate, and Fanny-Rosa sitting in the arm-chair next to the fire, bending over the new gowns she was making for the fast-growing Johnnie, looking up at her husband now and again with her vivid smile, generally to make some remark upon the precocity of their son.

It was, John thought, a good idea of Fanny-Rosa’s to come across the water to Lletharrog. In the sheltered valley here, with the animals about the farm, and the little village close at hand, the placid stream winding below the house, the disaster of the early summer seemed more distant, and could be forgotten for many hours of the day. The shock and tragedy of Jane’s death became blurred, and, in retrospect, a conclusion perhaps more fitting than the many long years of spinsterhood there might have been.

John knew his sister too well. Not for her the quick parting and the soon forgetting, the marriage a year or so later with somebody else. Jane would have sighed, and wilted, a flower with a drooping head. It was better to have gone as she had, suddenly, and bravely, at the foot of Hungry Hill, leaving behind her no bitter memories, only the portrait of a girl of eighteen years, the brown eyes warm and hopeful, the small slim hand touching the pearls at her throat. John would miss her, there would be a great emptiness in his heart because of her, but here, at Lletharrog, he believed it best that she had gone.

The first weeks after her death had been very hard to bear. His father, stunned and suddenly aged, had shut himself up in the library and would have speech with no one, not even Barbara. What agony he endured alone in his dark, cheerless room they none of them knew. But when he emerged, and they feared to find him broken, a shadow of his former self, he was little changed from the man he had been before, only the lines were deeper in his face, the eyes were harder.

John, whose loathing of the mine since the flood had increased tenfold, found it more impossible than ever to discuss business with his father, and he would watch him ride off every morning after breakfast, on his daily visit to the mine, with a feeling of bewilderment, almost of revulsion. When his father announced in tones of great satisfaction, barely three weeks after Jane had gone from them, that the new steam engine had arrived and been erected, and would pump all the water from the new mine without the slightest difficulty, and they would be shipping ore to Bronsea within a month, John had risen to his feet and left the room.

It was not long afterwards that Fanny-Rosa had suggested the move to Lletharrog, and John, for the first time in his life, had been glad to leave Clonmere.

He reflected that now he had a wife and a son, and there was every likelihood of more children to come, he could not continue to live in his father’s house with any great pleasure. For six brief months, after his marriage, he had known the pride of possession, but with the arrival of the family Clonmere had ceased to belong to him. One day, years hence perhaps, he would possess it again, but until that day it was better to visit it at intervals, as a guest, and in the meantime find somewhere for himself and Fanny-Rosa and young Johnnie.

“The trouble is,” Fanny-Rosa said, “that you make no attempt to stand up to your father. You and the girls are all frightened of him. A good quarrel and a lot of shouting would clear the air.”

“I detest quarrelling, and shouting even more,” said John. “Clonmere belongs to my father, and until he dies it is better that we do not try to divide it. Therefore, dearest, we have our own house this side of the water, where no one can interfere with us, I can race my greyhounds, and you can have your babies.”

“I think maybe you have the devil’s pride in you, John. You want Clonmere so much that you do not wish to share it with anyone else.”

“Maybe I have the devil’s pride, and maybe you are right, and maybe too I do not wish to share my Fanny-Rosa with my own black-headed, screaming devil of a son, who has got all the faults of his father, and the wickedness of his mother, and no good in him at all. So the sooner you have another baby the better, to put young Johnnie’s nose a little out of joint.”

Fanny-Rosa put her arms about her husband, and smiled the way she did, telling him he was jealous, and a bear, and she did not love him at all, and then she was gone in a flash, laughing over her shoulder, the old elusive Fanny-Rosa that had won him first on Hungry Hill.

The problem was made easier for them during the winter by his father suddenly buying a house some thirty miles from Lletharrog at the new fashionable watering-place of Saunby, which was within an hour or so’s steaming distance from Bronsea, and more accessible in winter than the long drive backwards and forwards made Lletharrog.

It was therefore suggested that John and Fanny-Rosa should remain on at the farm-house and make it their headquarters for the future, while Copper John and his daughters passed the winter at the new house in Saunby, which was promptly named Brodrick House and became their permanent address while living that side of the water. The arrangement suited everyone, and John did not have the bother of finding a house for himself. He was content with Lletharrog, and so was Fanny-Rosa, and so apparently was Johnnie, whose nose remained entirely in place when his sister Fanny was born the following April, and did not shift in the slightest at the appearance of small Henry a year or so later. Johnnie was in fact the tyrant of the household, and no one, except his mother, was allowed to gainsay him in any way whatever.

He was a handsome child, with his father’s dark hair and eyes, but, as old Martha said, with his mother’s ways and his mother’s quick temper into the bargain. If he wanted a thing he shouted for it, and when he had it soon tired of it, and shouted for something else.

“The boy never seems content,” John would say, staring in perplexity at his small son, who had thrown a fine toy into the fire because he had not liked the colour. “Why does he not sit quietly, like Fanny?”

“He has so much spirit,” said Fanny-Rosa, “haven’t you, my darling?”

Her darling scowled, and began drumming with his heels on the floor.

“I have never beaten a puppy I reared, and I don’t propose to beat my own son,” said John, “but I wish to heaven I knew the right way to handle the little fellow, so that he would keep quiet at least.

Look at him, now, pulling at Fanny’s hair.

I don’t remember that I ever pulled Barbara’s.”

“No doubt you did, and you have forgotten,” said Fanny-Rosa, lifting her boy and giving him a lolly-pop. “Call Martha, and tell her to take Fanny upstairs; she is being silly, and upsetting Johnnie’.

“I should have said it was the other way round,” said John.

“Nonsense! Fanny always whines when her hail is pulled, and the whining excites Johnnie. It is most irritating for him. You shall walk with me to the village, my darling, and we will see what old Mrs. Evans has in her shop for you. And if you are a very good boy you shall have dinner with father and mother, and drink ale out of your New Year mug as a special treat.”

Why Johnnie should suddenly deserve a special treat, after throwing his toy in the fire and pulling his sister’s hair, his father was at a loss to understand, but at least the promise had the desired effect, the scowl vanished, a radiant smile came over the boy’s face, transforming him immediately from an ugly imp into a small object of great charm and attraction, and he trotted off hand in hand with his mother, a model of good behaviour.

John shook his head and shrugged his shoulders, and went off whistling to visit the greyhounds in their kennels. The upbringing of children was beyond him. No doubt women knew what they were about, although he had an uneasy feeling that Copper John would have leathered him as a youngster had he behaved to his sisters as young Johnnie behaved to poor Fanny, but to take down the little chap’s breeches and lay hands on him was something he could not bring himself to do. When there was noise and confusion in the house because of Johnnie, his father would go into the garden, or down to the river, and come back again when it was all over. Somehow, it seemed to him the easiest thing to do. And little by little this policy of avoiding trouble would creep into everything.