Popular opinion certainly set down the mine as a disastrous enterprise, and the list of those who had been ruined by the speculation was a long one. Nothing daunted by all he had heard, and fully convinced in his own mind that his predecessors had earned their failures by their own mistakes, Fossbrooke had purchased the property many years before, and there it had remained, like many of his other acquisitions, uncared for and unthought of, till the sudden idea had struck him that he wanted to be rich, and to be rich instantaneously.
He had coffee-plantations somewhere in Ceylon, and he had purchased largely of land in Canada; but to utilize either of these would be a work of time, whereas the mine would yield its metal bright and ready for the market. It was so much actual available money at once.
His first care was to restore, so far as to make it habitable, a dreary old ruinous barrack of a house, which a former speculator had built to hold all his officials and dependants. A few rooms that opened on a tumble-down terrace—of which some marble urns yet remained to bear witness of former splendor—were all that Sir Brook could manage to make habitable, and even these would have seemed miserable and uncomfortable to any one less bent on “roughing it” than himself.
Some guns and fishing-gear covered one wall of the room that served as dinner-room; and a few rude shelves on the opposite side contained such specimens of ore as were yet discovered, and the three or four books which formed their library; the space over the chimney displaying a sort of trophy of pipes of every sort and shape, from the well-browned meerschaum to the ignoble “dudeen” of Irish origin.
These were the only attempts at decoration they had made, but it was astonishing with what pleasure the old man regarded them, and with what pride he showed the place to such as accidentally came to see him.
“I'll have a room yet, just arrayed in this fashion, Tom,” would he say, “when we have made our fortune, and go back to live in England. I 'll have a sort of snuggery a correct copy of this; all the old beams in the ceiling, and those great massive architraves round the doors, shall be exactly followed, and the massive stone mantelpiece; and it will remind us, as we sit there of a winter's night, of the jolly evenings we have had here after a hard day's work in the shaft. Won't I have the laugh at you, Tom, too, as I tell you of the wry face you used to make over our prospects, the hang-dog look you 'd give when the water was gaining on us, and our new pump got choked!”
Tom would smile at all this, though secretly nourishing no such thoughts for the future. Indeed, he had for many a day given up all hope of making his fortune as a miner, and merely worked on with the dogged determination not to desert his friend.
On one of the large white walls of their sitting-room Sir Brook had sketched in charcoal a picture of the mine, in all the dreariest aspect of its poverty, and two sad-looking men, Tom and himself, working at the windlass over the shaft; and at the other extremity of the space there stood a picturesque mansion, surrounded with great forest trees, under which deer were grouped, and two men—the same—were riding up the approach on mettlesome horses; the elder of the two, with outstretched arm and hand, evidently directing his companion's attention to the rich scenes through which they passed. These were the “now” and “then” of the old man's vision, and he believed in them, as only those believe who draw belief from their own hearts, unshaken by all without.
It was at the close of a summer day, just in that brief moment when the last flicker of light tinges the earth at first with crimson and then with deep blue, to give way a moment later to black night, that Sir Brook sat with Colonel Cave after dinner, explaining to his visitor the fresco on the wall, and giving, so far as he might, his reasons to believe it a truthful foreshadowing of the future.
“But you tell me,” said Cave, “that the speculation has proved the ruin of a score of fellows.”