Then he made a deliberate attempt to banish the subject from his mind, ordering his thoughts to their favorite haunts underground. But one little insidious tract, so difficult to control in all brains still young and human, showed a disposition to create startling and vivid pictures, to dream intensely, to cast up this woman’s face, fling it into his consciousness, with an automatic regularity that was like a diabolical challenge to his haughty will.
He endeavoured to think of Ora with contempt: she had married a good fellow, but one whom she must have been compelled by the circumstances of her life to regard as her social inferior, and who assuredly was in no sense suited to her—merely from a parasitic dread of poverty. Other women went to work, even if delicately nurtured. But he was too masculine and too little influenced by certain phases of modern thought to condemn any woman long for turning to man in her extremity. Privately he detested women that “did things”; better for them all to give some man the right to protect them: marriage with a good fellow like Mark Blake, even without love, spoilt them far less than mixing up with the world in a scramble for bread. It would have spoilt Ora, who was now merely undeveloped; hardened, sharpened, coarsened her. He dismissed his abortive attempt to despise her; also a dangerous tendency to pity her.
Before he finished his tramp he had recaptured his poise. What a woman like Ora Blake might have to give him he dared not think of, nor would he be betrayed again into speculation. Doubtless it was all rubbish anyway, merely another trick of the insatiable mating instinct. If it were more—the primal instinct plus the almost equally insistent demands of the civilised inheritances in the brain—so much the worse, the more reason to “cut it out.” But when he returned to the cottage in East Granite Street he threw himself on the divan in the parlour and slept there.
XXII
THEREFORE was he in no mood to fight another temptation; rather to take a sardonic pleasure in succumbing. An hour later, in overalls, and assisted by two of his labourers, outwardly more excited than he, for they had worked underground and vowed they smelt ore, he was running an open cut along the line of the float. As there was no outcropping it was mere guesswork; it might be weeks before he struck any definite sign of an ore body, but he was prepared to level the hill if necessary. Until he did come upon indications that would justify the expense, however, he was resolved not to sink a shaft nor drive a tunnel.
They used pick and shovel until at the depth of eight feet they struck rock. Gregory had been prepared for this and sent the unwilling but interested Oakley into Pony for drills and powder. For two days more they drilled and blasted; then—Gregory took out his watch and noted the hour, twenty-three minutes after four—one of the men gave a shout and tossed a fragment into the air.
“Stringer, by jinks!” he cried. “And it’s copper carbonate or I’m a dead ’un.”
Gregory frowned, but laid the bit of ore gently on his palm and regarded it with awe. He wanted gold, but at least this was his, and the first of his treasure to be torn from its sanctuary. For a moment the merely personal longing was lost in the enthusiasm of the geologist, for the fragment in his hand was very beautiful, a soft rich shaded green flecked with red; the vugs, or little cells, looked as if lined with deep green velvet.
But he turned and stared at the mining camp beyond his boundary line. One of the bits of float he had found last year had been gold quartz. Had it travelled, a mere chip, from the original body to this distant point, or danced here on the shoulders of an earthquake? Float, even under a layer of soil was often found so far from the ore body, that it was a more fallible guide than a prospector’s guess. He walked to the end of the hill, while his miners shrugged their shoulders and resumed the drilling.
The great vein of the Primo mine was dipping acutely to the right. Might it not be wise for him to abandon his present position and sink a shaft close to the line, trusting to his practical knowledge and highly organized faculty to strike the vein?