"If you want my personal opinion," answered the vicar dryly, "I should say that Jeckie Farnish is capable of any amount of sharp practice. Coal! Dear me! Now I wonder if that's really what she's after, and if there is coal? Because, of course, if there's coal under her land there'll be coal under my glebe, and in that case—really, one's almost afraid to think of such a possibility. Coal! I wonder when we shall get to know?"
The whole village knew within another week; indeed, from the time of Scholes's indignant outburst at the shop, it was hopeless to conceal the operations at the waste land. Throngs of villagers were at the hedgerow sides from morning till night, eager for news; there, too, might be seen the squire and the vicar, and Stubley and Merritt, as inquisitive as the rest. The men engaged in boring forgathered of evenings at the "Coach-and-Four," and, despite Mortimer's warnings and admonitions, talked, more or less freely, over their beer. And one day at noon the rumour ran from one end to the other of the village street that coal had been found, and that there would be a rich and productive yield; before night the rumour had become a certainty—the squire himself had it from Mortimer and his fellow-expert that beneath Jeckie Farnish's forty acres there was what would probably turn out to be one of the best beds of coal in the country, and that it doubtless extended beneath the land of the other property owners.
The one person who showed no excitement, who refused to allow herself to be bustled or flurried, was Jeckie herself. Within twenty-four hours she was visited by the squire, the vicar, and Stubley—each wanted to know what she was going to do, each had a proposal for coming in. The squire wanted to start a limited liability company for founding a colliery to work the district, with himself as the chairman; the vicar was anxious about royalties on the coal which no doubt lay beneath his glebe lands; Stubley came to warn Jeckie to make sure. Jeckie listened to each and said nothing; it was impossible to get a word out of her that gave any indication of what she had in her mind. The only persons with whom she held conversation at that time were Mortimer and his friend Farebrother; with them she was closeted in secret every evening; Farnish, told off to act as watch-dog, had strict orders that no other callers were to be admitted. The result of the conference was that within a fortnight Jeckie had acquired a vast mass of useful information, which she carefully memorised. And, as Mortimer remarked, at the end of one of these talks, there was now nothing to do but to arrange the financial matters for beginning work. Money—capital—that was all that was needed now. To that remark Jeckie made no answer—she already had her own ideas about the matter, and she was resolved to keep them carefully to herself.
CHAPTER IV
Birds of a Feather
Close countenance though Jeckie Farnish kept to all the world, her thoughts had never been so many nor so varied as at this eventful stage of her career. She spent many a sleepless night considering possibilities, probabilities, eventualities. She thought over ways and means; she reckoned up her resources. She tried to look ahead as far as possible; to take everything into account. But, in all her reflections and plans and schemings, there was one dominant note—the desire to make money out of her lucky discovery—money, more money than she had ever dreamed of possessing. She was in no hurry. She made Mortimer and Farebrother continue their boring operations until she became as certain as they were themselves. They had made these boreholes, so as to test the whole of Jeckie's property, and had kept a careful journal of the boring, which was punctiliously entered up—Jeckie made a point of inspecting that journal, and of examining the cores which the boring cylinders brought up and were duly labelled and laid out under cover. But she was not satisfied with this, nor with merely taking the opinions of Mortimer and his friend. At her own instance and expense she called in two acknowledged mining experts and a professor of geology from one of the local universities; to these three she submitted the whole matter, only impressing upon them that she wanted an opinion that could be relied upon. All three agreed with Mortimer and Farebrother—coal was there, under the otherwise unpromising surface of the forty acres, in vast quantity. So, as Mortimer was constantly saying, there was nothing to do but to arrange the financial side of the affair, and to get to work on the construction of the necessary mine.
Jeckie was not going to be hurried about that, either; she had her own ideas. In spite of Mortimer's exhortations and Farebrother's hints, she kept them to herself until she was ready to act. But upon one point she was determined, and had been determined from the very first. Neither squire, nor parson, nor Stubley, nor Merritt, nor any Savilestowe party was going to come in with her—no, nor was Mortimer, of whom, all unknown to him, she was making a convenience. She was going to keep this El Dorado to herself as far as ever she could—to be chief controller of its destinies, to be master. Nevertheless, knowing, after her various consultations with Mortimer and Farebrother, that she did not possess sufficient capital of her own to establish a colliery, she had decided to take in one partner who could contribute what she could not find. She had that partner in her mind's eye—Lucilla Grice.
Lucilla, as Jeckie well knew, had long been top dog in the Grice menage. Albert, from the day of his marriage, had become more and more of a nonentity; as years went by he grew to be of no greater importance than one of his wife's umbrellas; a thing that had its uses now and then, but could at any moment be tossed into a corner and disregarded for the time being. Lucilla managed everything. Lucilla invested the money which he got for his partnership and received the dividends; Lucilla kept the purse; Albert had no more concern with cash than the cob in his stable; all he knew of money was that he was allowed three-and-six a day to spend as he liked. Jeckie Farnish knew all this, and more. She knew that Lucilla's marriage portion of two thousand pounds, and Albert's partnership money of five thousand, both secure and untouched in Lucilla's hands, had been added to of late by legacies from Lucilla's father, the Nottingham draper, and her maternal uncle, a London solicitor, which had materially increased Mrs. Albert Grice's fortune. The Nottingham draper had left his daughter ten thousand pounds—one-third of his estate; the maternal uncle, an old bachelor, regarding her as his favourite niece, had bequeathed to her all he died possessed of, some fourteen or fifteen thousand; Lucilla, therefore (Albert being ruled clean out of all calculations), was worth at the very least thirty thousand pounds. And there were psychological reasons why Jeckie fixed on Lucilla as the proper person to come in with her. From the very first she had recognised in Lucilla, a kindred spirit—a lover of money for money's sake. Jeckie had known it at their first interview; she had seen signs of it in their business dealings; she had been quick to observe that when Lucilla received her important influx of money from her father and uncle, whose deaths had occurred about the same time, she had not launched out into greater expenditure. She and Albert still occupied the same villa residence, just outside Sicaster; still kept the same modest establishment; still stuck to the one cob and the same dog-cart; still pursued the same uneventful course of life. And as she spent no more than she had ever spent, Lucilla, according to Jeckie Farnish's reckoning, must, since her receipt of the family legacies, have added considerably to her capital. But—and here was another and more important psychological reason—Jeckie knew, by instinct as much as by observation, that Lucilla, like herself, was one of those persons who, having much, are always feverishly anxious to have still more. There were few details of the life of that neighbourhood with which Jeckie was not thoroughly familiar, and she knew intimately the habits and customs of the Grice household. She was well aware, for instance, that Albert, who had now grown a beard and become a somewhat fat man, more easygoing than ever, went into Sicaster every morning to spend his three-and-six and pass the time of day with his gossips in the bar-parlours of the two principal hotels; he left his door punctually at ten o'clock for this daily performance and returned—even more punctually—at precisely one o'clock. It was, therefore, at half-past ten one morning that Jeckie, armed with an old-fashioned reticule full of papers, presented herself at the villa and asked to see its mistress; Lucilla, she knew, would then be alone.
Lucilla had a certain feeling for Jeckie; a feeling closely akin to that which Jeckie had for Lucilla; it centered, of course, in money. Lucilla knew how Jeckie had made money, and how Jeckie could stick to money, and for money and anything and anybody that had to do with money Lucilla had instincts of respect which almost amounted to veneration. Accordingly, she not only welcomed her visitor with cordiality, but showed her pleasure at receiving her by immediately producing a decanter of port and a sponge cake, and insisting on Jeckie's partaking of both.