For the squire had given his voice against all operations in mining matters. He was conscious that he was no longer equal to a contest with younger men in a new field of action, and his advice to his son, whose powers he had measured, had been “to let well alone,” and leave to those who had less to lose, the chance of being winners in the new game. It would have been well if his words had been heeded, Jacob owned to himself; and partly for his own sake and partly for the sake of his father, he said little about his losses. He was willing to have him and others believe that railroad matters were not prospering as he would have liked, which indeed was true. “The Hawkshead and Dunn Valley” railroad, which he had been chiefly instrumental in starting, and the stock of which he held largely, had promised well for a time, and would doubtless pay well in the end; but in the meantime, the big men of Fosbrooke, who had been allowed to say less than they wished to say as to the location of the road, were agitating the subject of another road to connect more directly with the Grand Trunk, and with other lines on the south side of the border, and “Hawkshead and Dunn Valley” stock had gone down.
So Jacob candidly acknowledged that “the banks were crowding a little,” whenever he found it necessary to ask for the use of a fellow-townsman’s name to his paper. He found it necessary a good many times these days, and he was not very often refused. For there were few of the old settlers whom he or his father had not obliged in the same way at one time or the other, as he took occasion to tell the sons of some of them now and then. And besides this, giving one’s name was a mere form, very convenient in the way of business, which in those days was supposed to be done more rapidly than had been the way in old times.
That any of the signers, “joint and several,” ever imagined that they might, in the course of untoward events, be called upon to make good the promise to pay that stood over their names, is not likely. Nor did Jacob himself ever contemplate so painful a possibility. Serious as he saw his difficulties to be, he saw a way out of them—or he would have done so, he said to himself bitterly, if the will of an unreasonable old man had not stood in his way.
In the establishment and success of the new Company, so long the subject of discussion in the town, lay his best chance of freeing himself from his present embarrassment. If he might have had his way as to the site, so that the building might have been commenced, there would have been no trouble about the Company. A few good names with his own, and a moderate amount of capital, with the dam and the buildings commenced, there would have been no trouble about the rest. He felt that he would then have been master of the situation. Every cottage needed for the Mill hands and their families must be built on his land; and the chances were that by judicious management as to building, every one of them might become his tenant; and he had already in view certain arrangements by which most of the materials for building, and many of the supplies for the work-people, should be made to pass through his hands. By these means, and by the combination of other favourable circumstances, which he foresaw, he did not doubt that he could not only escape from present embarrassments, but recover much of what he had been obliged to sacrifice.
It is possible that he was quite mistaken in all this, but he believed it all, and no wonder that his indignation grew and strengthened as he thought of Mr Fleming.
Chapter Sixteen.
Jacob’s Experience.
Jacob spoke wonderfully little of all this, considering how much it was in his mind. He sometimes spoke to his wife, but even to her he said nothing of the losses that had fallen upon him, or of the fears that were weighing him down; but he did allow the bitterness which was gathering in his heart toward old Mr Fleming to overflow, once in a while, in her hearing. He knew it was not a wise thing to do, for she could only listen and add a word or two, which did no good, but harm. She dropped bitter words to other people too, nay, poured them forth to Elizabeth, and to Clifton when he came home, and to Miss Betsey, even, when a rare opportunity occurred.