“If it’s anything exciting, I’m your man,” said Lucian, completing his costume with a pair of carpet slippers and a white pith helmet, in which he looked as swarthy as a Hindoo. “Anyway, this is the last time. Come on, and I’ll post my letter to her on the way.”
He looked at Farquhar, gleefully anticipating a flash of jealousy, and he had his wish. He laughed, tossed up the letter and caught it, and smote Farquhar on the shoulder as they went down-stairs. “Only a fortnight more, sonny, and then we shall know!”
But Farquhar did not find an answer. Prudence and friendship combined to keep his wild-beast jealousy in order, but he never even tried to cast it out.
In the porch they found Charlesworth waiting impassive, drawn back into the shade. Summer had come suddenly upon them with a burning heat; the roads were padded with dust, herbs drooped as if they were broken, brick walls fumed like the outposts of Hades. Creeping up from the south, certain blue, hazy clouds, their scrolled rims tinged with amber and saffron, were surely invading the sky. In the quarry not a man was left; the intense heat, radiated and reflected from the granite walls, made the place a purgatory. Mica crystals scintillated in the grey dust. The noonday sun was shining straight down into the pit; the shrunken river, like a strip of blue satin, crept without coolness below along the cliffs; only under the great rock, which stood out now like a wen on the face of the hill, was any shadow to be found. Towards that shade Lucian promptly made his way, and there sat down on a wheelbarrow.
All the preliminaries were over, and the rock was ready to be blasted. On three sides it stood free, and across the fourth, at the back of the block, ranged the drilled holes following the line of fracture between the fine stone and the coarser. With what care Charlesworth had assigned and executed the boring and the tamping Lucian knew; yet the quarry-master was now prepared to examine it all again, patiently testing what could be tested, rigorously fulfilling his duty according to the laws of a pride which forbade imperfections. Farquhar helped him; Lucian, who was really a superfluous person, sat on his barrow and gibed at both.
A steam-whistle called the men back to work at one o’clock. Hidden behind the rock, Lucian had a good view of them as they trooped in, and he was surprised by their behaviour. The Belgians are by nature friendly and polite; as many as knew Lucian (and nine-tenths of them did) had always for him a smile, a wave of the hat, a word of kind greeting; but Charlesworth was severely ignored. One youth went to the length of a long nose behind the manager’s back. An English lad of his own age forthwith fell upon him, and after a brief and silent struggle proceeded to wipe the ground with his prostrate enemy until he craved for mercy; but the boy had merely expressed the feelings of his elders. Another point which perplexed Lucian was the silence of the men; a few were whispering together and glancing between their words at Charlesworth, but the usual lively chatter was not to be heard.
“Not much of the peace-on-earth business here, is there?” Charlesworth remarked to the philosopher on the wheelbarrow. “I don’t go around in these lanes after sundown without my revolver.”
“Think they’d go as far as that?”
“Don’t know; they hate me like poison, anyway. I can put up with that now we’ve got this business through; I guess we’ll pretty soon see who’s master here.”
Lucian nodded. He was not so sure as Charlesworth that force is the best preventive of rebellion; in fact, he held the heretical idea that he could have managed the men better himself.