"I'm not a Radical, or a revolutionist," said Hal. "I don't care a twopenny damn about politics. But I feel ashamed, that's all."
"Oh, come," said the manager, getting up and reaching for his coat, "that's all false sentiment. You keep the books in order, and forget the moral side of it. Besides, the day will come when you will be the owner yourself.
You can give all your profits away then, if you feel like it."
"Yes," said Hal, "but that's just the point. I shan't want to. I'll be thinking of sitting back and taking my ease, the same as my father."
He would drive home in the evening, turning his back on the sight and sound of the mines. The tall chimneys, black against the hill, would point their fingers to the sky, and a glare of fire would come from the open doors of the boiler-houses. He would hear the winding rattle of the drums in the shafts, and the ceaseless throb of the engine pumps. There would be the inevitable pungent smell in the air coming from the dressing-sheds where the ore was cleansed. And once away, along the road, with the chimneys out of sight, and the smoke from the furnaces blown eastward, and the tramping miners gone below on night-shift, there would be no other sound but the steady clop-clop of Tom Callaghan's mare taking Hal back to Doonhaven, and on his left the smooth, untroubled waters of Mundy Bay. Hungry Hill would rise above him, white and silent under the moon, and away yonder the pin-prick lights of Doonhaven danced and flickered.
Yes, thought Hal, and for all my brave talk to Griffiths about the hard work and low pay of the miners, all I want really is to be living in comfort in Clonmere, because of them, with Jinny dressed for dinner as my mother used to do, and a butler waiting on her instead of that half-witted girl. I want to enjoy the mines, as my forebears did, and forget the cost.
I don't want to go back to my poky little house in the village street and know that Jinny has cooked my supper for me and is feeling tired and worn.
He would leave the trap with Patsy at the Rectory, and walk through the village to his house.
A smell of cooking would greet his nostrils as he entered, a thing he detested and which it was impossible to smother in so small a house, for all the care that Jinny took.
She came, dear girl, running to meet him, with her bright eyes full of love, and her hair a little untidy, her face flushed from bending over the stove.
"Your favourite supper," she said, beaming, "herrings and cauliflower cheese. I've been given a new recipe from mother's precious book. Oh, and the chimney's been smoking in the sitting-room; we'll have to have it swept. Kitty and Simon called from Andriff; they left us a lovely melon and some grapes. So good of them. And Simon wants to buy one of your pictures, the little sketch of Doon Island from the creek."
"He doesn't really," said Hal. "He just does it out of charity."
"No, dear, he does not. You must not be so proud. He thinks you have great talent. Kitty told me so."
"He's the only one that does, then."
"No, Hal, that's naughty. Your wife is proud of your work."
"It's more than I am. I'm a rotten painter, and a rotten husband."
"Don't be so grumpy, love. Come and sit down and rest in your chair, even if the fire is smoking, and I'll bring you your supper on a tray."
Hal flung himself down and stretched out his arms to her.
"Why should you wait on me?" he said, drawing her on to his knee. "It's I who should look after you.
I'd like to see you with your hair smoothed back, Jinny girl, and a low-cut frock, instead of that old apron and your little hands all sticky with cooking."
"I'll smooth my hair for you, and I'll wear my wedding-dress, and I'll wash my hands in milk, if you will promise to be a good boy."
"I am a good boy."
"You know what I mean by a good boy."
"You mean I'm not to help myself to the whisky bottle in the cupboard? Don't worry, sweetheart; it's empty."
"Oh, Hal, and I asked you to keep some, in case of chills and colds."
"The winter's over, there won't be any chills and colds. I'm a brute and a swine, and I don't deserve you, Jinny girl. Why should you love me?"
"I don't know, Hal, but there it is."
She smiled, and he did not move, but stretched out his legs to the smoky fire, thinking of the great hall at Clonmere and the fire-place there, where no fire had ever been lit. Presently she came back with their supper on a tray, the herrings a little over-cooked, bless her, but he swore they were excellent, and she sat down at his feet afterwards and took her mending, while he stared into the fire and played with her hair.
"It's embroidery you should be doing," he told her, "not my old bocks."
"And if I let your socks go undarned," she asked, "who would do them?"
"You ought to have a lady's maid," he said, "and half-a-dozen servants to look after you. And me, dressed in a dinner-jacket, be coming into my drawing-room with a flower in my buttonhole, having dined on a saddle of venison and drunk old brandy."
"That means you didn't care for the herrings," she said in distress.
"It means nothing of the sort," he said, kissing the top of her head. "It means that I let my imagination run away with me when I look at that funny little top-knot of yours, pinned out of the way of your cooking. You have a neck that I can encircle with one hand. I wonder Patsy has never run amok and felled it with his axe when killing your mother's chickens."
"Ah, get along with you. Would you take your great hand away? I can't see the hole in your sock."
"Let it alone, darling."
"And you go barefoot?"
"I would have you sit beside me in the chair and watch the pictures in the fire."
She laid the mending aside, and curled up beside him in the old leather chair that had come from the Rectory, and they said little to one another, but listened to the clock in the corner, left by Doctor Armstrong, and heard the soft rain patter against the window, and saw the smoky turf sink lower on the hearth.
Up at the Rectory Tom Callaghan was writing to Herbert Brodrick at Lletharrog.
Dearest old Herby, You can't think what a real pleasure it was to get a letter once more from one of the family. It is years since I saw you, but I have photographs of you and the brothers as mementos of the past. It was so good to read your kind words about our dear Jinny, and that she has been a blessing to poor Hal. I never now say a word about either of them to Henry when I write, as no matter what I say he always speaks about the hopelessness of Hal's case. ' I am glad to say Hal is, I think, one of the most charming fellows I ever met-in fact his daddy over again, only with the one drawback, and he is getting over that too… There are no babies as yet, but I tell Jinny they will come along by-and-by. They are certainly one of the happiest couples it has ever been my good fortune to see'.
Hal was not a great newspaper reader. He took little interest in the affairs of the day. On winter evenings when he came back from the mines all he wanted to do was to sit with Jinny in front of the fire, and listen to her prattle, or laugh with her over the happenings in the counting-house. Therefore when he went one day to Slane, in the early spring of '94, to make purchases for Jinny and the household, and stood before the bar in one of the public-houses and turned over the pages of the Slane and County Advertiser, it was news to him, and something of a shock, to read a long column in the middle page about the large tin deposits in Malay, and the companies that had been formed to work them; and how, in the opinion of the writer, the discoveries would kill the home markets.
Life was so much a matter of routine these days-the day up at the mines, the keeping of the books, the going home to Jinny and the baby-that the rise and fall of prices had conveyed nothing to him, and when old Griffiths shook his head and spoke gloomily about the future Hal had put it down to the man's natural pessimism, that could see small hope in mining prospects, for either tin or copper. When Hal had read the article, he turned to the financial page to see the current price of tin. It was able84 a ton. It had been able100 six months ago. Yes, old Griffiths had reason to be gloomy. Hal, content and preoccupied with his own home life, had neglected to watch the fluctuations of the trade that gave him his livelihood. He wondered what his father thought about it. That evening, when he returned home, and found his father-in-law, the Rector, seated in the living-room nursing the solemn John-Henry, he asked him if he had read the article in the Slane Advertiser.