Hungry Hill by Daphne du Maurier

one the members of the party, wet and haggard, and drooping from fatigue, made their excuses, and so, in the falling rain, in the heavy, intense darkness that comes before the day, Copper John mounted his horse and rode through the silent streets of Doonhaven back to Clonmere, followed by his sons. Jane and Martha and the other servants, tense and anxious, were awaiting them in the hall, and at the sight of them safely returned old Martha burst into tears, shaking her head and reproving her master, clicking her tongue in distress at John’s swollen face.
    “That will do, Martha, that will do,” said Copper John, dismissing the servants with a wave of his hand.
    “None of us has come to harm and we have no bones broken. Master John will survive his cut, I have little doubt. What we need now is food and drink, and a warm by the fire, and very shortly to bed for what remains of the night, for we all of us have work to do in the morning.”
    They stood in the library, the four of them-the father with a glass in one hand and the other behind his back, his stern features relaxed for the moment while he smiled at his daughter, who tried to smile back at him, but was still so pale, so anxious, that the smile was a ghostly thing, a shadow of no substance; John leaning against the fireplace, his head resting in his hands, his face swollen and discoloured; while Henry, soaked to the skin, his clothes clinging to his slim body, his teeth chattering, lifted his glass and clinked it against his father’s.
    “Anyway,” he said, “whatever happens, we have beaten them, haven’t we, father?”
    “Yes,” said Copper John, “we have beaten them, Henry.”
    They drank together, watching one another over the rim of their glasses, and smiling.
    The mine, thought Jane, has not been destroyed, the mine will continue to be worked on Hungry Hill, and Morty Donovan has lost. Her father and her brothers were safe. John had a swollen face, but that was all. It was a picture she remembered always, the father and son pledging one another across the table, and she remembered too how John, looking up from the fire at the shivering, white-faced Henry, said suddenly, in anger: “For God’s sake go and change, Henry; you’ll catch your death from this night’s work.”
    She remembered how the rain pattered against the windows, and the wind sighed softly, and how, although they were safe, she was still afraid.
    They slept deeply that night, the young Brodricks, and only once did their father, Copper John, stir in his sleep and frown and mutter as though at some passing dream. The wind moaned a little, and was silent. The rain whispered, and pattered, and ceased. And away on the heather, five miles distant, a small donkey stood shivering beside an overturned cart, with Morty Donovan lying beneath it, his neck broken, clutching in his dead hands the stones and moss of Hungry Hill.
    On the first of every month, no matter where he should be, or engaged on what business, John Brodrick of Clonmere would write to his partner, Robert Lumley of Duncroom, and tender him a report on the condition of their mine on Hungry Hill, Doonhaven. It was one of those strict rules that he had laid down for himself at the beginning of the partnership, and although he had no great friendship for Robert Lumley, and saw him perhaps but twice in a whole year, yet month by month the letters would go forth, from Clonmere, from London, from Bath, from Lletharrog, from Bronsea, each letter written in his careful, pointed handwriting, signed with the Brodrick seal, a mailed fist holding a dagger, and the paper folded and crossed in the manner of the day.
    “It is a pleasure for me to acquaint you, my dear Mr. Lumley,” he would say, “that your royalty for the current year has exceeded that of last, and I have this day, the fourteenth of February, paid into your account in your bank at Slane the sum of Two Thousand pounds.”
    It was typical of John Brodrick that this