About this time he received two letters which gave him much to think about, but which he put at the back of his mind. I will give the shortest first:--
_To Captain Brentham, F.R.G.S., H.B.M. Consul for Zangia._
School of Mines, Jermyn Street, S.W. _October_ 5, 1889.
DEAR SIR,--
You will remember calling here in last July, just before I took my holiday.
You left with me for examination a series of rock specimens and some sediment of lake water from East Africa.
Of the rock specimens, at least six give indications of great interest. Those two labelled "Iraku I" and "Iraku II" are so rich in gold that their importance must have been apparent to yourself--unless you mistook the gold for iron pyrites, an inverse of the customary deception, which is generally the other way about. The specimen labelled "Marasha" is simply coal--rather shaley coal, probably a surface fragment. There are two specimens, unfortunately with their labels missing or indecipherable, which are a hard bluish green serpentine rock, obviously related to the "blue ground" of South Africa and probably diamondiferous. A fifth specimen yields evidence of wolframite, and in three other samples there is much mica. The lake sediment is being further examined by a colleague of mine. He believes it to be an indication of the formation of phosphates in the lake bed or shores which should be of great importance to agriculture as a constituent of chemical manure. These phosphates might be derived from birds' dung in great quantities, from guano in fact.
I assume you have duly registered the exact geographical localities of these specimens? Otherwise, they are very tantalizing, for they evidently indicate--if they come from one region and not from a wide area of travel--one of the wealthiest of African territories.
Pursuant to your wish, however, I shall treat the matter as confidential. But if you can at any time supply me with the exact geographical information I require I shall be pleased to write a report on the collection for the Petrographical Society or for the confidential information of the Government: whichever you prefer.
Yours faithfully, DANIEL RUTTER.
Unguja, _August_ 26, 1889.
DEAR CAPTAIN BRENTHAM,--
Mrs. Stott and I, we thank you very heartily for your kind remembrances of us. The generous present of tea you sent us as soon as you got back to England reached our good friend Callaway a little while ago and I found it here waiting for us when I arrived from the interior.
Captain Wissmann has had a wonderful series of victories over the Arabs and Wangwana, which in the good providence of God have cleared the way between Ugogo and the coast. I heard something of this in the Happy Valley last April; so, as we were running terribly short of supplies and as we felt "seed time was come" and that the Lord desired us to reopen our Burungi Station, and establish his tabernacle strongly in this glorious place--Manyara--"ripe unto harvest"--I felt my way cautiously up the Valley and through the Irangi country to Burungi. The place was not any worse treated than when you left it--you made a great impression on the Wagogo--so, as their elders begged me to rebuild the station I left some of our trained workers to do so. Besides that, Captain Wissmann, whom we met near-by, has lent us two German sergeants--biddable men and clever with their hands. They'd been sick, and wounded in the legs and he said it would do them good to have a spell of quiet sedentary life. He also put under their orders a guard of five Sudanese soldiers to guard the station whilst it is being rebuilt. So here I am at the coast, chopping yarns with Mr. Callaway, and laying in great supplies which I have been able to buy out of the price of that ivory you shot for us.
Captain Brentham, you don't know what a mine of wealth the Happy Valley is, and the cliffs and mountains on the western side (Iraku and Ilamba). I am an Australian, and before I found Christ I had a course of instruction as a mining engineer. The rocks in and about the Happy Valley tell me at first sight more than they would an ordinary Englishman. I suppose some one will have to find out this, sooner or later. I'd much sooner it were _you_. You may yet get it taken over by Great Britain. At any rate, if you came out here and prospected you would see what I mean. What did you do with the specimens you took away with you for analysis? Did you lose them on your way to the coast? Maybe if the Happy Valley is to come under the Germans they would give you a concession. This Captain Wissmann seems to like you, and he said it was far from his Government's intention to drive away English missionaries or English capital. He likes the English very much and speaks English very well.
I only write this because they say here you are not coming back as Consul. I am sorry. Why not then come out on your own? I've opened your letter to Mrs. Stott, which came with the tea, and _right glad_ I was to hear--and so will she be--that you'd married poor Lucy Baines. _Right glad_. Bring her out here with you, and Mrs. Stott shall look after her whilst you go round prospecting and staking out your claims. We may not see eye to eye over the Lord's work. The Lord hasn't revealed himself to you yet as He has to us. He will in His own good time. But you've got the root of the matter in you. I never yet met an unbeliever who was so reverent and so tender of other people's beliefs.... You're a good man, if you'll forgive my saying so. You wouldn't ever interfere with our work here, I know. It's getting on _grand_. We baptized the Chief of the Wambugwe and fifty of his men in the Lake at Manyara just before you left, and please God, we've saved the whole valley from Islam.
Mrs. Stott had always a first-class opinion of you, though you weren't of our way of thinking in religion. She is sure you'll always stand up for the natives and protect their rights. I hope I haven't been taking a liberty, writing this letter. If you don't like to come out yourself, any one you sent we should trust to do the right thing and would show him round. Otherwise, we have been careful to say _nothing_ about the Happy Valley, and so far no Arabs and no Germans have troubled us.
May God's blessing rest on you and on your sorely tried wife. I feel sure there are happier days in store for her.
Your sincere friend--if you'll allow me to say so.
JAMES EWART STOTT.
In regard to the School of Mines Report, Roger for acquitment of conscience and because he always liked to do the right thing, sent a resume of Professor Rutter's analysis to the F.O., stating that the specimens referred to had been picked up by him on his recent tour through the interior of German East Africa.
In reply, the Under Secretary of State Was directed to thank Captain Brentham for this valuable information.
In reality it was decided to pigeon-hole the report, certainly to give it no publicity. Let the Germans find out for themselves the value of their territories. If they discovered they had bitten off more than they could chew, why ... then....
In January, 1890, Lucy was delivered of a son. Roger was hugely delighted. When he asked Lucy a week after the birth if she had any preference for a name--_her_ father's, _his_ father's, his own--she said in a faint voice but with some finality in the accent: "Let him be called 'John'!" Then, as he did not reply, she added, "John loved me and I wasn't worthy of his love...."
"Well, and don't _I_ love you?" answered Roger with a tinge of compunction.
"She's a bit wandery in her mind, sir," said the nurse. "Don't pay any attention to what she's a saying. She's mistook your name. Several times since the baby was born she's seemed to be talking with a John, but it was you she was a thinkin' about, _I'll_ be bound. She wants keeping very quiet...."
Once Captain Brentham took up the affairs of the Silchester estates--which he did definitely in October, 1889, he went very thoroughly into their condition and their possibilities of development. He was not, of course, a trained, professional land agent, which was why his shrewd and original ideas of enhancing the value and productivity of land made the Institute of Land Agents so angry. But he knew something of surveying, and had been accustomed to value countries by the eye, to judge of soils, espy defects in farming, by his boyish life at Farleigh and his experiences in India and Africa.
Lord Silchester in his fondness for landscape beauty had preferred a lovely, unkempt, autumn-wistful wilderness to a possible brick-field, though to a geologist the clay was almost crying out to be turned to the service of man. He liked great spaces without a sign of man's habitation to mar the poem. Roger, though he had a strongly developed sense of the beautiful in Nature, yet combined with it a realization that much waste land in the England of latter days, and even in Scotland, is an offence and a temptation to discontent on the part of the landless. Another charm can be contributed to landscapes by the handiwork of man, provided the cottage is tastefully and soundly built, the manufactory--even the brick-kilns and chimneys--are of the right material for the neighbourhood, of harmonious colour and appropriate design.