Walter Besant - The Golden Butterfly

"And while you were eating the pork," said Ladds, "the Golden Butterfly flew down the shaft by himself, and struck oil of his own accord."

"No, sir; for once you are wrong. That most beautiful creation of Nature in her sweetest mood – she must have got up with the sun on a fine summer morning – was reposing in his box round my neck as usual. He did not go down the shaft at all. Nobody went down. But something came up – up like a fountain, up like the bubbling over of the airth's eternal teapot; a black muddy jet of stuff. Great sun! I think I see it now."

He paused and sighed.

"It was nearly all Ile, pure and unadulterated, from the world's workshop. Would you believe it, gentlemen? There were not enough bar'ls, not by hundreds, in the neighbourhood all round Limerick City, to catch that Ile. It flowed in a stream three feet down the creek; it was carried away into the lake and lost; it ran free and uninterrupted for three days and three nights. We saved what we could. The neighbours brought their pails, their buckets, their basins, their kettles; there was not a utensil of any kind that was not filled with Ile, from the pig's trough to the child's pap-bowl. Not one. It ran and it ran. When the first flow subsided we calculated that seven million bar'ls had been wasted and lost. Seven millions! I am a Christian man, and grateful to the Butterfly, but I sometimes repine when I think of that wasted Ile. Every bar'l worth nine dollars at least, and most likely ten. Sixty-three millions of dollars. Twelve millions of pounds sterling lost in three days for want of a few coopers. Did you ever think, Mr. Dunquerque, what you could do with twelve millions sterling?"

"I never did," said Jack. "My imagination never got beyond thousands."

"With twelve millions I might have bought up the daily press of England, and made you all republicans in a month. I might have made the Panama Canal; I might have bought Palesteen and sent the Jews back; I might have given America fifty ironclads; I might have put Don Carlos on the throne of Spain. But it warn't to be. Providence wants no rivals, meddling and messing. That was why the Ile ran away and was lost while I ate the cold boiled pork. Perhaps it's an interestin' fact that I never liked cold boiled pork before, and I have hated it ever since.

"The great spurt subsided, and we went to work in earnest. That well has continued to yield five hundred bar'ls daily. That is four thousand five hundred dollars in my pocket every four and twenty hours."

"Do you mean that your income is nine hundred pounds a day?" asked Jack.

"I do, sir. You go your pile on that. It is more, but I do not know how much more. Perhaps it's twice as much. There are wells of mine sunk all over the place; the swamp is covered with Gilead P. Beck's derricks. The township of Limerick has become the city of Rockoleaville – my name, that was – and a virtuous and industrious population are all engaged morning, noon, and night in fillin' my pails. There's twenty-five bars, I believe, at this moment. There are three meetin'-houses and two daily papers, and there air fifteen lawyers."

"It seems better than Cocoa Nibs," said Ladds.

"But the oil may run dry."

"It has run dry in Pennsylvania. That is so, and I do not deny it. But Ile will not run dry in Rockoleaville. I have been thinking over the geological problem, and I have solved it, all by myself."

"What is this world, gentlemen?"

"A round ball," said Jack, with the promptitude of a Board schoolboy and the profundity of a Woolwich cadet.

"Sir, it is like a great orange. It has its outer rind, what they call the crust. Get through that crust and what do you find?"

"More crust," replied Ladds, who was not a competition-wallah.

"Did you ever eat pumpkin-pie, sir?" Mr. Beck replied, more Socratico , by asking another question. "And if you did, was your pie all crust? Inside that pie, sir, was pumpkin, apple, and juice. So inside the rind of the earth there may be all sorts of things: gold and iron, lava, diamonds, coals; but the juice, the pie-juice, is Ile. You tap the rind and you get the Ile. This Ile will run, I calculate, for five thousand and fifty-two years, if they don't sinfully waste it, at an annual consumption of eighteen million bar'ls. Now that's a low estimate when you consider the progress of civilisation. When it is all gone, perhaps before, this poor old airth will crack up like an empty egg."

This was an entirely new view of geology, and it required time for Mr. Beck's hearers to grasp the truth thus presented to their minds. They were silent.

"At Rockoleaville," he went on, "I've got the pipe straight into the middle of the pie, and right through the crust. There's no mistake about that main shaft. Other mines may give out, but my Ile will run for ever."

"Then we may congratulate you," said Jack, "on the possession of a boundless fortune."

"You may, sir."

"And what do you intend to do?"

"For the present I shall stay in London. I like your great city. Here I get invited to dinner and dancin', because I am an American and rich. There they won't have a man who is not thoroughbred. Your friend Mrs. Cassilis asks me to her house – a first-rater. A New York lady turns up her pretty nose at a man who's struck Ile. 'Shoddy,' she says, and then she takes no more notice. Shoddy it may be. Rough my manners may be. But I don't pretend to anything, and the stamps air real."

"We always thought ourselves exclusive," said Jack.

"Did you, sir? Wall – " He stopped, as if he had intended to say something unpleasantly true. "I shall live in London for the present. I've got a big income, and I don't rightly know what to do with it. But I shall find out some time.

"That was a lovely young thing with Mrs. Cassilis the other night," he went on meditatively. "A young thing that a man can worship for her beauty while she is young, and her goodness all her life. Not like an American gal. Ours are prettier, but they look as if they would blow away. And their voices are not so full. Miss Fleming is flesh and blood. Don't blush, Mr. Dunquerque, because it does you credit."

Jack did blush, and they took their departure.

"Mr. Dunquerque," whispered Gilead P. Beck when Ladds was through the door, "think of what I told you; what is mine is yours. Remember that. If I can do anything for you, let me know. And come to see me. It does me good to look at your face. Come here as often as you can."

Jack laughed and escaped.

Jack Dunquerque was no more remarkable for shrinking modesty than any other British youth of his era; but he felt some little qualms as he walked towards Bloomsbury the day after Mrs. Cassilis's dinner to avail himself of Phillis's invitation.

Was it coquetry, or was it simplicity?

She said she would be glad to see him at luncheon. Who else would be there?

Probably a Mrs. Jagenal – doubtless the wife of the heavy man who brought Miss Fleming to the party; herself a solid person in black silk and a big gold chain; motherly with the illiterate Dryad.

"Houses mighty respectable," he thought, penetrating into Carnarvon Square. "Large incomes; comfortable quarters; admirable port, most likely, in most of them; claret certainly good, too – none of your Gladstone tap; sherry probably rather coarse. Must ask for Mrs. Jagenal, I suppose."

He did ask for Mrs. Jagenal, and was informed by Jane that there was no such person, and that, as she presently explained with warmth, no such person was desired by the household. Jack Dunquerque thereupon asked for Mr. Jagenal. The maid asked which Mr. Jagenal. Jack replied in the most irritating manner possible – the Socratic – by asking another question. The fact that Socrates went about perpetually asking questions is quite enough to account for the joy with which an exasperated mob witnessed his judicial murder. The Athenians bore for a good many years with his maddening questions – as to whether this way or that way or how – and finally lost patience. Hence the little bowl of drink.