Chapter 48 The Committee

The committee of the House of Commons sat in the second week of July, in the same high room in which the committee on the railway bill had sat the year before, and Arthur went down to London with Hollis, and Eleanor went with him, and they sat through the first three days of evidence with the patience of people who know that the game is played not in the speeches but in the details. The company's counsel was a man named Prendergast, of the kind that the railway promoters hired — large, loud, and furnished with every statistic that could be made to serve him. He opened for the Grand Western with the case that the bill was a public benefit, and he called his witnesses in the order that such witnesses are always called: the engineer, who described the proposed line with the aid of charts so fair that the committee could not help but see the smoke of the engines already upon them; the secretary of the company, who described the distress of the county and the want of coal and the salvation that the branch line would bring; and the surveyor, a thin, careful man named Murchison, who had walked the ridge above the common in April and who described, with the precision of a man who has measured what he means to take, the lie of the land along the eastern boundary of the vale. It was Murchison who changed the case. Not in the evidence he gave in chief, which was the evidence the company had paid for, but in the evidence he gave on cross-examination, when Hollis, in the quiet voice that had undone the syndicate's case in the same room a year before, asked him the question that the company's counsel had not prepared him to answer. "Mr. Murchison," Hollis said, "you have surveyed the line that the bill proposes. You have walked it, measured it, and reported upon it. Tell the committee how deep you sounded the coal measures along the eastern boundary." Murchison hesitated. "I sounded to a depth of forty fathoms, sir." "And what did you find?" "Coal, sir. Coal in good measure." "At forty fathoms," Hollis said. "And how deep did you sound in the lower meadows, where the bill's powers of purchase end?" Murchison hesitated again, and the hesitation was longer this time, and Arthur, watching from the body of the room, saw the surveyor's hands tighten on the rail of the witness box. "I did not sound the lower meadows, sir. The powers of the bill did not extend to them." "But you surveyed the lower meadows," Hollis said. "You walked them. You measured them. Your report to the company contains maps of them, drawn with the same care as your maps of the ridge. Is that not so?" "The line of the railway required me to survey the land in its vicinity, sir." "The land in its vicinity," Hollis repeated. "And in the course of that survey, did you form any opinion — any professional opinion — as to the extent of the coal measures beneath the lower meadows?" The room was very quiet. The chairman of the committee, a baronet of the old school who had heard a thousand such exchanges, leaned forward. Murchison looked at the company's counsel, and the company's counsel looked at his papers, and the surveyor understood, in the way of a man who has been left to carry a thing alone, that he had been abandoned. "I formed the opinion," Murchison said, "that the measures beneath the lower meadows were the same measures as those beneath the ridge. The basin, sir, is one basin. It runs under the whole of the vale. I have told the company so. I have told them that the coal beneath the estate of Ashworth is not the shallow edge of a prospect but the body of the thing itself." "Then the bill," Hollis said, very quietly, "does not propose to build a railway to the coal. It proposes to build a railway to the edge of a coal field that it has no power to touch — in order that the value of that coal field, being made by the railway, may be held against the trustees of the estate, who will be compelled by the court to realise it. Is that a fair reading of the matter, Mr. Murchison?" "I am a surveyor, sir, not a lawyer." "You are a surveyor," Hollis said, "who has measured, for the Grand Western Mineral and Iron Company, the ground upon which the whole of its case depends. And you have told the committee that the ground it prays for the power to cross is not the ground it means to take." He turned to the committee. "The bill before this committee, gentlemen, is not a railway bill. It is a key. And the lock it is cut to fit is the trust by which the people of the vale hold the ground they stand upon." The committee did not report that week. It sat again in the third week of July, and the company's counsel called his remaining witnesses, and Hollis cross-examined them, and the chairman asked questions of his own, and the case that had been opened with charts and smoke and the distress of the county closed with a surveyor's admission and a lawyer's reading of it. And on the last day of July, the committee reported the bill to the House — not lost, not withdrawn, but amended: amended by a clause, inserted on the motion of the chairman himself, providing that the powers of compulsory purchase conferred by the bill should not extend to any land held by the trustees of the estate of Ashworth without the consent in writing of the trustees, first had and obtained. The bill passed. The clause passed with it. And Arthur, reading the report in the library at Ashworth, understood that the war was not over — that the committee had given him the ground, and that Vane, who had lost the survey and lost the argument and lost the clause, had not lost the war, because he had never meant to win the clause. He had meant to win the argument that would follow it. The letter from London came three days later, and it was not from Hollis. It was from the office of the Grand Western's solicitors, and it was addressed to the trustees of the estate, and it informed them, in the courteous language of the law, that the company intended, at the next term, to petition the Court of Chancery for an order compelling the trustees to sell the mineral rights of the estate into the court, upon the ground that the trust, by locking up a fortune in the ground, was administering the estate to the detriment of the beneficiaries for whose benefit it had been created. The trust that had been built to keep the earth from being sold had been turned, by a clause of Arthur's own winning, into the instrument of its sale. The bill had been the key. The clause was the door.