Chapter 59 The Judgment of the Ground

The valley rang the bell until midnight, and for a week afterwards there was not an inn between the turnpike and the county town where a man might say the word *Chancery* without buying the company a round of drinks in celebration of its ruin. For ruined it was. The costs fell due within the month; shareholders who had subscribed on the faith of coal received instead an account of water; and by Lady Day the Grand Western Mineral and Iron Company had passed the resolution its directors had been hired to avoid, and dissolved itself. Its plant was sold upon the ground — engine, rods, timber, barrows — to buyers who came down from the Black Country with valuations ready-made. A letter from Lombard Street closed the account: Marrthers, writing with the perfect detachment of his profession, informed the trustees that the house had discharged the company's final balances, retained its costs, and considered the connection at an end — adding, in a postscript Arthur read aloud to Eleanor with some satisfaction, that the watermark of 1838 had been retired from the house's paper altogether. Trevanion's men were paid nothing. There is a kind of creditor the law never reaches, and the men who sank other people's shafts are of it. The Academy kept a half-holiday when the news came, by decree of Marie, who said that children ought to be taught what a victory looks like while it is still going on; and Thomas Gillingwater chalked the judgment's last line — *the silence has been kept* — across the whole tailboard of his cart, where it stood at market through two Saturdays, weathering like scripture. The trustees met to consider them in the church porch, because the porch had become the parish's court of conscience, and the debate was short. The deed settled income upon three purposes: drainage, schoolrooms, and relief of those who should fall into hardship through no fault of their own. Gillingwater read the third purpose aloud from his copy, folded it away, and said: "Cornishmen who took Cornish wages for Cornish work are through no fault of their own hard up in our parish this winter. I move we pay them off at full rates out of the relief fund, and buy their tools at honest prices, and see them home." Marie seconded it before he had finished. One trustee — Hobbs, the shepherd, who had grown into his five pounds like a coat bought large — asked only that the wages be paid by the trust's own hand, so that no man should say the vale had bought its victory twice. It was done so. Captain Trevanion, receiving the last of it into his own hands at the George, looked round the taproom at the tenants drinking his employers' ruin, and said, in his broad Redruth voice, that in thirty years under England he had been paid off by lords and companies both, "and this is the first time it was ever done as though I mattered," and he gave the vale his address in Camborne, and said if ever its ground spoke again, send him word. Devereux did not wait for dissolution. He resigned his chair a fortnight after judgment, transferred what could be transferred, and left for the north by way of London, leaving behind him at his hotel a bill for everything and a note for nobody. But Hollis, whose trade is the movement of men behind curtains, wrote within the week that Devereux had been seen in Leeds in the office of the Midland Union of Coalowners, carrying, in the phrase of the clerk who admitted him, "a case of papers very heavy for a man so thin." The vale let that go unread beside its fires. The court had spoken; the seal held; February went out cold and clean. It was Fenwick who kept the true ledger of those weeks, and Fenwick whose figures would not celebrate. The capped bores were inspected, and held. The overflow from the ridge had ceased with the frost. And yet the ring of stones stood level with its rim, and the beat inside the hill, which he timed every evening with a watch and an ear against the stone, stayed where winter had brought it: seven to the minute. "The pressure has not fallen," he told Arthur, in the library, on the first mild evening of March, with the windows open to a thaw-wind that smelled of the river meadows. "The court has stopped every straw we know of, my lord, and the water has not gone down one inch since November. Which leaves two possibilities. Either the seal has been so far opened that it now leaks by ways no survey will find — or something below is pressing it that was pressing before ever a rod of the Grand Western touched this parish. I cannot tell you which. I can tell you that the grandfather heard the same beat sixty years ago and sealed against it, and that his clay has been bearing whatever presses since before your father drew his deed." The answer came, as answers come, at its own choosing, and chose the worst hour. On the night of the sixth of March the thaw broke over the watershed all at once — rain on snow, the whole sky coming down the valley — and at half past eleven Catherine knocked at Arthur's door with a lamp and a boy behind her, soaked, from the George at the county town, with a message scrawled by the landlord because its bearer could not write. Trevanion's words, in the landlord's hand: *The old borehead collar at the closes has failed in the wet. Water rising in our pit timbers faster than any pump we have. If it finds the old workings under you, it carries your seal with mine. I can hold maybe two days with what I have. There is one cure and you know it as well as me — the drain your people drove to the river. Open it, and give the water somewhere to be.* Arthur dressed in the dark, woke Vane himself — the man slept light, like all who keep watch — and they went up the drove road together at two in the morning, with Fenwick and lanterns, through rain that fell straight as plumb-lines, to stand once more at the ninety-foot chamber where the bulkhead waited. The grandfather's chalked words ran with damp. Below them, across the faced stone, a dark shine had spread since December, wide as a hand, bright as lacquer in the lamp-light — the seal sweating, as a sick man sweats. "We open it tonight," Arthur said, "or we explain to our grandchildren why we watched."