Chapter 62 Lord Verrall

Lord Verrall came to see the valley in the second week of May, and he came as a landslide comes — without apparent haste and without any possibility of deflection. Three carriages and a mounted servant came up the drive at half past ten in the morning; and the man who stepped down from the first of them was broad and quiet and dressed in grey, with a collier's pallor under an outdoorsman's colour, and he looked at the façade of Ashworth Manor the way another man might look at a horse he had already agreed to buy. He declined the library. He asked instead to see the ground, which surprised them, and they gave him what he asked, because refusing a sight of one's own hill would have been a confession of something. So the party went up the drove road in a bright wind — Verrall walking most of the way with his coat over his arm, saying little, missing nothing, while his engineer Mr. Braithwaite trotted at his shoulder like a well-trained dog, and Devereux brought up the rear thin and correct and saying less than anyone. At the ring of stones Verrall stopped, and put the party at ease by ignoring it for a quarter of an hour while he examined instead the shaft head, the lantern-stand, and the capped bores, asking Braithwaite questions in a low even voice that no one else was meant to answer and no one else could have. Then he came back to the circle, and stood looking down at the water lying clear and still within its rim, and did the thing everyone did and no one had taught him: he knelt, and laid his palm flat on the rim stone, and took out his watch. They let him count. Whatever number he made of it, he pocketed with the watch together, and rose, and dusted his knee, and turned to Arthur with the first direct sentence he had spoken since the gates. "Your father beat a railway with songs and deputations, my lord, and your trustees beat a coal company with affidavits, and both victories were deserved, and neither concerns me, because I am not a railway and I am not a company. I am sixty pits and nine thousand men, and I have watched Parliament for forty years the way you watch this water — daily, and without sentiment." He nodded at the ring. "You tell me there is a cistern under this parish. Very likely. My own men struck the edge of warm strange ground beyond the northern scarp in the year of the frost, and I closed their level myself rather than quarrel with what I did not understand — so do not tell me I do not respect what lies under hills; I have buried better men than you for less. But here is the difference between us, Lord Pemberton. You believe the thing below is a treasure to be guarded. I believe it is a reservoir to be engineered. Water in the wrong place is a killer; water in the right place is worth sixpence a thousand gallons to nine thousand households and every millstream between here and the city, and there is no third condition, whatever your Cornishman's poetry says." "You would have to pass an act to try it," Arthur said, "and the act tells us what you intend. Two miles either side of forty miles of line, with power to drain." "To *manage*," said Verrall. "Drainage is management, my lord. Your grandfather managed nothing and called it duty, and the water rose anyway, and will rise again whether I lay a rail or not — your own surveyor knows it, if he is honest, and I am told he is. I am offering the valley a place in the largest work of its century. Station rights at Westfield, a coal-staith for your tenants' carting, three hundred places for your sons at wages no farm pays, and an endowment for your sister's school that would keep it lit for a hundred years after we are both forgotten." His eyes went past Arthur then, briefly, toward the white buildings on their hill, and came back. "Or keep your cistern, and your lantern, and your children with their notebooks, and I will lay my forty miles east of you and leave you your water and your poverty, entire and undisturbed, until some man stouter than either of us comes for both. There is no third course, my lord. I have looked for it all my life, and I am too old to flatter it when it hides." "Then we will differ in Parliament," Arthur said, "and the ground will arbitrate what Parliament cannot." Verrall accepted this without visible disappointment, as a man accepts weather. On the way down he walked beside Vane — whom he had marked from the first, being a man who knew working hands — and said something low to him that no one else caught, and Vane answered nothing at all, which was more than he had given Devereux in this same walk. At the gates the carriages swallowed the visitors, and the last Arthur saw of the Chairman of the Midland Union was a grey glove raised an inch off the window sill, neither farewell nor salute. Catherine met them in the hall with sherry nobody drank, and asked what had been offered. "Everything," said Eleanor, who had walked the hill with them and spoken perhaps ten words in two hours, all of them to the point. "He offered us everything we have been unable to afford for ourselves, and priced our refusal beforehand, and left us feeling it was we who had been unreasonable." She set down her stick — she had taken to a stick since the winter floods, and hated it — and looked at her husband. "Arthur, he timed the water." "He did," Arthur said. "And pocketed the number." "Men do not carry numbers idly," said Eleanor. "What is a man like that planning to do with the rate of a heartbeat?" No one in the hall had an answer, and none of them liked the shape of the question, which was, of course, why it had been asked aloud. ---