Chapter 82 The Sea-Cock

The far side of the door was not the Union's works at all, and the finding pulled the floor from under an assumption the whole valley had carried for three years. They came down through the arch again by daylight, through two feet of the walking water, and beyond it found a gallery of the old engineering running west beneath the upland, vaulted in brick older than the arch itself, floored in slate, and dry above the water-line save where the new inflow ran in a defined channel along the south wall — a road, not a seep, every yard of it tooled, coursed, and numbered in the same mason's hand that had keyed the door. Trevanion walked it with a candle at arm's length as he walked all unfamiliar ground, feeling the piers and the crown with his free hand, and gave his judgement at the first bend: "The vale has been keeping the wrong door shut, gentlemen. Our grandfathers built this hill two storeys deep. We have been sleeping in the upper one." At the second bend they came upon the breach, and the warmth of the day went out of the gallery about them. The Union's connecting drift — fresh oak, raw timber, the sap still bright where the adze had lifted — had been tailed through the north wall of the ancient vault, struck square through the coursed brick as though the grandfathers' wall were so much headland, and inside the mouth of it a heading ran on toward the Slack lifts. Fenwick unrolled his chain without a word and measured the drift's mouth against the axis of the vault, and the drift would have stood an inch true as a duck's lane; and Devereux, kneeling, put his hand into the water where it turned into the yaw of the new work and withdrew it with the fingers shining. "The sump-line. This is the very heading I drew in August, the one the order names clause by clause. They have driven it through the old wall rather than round it — two days saved and a cornerstone sacrificed, and sweet water paying for the convenience." He lifted his wet hand. "I drew its sister in Braithwaite's office to his dictation, and I will swear to the drawing of this one though it means the felon's dock for me. The water is being led, not taken." They had not finished chalking the seam when a lamp turned the corner of the drift from within, and the foreman came out of it wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, unhurried, with a hard hat pushed up off his brow, and behind him two gangers with their hammers over their shoulders. He looked at the party — at the chain, at Fenwick's chalk, at Devereux's wet hand — and nodded as a man nods at weather. Trevanion served him the engrossed order for the second time, reading the drawing clause aloud to the brick, and the foreman heard it out with the same grave attention and answered, with the last of his attention on Prosser, that the drift had been driven under instructions signed at the Union's offices at York, that the works of the appeal were lawfully continuing under the notices perfected, and that if the gentlemen wished to protest they might protest at the surface where the air was better. He turned to go, and Devereux said, very white, "I drew those instructions myself in August. There is a clause in them against wasting the old works, and you have wasted a cornerstone to save a morning." The foreman paused, looked at the wet hand shining in the lamplight, and said merely, "Mr. Braithwaite's gone north, sir. Things is different when the masters is absent." And they went away up the drift, and the party in the vault heard the hammers begin again at long measure, in time with the water now running at their knees. Beyond the breach the gallery held its course west for a hundred and fifty yards, and at its end they found the sea-cock, and it was a door in its own right: a tower of bronze and oak frame standing in a masonry head, the valve as tall as a man, the gearing seized where the years had rusted it into its sockets, and above the whole, cut into the keystone of the culvert, a single line of lettering that the lamps brought out letter by letter: *CLOSED THE YEAR OF THE HEALING. LET THE WALK STAY IN THE VALE.* Devereux read it twice, and then read the engineering, and what he found made him sit down upon the sill in the lamplight and hold his head. The sea-cock was not a drain. It was a vent, set at a height that nothing but an excess of the spring could ever pass, gauged to the tide by a date-table cut in the frame — a valve the grandfathers had built so that the walking water could never drown the vale and never leave it, and had shut once, after one overflowing year, and sealed with the promise that the walk should remain a walk and not a flood. Beyond it, under the gesture of the frame, a second date had been cut on a later day and by a later hand: the year of the sealing, and the name *Vane* under it, in the same hand that stood at the head of the Watch-book. They freed the gearing as far as the seizing would allow, working in turn with Trevanion's flannel tools and the wedges from his bundle, and the valve shivered in its frame and would not turn to the seat in full, and they drove the wedges and left it askew, a hand's breadth of the sea-road beginning to show between the valve and its bedding. The water, arriving at the foot of the tower, found that hand's breadth and went through it singing, and the level of the gallery fell at once by a foot, settling to the vent as to a habit. It was in the niche under the keystone, while Trevanion searched for the mason's tally that should stand beside the date, that his hand closed upon a box — lead, small, sealed with tarred canvas and the impression of a signet he did not know — and he brought it out into the light and set it on the sill, and there, by common and unspoken consent, they left it unopened, because whatever it was had waited in the dark since the year of the healing and could wait for the daylight of a proper reader. They came up with the evening and read the day's entry in the porch, and Fenwick's line, which nobody shortened, ran: *The far side of the door is a vent and a promise. She walks at five to the minute through the seal of 1752 and kisses the sea-cock of the healing year. We have not opened her; she has opened us. — R. F.* And Arthur, holding the bar across his knees in the lamplight, said what afterwards every schoolchild in the vale could recite: "She has left our valley, gentlemen, because the valley kept her too safely. Our grandfathers built her two doors — one to keep her, and one to let her out to the sea when the keeping grew proud. The Union has bought the keeping. We find to-night that we still hold the letting." ---