第54章 The Descent

The descent was made on the last day of November, in a hard clear noon when the frost held and the light would stand at the shaft mouth for four hours. Arthur had promised the trustees that no man should go down who was not wanted, and wanted men were few: the earl, who owned the ground; Vane, whose family had cut it; Fenwick, who measured it; and Hollis, whom Arthur had asked down from London for one reason only, that whatever was found below might be sworn to above it by a man whose word had never been bought. Thomas Gillingwater kept the head of the shaft with two estate men and a bell — the Academy's handbell, borrowed for the day, which Catherine rang once for every ten minutes gone. They went down on ladders set new that week against the old iron staples, and the first forty feet were nothing but cold, and stone, and the sound of their own blood. At sixty feet the daylight failed them altogether and the Davy lamps took up the work, and the character of the dark changed, as dark does underground, from absence into presence. The shaft walls glistened. Somewhere below, water moved without hurry. At the ninety-foot mark the shaft ended in a chamber floored with spoil compacted by eighty winters, and three galleries ran from it, and here, where any Pemberton had never set a mark, the wheel and crown waited for its lantern-light — cut deep into the rock, older than the timbering, patient as everything else that family had put into the ground. Fenwick knelt to it as a man kneels at an altar rail. He took the temperature of the chamber, and filled his sampling bag with its air, stoppering it with the care of a man capturing a witness; and he counted the ladder rungs aloud on the way down, as surveyors do, so that the depth of everything they found might be sworn against the daylight. "One hundred and sixty-eight rungs," he said. "Eighty-four feet of iron and oak between us and the sky, my lord. Men forget, above ground, what a number that is." "Beyond that mark," Vane said, "my grandfather posted his standing order: no barrow passes, no candle is carried past this point but along the left-hand wall." He led them left, along a heading shored with black oak that gave back the lamp-light like wet leather, and the air grew warmer with every yard, until Hollis, who was fifty and had walked behind Wellington's wagons in another life, unbuttoned his coat and said so. "I carried stretchers at San Sebastián's aftermath," Hollis remarked quietly, to no one in particular. "A wounded city smells of smoke and ruin. This is neither. This smells like a stable kept warm for something." The heading ran two hundred yards and ended at the bulkhead. It stood across the gallery like the end of the world: a wall of puddled clay faced with drystone, packed by hands that had meant it to outlast their names, and upon its face, chalked long ago and preserved under the smoke of a hundred lamps, words in the grandfather's upright script: *WATER IS MASTER HERE. WE HAVE SEALED HER WELL. LEAVE HER SLEEPING.* Beneath the words, cut into a facing stone, were letters and figures: *J.V. — M.V. — A.D. 1812.* And beneath those, small, almost shy, a single additional line in a different hand — the father's hand, Matthew Vane's, added later: *Repacked the face with my own clay, and my son's witness. God keep the vale.* No one spoke for a time. Fenwick moved first, because measurement is a kind of prayer among scientific men. He took the temperature of the air, and of the water standing ankle-deep along the floor. He laid his ear against a driving-bar that Vane, with the tenderness of a man touching a coffin-lid, held to the face of the bulkhead; and through the iron came the sound they had come two hundred yards to disbelieve — a slow, deep, rhythmic pressure, like a heart beating in the hill, or like the sea heard through a harbour wall. "It rises and falls," Fenwick whispered. "Count with me." They counted. Nine to the minute, steady as a clock. "That is no stream, my lord. Streams do not keep time. That is a body of water under its own head, moving as a whole — breathing against this seal because somewhere above us other men are knocking holes in its roof." Arthur put his own ear to the bar. The beat came up through his hand, through his knees, through the floor. He thought of his father standing here at some hour no record kept, hearing this, going home to draw a deed that would hold the valley's ground like a hand closes over a wound; and he understood at last what the trust had always been — not a lock thrown over a fortune, but a promise kept at the price of ever explaining it. "Mr. Hollis," he said. "You have heard it. You will swear it." "I have heard it," Hollis said quietly, "and I will swear it, and more than swear it — I will print it. But my lord, hear the other thing the sound is saying. That seal is clay, and clay is mortal, and the beat has grown louder since we entered. Your father bought the valley time. He did not buy it forever. Whatever you mean to do about the lid of this cistern must be done while the lid still holds." The bell above sent down twelve rings — an hour gone — and they turned back. At the bulkhead, before leaving it, Vane did a thing none of them had seen him do: he lit a fresh candle from his lantern and set it upright on the facing stone, in a niche worn smooth as if many candles had stood there before his. "My grandfather's rite," he said, answering the look rather than the question. "A light left burning at the seal, so that whatever watched from below would know men still kept faith with it. My father kept it when he could. I have kept it every year of my life on the night my grandfather died. Tonight there are four witnesses instead of one, and I find—" his voice went briefly out of true, and came back — "that sixty years is a long while to perform a duty alone." It was at the shaft mouth, blinking like men raised from drowning into the winter noon, that they learned what the morning had done while they were under the earth. Thomas Gillingwater met them with his face working, and he did not use the bell-language of bad news; he used plain words. "The borehead on the ridge burst its collar at eleven o'clock," he said. "The company's engine could not hold it, and they have let it run. There is warm water standing on the freehold strip like a spring come up wrong, and it is cutting itself a channel toward the common fence. And my lord—" he hesitated, and looked at the ring of stones behind them, where the rim now wore a thin bright collar of overflow, sliding eastward through the frosted grass toward the lane — "it is doing the same up here. Both waters are running the same way. Down the eastern lane."