第55章 The Returned Man

Silas Devereux arrived at the manor on the following Tuesday, in a hired carriage with London mud to the axles, and he sent in his card by the footman like any neighbour come about a boundary oak. Arthur received him in the library, with Hollis at the window and Vane — at his own request, and against all usage — standing at the side of the room like a witness called to identify a man. Devereux was thinner than Arthur remembered, and greyer, and his clothes were as beautiful as ever; exile had refined rather than diminished him. He declined tea. He declined the chair by the fire. He remained standing, and he spoke first to the room's master and then, deliberately, past him. "My lord, I will be as brief as your time deserves. The Grand Western is no longer the company you beat in July. Its old directors have retired — gentlemen of paper, easily retired — and through purchases too tedious to recite, control has passed to men of substance whom I have the honour to represent. We inherited, among other assets, an act of Parliament with powers of compulsory purchase inside six hundred yards of the authorised line, four winters of surveying that cost more than the surveys of most railways, and a body of shareholders who require, reasonably, that their capital produce coal." He paused. "The widow Harbury's two closes below the ridge lie within the six hundred yards. They were conveyed to us yesterday, at her own asking price, by her own attorney. We begin sinking there in the new year." "The borehead you let run for a week," Arthur said, "stands between your closes and the common like a confession." "The borehead was an engineering misfortune, generously insured. What stands between my closes and anything else, my lord, is law — and I have read the law of this valley more carefully than its late proprietors ever did. Your trust holds the mineral rights beneath the common, and no court will compel their sale while the trust serves its purpose. But the water—" he smiled, very slightly, "—the water is nobody's. It moves as fluids move, under whatever laws God keeps for such things. If it should leave your ground and come to mine, or drown mine, or rise inconveniently through anyone's borings, that is a matter for engineers, not Chancery. I am told your father's deed is a beautiful instrument. Instruments do not hold water, my lord. Clay does — for a season." "You have been told what lies below," Arthur said quietly. "Trevanion wrote it to you. Warm water, rising, breathing against a seal. You know that sinking beside the common may wake what the valley's grandfathers spent three generations putting back to sleep — and that if it wakes, it will not confine itself to widows' closes." "I know," Devereux said, "that every fortune in this island sits upon ground somebody called sacred until the price was right. Coal made this nation's winter warm and this nation's navy invincible, and it will do both again, here or elsewhere, with your blessing or without it." He took up his hat. "I did not come to quarrel, my lord. I came to offer what I offered once before through other men: partnership. A third of the workings, worked safely by Cornish methods, pumped and timbered and drained as science directs — and the vale rich beyond the dreams of its grandfathers, with its water supervised instead of merely feared. Consider it. Consider it especially, sir—" and here he turned at last, fully, to the man at the wall, and the courtesy in his voice became something colder and older, "—you, whose family had one claim to greatness in sixty years, and sold the surveys of it for ready money." Vane came away from the wall slowly. When he spoke it was without heat, which made it worse. "My grandfather sold nothing but his labour," he said, "and when the ground showed him its heart he threw his labour's wages into the grass and walked home. My father repacked that seal with clay he dug himself, sick, in the winter he died. You bought papers, Mr. Devereux. Men in my family have died holding better ones. Get out of this house." Devereux looked at him for a moment with something that was almost appreciation. Then he bowed to the room, wished them a good Christmas, and was shown out; and the carriage wheels had scarcely faded down the drive before Hollis had the door shut and was speaking fast and low, pacing before the fire like a man walking off a wound. "He has told us the whole campaign because telling it costs him nothing. The closes are legally his; the act is legally his; the water, as he says with perfect truth, belongs to nobody — and therefore, before any court in England, to whoever can show the harm of touching it. Harm, my lord. That is our whole fortress now. Not sentiment, not history, not even the trust — proof of danger, sworn, printed, and believed. Give me Fenwick's figures, Murchison's field books, the widow Tollervey's letters, and one sworn ear-witness to that heartbeat besides myself, and I will obtain an injunction before Hilary Term shuts. Fail in any part of it, and in February the rods go down at the widow Harbury's closes, forty yards nearer the sleeping water than Trevanion's borehead ever stood." It was at this point, precisely, that Graves the solicitor came in from the hall with rain still on his coat, saying that a man was at the back door who would give no name to the servants, and the man himself followed him in — broad, weathered, travel-soiled, with a canvas roll of notebooks under his arm and thirty years of other people's shafts in his face. "Captain Trevanion," Arthur said. "At your service, my lord — though maybe not for long, for I am a dismissed man since Friday, and glad of it." He set the roll of books on the desk like a man setting down iron. "I have kept every log of every boring the company drove in this parish — depths, waters, temperatures, strata, the whole truth they paid me to find and did not want found. There is a copy of everything in Devereux's own office, so burning these buys him nothing. I heard your captain of chalk-boards say in the market that you wanted evidence sworn." He unbuckled the roll, and his hands, which had sunk bores through half the strata of England, were perfectly steady. "I have been waiting since July for somebody to ask me properly."