第76章 The Second Offer

Lord Verrall came to Ashworth on the last day of September, unheralded by anything but his card, and found Arthur in the park with his coat off, helping the estate men load the year's first coppice cords onto a waggon; and the Chairman of the Midland Union watched the ninth Earl of Pemberton carry an armful of brushwood like a farm servant before he offered so much as good afternoon. They took coffee in the library, Eleanor pouring, Hollis present at Arthur's request and Devereux pointedly elsewhere; and Verrall began — as men of his weight always begin — with courtesies that were themselves the opening moves. The valley was looking well. The Academy's reputation had reached the North. He had read the porch evidence, he said, every sworn line of it, and no gentleman could withhold admiration from a parish that measured its own water for eleven days to confute a quarto report; indeed, he said it with a warmth that made Hollis's eyes narrow, because admiration from such a man is a bill rendered in advance. "You have found my grandmother's river-road," Verrall said then, setting down his cup, "and I am told it walks. I have not come to dispute the walking, Lord Pemberton; I have come, as one bookkeeper to another, to price it." He drew a paper from his breast pocket — not a legal instrument but a scheme, fair-copied, with schedules — and laid it on the desk between them. "The act will pass next session; you know the arithmetic of private bills better than to hope otherwise. But an act is only powers; what powers become is a question of the men who hold the ground they cross. Here is what I propose. The Union takes its water at Cinder Slack under the act, engine shafts, mains, the whole apparatus, upon our own freehold — nothing touches your land, your injunction stands untouched, your parish keeps its wells. In return: a tenth part of the water we raise, laid on at our cost to the eastern lane and the school, in perpetuity, through mains the Union maintains. Bath-houses at Westfield to employ two hundred hands. Salt pans beside them. And the Academy endowed out of the works — say four hundred the year — that your children's children may read their grandfather's Watch-book by gaslight paid for out of the very water he counted." He folded his hands. "You have spent five years refusing men who wanted to buy your earth. I am offering to endow your air. There is no clause of any trust in England against giving." Arthur let the silence do its work, because he had learned from his father's example that refusal weighs most when it is weighed. Then he pushed the scheme gently back across the desk. "You are offering us the tenth part of ourselves, Lord Verrall, dressed as a gift, and I must decline it as I decline the whole. Not because your water is not ours — though that we shall prove before any court you please, and the proof will be the Cure or nothing. Because of what the offer confesses. You do not want coal; your plates showed that long ago. You want the county drinking from your mains, and every drought a rent-day, and every arrears-list a lease of other men's lives. My father refused a valise of bank-notes for the same earth and told the buyer why: that a man who sells what his neighbours stand upon sells the neighbours. Water is nearer than earth, sir. It goes into the mouth. I will not sell the vale's throat at a tenth part, nor at nine parts, nor at the whole price of the North." Verrall heard him out without a flicker, which was itself frightening; and when he rose to go he stood a moment at the window, looking down the park toward the smoke of the lane, and spoke — quietly, without threat, almost with tenderness — the truest things about himself that anyone of the vale ever learned. "I was underground when the Greystones deep drowned," he said. "Thirty-one years ago this winter. I stood in water to my waist for six hours holding a lamp over a ladder-head while forty men climbed past me, and I counted them, my lord, as your children count — and three of the forty did not come, and I have paid their widows out of my own pocket ever since, and I tell you this so that you may weigh me justly. I went down into that pit a coal-owner and I came up knowing that everything a colliery is, its wages, its town, its railway, its very name, hangs by a pump; and the pump hangs by whoever owns the water; and I resolved, standing in the dark among the climbing boots, that I would spend the rest of my life on the owning side of water rather than the asking side of it. You call it empire. I earned my thirst, Lord Pemberton, at thirty-one feet a minute." He took up his hat. "Keep your river-road. Courts love antiquity; I was never yet beaten by a brick. But mark the calendar while you admire your arches. Your injunction binds works within your bounds until trial. My level runs outside your bounds, upon ground where your writ does not follow, and the law of percolation rides behind me like a troop of horse. I have been patient longer than you have been earl. Good day to you both." At the door he paused, as if an afterthought had struck him, and delivered the wound he had carried upstairs in his breast pocket all along. "Your guest in the east wing should write to his people more. A man alone in a strange house reads badly. And tell him Calais taught him nothing that a winter in York will teach him slower." He was gone down the drive before anyone in the room could answer; and Hartwell, summoned, reported the east wing quiet, the door locked on the outside, and Mr. Devereux at his window watching the carriage out of sight with a face like a man watching his own funeral arrange itself handsomely. ---