第77章 The Sweating Face

The seal sickened in the second week of October, and the vale learned of it the way it had learned everything that mattered: by counting. Protheroe, keeping his Tuesday watch at the bulkhead with the driving-bar, came up through the ladders two hours before his relief and asked for Arthur before he would so much as sit down; and the boy's face said what his report then confirmed. The pulse was five to the minute still — but on the lower course of facing stones, at the level where the standing water breathed against them, the clay had begun to shine. Not the damp of a healthy seal breathing, which Vane had taught them to read like weather; this was the bright lacquer-sheen of a face sweating in disease, and under the lamp the shine moved, gathering in beads too slow to fall. They held council at the shaft head that evening, for there was no time to be gentle about geography. Vane could not go down — the spring bending him had bent further since September, and the ladders he ruled out himself with a flatness that ended argument — but a repacking could not wait upon a strong man's convenience, because a sweating face left unrepaired invites its own failure, and failure meant not seepage but breach. So the operation fell to the hands Vane had spent the summer forming, and he directed it from a chair at the top like a general too old for the field, and no one in the parish thought it strange that the Earl of Pemberton should go down to labour in clay by lamplight; the vale had stopped thinking that strange long ago. The party went down at first dark: Arthur, Fenwick, Protheroe the elder as sworn witness, and Trevanion, who had repacked seals in three counties and brought his tools wrapped in flannel like instruments; Thomas Gillingwater took the bell, and Catherine stood at his elbow with the ledger of times, because she had decided, without consulting anyone, that a night of this kind should be written down as it happened. At the ninety-foot chamber they lit the niche candle first — the rite before the work, the words said low in the old rhythm, which none of them could have rendered into English and all of them could have hummed — and then worked four hours by rule. The diseased course was cut back to sound clay, the face re-tempered with water from the very pool, kneaded till it took the thumb-print and kept it without shining; new facing stones set leaning into the pressure, every fathom of the water's gain closing the joint instead of opening it; the whole finished above the standing line and dressed smooth, while Trevanion murmured the craft-judgments and Protheroe wrote the times. It was in the third hour that the pulse faltered. They had the bar set for the final reading, hands stacked on the iron in the lamplight, when the count changed between one minute and the next — five, five, four, four, the strokes arriving slower, deeper, as though something below had turned over in a sleep grown heavier — and for one full hour by Catherine's ledger the hill beat four to the minute while four men knelt on wet slate with their palms on an iron bar and did not look at one another. Then, as quietly as it had slowed, she came back: five again, steady, the interval restored, the sweat-beads drying even as Trevanion watched them. No one proposed a theory aloud. But Fenwick wrote one line in the Watch-book before they climbed, and the line was read round the parish within the week and kept its shape in every mouth: *Repaired the face at 9 of the clock. She stirred once toward morning, then settled. A sick man turns in bed; we must learn not to wake him mending him.* They came up at midnight into a park where every window of the manor burned, because Catherine had ruled that a house whose men were underground owed them light to come home to; and Eleanor had the kitchen ranges going, and Marie came over from the schoolhouse with her shawl pinned crooked and stayed till three, entering the times fair into a duplicate Watch-book she was compiling for the trial — *clay cut back, face redressed, pulse five, faltered to four one hour, restored* — in a hand steady as type, while her seniors slept on chairs in the passage like gunners off-watch. Nobody spoke much. The kettle spoke for the household. At the top, in the raw hour before midnight, Vane made them gather by the lantern, and did the thing he had been carrying up the hill all autumn. He put the driving-bar itself into Arthur's hands — the iron his grandfather had set to the face, worn bright along one edge by eighty years of listening palms — and spoke over it formally, while Gillingwater rang no bell and the park said nothing. "The vale has had Vanes for its hands three seasons," he said. "I am the last of my season, and I say before witnesses what I could not say in the chamber: the tools pass, my lord, or the duty dies with the family that mistook the duty for a property. Take the bar. Teach your children the count as mine taught me, and let some of them be called Protheroe, and Gillingwater, and Clegg, for the fault of our house was ever that we kept the knowing too narrow. I kept it alone too long myself." His voice went out of true and returned, level. "And now go home, all of you, and sleep, for Hollis writes me the list is published: our cause stands first in the Vice-Chancellor's chambers on Monday fortnight, and Mr. Caulfield desires the field book, the weir figures, the salt dishes, and — he says, and I quote his letter, being unable better it — *the wall entire, if the wall can be sworn.*" Marie read the letter aloud at breakfast to the senior form, as she read everything now that touched their water, and added one instruction of her own. "You will be called, some of you, before gentlemen who think a child's figures are a toy until they want them. You will bring your own books, signed in your own hands, and you will correct nothing, soften nothing, and round nothing — because the day this parish rounds a figure to oblige anybody, Mr. Verrall may keep the water and welcome, for we shall have proved ourselves unfit to hold it." Eleven faces regarded her with the gravity of clerks; and the Academy, which taught arithmetic first and history second, went in to sums. ---