The Quality of Mercy

35



When Kemp thought afterward about his conversation with Lord Spenton, and went over in his mind the words exchanged between them, what struck him as least supportable was the way in which he was allowed to go on at such length and enter into such detail about his idea for a road through the Dene before Spenton raised a hand in languid fashion—rather in the manner of one requesting less volume of sound—to announce that a piece of the Dene was no longer in his ownership.

“Not for the next forty years, at least,” he said, and Kemp, in the midst of his consternation, saw that he looked quite unperturbed as he spoke. There was even a slight smile on his face.

“How can that be?”

He listened, staring straight ahead, while Spenton explained how it had come to pass that Michael Bord on was now the owner of a piece of land adjoining the stream, about halfway through the Dene. It was a saga, as he related it: the offer of reward, the young man’s very affecting wish to acquire the land for his father with the money, and then, following hard upon this, the father’s death in an accident at the pit. “He was dead when they got to him,” he said. “It seems that he was killed outright by the fall. Even if they had reached him sooner, it would have been to no avail.”

But Kemp had no thought to spare for this obscure and irrelevant death. “You sold the land without so much as consulting me, the lessee?” There was fury in his face and his voice. The agreements for the lease had been drawn up and signed; he was no longer Spenton’s guest, there was no need now to countenance the man’s follies. “You have done a most ill-considered thing, sir,” he said. “And for the idlest of reasons.”

Spenton’s face did not change, but his voice was colder when he answered. “I suppose you do not think I should refer to you for my reasons? They seemed sufficient to me. The Dene does not form part of the mine. You are not thinking clearly, Kemp. How on earth was I to know that you had this plan in mind? You chose not to broach the subject while you were staying with me. Do you think I am a mindreader?”

There was justice in this, he was compelled to recognize; the caution that had kept him silent had been needless, due only to inveterate habit. But the knowledge did nothing to lessen the rage he was laboring under. Spenton’s smile had deepened with this last question; it seemed that in some outrageous and incomprehensible way he was finding the situation humorous. And not only that: it was clear that his sympathies lay with this miserable pitman rather than his partner in business. “There is no great harm done,” he said now.

“What can you mean? There is no other route than the bed of the stream. The land ends in cliffs on either side. The slopes of the ravine are too steep—we could not build a road that would be safe from slipping under such heavy loads.”

“The young man is far from stupid. No doubt you will be able to reach some settlement with him. It will involve you in expenses, of course, but that is no great objection, as far as I can see.”

There had been a note of contempt in this, quite undisguised, and Kemp knew as he got up to leave that Spenton too saw no further need for conciliation between them, knew that just as he resented the nobleman for the privilege that surrounded him, for his air of immunity to the common struggle, so Spenton disliked him for the fact that he had been through that struggle and acquired wealth from it—wealth in the form of capital, not land. The nonchalance of manner was a form of hostility, expressing disdain for the mercantile class Kemp knew himself to represent, which grew always richer, always more threatening to the power and influence of the landed gentry. “At least,” he said, repeating the other’s words with deliberate sarcasm, “you will have no great objection, as far as I can see, to the road being built, provided of course that the costs are met by the lessee.”

“None at all, my dear sir, good heavens, no,” Spenton said, and Kemp detected in his voice and look the complacent knowledge that profits deriving from the road would continue to accrue long after the lease had run out. He had considered the matter after all, without appearing to. He was far from indifferent to his own interests, despite the assumption of vagueness. This was the knowledge that Kemp bore away from the interview, a certain sense of duplicity on Spenton’s part, together with the conviction that the dislike thus revealed between them would prove to be lasting.

He would have to return to Durham sooner than he had intended, more or less immediately in fact, and endeavor to come to terms with this Michael Bordon, if possible buy him out. He would stay at an inn somewhere within a few miles, he would go nowhere near Wingfield. But he had to see Jane before leaving. The need for her to know at once of this new development was urgent with him; without this, without her blessing on the enterprise, he would be weaker. On arriving home again, he at once sent Hudson with a note asking if he might be allowed some minutes of her company, and obtained an appointment for that afternoon. She had paid—as always when she knew she was to see him—particular attention to the details of her appearance, and Kemp was smitten anew by the radiant pallor of her face, the beauty of her eyes and brows, the alluring grace of her movements in the lilac-colored taffeta gown, close-fitting at the waist and hips, as was then becoming fashionable.

“He has never shown any real interest in the running of the mine,” he said. “In all the time I have known him he has never shown much interest in anything but sopranos and waterworks and clockwork toys and handball.”

It smarted still that Spenton should have waited so long, sported with him, before coming out with the fact that a piece of the Dene had been bought. Kemp had begun with this news, wanting her to know at once the blow to his plans. “Buffooneries of that sort,” he said with contempt. “I shall have to return to Durham as soon as possible. This Michael Bordon is young and illiterate, he has never known anything but laboring in a pit. He may not realize the value of the land he has bought. If I can get to him in time, I may be able to prevail upon him to sell at a reasonable price.”

“But I understand that he bought the land as a gift for his father, to free him from the mine. This being so, he is not likely to sell it, surely—it would be like a kind of betrayal, wouldn’t it, changing his mind like that and taking money instead?”

“No, I forgot to tell you, the father is dead. I thought at first that the deed was in his name and that it might be possible to have it annulled with his death, but unfortunately it is made out to the son.”

“Forgot to tell me?” Jane looked closely at him, as if there might be something in his expression, some quality of sympathy or regret not evident in his words. But she could see nothing of the sort there, only the look she had always found so compelling, the dark, level brows, the eyes brilliant, full of light, the mouth firm set as if there were something to be resisted or endured, but not mean or ungenerous. It was the look that came to her mind when she thought of being with him, sharing his life. “But it is the most important thing of all,” she said. “He will want to keep the pact, keep faith with his father. He will want to fulfill his father’s wishes for the land by cultivating it himself, growing the things his father wanted to grow. He would be right to do that, surely?”

Her face was alight with approval for such a course, the love and duty it would show. “How fine it would be,” she said, and saw a smile appear on his face of the kind she had seen on other men’s faces when she had gone so far as to express enthusiasm for some cause or idea thought to be eccentric, a smile of indulgence for sentiments that only ignorance of the world could account for.

“Do you really think that will weigh so strongly with him? He has never seen more than a few shillings at any one time. I know these people—the immediate gain is everything to them. I will make him a good offer. Be assured that he will not resist for long.”

Despite the smile with which he accompanied these words, he felt disappointed at the way the conversation was going. She was not seeing things in a way that accorded with the realities of the situation; she was failing to put his interests first when they were so much more important, so much larger in scale. “No,” he said, “a lump of money in the pocket will always count for more with them. He will not choose to spend the rest of his life laboring on two or three acres of ground if he is offered a capital sum that would rescue him from the mine for good.”

“So if you were in his place you would sell out?”

“If I were in his place?” The question was misguided. How could he be in the place of someone who toiled his life away underground for a mere pittance? “I would weigh up the alternatives and choose the one most reasonable,” he said. It might be that Bordon still did not know that this was to hold on to the land and wait for the road to be built, so as to levy charges for the passage of the coal. He might have time enough yet to persuade Bordon to sell before the potential income from the wayleave became known to him. But he said nothing of this to Jane, who might think it was unfair—she was completely unversed in matters of business. It was the first time he had held something back from her regarding his plans for the mine, and he felt a certain desolation at it. “After all,” he said, “the father is no more, why should his wishes matter so much? Compared with the building of the road, I mean. We have to try to improve the world in the way that seems best to us. The road will change the whole working of the pit, in the end the whole community will benefit from it.”

He had thought to regain her sympathy with these words, knowing her belief in direct action—a belief he shared. But she was still regarding him more narrowly than he liked, with a look in her eyes he had never seen there before, a look not so much of disagreeing as of adversely judging, which was worse. She had allowed herself to get caught up in this sentimental notion of honoring the father’s wishes, against all rational arguments of self-interest. “You have a tender heart,” he said. “I am aware of it. I know the value of it.”

“Erasmus,” she said, and there was suddenly a note of patience in her voice, almost as if she were talking to someone of less than ready understanding, “you have told me of your feelings when your father died, and how you gave years and sacrificed your ambitions in order to pay the debts he left and clear his name. Was not this due to the love you bore him, the sense you had of a pact, of a vow? Did his motives and purposes not matter any longer to you because he had died?” Again she scanned his face. Surely he must see the similarity, the closeness of the connection.

“The debts were real,” he said. “Debts are not motives, they are not wishes. I did not build a shrine to my father, which is what Bordon would be doing if he made that piece of land into a garden.”

As he spoke, and during the silence that followed his words, there came to his mind a memory like a throb of pain. So many years ago now, kneeling at his bedside in the loneliness of his room in the immediate aftermath of his father’s death, he had made his vow to God and to his most cherished possession, the brace of dueling pistols hanging on the wall. He had wanted to say the words aloud, but his mouth and throat were too dry for more than a whisper. Every penny …

“It is true that I made a promise to him,” he said, and Jane saw his eyes lose their fixity of expression and the line of his mouth slacken and grow softer. “I made a vow to restore his good name. But it wasn’t only the money …” He hesitated a moment, then plunged into words never before uttered to a living soul. “My father took his own life, though we managed to get it brought in as a death due to natural causes. He hanged himself because of his losses, the disgrace of it.”

He had come to a position of attention, hands by his sides, as if only thus braced could he bring out the words. “He hanged himself in the dark,” he said. “It was I that found him hanging there. I should have known it, I should have seen it. We were together a great deal. I was not a child, I was twenty-one years of age. Someone else would have seen it. I was too much occupied with myself. We might have talked together, shared the burden. But I left him to die alone. It has always been in my mind that I left him to die alone, in the dark. I understand now, as I did not then, that it was this that I was promising to make up for, this that I was vowing to put right. I have never put it right. I paid the debts, I made money in the sugar trade and then through the bank, but I have not kept my vow.”

For some moments, deeply moved by these words and distressed at his visible suffering in pronouncing them, Jane remained silent, not sure she could trust to her voice. Then, with a conscious effort of control, she said, “You have kept it, in the only way it could be kept.” Hardly a failure at all, she thought. Only someone so dedicated to success as Erasmus could have thought it so, kept the wound open for so long. He had been young, two years younger than she herself was now, and probably not much accustomed to looking for feelings and thoughts that lay below the surface. His father would have taken care to conceal the signs of his despair; no one would advertise such an intention unless wishing to be prevented from carrying it out. “You have kept your vow,” she said again. “In what you have just said to me, in what it cost you to say it.”

He saw a look on her face that seemed like pity for him—intolerable in anyone else, sweet in her, like a balm to him, a sort of forgiveness. He could not know, as he stood there and felt the love for her gather in him, how far his confession, made to no one else, had been to ease his heart with a truth finally acknowledged, finally released from the prison of his need to think well of himself, and how far it had been to regain Jane’s good graces, which he had feared he might be losing through her failure to understand the importance of this road through the Dene as against a few cartloads of cabbages and turnips and potatoes.

The compassion, however, the softening of her feelings, was plain to see. It was in her face and in her voice. It might be propitious for him. “Have you thought more about my proposal?” he said. “I shall have to leave for Durham again very soon. Can I hope for an answer before I go?”

“I will write to you. You will find my letter on your return.”

“Think kindly of me. You are at the center of everything I wish for. You are my guiding star.”