The Quality of Mercy (39 page)

This at first proved something of a problem. Kemp did not want to conduct the conversation in Elsie’s home or in Michael’s. The houses were small; there would be people coming and going, perhaps even some who would be ready with opinion or advice, unasked for but vouchsafed nevertheless. He did not want to walk and talk in the open, because he again had the sense that the young man might find some stiffening of resolution in surroundings he knew well. The same objection applied to the alehouse, and besides he did not want to set eyes again on Sullivan, in whom he felt he had confided too much already. He wanted Michael Bordon within four walls, on his own, with no possibility of interruption and no prospect of an alliance.

The solution was found by Michael himself. He had a key to the small shed behind the handball court, where the players kept their shoes and spare clothes for the practice games. There was no one there now, to the best of his knowledge. Together the two men made their way there.

The roof was low, there was just room enough to stand upright, and both men were tall. Less accustomed than the other to physical restriction, Kemp felt the oppression of this, inclining him to fear collision, duck his head. But there was a narrow wooden bench against one wall and they sat on this, no more than a yard apart, only able to look each other in the face by a deliberate turning to the side, which Kemp felt at first to be something of a snag, as it would allow the young man to face away from him, find relief from the stresses of doubt and temptation that he was sure the offer of money would cause. But in the event Bordon proved in no way reluctant to meet his gaze, even eager and ready to do so, with the same open and lively regard he had shown earlier.

“I have come to make you an offer for the piece of land you have acquired in the Dene,” Kemp said. “I am ready to pay you two hundred and fifty pounds for it.”

“That is much more than the land is worth, takin’ it by the acre. Tha must have good reason for wantin’ it.”

The frankness and immediacy of this took Kemp by surprise. There had not been much room for sporting activities in his life, and he could not know that this swiftness of response was in the nature of taking the ball on a rising bounce, nor that this shed, so carefully chosen as neutral ground, would turn out to be a meeting place of considerable disadvantage to him.

“Two hundred and fifty pounds is a lot of money,” he said. “I wonder if you realize how much. It is easily enough to establish you in some independent business on your own, or if you thought of investing it I could arrange through my bank for you to realize a good return on the money. Two hundred and fifty pounds, invested wisely, could bring you seven shillings a week. When you marry and start a family, that would be a great resource to you, coming in addition to your wages.”

“There must be more to it than that. Tha canna be only wantin’ to do me a favor.”

“The Dene is a place of great natural beauty,” Kemp said. Things were not going as he had expected. The offer of money had brought no change in the young man’s face or manner. “It should be kept as a whole, not divided up into smallholdings. All the character would be gone.”

Michael looked for some moments in silence at the stranger sitting so close to him, who had been a guest of Lord Spenton’s, who had been seen riding round the place, asking questions, looking at everything. Since he had first started playing handball, eight years ago now, he had waited quite often in this shed with the one who was shortly to be his opponent on the court, and some strain of antagonism had developed in these moments of waiting, a period of mutual assessment, of firm intention to win, to prevail. He recognized the feeling now, it was the same; they
had come to the shed to meet as opponents, one to win and one to lose.

“Tha’s off’rin’ me two hunnerd an’ fifty pound so the Dene can keep its character?” he said.

“Well, there is more to it than that. I have learned that you bought the land out of care for your father. I was sorry indeed to hear of the accident that befell him, you have my deepest condolences. Obviously, he cannot now fulfill the ambition of making a garden there. Not to be able to make him this gift must have been a great blow to you and aggravated the loss, and this consideration has influenced me in making the offer, which I feel to be not excessive at all but just and appropriate under the circumstances.”

“How does tha know so much? Tha must be him that wants to make the road through. He said there was someone.”

“Who was it said that?”

“The notary, Mr. Bathgate, when he came to make out the deed of sale.”

“I see, yes.” He had been too high-handed with Bathgate. He had realized it at the time, but too late; aided by enmity and no doubt by native shrewdness, the rogue had sniffed him out. “I had formed such an idea, yes,” he said. “I will make it three hundred and fifty pounds, immediate cash.”

The two regarded each other closely for some moments. The words of condolence, rendered meaningless—as it seemed to him—by the swift jumping-up of the price, had gone down badly with Michael, who was in grief for his father, not long since buried. A faint smell of hyacinths came from the other’s person, scent of some kind. He was in riding clothes, obviously expensive: high-collared frock coat, jack boots and spurs; a tall hat rested on his knees as he sat there; the cravat looked like silk, the pin in it looked like silver. His clothes, Michael estimated, would have cost more than he himself could earn in a year’s work down the mine. He owned a bank, as it seemed; he would have a grand house. And yet he sits there, Michael thought, offering sums that are nothing to him, trying to whittle away my chances. He
belongs among those who killed my father and others besides, out of greed, whittling away at the pillars of coal until they are not strong enough to hold up the roof.

“He told me I should sell to naybody,” he said.

“He gave you bad advice. How long will you have to work on that bit of land, and plant and sow and cart your produce to where you can sell it, how long before you have three hundred and fifty pounds in your pocket?”

“Tha talks as if them was the only choices,” Michael said, and there was a note of anger now in his voice, though he still spoke quietly. “But tha knows full well there is another way.”

He paused on this, thinking of his wealth of choices, knowing already which choice would be his. Choice was wealth. He remembered the sitting room at Wingfield, where he had waited for Lord Spenton to see him. The furniture came back to his mind, the objects in the room, the lions’ heads on the drawers, the several chairs, the divan that fitted into a corner, the numerous pictures on the walls. Choice was having things you didn’t need but wanted to have—the silk cravat, the silver pin; choice gave you freedom from need. His father had labored all his life to escape from this cage of need; he himself had been imprisoned in it from the age of seven. And now this man was striving to keep him caged.

“Tha was hopin’ a didna know,” he said. “Tha was thinkin’ to take me for a fool. A will not work on the land an’ a will not sell it, not to you, not to naybody. Them that use the road will pay for passage as long as they gan on bringin’ out the coal. Me an’ my fam’ly will have a share in the money that’s made from it. Why should you have it all? That’s what my father would have wanted for us, that’s what he would have said if he’d been standin’ here today.”

In the face of these words and the look that accompanied them, Kemp found little to say. He was intending to point out, as he got to his feet, that there could in the nature of things be no certainty as to what the father would have wanted or what he would have
said; there was only one certainty in the matter, which was that those interpreting the wishes of the dead would study their own advantage and convenience.

These sage remarks, delivered with the authority of his greater age and wider experience, might have gone some way to lessen the sting of his defeat, the bitter knowledge that this miner he had thought so ignorant had proved him wrong, worsted him, shown him up, and all without even raising his voice. But as he hesitated on the brink of speech, some delayed and changed reaction to Bordon’s last words came to him. He looked again, more closely now, at the young man’s face, and as he did so, as he met the other’s clear and determined gaze, he was pierced suddenly and unexpectedly by a feeling of fellowship completely new to him, an emotion like an ambush, something lying in wait for just such an unwary moment. He had resisted the comparison when Jane made it. Debts are not wishes, he had said. But they were, they were—he had been wrong.

It was himself that he was looking at, not an adversary, not someone to be outwitted, but the young man he had been fourteen years before, when he had lost his own father at much the same age. The ambitions were his own, the need to repair things, to refashion the world after such loss. But the man before him did not see debts to pay; he sought to make his father the giver of blessings, the giver of freedom from drudgery and want. Of course there was self-interest in it—no human motive was free from this, in Kemp’s view—but there was much more besides, so much more … He felt a tightness in his throat as he held out a hand to the other and felt it, after some hesitation, grasped and held, though briefly. “Good luck to you, Michael Bordon,” he said. “You have been in the right today.” And as he spoke it was strangely as if, in spite of the reluctance to take his hand, in spite of his own lingering sense of defeat, the congratulation was for them both.

There was no other form of farewell between them. As Kemp rode back to the inn, the sense of kinship faded, the sting of the
defeat returned and with it the knowledge of financial loss. In the light of what he knew now about Michael Bordon, it was highly unlikely that the young man could be beguiled into accepting anything less than the standard rate for a wayleave of such a kind. Jane too had been wrong about the young man, he thought, but somehow she had come closer to the truth of things than he had. It was the kind of distinction he was not used to making, and he puzzled over it for a while without coming to any definite conclusion. But when they met he would tell her how things had gone, he would not conceal anything, he would confess the sympathy that had taken him so unawares. Sympathy for an opponent, and one, moreover, who had defeated him, an emotion deep enough almost to bring tears. She would be pleased to hear of this rush of feeling on his part. In fact, he was already feeling slightly ashamed of the display; it could not be regarded as anything but weakness to allow feeling to obscure your objectives; there might have been further arguments that could never now be put forward. He would say nothing of this to Jane, however. He had not so far told her of his interview with Sullivan, but he would do so when he saw her, he would tell her how he had been compelled by that runaway into a sense of sharing, still not fully accepted or understood …

Should he mention the brass button? To do so would cast him in the role of beneficiary; he had been left in possession of the token and the gifts of fortune it had brought. It was as the granter of pardon, the dispenser of mercy, that he wanted her to see him. He had forgiven Sullivan, or so he felt now; it was in this light that he would relate the matter. She would approve, she would think it high-minded, he would gain merit in her eyes. Sullivan had not forgiven
him
, in the slightest degree, any more than Michael Bordon had, but there was no need to dwell on this. Instead he would tell her of the words overheard as he approached the open door of the alehouse, the only ones he could afterward recall:
It is the power of imagining that makes a man stand out
.

She had that power in full measure. She had said something
not much different when they had last talked together and he had seen the compassion for him on her face. Probably a faculty more common among women than among men, he thought—they had more leisure. He saw it as a sort of task, an effort of the will, requiring concentration. A man with important aims in life would be too much occupied for it. Pike too had spoken of the power of imagination, he suddenly remembered. Disapproval of the lawyer had prevented him from giving much weight to the words. By reporting that vagabond’s remark and giving it some stamp of his own assent and sympathy, he would please Jane, he felt sure of that. And he wanted, before all else, to please her. All the same, it was odd, he thought, extremely so, that an itinerant fiddler, a person of no substance and no standing, a fugitive from the gallows, should have the last word.

In the silence of her apartment, seated at the small writing desk, Jane Ashton strove to compose the promised letter, the main labor of which lay in the effort to understand herself.

There were things about Erasmus Kemp that she could not admire. The way he set the achievement of his aims on the same, unqualified, identical plane of success, whatever their nature, the way he neglected to consider the cost to others. However, she felt that she understood these things better now, after their last talk together. Something of the compassion she had felt for him on that occasion returned to her mind. He was endlessly seeking to fulfill the vow he had made to his father, as if in the end his successes would leave no room for any sense of inadequacy or guilt. Like trying to fill a pit with gold, not knowing that the pit was bottomless … Or was she simply trying to find excuses for this lack of care he showed, this overriding devotion to his own purposes? Finding excuses for him was easy; he was attractive to her in a way no other man had ever been, she was stirred by the thought of lovemaking between them, his imagined touch upon her. His desire was so strong, so evident in his looks and behavior. Sometimes she had found it hard to meet his eyes, fierce with need in that dark-complexioned face. He was relentless …

It came to her, in this room where she had thought so much
about him from the very first, where from girlhood she had tried to understand life and the world and her place in things, where she had thrilled to Gray’s Pindaric odes and wrestled with Hume and Voltaire, that perhaps it was this, the relentlessness, something merciless in him, that attracted her so. She reviewed all she knew of him, what she had sensed and what he had told her, the wishes, the ambitions. His life had been a series of aims imposed on himself. Was she no more than this, something to achieve and possess and then lay indifferently aside among the other trophies? Like the mission of justice that had taken him in pursuit of the survivors of the
Liverpool Merchant
, like this Durham coal mine that he would take over and then perhaps lose interest in and relinquish.