Читать книгу Iron and Smoke - Sheila Kaye-Smith - Страница 7

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Humphrey Mallard came in.

“I hope I’m not interrupting you.”

“Not a bit, Sir. Sit ye down.”

Mallard sat down and lit a cigarette before Bastow could push the cigars towards him. He seemed a little nervous—he had lost some of the dignity and confidence that the elder man had always grudged him a little. Mallard was a walking exhibition of the graces that cannot be bought, and Bastow resented it. The sight of a shaking hand and a twitching lip, as well as a slight precipitancy in actions generally deliberate, encouraged the iron-master who in the presence of the squire had so often felt himself a clumsy beast. He broke the silence heartily.

“Well, well. I think I can guess why you’ve come to see me.”

Mallard smiled his quick, disarming smile.

“Then I needn’t waste your time telling you. I’m a happy man.”

“And I’m a proud father.”

“I hope I’ll turn out a satisfactory son-in-law. I ought to be, with such a wife.”

“She’s a champion, my Jenny. The man who gets her gets a darling. Ee, but there’ll be a crowd of lads envying you—the number that’s been after her, you’d never believe, and all of the highest quality too. But you’re the first she’s ever turned to herself, so to speak, and I’d never force her hand where she hadn’t first given her heart. When she told me all about meeting you at the London ball I guessed something had happened, and after, when I met you staying over at Dilworth’s I felt proud it had.

“Then you don’t despise the poor landowner’s suit?”

“Sir, I don’t ask for riches. I’ve got ’em. But you’ve got what I haven’t got, and that’s rank. Let’s be honest as between man and man. Between my daughter and you it’s true love, just as it should be, but between you and me it’s business. You’re going to give me a title in my family and I’m going to give you forty thousand pounds.”

Humphrey started slightly. It had been a relief to find Bastow so direct—so unentrenched behind conventions that might have kept them skirmishing for hours. But he carried directness to the point of crudity, and the younger man’s fastidiousness was jarred. Still no shocked sensibilities could lessen the overwhelming relief and gratification of such an announcement. It had always been understood that the father would liberally endow his daughter—of course at his death she would inherit a pretty fortune, but to have forty thousand pounds here and now ... Mallard felt almost silly with delight. For one ecstatic moment he saw his debts paid, his mortgages redeemed, Herringdales restored and reconstructed, Yockletts rebuilt and the land reclaimed. Here indeed was ample acceptance of his sacrifice.

He became aware of old Bastow’s voice continuing.

“But of course it must remain in the business. I don’t expect a man to understand the iron trade who ain’t in it, but you must take my word that it would be worse than inconvenient—it would be disastrous for me to take forty thousand pounds out of the firm just now.”

“Remain in the business ... then I’m to understand ...”

He didn’t understand anything really—the sudden reaction was too great.

“Your wife becomes a shareholder in Bastow, Routh and Partners to the extent of forty thousand pounds. I consider that an honourable arrangement. I can’t hobble the company by taking out a large sum of money just at the present moment, and if I gave you forty thousand pounds here in notes into your hand you couldn’t put it into a better thing than Bastows’—twenty per cent, and as safe as houses. You can’t buy these shares in the open market.”

Humphrey licked his lips, forcing himself to speak.

“You are most generous. But the whole point with me is—I mean to say—well, I’ll go on being frank with you, Sir. I’m desperately in need of ready money.”

“Debts, eh?”

“Debts and mortgages.”

“How much?”

“Well, a couple of thousand pounds would pay off my debts, but it ud take thirty thousand to redeem my land.”

The old man looked grave.

“How’s that?”

Humphrey tried to explain, but he did not feel his explanation did him much service. The misfortunes of the Mallards were chiefly due to improvident living. To pay for their improvidence they had mortgaged their land, every rood they possessed.

“How much land have you?”

“About two thousand acres, Sir, all told. There’s some twelve hundred round the Herringdales, and eight hundred over at Easternhanger in Kent.”

“I didn’t know you had land anywhere but in Sussex.”

“I bought the Kent estate some ten years ago. It came into the market, and things weren’t so tight with me then.”

“Can’t you sell it?”

“No, Sir.”

He could almost have added, “It’s to save myself from selling it that I’m marrying your daughter.”

“Why can’t you sell it?” persisted the old man, “land isn’t so hard to get rid of these days.”

“I’ve only just bought it—that is, I bought it only ten years ago, and it would be a shame to sell it, even if I could get what I paid, which I can’t.”

“What sort of land is it? How much does it bring in?”

“I can’t say that up till now it’s brought in much. It wants some money spent on it before it can do that.”

“Not likely to be coal under it?”

“Coal!”

“Yes, it’s been found in Kent, you know—in the Brady boring for the Channel tunnel. Is your land near Dover?”

“About forty miles away, west of Canterbury.”

“Most like that ud be too far. You’d better sell it.”

Mallard felt his anger rise.

“I prefer not to sell it. I prefer to keep it and improve it in every way I can. It’s not what is or may be under the land that I care about, it’s what grows on it—corn and timber....”

“That you can’t get to pay because of the foreign stuff that’s cheaper and better. Now coal, you can charge what you like for that, and you’ll still hold the market, because the foreign stuff’s no good.”

“But I don’t want to own coal even if it happens to be there, which I don’t believe for a moment. I want to own my land. My people have always been land-owners.”

Old Bastow nearly said, “Which accounts for the mess you’re in now.” But he had the sense to hold his tongue. He was bewildered and shocked by Mallard’s point of view. To acquire land not for the sake of the treasures hidden beneath it, the coal and iron that bring wealth, but for the sake of mere breadth and surface, the acres of its extent, that mean poverty rather than riches ... the whole conception was to him pernicious, he told himself that even if he could have taken money out of the firm he wouldn’t have let this man have a penny of it. But he did not want to quarrel with him now. He felt uneasily that if the argument went much further, Mallard might say something to show even more definitely that he was marrying Jenny from mixed motives. That business should accompany romance was one thing—that it should take the place of it was another—and Bastow feared that circumstances might arise in which his conscience would not allow him to proceed, and the honour of the alliance as well as the young blush of Jenny’s happiness must be sacrificed. Mallard, too, on his side, was ashamed of bargaining. It seemed a cruelty and a treachery to the innocent Jenny, whose romantic mind was picturing a very different interview between her father and her lover.

“Remember,” said Bastow—“the interest is twenty per cent.”

The young man calculated swiftly. Twenty per cent on forty thousand pounds—that was eight thousand a year. He had scarcely taken in the magnitude of the income. He could save half of it easily, and pay off the mortgage bit by bit. Meanwhile he would be spared the worry of finding the interest every year, and could devote a certain amount to improving the land.

“Of course I don’t say it’s an impossibility that there should be coal on the Easternhanger estate—the seam may run as far ... always providing there really is useable coal in Kent, which I doubt.”

“Well, you can hang on for a bit and see. I expect the value of land to go up in the next few years.”