He left me when the down upon his lip
Lay like the shadow of a hovering kiss.
‘Beautiful mother, do not grieve,’ he said;
‘I will be great, and build our fortunes high,
And you shall wear the longest train at court,
And look so queenly, all the lords shall say,
“She is a royal changeling: there’s some crown
Lacks the right head, since hers wears nought but braids.” ’
O, he is coming now — but I am grey;
And he —
ON the 1st of September, in the memorable year 1832, some one was expected at Transome Court. As early as two o’clock in the afternoon the aged lodge-keeper had opened the heavy gate, green as the tree trunks were green with nature’s powdery paint, deposited year after year. Already in the village of Little Treby, which lay on the side of a steep hill not far off the lodge gates, the elder matrons sat in their best gowns at the few cottage doors bordering the road, that they might be ready to get up and make their curtsy when a travelling carriage should come in sight; and beyond the village several small boys were stationed on the lookout, intending to run a race to the barn-like old church, where the sexton waited in the belfry ready to set the one bell in joyful agitation just at the right moment.
The old lodge-keeper had opened the gate and left it in the charge of his lame wife, because he was wanted at the Court to sweep away the leaves, and perhaps to help in the stables. For though Transome Court was a large mansion, built in the fashion of Queen Anne’s time, with a park and grounds as fine as any to be seen in Loamshire, there were very few servants about it. Especially, it seemed, there must be a lack of gardeners; for, except on the terrace surrounded with a stone parapet in front of the house, where there was a parterre kept with some neatness, grass had spread itself over the gravel walks, and over all the low mounds once carefully cut as black beds for the shrubs and larger plants. Many of the windows had the shutters closed, and under the grand Scotch fir that stooped towards one corner, the brown fir-needles of many years lay in a small stone balcony in front of two such darkened windows. All round, both near and far, there were grand trees, motionless in the still sunshine, and, like all large motionless things, seeming to add to the stillness. Here and there a leaf fluttered down; petals fell in a silent shower; a heavy moth floated by, and, when it settled, seemed to fall wearily; the tiny birds alighted on the walks, and hopped about in perfect tranquillity; even a stray rabbit sat nibbling a leaf that was to its liking, in the middle of a grassy space, with an air that seemed quite impudent in so timid a creature. No sound was to be heard louder than a sleepy hum, and the soft monotony of running water hurrying on to the river that divided the park. Standing on the south or east side of the house, you would never have guessed that an arrival was expected.
But on the west side, where the carriage entrance was, the gates under the stone archway were thrown open; and so was the double door of the entrance-hall, letting in the warm light on the scagliola pillars, the marble statues, and the broad stone staircase, with its matting worn into large holes. And, stronger sign of expectation than all, from one of the doors which surrounded the entrance-hall, there came forth from time to time a lady, who walked lightly over the polished stone floor, and stood on the doorsteps and watched and listened. She walked lightly, for her figure was slim and finely formed, though she was between fifty and sixty. She was a tall, proud-looking woman, with abundant grey hair, dark eyes and eyebrows, and a somewhat eagle-like yet not unfeminine face. Her tight-fitting black dress was much worn; the fine lace of her cuffs and collar, and of the small veil which fell backwards over her high comb, was visibly mended; but rare jewels flashed on her hands, which lay on her folded black-clad arms like finely cut onyx cameos.
Many times Mrs Transome went to the doorsteps, watching and listening in vain. Each time she returned to the same room: it was a moderate-sized comfortable room, with low ebony bookshelves round it, and it formed an anteroom to a large library, of which a glimpse could be seen through an open doorway, partly obstructed by a heavy tapestry curtain drawn on one side. There was a great deal of tarnished gilding and dinginess on the walls and furniture of this smaller room, but the pictures above the bookcases were all of a cheerful kind: portraits in pastel of pearly-skinned ladies with hair-powder; blue ribbons, and low-bodices; a splendid portrait in oils of a Transome in the gorgeous dress of the Restoration; another of a Transome in his boyhood, with his hand on the neck of a small pony; and a large Flemish battle-piece, where war seemed only a picturesque blue-and-red accident in a vast sunny expanse of plain and sky. Probably such cheerful pictures had been chosen because this was Mrs Transome’s usual sitting-room: it was certainly for this reason that, near the chair in which she seated herself each time she re-entered, there hung a picture of a youthful face which bore a strong resemblance to her own: a beardless but masculine face, with rich brown hair hanging low on the forehead, and undulating beside each cheek down to the loose white cravat. Near this same chair were her writing-table, with vellum-covered account-books on it, the cabinet in which she kept her neatly-arranged drugs, her basket for her embroidery, a folio volume of architectural engravings from which she took her embroidery patterns, a number of the North Loamshire Herald, and the cushion for her fat Blenheim, which was too old and sleepy to notice its mistress’s restlessness. For, just now, Mrs Transome could not abridge the sunny tedium of the day by the feeble interest of her usual indoor occupations. Her consciousness was absorbed by memories and prospects, and except when she walked to the entrance-door to look out, she sat motionless with folded arms, involuntarily from time to time turning towards the portrait close by her, and as often, when its young brown eyes met hers, turning away again with self-checking resolution.
At last, prompted by some sudden thought or by some sound, she rose and went hastily beyond the tapestry curtain into the library. She paused near the door without speaking: apparently she only wished to see that no harm was being done. A man nearer seventy than sixty was in the act of ranging on a large library-table a series of shallow drawers, some of them containing dried insects, others mineralogical specimens. His pale mild eyes, receding lower jaw, and slight frame, could never have expressed much vigour, either bodily or mental; but he had now the unevenness of gait and feebleness of gesture which tell of a past paralytic seizure. His threadbare clothes were thoroughly brushed; his soft white hair was carefully parted and arranged: he was not a neglected-looking old man; and at his side a fine black retriever, also old, sat on its haunches, and watched him as he went to and fro. But when Mrs Transome appeared within the doorway, her husband paused in his work and shrank like a timid animal looked at in a cage where flight is impossible. He was conscious of a troublesome intention, for which he had been rebuked before — that of disturbing all his specimens with a view to a new arrangement.
After an interval, in which his wife stood perfectly still, observing him, he began to put back the drawers in their places in the row of cabinets which extended under the bookshelves at one end of the library. When they were all put back and closed, Mrs Transome turned away, and the frightened old man seated himself with Nimrod the retriever on an ottoman. Peeping at him again, a few minutes after, she saw that he had his arm round Nimrod’s neck, and was uttering his thoughts to the dog in a loud whisper, as little children do to any object near them when they believe themselves unwatched.
At last the sound of the church-bell reached Mrs Transome’s ear, and she knew that before long the sound of wheels must be within hearing; but she did not at once start up and walk to the entrance-door. She sat still, quivering and listening; her lips became pale, her hands were cold and trembling. Was her son really coming? She was far beyond fifty; and since her early gladness in this best-loved boy, the harvest of her life had been scanty. Could it be that now — when her hair was grey, when sight had become one of the day’s fatigues, when her young accomplishments seemed almost ludicrous, like the tone of her first harpsichord and the words of the songs long browned with age — she was going to reap an assured joy? — to feel that the doubtful deeds of her life were justified by the result, since a kind Providence had sanctioned them? — to be no longer tacitly pitied by her neighbours for her lack of money, her imbecile husband, her graceless eldest-bom, and the loneliness of her life; but to have at her side a rich, clever, possibly a tender, son? Yes; but there were the fifteen years of separation, and all that had happened in that long time to throw her into the background in her son’s memory and affection. And yet — did not men sometimes become more filial in their feeling when experience had mellowed them, and they had themselves become fathers? Still, if Mrs Transome had expected only her son, she would have trembled less; she expected a little grandson also: and there were reasons why she had not been enraptured when her son had written to her only when he was on the eve of returning that he already had an heir born to him.
But the facts must be accepted as they stood, and, after all, the chief thing was to have her son back again. Such pride, such affection, such hopes as she cherished in this fifty-sixth year of her life, must find their gratification in him — or nowhere. Once more she glanced at the portrait. The young brown eyes seemed to dwell on her pleasantly; but, turning from it with a sort of impatience, and saying aloud, ‘Of course he will be altered!’ she rose almost with difficulty, and walked more slowly than before across the hall to the entrance-door.
Already the sound of wheels was loud upon the gravel. The momentary surprise of seeing that it was only a post-chaise, without a servant or much luggage, that was passing under the stone archway and then wheeling round against the flight of stone steps, was at once merged in the sense that there was a dark face under a red travelling-cap looking at her from the window. She saw nothing else: she was not even conscious that the small group of her own servants had mustered, or that old Hickes the butler had come forward to open the chaise door. She heard herself called ‘Mother! ‘ and felt a light kiss on each cheek; but stronger than all that sensation was the consciousness which no previous thought could prepare her for, that this son who had come back to her was a stranger. Three minutes before, she had fancied that, in spite of all changes wrought by fifteen years of separation, she should clasp her son again as she had done at their parting; but in the moment when their eyes met, the scnse of strangeness came upon her like a terror. It was not hard to understand that she was agitated, and the son led her across the hall to the sitting-room, closing the door behind them. Then he turned towards her and said, smiling — ‘You would not have known me, eh, mother?’
It was perhaps the truth. If she had seen him in a crowd, she might have looked at him without recognition — not, however, without startled wonder; for though the likeness to herself was no longer striking, the years had overlaid it with another likeness which would have arrested her. Before she answered him, his eyes, with a keen restlessness, as unlike as possihle to the lingering gaze of the portrait, had travelled quickly over the room, alighting on her again as she said —
‘Everything is changed, Harold. I am an old woman, you see.’
‘But straighter and more upright than some of the young ones!’ said Harold; inwardly, however, feeling that age had made his mother’s face very anxious and eager. ‘The old women at Smyrna are like sacks. You’ve not got clumsy and shapeless. How is it I have the trick of getting fat?’ (Here Harold lifted his arm and spread out his plump hand.) ‘I remember my father was as thin as a herring. How is my father? Where is he?’
Mrs Transome just pointed to the curtained doorway, and let her son pass through it alone. She was not given to tears; but now, under the pressure of emotion that could find no other vent, they burst forth. She took care that they should be silent tears, and before Harold came out of the library again they were dried. Mrs Transome had not the ferninine tendency to seek influence through pathos; she had been used to rule in virtue of acknowledged superiority. The consciousness that she had to make her son’s acquaintance, and that her knowledge of the youth of nineteen might help her little in interpreting the man of thirty-four, had fallen like lead on her soul; but in this new acquaintance of theirs she cared especially that her son, who had seen a strange world, should feel that he was come home to a mother who was to be consulted on all things, and who could supply his lack of the local experience necessary to an English land-holder. Her part in life had been that of the clever sinner, and she was equipped with the views, the reasons, and the habits which belonged to that character: life would have little meaning for her if she were to be gently thrust aside as a harmless elderly woman. And besides, there were secrets which her son must never know. So, by the time Harold came from the library again, the traces of tears were not discernible, except to a very careful observer. And he did not observe his mother carefully; his eyes only glanced at her on their way to the North Loamshire Herald, lying on the table near her, which he took up with his left hand, as he said —
‘Gad! what a wreck poor father is! Paralysis, eh? Terribly shrunk and shaken — crawls about among his books and beetles as usual, though. Well, it’s a slow and easy death. But he’s not much over sixty-five, is he?’
‘Sixty-seven, counting by birthdays; but your father was born old, I think,’ said Mrs Transome, a little flushed with the determination not to show any unasked-for feeling.
Her son did not notice her. All the time he had been speaking his eyes had been running down the columns of the newspaper.
‘But your little boy, Harold — where is he? How is it he has not come with you?’
‘O, I left him behind, in town,’ said Harold, still looking at the paper. ‘My man Dominic will bring him, with the rest of the luggage. Ah, I see it is young Debarry, and not my old friend Sir Maximus, who is offering himself as candidate for North Loamshire.’
‘Yes. You did not answer me when I wrote to you to London about your standing. There is no other Tory candidate spoken of, and you would have all the Debarry interest.’
‘I hardly think that,’ said Harold, significantly.
‘Why? Jermyn says a Tory candidate can never be got in without it.’
‘But I shall not be a Tory candidate.’
Mrs Transome felt something like an electric shock.
‘What then?’ she said, almost sharply. ‘You will not call yourself a Whig?’
‘God forbid! I’m a Radical.’
Mrs Transome’s limbs tottered; she sank into a chair. Here was a distinct confirmation of the vague but strong feeling that her son was a stranger to her. Here was a revelation to which it seemed almost as impossible to adjust her hopes and notions of a dignified life as if her son had said that he had been converted to Mahometanism at Smyrna, and had four wives, instead of one son, shortly to arrive under the care of Dominic. For the moment she had a sickening feeling that it was all of no use that the long-delayed good fortune had come at last — all of no use though the unloved Durfey was dead and buried, and though Harold had come home with plenty of money. There were rich Radicals, she was aware, as there were rich Jews and Dissenters, but she had never thought of them as county people. Sir Francis Burdett had been generally regarded as a madman. It was better to ask no questions, but silently to prepare herself for anything else there might be to come.
‘Will you go to your rooms, Harold, and see if there is anything you would like to have altered?’
‘Yes, let us go,’ said Harold, throwing down the newspaper, in which he had been rapidly reading almost every advertisement while his mother had been going through her sharp inward struggle. ‘Uncle Lingon is on the bench still, I see,’ he went on, as he followed her across the hall; ‘is he at home — will he be here this evening?’
‘He says you must go to the rectory when you want to see him. You must remember you have come back to a family who have old-fashioned notions. Your uncle thought I ought to have you to myself in the first hour or two. He remembered that I had not seen my son for fifteen years.’
‘Ah, by Jove! fifteen years — so it is I ‘ said Harold, taking his mother’s hand and drawing it under his arm; for he had perceived that her words were charged with an intention. ‘And you are as straight as an arrow still; you will carry the shawls I have brought you as well as ever.’
They walked up the broad stone steps together in silence. Under the shock of discovering her son’s Radicalism, Mrs Transome had no impulse to say one thing rather than another; as in a man who had just been branded on the forehead all wonted motives would be uprooted. Harold, on his side, had no wish opposed to filial kindness, but his busy thoughts were imperiously determined by habits which had no reference to any woman’s feeling; and even if he could have conceived what his mother’s feeling was, his mind, after that momentary arrest, would have darted forward on its usual course.
‘I have given you the south rooms, Harold,’ said Mrs Transome, as they passed along a corridor lit from above, and lined with old family pictures ‘I thought they would suit you best, as they all open into each other, and this middle one will make a pleasant sitting-room for you.’
‘Gad! the furniture is in a bad state,’ said Harold, glancing round at the middle room which they had just entered; ‘the moths seem to have got into the carpets and hangings.’
‘I had no choice except moths or tenants who would pay rent,’ said Mrs Transome. ‘We have been too poor to keep servants for uninhabited rooms.’
‘What! you’ve been rather pinched, eh?’
‘You find us living as we have been living these twelve years.’
‘Ah, you’ve had Durfey’s debts as well as the lawsuits — confound them! It will make a hole in sixty thousand pounds to pay off the mortgages. However, he’s gone now, poor fellow; and I suppose I should have spent more in buying an English estate some time or other. I always meant to be an Englishman, and thrash a lord or two who thrashed me at Eton.’
‘I hardly thought you could have meant that, Harold, when I found you had married a foreign wife.’
‘Would you have had me wait for a consumptive lackadaisical Englishwoman, who would have hung all her relations round my neck? I hate English wives; they want to give their opinion about everything. They interfere with a man’s life. I shall not marry again.’
Mrs Transome bit her lip, and turned away to draw up a blind. She would not reply to words which showed how completely any conception of herself and her feelings was excluded from her son’s inward world.
As she turned round again she said, ‘I suppose you have been used to great luxury; these rooms look miserable to you, but you can soon make any alteration you like.’
‘O, I must have a private sitting-room fitted up for myself down-stairs. And the rest are bedrooms, I suppose,’ he went on, opening a side-door. ‘Ah, I can sleep here a night or two. But there’s a bedroom down-stairs, with an anteroom, I remember, that would do for my man Dominic and the little boy. I should like to have that.’
‘Your father has slept there for years. He will be like a distracted insect, and never know where to go, if you alter the track he has to walk in.’ ‘That’s a pity. I hate going up-stairs.’
‘There is the steward’s room: it is not used, and might be turned into a bedroom. I can’t offer you my room, for I sleep up-stairs.’ (Mrs Transome’s tongue could be a whip upon occasion, but the lash had not fallen on a sensitive spot.)
‘No; I’m determined not to sleep up-stairs. We’ll see about the steward’s room tomorrow, and I daresay I shall find a closet of some sort for Dominic. It’s a nuisance he had to stay behind, for I shall have nobody to cook for me. Ah, there’s the old river I used to fish in. I often thought, when I was at Smyrna, that I would buy a park with a river through it as much like the Lapp as possible. Gad, what fine oaks those are opposite! Some of them must come down, though.’
‘I’ve held every tree sacred on the demesne, as I told you, Harold. I trusted to your getting the estate some time, and releasing it; and I determined to keep it worth releasing. A park without fine timber is no better than a beauty without teeth and hair.’
‘Bravo, mother!’ said Harold, putting his hand on her shoulder. ‘Ah, you’ve had to worry yourself about things that don’t properly belong to a woman — my father being weakly. We’ll set all that right. You shall have nothing to do now but to be grandmamma on satin cushions.’
‘You must excuse me from the satin cushions. That is a part of the old woman’s duty I am not prepared for. I am used to be chief bailiff, and to sit in the saddle two or three hours every day. There are two farms on our hands besides the Home Farm.’
‘Phew-ew! Jermyn manages the estate badly, then. That will not last under my reign,’ said Harold, turning on his heel and feeling in his pockets for the keys of his portmanteaus, which had been brought up.
‘Perhaps when you’ve been in England a little longer,’ said Mrs Transome, colouring as if she had been a girl, ‘you will understand better the difficulties there is in letting farms in these times.’
‘I understand the difficulty perfectly, mother. To let farms, a man must have the sense to see what will make them inviting to farmers, and to get sense supplied on demand is just the most difficult transaction I know of. I suppose if I ring there’s some fellow who can act as valet and learn to attend to my hookah?’
‘There is Hickes the butler, and there is Jabez the footman; those are all the men in the house. They were here when you left.’
‘O, I remember Jabez — he was a dolt. I’ll have old Hickes. He was a neat little machine of a butler; his words used to come like the clicks of an engine. He must be an old machine now, though.’
‘You seem to remember some things about home wonderfully well, Harold.
‘Never forget places and people — how they look and what can be done with them. All the country round here lies like a map in my brain. A deuced pretty country too; but the people were a stupid set of old Whigs and Tories. I suppose they are much as they were.’
‘I am, at least, Harold. YOU are the first of your family that ever talked of being a Radical. I did not think I was taking care of our old oaks for that. I always thought Radicals’ houses stood staring above poor sticks of young trees and iron hurdles.’
‘Yes. but the Radical sticks are growing, mother, and half the Tory oaks are rotting,’ said Harold, with gay carelessness. ‘You’ve arranged for Jermyn to be early tomorrow?’
‘He will be here to breakfast at nine. But I leave you to Hickes now; we dine in an hour.’
Mrs Transome went away and shut herself in her own dressing-room. It had come to pass now — this meeting with the son who had been the object of so much longing; whom she had longed for before he was born, for whom she had sinned, from whom she had wrenched herself with pain at their parting, and whose coming again had been the one great hope of her years. The moment was gone by; there had been no ecstasy, no gladness even; hardly half an hour had passed, and few words had been spoken, yet with that quickness in weaving new futures which belongs to women whose actions have kept them in habitual fear of consequences, Mrs Transome thought she saw with all the clearness of demonstration that her son’s return had not been a good for her in the sense of making her any happier.
She stood before a tall mirror, going close to it and looking at her face with hard scrutiny, as if it were unreIated to herself. No elderly face can be handsome, looked at in that way; every little detail is startlingly prominent, and the effect of the whole is lost. She saw the dried-up complexion, and the deep lines of bitter discontent about the mouth.
‘I am a hag!’ she said to herself (she was accustomed to give her thoughts a very sharp outline), ‘an ugly old woman who happens to be his mother. That is what he sees in me, as I see a stranger in him. I shall count for nothing. I was foolish to expect anything else.’
She turned away from the mirror and walked up and down her room.
‘What a likeness!’ she said, in a loud whisper; ‘yet, perhaps, no one will see it besides me.’
She threw herself into a chair, and sat with a fixed look, seeing nothing that was actually present, but inwardly seeing with painful vividness what had been present with her a little more than thirty years ago — the little round-limbed creature that had been leaning against her knees, and stamping tiny feet, and looking up at her with gurgling laughter. She had thought that the possession of this child would give unity to her life, and make some gladness through the changing years that would grow up as fruit out of these early maternal caresses. But nothing had come just as she had wished. The mother’s early raptures had lasted but a short time, and even while they lasted there had grown up in the midst of them a hungry desire, like a black poisonous plant feeding in the sunlight, — the desire that her first, rickety, ugly, imbecile child should die, and leave room for her darling, of whom she could be proud. Such desires make life a hideous lottery, where every day may turn up a blank; where men and women who have the softest beds and the most delicate eating, who have a very large share of that sky and earth which some are born to have no more of than the fraction to be got in a crowded entry, yet grow haggard, fevered, and restless, like those who watch in other lotteries. Day after day, year after year, had yielded blanks; new cares had come, bringing other desires for results quite beyond her grasp, which must also be watched for in the lottery; and all the while the round-limbed pet had been growing into a strong youth, who liked many things better than his mother’s caresses, and who had a much keener consciousness of his independent existence than of his relation to her: the lizard’s egg, that white rounded passive prettiness, had become a brown, darting, determined lizard. The mother’s love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities; it is an expansion of the animal existence; it enlarges the imagined range for self to move in: but in after years it can only continue to be joy on the same terms as other long-lived love — that is, by much suppression of self, and power of living in the experience of another. Mrs Transome had darkly felt the pressure of that unchangeable fact. Yet she had clung to the belief that somehow the possession of this son was the best thing she lived for; to believe otherwise would have made her memory too ghastly a companion. Some time or other, by some means, the estate she was struggling to save from the grasp of the law would be Harold’s. Somehow the hated Durfey, the imbecile eldest, who seemed to have become tenacious of a despicable squandering life, would be got rid of; vice might kill him. Meanwhile the estate was burthened: there was no good prospect for any heir. Harold must go and make a career for himself: and this was what he was bent on, with a precocious clearness of perception as to the conditions on which he could hope for any advantages in life. Like most energetic natures, he had a strong faith in his luck; he had been gay at their parting, and had promised to make his fortune; and in spite of past disappointments, Harold’s possible fortune still made some ground for his mother to plant her hopes in. His luck had not failed him; yet nothing had turned out according to her expectations. Her life had been like a spoiled shabby pleasure-day, in which the music and the processions are all missed, and nothing is left at evening but the weariness of striving after what has been failed of. Harold had gone with the Embassy to Constantinople, under the patronage of a high relative, his mother’s cousin; he was to be a diplomatist, and work his way upward in public life. But his luck had taken another shape: he had saved the life of an Armenian banker, who in gratitude had offered him a prospect which his practical mind had preferred to the problematic promises of diplomacy and high born cousinship. Harold had become a merchant and banker at Smyrna; had let the years pass without caring to find the possibility of visiting his early home, and had shown no eagerness to make his life at all familiar to his mother, asking for letters about England, but writing scantily about himself. Mrs Transome had kept up the habit of writing to her son, but gradually the unfruitful years had dulled her hopes and yearnings; increasing anxieties about money had worried her, and she was more sure of being fretted by bad news about her dissolute eldest son than of hearing anything to cheer her from Harold. She had begun to live merely in small immediate cares and occupations, and, like all eager-minded women who advance in life without any activity of tenderness or any large sympathy, she had contracted small rigid habits of thinking and acting, she had her ‘ways’ which must not be crossed, and had learned to fill up the great void of life with giving small orders to tenants, insisting on medicines for infirm cottagers, winning small triumphs in bargains and personal economies, and parrying ill-natured remarks of Lady Debarry’s by lancet-edged epigrams. So her life had gone on till more than a year ago, when the desire which had been so hungry while she was a blooming young mother, was at last fulfilled — at last, when her hair was grey, and her face looked bitter, resdess, and unenjoying, like her life. The news came from Jersey that Durfey, the imbecile son, was dead. Now Harold was heir to the estate; now the wealth he had gained could release the land from its burthens; now he would think it worth while to return home. A change had at last come over her life, and the sunlight breaking the clouds at evening was pleasant, though the sun must sink before long. Hopes, affections, the sweeter part of her memories, started from their wintry sleep, and it once more seemed a great good to have had a second son who in some ways had cost her dearly. But again there were conditions she had not reckoned on. When the good tidings had been sent to Harold, and he had announced that he would return so soon as he could wind up his afEairs, he had for the first time informed his mother that he had been married, that his Greek wife was no longer living, but that he should bring home a litde boy, the finest and most desirable of heirs and grandsons. Harold, seated in his distant Smyrna home, considered that he was taking a rational view of what tbings must have become by this time at the old place in England, when he figured his mother as a good elderly lady, who would necessarily be delighted with the possession on any terms of a healthy grandchild, and would not mind much about the particulars of the long-concealed marriage.
Mrs Transome had tom up that letter in a rage. But in the months which had elapsed before Harold could actually arrive, she had prepared herself as well as she could to suppress all reproaches or queries which her son might resent, and to acquiesce in his evident wishes. The return was still looked for with longing; affection and satisfied pride would again warm her later years. She was ignorant what sort of man Harold had become now, and of course he must be changed in many ways; but though she told herself this, still the image that she knew, the image fondness clung to, necessarily prevailed over the negatives insisted on by her reason.
And so it was, that when she had moved to the door to meet him, she had been sure that she should clasp her son again, and feel that he was the same who had been her boy, her little one, the loved child of her passionate youth. An hour seemed to have changed everything for her. A woman’s hopes are woven of sunbeams; a shadow annihilates them. The shadow which had fallen over Mrs Transome in this first interview with her son was the presentiment of her powerlessness. If things went wrong, if Harold got unpleasantly disposed in a certain direction where her chief dread had always lain, she seemed to foresee that her words would be of no avail. The keenness of her anxiety in this matter had served as insight; and Harold’s rapidity, decision, and indifference to any impressions in others which did not further or impede his own purposes, had made themselves felt by her as much as she would have felt the unmanageable strength of a great bird which had alighted near her, and allowed her to stroke its wing for a moment because food lay near her.
Under the cold weight of these thoughts Mrs Transome shivered. That physical reaction roused her from her reverie, and she could now hear the gende knocking at the door to which she had been deaf before. Notwithstanding her activity and the fewness of her servants, she had never dressed herself without aid; nor would that small, neat, exquisitely clean old woman who now presented herself have wished that her labour should be saved at the expense of such a sacrifice on her lady’s part. The small old woman was Mrs Hickes, the butler’s wife, who acted as housekeeper, lady’s-maid, and superintendent of the kitchen — the large stony scene of inconsiderable cooking. Forty years ago she had entered Mrs Transome’s service, when that lady was beautiful Miss Lingon, and her mistress still called her Denner, as she had done in the old days.
‘The bell has rung, then, Denner, without my hearing it?’ said Mrs Transome, rising.
‘Yes, madame,’ said Denner, reaching from a wardrobe an old black velvet dress trimmed with much mended point, in which Mrs Transome was wont to look queenly of an evening.
Denner had still strong eyes of that shortsighted kind which sees through the narrowest chink between the eye-lashes. The physical contrast between the tall, eagle-faced, dark-eyed lady, and the little peering waidng-woman, who had been round-featured and of pale mealy complexion from her youth up, had doubdess had a strong influence in determining Denner’s feeling towards her mistress, which was of that worshipful sort paid to a goddess in ages when it was not thought necessary or likely that a goddess should be very moral. There were different orders of beings — so ran Denner’s creed — and she belonged to another order than that to which her mistress belonged. She had a mind as sharp as a needle, and would have seen through and through the ridiculous pretensions of a born servant who did not submissively accept the rigid fate which had given her born superiors. She would have called such pretensions the wrigglings of a worm that tried to walk on its tail. There was a tacit understanding that Denner knew all her mistress’s secrets, and her speech was plain and unflattering; yet with wonderful subtlety of instinct she never said anything which Mrs Transome could feel humiliated by, as by a familiarity from a servant who knew too much. Denner idendfied her own dignity with that of her mistress. She was a hard-headed godless little woman, but with a character to be reckoned on as you reckon on the qualities of iron.
Peering into Mrs Transome’s face, she saw clearly that the meeting with the son had been a disappointment in some way. She spoke with a refined accent, in a low, quick, monotonous tone —
‘Mr Harold is drest; he shook me by the hand in the corridor, and was very pleasant.’ ‘What an alteration, Denner! No likeness to me now.’
‘Handsome, though, spite of his being so browned and stout. There’s a fine presence about Mr Harold. I remember you used to say, madam, there were some people you would always know were in the room though they stood round a corner, and others you might never see till you ran against them. That’s as true as truth. And as for likenesses, thirty-five and sixty are not much alike, only to people’s memories.’
Mrs Transome knew perfectly that Denner had divined her thoughts.
‘I don’t know how things will go on now; but it seems something too good to happen that they will go on well. I am afraid of ever expecting anything good again.’
‘That’s weakness, madam. Things don’t happen because they’re bad or good, else all eggs would be addled or none at all, and at the most it is but six to the dozen. There’s good chances and bad chances, and nobody’s luck is pulled only by one string.’
‘What a woman you are, Denner I You talk like a French infidel. It seems to me you are afraid of nothing. I have been full of fears all my life — always seeing something or other hanging over me that I couldn’t bear to happen.’
‘Well, madam, put a good face on it, and don’t seem to be on the look-out for crows, else you’ll set the other people watching. Here you have a rich son come home, and the debts will all be paid, and you have your health and can ride about, and you’ve such a face and figure, and will have if you live to be eighty, that everybody is cap in hand to you before they know who you are — let me fasten up your veil a little higher: there’s a good deal of pleasure in life for you yet.’
‘Nonsense I there’s no pleasure for old women, unless they get it out of tormenting other people. What are your pleasures, Denner — besides being a slave to me?’
‘Oh, there’s pleasure in knowing one’s not a fool, like half the people one sees about. And managing one’s husband is some pleasure; and doing all one’s business well Why, if I’ve only got some orange flowers to candy, I shouldn’t like to die till I see them all right. Then there’s the sunshine now and then; I like that, as the cats do. I look upon it, life is like our game at whist, when Banks and his wife come to the still-room of an evening. I don’t enjoy the game much, but I like to play my cards well, and see what will be the end of it; and I want to see you make the best of your hand, madam, for your luck has been mine these forty years now. But I must go and see how Kitty dishes up the dinner, unless you have any more commands.’ ‘No, Denner; I am going down immediately.’
As Mrs Transome descended the stone staircase in her old black velvet and point, her appearance justified Denner’s personal compliment. She had that high-born imperious air which would have marked her as an object of hatred and reviling by a revolutionary mob. Her person was too typical of social distinctions to be passed by with indifference by any one; it would have fitted an empress in her own right, who had had to rule in spite of faction, to dare the violation of treaties and dread retributive invasions, to grasp after new territories, to be defiant in desperate circumstances, and to feel a woman’s hunger of the heart for ever unsatisfied. Yet Mrs Transome’s cares and occupations had not been at all of an imperial sort. For thirty years she had led the monotonous narrowing life which used to be the lot of our poorer gentry, who never went to town, and were probably not on speaking terms with two out of the five families whose parks lay within the distance of a drive. When she was young she had been thought wonderfully clever and accomplished, and had been rather ambitious of intellectual superiority — had secretly picked out for private reading the lighter parts of dangerous French authors — and in company had been able to talk of Mr Burke’s style, or of Chateaubriand’s eloquence — had laughed at the Lyrical Ballads and admired Mr Southey’s ‘Thalaba’. She always thought that the dangerous French writers were wicked, and that her reading of them was a sin; but many sinful things were highly agreeable to her, and many things which she did not doubt to be good and true were dull and meaningless. She found ridicule of Biblical characters very amusing, and she was interested in stories of illicit passion: but she believed all the while that truth and safety lay in due attendance on prayers and sermons, in the admirable doctrines and ritual of the Church of England, equally remote from Puritanism and Popery; in fact, in such a view of this world and the next as would preserve the existing arrangements of English society quite unshaken, keeping down the obtrusiveness of the vulgar and the discontent of the poor. The history of the Jews, she knew, ought to be preferred to any profane history; the Pagans, of course, were vicious, and their religions quite nonsensical, considered as religions — but classical learning came from the Pagans; the Greeks were famous for sculpture; the Italians for painting; the middle ages were dark and papistical; but now Christianity went hand in hand with civilization, and the providential government of the world, though a little confused and entangled in foreign countries, in our favoured land was clearly seen to be carried forward on Tory and Church of England principles, sustained by the succession of the House of Brunswick, and by sound English divines. For Miss Lingon had had a superior governess, who held that a woman should be able to write a good letter, and to express herself with propriety on general subjects. And it is astonishing how effective this education appeared in a handsome girl, who sat supremely well on horseback, sang and played a little, painted small figures in water-colours, had a naughty sparkle in her eyes when she made a daring quotation, and an air of serious dignity when she recited something from her store of correct opinions. But however such a stock of ideas may be made to tell in elegant society, and during a few seasons in town, no amount of bloom and beauty can make them a perennial source of interest in things not personal; and the notion that what is true and, in general, good for mankind, is stupid and drug-like, is not a safe theoretic basis in circumstances of temptation and difficulty. Mrs Transome had been in her bloom before this century began, and in the long painful years since then, what she had once regarded as her knowledge and accomplishments had become as valueless as old-fashioned stucco ornaments, of which the substance was never worth anything, while the form is no longer to the taste of any living mortal. Crosses, mortifications, money-cares, conscious blameworthiness, had changed the aspect of the world for her: there was anxiety in the morning sunlight; there was unkind triumph or disapproving pity in the glances of greeting neighbours; there was advancing age, and a contracting prospect in the changing seasons as they came and went. And what could then sweeten the days to a hungry much-exacting self like Mrs Transome’s? Under protracted ill every living creature will find something that makes a comparative ease, and even when life seems woven of pain, will convert the fainter pang into a desire. Mrs Transome, whose imperious will had availed little to ward off the great evils of her life, found the opiate for her discontent in the exertion of her will about smaller things. She was not cruel, and could not enjoy thoroughly what she called the old woman’s pleasure of tormenting; but she liked every little sign of power her lot had left her. She liked that a tenant should stand bareheaded below her as she sat on horseback. She liked to insist that work done without her orders should be undone from beginning to end. She liked to be curtsied and bowed to by all the congregation as she walked up the little barn of a church. She liked to change a labourer’s medicine fetched from the doctor, and substitute a prescription of her own. If she had only been more haggard and less majestic, those who had glimpses of her outward life might have said she was a tyrannical, griping harridan, with a tongue like a razor. No one said exactly that; but they never said anything like the full truth about her, or divined what was hidden under that outward life — a woman’s keen sensibility and dread, which lay screened behind all her petty habits and narrow notions, as some quivering thing with eyes and throbbing heart may lie crouching behind withered rubbish. The sensibility and dread had palpitated all the faster in the prospect of her son’s return; and now that she had seen him, she said to herself, in her bitter way, ‘It is a lucky eel that escapes skinning. The best happiness I shall ever know, will be to escape the worst misery.’
A jolly parson of the good old stock,
By birth a gentleman, yet homely too,
Suiting his phrase to Hodge and Margery
Whom he once christened, and has married since.
A little lax in doctrine and in life,
Not thinking God was captious in such things
As what a man might drink on holidays,
But holding true religion was to do
As you’d be done by — which could never mean
That he should preach three sermons in a week.
HAROLD TRANSOME did not choose to spend the whole evening with his mother. It was his habit to compress a great deal of effective conversation into a short space of time, asking rapidly all the questions he wanted to get answered, and diluting no subject with irrelevancies, paraphrase, or repetitions. He volunteered no information about himself and his past life at Smyrna, but answered pleasantly enough, though briefly, whenever his mother asked for any detail. He was evidently ill-satisfied as to his palate, trying red pepper to everything, then asking if there were any relishing sauces in the house, and when Hickes brought various home-filled bottles, trying several, finding them failures, and finally falling back from his plate in despair. Yet he remained good-humoured, saying something to his father now and then for the sake of being kind, and looking on with a pitying shrug as he saw him watch Hickes cutting his food. Mrs Transome thought with some bitterness that Harold showed more feeling for her feeble husband who had never cared in the least about him, than for her, who had given him more than the usual share of mother’s love. An hour after dinner, Harold, who had already been turning over the leaves of his mother’s account-books, said —
‘I shall just cross the park to the parsonage to see my uncle Lingon.’ ‘Very well. He can answer more questions for you.’
‘Yes,’ said Harold, quite deaf to the innuendo, and accepting the words as a simple statement of the fact. ‘I want to hear all about the game and the North Loamshire Hunt. I’m fond of sport; we had a great deal of it at Smyrna, and it keeps down my fat.’
The Reverend John Lingon became very talkative over his second bottle of port, which was opened on his nephew’s arrival. He was not curious about the manners of Smyrna, or about Harold’s experience, but he unbosomed himself very freely as to what he himself liked and disliked, which of the farmers he suspected of killing the foxes, what game he had bagged that very morning, what spot he would recommend as a new cover, and the comparative flatness of all existing sport compared with cock-fighting, under which Old England had been prosperous and glorious, while, so far as he could see, it had gained little by the abolition of a practice which sharpened the faculties of men, gratified the instincts of the fowl, and carried out the designs of heaven in its admirable device of spurs. From these main topics which made his points of departure and return, he rambled easily enough at any new suggestion or query; so that when Harold got home at a late hour, he was conscious of having gathered from amidst the pompous full-toned triviality of his uncle’s chat some impressions which were of practical importance. Among the rector’s dislikes, it appeared, was Mr Matthew Jermyn.
‘A fat-handed, glib-tongued fellow, with a scented cambric handkerchief; one of your educated low-bred fellows; a foundling who got his Latin for nothing at Christ’s Hospital; one of your middle-class upstarts who want to rank with gentlemen, and think they’ll do it with kid gloves and new furniture.’
But since Harold meant to stand for the county, Mr Lingon was equally emphatic as to the necessity of his not quarrelling with Jermyn till the election was over. Jermyn must be his agent; Harold must wink hard till he found himself safely returned; and even then it might be well to let Jermyn drop gently and raise no scandal. He himself had no quarrel with the fellow: a clergyman should have no quarrels, and he made it a point to be able to take wine with any man he met at table. And as to the estate, and his sister’s going too much by Jermyn’s advice, he never meddled with business: it was not his duty as a clergyman. That, he considered, was the meaning of Melchisedec and the tithe, a subject into which he had gone to some depth thirty years ago, when he preached the Visitation sermon.
The discovery that Harold meant to stand on the Liberal side — nay, that he boldly declared himself a Radical — was rather startling; but to his uncle’s good-humour, beatified by the sipping of port-wine, nothing could seem highly objectionable, provided it did not disturb that operation. In the course of half an hour he had brought himself to see that anything really worthy to be called British Toryism had been entirely extinct since the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel had passed the Catholic Emancipation Bill; that Whiggery, with its rights of man stopping short at ten-pound householders, and its policy of pacifying a wild beast with a bite, was a ridiculous monstrosity; that therefore, since an honest man could not call himself a Tory, which it was, in fact, as impossible to be now as to fight for the old Pretender, and could still less become that execrable monstrosity a Whig, there remained but one course open to him. ‘Why, lad, if the world was turned into a swamp, I suppose we should leave off shoes and stockings, and walk about like cranes’ — whence it followed plainly enough that, in these hopeless times, nothing was left to men of sense and good family but to retard the national ruin by declaring themselves Radical, and take the inevitable process of changing everything out of the hands of beggarly demagogues and purse-proud tradesmen. It is true the rector was helped to this chain of reasoning by Harold’s remarks; but he soon became quite ardent in asserting the conclusion.
‘If the mob can’t be turned back, a man of family must try and head the mob, and save a few homes and hearths, and keep the country up on its last legs as long as he can. And you’re a man of family, my lad — dash it! You’re a Lingon, whatever else you may be, and I’ll stand by you. I’ve no great interest; I’m a poor parson. I’ve been forced to give up hunting; my pointers and a glass of good wine are the only decencies becoming my station that I can allow myself. But I’ll give you my countenance — I’ll stick to you as my nephew. There’s no need for me to change sides exactly. I was born a Tory, and I shall never be a bishop. But if anybody says you’re in the wrong, I shall say, “My nephew is in the right; he has turned Radical to save his country.” If William Pitt had been living now, he’d have done the same; for what did he say when he was dying? Not “O save my party!” but “O save my country, heaven!” That was what they dinned in our ears about Peel and the duke; and now I’ll turn it round upon them. They shall be hoist with their own petard. Yes, yes, I’ll stand by you.’
Harold did not feel sure that his uncle would thoroughly retain this satisfactory thread of argument in the uninspired hours of the morning; but the old gentleman was sure to take the facts easily in the end, and there was no fear of family coolness or quarrelling on this side. Harold was glad of it. He was not to be turned aside from any course he had chosen; but he disliked all quarrelling as an unpleasant expenditure of energy that could have no good practical result. He was at once active and luxurious; fond of mastery, and good-natured enough to wish that every one about him should like his mastery; not caring greatly to know other people’s thoughts, and ready to despise them as blockheads if their thoughts differed from his, and yet solicitous that they should have no colourable reason for slight thoughts about him. The blockheads must be forced to respect him. Hence, in proportion as he foresaw that his equals in the neighbourhood would be indignant with him for his political choice, he cared keenly about making a good figure before them in every other way. His conduct as a landholder was to be judicious, his establishment was to be kept up generously, his imbecile father treated with careful regard, his family relations entirely without scandal. He knew that affairs had been unpleasant in his youth — that there had been ugly lawsuits — and that his scapegrace brother Durfey had helped to lower still farther the depressed condition of the family. All this must be retrieved, now that events had made Harold the head of the Transome name.
Jermyn must be used for the election, and after that, if he must be got rid of, it would be well to shake him loose quietly: his uncle was probably right on both those points. But Harold’s expectation that he should want to get rid of Jermyn was founded on other reasons than his scented handkerchief and his charity-school Latin.
If the lawyer had been presuming on Mrs Transome’s ignorance as a woman, and on the stupid rakishness of the original heir, the new heir would prove to him that he had calculated rashly. Otherwise, Harold had no prejudice against him. In his boyhood and youth he had seen Jermyn frequenting Transome Court, but had regarded him with that total indifference with which youngsters are apt to view those who neither deny them pleasures nor give them any. Jermyn used to smile at him, and speak to him affably; but Harold, half proud, half shy, got away from such patronage as soon as possible: he knew Jermyn was a man of business; his father, his uncle, and Sir Maximus Debarry did not regard him as a gentleman and their equal. He had known no evil of the man; but he saw now that if he were really a covetous upstart, there had been a temptation for him in the management of the Transome affairs; and it was clear that the estate was in a bad condition.
When Mr Jermyn was ushered into the breakfast-room the next morning, Harold found him surprisingly little altered by the fifteen years. He was grey, but still remarkably handsome; fat, but tall enough to bear that trial to man’s dignity. There was as strong a suggestion of toilette about him as if he had been five-and-twenty instead of nearly sixty. He chose always to dress in black, and was especially addicted to black satin waistcoats, which carried out the general sleekness of his appearance; and this, together with his white, fat, but beautifully-shaped hands, which he was in the habit of rubbing gently on his entrance into a room, gave him very much the air of a lady’s physician. Harold remembered with some amusement his uncle’s dislike of those conspicuous hands; but as his own were soft and dimpled, and as he too was given to the innocent practice of rubbing those members, his suspicions were not yet deepened.
‘I congratulate you, Mrs Transome,’ said Jermyn, with a soft and deferential smile, ‘all the more,’ he added, turning towards Harold, ‘now I have the pleasure of actually seeing your son. I am glad to perceive that an Eastern climate has not been unfavourable to him.’
‘No,’ said Harold, shaking Jermyn’s hand carelessly, and speaking with more than his usual rapid brusqueness, ‘the question is, whether the English climate will agree with me. It’s deuced shifting and damp: and as for the food, it would be the finest thing in the world for this country if the southern cooks would change their religion, get persecuted, and fly to England, as the old silk-weavers did.’
‘There are plenty of foreign cooks for those who are rich enough to pay for them, I suppose,’ said Mrs Transome, ‘but they are unpleasant people to have about one’s house.’
‘Gad! I don’t think so,’ said Harold.
‘The old servants are sure to quarrel with them.’
‘That’s no concern of mine. The old servants will have to put up with my man Dominic, who will show them how to cook and do everything else, in a way that will rather astonish them.’
‘Old people are not so easily taught to change all their ways, Harold.’
‘Well, they can give up and watch the young ones,’ said Harold, thinking only at that moment of old Mrs Hickes and Dominic. But his mother was not thinking of them only.
‘You have a valuable servant, it seems,’ said Jermyn, who understood Mrs Transome better than her son did, and wished to smoothen the current of their dialogue.
‘O! one of those wonderful southern fellows that make one’s life easy. He’s of no country in particular. I don’t know whether he’s most of a Jew, a Greek, an Italian, or a Spaniard. He speaks five or six languages, one as well as another. He’s cook, valet, major-domo, and secretary all in one; and what’s more, he’s an affectionate fellow — I can trust to his attachment. That’s a sort of human specimen that doesn’t grow here in England, I fancy. I should have been badly off if I could not have brought Dominic.’
They sat down to breakfast with such slight talk as this going on. Each of the party was preoccupied and uneasy. Harold’s mind was busy constructing probabilities about what he should discover of Jermyn’s mismanagement or dubious application of funds, and the sort of self-command he must in the worst case exercise in order to use the man as long as he wanted him. Jermyn was closely observing Harold with an unpleasant sense that there was an expression of acuteness and determination about him which would make him formidable. He would certainly have preferred at that moment that there had been no second heir of the Transome name to come back upon him from the East. Mrs Transome was not observing the two men; rather, her hands were cold, and her whole person shaken by their presence; she seemed to hear and see what they said and did with preternatural acuteness, and yet she was also seeing and hearing what had been said and done many years before, and feeling a dim terror about the future. There were piteous sensibilities in this faded woman, who thirty-four years ago, in the splendour of her bloom, had been imperious to one of these men, and had rapturously pressed the other as an infant to her bosom, and now knew that she was of little consequence to either of them.
‘Well, what are the prospects about the election?’ said Harold, as the breakfast was advancing. ‘There are two Whigs and one Conservative likely to be in the field, I know. What is your opinion of the chances?’
Mr Jermyn had a copious supply of words, which often led him into periphrase, but he cultivated a hesitating stammer, which, with a handsome impassiveness of face, except when he was smiling at a woman, or when the latent savageness of his nature was thoroughly roused, he had found useful in many relations, especially in business. No one could have found out that he was not at his ease. ‘My opinion,’ he replied, ‘is in a state of balance at present. This division of the county, you are aware, contains one manufacturing town of the first magnitude, and several smaller ones. The manufacturing interest is widely dispersed. So far — a — there is a presumption — a — in favour of the two Liberal candidates. Still with a careful canvass of the agricultural districts, such as those we have round us at Treby Magna, I think — a — the auguries — a — would not be unfavourable to the return of a Conservative. A fourth candidate of good position, who should coalesce with Mr Debarry. — a —’
Here Mr Jermyn hesitated for the third time, and Harold broke in.
‘That will not be my line of action, so we need not discuss it. If I put up it will be as a Radical; and I fancy, in any county that would return Whigs there would be plenty of voters to be combed off by a Radical who offered himself with good pretensions.’
There was the slightest possible quiver discernible across Jermyn’s face. Otherwise he sat as he had done before, with his eyes fixed abstractedly on the frill of a ham before him, and his hand trifling with his fork. He did not answer immediately, but when he did, he looked round steadily at Harold.
‘I’m delighted to perceive that you have kept yourself so thoroughly acquainted with English politics.’
‘O, of course,’ said Harold, impatiently. ‘I’m aware how things have been going on in England. I always meant to come back ultimately. I suppose I know the state of Europe as well as if I’d been stationary at Little Treby for the last fifteen years. If a man goes to the East, people seem to think he gets turned into something like the one-eyed calender in the Arabian Nights.”
‘Yet I should think there are some things which people who have been stationary at Little Treby could tell you, Harold,’ said Mrs Transome. ‘It did not signify about your holding Radical opinions at Smyma; but you seem not to imagine how your putting up as a Radical will affect your position here, and the position of your family. No one will visit you. And then — the sort of people who will support you! You really have no idea what an impression it conveys when you say you are a Radical. There are none of our equals who will not feel that you have disgraced yourself. ‘Pooh!’ said Harold, rising and walking along the room.
But Mrs Transome went on with growing anger in her voice — ‘It seems to me that a man owes something to his birth and station, and has no right to take up this notion or the other, just as it suits his fancy; still less to work at the overthrow of his class. That was what everyone said of Lord Grey, and my family at least is as good as Lord Grey’s. You have wealth now, and might distinguish yourself in the county; and if you had been true to your colours as a gentleman, you would have had all the greater opportunity because the times are so bad. The Debarrys and Lord Wyvem would have set all the more store by you. For my part, I can’t conceive what good you propose to yourself. I only entreat you to think again before you take any decided step.’
‘Mother,’ said Harold, not angrily or with any raising of his voice, but in a quick, impatient manner, as if the scene must be got through as quickly as possible; ‘it is natural that you should think in this way. Women, very properly, don’t change their views, but keep to the notions in which they have been brought up. It doesn’t signify what they think — they are not called upon to judge or to act. You must really leave me to take my own course in these matters, which properly belong to men. Beyond that, I will gratify any wish you choose to mention. You shall have a new carriage and a pair of bays all to yourself; you shall have the house done up in first-rate style, and I am not thinking of marrying. But let us understand that there shall be no further collision between us on subjects in which I must be master of my own actions.’
‘And you will put the crown to the mortifications of my life, Harold. I don’t know who would be a mother if she could foresee what a slight thing she will be to her son when she is old.’
Mrs Transome here walked out of the room by the nearest way — the glass door open towards the terrace. Mr Jermyn had risen too, and his hands were on the back of his chair. He looked quite impassive: it was not the first time he had seen Mrs Transome angry; but now, for the first time, he thought the outburst of her temper would be useful for him. She, poor woman, knew quite well that she had been unwise, and that she had been making herself disagreeable to Harold to no purpose. But half the sorrows of women would be averted if they could repress the speech they know to be useless; nay, the speech they have resolved not to utter. Harold continued his walking a moment longer, and then said to Jermyn —
‘You smoke?’
‘No, I always defer to the ladies. Mrs Jermyn is peculiarly sensitive on such matters, and doesn’t like tobacco.’
Harold, who, underneath all the tendencies which had made him a Liberal, had intense personal pride, thought, ‘Confound the fellow — with his Mrs Jermyn! Does he think we are on a footing for me to know anytlung about his wife?’
‘Well, I took my hookah before breakfast,’ he said aloud; ‘so, if you like, we’ll go into the library. My father never gets up till mid-day, I find.’
‘Sit down, sit down,’ said Harold, as they entered the handsome, spacious library. But he himself continued to stand before a map of the county which he had opened from a series of rollers occupying a compartment among the bookshelves. ‘The first question, Mr Jermyn, now you know my intentions, is, whether you will undertake to be my agent in this election, and help me through? There’s no time to be lost, and I don’t want to lose my chance, as I may not have another for seven years. I understand,’ he went on, flashing a look straight at Jermyn, ‘that you have not taken any conspicuous course in politics; and I know that Labron is agent for the Debarrys.’
‘O— a — my dear sir — a man necessarily has his political convictions, but of what use is it for a professional man — a — of some education, to talk of them in a little country town? There really is no comprehension of public questions in such places. Party feeling, indeed, was quite asleep here before the agitation about the Catholic Relief Bill. It is true that I concurred with our incumbent in getting up a petition against the Reform Bill, but I did not state my reasons. The weak points in that Bill are — a — too palpable, and I fancy you and I should not differ much on that head. The fact is, when I knew that you were to come back to us, I kept myself in reserve, though I was much pressed by the friends of Sir James Clement, the Ministerial candidate, who is —’
‘However, you will act for me — that’s settled?’ said Harold.
‘Certainly,’ said Jermyn, inwardly irritated by Harold’s rapid manner of cutting him short.
‘Which of the Liberal candidates, as they call themselves, has the better chance, eh?’
‘I was going to observe that Sir James Clement has not so good a chance as Mr Garstin, supposing that a third Liberal candidate presents himself. There are two senses in which a politician can be liberal’ — here Mr Jermyn smiled — ‘Sir James Clement is a poor baronet, hoping for an appointment, and can’t be expected to be liberal in that wider sense which commands majorities.’
‘I wish this man were not so much of a talker,’ thought Harold; ‘he’ll bore me. We shall see,’ he said aloud, ‘what can be done in the way of combination. I’ll come down to your office after one o’clock, if it will suit you?’
‘Perfectly.’
‘Ah, and you’ll have all the lists and papers and necessary information ready for me there. I must get up a dinner for the tenants, and we can invite whom we like besides the tenants. Just now, I’m going over one of the farms on hand with the bailiff. By the way, that’s a desperately bad business, having three farms unlet — how comes that about, eh?’
‘That is precisely what I wanted to say a few words about to you. You have observed already how strongly Mrs Transome takes certain things to heart. You can imagine that she has been severely tried in many ways. Mr Transome’s want of health; Mr Durfey’s habits — a —’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘She is a woman for whom I naturally entertain the highest respect, and she has had hardly any gratification for many years, except the sense of having affairs to a certain extent in her own hands. She objects to changes; she will not have a new style of tenants; she likes the old stock of farmers who milk their own cows, and send their younger daughters out to service: all this makes it difficult to do the best with the estate. I am aware things are not as they ought to be, for, in point of fact, an improved agricultural management is a matter in which I take considerable interest, and the farm which I myself hold on the estate you will see, I think, to be in a superior condition. But Mrs Transome is a woman of strong feeling, and I would urge you, my dear sir, to make the changes which you have, but which I had not, the right to insist on, as little painful to her as possible.’
‘I shall know what to do, sir, never fear,’ said Harold, much offended.
‘You will pardon, I hope, a perhaps undue freedom of suggestion from a man of my age, who has been so long in a close connection with the family affairs — a — I have never considered that connection simply in the light of a business — a —’
‘Damn him, I’ll soon let him know that I do,’ thought Harold. But in proportion as he found Jermyn’s manners annoying, he felt the necessity of controlling himself. He despised all persons who defeated their own projects by the indulgence of momentary impulses.
‘I understand, I understand,’ he said aloud. ‘You’ve had more awkward business on your hands than usually falls to the share of the family lawyer. We shall set everything right by degrees. But now as to the canvassing. I’ve made arrangements with a first-rate man in London, who understands these matters thoroughly — a solicitor of course — he has carried no end of men into parliament. I’ll engage him to meet us at Duffield — say when?’
The conversation after this was driven carefully clear of all angles, and ended with determined amicableness. When Harold, in his ride an hour or two afterwards, encountered his uncle shouldering a gun, and followed by one black and one liver-spotted pointer, his muscular person with its red eagle face set off by a velveteen jacket and leather leggings, Mr Lingon’s first question was —
‘Well, lad, how have you got on with Jermyn?’
‘O, I don’t think I shall like the fellow. He’s a sort of amateur gentleman. But I must make use of him. I expect whatever I get out of him will only be something short of fair pay for what he has got out of us. But I shall see.’
‘Ay, ay, use his gun to bring down your game, and after that beat the thief with the butt-end. That’s wisdom and justice and pleasure all in one — talking between ourselves, as uncle and nephew. But I say, Harold, I was going to tell you, now I come to think of it, this is rather a nasty business, your calling yourself a Radical. I’ve been turning it over in after-dinner speeches, but it looks awkward — it’s not what people are used to — it wants a good deal of Latin to make it go down. I shall be worried about it at the sessions, and I can think of nothing neat enough to carry about in my pocket by way of answer.’
‘Nonsense, uncle; I remember what a good speechifier you always were: you’ll never be at a loss. You only want a few more evenings to think of it.’
‘But you’ll not be attacking the church and the institutions of the country — you’ll not be going to those lengths; you’ll keep up the bulwarks, and so on, eh?’
‘No, I shan’t attack the church — only the incomes of the bishops, perhaps, to make them eke out the incomes of the poor clergy.’
‘Well, well, I have no objection to that. Nobody likes our bishop: he’s all Greek and greediness; too proud to dine with his own father. You may pepper the bishops a little. But you’ll respect the constitution handed down, etc. — and you’ll rally round the throne — and the king, God bless him, and the usual toasts, eh?’
‘Of course, of course. I am a Radical only in rooting out abuses.’
‘That’s the word I wanted, my lad!’ said the vicar, slapping Harold’s knee. ‘That’s a spool to wind a speech on. Abuses is the very word; and if anybody shows himself offended, he’ll put the cap on for himself.’
‘I remove the rotten timbers,’ said Harold, inwardly amused, ‘and substitute fresh oak, that’s all.’
‘Well done, my boy! By George, you’ll be a speaker. But, I say, Harold, I hope you’ve got a little Latin left. This young Debarry is a tremendous fellow at the classics, and walks on stilts to any length. He’s one of the new Conservatives. Old Sir Maximus doesn’t understand him at all.’
‘That won’t do at the hustings,’ said Harold. ‘He’ll get knocked off his stilts pretty quickly there.’
‘Bless me! it’s astonishing how well you’re up in the affairs of the country, my boy. But rub up a few quotations — “Quod turpe bonis decebat Crispinum” — and that sort of thing — just to show Debarry what you could do if you liked. But you want to ride on?’ ‘Yes; I have an appointment at Treby. Good-bye.’
‘He’s a cleverish chap,’ muttered the vicar, as Harold rode away. ‘When he’s had plenty of English exercise, and brought out his knuckle a bit, he’ll be a Lingon again as he used to be. I must go and see how Arabella takes his being a Radical. It’s a little awkward; but a clergyman must keep peace in a family. Confound it! I’m not bound to love Toryism better than my own flesh and blood, and the manor I shoot over. That’s a heathenish, Brutus-like sort of thing, as if Providence couldn’t take care of the country without my quarrelling with my own sister’s son!’
’Twas town, yet country too; you felt the warmth
Of clustering houses in the wintry time;
Supped with a friend, and went by lantern home.
Yet from your chamber window you could hear
The tiny bleat of new-yeaned lambs, or see
The children bend beside the hedgerow banks
To pluck the primroses.
TREBY MAGNA, on which the Reform Bill had thrust the new honour of being a polling-place, had been, at the beginning of the century, quite a typical old market-town, lying in pleasant sleepiness among green pastures, with a rush-fringed river meandering through them. Its principal street had various handsome and tall-windowed brick houses with walled gardens behind them; and at the end, where it widened into the market-place, there was the cheerful rough-stuccoed front of that excellent inn, the Marquis of Granby, where the farmers put up their gigs, not only on fair and market days, but on exceptional Sundays when they came to church. And the church was one of those fine old English structures worth travelling to see, standing in a broad churchyard with a line of solemn yew-trees beside it, and lifting a majestic tower and spire far above the red-and-purple roofs of the town. It was not large enough to hold all the parishioners of a parish which stretched over distant villages and hamlets; but then they were never so unreasonable as to wish to be all in at once, and had never complained that the space of a large side-chapel was taken up by the tombs of the Debarrys, and shut in by a handsome iron screen. For when the black Benedictines ceased to pray and chant in this church, when the Blessed Virgin and St Gregory were expelled, the Debarrys, as lords of the manor, naturally came next to Providence and took the place of the saints. Long before that time, indeed, there had been a Sir Maximus Debarry who had been at the fortifying of the old castle, which now stood in ruins in the midst of the green pastures, and with its sheltering wall towards the north made an excellent strawyard for the pigs of Wace & Co., brewers of the celebrated Treby beer. Wace & Co. did not stand alone in the town as prosperous traders on a large scale, to say nothing of those who had retired from business; and in no country town of the same small size as Treby was there a larger proportion of families who had handsome sets of china without handles, hereditary punchbowls, and large silver ladles with a Queen Anne’s guinea in the centre. Such people naturally took tea and supped together frequently; and as there was no professional man or tradesman in Treby who was not connected by business, if not by blood, with the farmers of the district, the richer sort of these were much invited, and gave invitations in their turn. They played at whist, ate and drank generously, praised Mr Pitt and the war as keeping up prices and religion, and were very humorous about each other’s property, having much the same coy pleasure in allusions to their secret ability to purchase, as blushing lasses sometimes have in jokes about their secret preferences. The rector was always of the Debarry family, associated only with county people, and was much respected for his affability; a clergyman who would have taken tea with the townspeople would have given a dangerous shock to the mind of a Treby church-man.
Such was the old-fashioned, grazing, brewing, woolpacking, cheese-loading life of Treby Magna, until there befell new conditions, complicating its relating with the rest of the world, and gradually awakening in it that higher consciousness which is known to bring higher pains. First came the canal; next, the working of the coal-mines at Sproxton, two miles off the town; and, thirdly, the discovery of a saline spring, which suggested to a too constructive brain the possibility of turning Treby Magna into a fashionable watering-place. So daring an idea was not originated by a native Trebian, but by a young lawyer who came from a distance, knew the dictionary by heart, and was probably an illegitimate son of somebody or other. The idea, although it promised an increase of wealth to the town, was not well received at first; ladies objected to seeing ‘objects’ drawn about in hand-carriages, the doctor foresaw the advent of unsound practitioners, and most retail tradesmen concurred with him that new doings were usually for the advantage of new people. The more unanswerable reasons urged that Treby had prospered without baths, and it was yet to be seen how it would prosper with them; while a report that the proposed name for them was Bethesda Spa, threatened to give the whole affair a blasphemous aspect. Even Sir Maximus Debarry, who was to have an unprecedented return for the thousands he would lay out on a pump-room and hotel, regarded the thing as a little too new, and held back for some time. But the persuasive powers of the young lawyer, Mr Matthew Jermyn, together with the opportune opening of a stone-quarry, triumphed at last; the handsome buildings were erected, an excellent guide-book and descriptive cards, surmounted by vignettes, were printed, and Treby Magna became conscious of certain facts in its own history, of which it had previously been in contented ignorance.
But it was all in vain. The Spa, for some mysterious reason, did not succeed. Some attributed the failure to the coal-mines and the canal, others to the peace, which had had ruinous effects on the country, and others, who disliked Jermyn, to the original folly of the plan. Among these last was Sir Maximus himself, who never forgave the too persuasive attorney: it was Jermyn’s fault not only that a useless hotel had been built, but that he, Sir Maximus, being straitened for money, had at last let the building, with the adjacent land lying on the river, on a long lease, on the supposition that it was to be turned into a benevolent college, and had seen himself subsequently powerless to prevent its being turned into a tape manufactory — a bitter thing to any gentleman, and especially to the representative of one of the oldest families in England.
In this way it happened that Treby Magna gradually passed from being simply a respectable market-town — the heart of a great rural district, where the trade was only such as had close relations with the local landed interest — and took on the more complex life brought by mines and manufactures, which belong more directly to the great circulating system of the nation than to the local system to which they have been superadded; and in this way it was that Trebian Dissent gradually altered its character. Formerly it had been of a quiescent, well-to-do kind, represented architecturally by a small, venerable, dark-pewed chapel, built by Presbyterians, but long occupied by a sparse congregation of Independents, who were as little moved by doctrinal zeal as their church-going neighbours, and did not feel themselves deficient in religious liberty, inasmuch as they were not hindered from occasionally slumbering in their pews, and were not obliged to go regularly to the weekly prayer-meeting. But when stone-pits and coal-pits made new hamlets that threatened to spread up to the very town, when the tape-weavers came with their news-reading inspectors and book-keepers, the Independent chapel began to be filled with eager men and women, to whom the exceptional possession of religious truth was the condition which reconciled them to a meagre existence, and made them feel in secure alliance with the unseen but supreme rule of a world in which their own visible part was small. There were Dissenters in Treby now who could not be regarded by the church people in the light of old neighbours to whom the habit of going to chapel was an innocent, unenviable inheritance along with a particular house and garden, a tanyard, or a grocery business — Dissenters who, in their turn, without meaning to be in the least abusive, spoke of the high-bred rector as a blind leader of the blind. And Dissent was not the only thing that the times had altered; prices had fallen, poor-rates had risen, rent and tithe were not elastic enough, and the farmer’s fat sorrow had become lean; he began to speculate on causes, and to trace things back to that causeless mystery, the cessation of one-pound notes. Thus, when political agitation swept in a great current through the country, Treby Magna was prepared to vibrate. The Catholic Emancipation Bill opened the eyes of neighbours, and made them aware how very injurious they were to each other and to the welfare of mankind generally. Mr Tiliot, the church spirit-merchant, knew now that Mr Nuttwood, the obliging grocer, was one of those Dissenters, Deists, Socinians, Papists and Radicals, who were in league to destroy the constitution. A retired old London tradesman, who was believed to understand politics, said that thinking people must wish George the Third alive again in all his early vigour of mind; and even the farmers became less materialistic in their view of causes, and referred much to the agency of the devil and the Irish Romans. The rector, the Rev. Augustus Debarry, really a fine specimen of the old-fashioned aristocratic clergyman, preaching short sermons, understanding business, and acting liberally about his tithe, had never before found himself in collision with Dissenters; but now he began to feel that these people were a nuisance in the parish, that his brother Sir Maximus must take care lest they should get land to build more chapels, and that it might not have been a bad thing if the law had furnished him as a magistrate with a power of putting a stop to the political sermons of the Independent preacher, which, in their way, were as pernicious sources of intoxication as the beerhouses. The Dissenters, on their side, were not disposed to sacrifice the cause of truth and freedom to a temporizing mildness of language; but they defended themselves from the charge of religious indifference, and solemnly disclaimed any lax expectations that Catholics were likely to be saved — urging, on the contrary, that they were not too hopeful about Protestants, who adhered to a bloated and worldly prelacy. Thus Treby Magna, which had lived quietly through the great earthquakes of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, which had remained unmoved by the Rights of Man, and saw little in Mr Cobbett’s Weekly Register ‘ except that he held eccentric views about potatoes, began at last to know the higher pains of a dim political consciousness; and the development had been greatly helped by the recent agitation about the Reform Bill. Tory, Whig, and Radical did not perhaps become clearer in their definition of each other; but the names seemed to acquire so strong a stamp of honour or infamy, that definitions would only have weakened the impression. As to the short and easy method of judging opinions by the personal character of those who held them, it was liable to be much frustrated in Treby. It so happened in that particular town that the Reformers were not all of them large-hearted patriots or ardent lovers of justice; indeed, one of them, in the very midst of the agitation, was detected in using unequal scales — a fact to which many Tories pointed with disgust as showing plainly enough, without further argument, that the cry for a change in the representative system was hollow trickery. Again, the Tories were far from being all oppressors, disposed to grind down the working classes into serfdom; and it was undeniable that the inspector at the tape manufactory, who spoke with much eloquence on the extension of the suffrage, was a more tyrannical personage than open-handed Mr Wace, whose chief political tenet was, that it was all nonsense giving men votes when they had no stake in the country. On the other hand, there were some Tories who gave themselves a great deal of leisure to abuse hypocrites, Radicals, Dissenters, and atheism generally, but whose inflamed faces, theistic swearing, and frankness in expressing a wish to borrow, certainly did not mark them out strongly as holding opinions likely to save society.
The Reformers had triumphed: it was clear that the wheels were going whither they were pulling, and they were in fine spirits for exertion. But if they were pulling towards the country’s ruin, there was the more need for others to hang on behind and get the wheels to stick if possible. In Treby, as elsewhere, people were told they must ‘rally’ at the coming election; but there was now a large number of waverers — men of flexible, practical minds, who were not such bigots as to cling to any views when a good tangible reason could be urged against them; while some regarded it as the most neighbourly thing to hold a little with both sides, and were not sure that they should rally or vote at all. It seemed an invidious thing to vote for one gentleman rather than another.
These social changes in Treby parish are comparatively public matters, and this history is chiefly concerned with the private lot of a few men and women; but there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life, from the time when the primeval milkmaid had to wander with the wanderings of her clan, because the cow she milked was one of a herd which had made the pastures bare. Even in that conservatory existence where the fair Camelia is sighed for by the noble young Pineapple, neither of them needing to care about the frost or rain outside, there is a nether apparatus of hot-water pipes liable to cool down on a strike of the gardeners or a scarcity of coal. And the lives we are about to look back upon do not belong to those conservatory species; they are rooted in the common earth, having to endure all the ordinary chances of past and present weather. As to the weather of 1832, the Zadkiel of that time had predicted that the electrical condition of the clouds in the political hemisphere would produce unusual perturbations in organic existence, and he would perhaps have seen a fulfilment of his remarkable prophecy in that mutual influence of dissimilar destinies which we shall see gradually unfolding itself. For if the mixed political conditions of Treby Magna had not been acted on by the passing of the Reform Bill, Mr Harold Transome would not have presented himself as a candidate for North Loamshire, Treby would not have been a polling-place, Mr Matthew Jermyn would not have been on affable terms with a Dissenting preacher and his flock, and the venerable town would not have been placarded with handbills, more or less complimentary and retrospective — conditions in this case essential to the ‘where’, and the ‘what’, without which, as the learned know, there can be no event whatever.
For example, it was through these conditions that a young man named Felix Holt made a considerable difference in the life of Harold Transome, though nature and fortune seemed to have done what they could to keep the lots of the two men quite aloof from each other. Felix was heir to nothing better than a quack medicine; his mother lived up a back street in Treby Magna, and her sitting-room was ornamented with her best tea-tray and several framed testimonials to the virtues of Holt’s Cathartic Lozenges and Holt’s Restorative Elixir. There could hardly have been a lot less like Harold Transome’s than this of the quack doctor’s son, except in the superficial facts that he called himself a Radical, that he was the only son of his mother, and that he had lately returned to his home with ideas and resolves not a little disturbing to that mother’s mind.
But Mrs Holt, unlike Mrs Transome, was much disposed to reveal her troubles, and was not without a counsellor into whose ear she could pour them. On this 2nd of September, when Mr Harold Transome had had his first interview with Jermyn, and when the attorney went back to his office with new views of canvassing in his mind, Mrs Holt had put on her bonnet as early as nine o’clock in the morning, and had gone to see the Rev. Rufus Lyon, minister of the Independent Chapel usually spoken of as ‘Malthouse Yard.’
‘A pious and painful preacher.’ — FULLER.
MR LYON lived in a small house, not quite so good as the parish clerk’s, adjoining the entry which led to the Chapel Yard. The new prosperity of Dissent at Treby had led to an enlargement of the chapel, which absorbed all extra funds and left none for the enlargement of the minister’s income. He sat this morning, as usual, in a low up-stairs room, called his study, which, by means of a closet capable of holding his bed, served also as a sleeping-room. The bookshelves did not suffice for his store of old books, which lay about him in piles so arranged as to leave narrow lanes between them; for the minister was much given to walking about during his hours of meditation, and very narrow passages would serve for his small legs, unencumbered by any other drapery than his black silk stockings and the flexible, though prominent, bows of black ribbon that tied his knee-breeches. He was walking about now, with his hands clasped behind him, an attitude in which his body seemed to bear about the same proportion to his head as the lower part of a stone Hermes bears to the carven image that crowns it. His face looked old and worn, yet the curtain of hair that fell from his bald crown and hung about his neck retained much of its original auburn tint, and his large, brown, shortsighted eyes were still clear and bright. At the first glance, every one thought him a very odd-looking rusty old man; the freeschool boys often hooted after him, and called him ‘Revelations’; and to many respectable church people, old Lyon’s little legs and large head seemed to make Dissent additionally preposterous. But he was too shortsighted to notice those who tittered at him — too absent from the world of small facts and petty impulses in which titterers live. With Satan to argue against on matters of vital experience as well as of church government, with great texts to meditate on, which seemed to get deeper as he tried to fathom them, it had never occurred to him to reflect what sort of image his small person made on the retina of a light-minded beholder. The good Rufus had his ire and his egoism; but they existed only as the red heat which gave force to his belief and his teaching. He was susceptible concerning the true office of deacons in the primitive church, and his small nervous body was jarred from head to foot by the concussion of an argument to which he saw no answer. In fact, the only moments when he could be said to be really conscious of his body, were when he trembled under the pressure of some agitating thought.
He was meditating on the text for his Sunday morning sermon: ‘And all the people said, Amen’ — a mere mustard-seed of a text, which had split at first only into two divisions, ‘What was said’, and ‘Who said it’; but these were growing into a many-branched discourse, and the preacher’s eyes dilated, and a smile played about his mouth till, as his manner was, when he felt happily inspired, he had begun to utter his thoughts aloud in the varied measure and cadence habitual to him, changing from a rapid but distinct undertone to a loud emphatic rallentando.
‘My brethren, do you think that great shout was raised in Israel by each man’s waiting to say “amen” till his neighbours had said amen? Do you think there will ever be a great shout for the right — the shout of a nation as of one man, rounded and whole, like the voice of the archangel that bound together all the listeners of earth and heaven — if every Christian of you peeps round to see what his neighbours in good coats are doing, or else puts his hat before his face that he may shout and never be heard? But this is what you do: when the servant of God stands up to deliver his message, do you lay your souls beneath the Word as you set out your plants beneath the falling rain? No; one of you sends his eyes to all corners, he smothers his soul with small questions, “What does brother Y. think?” “Is this doctrine high enough for brother Z?” “Will the church members be pleased?” And another —’
Here the door was opened, and old Lyddy, the minister’s servant, put in her head to say, in a tone of despondency, finishing with a groan, ‘Here is Mrs Holt wanting to speak to you; she says she comes out of season, but she’s in trouble.’
‘Lyddy,’ said Mr Lyon, falling at once into a quiet conversational tone, ‘if you are wrestling with the enemy, let me refer you to Ezekiel the thirteenth and twenty-second, and beg of you not to groan. It is a stumbling-block and offence to my daughter; she would take no broth yesterday, because she said you had cried into it. Thus you cause the truth to be lightly spoken of, and make the enemy rejoice. If your face-ache gives him an advantage, take a little warm ale with your meat — I do not grudge the money.’
‘If I thought my drinking warm ale would hinder poor dear Miss Esther from speaking light — but she hates the smell of it.’
‘Answer not again, Lyddy, but send up Mistress Holt to me.’
Lyddy closed the door immediately.
‘I lack grace to deal with these weak sisters,’ said the minister, again thinking aloud, and walking. ‘Their needs lie too much out of the track of my meditations, and take me often unawares. Mistress Holt is another who darkens counsel by words without knowledge, and angers the reason of the natural man. Lord, give me patience. My sins were heavier to bear than this woman’s folly. Come in, Mistress Holt, come in.’
He hastened to disencumber a chair of Matthew Henry’s Commentary, and begged his visitor to be seated. She was a tall elderly woman, dressed in black, with a light-brown front and a black band over her forehead. She moved the chair a little and seated herself in it with some emphasis, looking fixedly at the opposite wall with a hurt and argumentative expression. Mr Lyon had placed himself in the chair against his desk, and waited with the resolute resignation of a patient who is about to undergo an operation. But his visitor did not speak.
‘You have something on your mind, Mistress Holt?’ he said, at last.
‘Indeed I have, sir, else I shouldn’t be here.’
‘Speak freely.’
‘It’s well known to you, Mr Lyon, that my husband, Mr Holt, came from the north, and was a member in Malthouse Yard long before you began to be pastor of it, which was seven year ago last Michaelmas. It’s the truth, Mr Lyon, and I’m not that woman to sit here and say it if it wasn’t true.’
‘Certainly, it is true.’
‘And if my husband had been alive when you’d come to preach upon trial, he’d have been as good a judge of your gifts as Mr Nuttwood and Mr Muscat, though whether he’d have agreed with some that your doctrine wasn’t high enough, I can’t say. For myself, I’ve my opinion about high doctrine.’
‘Was it my preaching you came to speak about?’ said the minister, hurrying in the question.
‘No, Mr Lyon, I’m not that woman. But this I will say, for my husband died before your time, that he had a wonderful gift in prayer, as the old members well know, if anybody likes to ask ’em, not believing my words; and he believed himself that the receipt for the Cancer Cure, which I’ve sent out in bottles till this very last April before September as now is, and have bottles standing by me, — he believed it was sent him in answer to prayer; and nobody can deny it, for he prayed most regular, and read out of the green baize Bible.’
Mrs Holt paused, appearing to think that Mr Lyon had been successfully confuted, and should show himself convinced.
‘Has any one been aspersing your husband’s character?’ said Mr Lyon, with a slight initiative towards that relief of groaning for which he had reproved Lyddy.
‘Sir, they daredn’t. For though he was a man of prayer, he didn’t want skill and knowledge to find things out for himself; and that was what I used to say to my friends when they wondered at my marrying a man from Lancashire, with no trade or fortune but what he’d got in his head. But my husband’s tongue ‘ud have been a fortune to anybody, and there was many a one said it was as good as a dose of physic to hear him talk; not but what that got him into trouble in Lancashire, but he always said, if the worst came to the worst, he could go and preach to the blacks. But he did better than that, Mr Lyon, for he married me; and this I will say, that for age, and conduct, and managing —’
‘Mistress Holt,’ interrupted the minister, ‘these are not the things whereby we may edify one another. Let me beg of you to be as brief as you can. My time is not my own.’
‘Well, Mr Lyon, I’ve a right to speak to my own character; and I’m one of your congregation, though I’m not a church member, for I was born in the general Baptist connection: and as for being saved without works, there’s a many, I daresay, can’t do without that doctrine; but I thank the Lord I never needed to put myself on a level with the thief on the cross. I’ve done my duty, and more, if anybody comes to that; for I’ve gone without my bit of meat to make broth for a sick neighbour: and if there’s any of the church members say they’ve done the same, I’d ask them if they had the sinking at the stomach as I have; for I’ve ever strove to do the right thing, and more, for good-natured I always was; and I little thought, after being respected by everybody, I should come to be reproached by my own son. And my husband said, when he was a-dying — “Mary,” he said, “the elixir, and the pills, and the cure will support you, for they’ve a great name in all the country round, and you’ll pray for a blessing on them.” And so I have done, Mr Lyon; and to say they’re not good medicines, when they’ve been taken for fifty miles round by high and low, and rich and poor, and nobody speaking against ’em but Dr Lukin, it seems to me it’s a flying in the face of Heaven; for if it was wrong to take medicine, couldn’t the blessed Lord have stopped it?’
Mrs Holt was not given to tears; she was much sustained by conscious unimpeachableness, and by an argumentative tendency which usually checks the too great activity of the lachrymal gland; nevertheless her eyes had become moist, her fingers played on her knee in an agitated manner, and she finally plucked a bit of her gown and held it with great nicety between her thumb and finger. Mr Lyon, however, by listening attentively, had begun partly to divine the source of her trouble.
‘Am I wrong in gathering from what you say, Mistress Holt, that your son has objected in some way to your sale of your late husband’s medicines?’
‘Mr Lyon, he’s masterful beyond everything, and he talks more than his father did. I’ve got my reason, Mr Lyon, and if anybody talks sense I can follow him; but Felix talks so wild, and contradicts his mother. And what do you think he says, after giving up his ‘prenticeship, and going off to study at Glasgow, and getting through all the bit of money his father saved for his bringing-up — what has all his learning come to? He says I’d better never open my Bible, for it’s as bad poison to me as the pills are to half the people as swallow ’em. You’ll not speak of this again, Mr Lyon — I don’t think ill enough of you to believe that. For I suppose a Christian can understand the word o’ God without going to Glasgow, and there’s texts upon texts about ointment and medicine, and there’s one as might have been made for a receipt of my husband’s — it’s just as if it was a riddle, and Holt’s Elixir was the answer.’
‘Your son uses rash words, Mistress Holt,’ said the minister, ‘but it is quite true that we may err in giving a too private interpretation to the Scripture. The word of God has to satisfy the larger needs of His people, like the rain and the sunshine — which no man must think to be meant for his own patch of seed-ground solely. Will it not be well that I should see your son, and talk with him on these matters? He was at chapel, I observed, and I suppose I am to be his pastor.’
‘That was what I wanted to ask you, Mr Lyon. For perhaps he’ll listen to you, and not talk you down as he does his poor mother. For after we’d been to chapel, he spoke better of you than he does of most: he said you was a fine old fellow, and an old-fashioned Puritan — he uses dreadful language, Mr Lyon; but I saw he didn’t mean you ill, for all that. He calls most folks’ religion rottenness; and yet another time he’ll tell me I ought to feel myself a sinner, and do God’s will and not my own. But it’s my belief he says first one thing and then another only to abuse his mother. Or else he’s going off his head, and must be sent to a ‘sylum. But if he writes to the North Loamshire Herald first, to tell everybody the medicines are good for nothing, how can I ever keep him and myself?’
‘Tell him I shall feel favoured if he will come and see me this evening,’ said Mr Lyon, not without a little prejudice in favour of the young man, whose language about the preacher in Malthouse Yard did not seem to him to be altogether dreadful. ‘Meanwhile, my friend, I counsel you to send up a supplication, which I shall not fail to offer also, that you may receive a spirit of humility and submission, so that you may not be hindered from seeing and following the divine guidance in this matter by any false lights of pride and obstinacy. Of this more when I have spoken with your son.’
‘I’m not proud or obstinate, Mr Lyon. I never did say I was everything that was bad, and I never will. And why this trouble should be sent on me above everybody else — for I haven’t told you all. He’s made himself a journeyman to Mr Prowd the watchmaker — after all this learning — and he says he’ll go with patches on his knees, and he shall like himself the better. And as for his having little boys to teach, they’ll come in all weathers with dirty shoes. If it’s madness, Mr Lyon, it’s no use your talking to him.’
‘We shall see. Perhaps it may even be the disguised working of grace within him. We must not judge rashly. Many eminent servants of God have been led by ways as strange.’
‘Then I’m sorry for their mothers, that’s all, Mr Lyon; and all the more if they’d been well-spoken-on women. For not my biggest enemy, whether it’s he or she, if they’ll speak the truth, can turn round and say I’ve deserved this trouble. And when everybody gets their due, and people’s doings are spoke of on the house-tops, as the Bible says they will be, it’ll be known what I’ve gone through with those medicines — the pounding, and the pouring, and the letting stand, and the weighing — up early and down late — there’s nobody knows yet but One that’s worthy to know; and the pasting o’ the printed labels right side upwards. There’s few women would have gone through with it; and it’s reasonable to think it’ll be made up to me; for if there’s promised and purchased blessings, I should think this trouble is purchasing ’em. For if my son Felix doesn’t have a strait-waistcoat put on him, he’ll have his way. But I say no more. I wish you good-morning, Mr Lyon, and thank you, though I well know it’s your duty to act as you’re doing. And I never troubled you about my own soul, as some do who look down on me for not being a church member.’
‘Farewell, Mistress Holt, farewell. I pray that a more powerful teacher than I am may instruct you.’
The door was closed, and the much-tried Rufus walked about again, saying aloud, groaningly —
‘This woman has sat under the gospel all her life, and she is as blind as a heathen, and as proud and stiff-necked as a Pharisee; yet she is one of the souls I watch for. ’Tis true that even Sara, the chosen mother of God’s people, showed a spirit of unbelief, and perhaps of selfish anger; and it is a passage that bears the unmistakable signet, “doing honour to the wife or woman, as unto the weaker vessel”. For therein is the greatest check put on the ready scorn of the natural man.’
1ST CITIZEN Sir, there’s a hurry in the veins of youth
That makes a vice of virtue by excess.
2ND CITIZEN What if the coolness of our tardier veins
Be loss of virtue?
1ST CITIZEN All things cool with time —
The sun itself, they say, till heat shall find
A general level, nowhere in excess.
2ND CITIZEN ’Tis a poor climax, to my weaker thought,
That future middlingness.
IN the evening, when Mr Lyon was expecting the knock at the door that would announce Felix Holt, he occupied his cushionless arm-chair in the sitting-room, and was skimming rapidly, in his short-sighted way, by the light of one candle, the pages of a missionary report, emitting occasionally a slight ‘Hm-m’ that appeared to be expressive of criticism rather than of approbation. The room was dismally furnished, the only objects indicating an intention of ornament being a bookcase, a map of the Holy Land, an engraved portrait of Dr Doddridge, and a black bust with a coloured face, which for some reason or other was covered with green gauze. Yet any one whose attention was quite awake must have been aware, even on entering, of certain things that were incongruous with the general air of sombreness and privation. There was a delicate scent of dried rose-leaves; the light by which the minister was reading was a wax-candle in a white earthenware candlestick, and the table on the opposite side of the fireplace held a dainty work-basket frilled with blue satin.
Felix Holt, when he entered, was not in an observant mood; and when, after seating himself, at the minister’s invitation, near the little table which held the work-basket, he stared at the wax-candle opposite to him, he did so without any wonder or consciousness that the candle was not of tallow. But the minister’s sensitiveness gave another interpretation to the gaze which he divined rather than saw; and in alarm lest this inconsistent extravagance should obstruct his usefulness, he hastened to say —
‘You are doubtless amazed to see me with a wax-light, my young friend; but this undue luxury is paid for with the earnings of my daughter, who is so delicately framed that the smell of tallow is loathsome to her.’
‘I heeded not the candle, sir. I thank Heaven I am not a mouse to have a nose that takes note of wax or tallow.’
The loud abrupt tones made the old man vibrate a little. He had been stroking his chin gently before, with a sense that he must be very quiet and deliberate in his treatment of the eccentric young man; but now, quite unreflectingly, he drew forth a pair of spectacles, which he was in the habit of using when he wanted to observe his interlocutor more closely than usual.
‘And I myself, in fact, am equally indifferent,’ he said, as he opened and adjusted his glasses, ‘so that I have a sufficient light on my book.’ Here his large eyes looked discerningly through the spectacles.
’Tis the quality of the page you care about, not of the candle,’ said Felix, smiling pleasantly enough at his inspector. ‘You’re thinking that you have a roughly-written page before you now.’
That was true. The minister, accustomed to the respectable air of provincial townsmen, and especially to the sleek well-clipped gravity of his own male congregation, felt a slight shock as his glasses made perfectly clear to him the shaggy-headed, large-eyed, strong-limbed person of this questionable young man, without waistcoat or cravat. But the possibility, supported by some of Mrs Holt’s words, that a disguised work of grace might be going forward in the son of whom she complained so bitterly, checked any hasty interpretations.
‘I abstain from judging by the outward appearance only,’ he answered, with his usual simplicity. ‘I myself have experienced that when the spirit is much exercised it is difficult to remember neckbands and strings and such small accidents of our vesture, which are nevertheless decent and needful so long as we sojourn in the flesh. And you too, my young friend, as I gather from your mother’s troubled and confused report, are undergoing some travail of mind. You will not, I trust, object to open yourself fully to me, as to an aged pastor who has himself had much inward wrestling, and has especially known much temptation from doubt.’
‘As to doubt,’ said Felix, loudly and brusquely as before, ‘if it is those absurd medicines and gulling advertisements that my mother has been talking of to you — and I suppose it is — I’ve no more doubt about them than I have about pocket-picking. I know there’s a stage of speculation in which a man may doubt whether a pickpocket is blame-worthy — but I’m not one of your subtle fellows who keep looking at the world through their own legs. If I allowed the sale of those medicines to go on, and my mother to live out of the proceeds when I can keep her by the honest labour of my hands, I’ve not the least doubt that I should be a rascal.’
‘I would fain inquire more particularly into your objection to these medicines,’ said Mr Lyon, gravely. Notwithstanding his conscientiousness and a certain originality in his own mental disposition, he was too little used to high principle quite dissociated from sectarian phraseology to be as immediately in sympathy with it as he would otherwise have been. ‘I know they have been well reported of, and many wise persons have tried remedies providentially discovered by those who are not regular physicians, and have found a blessing in the use of them. I may mention the eminent Mr Wesley, who, though I hold not altogether with his Arminian doctrine, nor with the usages of his institution, was nevertheless a man of God; and the journals of various Christians whose names have left a sweet savour might be cited in the same sense. Moreover, your father, who originally concocted these medicines and left them as a provision for your mother, was, as I understand, a man whose walk was not unfaithful.’
‘My father was ignorant,’ said Felix, bluntly. ‘He knew neither the complication of the human system, nor the way in which drugs counteract each other. Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug, but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm. I know something about these things. I was ‘prentice for five miserable years to a stupid brute of a country apothecary — my poor father left money for that — he thought nothing could be finer for me. No matter: I know that the Cathartic Pills are a drastic compound which may be as bad as poison to half the people who swallow them — that the Elixir is an absurd farrago of a dozen incompatible things; and that the Cancer Cure might as well be bottled ditch-water.’
Mr Lyon rose and walked up and down the room. His simplicity was strongly mixed with sagacity as well as sectarian prejudice, and he did not rely at once on a loud-spoken integrity — Satan might have flavoured it with ostentation. Presently he asked in a rapid low tone, ‘How long have you known this, young man?’
‘Well put, sir,’ said Felix. ‘I’ve known it a good deal longer than I’ve acted on it, like plenty of other things. But you believe in conversion?’
‘Yea, verily.’
‘So do I. I was converted by six weeks’ debauchery.’
The minister started. ‘Young man,’ he said, solemnly, going up close to Felix and laying a hand on his shoulder, ‘speak not lightly of the divine operations, and restrain unseemly words.’
‘I’m not speaking lightly,’ said Felix. ‘If I had not seen that I was making a hog of myself very fast, and that pig wash, even if could have got plenty of it, was a poor sort of thing, I should never have looked life fairly in the face to see what was to be done with it. I laughed out loud at last to think of a poor devil like me, in a Scotch garret, with my stockings out at heel and a shilling or two to be dissipated upon, with a smell of raw haggis mounting from below, and old women breathing gin as they passed me on the stairs — wanting to turn my life into easy pleasure. Then I began to see what else it could be turned into. Not much, perhaps. This world is not a very fine place for a good many of the people in it. But I’ve made up my mind it shan’t be the worse for me, if I can help it. They may tell me I can’t alter the world — that there must be a certain number of sneaks and robbers in it, and if I don’t lie and filch somebody else will. Well, then, somebody else shall, for I won’t. That’s the upshot of my conversion, Mr Lyon, if you want to know it.’
Mr Lyon removed his hand from Felix’s shoulder and walked about again. ‘Did you sit under any preacher at Glasgow, young man?’
‘No: I heard most of the preachers once, but I never wanted to hear them twice.’
The good Rufus was not without a slight rising of resentment at this young man’s want of reverence. It was not yet plain whether he wanted to hear twice the preacher in Malthouse Yard. But the resentful feeling was carefully repressed: a soul in so peculiar a condition must be dealt with delicately.
‘And now, may I ask,’ he said, ‘what course you mean to take, after hindering your mother from making and selling these drugs? I speak no more in their favour after what you have said. God forbid that I should strive to hinder you from seeking whatsoever things are honest and honourable. But your mother is advanced in years; she needs comfortable sustenance; you have doubtless considered how you may make her amends? “He that provideth not for his own —” I trust you respect the authority that so speaks. And I will not suppose that, after being tender of conscience towards strangers, you will be careless towards your mother. There be indeed some who, taking a mighty charge on their shoulders, must perforce leave their households to Providence, and to the care of humbler brethren, but in such a case the call must be clear.’
‘I shall keep my mother as well — nay, better — than she has kept herself. She has always been frugal. With my watch and clock cleaning, and teaching one or two little chaps that I’ve got to come to me, I can earn enough. As for me, I can live on bran porridge. I have the stomach of a rhinoceros.’
‘But for a young man so well furnished as you, who can questionless write a good hand and keep books, were it not well to seek some higher situation as clerk or assistant? I could speak to Brother Muscat, who is well acquainted with all such openings. Any place in Pendrell’s Bank, I fear, is now closed against such as are not Churchmen. It used not to be so, but a year ago he discharged Brother Bodkin, although he was a valuable servant. Still, something might be found. There are ranks and degrees — and those who can serve in the higher must not unadvisedly change what seems to be a providential appointment. Your poor mother is not altogether —’
‘Excuse me, Mr Lyon; I’ve had all that out with my mother, and I may as well save you any trouble by telling you that my mind has been made up about that a long while ago. I’ll take no employment that obliges me to prop up my chin with a high cravat, and wear straps, and pass the live-long day with a set of fellows who spend their spare money on shirt-pins. That sort of work is really lower than many handicrafts; it only happens to be paid out of proportion. That’s why I set myself to learn the watchmaking trade. My father was a weaver first of all. It would have been better for him if he had remained a weaver. I came home through Lancashire and saw an uncle of mine who is a weaver still. I mean to stick to the class I belong to — people who don’t follow the fashions.’
Mr Lyon was silent a few moments. This dialogue was far from plain sailing; he was not certain of his latitude and longitude. If the despiser of Glasgow preachers had been arguing in favour of gin and Sabbath-breaking, Mr Lyon’s course would have been clearer. ‘Well, well,’ he said, deliberately, ‘it is true that St Paul exercised the trade of tent-making, though he was learned in all the wisdom of the Rabbis.’
‘St Paul was a wise man,’ said Felix. ‘Why should I want to get into the middle class because I have some learning? The most of the middle class are as ignorant as the working people about everything that doesn’t belong to their own Brummagem life. That’s how the working men are left to foolish devices and keep worsening themselves: the best heads among them forsake their born comrades, and go in for a house with a high door-step and a brass knocker.’
Mr Lyon stroked his mouth and chin, perhaps because he felt some disposition to smile; and it would not be well to smile too readily at what seemed but a weedy resemblance of Christian unworldliness. On the contrary, there might be a dangerous snare in an unsanctified outstepping of average Christian practice.
‘Nevertheless,’ he observed, gravely, ‘it is by such self-advancement that many have been enabled to do good service to the cause of liberty and to the public wellbeing. The ring and the robe of Joseph were no objects for a good man’s ambition, but they were the signs of that credit which he won by his divinely-inspired skill, and which enabled him to act as a saviour to his brethren.’
‘O yes, your ringed and scented men of the people! — I won’t be one of them. Let a man once throttle himself with a satin stock, and he’ll get new wants and new motives. Metamorphosis will have begun at his neck-joint, and it will go on till it has changed his likings first and then his reasoning, which will follow his likings as the feet of a hungry dog follow his nose. I’ll have none of your clerkly gentility. I might end by collecting greasy pence from poor men to buy myself a fine coat and a glutton’s dinner, on pretence of serving the poor men. I’d sooner be Paley’s fat pigeon than a demagogue all tongue and stomach, though’ — here Felix changed his voice a little — ‘I should like well enough to be another sort of demagogue, if I could.’
‘Then you have a strong interest in the great political movements of these times?’ said Mr Lyon, with a perceptible flashing of the eyes.
‘I should think so. I despise every man who has not — or, having it, doesn’t try to rouse it in other men.’
‘Right, my young friend, right,’ said the minister, in a deep cordial tone. Inevitably his mind was drawn aside from the immediate consideration of Felix Holt’s spiritual interest by the prospect of political sympathy. In those days so many instruments of God’s cause in the fight for religious and political liberty held creeds that were painfully wrong, and, indeed, irreconcilable with salvation! ‘That is my own view, which I maintain in the face of some opposition from brethren who contend that a share in public movements is a hindrance to the closer walk, and that the pulpit is no place for teaching men their duties as members of the common-wealth. I have had much puerile blame cast upon me because I have uttered such names as Brougham and Wellington in the pulpit. Why not Wellington as well as Rabshakeh? and why not Brougham as well as Balaam?’ Does God know less of men than He did in the days of Hezekiah and Moses? — is His arm shortened, and is the world become too wide for His providence? But, they say, there are no politics in the New Testament —’
‘Well, they’re right enough there,’ said Felix, with his usual unceremoniousness.
‘What! you are of those who hold that a Christian minister should not meddle with public matters in the pulpit?’ said Mr Lyon, colouring. ‘I am ready to join issue on that point.’
‘Not I, sir,’ said Felix; ‘I should say, teach any truth you can, whether it’s in the Testament or out of it. It’s little enough anybody can get hold of, and still less what he can drive into the skulls of a pence-counting, parcel-tying gcneration, such as mostly fill your chapels.’
‘Young man,’ said Mr Lyon, pausing in front of Felix. He spoke rapidly, as he always did, except when his words were specially weighted with emotion: he overflowed with matter, and in his mind matter was always completely organised into words. ‘I speak not on my own behalf, for not only have I no desire that any man should think of me above that which he seeth me to be, but I am aware of much that should make me patient under a disesteem resting even on too hasty a construction. I speak not as claiming reverence for my own age and office — not to shame you, but to warn you. It is good that you should use plainness of speech, and I am not of those who would enforce a submissive silence on the young, that they themselves, being elders, may be heard at large; for Elihu was the youngest of Job’s friends, yet was there a wise rebuke in his words; and the aged Eli was taught by a revelation to the boy Samuel. I have to keep a special watch over myself in this matter, inasmuch as I have a need of utterance which makes the thought within me seem as a pent-up fire, until I have shot it forth, as it were, in arrowy words, each one hitting its mark. Therefore I pray for a listening spirit, which is a great mark of grace. Nevertheless, my young friend, I am bound, as I said, to warn you. The temptations that most beset those who have great natural gifts, and are wise after the flesh, are pride and scorn, more particularly towards those weak things of the world which have been chosen to confound the things which are mighty. The scornful nostril and the high head gather not the odours that lie on the track of truth The mind that is too ready at contempt and reprobation is —’
Here the door opened, and Mr Lyon paused to look round, but seeing only Lyddy with the tea-tray, he went on:
‘Is, I may say, as a clenched fist that can give blows, but is shut up from receiving and holding ought that is precious — though it were heaven-sent manna.’
‘I understand you, sir,’ said Felix, good-humouredly, putting out his hand to the little man, who had come close to him as he delivered the last sentence with sudden emphasis and slowness. ‘But I’m not inclined to clench my fist at you.’ ‘Well, well,’ said Mr Lyon, shaking the proffered hand, ‘we shall see more of each other, and I trust shall have much profitable communing. You will stay and have a dish of tea with us: we take the meal late on Thursdays, because my daughter is detained by giving a lesson in the French tongue. But she is doubtless returned now, and will presently come and pour out tea for us.’
‘Thank you; I’ll stay,’ said Felix, not from any curiosity to see the minister’s daughter, but from a liking for the society of the minister himself — for his quaint looks and ways, and the transparency of his talk, which gave a charm even to his weaknesses. The daughter was probably some prim Miss, neat, sensible, pious, but all in a small feminine way, in which Felix was no more interested than in Dorcas meetings, biographies of devout women, and that amount of ornamental knitting which was not inconsistent with Nonconforming seriousness.
‘I’m perhaps a little too fond of banging and smashing,’ he went on; ‘a phrenologist at Glasgow told me I had large veneration; another man there, who knew me, laughed out and said I was the most blasphemous iconoclast living. “That,” says my phrenologist, “is because of his large Ideality, which prevents him from finding anything perfect enough to be venerated.” Of course I put my ears down and wagged my tail at that stroking.’
‘Yes, yes; I have had my own head explored with somewhat similar results. It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, “Know thyself”, and too often leads to a self-estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident. Nevertheless — Esther, my dear, this is Mr Holt, whose acquaintance I have even now been making with more than ordinary interest. He will take tea with us.’
Esther bowed slightly as she walked across the room to fetch the candle and place it near her tray. Felix rose and bowed, also with an air of indifference, which was perhaps exaggerated by the fact that he was inwardly surprised. The minister’s daughter was not the sort of person he expected. She was quite incongruous with his notion of ministers’ daughters in general; and though he had expected something nowise delightful, the incongruity repelled him. A very delicate scent, the faint suggestion of a garden, was wafted as she went. He would not observe her, but he had a sense of an elastic walk, the tread of small feet, a long neck and a high crown of shining brown plaits with curls that floated backward — things, in short, that suggested a fine lady to him, and determined him to notice her as little as possible. A fine lady was always a sort of spun-glass affair — not natural, and with no beauty for him as art; but a fine lady as the daughter of this rusty old Puritan was especially offensive.
‘Nevertheless,’ continued Mr Lyon, who rarely let drop any thread of discourse, ‘that phrenological science is not irreconcilable with the revealed dispensations. And it is undeniable that we have our varying native dispositions which even grace will not obliterate. I myself, from my youth up, have been given to question too curiously concerning the truth — to examine and sift the medicine of the soul rather than to apply it.’
‘If your truth happens to be such medicine as Holt’s Pills and Elixir, the less you swallow of it the better,’ said Felix. ‘But truth-vendors and medicine-vendors usually recommend swallowing. When a man sees his livelihood in a pill or a proposition, he likes to have orders for the dose, and not curious inquiries.’
This speech verged on rudeness, but it was delivered with a brusque openness that implied the absence of any personal intention. The minister’s daughter was now for the first time startled into looking at Felix. But her survey of this unusual speaker was soon made, and she relieved her father from the need to reply by saying —
‘The tea is poured out, father.’
That was the signal for Mr Lyon to advance towards the table, raise his right hand, and ask a blessing at sufficient length for Esther to glance at the visitor again. There seemed to be no danger of his looking at her; he was observing her father. She had time to remark that he was a peculiar-looking person, but not insignificant, which was the quality that most hopelessly consigned a man to perdition. He was massively built. The striking points in his face were large clear grey eyes and full lips. ‘Will you draw up to the table, Mr Holt?’ said the minister.
In the act of rising, Felix pushed back his chair too suddenly against the rickety table close by him, and down went the blue-frilled work-basket, flying open, and dispersing on the floor reels, thimble, muslin work, a small sealed bottle of atta of rose, and something heavier than these — a duodecimo volume which fell close to him between the table and the fender.
‘O my stars!’ said Felix, ‘I beg your pardon.’ Esther had already started up, and with wonderful quickness had picked up half the small rolling things while Felix was lifting the basket and the book. This last had opened, and had its leaves crushed in falling; and, with the instinct of a bookish man, he saw nothing more pressing to be done than to flatten the corners of the leaves.
‘Byron’s Poems!’ he said, in a tone of disgust, while Esther was recovering all the other articles. ‘ “The Dream” — he’d better have been asleep and snoring. What! do you stuff your memory with Byron, Miss Lyon?’
Felix, on his side, was led at last to look straight at Esther, but it was with a strong denunciatory and pedagogic intention. Of course he saw more clearly than ever that she was a fine lady.
She reddened, drew up her long neck, and said, as she retreated to her chair again —
‘I have a great admiration for Byron.’
Mr Lyon had paused in the act of drawing his chair to the tea-table, and was looking on at this scene, wrinkling the corners of his eyes with a perplexed smile. Esther would not have wished him to know anything about the volume of Byron, but she was too proud to show any concern.
‘He is a worldly and vain writer, I fear,’ said Mr Lyon. He knew scarcely anything of the poet, whose books embodied the faith and ritual of many young ladies and gentlemen.
‘A misanthropic debauchee,’ said Felix, lifting a chair with one hand, and holding the book open in the other, ‘whose notion of a hero was that he should disorder his stomach and despise mankind. His corsairs and renegades, his Alps and Manfreds, are the most paltry puppets that were ever pulled by the strings of lust and pride.’
‘Hand the book to me,’ said Mr Lyon.
‘Let me beg of you to put it aside till after tea, father,’ said Esther. ‘However objectionable Mr Holt may find its pages, they would certainly be made worse by being greased with bread-and-butter.’
‘That is true, my dear,’ said Mr Lyon, laying down the book on the small table behind him. He saw that his daughter was angry.
‘Ho, ho!’ thought Felix, ‘her father is frightened at her. How came he to have such a nice-stepping, long-necked peacock for his daughter? but she shall see that I am not frightened.’ Then he said aloud, ‘I should like to know how you will justify your admiration for such a writer, Miss Lyon.’
‘I should not attempt it with you, Mr Holt,’ said Esther. ‘You have such strong words at command, that they make the smallest argument seem formidable. If I had ever met the giant Cormoran, I should have made a point of agreeing with him in his literary opinions.’
Esther had that excellent thing in woman, a soft voice with a clear fluent utterance. Her sauciness was always charming, because it was without emphasis, and was accompanied with graceful little turns of the head.
Felix laughed at her thrust with young heartiness.
‘My daughter is a critic of words, Mr Holt,’ said the minister, smiling complacently, ‘and often corrects mine on the ground of niceties, which I profess are as dark to me as if they were the reports of a sixth sense which I possess not. I am an eager seeker for precision, and would fain find language subtle enough to follow the utmost intricacies of the soul’s pathways, but I see not why a round word that means some object, made and blessed by the Creator, should be branded and banished as a malefactor.’
‘O, your niceties — I know what they are,’ said Felix, in his usual fortissimo. ‘They all go on your system of make-believe. “Rottenness” may suggest what is unpleasant, so you’d better say “sugar-plums”, or something else such a long way off the fact that nobody is obliged to think of it. Those are your round-about euphuisms that dress up swindling till it looks as well as honesty, and shoot with boiled pease instead of bullets. I hate your gentlemanly speakers.’
‘Then you would not like Mr Jermyn, I think,’ said Esther. ‘That reminds me, father, that today, when I was giving Miss Louisa Jermyn her lesson, Mr Jermyn came in and spoke to me with grand politeness, and asked me at what times you were likely to be disengaged, because he wished to make your better acquaintance, and consult you on matters of importance. He never took the least notice of me before. Can you guess the reason of his sudden ceremoniousness?’
‘Nay, child,’ said the minister, ponderingly.
‘Politics, of course,’ said Felix. ‘He’s on some committee. An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry. Eh, Mr Lyon? Isn’t that it?’
‘Nay, not so. He is the close ally of the Transome family, who are blind hereditary Tories like the Debarrys, and will drive their tenants to the poll as if they were sheep. And it has even been hinted that the heir who is coming from the East may be another Tory candidate, and coalesce with the younger Debarry. It is said that he has enormous wealth, and could purchase every vote in the county that has a price.’
‘He is come,’ said Esther. ‘I heard Miss Jermyn tell her sister that she had seen him going out of her father’s room.’
‘ ’Tis strange,’ said Mr Lyon.
‘Something extraordinary must have happened,’ said Esther, ‘for Mr Jermyn to intend courting us. Miss Jermyn said to me only the other day that she could not think how I came to be so well educated and ladylike. She always thought Dissenters were ignorant, vulgar people. I said, so they were, usually, and Church people also in small towns. She considers herself a judge of what is ladylike, and she is vulgarity personified — with large feet, and the most odious scent on her handkerchief, and a bonnet that looks like “The Fashion” printed in capital letters.’
‘One sort of fine ladyism is as good as another,’ said Felix.
‘No, indeed. Pardon me,’ said Esther. ‘A real fine-lady does not wear clothes that flare in people’s eyes, or use importunate scents, or make a noise as she moves: she is something refined, and graceful, and charming, and never obtrusive.’
‘O yes,’ said Felix, contemptuously. ‘And she reads Byron also, and admires Childe Harold — gentlemen of unspeakable woes, who employ a hairdresser, and look seriously at themselves in the glass.’
Esther reddened, and gave a little toss. Felix went on triumphantly. ‘A fine lady is a squirrel-headed thing, with small airs and small notions, about as applicable to the business of life as a pair of tweezers to the clearing of a forest. Ask your father what those old persecuted emigrant Puritans would have done with fine-lady wives and daughters.’
‘O there is no danger of such misalliances,’ said Esther. ‘Men who are unpleasant companions and make frights of themselves, are sure to get wives tasteless enough to suit them.’
‘Esther, my dear,’ said Mr Lyon, ‘let not your playfulness betray you into disrespect towards those venerable pilgrims. They struggled and endured in order to cherish and plant anew the seeds of scriptural doctrine and of a pure discipline.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Esther, hastily, dreading a discourse on the pilgrim fathers.
‘O they were an ugly lot!’ Felix burst in, making Mr Lyon start. ‘Miss Medora wouldn’t have minded if they had all been put into the pillory and lost their ears. She would have said, “Their ears did stick out so.” I shouldn’t wonder if that’s a bust of one of them.’ Here Felix, with sudden keenness of observation, nodded at the black bust with the gauze over its coloured face.
‘No,’ said Mr Lyon; ‘that is the eminent George Whitfield, who, you well know, had a gift of oratory as of one on whom the tongue of flame had rested visibly. But Providence — doubtless for wise ends in relation to the inner man, for I would not inquire too closely into minutiae which carry too many plausible interpretations for any one of them to be stable — Providence, I say, ordained that the good man should squint; and my daughter has not yet learned to bear with this infirmity.’
‘So she has put a veil over it. Suppose you had squinted yourself?’ said Felix, looking at Esther.
‘Then, doubtless, you could have been more polite to me, Mr Holt,’ said Esther, rising and placing herself at her worktable. ‘You seem to prefer what is unusual and ugly.’
‘A peacock!’ thought Felix. ‘I should like to come and scold her every day, and make her cry and cut her fine hair off.’
Felix rose to go, and said, ‘I will not take up more of your valuable time, Mr Lyon. I know that you have not many spare evenings.’
‘That is true, my young friend; for I now go to Sproxton one evening in the week. I do not despair that we may some day need a chapel there, though the hearers do not multiply save among the women, and there is no work as yet begun among the miners themselves. I shall be glad of your company in my walk thither tomorrow at five o’clock, if you would like to see how that population has grown of late years.’
‘O, I’ve been to Sproxton already several times. I had a congregation of my own there last Sunday evening.’
‘What! do you preach?’ said Mr Lyon, with a brightened glance
‘Not exactly. I went to the ale-house.’
Mr Lyon started. ‘I trust you are putting a riddle to me, young man, even as Samson did to his companions. From what you said but lately, it cannot be that you are given to tippling and to taverns.’
‘O, I don’t drink much. I order a pint of beer, and I get into talk with the fellows over their pots and pipes. Somebody must take a little knowledge and common sense to them in this way, else how are they to get it? I go for educating the non-electors, so I put myself in the way of my pupils — my academy is the beer-house. I’ll walk with you tomorrow with great pleasure.’
‘Do so, do so,’ said Mr Lyon, shaking hands with his old acquaintance. ‘We shall understand each other better by-and-by, I doubt not.’
‘I wish you good-evening, Miss Lyon.’
Esther bowed very slightly, without speaking.
‘That is a singular young man, Esther,’ said the minister, walking about after Felix was gone. ‘I discern in him a love for whatsoever things are honest and true, which I would fain believe to be an earnest of further endowment with the wisdom that is from on high. It is true that, as the traveller in the desert is often lured, by a false vision of water and freshness, to turn aside from the track which leads to the tried and established fountains, so the Evil One will take advantage of a natural yearning towards the better, to delude the soul with a self-flattering belief in a visionary virtue, higher than the ordinary fruits of the Spirit. But I trust it is not so here. I feel a great enlargement in this young man’s presence, notwithstanding a certain licence in his language, which I shall use my efforts to correct.’
‘I think he is very coarse and rude,’ said Esther, with a touch of temper in her voice. ‘But he speaks better English than most of our visitors. What is his occupation?’
‘Watch and clock making, by which, together with a little teaching, as I understand, he hopes to maintain his mother, not thinking it right that she should live by the sale of medicines whose virtues he distrusts. It is no common scruple.’
‘Dear me,’ said Esther, ‘I thought he was something higher than that.’ She was disappointed.
Felix, on his side, as he strolled out in the evening air, said to himself: ‘Now by what fine meshes of circumstance did that queer devout old man, with his awful creed, which makes this world a vestibule with double doors to hell, and a narrow stair on one side whereby the thinner sort may mount to heaven — by what subtle play of flesh and spirit did he come to have a daughter so little in his own likeness? Married foolishly, I suppose. I’ll never marry, though I should have to live on raw turnips to subdue my flesh. I’ll never look back and say, “I had a fine purpose once — I meant to keep my hands clean, and my soul upright, and to look truth in the face; but pray excuse me, I have a wife and children — I must lie and simper a little, else they’ll starve! ” or, “My wife is nice, she must have her bread well buttered, and her feelings will be hurt if she is not thought genteel.” That is the lot Miss Esther is preparing for some man or other. I could grind my teeth at such self-satisfied minxes, who think they can tell everybody what is the correct thing, and the utmost stretch of their ideas will not place them on a level with the intelligent fleas. I should like to see if she could be made ashamed of herself.’
‘Though she be dead, yet let me think she lives,
And feed my mind, that dies for want of her.’
MARLOWE: Tamburlaine the Great.
HARDLY any one in Treby who thought at all of Mr Lyon and his daughter had not felt the same sort of wonder about Esther as Felix felt. She was not much liked by her father’s church and congregation. The less serious observed that she had too many airs and graces, and held her head much too high; the stricter sort feared greatly that Mr Lyon had not been sufficiently careful in placing his daughter among God-fearing people, and that, being led astray by the melancholy vanity of giving her exceptional accomplishments, he had sent her to a French school, and allowed her to take situations where she had contracted notions not only above her own rank, but of too worldly a kind to be safe in any rank. But no one knew what sort of woman her mother had been, for Mr Lyon never spoke of his past domesticities. When he was chosen as pastor at Treby in 1825, it was understood that he had been a widower many years, and he had no companion but the tearful and much-exercised Lyddy, his daughter being still at school. It was only two years ago that Esther had come home to live permanently with her father, and take pupils in the town. Within that time she had excited a passion in two young Dissenting breasts that were clad in the best style of Treby waistcoat — a garment which at that period displayed much design both in the stuff and the wearer; and she had secured an astonished admiration of her cleverness from the girls of various ages who were her pupils; indeed, her knowledge of French was generally held to give a distinction to Treby itself as compared with other market-towns. But she had won little regard of any other kind. Wise Dissenting matrons were divided between fear lest their sons should want to marry her and resentment that she should treat those ‘undeniable’ young men with a distant scorn which was hardly to be tolerated in a minister’s daughter; not only because that parentage appeared to entail an obligation to show an exceptional degree of Christian humility, but because, looked at from a secular point of view, a poor minister must be below the substantial householders who kept him. For at that time the preacher who was paid under the Voluntary system was regarded by his flock with feelings not less mixed than the spiritual person who still took his tithe-pig or his modus. His gifts were admired, and tears were shed under best bonnets at his sermons; but the weaker tea was thought good enough for him; and even when he went to preach a charity sermon in a strange town, he was treated with home-made wine and the smaller bedroom. As the good churchman’s reverence was often mixed with growling, and was apt to be given chiefly to an abstract parson who was what a parson ought to be, so the good Dissenter sometimes mixed his approval of ministerial gifts with considerable criticism and cheapening of the human vessel which contained these treasures. Mrs Muscat and Mrs Nuttwood applied the principle of Christian equality by remarking that Mr Lyon had his oddities, and that he ought not to allow his daughter to indulge in such unbecoming expenditure on her gloves, shoes, and hosiery, even if she did pay for them out of her earnings. As for the Church people who engaged Miss Lyon to give lessons in their families, their imaginations were altogether prostrated by the incongruity between accomplishments and Dissent, between weekly prayer-meetings and a conversance with so lively and altogether worldly a language as the French. Esther’s own mind was not free from a sense of irreconcilableness between the objects of her taste and the conditions of her lot. She knew that Dissenters were looked down upon by those whom she regarded as the most refined classes; her favourite companions, both in France and at an English school where she had been a junior teacher, had thought it quite ridiculous to have a father who was a Dissenting preacher; and when an ardently admiring schoolfellow induced her parents to take Esther as a governess to the younger children, all her native tendencies towards luxury, fastidiousness, and scorn of mock gentility, were strengthened by witnessing the habits of a well-born and wealthy family. Yet the position of servitude was irksome to her, and she was glad at last to live at home with her father; for though, throughout her girlhood, she had wished to avoid this lot, a little experience had taught her to prefer its comparative independence. But she was not contented with her life: she seemed to herself to be surrounded with ignoble, uninteresting conditions, from which there was no issue; for even if she had been unamiable enough to give her father pain deliberately, it would have been no satisfaction to her to go to Treby church, and visibly turn her back on Dissent. It was not religious differences, but social differences, that Esther was concerned about, and her ambitious taste would have been no more gratified in the society of the Waces than in that of the Muscats. The Waces spoke imperfect English and played whist; the Muscats spoke the same dialect and took in the Evangelical Magazine. Esther liked neither of these amusements. She had one of those exceptional organisations which are quick and sensitive without being in the least morbid; she was alive to the finest shades of manner, to the nicest distinctions of tone and accent; she had a little code of her own about scents and colours, textures and behaviour, by which she secretly condemned or sanctioned all things and persons. And she was well satisfied with herself for her fastidious taste, never doubting that hers was the highest standard. She was proud that the best-born and handsomest girls at school had always said that she might be taken for a born lady. Her own pretty instep, clad in a silk stocking, her little heel, just rising from a kid slipper, her irreproachable nails and delicate wrist, were the objects of delighted consciousness to her; and she felt that it was her superiority which made her unable to use without disgust any but the finest cambric handkerchiefs and freshest gloves. Her money all went in the gratification of these nice tastes, and she saved nothing from her earnings. I cannot say that she had any pangs of conscience on this score; for she felt sure that she was generous: she hated all meanness, would empty her purse impulsively on some sudden appeal to her pity, and if she found out that her father had a want, she would supply it with some pretty device of a surprise. But then the good man so seldom had a want — except the perpetual desire, which she could never gratify, of seeing her under convictions, and fit to become a member of the church.
As for little Mr Lyon, he loved and admired this unregenerate child more, he feared, than was consistent with the due preponderance of impersonal and ministerial regards: he prayed and pleaded for her with tears, humbling himself for her spiritual deficiencies in the privacy of his study; and then he came downstairs to find himself in timorous subjection to her wishes, lest, as he inwardly said, he should give his teaching an ill savour, by mingling it with outward crossing. There will be queens in spite of Salic or other laws of later date than Adam and Eve; and here, in this small dingy house of the minister in Malthouse Yard, there was a light-footed, sweet-voiced Queen Esther.
The stronger will always rule, say some, with an air of confidence which is like a lawyer’s flourish, forbidding exceptions or additions. But what is strength? Is it blind wilfulness that sees no terrors, no many-linked consequences, no bruises and wounds of those whose cords it tightens? Is it the narrowness of a brain that conceives no needs differing from its own, and looks to no results beyond the bargains of today; that tugs with emphasis for every small purpose, and thinks it weakness to exercise the sublime power of resolved renunciation? There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness
Esther had affection for her father: she recognised the purity of his character, and a quickness of intellect in him which responded to her own liveliness, in spite of what seemed a dreary piety, which selected everything that was least interesting and romantic in life and history. But his old clothes had a smoky odour, and she did not like to walk with him, because, when people spoke to him in the street, it was his wont, instead of remarking on the weather and passing on, to pour forth in an absent manner some reflections that were occupying his mind about the traces of the divine government, or about a peculiar incident narrated in the life of the eminent Mr Richard Baxter. Esther had a horror of appearing ridiculous even in the eyes of vulgar Trebians. She fancied that she should have loved her mother better than she was able to love her father; and she wished she could have remembered that mother more thoroughly.
But she had no more than a broken vision of the time before she was five years old — the time when the word oftenest on her lips was ‘Mamma;’ when a low voice spoke caressing French words to her, and she in her turn repeated the words to her rag-doll; when a very small white hand, different from any that came after, used to pat her, and stroke her, and tie on her frock and pinafore, and when at last there was nothing but sitting with a doll on a bed where mamma was lying, till her father once carried her away. Where distinct memory began, there was no longer the low caressing voice and the small white hand. She knew that her mother was a Frenchwoman, that she had been in want and distress, and that her maiden name was Annette Ledru. Her father had told her no more than this; and once, in her childhood, when she had asked him some question, he had said, ‘My Esther, until you are a woman, we will only think of your mother: when you are about to be married and leave me, we will speak of her, and I will deliver to you her ring and all that was hers; but, without a great command laid upon me, I cannot pierce my heart by speaking of that which was and is lost.’ Esther had never forgotten these words, and the older she became, the more impossible she felt it that she should urge her father with questions about the past.
His inability to speak of that past to her depended on manifold causes. Partly it came from an initial concealment. He had not the courage to tell Esther that he was not really her father: he had not the courage to renounce that hold on her tenderness which the belief in his natural fatherhood must help to give him, or to incur any resentment that her quick spirit might feel at having been brought up under a false supposition. But there were other things yet more difficult for him to be quite open about — deep sorrows of his life as a Christian minister that were hardly to be told to a girl.
Twenty-two years before, when Rufus Lyon was no more than thirty-six years old, he was the admired pastor of a large Independent congregation in one of our southern seaport towns. He was unmarried, and had met all exhortations of friends who represented to him that a bishop — i.e., the overseer of an Independent church and congregation — should be the husband of one wife, by saying that St Paul meant this particular as a limitation, and not as an injunction; that a minister was permitted to have one wife, but that he, Rufus Lyon, did not wish to avail himself of that permission, finding his studies and other labours of his vocation all-absorbing, and seeing that mothers in Israel were sufficiently provided by those who had not been set apart for a more special work. His church and congregation were proud of him: he was put forward on platforms, was made a ‘deputation,’ and was requested to preach anniversary sermons in far-off towns. Wherever noteworthy preachers were discussed, Rufus Lyon was almost sure to be mentioned as one who did honour to the Independent body; his sermons were said to be full of study yet full of fire; and while he had more of human knowledge than many of his brethren, he showed in an eminent degree the marks of a true ministerial vocation. But on a sudden this burning and shining light seemed to be quenched: Mr Lyon voluntarily resigned his charge and withdrew from the town.
A terrible crisis had come upon him; a moment in which religious doubt and newly-awakened passion had rushed together in a common flood, and had paralysed his ministerial gifts. His life of thirty-six years had been a story of purely religious and studious fervour; his passion had been for doctrines, for argumentative conquest on the side of right; the sins he had had chiefly to pray against had been those of personal ambition (under such forms as ambition takes in the mind of a man who has chosen the career of an Independent preacher), and those of a too restless intellect, ceaselessly urging questions concerning the mystery of that which was assuredly revealed, and thus hindering the due nourishment of the soul on the substance of the truth delivered. Even at that time of comparative youth, his unworldliness and simplicity in small matters (for he was keenly awake to the larger affairs of this world) gave a certain oddity to his manners and appearance; and though his sensitive face had much beauty, his person altogether seemed so irrelevant to a fashionable view of things, that well-dressed ladies and gentlemen usually laughed at him, as they probably did at Mr John Milton after the Restoration and ribbons had come in, and still more at that apostle, of weak bodily presence, who preached in the back streets of Ephesus and elsewhere, a new view of a new religion that hardly anybody believed in. Rufus Lyon was the singular-looking apostle of the meeting in Skipper’s Lane. Was it likely that any romance should befall such a man? Perhaps not; but romance did befall him.
One winter’s evening in 1812, Mr Lyon was returning from a village preaching. He walked at his usual rapid rate, with busy thoughts undistracted by any sight more distinct than the bushes and hedgerow trees, black beneath a faint moon-light, until something suggested to him that he had perhaps omitted to bring away with him a thin account-book in which he recorded certain subscriptions. He paused, unfastened his outer coat and felt in all his pockets, then he took off his hat and looked inside it. The book was not to be found, and he was about to walk on, when he was startled by hearing a low, sweet voice say, with a suong foreign accent — ‘Have pity on me, sir.’
Searching with his short-sighted eyes, he perceived some one on a side-bank; and approaching, he found a young woman with a baby on her lap. She spoke again, more faintly than before —
‘Sir, I die with hunger; in the name of God take the little one.’
There was no distrusting the pale face and the sweet low voice. Without pause, Mr Lyon took the baby in his arms and said, ‘Can you walk by my side, young woman?’
She rose, but seemed tottering. ‘Lean on me,’ said Mr Lyon. And so they walked slowly on, the minister for the first time in his life carrying a baby.
Nothing better occurred to him than to take his charge to his own house; it was the simplest way of relieving the woman’s wants, and finding out how she could be helped further; and he thought of no other possibilities. She was too feeble for more words to be spoken between them till she was seated by his fireside. His elderly servant was not easily amazed at anything her master did in the way of charity, and at once took the baby, while Mr Lyon unfastened the mother’s damp bonnet and shawl, and gave her something warm to drink. Then, waiting by her till it was time to offer her more, he had nothing to do but to notice the loveliness of her face, which seemed to him as that of an angel, with a benignity in its repose that carried a more assured sweetness than any smile. Gradually she revived, lifted up her delicate hands between her face and the firelight, and looked at the baby which lay opposite to her on the old servant’s lap, taking in spoonfuls with much content, and stretching out naked feet towards the warmth. Then, as her consciousness of relief grew into contrasting memory, she lifted up her eyes to Mr Lyon, who stood close by her, and said, in her pretty broken way —
‘I knew you had a good heart when you took your hat off. You seemed to me as the image of the bien-aime Saint Jean.’
The grateful glance of those blue-grey eyes, with their long shadow-making eyelashes, was a new kind of good to Rufus Lyon; it seemed to him as if a woman had never really looked at him before. Yet this poor thing was apparently a blind French Catholic — of delicate nurture, surely, judging from her hands. He was in a tremor; he felt that it would be rude to question her, and he only urged her now to take a little food. She accepted it with evident enjoyment, looking at the child continually, and then, with a fresh burst of gratitude, leaning forward to press the servant’s hand, and say, ‘O, you are good!’ Then she looked up at Mr Lyon again and said, ‘Is there in the world a prettier marmot?”
The evening passed; a bed was made up for the strange woman, and Mr Lyon had not asked her so much as her name. He never went to bed himself that night. He spent it in misery, enduring a horrible assault of Satan. He thought a frenzy had seized him. Wild visions of an impossible future thrust themselves upon him. He dreaded lest the woman had a husband; he wished that he might call her his own, that he might worship her beauty, that she might love and caress him. And what to the mass of men would have been only one of many allowable follies — a transient fascination, to be dispelled by daylight and contact with those common facts of which common-sense is the reflex — was to him a spiritual convulsion. He was as one who raved, and knew that he raved. These mad wishes were irreconcilable with what he was, and must be, as a Christian minister; nay, penetrating his soul as tropic heat penetrates the frame, and changes for it all aspects and all flavours, they were irreconcilable with that conception of the world which made his faith. All the busy doubt which had before been mere impish shadows flitting around a belief that was strong with the strength of an unswerving moral bias, had now gathered blood and substance. The questioning spirit had become suddenly bold and blasphemous: it no longer insinuated scepticism — it prompted defiance; it no longer expressed cool inquisitive thought, but was the voice of a passionate mood. Yet he never ceased to regard it as the voice of the tempter: the conviction which had been the law of his better life remained within him as a conscience.
The struggle of that night was an abridgment of all the struggles that came after. Quick souls have their intensest life in the first anticipatory sketch of what may or will be, and the pursuit of their wish is the pursuit of that paradisaic vision which only impelled them, and is left farther and farther behind, vanishing for ever even out of hope in the moment which is called success.
The next morning Mr Lyon heard his guest’s history. She was the daughter of a French officer of considerable rank, who had fallen in the Russian campaign. She had escaped from France to England with much difficulty in order to rejoin her husband, a young Englishman, to whom she had become attached during his detention as a prisoner of war on parole at Vesoul, where she was living under the charge of some relatives, and to whom she had been married without the consent of her family. Her husband had served in the Hanoverian army, had obtained his discharge in order to visit England on some business, with the nature of which she was not acquainted, and had been taken prisoner as a suspected spy. A short time after their marriage he and his fellow-prisoners had been moved to a town nearer the coast, and she had remained in wretched uncertainty about him, until at last a letter had come from him telling her that an exchange of prisoners had occurred, that he was in England, that she must use her utmost effort to follow him, and that on arriving on English ground she must send him word under a cover which he enclosed, bearing an address in London. Fearing the opposition of her friends, she started unknown to them, with a very small supply of money; and after enduring much discomfort and many fears in waiting for a passage, which she at last got in a small trading smack, she arrived at Southampton — ill. Before she was able to write her baby was born; and before her husband’s answer came, she had been obliged to pawn some clothes and trinkets. He desired her to travel to London, where he would meet her at the Belle Sauvage, adding that he was himself in distress and unable to come to her: when once he was in London they would take ship and quit the country. Arrived at the Belle Sauvage, the poor thing waited three days in vain for her husband: on the fourth a letter came in a strange hand, saying that in his last moments he had desired this letter to be written to inform her of his death, and recommend her to return to her friends. She could choose no other course, but she had soon been reduced to walking, that she might save her pence to buy bread with; and on the evening when she made her appeal to Mr Lyon, she had pawned the last thing, over and above needful clothing, that she could persuade herself to part with. The things she had not borne to part with were her marriage-ring and a locket containing her husband’s hair, and bearing his baptismal name. This locket, she said, exactly resembled one worn by her husband on his watch-chain, only that his bore the name Annette, and contained a lock of her hair. The precious trifle now hung round her neck by a cord, for she had sold the small gold chain which formerly held it.
The only guarantee of this story, besides the exquisite candour of her face, was a small packet of papers which she carried in her pocket, consisting of her husband’s few letters, the letter which announced his death, and her marriage certificate. It was not so probable a story as that of many an inventive vagrant; but Mr Lyon did not doubt it for a moment. It was impossible to him to suspect this angelic-faced woman, but he had strong suspicions concerning her husband. He could not help being glad that she had not retained the address he had desired her to send to in London, as that removed any obvious means of learning particulars about him. But inquiries might have been made at Vesoul by letter, and her friends there might have been appealed to. A consciousness, not to be quite silenced, told Mr Lyon that this was the course he ought to take, but it would have required an energetic self-conquest, and he was excused from it by Annette’s own disinclination to return to her relatives if any other acceptable possibility could be found.
He dreaded, with a violence of feeling which surmounted all struggles, lest anything should take her away, and place such barriers between them as would make it unlikely or impossible that she should ever love him well enough to become his wife. Yet he saw with perfect clearness that unless he tore up this mad passion by the roots, his ministerial usefulness would be frustrated, and the repose of his soul would be destroyed. This woman was an unregenerate Catholic; ten minutes’ listening to her artless talk made that plain to him: even if her position had been less equivocal, to unite himself to such a woman was nothing less than a spiritual fall. It was already a fall that he had wished there was no high purpose to which he owed an allegiance — that he had longed to fly to some backwoods where there was no church to reproach him, and where he might have this sweet woman to wife, and know the joys of tenderness. Those sensibilities which in most lives are diffused equally through the youthful years, were aroused suddenly in Mr Lyon, as some men have their special genius revealed to them by a tardy concurrence of conditions. His love was the first love of a fresh young heart full of wonder and worship. But what to one man is the virtue which he has sunk below the possibility of aspiring to, is to another the backsliding by which he forfeits his spiritual crown.
The end was, that Annette remained in his house. He had striven against himself so far as to represent her position to some chief matrons in his congregations, praying and yet dreading that they would so take her by the hand as to impose on him that denial of his own longing not to let her go out of his sight, which he found it too hard to impose on himself. But they regarded the case coldly: the woman was, after all, a vagrant. Mr Lyon was observed to be surprisingly weak on the subject — his eagerness seemed disproportionate and unbecoming; and this young Frenchwoman, unable to express herself very clearly, was no more interesting to those matrons and their husbands than other pretty young women suspiciously circumstanced. They were willing to subscribe something to carry her on her way, or if she took some lodgings they would give her a little sewing, and endeavour to convert her from papistry. If, however, she was a respectable person, as she said, the only proper thing for her was to go back to her own country and friends. In spite of himself, Mr Lyon exulted. There seemed a reason now that he should keep Annette under his own eyes. He told himself that no real object would be served by his providing food and lodging for her elsewhere — an expense which he could ill afford. And she was apparently so helpless, except as to the one task of attending to her baby, that it would have been folly to think of her exerting herself for her own support.
But this course of his was severely disapproved by his church. There were various signs that the minister was under some evil influence: his preaching wanted its old fervour, he seemed to shun the intercourse of his brethren, and very mournful suspicions were entertained. A formal remonstrance was presented to him, but he met it as if he had already determined to act in anticipation of it. He admitted that external circumstances, conjoined with a peculiar state of mind, were likely to hinder the fruitful exercise of his ministry, and he resigned it. There was much sorrowing, much expostulation, but he declared that for the present he was unable to unfold himself more fully; he only wished to state solemnly that Annette Ledru, though blind in spiritual things, was in a worldly sense a pure and virtuous woman. No more was to be said, and he departed to a distant town. Here he maintained himself, Annette, and the child, with the remainder of his stipend, and with the wages he earned as a printer’s reader. Annette was one of those angelic-faced helpless women who take all things as manna from heaven: the good image of the well-beloved Saint John wished her to stay with him, and there was nothing else that she wished for except the unattainable. Yet for a whole year Mr Lyon never dared to tell Annette that he loved her: he trembled before this woman; he saw that the idea of his being her lover was too remote from her mind for her to have any idea that she ought not to live with him. She had never known, never asked the reason why he gave up his ministry. She seemed to entertain as little concern about the strange world in which she lived as a bird in its nest: an avalanche had fallen over the past, but she sat warm and uncrushed — there was food for many morrows, and her baby flourished. She did not seem even to care about a priest, or about having her child baptised; and on the subject of religion Mr Lyon was as timid, and shrank as much from speaking to her, as on the subject of his love. He dreaded anything that might cause her to feel a sudden repulsion towards him. He dreaded disturbing her simple gratitude and content. In these days his religious faith was not slumbering; it was awake and achingly conscious of having fallen in a struggle. He had had a great treasure committed to him, and had flung it away: he held himself a backslider. His unbelieving thoughts never gained the full ear and consent of his soul. His prayers had been stifled by the sense that there was something he preferred to complete obedience: they had ceased to be anything but intemmittent cries and confessions, and a submissive presentiment, rising at times even to an entreaty, that some great discipline might come, that the dulled spiritual sense might be roused to full vision and hearing as of old, and the supreme facts become again supreme in his soul. Mr Lyon will perhaps seem a very simple personage, with pitiably narrow theories; but none of our theories are quite large enough for all the disclosures of time, and to the end of men’s struggles a penalty will remain for those who sink from the ranks of the heroes into the crowd for whom the heroes fight and die.
One day, however, Annette learned Mr Lyon’s secret. The baby had a tooth coming, and being large and strong now, was noisily fretful. Mr Lyon, though he had been working extra hours and was much in need of repose, took the child from its mother immediately on entering the house and walked about with it, patting and talking soothingly to it. The stronger grasp, the new sensations, were a successful anodyne, and baby went to sleep on his shoulder. But fearful lest any movement should disturb it, he sat down, and endured the bondage of holding it still against his shoulder.
‘You do nurse baby well,’ said Annette, approvingly. ‘Yet you never nursed before I came?’
‘No,’ said Mr Lyon. ‘I had no brothers and sisters.’
‘Why were you not married?’ Annette had never thought of asking that question before.
‘Because I never loved any woman — till now. I thought I should never marry. Now I wish to marry.’
Annette started. She did not see at once that she was the woman he wanted to marry; what had flashed on her mind was, that there might be a great change in Mr Lyon’s life. It was as if the lightning had entered into her dream, and half awakened her.
‘Do you think it foolish, Annette, that I should wish to marry?’
‘I did not expect it,’ she said, doubtfully. ‘I did not know you thought about it.’
‘You know the woman I should like to marry?’
‘I know her?’ she said, interrogatively, blushing deeply.
‘It is you, Annette — you whom I have loved better than my duty. I forsook everything for you.’
Mr Lyon paused: he was about to do what he felt would be ignoble — to urge what seemed like a claim.
‘Can you love me, Annette? Will you be my wife?’ Annette trembled and looked miserable.
‘Do not speak — forget it,’ said Mr Lyon, rising suddenly and speaking with loud energy. ‘No, no — I do not want it — I do not wish it.’
The baby awoke as he started up; he gave the child into Annette’s arms, and left her.
His work took him away early the next morning and the next again. They did not need to speak much to each other. The third day Mr Lyon was too ill to go to work. His frame had been overwrought; he had been too poor to have sufficiently nourishing food, and under the shattering of his long-deferred hope his health had given way. They had no regular servant — only occasional help from an old woman, who lit the fires and put on the kettles. Annette was forced to be the sick-nurse, and this sudden demand on her shook away some of her torpor. The illness was a serious one, and the medical man one day hearing Mr Lyon in his delirium raving with an astonishing fluency in Biblical language, suddenly looked round with increased curiosity at Annette, and asked if she were the sick man’s wife, or some other relative.
‘No — no relation,’ said Annette, shaking her head. ‘He has been good to me.’
‘How long have you lived with him?’
‘More than a year.’
‘Was he a preacher once?’
‘Yes.’
‘When did he leave off being a preacher?’
‘Soon after he took care of me.’
‘Is that his child?’
‘Sir,’ said Annette, colouring indignantly. ‘I am a widow.’
The doctor, she thought, looked at her oddly, but he asked no more questions.
When the sick man was getting better, and able to enjoy invalid’s food, he observed one day, while he was taking some broth, that Annette was looking at him; he paused to look at her in return, and was struck with a new expression in her face, quite distinct from the merely passive sweetness which usually characterised it. She laid her little hand on his, which was now transparently thin, and said, ‘I am getting very wise; I have sold some of the books to make money — the doctor told me where; and I have looked into the shops where they sell caps and bonnets and pretty things, and I can do all that, and get more money to keep us. And when you are well enough to get up, we will go out and be married — shall we not? See! and la petite (the baby had never been named anything else) shall call you papa — and then we shall never part.’
Mr Lyon trembled. This illness — something else, perhaps — had made a great change in Annette. A fortnight after that they were married. The day before, he had ventured to ask her if she felt any difficulty about her religion, and if she would consent to have la petite baptised and brought up as a Protestant. She shook her head and said very simply —
‘No: in France, in other days, I would have minded; but all is changed. I never was fond of religion, but I knew it was right. J’aimais les fleurs, les bals, la musique, et mon mari qui etait beau. But all that is gone away. There is nothing of my religion in this country. But the good God must be here, for you are good; I leave all to you.’
It was clear that Annette regarded her present life as a sort of death to the world — an existence on a remote island where she had been saved from wreck. She was too indolent mentally, too little interested, to acquaint herself with any secrets of the isle. The transient energy, the more vivid consciousness and sympathy which had been stirred in her during Mr Lyon’s illness, had soon subsided into the old apathy to everything except her child. She withered like a plant in strange air, and the three years of life that remained were but a slow and gentle death. Those three years were to Mr Lyon a period of such self-suppression and life in another as few men know. Strange I that the passion for this woman, which he felt to have drawn him aside from the right as much as if he had broken the most solemn vows — for that only was right to him which he held the best and highest — the passion for a being who had no glimpse of his thoughts induced a more thorough renunciation than he had ever known in the time of his complete devotion to his ministerial career. He had no flattery now, either from himself or the world; he knew that he had fallen, and his world had forgotten him, or shook their heads at his memory. The only satisfaction he had was the satisfaction of his tenderness — which meant untiring work, untiring patience, untiring wakefulness even to the dumb signs of feeling in a creature whom he alone cared for.
The day of parting came, and he was left with little Esther as the one visible sign of that four years’ break in his life. A year afterwards he entered the ministry again, and lived with the utmost sparingness that Esther might be so educated as to be able to get her own bread in case of his death. Her probable facility in acquiring French naturally suggested his sending her to a French school, which would give her a special advantage as a teacher. It was a Protestant school, and French Protestantism had the high recommendation of being non-prelatical. It was understood that Esther would contract no papistical superstitions; and this was perfectly true; but she contracted, as we see, a good deal of non-papistical vanity.
Mr Lyon’s reputation as a teacher and devoted pastor had revived; but some dissatisfaction beginning to be felt by his congregation at a certain laxity detected by them in his views as to the limits of salvation, which he had in one sermon even hinted might extend to unconscious recipients of mercy, he had found it desirable seven years ago to quit this ten years’ pastorate and accept a call from the less important church in Malthouse Yard, Treby Magna.
This was Rufus Lyon’s history, at that time unknown in its fulness to any human being besides himself. We can perhaps guess what memories they were that relaxed the stringency of his doctrine on the point of salvation. In the deepest of all senses his heart said — ‘Though she be dead, yet let me think she lives, And feed my mind, that dies for want of her ’
M. It was but yesterday you spoke him well —
You’ve changed your mind so soon?
N. Not I— ’tis he
That, changing to my thought, has changed my mind.
No man puts rotten apples in his pouch
Because their upper side looked fair to him.
Constancy in mistake is constant folly.
THE news that the rich heir of the Transomes was actually come back, and had been seen at Treby, was carried to some one else who had more reasons for being interested in it than the Reverend Rufus Lyon was yet conscious of having. It was owing to this that at three o’clock, two days afterwards, a carriage and pair, with coachman and footman in crimson and drab, passed through the lodge-gates of Transome Court. Inside there was a hale good-natured-looking man of sixty, whose hands rested on a knotted stick held between his knees; and a blue-eyed, well-featured lady, fat and middle-aged — a mountain of satin, lace, and exquisite muslin embroidery. They were not persons of highly remarkable appearance, but to most Trebians they seemed absolutely unique, and likely to be known anywhere. If you had looked down on them from the box of Sampson’s coach, he would have said, after lifting his hat, ‘Sir Maximus and his lady — did you see?’ thinking it needless to add the surname.
‘We shall find her greatly elated, doubtless,’ Lady Debarry was saying. ‘She has been in the shade so long.’
‘Ah, poor thing!’ said Sir Maximus. ‘A fine woman she was in her bloom. I remember the first county ball she attended we were all ready to fight for the sake of dancing with her. I always liked her from that time — I never swallowed the scandal about her myself.’
‘If we are to be intimate with her,’ said Lady Debarry, ‘I wish you would avoid making such allusions, Sir Maximus. I should not like Selina and Harriet to hear them.’
‘My dear, I should have forgotten all about the scandal, only you remind me of it sometimes,’ retorted the baronet, smiling and taking out his snuff-box.
‘These sudden turns of fortune are often dangerous to an excitable constitution,’ said Lady Debarry, not choosing to notice her husband’s epigram. ‘Poor Lady Alicia Methurst got heart-disease from a sudden piece of luck — the death of her uncle, you know. If Mrs Transome were wise she would go to town — she can afford it now — and consult Dr Truncheon. I should say myself he would order her digitalis: I have often guessed exactly what a prescription would be. But it certainly was always one of her weak points to think that she understood medicine better than other people.’
‘She’s a healthy woman enough, surely: see how upright she is, and she rides about like a girl of twenty.’
‘She is so thin that she makes me shudder.’
‘Pooh I she’s slim and active; women are not bid for by the pound.’
‘Pray don’t be so coarse.’
Sir Maximus laughed and showed his good teeth, which made his laughter very becoming. The carriage stopped, and they were soon ushered into Mrs Transome’s sitting-room, where she was working at her worsted embroidery. A little daily embroidery had been a constant element in Mrs Transome’s life; that soothing occupation of taking stitches to produce what neither she nor any one else wanted, was then the resource of many a well-born and unhappy woman.
She received much warm congratulation and pressure of her hand with perfect composure of manner; but she became paler than usual, and her hands turned quite cold. The Debarrys did not yet know what Harold’s politics were.
‘Well, our lucky youngster is come in the nick of time,’ said Sir Maximus: ‘if he’ll stand, he and Philip can run in harness together and keep out both the Whigs.’
‘It is really quite a providential thing — his returning just now,’ said Lady Debarry. ‘I couldn’t help thinking that something would occur to prevent Philip from having such a man as Peter Garstin for his colleague.’
‘I call my friend Harold a youngster,’ said Sir Maximus, ‘for, you know, I remember him only as he was when that portrait was taken.’
‘That is a long while ago,’ said Mrs Transome. ‘My son is much altered, as you may imagine.’
There was a confused sound of voices in the library while this talk was going on. Mrs Transome chose to ignore that noise, but her face, from being pale, began to flush a little.
‘Yes, yes, on the outside, I daresay. But he was a fine fellow — I always liked him. And if anybody had asked me what I should choose for the good of the county, I couldn’t have thought of anything better than having a young Transome for a neighbour who will take an active part. The Transomes and the Debarrys were always on the right side together in old days. Of course he’ll stand — he has made up his mind to it?’
The need for an answer to this embarrassing question was deferred by the increase of inarticulate sounds accompanied by a bark from the library, and the sudden appearance at the tapestry-hung doorway of old Mr Transome with a cord round his waist, playing a very poor-paced horse for a black-maned little boy about three years old, who was urging him on with loud encouraging noises and occasional thumps from a stick which he wielded with some difficulty. The old man paused with a vague gentle smile at the doorway, while the baronet got up to speak to him. Nimrod snuffed at his master’s legs to ascertain that he was not hurt, and the little boy, finding something new to be looked at, let go the cord and came round in front of the company, dragging his stick, and standing at a safe war-dancing distance as he fixed his great black eyes on Lady Debarry.
‘Dear me, what a splendid little boy, Mrs Transome I why — it cannot be — can it be — that you have the happiness to be a grandmamma?’ ‘Yes; that is my son’s little boy.’
‘Indeed!’ said Lady Debarry, really amazed. ‘I never heard you speak of his marriage. He has brought you home a daughter-inlaw, then?’
‘No,’ said Mrs Transome, coldly; ‘she is dead.’
‘O— o — oh!’ said Lady Debarry, in a tone ludicrously undecided between condolence, satisfaction, and general mistiness. ‘How very singular — I mean that we should not have heard of Mr Harold’s marriage. But he’s a charming little fellow: come to me, you round-cheeked cherub.’
The black eyes continued fixed as if by a sort of fascination on Lady Debarry’s face, and her affable invitation was unheeded. At last, putting his head forward and pouting his lips, the cherub gave forth with marked intention the sounds, ‘Nau-o-oom,’ many times repeated: apparently they summed up his opinion of Lady Debarry, and may perhaps have meant ‘naughty old woman’, but his speech was a broken lisping polyglot of hazardous interpretation. Then he turned to pull at the Blenheim spaniel, which, being old and peevish, gave a little snap.
‘Go, go, Harry; let poor Puff alone — he’ll bite you,’ said Mrs Transome, stooping to release her aged pet.
Her words were too suggestive, for Harry immediately laid hold of her arm with his teeth, and bit with all his might. Happily the stuffs upon it were some protection, but the pain forced Mrs Transome to give a low cry; and Sir Maximus, who had now turned to reseat himself, shook the little rascal off, whereupon he burst away and trotted into the library again.
‘I fear you are hurt,’ said Lady Debarry, with sincere concern. ‘What a little savage! Do have your arm attended to, my dear — I recommend fomentation — don’t think of me.’
‘O thank you, it is nothing,’ said Mrs Transome, biting her lip and smiling alternately; ‘it will soon go off. The pleasures of being a grandmamma, you perceive. The child has taken a dislike to me; but he makes quite a new life for Mr Transome; they were playfellows at once.’
‘Bless my heart!’ said Sir Maximus, ‘it is odd to think of Harold having been a family man so long. I made up my mind he was a young bachelor. What an old stager I am, to be sure! And whom has he married? I hope we shall soon have the pleasure of seeing Mrs Harold Transome.’ Sir Maximus, occupied with old Mr Transome, had not over heard the previous conversation on that subject.
‘She is no longer living,’ Lady Debarry hastily interposed: ‘but now, my dear Sir Maximus, we must not hinder Mrs Transome from attending to her arm. I am sure she is in pain. Don’t say another word, my dear — we shall see you again — you and Mr Harold will come and dine with us on Thursday — say yes, only yes. Sir Maximus is longing to see him; and Philip will be down.’
‘Yes, yes!’ said Sir Maximus; ‘he must lose no time in making Philip’s acquaintance. Tell him Philip is a fine fellow — carried everything before him at Oxford. And your son must be returned along with him for North Loamshire. You said he meant to stand?’
‘I will write and let you know if Harold has any engagement for Thursday; he would of course be happy otherwise,’ said Mrs Transome, evading the question.
‘If not Thursday, the next day — the very first day he can.’
The visitors left, and Mrs Transome was almost glad of the painful bite which had saved her from being questioned further about Harold’s politics. ‘This is the last visit I shall receive from them,’ she said to herself as the door closed behind them, and she rang for Denner.
‘That poor creature is not happy, Sir Maximus,’ said Lady Debarry as they drove along. ‘Something annoys her about her son. I hope there is nothing unpleasant in his character. Either he kept his marriage a secret from her, or she was ashamed of it. He is thirty-four at least by this time. After living in the East so long he may have become a sort of person one would not care to be intimate with; and that savage boy — he doesn’t look like a lady’s child.’
‘Pooh, my dear,’ said Sir Maximus, ‘women think so much of those minutiae. In the present state of the country it is our duty to look at a man’s position and politics. Philip and my brother are both of that opinion, and I think they know what’s right, if any man does. We are bound to regard every man of our party as a public instrument, and to pull all together. The Transomes have always been a good Tory family, but it has been a cipher of late years. This young fellow coming back with a fortune to give the family a head and a position is a clear gain to the county; and with Philip he’ll get into the right hands — of course he wants guiding, having been out of the country so long. All we have to ask is, whether a man’s a Tory, and will make a stand for the good of the country? — that’s the plain English of the matter. And I do beg of you, my dear, to set aside all these gossiping niceties, and exert yourself, like a woman of sense and spirit as you are, to bring the right people together.’
Here Sir Maximus gave a deep cough, took out his snuff-box, and tapped it: he had made a serious marital speech, an exertion to which he was rarely urged by anything smaller than a matter of conscience. And this outline of the whole duty of a Tory was matter of conscience with him; though the Duffield Watchman had pointed expressly to Sir Maximus Debarry amongst others, in branding the cooperation of the Tories as a conscious selfishness and reckless immorality, which, however, would be defeated by the cooperation of all the friends of truth and liberty, who, the Watchman trusted, would subordinate all non-political differences in order to return representatives pledged to support the present government.
‘I am sure, Sir Maximus,’ Lady Debarry answered, ‘you could not have observed that anything was wanting in my manners to Mrs Transome.’
‘No, no, my dear; but I say this by way of caution. Never mind what was done at Smyrna, or whether Transome likes to sit with his heels tucked up. We may surely wink at a few things for the sake of the public interest, if God Almighty does; and if He didn’t, I don’t know what would have become of the country — government could never have been carried on, and many a good battle would have been lost. That’s the philosophy of the matter, and the common sense too.’
Good Sir Maximus gave a deep cough and tapped his box again, inwardly remarking, that if he had not been such a lazy fellow he might have made as good a figure as his son Philip.
But at this point the carriage, which was rolling by a turn towards Treby Magna, passed a well-dressed man, who raised his hat to Sir Maximus, and called to the coachman to stop.
‘Excuse me, Sir Maximus,’ said this personage, standing uncovered at the carriage-door, ‘but I have just learned something of importance at Treby, which I thought you would like to know as soon as possible.’
‘Ah! what’s that? Something about Garstin or Clement?’ said Sir Maximus, seeing the other draw a poster from his pocket.
‘No; rather worse, I fear you will think. A new Radical candidate. I got this by a stratagem from the printer’s boy. They’re not posted yet.’
‘A Radical!’ said Sir Maximus, in a tone of incredulous disgust, as he took the folded bill. ‘What fool is he? — he’ll have no chance.’
‘They say he’s richer than Garstin.’
‘Harold Transome!’ shouted Sir Maximus, as he read the name in three-inch letters. ‘I don’t believe it — it’s a trick — it’s a squib: why — why — we’ve just been to his place — eh? do you know any more? Speak, sir — speak; don’t deal out your story like a damned mountebank, who wants to keep people gaping.’
‘Sir Maximus, pray don’t give way so,’ said Lady Debarry.
‘I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it, sir,’ said Christian. ‘After getting the bill, I met Mr Labron’s clerk, and he said he had just had the whole story from Jermyn’s clerk. The Ram Inn is engaged already, and a committee is being made up. He says Jermyn goes like a steam-engine, when he has a mind, although he makes such long-winded speeches.’
‘Jermyn be hanged for a two-faced rascal! Tell Mitchell to drive on. It’s of no use to stay chattering here. Jump up on the box and go home with us. I may want you.’
‘You see I was right, Sir Maximus,’ said the baronet’s wife, ‘I had an instinct that we should find him an unpleasant person.’
‘Fudge! if you had such a fine instinct, why did you let us go to Transome Court and make fools of ourselves?’
‘Would you have listened to me? But of course you will not have him to dine with you?’
‘Dine with me? I should think not. I’d sooner he should dine off me. I see how it is clearly enough. He has become a regular beast among those Mahometans — he’s got neither religion nor morals left. He can’t know anything about English politics. He’ll go and cut his own nose off as a land-holder, and never know. However, he won’t get in — he’ll spend his money for nothing.’
‘I fear he is a very licentious man,’ said Lady Debarry. ‘We know now why his mother seemed so uneasy. I should think she reflects a little, poor creature.’
‘It’s a confounded nuisance we didn’t meet Christian on our way, instead of coming back; but better now than later. He’s an uncommonly adroit, useful fellow, that factotum of Philip’s. I wish Phil would take my man and give me Christian. I’d make him house-steward; he might reduce the accounts a little.’
Perhaps Sir Maximus would not have been so sanguine as to Mr Christian’s economical virtues if he had seen that gentleman relaxing himself the same evening among the other distinguished dependants of the family and frequenters of the steward’s room. But a man of Sir Maximus’s rank is like those antediluvian animals whom the system of things condemned to carry such a huge bulk that they really could not inspect their bodily appurtenance, and had no conception of their own tails: their parasites doubtless had a merry time of it, and after did extremely well when the high-bred saurian himself was ill at ease. Treby Manor, measured from the front saloon to the remotest shed, was as large as a moderate-sized village, and there were certainly more lights burning in it every evening, more wine, spirits, and ale drunk, more waste and more folly, than could be found in some large villages. There was fast revelry in the steward’s room, and slow revelry in the Scotch bailiff’s room; short whist, costume, and flirtation in the housekeeper’s room, and the same at a lower price in the servants’ hall; a select Olympian feast in the private apartment of the cook, who was a much grander person than her ladyship, and wore gold and jewellery to a vast amount of suet; a gambling group in the stables, and the coachman, perhaps the most innocent member of the establishment, tippling in majestic solitude by a fire in the harness room. For Sir Maximus, as every one said, was a gentleman of the right sort, condescended to no mean inquiries, greeted his head-servants with a ‘good evening, gentlemen’, when he met them in the park, and only snarled in a subdued way when he looked over the accounts, willing to endure some personal inconvenience in order to keep up the institutions of the country, to maintain his hereditary establishment, and do his duty in that station of life — the station of the long-tailed saurian — to which it had pleased Providence to call him.
The focus of brilliancy at Treby Manor that evening was in no way the dining-room, where Sir Maximus sipped his port under some mental depression, as he discussed with his brother, the Reverend Augustus, the sad fact, that one of the oldest names in the county was to be on the wrong side — not in the drawing-room, where Miss Debarry and Miss Selina, quietly elegant in their dress and manners, were feeling rather dull than otherwise, having finished Mr Bulwer’s Eugene Aram, and being thrown back on the last great prose work of Mr Southey, while their mamma slumbered a little on the sofa. No; the centre of eager talk and enjoyment was the steward’s room, where Mr Scales, house-steward and head-butler, a man most solicitous about his boots, wristbands, the roll of his whiskers, and other attributes of a gentleman, distributed cigars, cognac, and whisky, to various colleagues and guests who were discussing, with that freedom of conjecture which is one of our inalienable privileges as Britons, the probable amount of Harold Transome’s fortune, concerning which fame had already been busy long enough to have acquired vast magnifying power.
The chief part in this scene was undoubtedly Mr Christian’s, although he had hitherto been comparatively silent; but he occupied two chairs with so much grace, throwing his right leg over the seat of the second, and resting his right hand on the back; he held his cigar and displayed a splendid seal-ring with such becoming nonchalance, and had his grey hair arranged with so much taste, that experienced eyes would at once have seen even the great Scales himself to be but a secondary character.
‘Why,’ said Mr Crowder, an old respectable tenant, though much in arrear as to his rent, who condescended frequently to drink in the steward’s room for the sake of the conversation; ‘why, I suppose they get money so fast in the East — it’s wonderful. Why,’ he went on, with a hesitating look towards Mr Scales, ‘this Transome has p’raps got a matter of a hundred thousand.’
‘A hundred thousand, my dear sir! fiddle-stick’s end of a hundred thousand,’ said Mr Scales, with a contempt very painful to be borne by a modest man.
‘Well,’ said Mr Crowder, giving way under torture, as the all-knowing butler puffed and stared at him, ‘perhaps not so much as that.’
‘Not so much, sir! I tell you that a hundred thousand pounds is a bagatelle.’
‘Well, I know it’s a big sum,’ said Mr Crowder, deprecatingly.
Here there was a general laugh. All the other intellects present were more cultivated than Mr Crowder’s.
‘Bagatelle is the French for trifle, my friend,’ said Mr Christian. ‘Don’t talk over people’s heads so, Scales. I shall have hard work to understand you myself soon.’
‘Come, that’s a good one,’ said the head-gardener, who was a ready admirer; ‘I should like to hear the thing you don’t understand, Christian.’
‘He’s a first-rate hand at sneering,’ said Mr Scales, rather nettled.
‘Don’t be waspish, man. I’ll ring the bell for lemons, and make some punch. That’s the thing for putting people up to the unknown tongues,’ said Mr Christian, starting up, and slapping Scales’s shoulder as he passed him.
‘What I mean, Mr Crowder, is this.’ Here Mr Scales paused to puff, and pull down his waistcoat in a gentlemanly manner, and drink. He was wont in this way to give his hearers time for meditation.
‘Come, then, speak English; I’m not against being taught,’ said the reasonable Crowder.
‘What I mean is, that in a large way of trade a man turns his capital over almost as soon as he can turn himself. Bless your soul! I know something about these matters, eh, Brent?’
‘To be sure you do — few men more,’ said the gardener, who was the person appealed to.
‘Not that I’ve had anything to do with commercial families myself. I’ve those feelings that I look to other things besides lucre. But I can’t say that I’ve not been intimate with parties who have been less nice than I am myself; and knowing what I know, I shouldn’t wonder if Transome had as much as five hundred thousand. Bless your soul, sir I people who get their money out of land are as long scraping five pounds together as your trading men are in turning five pounds into a hundred.’
‘That’s a wicked thing, though,’ said Mr Crowder, meditatively. ‘However,’ he went on, retreating from this difficult ground, ‘trade or no trade, the Transomes have been poor enough this many a long year. I’ve a brother a tenant on their estate — I ought to know a little bit about that.’
‘They’ve kept up no establishment at all,’ said Mr Scales, with disgust. ‘They’ve even let their kitchen gardens. I suppose it was the eldest son’s gambling. I’ve seen something of that. A man who has always lived in first-rate families is likely to know a thing or two on that subject.’
‘Ah, but it wasn’t gambling did the first mischief,’ said Mr Crowder, with a slight smile, feeling that it was his turn to have some superiority. ‘New-comers don’t know what happened in this country twenty and thirty year ago. I’m turned fifty myself, and my father lived under Sir Maximus’s father. But if anybody from London can tell me more than I know about this country-side, I’m willing to listen.’
‘What was it, then, if it wasn’t gambling?’ said Mr Scales, with some impatience. ‘I don’t pretend to know.’
‘It was law — law — that’s what it was. Not but what the Transomes always won.’
‘And always lost,’ said the too-ready Scales. ‘Yes, yes; I think we all know the nature of law.’
‘There was the last suit of all made the most noise, as I understood,’ continued Mr Crowder; ‘but it wasn’t tried hereabout. They said there was a deal o’ false swearing. Some young man pretended to be the true heir — let me see — I can’t justly remember the names — he’d got two. He swore he was one man, and they swore he was another. However, Lawyer Jermyn won it — they say he’d win a game against the Old One himself — and the young fellow turned out to be a scamp. Stop a bit — his name was Scaddon — Henry Scaddon.’
Mr Christian here let a lemon slip from his hand into the punch-bowl with a plash which sent some of the nectar into the company’s faces.
‘Hallo! What a bungler I am!’ he said, looking as if he were quite jarred by this unusual awkwardness of his. ‘Go on with your tale, Mr Crowder — a scamp named Harry Scaddon.’
‘Well, that’s the tale,’ said Mr Crowder. ‘He was never seen nothing of any more. It was a deal talked of at the time — and I’ve sat by; and my father used to shake his head; and always when this Mrs Transome was talked of, he used to shake his head, and say she carried things with a high hand once. But, Lord I it was before the battle of Waterloo, and I’m a poor hand at tales; I don’t see much good in ’em myself — but if anybody’ll tell me a cure for the sheep-rot I’ll thank him.’
Here Mr Crowder relapsed into smoking and silence, a little discomfited that the knowledge of which he had been delivered had turned out rather a shapeless and insignificant birth.
‘Well, well, bygones should be bygones; there are secrets in most good families,’ said Mr Scales, winking, ‘and this young Transome, coming back with a fortune to keep up the establishment, and have things done in a decent and gentlemanly way — it would all have been right if he’d not been this sort of Radical madman. But now he’s done for himself. I heard Sir Maximus say at dinner that he would be excommunicated; and that’s a pretty strong word, I take it.’
‘What does it mean, Scales,’ said Mr Christian, who loved tormenting.
‘Ay, what’s the meaning?’ insisted Mr Crowder, encouraged by finding that even Christian was in the dark.
‘Well, it’s a law term — speaking in a figurative sort of way — meaning that a Radical was no gentleman.’
‘Perhaps it’s partly accounted for by his getting his money so fast, and in foreign countries,’ said Mr Crowder, tentatively. ‘It’s reasonable to think he’d be against the land and this country — eh, Sircome?’
Sircome was an eminent miller who had considerable business transactions at the manor, and appreciated Mr Scales’s merits at a handsome percentage on the yearly account. He was a highly honourable tradesman, but in this and in other matters submitted to the institutions of his country; for great houses, as he observed, must have great butlers. He replied to his friend Crowder sententiously.
‘I say nothing. Before I bring words to market, I should like to see ’em a bit scarcer. There’s the land and there’s trade — I hold with both. I swim with the stream.’
‘Hey-day, Mr Sircome! that’s a Radical maxim,’ said Mr Christian, who knew that Mr Sircome’s last sentence was his favourite formula. ‘I advise you to give it up, else it will injure the quality of your flour.’
‘A Radical maxim!’ said Mr Sircome, in a tone of angry astonishment. I should like to hear you prove that. It’s as old as my grandfather, anyhow.’
‘I’ll prove it in one minute,’ said the glib Christian. ‘Reform has set in by the will of the majority — that’s the rabble you know; and the respectability and good sense of the country, which are in the minority, are afraid of Reform running on too fast. So the stream must be running towards Reform and Radicalism; and if you swim with it, Mr Sir — come, you’re a Reformer and a Radical, and your flour is objectionable, and not full weight — and being tried by Scales, will be found wanting.’
There was a roar of laughter. This pun upon Scales was highly appreciated by every one except the miller and the butler. The latter pulled down his waistcoat, and puffed and stared in rather an excited manner. Mr Christian’s wit, in general, seemed to him a poor kind of quibbling.
‘What a fellow you are for fence, Christian,’ said the gardener. ‘Hang me, if I don’t think you’re up to everything.’
‘That’s a compliment you might pay Old Nick, if you come to that,’ said Mr Sircome, who was in the painful position of a man deprived of his formula.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Mr Scales; ‘I’m no fool myself, and could parry a thrust if I liked, but I shouldn’t like it to be said of me that I was up to everything. I’ll keep a little principle if you please.’
‘To be sure,’ said Christian, ladling out the punch. ‘What would justice be without Scales?’
The laughter was not quite so full-throated as before. Such excessive cleverness was a little Satanic.
‘A joke’s a joke among gentlemen,’ said the butler, getting exasperated; ‘I think there has been quite liberties enough taken with my name. But if you must talk about names, I’ve heard of a party before now calling himself a Christian, and being anything but it.’
‘Come, that’s beyond a joke,’ said the surgeon’s assistant, a fast man, whose chief scene of dissipation was the Manor. ‘Let it drop, Scales.’
‘Yes, I daresay it’s beyond a joke. I’m not a harlequin to talk nothing but jokes. I leave that to other Christians, who are up to everything, and have been everywhere — to the hulks, for what I know; and more than that, they come from nobody knows where, and try to worm themselves into gentlemen’s confidence, to the prejudice of their betters.’
There was a stricter sequence in Mr Scales’s angry eloquence than was apparent — some chief links being confined to his own breast, as is often the case in energetic discourse. The company were in a state of expectation. There was something behind worth knowing, and something before them worth seeing. In the general decay of other fine British pugnacious sports, a quarrel between gentlemen was all the more exciting, and though no one would himself have liked to turn on Scales, no one was sorry for the chance of seeing him put down. But the amazing Christian was unmoved. He had taken out his handkerchief and was rubbing his lips carefully. After a slight pause, he spoke with perfect coolness.
‘I don’t intend to quarrel with you, Scales. Such talk as this is not profitable to either of us. It makes you purple in the face — you are apoplectic, you know — and it spoils good company. Better tell a few fibs about me behind my back — it will heat you less, and do me more harm. I’ll leave you to it; I shall go and have a game at whist with the ladies.’
As the door closed behind the questionable Christian, Mr Scales was in a state of frustration that prevented speech. Every one was rather embarrassed.
‘That’s a most uncommon sort o’ fellow,’ said Mr Crowder, in an under-tone, to his next neighbour, the gardener. ‘Why, Mr Philip picked him up in foreign parts, didn’t he?’
‘He was a courier,’ said the gardener. ‘He’s had a deal of experience. And I believe, by what I can make out — for he’s been pretty free with me sometimes — there was a time when he was in that rank of life that he fought a duel.’ ‘Ah I that makes him such a cool chap,’ said Mr Crowder.
‘He’s what I call an overbearing fellow,’ said Mr Sircome, also sotto voce, to his next neighbour, Mr Filmore, the surgeon’s assistant. ‘He runs you down with a sort of talk that’s neither here nor there. He’s got a deal too many samples in his pocket for me.’
‘All I know is, he’s a wonderful hand at cards,’ said Mr Filmore, whose whiskers and shirt-pin were quite above the average. ‘I wish I could play ecarte as he does; it’s beautiful to see him; he can make a man look pretty blue — he’ll empty his pocket for him in no time.’
‘That’s none to his credit,’ said Mr Sircome.
The conversation had in this way broken up into tete-a-tete, and the hilarity of the evening might be considered a failure. Still the punch was drunk, the accounts were duly swelled, and, notwithstanding the innovating spirit of the time, Sir Maximus Debarry’s establishment was kept up in a sound hereditary British manner.
‘Rumour doth double like the voice and echo.’ — SHAKESPEARE.
The mind of a man is as a country which was once open to squatters, who have bred and multiplied and become masters of the land. But then happeneth a time when new and hungry comers dispute the land; and there is trial of strength, and the stronger wins. Nevertheless the first squatters be they who have prepared the ground, and the crops to the end will be sequent (though chiefly on the nature of the soil, as of light sand, mixed loam, or heavy clay, yet) somewhat on the primal labour and sowing.
THAT talkative maiden, Rumour, though in the interest of art she is figured as a youthful winged beauty with flowing garments, soaring above the heads of men, and breathing world-thrilling news through a gracefully-curved trumpet, is in fact a very old maid, who puckers her silly face by the fireside, and really does no more than chirp a wrong guess or a lame story into the ear of a fellow-gossip; all the rest of the work attributed to her is done by the ordinary working of those passions against which men pray in the Litany, with the help of a plentiful stupidity against which we have never yet had any authorised form of prayer.
When Mr Scales’s strong need to make an impressive figure in conversation, together with his very slight need of any other premise than his own sense of his wide general knowledge and probable infallibility, led him to specify five hundred thousand as the lowest admissible amount of Harold Transome’s commercially-acquired fortune, it was not fair to put this down to poor old Miss Rumour, who had only told Scales that the fortune was considerable. And again, when the curt Mr Sircome found occasion at Treby to mention the five hundred thousand as a fact that folks seemed pretty sure about, this expansion of the butler into ‘folks’ was entirely due to Mr Sircome’s habitual preference for words which could not be laid hold of or give people a handle over him. It was in this simple way that the report of Harold Transome’s fortune spread and was magnified, adding much lustre to his opinions in the eyes of Liberals, and compelling even men of the opposite party to admit that it increased his eligibility as a member for North Loamshire. It was observed by a sound thinker in these parts that property was ballast; and when once the aptness of that metaphor had been perceived, it followed that a man was not fit to navigate the sea of politics without a great deal of such ballast; and that, rightly understood, whatever increased the expense of election, inasmuch as it virtually raised the property qualification, was an unspeakable boon to the country.
Meanwhile the fortune that was getting larger in the imagination of constituents was shrinking a little in the imagination of its owner. It was hardly more than a hundred and fifty thousand; and there were not only the heavy mortgages to be paid off, but also a large amount of capital was needed in order to repair the farm-buildings all over the estate, to carry out extensive draining, and make allowances to incoming tenants, which might remove the difficulty of newly letting the farms in a time of agricultural depression. The farms actually tenanted were held by men who had begged hard to succeed their fathers in getting a little poorer every year, on land which was also getting poorer, where the highest rate of increase was in the arrears of rent, and where the master, in crushed hat and corduroys, looked pitiably lean and care-worn by the side of pauper labourers, who showed that superior assimilating power often observed to attend nourishment by the public money. Mr Goffe, of Rabbit’s End, had never had it explained to him that, according to the true theory of rent, land must inevitably be given up when it would not yield a profit equal to the ordinary rate of interest; so that from want of knowing what was inevitable, and not from a Titanic spirit of opposition, he kept on his land. He often said of himself, with a melancholy wipe of his sleeve across his brow, that he ‘didn’t know which-a-way to turn’; and he would have been still more at a loss on the subject if he had quitted Rabbit’s End with a waggonful of furniture and utensils, a file of receipts, a wife with five children, and a shepherd-dog in low spirits.
It took no long time for Harold Transome to discover this state of things, and to see, moreover, that, except on the demesne immediately around the house, the timber had been mismanaged. The woods had been recklessly thinned, and there had been insufficient planting. He had not yet thoroughly investigated the various accounts kept by his mother, by Jermyn, and by Banks the bailiff; but what had been done with the large sums which had been received for timber was a suspicious mystery to him. He observed that the farm held by Jermyn was in first-rate order, that a good deal had been spent on the buildings, and that the rent had stood unpaid. Mrs Transome had taken an opportunity of saying that Jermyn had had some of the mortgage-deeds transferred to him, and that his rent was set against so much interest. Harold had only said, in his careless yet decisive way, ‘O, Jermyn be hanged! It seems to me if Durfey hadn’t died and made room for me, Jermyn would have ended by coming to live here, and you would have had to keep the lodge and open the gate for his carriage. But I shall pay him off — mortgages and all — by-and-by. I’ll owe him nothing — not even a curse.’ Mrs Transome said no more. Harold did not care to enter fully into the subject with his mother. The fact that she had been active in the management of the estate — had ridden about it continually, had busied herself with accounts, had been head-bailiff of the vacant farms, and had yet allowed things to go wrong — was set down by him simply to the general futility of women’s attempts to transact men’s business. He did not want to say anything to annoy her: he was only determined to let her understand, as quietly as possible, that she had better cease all interference.
Mrs Transome did understand this; and it was very little that she dared to say on business, though there was a fierce struggle of her anger and pride with a dread which was nevertheless supreme. As to the old tenants, she only observed, on hearing Harold burst forth about their wretched condition ‘that with the estate so burthened, the yearly loss by arrears could better be borne than the outlay and sacrifice necessary in order to let the farms anew’.
‘I was really capable of calculating, Harold,’ she ended, with a touch of bitterness. ‘It seems easy to deal with farmers and their affairs when you only see them in print, I daresay; but it’s not quite so easy when you live among them. You have only to look at Sir Maximus’s estate: you will see plenty of the same thing. The times have been dreadful, and old families like to keep their old tenants. But I daresay that is Toryism.’
‘It’s a hash of odds and ends, if that is Toryism, my dear mother. However, I wish you had kept three more old tenants; for then I should have had three more fifty-pound voters. And, in a hard run, one may be beaten by a head. But,’ Harold added, smiling and handing her a ball of worsted, which had fallen, ‘a woman ought to be a Tory, and graceful, and handsome, like you. I should hate a woman who took up my opinions, and talked for me. I’m an Oriental, you know. I say, mother, shall we have this room furnished with rose-colour? I notice that it suits your bright grey hair.’
Harold thought it was only natural that his mother should have been in a sort of subjection to Jermyn throughout the awkward circumstances of the family. It was the way of women, and all weak minds, to think that what they had been used to was inalterable, and any quarrel with a man who managed private affairs was necessarily a formidable thing. He himself was proceeding very cautiously, and preferred not even to know too much just at present, lest a certain personal antipathy he was conscious of toward Jermyn, and an occasional liability to exasperation, should get the better of a calm and clear-sighted resolve not to quarrel with the man while he could be of use. Harold would have been disgusted with himself if he had helped to frustrate his own purpose. And his strongest purpose now was to get returned for parliament, to make a figure there as a Liberal member, and to become on all grounds a personage of weight in North Loamshire.
How Harold Transome came to be a Liberal in opposition to all the traditions of his family, was a more subtle inquiry than he had ever cared to follow out. The newspapers undertook to explain it. The North Loamshire Herald witnessed with a grief and disgust certain to be shared by all persons who were actuated by wholesome British feeling, an example of defection in the inheritor of a family name which in times past had been associated with attachment to right principle, and with the maintenance of our constitution in Church and State; and pointed to it as an additional proof that men who had passed any large portion of their lives beyond the limits of our favoured country, usually contracted not only a laxity of feeling towards Protestantism, nay, towards religion itself — a latitudinarian spirit hardly distinguishable from atheism — but also a levity of disposition, inducing them to tamper with those institutions by which alone Great Britain had risen to her preeminence among the nations. Such men, infected with outlandish habits, intoxicated with vanity, grasping at momentary power by flattery of the multitude, fearless because godless, liberal because unEnglish, were ready to pull one stone from under another in the national edifice, till the great structure tottered to its fall. On the other hand, the Duffield Watchman saw in this signal instance of self-liberation from the trammels of prejudice, a decisive guarantee of intellectual preeminence, united with a generous sensibility to the claims of man as man, which had burst asunder, and cast off, by a spontaneous exertion of energy, the cramping out-worn shell of hereditary bias and class interest.
But these large-minded guides of public opinion argued from wider data than could be furnished by any knowledge of the particular case concerned. Harold Transome was neither the dissolute cosmopolitan so vigorously sketched by the Tory Herald, nor the intellectual giant and moral lobster suggested by the liberal imagination of the Watchman. Twenty years ago he had been a bright, active, good-tempered lad, with sharp eyes and a good aim; he delighted in success and in predominance; but he did not long for an impossible predominance, and become sour and sulky because it was impossible. He played at the games he was clever in, and usually won; all other games he let alone, and thought them of little worth. At home and at Eton he had been side by side with his stupid elder brother Durfey, whom he despised; and he very early began to reflect that since this Caliban in miniature was older than himself, he must carve out his own fortune. That was a nuisance; and on the whole the world seemed rather ill-arranged, at Eton especially, where there were many reasons why Harold made no great figure. He was not sorry the money was wanting to send him to Oxford; he did not see the good of Oxford; he had been surrounded by many things during his short life, of which he had distinctly said to himself that he did not see the good, and he was not disposed to venerate on the strength of any good that others saw. He turned his back on home very cheerfully, though he was rather fond of his mother, and very fond of Transome Court, and the river where he had been used to fish; but he said to himself as he passed the lodge-gates, ‘I’ll get rich somehow, and have an estate of my own, and do what I like with it.’ This determined aiming at something not easy but clearly possible, marked the direction in which Harold’s nature was strong; he had the energetic will and muscle, the self-confidence, the quick perception, and the narrow imagination which make what is admiringly called the practical mind.
Since then his character had been ripened by a various experience, and also by much knowledge which he had set himself deliberately to gain. But the man was no more than the boy writ large, with an extensive commentary. The years had nourished an inclination to as much opposition as would enable him to assert his own independence and power without throwing himself into that tabooed condition which robs power of its triumph. And this inclination had helped his shrewdness in forming judgments which were at once innovating and moderate. He was addicted at once to rebellion and to conformity, and only an intimate personal knowledge could enable any one to predict where his conformity would begin. The limit was not defined by theory, but was drawn in an irregular zigzag by early disposition and association; and his resolution, of which he had never lost hold, to be a thorough Englishman again some day, had kept up the habit of considering all his conclusions with reference to English politics and English social conditions. He meant to stand up for every change that the economical condition of the country required, and he had an angry contempt for men with coronets on their coaches, but too small a share of brains to see when they had better make a virtue of necessity. His respect was rather for men who had no coronets, but who achieved a just influence by furthering all measures which the common sense of the country, and the increasing self-assertion of the majority, peremptorily demanded. He could be such a man himself.
In fact Harold Transome was a clever, frank, good-natured egoist; not stringently consistent, but without any disposition to falsity; proud, but with a pride that was moulded in an individual rather than an hereditary form; unspeculative, unsentimental, unsympathetic; fond of sensual pleasures, but disinclined to all vice, and attached as a healthy, clear-sighted person, to all conventional morality, construed with a certain freedom, like doctrinal articles to which the public order may require subscription. A character is apt to look but indifferently, written out in this way. Reduced to a map, our premises seem insignificant, but they make, nevertheless, a very pretty freehold to live in and walk over; and so, if Harold Transome had been among your acquaintances, and you had observed his qualities through the medium of his agreeable person, bright smile, and a certain easy charm which accompanies sensuousness when unsullied by coarseness — through the medium also of the many opportunities in which he would have made himself useful or pleasant to you — you would have thought him a good fellow, highly acceptable as a guest, a colleague, or a brother-inlaw. Whether all mothers would have liked him as a son, is another question.
It is a fact perhaps kept a little too much in the back-ground, that mothers have a self larger than their maternity, and that when their sons have become taller than themselves, and are gone from them to college or into the world, there are wide spaces of their time which are not filled with praying for their boys, reading old letters, and envying yet blessing those who are attending to their shirt-buttons. Mrs Transome was certainly not one of those bland, adoring, and gently tearful women. After sharing the common dream that when a beautiful man-child was born to her, her cup of happiness would be full, she had travelled through long years apart from that child to find herself at last in the presence of a son of whom she was afraid, who was utterly unmanageable by her, and to whose sentiments in any given case she possessed no key. Yet Harold was a kind son: he kissed his mother’s brow, offered her his arm, let her choose what she liked for the house and garden, asked her whether she would have bays or greys for her new carriage, and was bent on seeing her make as good a figure in the neighbourhood as any other woman of her rank. She trembled under this kindness: it was not enough to satisfy her; still, if it should ever cease and give place to something else — she was too uncertain about Harold’s feelings to imagine clearly what that something would be. The finest threads, such as no eye sees, if bound cunningly about the sensitive flesh, so that the movement to break them would bring torture, may make a worse bondage than any fetters. Mrs Transome felt the fatal threads about her, and the bitterness of this helpless bondage mingled itself with the new elegancies of the dining and drawing rooms, and all the household changes which Harold had ordered to be brought about with magical quickness. Nothing was as she had once expected it would be. If Harold had shown the least care to have her stay in the room with him — if he had really cared for her opinion — if he had been what she had dreamed he would be in the eyes of those people who had made her world — if all the past could be dissolved, and leave no solid trace of itself — mighty ifs that were all impossible — she would have tasted some joy; but now she began to look back with regret to the days when she sat in loneliness among the old drapery, and still longed for something that might happen. Yet, save in a bitter little speech, or in a deep sigh heard by no one besides Denner, she kept all these things hidden in her heart, and went out in the autumn sunshine to overlook the alterations in the pleasure-grounds very much as a happy woman might have done. One day, however, when she was occupied in this way, an occasion came on which she chose to express indirectly a part of her inward care.
She was standing on the broad gravel in the afternoon; the long shadows lay on the grass; the light seemed the more glorious because of the reddened and golden trees. The gardeners were busy at their pleasant work; the newly-turned soil gave out an agreeable fragrance; and little Harry was playing with Nimrod round old Mr Transome, who sat placidly on a low garden-chair. The scene would have made a charming picture of English domestic life, and the handsome, majestic, grey-haired woman (obviously grandmamma) would have been especially aclmired. But the artist would have felt it requisite to turn her face towards her husband and little grandson, and to have given her an elderly amiability of expression which would have divided remark with his exquisite rendering of her Indian shawl. Mrs Transome’s face was turned the other way, and for this reason she only heard an approaching step, and did not see whose it was; yet it startled her: it was not quick enough to be her son’s step, and besides, Harold was away at Duffield. It was Mr Jermyn’s.
‘A woman, naturally born to fears.’ — King John.
‘Methinks
Some unborn sorrow, ripe in fortune’s womb,
Is coming towards me; and my inward soul
With nothing trembles.’ — King Richard II.
MATTHEW JERMYN approached Mrs Transome taking off his hat and smiling. She did not smile, but said — ‘You knew Harold was not at home?’
‘Yes; I came to see you, to know if you had any wishes that I could further, since I have not had an opportunity of consulting you since he came home.’
‘Let us walk towards the Rookery, then.’
They turned together, Mr Jermyn still keeping his hat off and holding it behind him; the air was so soft and agreeable that Mrs Transome herself had nothing but a large veil over her head.
They walked for a little while in silence till they were out of sight, under tall trees, and treading noiselessly on fallen leaves. What Jermyn was really most anxious about, was to learn from Mrs Transome whether anything had transpired that was significant of Harold’s disposition towards him, which he suspected to be very far from friendly. Jermyn was not naturally flinty-hearted: at five-and-twenty he had written verses, and had got himself wet through in order not to disappoint a dark-eyed woman whom he was proud to believe in love with him; but a family man with grown-up sons and daughters, a man with a professional position and complicated affairs that make it hard to ascertain the exact relation between property and liabilities, necessarily thinks of himself and what may be impending.
‘Harold is remarkably acute and clever,’ he began at last, since Mrs Transome did not speak. ‘If he gets into parliament, I have no doubt he will distinguish himself. He has a quick eye for business of all kinds.’
‘That is no comfort to me,’ said Mrs Transome. To-day she was more conscious than usual of that bitterness which was always in her mind in Jermyn’s presence, but which was carefully suppressed: — suppressed because she could not endure that the degradation she inwardly felt should ever become visible or audible in acts or words of her own — should ever be reflected in any word or look of his. For years there had been a deep silence about the past between them: on her side, because she remembered; on his, because he more and more forgot.
‘I trust he is not unkind to you in any way. I know his opinions pain you; but I trust you find him in everything else disposed to be a good son.’
‘O, to be sure — good as men are disposed to be to women, giving them cushions and carriages, and recommending them to enjoy themselves, and then expecting them to be contented under contempt and neglect. I have no power over him — remember that — none.’
Jermyn turned to look in Mrs Transome’s face: it was long since he had heard her speak to him as if she were losing her self-command.
‘Has he shown any unpleasant feeling about your management of the affairs?’
‘My management of the affairs?’ Mrs Transome said, with concentrated rage, flashing a fierce look at Jermyn. She checked herself: she felt as if she were lighting a torch to flare on her own past folly and misery. It was a resolve which had become a habit, that she would never quarrel with this man — never tell him what she saw him to be. She had kept her woman’s pride and sensibility intact: through all her life there had vibrated the maiden need to have her hand kissed and be the object of chivalry. And so she sank into silence again, trembling.
Jermyn felt annoyed — nothing more. There was nothing in his mind corresponding to the intricate meshes of sensitiveness in Mrs Transome’s. He was anything but stupid; yet he always blundered when he wanted to be delicate or magnanimous; he constantly sought to soothe others by praising himself. Moral vulgarity cleaved to him like an hereditary odour. He blundered now.
‘My dear Mrs Transome,’ he said in a tone of bland kindness, ‘you are agitated — you appear angry with me. Yet I think, if you consider, you will see that you have nothing to complain of in me, unless you will complain of the inevitable course of man’s life. I have always met your wishes both in happy circumstances and in unhappy ones. I should be ready to do so now, if it were possible.’
Every sentence was as pleasant to her as if it had been cut in her bared arm. Some men’s kindness and love-making are more exasperating, more humiliating than others’ derision; but the pitiable woman who has once made herself secretly dependent on a man who is beneath her in feeling, must bear that humiliation for fear of worse. Coarse kindness is at least better than coarse anger; and in all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of its dulness. Mrs Transome knew in her inmost soul that those relations which had sealed her lips on Jermyn’s conduct in business matters, had been with him a ground for presuming that he should have impunity in any lax dealing into which circumstances had led him. She knew that she herself had endured all the more privation because of his dishonest selfishness. And now, Harold’s long-deferred heirship, and his return with startlingly unexpected penetration, activity, and assertion of mastery, had placed them both in the full presence of a difficulty which had been prepared by the years of vague uncertainty as to issues. In this position, with a great dread hanging over her, which Jermyn knew, and ought to have felt that he had caused her, she was inclined to lash him with indignation, to scorch him with the words that were just the fit names for his doings — inclined all the more when he spoke with an insolent blandness, ignoring all that was truly in her heart. But no sooner did the words ‘You have brought it on me’ rise within her than she heard within also the retort, ‘You brought it on yourself.’ Not for all the world beside could she bear to hear that retort uttered from without. What did she do? With strange sequence to all that rapid tumult, after a few moments’ silence she said, in a gentle and almost tremulous voice — ‘Let me take your arm.’
He gave it immediately, putting on his hat and wondering. For more than twenty years Mrs Transome had never chosen to take his arm.
‘I have but one thing to ask. Make me a promise.’
‘What is it?’
‘That you will never quarrel with Harold.’
‘You must know that it is my wish not to quarrel with him.’
‘But make a vow — fix it in your mind as a thing not to be done. Bear anything from him rather than quarrel with him.
‘A man can’t make a vow not to quarrel,’ said Jermyn, who was already a little irritated by the implication that Harold might be disposed to use him roughly. ‘A man’s temper may get the better of him at any moment. I am not prepared to bear anything.’
‘Good God!’ said Mrs Transome, taking her hand from his arm,’ is it possible you don’t feel how horrible it would be?’
As she took away her hand, Jermyn let his arm fall, put both his hands in his pockets, and shrugging his shoulders said, ‘I shall use him as he uses me.’
Jermyn had turned round his savage side, and the blandness was out of sight. It was this that had always frightened Mrs Transome: there was a possibility of fierce insolence in this man who was to pass with those nearest to her as her indebted servant, but whose brand she secretly bore. She was as powerless with him as she was with her son.
This woman, who loved rule, dared not speak another word of attempted persuasion. They were both silent, taking the nearest way into the sunshine again. There was a half-formed wish in both their minds — even in the mother’s — that Harold Transome had never been born.
‘We are working hard for the election,’ said Jermyn, recovering himself, as they turned into the sunshine again. ‘I think we shall get him returned, and in that case he will be in high good-humour. Everything will be more propitious than you are apt to think. You must persuade yourself,’ he added, smiling at her, ‘that it is better for a man of his position to be in parliament on the wrong side than not be in at all.’
‘Never,’ said Mrs Transome. ‘I am too old to learn to call bitter sweet and sweet bitter. But what I may think or feel is of no consequence now. I am as unnecessary as a chimney ornament.’
And in this way they parted on the gravel, in that pretty scene where they had met. Mrs Transome shivered as she stood alone: all around her, where there had once been brightness and warmth, there were white ashes, and the sunshine looked dreary as it fell on them.
Mr Jermyn’s heaviest reflections in riding homeward turned on the possibility of incidents between himself and Harold Transome which would have disagreeable results, requiring him to raise money, and perhaps causing scandal, which in its way might also help to create a monetary deficit. A man of sixty, with a wife whose Duffield connections were of the highest respectability, with a family of tall daughters, an expensive establishment, and a large professional business, owed a great deal more to himself as the mainstay of all those solidities, than to feelings and ideas which were quite unsubstantial. There were many unfortunate coincidences which placed Mr Jermyn in an uncomfortable position just now; he had not been much to blame, he considered; if it had not been for a sudden turn of affairs no one would have complained. He defied any man to say that he had intended to wrong people; he was able to refund, to make reprisals, if they could be fairly demanded. Only he would certainly have preferred that they should not be demanded.
A German poet was intrusted with a particularly fine sausage, which he was to convey to the donor’s friend at Paris. In the course of the long journey he smelt the sausage; he got hungry, and desired to taste it; he pared a morsel off, then another, and another, in successive moments of temptation, till at last the sausage was, humanly speaking, at an end. The offence had not been premeditated. The poet had never loved meanness, but he loved sausage; and the result was undeniably awkward.
So it was with Matthew Jermyn. He was far from liking that ugly abstraction rascality, but he had liked other things which had suggested nibbling. He had had to do many things in law and in daily life which, in the abstract, he would have condemned; and indeed he had never been tempted by them in the abstract. Here, in fact, was the inconvenience; he had sinned for the sake of particular concrete things, and particular concrete consequences were likely to follow.
But he was a man of resolution, who, having made out what was the best course to take under a difficulty, went straight to his work. The election must be won: that would put Harold in good-humour, give him something to do, and leave himself more time to prepare for any crisis.
He was in anything but low spirits that evening. It was his eldest daughter’s birthday, and the young people had a dance. Papa was delightful — stood up for a quadrille and a country-dance, told stories at supper, and made humorous quotations from his early readings: if these were Latin, he apologised, and translated to the ladies; so that a deaf lady-visitor from Duffield kept her trumpet up continually, lest she should lose any of Mr Jermyn’s conversation, and wished that her niece Maria had been present, who was young and had a good memory.
Still the party was smaller than usual, for some families in Treby refused to visit Jermyn, now that he was concerned for a Radical candidate.