Consistency? — I never changed my mind,
Which is, and always was, to live at ease.
IT was only in the time of the summer fairs that the market-place had ever looked more animated than it did under that autumn mid-day sun. There were plenty of blue cockades and streamers, faces at all the windows, and a crushing buzzing crowd, urging each other backwards and forwards round the small hustings in front of the Ram Inn, which showed its more plebeian sign at right angles with the venerable Marquis of Granby. Sometimes there were scornful shouts, sometimes a rolling cascade of cheers, sometimes the shriek of a penny whistle; but above all these fitful and feeble sounds, the fine old church-tower, which looked down from above the trees on the other side of the narrow stream, sent vibrating, at every quarter, the sonorous tones of its great bell, the Good Queen Bess.
Two carriages, with blue ribbons on the hamess, were conspicuous near the hustings. One was Jermyn’s, filled with the brilliantly-attired daughters, accompanied by Esther, whose quieter dress helped to mark her out for attention as the most striking of the group. The other was Harold Transsome’s; but in this there was no lady — only the olive-skinned Dominic, whose acute yet mild face was brightened by the occupation of amusing little Harry and rescuing from his tyrannies a King Charles puppy, with big eyes, much after the pattern of the boy’s.
This Trebian crowd did not count for much in the political force of the nation, but it was not the less determined as to lending or not lending its ears. No man was permitted to speak from the platform except Harold and his uncle Lingon, though, in the interval of expectation, several Liberals had come forward. Among these ill-advised persons the one whose attempt met the most emphatic resistance was Rufus Lyon. This might have been taken for resentment at the unreasonableness of the cloth, that, not content with pulpits, from whence to tyrannise over the ears of men, wishes to have the larger share of the platforms; but it was not so, for Mr Lingon was heard with much cheering, and would have been welcomed again.
The rector of Little Treby had been a favourite in the neighbourhood since the beginning of the century. A clergy-man thoroughly unclerical in his habits had a piquancy about him which made him a sort of practical joke. He had always been called Jack Lingon, or Parson Jack — sometimes, in older and less serious days, even ‘Cock-fighting Jack’. He swore a little when the point of a joke seemed to demand it, and was fond of wearing a coloured bandana tied loosely over his cravat, together with large brown leather leggings; he spoke in a pithy familiar way that people could understand, and had none of that frigid mincingness called dignity, which some have thought a peculiar clerical disease. In fact, he was ‘a character’ — something cheerful to think of, not entirely out of connection with Sunday and sermons. And it seemed in keeping that he should have turned sharp round in politics, his opinions being only part of the excellent joke called Parson Jack. When his red eagle face and white hair were seen on the platform, the Dissenters hardly cheered this questionable Radical; but to make amends, all the Tory farmers gave him a friendly ‘hurray’. ‘Let’s hear what old Jack will say for himself,’ was the predominant feeling among them; ‘he’ll have something funny to say, I’ll bet a penny.’
It was only Lawyer Labron’s young clerks and their hangers-on who were sufficiently dead to Trebian traditions to assail the parson with various sharp-edged interjections, such as broken shells, and cries of ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo’.
‘Come now, my lads,’ he began, in his full, pompous, yet jovial tones, thrusting his hands into the stuffed-out pockets of his greatcoat, ‘I’ll tell you what; I’m a parson, you know; I ought to return good for evil. So here are some good nuts for you to crack in return for your shells.’
There was a roar of laughter and cheering as he threw handfuls of nuts and filberts among the crowd.
‘Come, now, you’ll say I used to be a Tory; and some of you, whose faces I know as well as I know the head of my own crab-stick, will say that’s why I’m a good fellow. But now I’ll tell you something else. It’s for that very reason — that I used to be a Tory, and am a good fellow — that I go along with my nephew here, who is a thoroughgoing Liberal. For will anybody here come forward and say, “A good fellow has no need to tack about and change his road?” No, there’s not one of you such a Tom-noddy. What’s good for one time is bad for another. If anybody contradicts that, ask him to eat pickled pork when he’s thirsty, and to bathe in the Lapp there when the spikes of ice are shooting. And that’s the eason why the men who are the best Liberals now are the very men who used to be the best Tories. There isn’t a nastier horse than your horse that’ll jib and back and turn round when there is but one road for him to go, and that’s the road before him.
‘And my nephew here — he comes of a Tory breed, you know — I’ll answer for the Lingons. In the old Tory times there was never a pup belonging to a Lingon but would howl if a Whig came near him. The Lingon blood is good, rich old Tory blood — like good rich milk — and that’s why, when the right time comes, it throws up a Liberal cream. The best sort of Tory turns to the best sort of Radical. There’s plenty of Radical scum — I say, beware of the scum, and look out for the cream. And here’s my nephew — some of the cream, if there is any: none of your Whigs, none of your painted water that looks as if it ran, and it’s standing still all the while; none of your spinning-jenny fellows. A gentleman; but up to all sorts of business. I’m no fool myself; I’m forced to wink a good deal, for fear of seeing too much, for a neighbourly man must let himself be cheated a little. But though I’ve never been out of my own country, I know less about it than my nephew does. You may tell what he is, and only look at him. There’s one sort of fellow sees nothing but the end of his own nose, and another sort that sees nothing but the hinder side of the moon; but my nephew Harold is of another sort; he sees everything that’s at hitting distance, and he’s not one to miss his mark. A good-looking man in his prime! Not a greenhorn; not a shrivelled old fellow, who’ll come to speak to you and find he’s left his teeth at home by mistake. Harold Transome will do you credit; if anybody says the Radicals are a set of sneaks, Brummagem halfpennies, scamps who want to play pitch and toss with the property of the country, you can say, “Look at the member for North Loamshire! “ And mind what you’ll hear him say; he’ll go in for making everything right — Poor-laws and charities and church — he wants to reform ’em all. Perhaps you’ll say, “There’s that Parson Lingon talking about church reform — why, he belongs to the church himself — he wants reforming too.” Well, well, wait a bit, and you’ll hear by-and-by that old Parson Lingon is reformed — shoots no more cracks his joke no more, has drunk his last bottle: the dogs the old pointers, will be sorry; but you’ll hear that the parson at Little Treby is a new man. That’s what church reform is sure to come to before long. So now here are some more nuts for you, lads, and I leave you to listen to your candidate. Here he is — give him a good hurray; wave your hats, and I’ll begin. Hurray!
Harold had not been quite confident beforehand as to the good effect of his uncle’s introduction; but he was soon reassured. There was no acrid partisanship among the oldfashioned Tories who mustered strong about the Marquis of Granby, and Parson Jack had put them in a good humour. Harold’s only interruption came from his own party. The oratorical clerk at the factory, acting as the tribune of the dissenting interest, and feeling bound to put questions, might have been troublesome; but his voice being unpleasantly sharp, while Harold’s was full and penetrating, the questioning was cried down. Harold’s speech ‘did’: it was not of the glib-nonsensical sort, not ponderous, not hesitating — which is as much as to say, that it was remarkable among British speeches. Read in print the next day, perhaps it would be neither pregnant nor conclusive, which is saying no more than that its excellence was not of an abnormal kind, but such as is usually found in the best efforts of eloquent candidates. Accordingly the applause drowned the opposition, and content predominated.
But, perhaps, the moment of most diffusive pleasure from public speaking is that in which the speech ceases and the audience can turn to commenting on it. The one speech, sometimes uttered under great responsibility as to missiles and other consequences, has given a text to twenty speakers who are under no responsibility. Even in the days of duelling a man was not challenged for being a bore, nor does this quality apparently hinder him from being much invited to dinner, which is the great index of social responsibility in a less barbarous age.
Certainly the crowd in the market-place seemed to experience this culminating enjoyment when the speaking on the platform in front of the Ram had ceased, and there were no less than three orators holding forth from the elevation of chance vehicles, not at all to the prejudice of the talking among those who were on a level with their neighbours. There was little ill-humour among the listeners, for Queen Bess was striking the last quarter before two, and a savoury smell from the inn kitchens inspired them with an agreeable consciousness that the speakers were helping to trifle away the brief time before dinner.
Two or three of Harold’s committee had lingered talking to each other on the platform, instead of re-entering; and Jermyn, after coming out to speak to one of them, had tunred to the corner near which the carriages were standing, that he might tell the Transomes’ coachman to drive round to the side door, and signal to his own coachman to follow. But a dialogue which was going on below induced him to pause, and, instead of giving the order, to assume the air of a careless gazer. Christian, whom the attorney had already observed looking out of a window at the Marquis of Granby, was talking to Dominic. The meeting appeared to be one of new recognition, for Christian was saying —
‘You’ve not got grey as I have, Mr Lenoni; you’re not a day older for the sixteen years. But no wonder you didn’t know me; I’m bleached like a dried bone.’
‘Not so. It is true I was confused a meenute — I could put your face nowhere; but after that, Naples came behind it, and I said, Mr Creestian. And so you reside at the Manor, and I am at Transome Court.’
‘Ah I it’s a thousand pities you’re not on our side, else we might have dined together at the Marquis,’ said Christian. ‘Eh, could you manage it?’ he added, languidly, knowing there was no chance of a yes.
‘No — much obliged — couldn’t leave the leetle boy. Ahi I Arry, Arry, pinch not poor Moro.’
While Dominic was answering, Christian had stared about him, as his manner was when he was being spoken to, and had had his eyes arrested by Esther, who was leaning forward to look at Mr Harold Transome’s extraordinary little gipsy of a son. But happening to meet Christian’s stare, she felt annoyed, drew back, and turned away her head, colouring.
‘Who are those ladies?’ said Christian, in a low tone, to Dominic, as if he had been startled into a sudden wish for this information.
‘They are Meester Jermyn’s daughters,’ said Dominic, who knew nothing either of the lawyer’s family or of Esther.
Christian looked puzzled a moment or two, and was silent.
‘O, well — au revoir,’ he said, kissing the tips of his fingers, as the coachman, having had Jermyn’s order, began to urge on the horses.
‘Does he see some likeness in the girl?’ thought Jermyn, as he turned away. ‘I wish I hadn’t invited her to come in the carriage, as it happens.’
‘Good earthenware pitchers, sir! — of an excellent quaint pattern and sober colour.’
THE market dinner at ‘the Marquis’ was in high repute in Treby and its neighbourhood. The frequenters of this three-and-sixpenny ordinary liked to allude to it, as men allude to anything which implies that they move in good society, and habitually converse with those who are in the secret of the highest affairs. The guests were not only such rural residents as had driven to market, but some of the most substantial townsmen, who had always assured their wives that business required this weekly sacrifice of domestic pleasure. The poorer farmers, who put up at the Ram or the Seven Stars, where there was no fish, felt their disadvantage, bearing it modestly or bitterly, as the case might be; and although the Marquis was a Tory house, devoted to Debarry, it was too much to expect that such tenants of the Transomes as had always been used to dine there, should consent to eat a worse dinner, and sit with worse company, because they suddenly found themselves under a Radical landlord, opposed to the political party known as Sir Maxim’s. Hence the recent political divisions had not reduced the handsome length of the table at the Marquis; and the many gradations of dignity — from Mr Wace, the brewer, to the rich butcher from Leek Malton, who always modestly took the lowest seat, though without the reward of being asked to come up higher — had not been abbreviated by any secessions.
To-day there was an extra table spread for expected supernumeraries, and it was at this that Christian took his place with some of the younger farmers, who had almost a sense of dissipation in talking to a man of his questionable station and unknown experience. The provision was especially liberal, and on the whole the presence of a minority destined to vote for Transome was a ground for joking, which added to the good-humour of the chief talkers. A respectable old acquaintance turned Radical rather against his will, was rallied with even greater gusto than if his wife had had twins twice over. The best Trebian Tories were far too sweet-blooded to turn against such old friends, and to make no distinction between them and the Radical, Dissenting, Papistical, Deistical set with whom they never dined, and probably never saw except in their imagination. But the talk was necessarily in abeyance until the more serious business of dinner was ended, and the wine, spirits, and tobacco raised mere satisfaction into beatitude.
Among the frequent though not regular guests, whom every one was glad to see, was Mr Nolan, the retired London hosier, a wiry old gentleman past seventy, whose square tight forehead, with its rigid hedge of grey hair, whose bushy eyebrows, sharp dark eyes, and remarkable hooked nose, gave a handsome distinction to his face in the midst of rural physiognomies. He had married a Miss Pendrell early in life, when he was a poor young Londoner, and the match had been thought as bad as ruin by her family; but fifteen years ago he had had the satisfaction of bringing his wife to settle amongst her own friends, and of being received with pride as a brother-inlaw, retired from business, possessed of unknown thousands, and of a most agreeable talent for anecdote and conversation generally. No question had ever been raised as to Mr Nolan’s extraction on the strength of his hooked nose, or of his name being Baruch. Hebrew names ‘ran’ in the best Saxon families; the Bible accounted for them; and no one among the uplands and hedgerows of that district was suspected of having an Oriental origin unless he carried a pedlar’s jewel-box. Certainly, whatever genealogical research might have discovered, the worthy Baruch Nolan was so free from any distinctive marks of religious persuasion — he went to church with so ordinary an irregularity, and so often grumbled at the sermon — that there was no ground for classing him otherwise than with good Trebian Churchmen. He was generally regarded as a good-looking old gentleman, and a certain thin eagerness in his aspect was attributed to the life of the metropolis, where narrow space had the same sort of effect on men as on thickly-planted trees. Mr Nolan always ordered his pint of port, which, after he had sipped it a little, was wont to animate his recollections of the Royal Family, and the various ministries which had been contemporary with the successive stages of his prosperity. He was always listened to with interest: a man who had been born in the year when good old King George I came to the throne — who had been acquainted with the nude leg of the Prince Regent, and hinted at private reasons for believing that the Princess Charlotte ought not to have died — had conversational matter as special to his auditors as Marco Polo could have had on his return from Asiatic travel.
‘My good sir,’ he said to Mr Wace, as he crossed his knees and spread his silk handkerchief over them, ‘Transome may be returned, or he may not be returned — that’s a question for North Loamshire; but it makes little difference to the kingdom. I don’t want to say things which may put younger men out of spirits, but I believe this country has seen its best days — I do indeed.’
‘I am sorry to hear it from one of your experience, Mr Nolan,’ said the brewer, a large happy-looking man. ‘I’d make a good fight myself before I’d leave a worse world for my boys than I’ve found for myself. There isn’t a greater pleasure than doing a bit of planting and improving one’s buildings, and investing one’s money in some pretty acres of land, when it turns up here and there — land you’ve known from a boy. It’s a nasty thought that these Radicals are to turn things round so as one can calculate on nothing. One doesn’t like it for one’s self, and one doesn’t like it for one’s neighbours. But somehow, I believe it won’t do: if we can’t trust the government just now, there’s providence and the good sense of the country; and there’s a right in things — that’s what I’ve always said — there’s a right in things. The heavy end will get downmost. And if church and king, and every man being sure of his own, are things good for this country, there’s a God above will take care of ’em.’
‘It won’t do, my dear sir,’ said Mr Nolan — ‘it won’t do. When Peel and the duke turned round about the Catholics in ‘29, I saw it was all over with us. We could never trust ministers any more. It was to keep off a rebellion, they said; but I say it was to keep their places. They’re monstrously fond of place, both of them — that I know.’ Here Mr Nolan changed the crossing of his legs, and gave a deep cough, conscious of having made a point. Then he went on — ‘What we want is a king with a good will of his own. If we’d had that, we shouldn’t have heard what we’ve heard today; reform would never have come to this pass. When our good old King George the Third heard his ministers talking about Catholic Emancipation, he boxed their ears all round. Ah, poor soul! he did indeed, gentlemen,’ ended Mr Nolan, shaken by a deep laugh of admiration.
‘Well, now, that’s something like a king,’ said Mr Crowder, who was an eager listener.
‘It was uncivil, though. How did they take it?’ said Mr Timothy Rose, a ‘gentleman farmer’ from Leek Malton, against whose independent position nature had provided the safeguard of a spontaneous servility. His large porcine cheeks, round twinkling eyes, and thumbs habitually twirling, expressed a concentrated effort not to get into trouble, and to speak everybody fair except when they were safely out of hearing.
‘Take it! they’d be obliged to take it,’ said the impetuous young Joyce, a farmer of superior information. ‘Have you ever heard of the king’s prerogative?’
‘I don’t say but what I have,’ said Rose, retreating. ‘I’ve nothing against it — nothing at all.’
‘No, but the Radicals have,’ said young Joyce, winking. ‘The prerogative is what they want to clip close. They want us to be governed by delegates from the trades-unions, who are to dictate to everybody, and make everything square to their mastery.’
‘They’re a pretty set, now, those delegates,’ said Mr Wace, with disgust. ‘I once heard two of ’em spouting away. They’re a sort of fellow I’d never employ in my brewery, or anywhere else. I’ve seen it again and again. If a man takes to tongue-work it’s all over with him. “Everything’s wrong,” says he. That’s a big text. But does he want to make everything right? Not he. He’d lose his text. “We want every man’s good,” say they. Why, they never knew yet what a man’s good is. How should they? It’s working for his victual — not getting a slice of other people’s.’
‘Ay, ay,’ said young Joyce, cordially. ‘I should just have liked all the delegates in the country mustered for our yeomanry to go into — that’s all. They’d see where the strength of Old England lay then. You may tell what it is for a country to trust to trade when it breeds such spindling fellows as those.’
‘That isn’t the fault of trade, my good sir,’ said Mr Nolan, who was often a little pained by the defects of provincial culture. ‘Trade, properly conducted, is good for a man’s constitution. I could have shown you, in my time, weavers past seventy, with all their faculties as sharp as a penknife, doing without spectacles. It’s the new system of trade that’s to blame: a country can’t have too much trade, if it’s properly managed. Plenty of sound Tories have made their fortune by trade. You’ve heard of Calibut & Co. — everybody has heard of Calibut. Well, sir, I knew old Mr Calibut as well as I know you. He was once a crony of mine in a city warehouse; and now, I’ll answer for it, he has a larger rent-roll than Lord Wyvern. Bless your soul! his subscriptions to charities would make a fine income for a nobleman. And he’s as good a Tory as I am. And as for his town establishment — why, how much butter do you think is consumed there annually?’
Mr Nolan paused, and then his face glowed with triumph as he answered his own question. ‘Why, gentlemen, not less than two thousand pounds of butter during the few months the family is in town! Trade makes property, my good sir, and property is Conservative, as they say now. Calibut’s son-inlaw is Lord Fortinbras. He paid me a large debt on his marriage. It’s all one web, sir. The prosperity of the country is one web.’
‘To be sure,’ said Christian, who, smoking his cigar with his chair turned away from the table, was willing to make himself agreeable in the conversation. ‘We can’t do without nobility. Look at France. When they got rid of the old nobles they were obliged to make new.’
‘True, very true,’ said Mr Nolan, who thought Christian a little too wise for his position, but could not resist the rare gift of an instance in point. ‘It’s the French Revolution that has done us harm here. It was the same at the end of the last century, but the war kept it off — Mr Pitt saved us. I knew Mr Pitt. I had a particular interview with him once. He joked me about getting the length of his foot. “Mr Nolan,” said he, “there are those on the other side of the water whose name begins with N. who would be glad to know what you know.” I was recommended to send an account of that to the newspapers after his death, poor man! but I’m not fond of that kind of show myself.’ Mr Nolan swung his upper leg a little, and pinched his lip between thumb and finger, naturally pleased with his own moderation.
‘No, no, very right,’ said Mr Wace, cordially. ‘But you never said a truer word than that about property. If a man’s got a bit of property, a stake in the country, he’ll want to keep things square. Where Jack isn’t safe, Tom’s in danger. But that’s what makes it such an uncommonly nasty thing that a man like Transome should take up with these Radicals. It’s my belief he does it only to get into parliament; he’ll turn round when he gets there. Come, Dibbs, there’s something to put you in spirits,’ added Mr Wace, raising his voice a little and looking at a guest lower down. ‘You’ve got to vote for a Radical with one side of your mouth, and make a wry face with the other; but he’ll turn round by-and-by. As Parson Jack says, he’s got the right sort of blood in him.’
‘I don’t care two straws who I vote for,’ said Dibbs, sturdily. ‘I’m not going to make a wry face. It stands to reason a man should vote for his landlord. My farm’s in good condition, and I’ve got the best pasture on the estate. The rot’s never come nigh me. Let them grumble as are on the wrong side of the hedge.’
‘I wonder if Jermyn’ll bring him in, though,’ said Mr Sircome, the great miller. ‘He’s an uncommon fellow for carrying things through. I know he brought me through that suit about my weir; it cost a pretty penny, but he brought me through.’
‘It’s a bit of a pill for him, too, having to turn Radical,’ said Mr Wace. ‘They say he counted on making friends with Sir Maximus, by this young one coming home and joining with Mr Philip.’
‘But I’ll bet a penny he brings Transome in,’ said Mr Sircome. ‘Folks say he hasn’t got many votes hereabout; but towards Duffield, and all there, where the Radicals are, everybody’s for him. Eh, Mr Christian? Come — you’re at the fountainhead — what do they say about it now at the Manor?’
When general attention was called to Christian, young Joyce looked down at his own legs and touched the curves of his own hair, as if measuring his own approximation to that correct copy of a gentleman. Mr Wace turned his head to listen for Christian’s answer with that tolerance of inferiority which becomes men in places of public resort.
‘They think it will be a hard run between Transome and Garstin,’ said Christian. ‘It depends on Transome’s getting plumpers.’
‘Well, I know I shall not split for Garstin,’ said Mr Wace. ‘It’s nonsense for Debarry’s voters to split for a Whig. A man’s either a Tory or not a Tory.’
‘It seems reasonable there should be one of each side,’ said Mr Timothy Rose. ‘I don’t like showing favour either way. If one side can’t lower the poor’s rates and take off the tithe, let the other try.’
‘But there’s this in it, Wace,’ said Mr Sircome. ‘I’m not altogether against the Whigs. For they don’t want to go so far as the Radicals do, and when they find they’ve slipped a bit too far, they’ll hold on all the tighter. And the Whigs have got the upper hand now, and it’s no use fighting with the current. I run with the —’
Mr Sircome checked himself, looked furtively at Christian, and, to divert criticism, ended with — ‘eh, Mr Nolan?’
‘There have been eminent Whigs, sir. Mr Fox was a Whig,’ said Mr Nolan. ‘Mr Fox was a great orator. He gambled a good deal. He was very intimate with the Prince of Wales. I’ve seen him, and the Duke of York’ too, go home by daylight with their hats crushed. Mr Fox was a great leader of the Opposition: Government requires an Opposition. The Whigs should always be in opposition, and the Tories on the ministerial side. That’s what the country used to like. “The Whigs for salt and mustard, the Tories for meat,” Mr Gottlib the banker used to say to me. Mr Gottlib was a worthy man. When there was a great run on Gottlib’s bank in ‘16, I saw a gentleman come in with bags of gold, and say, “Tell Mr Gottlib there’s plenty more where that came from.” It stopped the run, gentlemen — it did indeed.’
This anecdote was received with great admiration, but Mr Sircome returned to the previous question.
‘There now, you see, Wace — it’s right there should be Whigs as well as Tories — Pitt and Fox — I’ve always heard them go together.’
‘Well, I don’t like Garstin,’ said the brewer. ‘I didn’t like his conduct about the canal company. Of the two, I like Transome best. If a nag is to throw me, I say, let him have some blood.’
‘As for blood, Wace,’ said Mr Salt, the wool-factor, a relious man, who only spoke when there was a good opportunity of contradicting, ‘ask my brother-inlaw Labron a little about that. These Transomes are not the old blood.’
‘Well, they’re the oldest that’s forthcoming, I suppose,’ said Mr Wace, laughing. ‘Unless you believe in mad old Tommy Trounsem. I wonder where that old poaching fellow is now.’
‘I saw him half-drunk the other day,’ said young Joyce. ‘He’d got a flag-basket with hand-bills in it over his shoulder.’
‘I thought the old fellow was dead,’ said Mr Wace. ‘Hey I why, Jermyn,’ he went on merrily, as he turned round and saw the attorney entering; ‘you Radical! how dare you show yourself in this Tory house? Come, this is going a bit too far. We don’t mind Old Harry managing our law for us — that’s his proper business from time immemorial; but —’
‘But — a —’ said Jermyn, smiling, always ready to carry on a joke, to which his slow manner gave the piquancy of surprise, ‘if he meddles with politics he must be a Tory.’
Jermyn was not afraid to show himself anywhere in Treby. He knew many people were not exactly fond of him, but a man can do without that, if he is prosperous. A provincial lawyer in those old-fashioned days was as independent of personal esteem as if he had been a Lord Chancellor.
There was a good-humoured laugh at this upper end of the room as Jermyn seated himself at about an equal angle between Mr Wace and Christian.
‘We were talking about old Tommy Trounsem; you remember him? They say he’s turned up again,’ said Mr Wace.
‘Ah?’ said Jermyn, indifferently. ‘But — a — Wace — I’m very busy today — but I wanted to see you about that bit of land of yours at the corner of Pod’s End. I’ve had a handsome offer for you — I’m not at liberty to say from whom — but an offer that ought to tempt you.’
‘It won’t tempt me,’ said Mr Wace, peremptorily; ‘if I’ve got a bit of land, I’ll keep it. It’s hard enough to get hereabouts.’
‘Then I’m to understand that you refuse all negotiation?’ said Jermyn, who had ordered a glass of sherry, and was looking round slowly as he sipped it, till his eyes seemed to rest for the first time on Christian, though he had seen him at once on entering the room.
‘Unless one of the confounded railways should come. But then I’ll stand out and make ’em bleed for it.’
There was a murmur of approbation; the railways were a public wrong much denunciated in Treby.
‘A— Mr Philip Debarry at the Manor now?’ said Jermyn, suddenly questioning Christian, in a haughty tone of superiority which he often chose to use.
‘No,’ said Christian, ‘he is expected tomorrow morning.’
‘Ah! —’ Jermyn paused a moment or two, and then said, ‘You are sufficiently in his confidence, I think, to carry a message to him with a small document?’
‘Mr Debarry has often trusted me so far,’ said Christian, with much coolness; ‘but if the business is yours, you can probably find some one you know better.’
There was a little winking and grimacing among those of the company who heard this answer.
‘A— true — a,’ said Jermyn, not showing any offence; ‘if you decline. But I think, if you will do me the favour to step round to my residence on your way back, and learn the business, you will prefer carrying it yourself. At my residence, if you please — not my office.’
‘O very well,’ said Christian. ‘I shall be very happy.’ Christian never allowed himself to be treated as a servant by any one but his master, and his master treated a servant more deferentially than an equal.
‘Will it be five o’clock? what hour shall we say?’ said Jermyn.
Christian looked at his watch and said, ‘About five I can be there.’
‘Very good,’ said Jermyn, finishing his sherry.
‘Well — a — Wace — a — so you will hear nothing about Pod’s End?’
‘Not I.’
‘A mere pocket-handkerchief, not enough to swear by — a —’ here Jermyn’s face broke into a smile — ‘without a magnifying-glass.’
‘Never mind. It’s mine into the bowels of the earth and up to the sky. I can build the Tower of Babel on it if I like — eh, Mr Nolan?’
‘A bad investment, my good sir,’ said Mr Nolan, who enjoyed a certain flavour of infidelity in this smart reply, and laughed much at it in his inward way.
‘See now, how blind you Tories are,’ said Jermyn, rising; ‘if I had been your lawyer, I’d have had you make another forty-shilling freeholder with that land, and all in time for this election. But — a — the verbum sapientibus comes a little too late now.’
Jermyn was moving away as he finished speaking, but Mr Wace called out after him, ‘We’re not so badly off for voices as you are — good sound votes, that’ll stand the revising barrister. Debarry at the top of the poll!’
The lawyer was already out of the doorway.
’Tis grievous, that with all amplification of travel both by sea and land, a man can never separate himself from his past history.
MR JERMYN’S handsome house stood a little way out of the town, surrounded by garden and lawn and plantations of hopeful trees. As Christian approached it he was in a perfectly easy state of mind: the business he was going on was none of his, otherwise than as he was well satisfied with any opportunity of making himself valuable to Mr Philip Debarry. As he looked at Jermyn’s length of wall and iron railing, he said to himself, ‘These lawyers are the fellows for getting on in the world with the least expense of civility. With this cursed conjuring secret of theirs called Law, they think everybody’s frightened at them. My Lord Jermyn seems to have his insolence as ready as his soft sawder. He’s as sleek as a rat, and has as vicious a tooth. I know the sort of vermin well enough. I’ve helped to fatten one or two.’
In this mood of conscious, contemptuous penetration, Christian was shown by the footman into Jermyn’s private room, where the attorney sat surrounded with massive oaken bookcases, and other furniture to correspond, from the thickest-legged library-table to the calendar frame and card-rack. It was the sort of room a man prepares for himself when he feels sure of a long and respectable future. He was leaning back in his leather chair, against the broad window opening on the lawn, and had just taken off his spectacles and let the newspaper fall on his knees, in despair of reading by the fading light.
When the footman opened the door and said, ‘Mr Christian,’ Jermyn said, ‘Good evening, Mr Christian. Be seated,’ pointing to a chair opposite himself and the window. ‘Light the candles on the shelf, John, but leave the blinds alone.’
He did not speak again till the man was gone out, but appeared to be referring to a document which lay on the bureau before him. When the door was closed he drew himself up again, began to rub his hands, and turned towards his visitor, who seemed perfectly indifferent to the fact that the attorney was in shadow, and that the light fell on himself. ‘A— your name — a — is Henry Scaddon.’
There was a start through Christian’s frame which he was quick enough, almost simultaneously, to try and disguise as a change of position. He uncrossed his legs and unbuttoned his coat. But before he had time to say anything, Jermyn went on with slow emphasis.
‘You were born on the 16th of December 1782, at Blackheath Your father was a cloth-merchant in London: he died when you were barely of age, leaving an extensive business; before you were five-and-twenty you had run through the greater part of the property, and had compromised your safety by an attempt to defraud your creditors. Subsequently you forged a cheque on your father’s elder brother, who had intended to make you his heir.’
Here Jermyn paused a moment and referred to the document. Christian was silent.
‘In 1808 you found it expedient to leave this country in a military disguise, and were taken prisoner by the French. On the occasion of an exchange of prisoners you had the opportunity of returning to your own country, and to the bosom of your own family. You were generous enough to sacrifice that prospect in favour of a fellow-prisoner, of about your own age and figure, who had more pressing reasons than yourself for wishing to be on this side of the water. You exchanged dress, luggage, and names with him, and he passed to England instead of you as Henry Scaddon. Almost immediately afterwards you escaped from your imprisonment, after feigning an illness which prevented your exchange of names from being discovered; and it was reported that you — that is, you under the name of your fellow-prisoner — were drowned in an open boat, trying to reach a Neapolitan vessel bound for Malta. Nevertheless I have to congratulate you on the falsehood of that report, and on the certainty that you are now, after the lapse of more than twenty years, seated here in perfect safety.’
Jermyn paused so long that he was evidently awaiting some answer. At last Christian replied, in a dogged tone —
‘Well, sir, I’ve heard much longer stories than that told quite as solemnly, when there was not a word of truth in them. Suppose I deny the very peg you hang your statement on. Suppose I say I am not Henry Scaddon.’
‘A— in that case — a,’ said Jermyn, with a wooden indifference, ‘you would lose the advantage which — a — may attach to your possession of Henry Scaddon’s knowledge. And at the same time, if it were in the least — a — inconvenient to you that you should be recognised as Henry Scaddon, your denial would not prevent me from holding the knowledge and evidence which I possess on that point; it would only prevent us from pursuing the present conversation.’
‘Well, sir, suppose we admit, for the sake of the conversation, that your account of the matter is the true one: what advantage have you to offer the man named Henry Scaddon?’
‘The advantage — a — is problematical; but it may be considerable. It might, in fact, release you from the necessity of acting as courier, or — a — valet, or whatever other office you may occupy which prevents you from being your own master. On the other hand, my acquaintance with your secret is not necessarily a disadvantage to you. To put the matter in a nutshell, I am not inclined — a — gratuitously — to do you any harm, and I may be able to do you a considerable service.’
‘Which you want me to earn somehow?’ said Christian. ‘You offer me a turn in a lottery?’
‘Precisely. The matter in question is of no earthly interest to you, except — a — as it may yield you a prize. We lawyers have to do with complicated questions, and — a — legal subtleties, which are never — a — fully known even to the parties immediately interested, still less to the witnesses. Shall we agree, then, that you continue to retain two-thirds of the name which you gained by exchange, and that you oblige me by answering certain questions as to the experience of Henry Scaddon?’ ‘Very good. Go on.’
‘What articles of property, once belonging to your fellow-prisoner, Maurice Christian Bycliffe, do you still retain?’
‘This ring,’ said Christian, twirling round the fine seal-ring on his finger, ‘his watch, and the little matters that hung with it, and a case of papers. I got rid of a gold snuff-box once when I was hard-up. The clothes are all gone, of course. We exchanged everything; it was all done in a hurry. Bycliffe thought we should meet again in England before long, and he was mad to get there. But that was impossible — I mean that we should meet soon after. I don’t know what’s become of him, else I would give him up his papers and the watch, and so on — though, you know, it was I who did him the service, and he felt that.’
‘You were at Vesoul together before being moved to Verdun?’
‘Yes.’
‘What else do you know about Bycliffe?’
‘O, nothing very particular,’ said Christian, pausing, and rapping his boot with his cane. ‘He’d been in the Hanoverian army — a high-spirited fellow, took nothing easily; not overstrong in health. He made a fool of himself with marrying at Vesoul; and there was the devil to pay with the girl’s relations; and then, when the prisoners were ordered off, they had to part. Whether they ever got together again I don’t know.’
‘Was the marriage all right, then?’
‘O, all on the square — civil marriage, church — everything. Bycliffe was a fool — a good-natured, proud, head-strong fellow.’
‘How long did the marriage take place before you left Vesoul?’ ‘About three months. I was a witness to the marriage.’ ‘And you know no more about the wife?’
‘Not afterwards. I knew her very well before — pretty Annette — Annette Ledru was her name. She was of a good family, and they had made up a fine match for her. But she was one of your meek little diablesses, who have a will of their own once in their lives — the will to choose their own master.’
‘Bycliffe was not open to you about his other affairs7’
‘O no — a fellow you wouldn’t dare to ask a question of. People told him everything, but he told nothing in return. If Madame Annette ever found him again, she found her lord and master with a vengeance; but she was a regular lapdog. However, her family shut her up — made a prisoner of her — to prevent her running away.’
‘Ah — good. Much of what you have been so obliging as to say is irrelevant to any possible purpose of mine, which, in fact, has to do only with a mouldy law-case that might be aired some day. You will doubtless, on your own account, maintain perfect silence on what has passed between us, and with that condition duly preserved — a — it is possible that — a — the lottery you have put into — as you observe — may turn up a prize.’
‘This, then, is all the business you have with me?’ said Christian, rising.
‘All. You will, of course, preserve carefully all the papers and other articles which have so many — a — recollections — a — attached to them?’
‘O yes. If there’s any chance of Bycliffe turning up again, I shall be sorry to have parted with the snuff-box; but I was hard-up at Naples. In fact, as you see, I was obliged at last to turn courier.’
‘An exceedingly agreeable life for a man of some — a — accomplishments and — a — no income,’ said Jermyn, rising, and reaching a candle, which he placed against his desk.
Christian knew this was a sign that he was expected to go, but he lingered standing, with one hand on the back of his chair. At last he said, rather sulkily —
‘I think you’re too clever, Mr Jermyn, not to perceive that I’m not a man to be made a fool of.’
‘Well — a — it may perhaps be a still better guarantee for you,’ said Jermyn, smiling, ‘that I see no use in attempting that — a — metamorphosis.’
The old gentleman, who ought never to have felt himself injured, is dead now, and I’m not afraid of creditors after more than twenty years.’
‘Certainly not; — a — there may indeed be claims which can’t assert themselves — a — legally, which yet are molesting to a man of some reputation. But you may perhaps be happily free from such fears.’
Jermyn drew round his chair towards the bureau, and Christian, too acute to persevere uselessly, said, ‘Good-day,’ and left the room.
After leaning back in his chair to reflect a few minutes, Jermyn wrote the following letter:
Dear Johnson, — I learn from your letter, received this morning, that you intend returning to town on Saturday.
While you are there, be so good as to see Medwin, who used to be with Batt & Cowley, and ascertain from him indirectly, and in the course of conversation on other topics, whether in that old business in 1810-11, Scaddon alias Bycliffe, or Bycliffe alias Scaddon, before his imprisonment, gave Batt & Cowley any reason to believe that he was married and expected to have a child. The question, as you know, is of no practical importance; but I wish to draw up an abstract of the Bycliffe case, and the exact position in which it stood before the suit was closed by the death of the plaintiiff, in order that, if Mr Harold Transome desires it, he may see how the failure of the last claim has secured the Durfey-Transome title, and whether there is a hair’s-breadth of a chance that another claim should be set up.
Of course there is not a shadow of such a chance. For even if Batt & Cowley were to suppose that they had alighted on a surviving representative of the Bycliffes, it would not enter into their heads to set up a new claim, since they brought evidence that the last life which suspended the Bycliffe remainder was extinct before the case was closed, a good twenty years ago.
Still, I want to show the present heir of the Durfey-Transomes the exact condition of the family title to the estates. So get me an answer from Medwin on the above-mentioned point.
I shall meet you at Duffield next week. We must get Transome returned. Never mind his having been a little rough the other day, but go on doing what you know is necessary for his interest. His interest is mine, which I need not say is John Johnson’s. — Yours faithfully, MATTIEW JERMYN.
When the attorney had sealed this letter and leaned back in his chair again, he was inwardly saying —
‘Now, Mr Harold, I shall shut up this affair in a private drawer till you choose to take any extreme measures which will force me to bring it out. I have the matter entirely in my own power. No one but old Lyon knows about the girl’s birth. No one but Scaddon can clinch the evidence about Bycliffe, and I’ve got Scaddon under my thumb. No soul except myself and Johnson, who is a limb of myself, knows that there is one half-dead life which may presently leave the girl a new claim to the Bycliffe heirship. I shall learn through Methurst whether Batt & Cowley knew, through Bycliffe, of this woman having come to England. I shall hold all the threads between my thumb and finger. I can use the evidence or I can nullify it.
‘And so, if Mr Harold pushes me to extremity, and threatens me with Chancery and ruin, I have an opposing threat, which will either save me or turn into a punishment for him.’
He rose, put out his candles, and stood with his back to the fire, looking out on the dim lawn, with its black twilight fringe of shrubs, still meditating. Quick thought was gleaming over five-and-thirty years filled with devices more or less clever, more or less desirable to be avowed. Those which might be avowed with impunity were not always to be distinguished as innocent by comparison with those which it was advisable to conceal. In a profession where much that is noxious may be done without disgrace, is a conscience likely to be without balm when circumstances have urged a man to overstep the line where his good technical information makes him aware that (with discovery) disgrace is likely to begin?
With regard to the Transome affairs, the family had been in pressing need of money, and it had lain with him to get it for them: was it to be expected that he would not consider his own advantage where he had rendered services such as are never fully paid? If it came to a question of right and wrong instead of law, the least justifiable things he had ever done had been done on behalf of the Transomes. It had been a deucedly unpleasant thing for him to get Bycliffe arrested and thrown into prison as Henry Scaddon — perhaps hastening the man’s death in that way. But if it had not been done by dint of his (Jermyn’s) exertions and tact, he would like to know where the Durfey-Transomes might have been by this time. As for right or wrong, if the truth were known, the very possession of the estate by the Durfey-Transomes was owing to law-tricks that took place nearly a century ago, when the original old Durfey got his base fee.
But inward argument of this sort now, as always, was merged in anger, in exasperation, that Harold, precisely Harold Transome should have turned out to be the probable instrument of a visitation which would be bad luck, not justice; for is there any justice where ninety-nine out of a hundred escape? He felt himself beginning to hate Harold as he had never —
Just then Jermyn’s third daughter, a tall slim girl wrapped in a white woollen shawl, which she had hung over her blanketwise, skipped across the lawn towards the greenhouse to get a flower. Jermyn was startled, and did not identify the figure, or rather he identified it falsely with another tall white-wrapped figure which had sometimes set his heart beating quickly more than thirty years before. For a moment he was fully back in those distant years when he and another bright-eyed person had seen no reason why they should not indulge their passion and their vanity, and determine for themselves how their lives should be made delightful in spite of unalterable external conditions. The reasons had been unfolding themselves gradually ever since through all the years which had converted the handsome, soft-eyed, slim young Jermyn (with a touch of sentiment) into a portly lawyer of sixty, for whom life had resolved itself into the means of keeping up his head among his professional brethren and maintaining an establishment — into a grey-haired husband and father, whose third affectionate and expensive daughter now rapped at the window and called to him, ‘Papa, papa, get ready for dinner; don’t you remember the Lukyns are coming?’
Her gentle looks shot arrows, piercing him
As gods are pierced, with poison of sweet pity.
THE evening of the market-day had passed, and Felix had not looked in at Malthouse Yard to talk over the public events with Mr Lyon. When Esther was dressing the next morning, she had reached a point of irritated anxiety to see Felix, at which she found herself devising little schemes for attaining that end in some way that would be so elaborate as to seem perfectly natural. Her watch had a long-standing ailment of losing; possibly it wanted cleaning; Felix would tell her if it merely wanted regulating, whereas Mr Prowd might detain it unnecessarily, and cause her useless inconvenience. Or could she not get a valuable hint from Mrs Holt about the home-made bread, which was something as ‘sad’ as Lyddy herself? Or, if she came home that way at twelve o’clock, Felix might be going out, she might meet him, and not be obliged to call. Or — but it would be very much beneath her to take any steps of this sort. Her watch had been losing for the last two months — why should it not go on losing a little longer? She could think of no devices that were not so transparent as to be undignified. All the more undignified because Felix chose to live in a way that would prevent any one from classing him according to his education and mental refinement — ‘which certainly are very high’, said Esther inwardly, colouring, as if in answer to some contrary allegation, ‘else I should not think his opinion of any consequence’. But she came to the conclusion that she could not possibly call at Mrs Holt’s.
It followed that up to a few minutes past twelve, when she reached the turning towards Mrs Holt’s, she believed that she should go home the other way; but at the last moment there is always a reason not existing before — namely, the impossibility of further vacillation. Esther turned the corner without any visible pause, and in another minute was knocking at Mrs Holt’s door, not without an inward flutter, which she was bent on disguising.
‘It’s never you, Miss Lyon! who’d have thought of seeing you at this time? Is the minister ill? I thought he looked creechy. If you want help, I’ll put my bonnet on.’
‘Don’t keep Miss Lyon at the door, mother; ask her to come in,’ said the ringing voice of Felix, surmounting various small shufflings and babbling voices within.
‘It’s my wish for her to come in, I’m sure,’ said Mrs Holt, making way; ‘but what is there for her to come in to? a floor worse than any public. But step in, pray, if you’re so inclined. When I’ve been forced to take my bit of carpet up, and have benches, I don’t see why I need mind nothing no more.’
‘I only came to ask Mr Holt if he would look at my watch for me,’ said Esther, entering, and blushing a general rose-colour.
‘He’ll do that fast enough,’ said Mrs Holt, with emphasis; ‘that’s one of the things he will do.’
‘Excuse my rising, Miss Lyon,’ said Felix; ‘I’m binding up Job’s finger.’
Job was a small fellow about five, with a germinal nose, large round blue eyes, and red hair that curled close to his head like the wool on the back of an infantine lamb. He had evidently been crying, and the corners of his mouth were still dolorous. Felix held him on his knee as he bound and tied up very cleverly a tiny forefinger. There was a table in front of Felix and against the window, covered with his watchmaking implements and some open books. Two benches stood at right angles on the sanded floor, and six or seven boys of various ages up to twelve were getting their caps and preparing to go home. They huddled themselves together and stood still when Esther entered. Felix could not look up till he had finished his surgery, but he went on speaking.
‘This is a hero, Miss Lyon. This is Job Tudge, a bold Briton whose finger hurts him, but who doesn’t mean to cry. Good morning, boys. Don’t lose your time. Get out into the air.’
Esther seated herself on the end of the bench near Felix, much relieved that Job was the immediate object of attention; and the other boys rushed out behind her with a brief chant of ‘Good morning!’
‘Did you ever see,’ said Mrs Holt, standing to look on, ‘how wonderful Felix is at that small work with his large fingers? And that’s because he learnt doctoring. It isn’t for want of cleverness he looks like a poor man, Miss Lyon. I’ve left off speaking, else I should say it’s a sin and a shame.’
‘Mother,’ said Felix, who often amused himself and kept good-humoured by giving his mother answers that were unintelligible to her, ‘you have an astonishing readiness in the Ciceronian antiphrasis, considering you have never studied oratory. There, Job — thou patient man — sit still if thou wilt; and now we can look at Miss Lyon.’
Esther had taken off her watch and was holding it in her hand. But he looked at her face, or rather at her eyes, as he said, ‘You want me to doctor your watch?’
Esther’s expression was appealing and timid, as it had never been before in Felix’s presence; but when she saw the perfect calmness, which to her seemed coldness, of his clear grey eyes, as if he saw no reason for attaching any emphasis to this first meeting, a pang swift as an electric shock darted through her. She had been very foolish to think so much of it. It seemed to her as if her inferiority to Felix made a great gulf between them. She could not at once rally her pride and self-command, but let her glance fall on her watch, and said, rather tremulously, ‘It loses. It is very troublesome. It has been losing a long while.’
Felix took the watch from her hand; then, looking round and seeing that his mother was gone out of the room, he said, very gently —
‘You look distressed, Miss Lyon. I hope there is no trouble at home’ (Felix was thinking of the minister’s agitation on the previous Sunday). ‘But I ought perhaps to beg your pardon for saying so much.’
Poor Esther was quite helpless. The mortification which had come like a bruise to all the sensibilities that had been in keen activity, insisted on some relief. Her eyes filled instantly, and a great tear rolled down while she said in a loud sort of whisper, as involuntary as her tears —
‘I wanted to tell you that I was not offended — that I am not ungenerous — I thought you might think — but you have not thought of it.’
Was there ever more awkward speaking? — or any behaviour less like that of the graceful, self-possessed Miss Lyon, whose phrases were usually so well turned, and whose repartees were so ready?
For a moment there was silence. Esther had her two little delicately-gloved hands clasped on the table. The next moment she felt one hand of Felix covering them both and pressing them firmly; but he did not speak. The tears were both on her cheeks now, and she could look up at him. His eyes had an expression of sadness in them, quite new to her. Suddenly little Job, who had his mental exercises on the occasion, called out, impatiently —
‘She’s tut her finger!’
Felix and Esther laughed, and drew their hands away; and as Esther took her handkerchief to wipe the tears from her cheeks, she said —
‘You see, Job, I am a naughty coward I can’t help crying when I’ve hurt myself.’
‘Zoo soodn’t kuy,’ said Job, energetically, being much impressed with a moral doctrine which had come to him after a sufficient transgression of it.
‘Job is like me,’ said Felix, ‘fonder of preaching than of practice. But let us look at this same watch,’ he went on, opening and examining it. ‘These little Geneva toys are cleverly constructed to go always a little wrong. But if you wind them up and set them regularly every night, you may know at least that it’s not noon when the hand points there.’
Felix chatted, that Esther might recover herself; but now Mrs Holt came back and apologised.
‘You’ll excuse my going away, I know, Miss Lyon. But there were the dumplings to see to, and what little I’ve got left on my hands now, I like to do well. Not but what I’ve more cleaning to do than ever I had in my life before, as you may tell soon enough if you look at this floor. But when you’ve been used to doing things, and they’ve been taken away from you, it’s as if your hands had been cut off, and you felt the fingers as are of no use to you.’
‘That’s a great image, mother,’ said Felix, as he snapped the watch together, and handed it to Esther: ‘I never heard you use such an image before.’
‘Yes, I know you’ve always some fault to find with what your mother says. But if ever there was a woman could talk with the open Bible before her, and not be afraid, it’s me. I never did tell stories, and I never will — though I know it’s done, Miss Lyon, and by church members too, when they have candles to sell, as I could bring you the proof. But I never was one of ’em, let Felix say what he will about the printing on the tickets. His father believed it was gospel truth, and it’s presumptious to say it wasn’t. For as for curing, how can anybody know? There’s no physic’ll cure without a blessing, and with a blessing I know I’ve seen a mustard plaister work when there was no more smell nor strength in the mustard than so much flour. And reason good — for the mustard had laid in paper nobody knows how long — so I’ll leave you to guess.’
Mrs Holt looked hard out of the window and gave a slight inarticulate sound of scorn.
Felix had leaned back in his chair with a resigned smile, and was pinching Job’s ears.
Esther said, ‘I think I had better go now,’ not knowing what else to say, yet not wishing to go immediately, lest she should seem to be running away from Mrs Holt. She felt keenly how much endurance there must be for Felix. And she had often been discontented with her father, and called him tiresome!
‘Where does Job Tudge live?’ she said, still sitting, and looking at the droll little figure, set off by a ragged jacket with a tail about two inches deep sticking out above the funniest of corduroys.
‘Job has two mansions,’ said Felix. ‘He lives here chiefly; but he has another home, where his grandfather, Mr Tudge the stone-breaker, lives. My mother is very good to Job, Miss Lyon. She has made him a little bed in a cupboard, and she gives him sweetened porridge.’
The exquisite goodness implied in these words of Felix impressed Esther the more, because in her hearing his talk had usually been pungent and denunciatory. Looking at Mrs Holt, she saw that her eyes had lost their bleak north-easterly expression, and were shining with some mildness on little Job, who had turned round towards her, propping his head against Felix.
‘Well, why shouldn’t I be motherly to the child, Miss Lyon?’ said Mrs Holt, whose strong powers of argument required the file of an imagined contradiction, if there were no real one at hand. ‘I never was hard-hearted, and I never will be. It was Felix picked the child up and took to him, you may be sure, for there’s nobody else master where he is; but I wasn’t going to beat the orphin child and abuse him because of that, and him as straight as an arrow when he’s stript, and me so fond of children, and only had one of my own to live. I’d three babies, Miss Lyon, but the blessed Lord only spared Felix, and him the masterfullest and the brownest of ’em all. But I did my duty by him, and I said, he’ll have more schooling than his father, and he’ll grow up a doctor, and marry a woman with money to furnish — as I was myself, spoons and everything — and I shall have the grandchildren to look up to me, and be drove out in the gig sometimes, like old Mrs Lukyn. And you see what it’s all come to, Miss Lyon: here’s Felix made a common man of himself, and says he’ll never be married — which is the most unreasonable thing, and him never easy but when he’s got the child on his lap, or when —’
‘Stop, stop, mother,’ Felix burst in; ‘pray don’t use that limping argument again — that a man should marry because he’s fond of children. That’s a reason for not marrying. A bachelor’s children are always young: they’re immortal children — always lisping, waddling, helpless, and with a chance of turning out good.’
‘The Lord above may know what you mean! And haven’t other folk’s children a chance of turning out good?’
‘O, they grow out of it very fast. Here’s Job Tudge now,’ said Felix, turning the little one round on his knee, and holding his head by the back — ‘Job’s limbs will get lanky; this little fist, that looks like a puff-ball, and can hide nothing bigger than a gooseberry, will get large and bony, and perhaps want to clutch more than its share; these wide blue eyes that tell me more truth than Job knows, will narrow and narrow and try to hide truth that Job would be better without knowing; this little negative nose will become long and self-asserting; and this little tongue — put out thy tongue, Job’ — Job, awe-struck under this ceremony, put out a little red tongue very timidly — ‘this tongue, hardly bigger than a rose-leaf, will get large and thick, wag out of season, do mischief, brag and cant for gain or vanity, and cut as cruelly, for all its clumsiness as if it were a sharp-edge blade. Big Job will perhaps be naughty —’ As Felix, speaking with the loud emphatic distinctness habitual to him, brought out this terribly familiar word, Job’s sense of mystification became too painful: he hung his lip, and began to cry.
‘See there,’ said Mrs Holt, ‘you’re frightening the innicent child with such talk — and it’s enough to frighten them that think themselves the safest.’
‘Look here, Job, my man,’ said Felix, setting the boy down and turning him towards Esther; ‘go to Miss Lyon, ask her to smile at you, and that will dry up your tears like the sunshine.’
Job put his two brown fists on Esther’s lap, and she stooped to kiss him. Then holding his face between her hands, she said, ‘Tell Mr Holt we don’t mean to be naughty, Job. He should believe in us more. But now I must really go home.’
Esther rose and held out her hand to Mrs Holt who kept it while she said, a little to Esther’s confusion —
‘I’m very glad it’s took your fancy to come here sometimes, Miss Lyon. I know you’re thought to hold your head high, but I speak of people as I find ’em. And I’m sure anybody had need be humble that comes where there’s a floor like this — for I’ve put by my best tea-trays, they’re so out of all charicter — I must look Above for comfort now; but I don’t say I’m not worthy to be called on for all that.’
Felix had risen and moved towards the door that he might open it and shield Esther from more last words on his mother’s part.
‘Good-bye, Mr Holt.’
‘Will Mr Lyon like me to sit with him an hour this evening, do you think?’
‘Why not? He always likes to see you.’
‘Then I will come. Good-bye.’
‘She’s a very straight figure,’ said Mrs Holt. ‘How she carries herself! But I doubt there’s some truth in what our people say. If she won’t look at young Muscat, it’s the better for him. He’d need have a big fortune that marries her.’
‘That’s true, mother,’ said Felix, sitting down, snatching up little Job, and finding a vent for some unspeakable feeling in the pretence of worrying him.
Esther was rather melancholy as she went home, yet happier withal than she had been for many days before. She thought, ‘I need not mind having shown so much anxiety about his opinion. He is too clear-sighted to mistake our mutual position; he is quite above putting a false interpretation on what I have done. Besides, he had not thought of me at all — I saw that plainly enough. Yet he was very kind. There is something greater and better in him than I had imagined. His behaviour today — to his mother and me too — I should call it the highest gentlemanliness, only it seems in him to be something deeper. But he has chosen an intolerable life; though I suppose, if I had a mind equal to his, and if he loved me very dearly, I should choose the same life.’
Esther felt that she had prefixed an impossible ‘if’ to that result. But now she had known Felix, her conception of what a happy love must be had become like a dissolving view, in which the once-clear images were gradually melting into new forms and new colours. The favourite Byronic heroes were beginning to look something like last night’s decorations seen in the sober dawn. So fast does a little leaven spread within us — so incalculable is the effect of one personality on another. Behind all Esther’s thoughts, like an unacknowledged yet constraining presence, there was the sense, that if Felix Holt were to love her, her life would be exalted into something quite new — into a sort of difficult blessedness, such as one may imagine in beings who are conscious of painfully growing into the possession of higher powers.
It was quite true that Felix had not thought the more of Esther because of that Sunday afternoon’s interview which had shaken her mind to the very roots. He had avoided intruding on Mr Lyon without special reason, because he believed the minister to be preoccupied with some private care. He had thought a great deal of Esther with a mixture of strong disapproval and strong liking, which both together made a feeling the reverse of indifference; but he was not going to let her have any influence on his life. Even if his determination had not been fixed, he would have believed that she would utterly scorn him in any other light than that of an acquaintance, and the emotion she had shown today did not change that belief. But he was deeply touched by this manifestation of her better qualities, and felt that there was a new tie of friendship between them. That was the brief history Felix would have given of his relation to Esther. And he was accustomed to observe himself. But very close and diligent looking at living creatures, even through the best microscope, will leave room for new and contradictory discoveries.
Felix found Mr Lyon particularly glad to talk to him. The minister had never yet disburthened himself about his letter to Mr Philip Debarry concerning the public conference; and as by this time he had all the heads of his discussion thoroughly in his mind, it was agreeable to recite them, as well as to express his regret that time had been lost by Mr Debarry’s absence from the Manor, which had prevented the immediate fulfilment of his pledge.
‘I don’t see how he can fulfil it if the rector refuses,’ said Felix, thinking it well to moderate the little man’s confidence.
‘The rector is of a spirit that will not incur earthly impeachment, and he cannot refuse what is necessary to his nephew’s honourable discharge of an obligation,’ said Mr Lyon. ‘My young friend, it is a case wherein the prearranged conditions tend by such a beautiful fitness to the issue I have sought, that I should have for ever held myself a traitor to my charge had I neglected the indication.’
‘I will not excuse you; you shall not be excused; excuses shall not be admitted; there’s no excuse shall serve; you shall not be excused.’ — Henry IV.
WHEN Philip Debarry had come home that morning and read the letters which had not been forwarded to him, he laughed so heartily at Mr Lyon’s that he congratulated himself on being in his private room. Otherwise his laughter would have awakened the curiosity of Sir Maximus, and Philip did not wish to tell any one the contents of the letter until he had shown them to his uncle. He determined to ride over to the rectory to lunch; for as Lady Mary was away, he and his uncle might be tete-a-tete.
The rectory was on the other side of the river, close to the church of which it was the fitting companion: a fine old brick-and-stone house, with a great bow-window opening from the library on to the deep-turfed lawn, one fat dog sleeping on the door-stone, another fat dog waddling on the gravel, the autumn leaves duly swept away, the lingering chrysanthemums cherished, tall trees stooping or soaring in the most picturesque variety, and a Virginian creeper turning a little rustic hut into a scarlet pavilion. It was one of those rectories which are among the bulwarks of our venerable institutions — which arrest disintegrating doubt, serve as a double embankment against Popery and Dissent, and rally feminine instinct and affection to reinforce the decisions of masculine thought.
‘What makes you look so merry, Phil?’ said the rector, as his nephew entered the pleasant library.
‘Something that concerns you,’ said Philip, taking out the letter. ‘A clerical challenge. Here’s an opportunity for you to emulate the divines of the sixteenth century and have a theological duel. Read this letter.’
‘What answer have you sent the crazy little fellow?’ said the rector, keeping the letter in his hand and running over it again and again, with brow knit, but eyes gleaming without any malignity. ‘O, I sent no answer. I awaited yours.’
‘Mine!’ said the rector, throwing down the letter on the table. ‘You don’t suppose I’m going to hold a public debate with a schismatic of that sort? I should have an infidel shoe-maker next expecting me to answer blasphemies delivered in bad grammar.’
‘But you see how he puts it,’ said Philip. With all his gravity of nature he could not resist a slightly michievous prompting, though he had a serious feeling that he should not like to be regarded as failing to fulfil his pledge. ‘I think if you refuse, I shall be obliged to offer myself.’
‘Nonsense! Tell him he is himself acting a dishonourable part in interpreting your words as a pledge to do any preposterous thing that suits his fancy. Suppose he had asked you to give him land to build a chapel on; doubtless that would have given him a “lively satisfaction.” A man who puts a non-natural strained sense on a promise is no better than a robber.’
‘But he has not asked for land. I daresay he thinks you won’t object to his proposal. I confess there’s a simplicity and quaintness about the letter that rather pleases me.’
‘Let me tell you, Phil, he’s a crazy little firefly, that does a great deal of harm in my parish. He inflames the Dissenters’ minds on politics. There’s no end to the mischief done by these busy prating men. They make the ignorant multitude the judges of the largest questions, both political and religious, till we shall soon have no institution left that is not on a level with the comprehension of a huckster or a drayman. There can be nothing more retrograde — losing all the results of civilisation, all the lessons of Providence — letting the windlass run down after men have been turning at it painfully for generations. If the instructed are not to judge for the uninstructed, why, let us set Dick Stubbs to make our almanacs, and have a President of the Royal Society elected by universal suffrage.’
The rector had risen, placed himself with his back to the fire, and thrust his hands in his pockets, ready to insist further on this wide argument. Philip sat nursing one leg, listening respectfully, as he always did, though often listening to the sonorous echo of his own statements, which suited his uncle’s needs so exactly that he did not distinguish them from his old impressions.
‘True,’ said Philip, ‘but in special cases we have to do with special conditions. You know I defend the casuists. And it may happen that, for the honour of the church in Treby and a little also for my honour, circumstances may demand a concession even to some notions of a dissenting preacher.’
‘Not at all. I should be making a figure which my brother clergy might well take as an affront to themselves. The character of the establishment has suffered enough already through the Evangelicals, with their extempore incoherence and their pipe-smoking piety. Look at Wimple, the man who is vicar of Shuttleton — without his gown and bands, anybody would take him for a grocer in mourning.’
‘Well, I shall cut a still worse figure, and so will you, in the dissenting magazines and newspapers. It will go the round of the kingdom. There will be a paragraph headed, “Tory Falsehood and Clerical Cowardice,” or else “The Meanness of the Aristocracy and the Incompetence of the Beneficed Clergy.” ’
‘There would be a worse paragraph if I were to consent to the debate. Of course it would be said that I was beaten hollow, and that now the question had been cleared up at Treby Magna, the church had not a sound leg to stand on. Besides,’ the rector went on, frowning and smiling, ‘it’s all very well for you to talk, Phil, but this debating is not so easy when a man’s close upon sixty. What one writes or says must be something good and scholarly; and after all had been done, this little Lyon would buzz about one like a wasp, and cross-question and rejoin. Let me tell you, a plain truth may be so worried and mauled by fallacies as to get the worst of it. There’s no such thing as tiring a talking machine like Lyon.’ ‘Then you absolutely refuse?’ ‘Yes, I do.’
‘You remember that when I wrote my letter of thanks to Lyon you approved my offer to serve him if possible.’
‘Certainly I remember it. But suppose he had asked you to vote for civil marriage, or to go and hear him preach every Sunday?’
‘But he has not asked that.’
‘Something as unreasonable, though.’
‘Well,’ said Philip, taking up Mr Lyon’s letter and looking graver — looking even vexed, ‘it is rather an unpleasant business for me. I really felt obliged to him. I think there’s a sort of worth in the man beyond his class. Whatever may be the reason of the case, I shall disappoint him instead of doing him the service I offered.’
‘Well, that’s a misfortune; we can’t help it.’
‘The worst of it is, I should be insulting him to say, “I will do anything else, but not just this that you want.” He evidently feels himself in company with Luther and Zwingli and Calvin and considers our letters part of the history of Protestantism.’
‘Yes, yes. I know it’s rather an unpleasant thing, Phil. You are aware that I would have done anything in reason to prevent you from becoming unpopular here. I consider your character a possession to all of us.’
‘I think I must call on him forthwith, and explain and apologise.’
‘No, sit still; I’ve thought of something,’ said the rector, with a sudden revival of spirits. ‘I’ve just seen Sherlock coming in. He is to lunch with me today. It would do no harm for him to hold the debate — a curate and a young man — he’ll gain by it; and it would release you from any awkwardness, Phil. Sherlock is not going to stay here long, you know; he’ll soon have his title. I’ll put the thing to him. He won’t object if I wish it. It’s a capital idea. It will do Sherlock good. He’s a clever fellow, but he wants confidence.’
Philip had not time to object before Mr Sherlock appeared — a young divine of good birth and figure, of sallow complexion and bashful address.
‘Sherlock, you have came in most opportunely,’ said the rector. ‘A case has turned up in the parish in which you can be of eminent use. I know that is what you have desired ever since you have been with me. But I’m about so much myself that there really has not been sphere enough for you. You are a studious man, I know; I daresay you have all the necessary matter prepared — at your finger-ends, if not on paper.’
Mr Sherlock smiled with rather a trembling lip, willing to distinguish himself, but hoping that the rector only alluded to a dialogue on baptism by aspersion, or some other pamphlet suited to the purposes of the Christian Knowledge Society. But as the rector proceeded to unfold the circumstances under which his eminent service was to be rendered, he grew more and more nervous.
‘You’ll oblige me very much, Sherlock,’ the rector ended, ‘by going into this thing zealously. Can you guess what time you will require? because it will rest with us to fix the day.’
‘I should be rejoiced to oblige you, Mr Debarry, but I really think I am not competent to —’
‘That’s your modesty, Sherlock. Don’t let me hear any more of that. I know Filmore of Corpus said you might be a first-rate man if your diffidence didn’t do you injustice. And you can refer anything to me, you know. Come, you will set about the thing at once. But, Phil, you must tell the preacher to send a scheme of the debate — all the different heads — and he must agree to keep rigidly within the scheme. There, sit down at my desk and write the letter now; Thomas shall carry it.’
Philip sat down to write, and the rector, with his firm ringing voice, went on at his ease, giving ‘indications’ to his agitated curate.
‘But you can begin at once preparing a good, cogent, clear statement, and considering the probable points of assault. You can look into Jewel, Hall, Hooker, Whitgift, and the rest: you’ll find them all here. My library wants nothing in English divinity. Sketch the lower ground taken by Usher and those men, but bring all your force to bear on marking out the true High-Church doctrine. Expose the wretched cavils of the Nonconformists, and the noisy futility that belongs to schismatics generally. I will give you a telling passage from Burke on the Dissenters, and some good quotations which I brought together in two sermons of my own on the Position of the English Church in Christendom. How long do you think it will take you to bring your thoughts together? You can throw them afterwards into the form of an essay; we’ll have the thing printed; it will do you good with the bishop.’
With all Mr Sherlock’s timidity, there was fascination for him in this distinction. He reflected that he could take coffee and sit up late, and perhaps produce something rather fine. It might be a first step towards that eminence which it was no more than his duty to aspire to. Even a polemical fame like that of a Philpotts must have had a beginning. Mr Sherlock was not insensible to the pleasure of turning sentences successfully, and it was a pleasure not always unconnected with preferment. A diffident man likes the idea of doing something remarkable, which will create belief in him without any immediate display of brilliancy. Celebrity may blush and be silent, and win a grace the more. Thus Mr Sherlock was constrained, trembling all the while, and much wishing that his essay were already in print.
‘I think I could hardly be ready under a fortnight.’
‘Very good. Just write that, Phil, and tell him to fix the precise day and place. And then we’ll go to lunch.’
The rector was quite satisfied. He had talked himself into thinking that he should like to give Sherlock a few useful hints, look up his own earlier sermons, and benefit the curate by his criticism, when the argument had been got into shape. He was a healthy-natured man, but that was not at all a reason why he should not have those sensibilities to the odour of authorship which belong to almost everybody who is not expected to be a writer — and especially to that form of authorship which is called suggestion, and consists in telling another man that he might do a great deal with a given subject, by bringing a sufficient amount of knowledge, reasoning, and wit to bear upon it.
Philip would have had some twinges of conscience about the curate, if he had not guessed that the honour thrust upon him was not altogether disagreeable. The church might perhaps have had a stronger supporter; but for himself, he had done what he was bound to do: he had done his best towards fulfilling Mr Lyon’s desire.
‘If he come not, the play is marred.’ — Midsummer Night’s Dream
RUFUS LYON was very happy on that mild November morning appointed for the great conference in the larger room at the Free School, between himself and the Rev. Theodore Sherlock, B.A. The disappointment of not contending with the rector in person, which had at first been bitter, had been gradually lost sight of in the positive enjoyment of an opportunity for debating on any terms. Mr Lyon had two grand elements of pleasure on such occasions: confidence in the strength of his case, and confidence in his own power of advocacy. Not — to use his own phrase — not that he ‘glorified himself herein’; for speech and exposition were so easy to him, that if he argued forcibly, he believed it to be simply because the truth was forcible. He was not proud of moving easily in his native medium. A panting man thinks of himself as a clever swimmer; but a fish swims much better, and takes his performance as a matter of course.
Whether Mr Sherlock were that panting, self-gratulating man, remained a secret. Philip Debarry, much occupied with his electioneering affairs, had only once had an opportunity of asking his uncle how Sherlock got on, and the rector had said, curtly, ‘I think he’ll do. I’ve supplied him well with references. I advise him to read only, and decline everything else as out of order. Lyon will speak to a point, and then Sherlock will read: it will be all the more telling. It will give variety.’ But on this particular morning peremptory business connected with the magistracy called the rector away.
Due notice had been given, and the feminine world of Treby Magna was much more agitated by the prospect than by that of any candidate’s speech. Mrs Pendrell at the Bank, Mrs Tiliot, and the church ladies generally, felt bound to hear the curate, who was known, apparently by an intuition concerning the nature of curates, to be a very clever young man; and he would show them what learning had to say on the right side. One or two Dissenting ladies were not without emotion at the thought that, seated on the front benches, they should be brought near to old Church friends, and have a longer greeting than had taken place since the Catholic Emancipation. Mrs Muscat, who had been a beauty, and was as nice in her millinery as any Trebian lady belonging to the establishment, reflected that she should put on her best large embroidered collar, and that she should ask Mrs Tiliot where it was in Duffield that she once got her bedhangings dyed so beautifully. When Mrs Tiliot was Mary Salt, the two ladies had been bosom friends; but Mr Tiliot had looked higher and higher since his gin had become so famous; and in the year ‘29 he had, in Mr Muscat’s hearing, spoken of Dissenters as sneaks, — a personality which could not be overlooked.
The debate was to begin at eleven, for the rector would not allow the evening to be chosen, when low men and boys might want to be admitted out of mere mischief. This was one reason why the female part of the audience outnumbered the males. But some chief Trebians were there, even men whose means made them as independent of theory as Mr Pendrell and Mr Wace; encouraged by reflecting that they were not in a place of worship, and would not be obliged to stay longer than they chose. There was a muster of all Dissenters who could spare the morning time, and on the back benches were all the aged churchwomen who shared the remnants of the sacrament wine, and who were humbly anxious to neglect nothing ecclesiastical or connected with ‘going to a better place’.
At eleven the arrival of listeners seemed to have ceased. Mr Lyon was seated on the school tribune or dais at his particular round table; another round table, with a chair, awaited the curate, with whose superior position it was quite in keeping that he should not be first on the ground. A couple of extra chairs were placed further back, and more than one important personage had been requested to act as chairman; but no churchman would place himself in a position so equivocal as to dignity of aspect, and so unequivocal as to the obligation of sitting out the discussion; and the rector had beforehand put a veto on any Dissenting chairman.
Mr Lyon sat patiently absorbed in his thoughts, with his notes in minute handwriting lying before him, seeming to look at the audience, but not seeing them. Every one else was contented that there should be an interval in which there could be a little neighbourly talk.
Esther was particularly happy, seated on a side-bench near her father’s side of the tribune, with Felix close behind her, so that she could turn her head and talk to him. He had been very kind ever since that morning when she had called at his home, more disposed to listen indulgently to what she had to say, and less blind to her looks and movements. If he had never railed at her or ignored her, she would have been less sensitive to the attention he gave her; but as it was, the prospect of seeing him seemed to light up her life, and to disperse the old dulness. She looked unusually charming today, from the very fact that she was not vividly conscious of anything but of having a mind near her that asked her to be something better than she actually was. The consciousness of her own superiority amongst the people around her was superseded, and even a few brief weeks had given a softened expression to her eyes, a more feminine beseechingness and self-doubt to her manners. Perhaps, however, a little new defiance was rising in place of the old contempt — defiance of the Trebian views concerning Felix Holt.
‘What a very nice-looking young woman your minister’s daughter is! ‘ said Mrs Tiliot in an undertone to Mrs Muscat, who, as she had hoped, had found a seat next to her quondam friend — ‘quite the lady’.
‘Rather too much so, considering,’ said Mrs Muscat. ‘She’s thought proud, and that’s not pretty in a girl, even if there was anything to back it up. But now she seems to be encouraging that young Holt, who scoffs at everything, as you may judge by his appearance. She has despised his betters before now; but I leave you to judge whether a young man who has taken to low ways of getting his living can pay for fine cambric handkerchiefs and light kid gloves.’
Mrs Muscat lowered her blond eyelashes and swayed her neat head just perceptibly from side to side, with a sincere desire to be moderate in her expressions, not withstanding any shock that facts might have given her.
‘Dear, dear,’ said Mrs Tiliot. ‘What! that is young Holt leaning forward now without a cravat? I’ve never seen him before to notice him, but I’ve heard Tiliot talking about him. They say he’s a dangerous character, and goes stirring up the working men at Sproxton. And — well, to be sure, such great eyes and such a great head of hair — it is enough to frighten one. What can she see in him? Quite below her.’
‘Yes, and brought up a governess,’ said Mrs Muscat; ‘you’d have thought she’d know better how to choose. But the minister has let her get the upper hand sadly too much. It’s a pity in a man of God — I don’t deny he’s that.’
‘Well, I am sorry,’ said Mrs Tiliot, ‘for I meant her to give my girls lessons when they came from school.’
Mr Wace and Pendrell meanwhile were standing up and looking round at the audience, nodding to their fellow-townspeople with the affability due from men in their position.
‘It’s time he came now,’ said Mr Wace, looking at his watch and comparing it with the schoolroom clock. ‘This debating is a newfangled sort of thing; but the rector would never have given in to it if there hadn’t been good reasons. Nolan said he wouldn’t come. He says this debating is an atheistical sort of thing; the Atheists are very fond of it. Theirs is a bad book to take a leaf out of. However, we shall hear nothing but what’s good from Mr Sherlock. He preaches a capital sermon — for such a young man.’
‘Well, it was our duty to support him — not to leave him alone among the Dissenters,’ said Mr Pendrell. ‘You see, everybody hasn’t felt that. Labron might have shown himself, if not Lukyn. I could have alleged business myself if I had thought proper.’
‘Here he comes, I think,’ said Mr Wace, turning round on hearing a movement near the small door on a level with the platform. ‘By George! it’s Mr Debarry. Come now, this is handsome.’
Mr Wace and Mr Pendrell clapped their hands, and the example was followed even by most of the Dissenters. Philip was aware that he was doing a popular thing, of a kind that Treby was not used to from the elder Debarrys; but his appearance had not been long premeditated. He was driving through the town towards an engagement at some distance, but on calling at Labron’s office he had found that the affair which demanded his presence had been deferred, and so had driven round to the Free School. Christian came in behind him.
Mr Lyon was now roused from his abstraction, and, stepping from his slight elevation, begged Mr Debarry to act as moderator or president on the occasion.
‘With all my heart,’ said Philip. ‘But Mr Sherlock has not arrived, apparently?’
‘He tarries somewhat unduly,’ said Mr Lyon. ‘Nevertheless there may be a reason of which we know not. Shall I collect the thoughts of the assembly by a brief introductory address in the interval?’
‘No, no, no,’ said Mr Wace, who saw a limit to his powers of endurance. ‘Mr Sherlock is sure to be here in a minute or two.’
‘Christian,’ said Philip Debarry, who felt a slight misgiving, ‘just be so good — but stay, I’ll go myself. Excuse me, gentlemen; I’ll drive round to Mr Sherlock’s lodgings. He may be under a little mistake as to the time. Studious men are sometimes rather absent. You needn’t come with me, Christian.’
As Mr Debarry went out, Rufus Lyon stepped on to the tribune again in rather an uneasy state of mind. A few ideas had occurred to him, eminently fitted to engage the audience profitably, and so to wrest some edification out of an unforeseen delay. But his native delicacy made him feel that in this assembly the church people might fairly decline any ‘deliverance’ on his part which exceeded the programme, and Mr Wace’s negative had been energetic. But the little man suffered from imprisoned ideas, and was as restless as a racer held in. He could not sit down again, but walked backwards and forwards, stroking his chin, emitting his low guttural interjection under the pressure of clauses and sentences which he longed to utter aloud, as he would have done in his own study. There was a low buzz in the room which helped to deepen the minister’s sense that the thoughts within him were as divine messengers unheeded or rejected by a trivial generation. Many of the audience were standing; all, except the old churchwomen on the back seats, and a few devout Dissenters who kept their eyes shut and gave their bodies a gentle oscillating motion, were interested in chat. ‘Your father is uneasy,’ said Felix to Esther.
‘Yes; and now, I think, he is feeling for his spectacles. I hope he has not left them at home: he will not be able to see anything two yards before him without them; — and it makes him so unconscious of what people expect or want.’
‘I’ll go and ask him whether he has them,’ said Felix, striding over the form in front of him, and approaching Mr Lyon, whose face showed a gleam of pleasure at this relief from his abstracted isolation.
‘Miss Lyon is afraid that you are at a loss for your spectacles, sir,’ said Felix.
‘My dear young friend,’ said Mr Lyon, laying his hand on Felix Holt’s fore-arm, which was about on a level with the minister’s shoulder, ‘it is a very glorious truth, albeit made somewhat painful to me by the circumstances of the present moment, that as a counterpoise to the brevity of our mortal life (wherein, as I apprehend, our powers are being trained not only for the transmission of an improved heritage, as I have heard you insist, but also for our own entrance into a higher initiation in the divine scheme) — it is, I say, a very glorious truth, that even in what are called the waste minutes of our time, like those of expectation, the soul may soar and range, as in some of our dreams which are brief as a broken rainbow in duration, yet seem to comprise a long history of terror or of joy. And again, each moment may be a beginning of a new spiritual energy; and our pulse would doubtless be a coarse and clumsy notation of the passage from that which was not to that which is, even in the finer processes of the material world — and how much more —’
Esther was watching her father and Felix, and though she was not within hearing of what was being said, she guessed the actual state of the case — that the inquiry about the spectacles had been unheeded, and that her father was losing himself and embarrassing Felix in the intricacies of a dissertation. There was not the stillness around her that would have made a movement on her part seem conspicuous, and she was impelled by her anxiety to step on the tribune and walk up to her father, who paused, a little startled.
‘Pray see whether you have forgotten your spectacles, father. If so, I will go home at once and look for them.’
Mr Lyon was automatically obedient to Esther, and he began immediately to feel in his pockets.
‘How is it that Miss Jermyn is so friendly with the Dissenting parson?’ said Christian to Quorlen, the Tory printer, who was an intimate of his. ‘Those grand Jermyns are not Dissenters surely?’
‘What Miss Jermyn?’
‘Why — don’t you see? — that fine girl who is talking to him.’
‘Miss Jermyn! Why, that’s the little parson’s daughter.’
‘His daughter!’ Christian gave a low brief whistle, which seemed a natural expression of surprise that ‘the rusty old ranter’ should have a daughter of such distinguished appearance.
Meanwhile the search for the spectacles had proved vain.
’Tis a grievous fault in me, my dear,’ said the little man, humbly; ‘I become thereby sadly burthensome to you.’
‘I will go at once,’ said Esther, refusing to let Felix go instead of her. But she had scarcely stepped off the tribune when Mr Debarry re-entered, and there was a commotion which made her wait. After a low-toned conversation with Mr Pendrell and Mr Wace, Philip Debarry stepped on to the tribune with his hat in his hand, and said, with an air of much concern and annoyance —
‘I am sorry to have to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that — doubtless owing to some accidental cause which I trust will soon be explained as nothing serious — Mr Sherlock is absent from his residence, and is not to be found. He went out early, his landlady informs me, to refresh himself by a walk on this agreeable morning, as is his habit, she tells me, when he has been kept up late by study; and he has not returned. Do not let us be too anxious. I shall cause inquiry to be made in the direction of his walk. It is easy to imagine many accidents, not of a grave character, by which he might nevertheless be absolutely detained against his will. Under these circumstances, Mr Lyon,’ continued Philip, turning to the minister, ‘I presume that the debate must be adjourned.’
‘The debate, doubtless,’ began Mr Lyon; but his further speech was drowned by a general rising of the church people from their seats, many of them feeling that even if the cause were lamentable, the adjournment was not altogether disagreeable.
‘Good gracious me!’ said Mrs Tiliot, as she took her husband’s arm, ‘I hope the poor young man hasn’t fallen into the river or broken his leg.’
But some of the more acrid Dissenters, whose temper was not controlled by the habits of retail business, had begun to hiss, implying that in their interpretation the curate’s absence had not depended on any injury to life or limb.
‘He’s turned tail, sure enough,’ said Mr Muscat to the neighbour behind him, lifting his eyebrows and shoulders, and laughing in a way that showed that, deacon as he was, he looked at the affair in an entirely secular light.
But Mrs Muscat thought it would be nothing but right to have all the waters dragged, agreeing in this with the majority of the church ladies.
‘I regret sincerely, Mr Lyon,’ said Philip Debarry, addressing the minister with politeness, ‘that I must say goodmorning to you, with the sense that I have not been able at present to contribute to your satisfaction as I had wished.’
‘Speak not of it in the way of apology, sir,’ said Mr Lyon, in a tone of depression. ‘I doubt not that you yourself have acted in good faith. Nor will I open any door of egress to constructions such as anger often deems ingenious, but which the disclosure of the simple truth may expose as erroneous and uncharitable fabrications. I wish you goodmorning, sir.’
When the room was deared of the church people, Mr Lyon wished to soothe his own spirit and that of his flock by a few reflections introductory to a parting prayer. But there was a general resistance to this effect. The men mustered round the minister, and declared their opinion that the whole thing was disgraceful to the church. Some said the curate’s absence had been contrived from the first. Others more than hinted that it had been a folly in Mr Lyon to set on foot any procedure in common with Tories and clergymen, who, if they ever aped civility to Dissenters, would never do anything but laugh at them in their sleeves. Brother Remp urged in his heavy bass that Mr Lyon should lose no time in sending an account of the affair to the Patriot; and Brother Hawkins, in his high tenor, observed that it was an occasion on which some stinging things might be said with all the extra effect of an apro pos.
The position of receiving a many-voiced lecture from the members of his church was familiar to Mr Lyon, but now he felt weary, frustrated, and doubtful of his own temper. Felix, who stood by and saw that this man of sensitive fibre was suffering from talkers whose noisy superficiality cost them nothing, got exasperated. ‘It seems to me, sirs,’ he burst in, with his predominant voice, ‘that Mr Lyon has hitherto had the hard part of the business, while you of his congregation have had the easy one. Punish the church clergy, if you like — they can take care of themselves. But don’t punish your own minister. It’s no business of mine, perhaps, except so far as fair-play is everybody’s business; but it seems to me the time to ask Mr Lyon to take a little rest, instead of setting on him like so many wasps.’
By this speech Felix raised a displeasure which fell on the minister as well as on himself; but he gained his immediate end. The talkers dropped off after a slight show of persistence, and Mr Lyon quitted the field of no combat with a small group of his less imperious friends, to whom he confided his intention of committing his argument fully to paper, and forwarding it to a discriminating editor.
‘But regarding personalities,’ he added, ‘I have not the same clear showing. For, say that this young man was pusillanimous — I were but ill provided with arguments if I took my stand even for a moment on so poor an irrelevancy as that because one curate is ill furnished therefore episcopacy is false. If I held up any one to just obloquy, it would be the well-designated incumbent of this parish, who, calling himself one of the church militant, sends a young and weak-kneed substitute to take his place in the fight.’
Mr Philip Debarry did not neglect to make industrious inquiry concerning the accidents which had detained the Rev. Theodore Sherlock on his moming walk. That well-intentioned young divine was seen no more in Treby Magna. But the river was not dragged, for by the evening coach the rector received an explanatory letter. The Rev. Theodore’s agitation had increased so much during his walk, that the passing coach had been a means of deliverance not to be resisted, and, literally at the eleventh hour, he had hailed and mounted the cheerful Tally-ho! and carried away his portion of the debate in his pocket.
But the rector had subsequently the satisfaction of receiving Mr Sherlock’s painstaking production in print, with a dedication to the Rev. Augustus Debarry, a motto from St Chrysostum, and other additions, the fruit of ripening leisure. He was ‘sorry for poor Sherlock, who wanted confidence’; but he was convinced that for his own part he had taken the course which under the circumstances was the least compromising to the church. Sir Maximus, however, observed to his son and brother that he had been right and they had been wrong as to the danger of vague, enormous expressions of gratitude to a Dissenting preacher, and on any differences of opinion seldom failed to remind them of that precedent.
Your fellow-man? — Divide the epithet:
Say rather, you’re the fellow, he the man.
WHEN Christian quitted the Free School with the discovery that the young lady whose appearance had first startled him with an indefinable impression in the market-place was the daughter of the old Dissenting preacher who had shown so much agitated curiosity about his name, he felt very much like an uninitiated chess-player who sees that the pieces are in a peculiar position on the board, and might open the way for him to give checkmate, if he only knew how. Ever since his interview with Jermyn, his mind had been occupied with the charade it offered to his ingenuity. What was the real meaning of the lawyer’s interest in him, and in his relations with Maurice Christian Bycliffe? Here was a secret; and secrets were often a source of profit, of that agreeable kind which involved little labour. Jermyn had hinted at profit which might possibly come through him; but Christian said inwardly, with well-satisfied self-esteem, that he was not so pitiable a nincompoop as to trust Jermyn. On the contrary, the only problem before him was to find out by what combination of independent knowledge he could outwit Jermyn, elude any purchase the attorney had on him through his past history, and get a handsome bonus, by which a somewhat shattered man of pleasure might live well without a master. Christian, having early exhausted the more impulsive delights of life, had become a sober calculator; and he had made up his mind that, for a man who had long ago run through his own money, servitude in a great family was the best kind of retirement after that of a pensioner; but if a better chance offered, a person of talent must not let it slip through his fingers. He held various ends of threads, but there was danger in pulling at them too impatiently. He had not forgotten the surprise which had made him drop the punch-ladle, when Mr Crowder, talking in the steward’s room, had said that a scamp named Henry Scaddon had been concerned in a lawsuit about the Transome estate. Again, Jermyn was the family lawyer of the Transomes; he knew about the exchange of names between Scaddon and Bycliffe; he clearly wanted to know as much as he could about Bycliffe’s history. The conclusion was not remote that Bycliffe had had some claim on the Transome property, and that a difficulty had arisen from his being confounded with Henry Scaddon. But hitherto the other incident which had been apparently connected with the interchange of names — Mr Lyon’s demand that he should write down the name Maurice Christian, accompanied with the question whether that were his whole name — had had no visible link with the inferences arrived at through Crowder and Jermyn.
The discovery made this morning at the Free School that Esther was the daughter of the Dissenting preacher at last suggested a possible link. Until then, Christian had not known why Esther’s face had impressed him so peculiarly; but the minister’s chief association for him was with Bycliffe, and that association served as a flash to show him that Esther’s features and expression, and still more her bearing, now she stood and walked, revived Bycliffe’s image. Daughter? There were various ways of being a daughter. Suppose this were a case of adoption: suppose Bycliffe were known to be dead, or thought to be dead. ‘Begad, if the old parson had fancied the original father was come to life again, it was enough to frighten him a little. Slow and steady,’ Christian said to himself; ‘I’ll get some talk with the old man again. He’s safe enough: one can handle him without cutting one’s self. I’ll tell him I knew Bycliffe, and was his fellow-prisoner. I’ll worm out the truth about this daughter. Could pretty Annette have married again, and married this little scarecrow? There’s no knowing what a woman will not do.’
Christian could see no distinct result for himself from his industry; but if there were to be any such result, it must be reached by following out every clue; and to the non-legal mind there are dim possibilities in law and heirship which prevent any issue from seeming too miraculous.
The consequence of these meditations was, that Christian hung about Treby more than usual in his leisure time, and that on the first opportunity he accosted Mr Lyon in the street with suitable civility, stating that since the occasion which had brought them together some weeks before he had often wished to renew their conversation, and, with Mr Lyon’s permission, would now ask to do so. After being assured, as he had been by Jermyn, that this courier, who had happened by some accident to possess the memorable locket and pocket-book, was certainly not Annette’s husband, and was ignorant whether Maurice Christian Bycliffe were living or dead, the minister’s mind had become easy again; his habitual lack of interest in personal details rendering him gradually oblivious of Jermyn’s precautionary statement that he was pursuing inquiries, and that if anything of interest turned up, Mr Lyon should be made acquainted with it. Hence, when Christian addressed him, the minister, taken by surprise and shaken by the recollections of former anxieties, said, helplessly —
‘If it is business, sir, you would perhaps do better to address yourself to Mr Jermyn.’
He could not have said anything that was a more valuable hint to Christian. He inferred that the minister had made a confidant of Jermyn, and it was needful to be wary
‘On the contrary, sir,’ he answered, ‘it may be of the utmost importance to you that what passes between us should not be known to Mr Jermyn.’
Mr Lyon was perplexed, and felt at once that he was no more in clear daylight concerning Jermyn than concerning Christian. He dared not neglect the possible duty of hearing what this man had to say, and he invited him to proceed to Malthouse Yard, where they could converse in private.
Once in Mr Lyon’s study, Christian opened the dialogue by saying that since he was in this room before it had occurred to him that the anxiety he had observed in Mr Lyon might be owing to some acquaintance with Maurice Christian Bycliffe — a fellow-prisoner in France whom he, Christian, had assisted in getting freed from his imprisonment, and who, in fact, had been the owner of the trifles which Mr Lyon had recently had in his possession and had restored. Christian hastened to say that he knew nothing of Bycliffe’s history since they had parted in France, but that he knew of his marriage with Annette Ledru, and had been acquainted with Annette herself. He would be very glad to know what became of Bycliffe, if he could, for he liked him uncommonly.
Here Christian paused; but Mr Lyon only sat changing colour and trembling. This man’s bearing and tone of mind were made repulsive to him by being brought in contact with keenly-felt memories, and he could not readily summon the courage to give answers or ask questions.
‘May I ask if you knew my friend Bycliffe?’ said Christian, trying a more direct method.
‘No, sir; I never saw him.’
‘Ah I well — you have seen a very striking likeness of him. It’s wonderful — unaccountable; but when I saw Miss Lyon at the Free School the other day, I could have sworn she was Bycliffe’s daughter.’
‘Sir!’ said Mr Lyon, in his deepest tone, half rising, and holding by the arms of his chair, ‘these subjects touch me with too sharp a point for you to be justified in thrusting them on me out of mere levity. Is there any good you seek or any injury you fear in relation to them?’
‘Precisely, sir. We shall come now to an understanding. Suppose I believed that the young lady who goes by the name of Miss Lyon was the daughter of Bycliffe?’
Mr Lyon moved his lips silently.
‘And suppose I had reason to suspect that there would be some great advantage for her if the law knew who was her father?’
‘Sir!’ said Mr Lyon, shaken out of all reticence, ‘I would not conceal it. She believes herself to be my daughter. But I will bear all things rather than deprive her of a right. Nevertheless I will appeal to the pity of any fellow-man, not to thrust himself between her and me, but to let me disclose the truth to her myself.’
‘All in good time,’ said Christian. ‘We must do nothing rash. Then Miss Lyon is Annette’s child?’
The minister shivered as if the edge of a knife had been drawn across his hand. But the tone of the question, by the very fact that it intensified his antipathy to Christian, enabled him to collect himself for what must be simply the endurance of a painful operation. After a moment or two he said more coolly, ‘It is true, sir. Her mother became my wife. Proceed with any statement which may concern my duty.’
‘I have no more to say than this: If there’s a prize that the law might hand over to Bycliffe’s daughter, I am much mistaken if there isn’t a lawyer who’ll take precious good care to keep the law hoodwinked. And that lawyer is Mat Jermyn. Why, my good sir, if you’ve been taking Jermyn into your confidence, you’ve been setting the fox to keep off the weasel. It strikes me that when you were made a little anxious about those articles of poor Bycliffe’s, you put Jermyn on making inquiries of me. Eh? I think I am right?’
‘I do not deny it.’
‘Ah! — it was very well you did, for by that means I’ve found out that he’s got hold of some secrets about Bycliffe which he means to stifle. Now, sir, if you desire any justice for your daughter, step-daughter, I should say — don’t so much as wink to yourself before Jermyn; and if you’ve got any papers or things of that sort that may come in evidence, as these confounded rescals the lawyers call it, clutch them tight, for if they get into Jermyn’s hands they may soon fly up the chimney. Have I said enough?’
‘I had not purposed any further communication with Mr Jermyn, sir; indeed, I have nothing further to communicate. Except that one fact concerning my daughter’s birth, which I have erred in concealing from her, I neither seek disclosures nor do I tremble before them.’
‘Then I have your word that you will be silent about this conversation between us? It is for your daughter’s interest, mind.’
‘Sir, I shall be silent,’ said Mr Lyon, with cold gravity. ‘Unless,’ he added, with an acumen as to possibilities rather disturbing to Christian’s confident contempt for the old man — ‘unless I were called upon by some tribunal to declare the whole truth in this relation; in which case I should submit myself to that authority of investigation which is a requisite of social order.’
Christian departed, feeling satisfied that he had got the utmost to be obtained at present out of the Dissenting preacher, whom he had not dared to question more closely. He must look out for chance lights, and perhaps, too, he might catch a stray hint by stirring the sediment of Mr Crowder’s memory. But he must not venture on inquiries that might be noticed. He was in awe of Jermyn.
When Mr Lyon was alone he paced up and down among his books, and thought aloud, in order to relieve himself after the constraint of this interview. ‘I will not wait for the urgency of necessity,’ he said, more than once. ‘I will tell the child, without compulsion. And then I shall fear nothing. And an unwonted spirit of tenderness has filled her of late. She will forgive me.’
‘Consideration like an angel came
And whipped the of ending Adam out of her
Leaving her body as a paradise
To envelop and contain celestial spirits.’
SHAKESPEARE: Henry V.
THE next morning, after much prayer for the needful strength and wisdom, Mr Lyon came downstairs with the resolution that another day should not pass without the fulfilment of the task he had laid on himself; but what hour he should choose for his solemn disclosure to Esther, must depend on their mutual occupations. Perhaps he must defer it till they sat up alone together, after Lyddy was gone to bed. But at breakfast Esther said —
‘To-day is a holiday, father. My pupils are all going to Duffield to see the wild beasts. What have you got to do today? Come, you are eating no breakfast. O, Lyddy, Lyddy, the eggs are hard again. I wish you would not read Alleyne’s Alarm before breakfast; it makes you cry and forget the eggs.’
‘They are hard, and that’s the truth; but there’s hearts as are harder, Miss Esther,’ said Lyddy.
‘I think not,’ said Esther. ‘This is leathery enough for the heart of the most obdurate Jew. Pray give it little Zachary for a football.’
‘Dear, dear, don’t you be so light, miss. We may all be dead before night.’
‘You speak out of season, my good Lyddy,’ said Mr Lyon, wearily; ‘depart into the kitchen.’
‘What have you got to do today, father?’ persisted Esther. ‘I have a holiday.’
Mr Lyon felt as if this were a fresh summons not to delay. ‘I have something of great moment to do, my dear; and since you are not otherwise demanded, I will ask you to come and sit with me up-stairs.’
Esther wondered what there could be on her father’s mind more pressing than his morning studies.
She soon knew. Motionless, but mentally stirred as she had never been before, Esther listened to her mother’s story, and to the outpouring of her step-father’s long-pent-up experience. The rays of the morning sun which fell athwart the books, the sense of the beginning day, had deepened the solemnity more than night would have done. All knowledge which alters our lives penetrates us more when it comes in the early morning: the day that has to be travelled with something new and perhaps for ever sad in its light, is an image of the life that spreads beyond. But at night the time of rest is near.
Mr Lyon regarded his narrative as a confession — as a revelation to this beloved child of his own miserable weakness and error. But to her it seemed a revelation of another sort: her mind seemed suddenly enlarged by a vision of passion and struggle, of delight and renunciation, in the lot of beings who had hitherto been a dull enigma to her. And in the act of unfolding to her that he was not her real father, but had only striven to cherish her as a father, had only longed to be loved as a father, the odd, wayworn, unworldly man became the object of a new sympathy in which Esther felt herself exalted. Perhaps this knowledge would have been less powerful within her, but for the mental preparation that had come during the last two months from her acquaintance with Felix Holt, which had taught her to doubt the infallibility of her own standard, and raised a presentiment of moral depths that were hidden from her.
Esther had taken her place opposite to her father, and had not moved even her clasped hands while he was speaking. But after the long out-pouring in which he seemed to lose the sense of everything but the memories he was giving utterance to, he paused a little while and then said timidly —
‘This is a late retrieval of a long error, Esther. I make not excuses for myself, for we ought to strive that our affections be rooted in the truth. Nevertheless you —’
Esther had risen, and had glided on to the wooden stool on a level with her father’s chair, where he was accustomed to lay books. She wanted to speak, but the floodgates could not be opened for words alone. She threw her arms round the old man’s neck and sobbed out with a passionate cry, ‘Father, father! forgive me if I have not loved you enough I will — I will!’
The old man’s little delicate frame was shaken by a surprise and joy that were almost painful in their intensity. He had been going to ask forgiveness of her who asked it for herself. In that moment of supreme complex emotion one ray of the minister’s joy was the thought, ‘Surely the work of grace is begun in her — surely here is a heart that the Lord hath touched.’
They sat so, enclasped in silence, while Esther relieved her full heart. When she raised her head, she sat quite still for a minute or two looking fixedly before her, and keeping one little hand in the minister’s. Presently she looked at him and said —
‘Then you lived like a working man, father; you were very, very poor. Yet my mother had been used to luxury. She was well born — she was a lady.’
‘It is true, my dear; it was a poor life that I could give her.’
Mr Lyon answered in utter dimness as to the course Esther’s mind was taking. He had anticipated before his disclosure, from his long-standing discernment of tendencies in her which were often the cause of silent grief to him, that the discovery likely to have the keenest interest for her would be that her parents had a higher rank than that of the poor Dissenting preacher; but she had shown that other and better sensibilities were predominant. He rebuked himself now for a hasty and shallow judgment concerning the child’s inner life, and waited for new clearness.
‘But that must be the best life, father,’ said Esther, suddenly rising, with a flush across her paleness, and standing with her head thrown a little backward, as if some illumination had given her a new decision. ‘That must be the best life.’ ‘What life, my dear child?’
‘Why, that where one bears and does everything because of some great and strong feeling — so that this and that in one’s circumstances don’t signify.’
‘Yea, verily; but the feeling that should be thus supreme is devotedness to the Divine Will.’
Esther did not speak; her father’s words did not fit on to the impressions wrought in her by what he had told her. She sat down again, and said, more quietly —
‘Mamma did not speak much of my — first father?’
‘Not much, dear. She said he was beautiful to the eye, and good and generous; and that his family was of those who have been long privileged among their fellows. But now I will deliver to you the letters, which, together with a ring and locket, are the only visible memorials she retained of him.’
Mr Lyon reached and delivered to Esther the box containing the relics. ‘Take them, and examine them in privacy, my dear. And that I may no more err by concealment, I will tell you some late occurrences that bear on these memorials, though to my present apprehension doubtfully and confusedly.’
He then narrated to Esther all that had passed between himself and Christian. The possibility — to which Mr Lyon’s alarms had pointed — that her real father might still be living, was a new shock. She could not speak about it to her present father, but it was registered in silence as a painful addition to the uncertainties which she suddenly saw hanging over her life.
‘I have little confidence in this man’s allegations,’ Mr Lyon ended. ‘I confess his presence and speech are to me as the jarring of metal. He bears the stamp of one who has never conceived aught of more sanctity than the lust of the eye and the pride of life. He hints at some possible inheritance for you, and denounces mysteriously the devices of Mr Jermyn. All this may or may not have a true foundation. But it is not my part to move in this matter save on a clearer showing.
‘Certainly not, father,’ said Esther, eagerly. A little while ago, these problematic prospects might have set her dreaming pleasantly; but now, for some reasons that she could not have put distinctly into words, they affected her with dread.
‘To hear with eyes is part of love’s rare wit.’
— SHAKESPEARE: Sonnets.
‘Custom calls me to’t :—
What custom wills, in all things should we do’t?
The dust on antique time would lie unswept,
And mountainous error be too highly heaped
For truth to over-peer.’ — Coriolanus.
IN the afternoon Mr Lyon went out to see the sick amongst his flock, and Esther, who had been passing the morning in dwelling on the memories and the few remaining relics of her parents, was left alone in the parlour amidst the lingering odours of the early dinner, not easily got rid of in that small house. Rich people, who know nothing of these vulgar details, can hardly imagine their significance in the history of multitudes of human lives in which the sensibilities are never adjusted to the external conditions. Esther always felt so much discomfort from those odours that she usually seized any possibility of escaping from them, and today they oppressed her the more because she was weary with long-continued agitation. Why did she not put on her bonnet as usual and get out into the open air? It was one of those pleasant November afternoons — pleasant in the wide country — when the sunshine is on the clinging brown leaves of the young oaks, and the last yellow leaves of the elms flutter down in the fresh but not eager breeze. But Esther sat still on the sofa — pale and with reddened eyelids, her curls all pushed back carelessly, and her elbow resting on the ridgy black horse-hair, which usually almost set her teeth on edge if she pressed it even through her sleeve — while her eyes rested blankly on the dull street. Lyddy had said, ‘Miss, you look sadly; if you can’t take a walk, go and lie down.’ She had never seen the curls in such disorder, and she reflected that there had been a death from typhus recently. But the obstinate miss only shook her head.
Esther was waiting for the sake of — not a probability, but — a mere possibility, which made the brothy odours endurable. Apparently, in less than half an hour, the possibility came to pass, for she changed her attitude, almost started from her seat, sat down again, and listened eagerly. If Lyddy should send him away, could she herself rush out and call him back? Why not? Such things were permissible where it was understood, from the necessity of the case, that there was only friendship. But Lyddy opened the door and said, ‘Here’s Mr Holt, miss, wants to know if you’ll give him leave to come in. I told him you was sadly.’
‘O yes, Lyddy, beg him to come in.’
‘I should not have persevered,’ said Felix, as they shook hands, ‘only I know Lyddy’s dismal way. But you do look ill,’ he went on, as he seated himself at the other end of the sofa. ‘Or rather — for that’s a false way of putting it — you look as if you had been very much distressed. Do you mind about my taking notice of it?’
He spoke very kindly, and looked at her more persistently than he had ever done before, when her hair was perfect.
‘You are quite right. I am not at all ill. But I have been very much agitated this morning. My father has been telling me things I never heard before about my mother, and giving me things that belonged to her. She died when I was a very little creature.’
‘Then it is no new pain or trouble for you and Mr Lyon? I could not help being anxious to know that.’
Esther passed her hand over her brow before she answered. ‘I hardly know whether it is pain, or something better than pleasure. It has made me see things I was blind to before — depths in my father’s nature.’
As she said this, she looked at Felix, and their eyes met very gravely.
‘It is such a beautiful day,’ he said, ‘it would do you good to go into the air. Let me take you along the river towards Little Treby, will you?’
‘I will put my bonnet on,’ said Esther, unhesitatingly, though they had never walked out together before.
It is true that to get into the fields they had to pass through the street; and when Esther saw some acquaintances, she reflected that her walking alone with Felix might be a subject of remark — all the more because of his cap, patched boots, no cravat, and thick stick. Esther was a little amazed herself at what she had come to. So our lives glide on: the river ends we don’t know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.
When they were in the streets Esther hardly spoke. Felix talked with his usual readiness, as easily as if he were not doing it solely to divert her thoughts, first about Job Tudge’s delicate chest, and the probability that the little white-faced monkey would not live long; and then about a miserable beginning of a night-school, which was all he could get together at Sproxton; and the dismalness of that hamlet, which was a sort of lip to the coalpit on one side and the ‘public’ on the other — and yet a paradise compared with the wynds of Glasgow, where there was little more than a chink of daylight to show the hatred in women’s faces.
But soon they got into the fields, where there was a right of way towards Little Treby, now following the course of the river, now crossing towards a lane, and now turning into a cart-track through a plantation.
‘Here we are!’ said Felix, when they had crossed the wooden bridge, and were treading on the slanting shadows made by the elm trunks. ‘I think this is delicious. I never feel less unhappy than in these late autumn afternoons when they are sunny.’
‘Less unhappy! There now!’ said Esther, smiling at him with some of her habitual sauciness, ‘I have caught you in self-contradiction. I have heard you quite furious against puling, melancholy people. If I had said what you have just said, you would have given me a long lecture, and told me to go home and interest myself in the reason of the rule of three.’
‘Very likely,’ said Felix, beating the weeds, according to the foible of our common humanity when it has a stick in its hand. ‘But I don’t think myself a fine fellow because I’m melancholy. I don’t measure my force by the negations in me, and think my soul must be a mighty one because it is more given to idle suffering than to beneficent activity. That’s what your favourite gentlemen do, of the Byronic bilious style.’ ‘I don’t admit that those are my favourite gentlemen.’
‘I’ve heard you defend them — gentlemen like your Renes, who have no particular talent for the finite, but a general sense that the infinite is the right thing for them. They might as well boast of nausea as a proof of a strong inside.’
‘Stop, stop! You run on in that way to get out of my reach. I convicted you of confessing that you are melancholy.’
‘Yes!’ said Felix, thrusting his left hand into his pocket, with a shrug; ‘as I could confess to a great many other things I’m not proud of. The fact is, there are not many easy lots to be drawn in the world at present; and such as they are I am not envious of them. I don’t say life is not worth having: it is worth having to a man who has some sparks of sense and feeling and bravery in him. And the finest fellow of all would be the one who could be glad to have lived because the world was chiefly miserable, and his life had come to help some one who needed it. He would be the man who had the most powers and the fewest selfish wants. But I’m not up to the level of what I see to be best. I’m often a hungry discontented fellow.’
‘Why have you made life so hard then?’ said Esther, rather frightened as she asked the question. ‘It seems to me you have tried to find just the most difficult task.’
‘Not at all,’ said Felix, with curt decision. ‘My course was a very simple one. It was pointed out to me by conditions that I saw as clearly as I see the bars of this stile. It’s a difficult stile too,’ added Felix, striding over. ‘Shall I help you, or will you be left to yourself?’
‘I can do without help, thank you.’
‘It was all simple enough,’ continued Felix, as they walked on. ‘If I meant to put a stop to the sale of those drugs, I must keep my mother, and of course at her age she would not leave the place she had been used to. And I had made up my mind against what they call genteel businesses.’
‘But suppose every one did as you do? Please to forgive me for saying so; but I cannot see why you could not have lived as honourably with some employment that presupposes education and refinement.’
‘Because you can’t see my history or my nature,’ said Felix, bluntly. ‘I have to determine for myself, and not for other men. I don’t blame them, or think I am better than they; their circumstances are different. I would never choose to withdraw myself from the labour and common burthen of the world; but I do choose to withdraw myself from the push and the scramble for money and position. Any man is at liberty to call me a fool, and say that mankind are benefited by the push and the scramble in the long-run. But I care for the people who live now and will not be living when the long-run comes. As it is, I prefer going shares with the unlucky.’
Esther did not speak, and there was silence between them for a minute or two, till they passed through a gate into a plantation where there was no large timber, but only thin-stemmed trees and underwood, so that the sunlight fell on the mossy spaces which lay open here and there.
‘See how beautiful those stooping birch-stems are with the light on them!’ said Felix. ‘Here is an old felled trunk they have not thought worth carrying away. Shall we sit down a little while?’
‘Yes, the mossy ground with the dry leaves sprinkled over it is delightful to one’s feet.’ Esther sat down and took off her bonnet, that the light breeze might fall on her head. Felix, too, threw down his cap and stick, lying on the ground with his back against the felled trunk.
‘I wish I felt more as you do,’ she said, looking at the point of her foot, which was playing with a tuft of moss. ‘I can’t help caring very much what happens to me. And you seem to care so little about yourself.’
‘You are thoroughly mistaken,’ said Felix. ‘It is just because I’m a very ambitious fellow, with very hungry passions, wanting a great deal to satisfy me, that I have chosen to give up what people call worldly good. At least that has been one determining reason. It all depends on what a man gets into his consciousness — what life thrusts into his mind, so that it becomes present to him as remorse is present to the guilty, or a mechanical problem to an inventive genius. There are two things I’ve got present in that way: one of them is the picture of what I should hate to be. I’m determined never to go about making my face simpering or solemn, and telling professional lies for profit; or to get tangled in affairs where I must wink at dishonesty and pocket the proceeds, and justify that knavery as part of a system that I can’t alter. If I once went into that sort of struggle for success, I should want to win — I should defend the wrong that I had once identified myself with. I should become everything that I see now beforehand to be detestable. And what’s more, I should do this, as men are doing it every day, for a ridiculously small prize — perhaps for none at all — perhaps for the sake of two parlours, a rank eligible for the church-wardenship, a discontented wife and several unhopeful children.’
Esther felt a terrible pressure on her heart — the certainty of her remoteness from Felix — the sense that she was utterly trivial to him.
‘The other thing that’s got into my mind like a splinter,’ said Felix, after a pause, ‘is the life of the miserable — the spawning life of vice and hunger. I’ll never be one of the sleek dogs. The old Catholics are right, with their higher rule and their lower. Some are called to subject themselves to a harder discipline, and renounce things voluntarily which are lawful for others. It is the old word — “necessity is laid upon me”.’
‘It seems to me you are stricter than my father is.’
‘No! I quarrel with no delight that is not base or cruel, but one must sometimes accommodate one’s self to a small share. That is the lot of the majority. I would wish the minority joy, only they don’t want my wishes.’
Again there was silence. Esther’s cheeks were hot in spite of the breeze that sent her hair floating backward. She felt an inward strain, a demand on her to see things in a light that was not easy or soothing. When Felix had asked her to walk, he had seemed so kind, so alive to what might be her feelings, that she had thought herself nearer to him than she had ever been before; but since they had come out, he had appeared to forget all that. And yet she was conscious that this impatience of hers was very petty. Battling in this way with her own little impulses, and looking at the birch-stems opposite till her gaze was too wide for her to see anything distinctly, she was unaware how long they had remained without speaking. She did not know that Felix had changed his attitude a little, and was resting his elbow on the tree-trunk, while he supported his head, which was turned towards her. Suddenly he said, in a lower tone than was habitual to him —
‘You are very beautiful.’
She started and looked round at him, to see whether his face would give some help to the interpretation of this novel speech. He was looking up at her quite calmly, very much as a reverential Protestant might look at a picture of the Virgin, with a devoutness suggested by the type rather than by the image. Esther’s vanity was not in the least gratified: she felt that, somehow or other, Felix was going to reproach her.
‘I wonder,’ he went on, still looking at her, ‘whether the subtle measuring of forces will ever come to measuring the force there would be in one beautiful woman whose mind was as noble as her face was beautiful — who made a man’s passion for her rush in one current with all the great aims of his life.’
Esther’s eyes got hot and smarting. It was no use trying to be dignified. She had turned away her head, and now said, rather bitterly, ‘It is difficult for a woman ever to try to be anything good when she is not believed in — when it is always supposed that she must be contemptible.’
‘No, dear Esther’ — it was the first time Felix had been prompted to call her by her Christian name, and as he did so he laid his large hand on her two little hands, which were clasped on her knees. ‘You don’t believe that I think you contemptible. When I first saw you —’
‘I know, I know,’ said Esther, interrupting him impetuously, but still looking away. ‘You mean you did think me contemptible then. But it was very narrow of you to judge me in that way, when my life had been so different from yours. I have great faults. I know I am selfish, and think too much of my own small tastes and too little of what affects others. But I am not stupid. I am not unfeeling. I can see what is better.’
‘But I have not done you injustice since I knew more of you,’ said Felix, gently.
‘Yes, you have,’ said Esther, turning and smiling at him through her tears. ‘You talk to me like an angry pedagogue. Were you always wise? Remember the time when you were foolish or naughty.’
‘That is not far off,’ said Felix, curtly, taking away his hand and clasping it with the other at the back of his head. The talk, which seemed to be introducing a mutual understanding, such as had not existed before, seemed to have undergone some check.
‘Shall we get up and walk back now?’ said Esther, after a few moments.
‘No,’ said Felix, entreatingly. ‘Don’t move yet. I daresay we shall never walk together or sit here again.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I am a man who am warned by visions. Those old stories of visions and dreams guiding men have their truth: we are saved by making the future present to ourselves.’
‘I wish I could get visions, then,’ said Esther, smiling at him, with an effort at playfulness, in resistance to something vaguely mournful within her.
‘That is what I want,’ said Felix, looking at her very earnestly. ‘Don’t turn your head. Do look at me, and then I shall know if I may go on speaking. I do believe in you; but I want you to have such a vision of the future that you may never lose your best self. Some charm or other may be flung about you — some of your atta-of-rose fascinations — and nothing but a good strong terrible vision will save you. And if it did save you, you might be that woman I was thinking of a little while ago when I looked at your face: the woman whose beauty makes a great task easier to men instead of turning them away from it. I am not likely to see such fine issues; but they may come where a woman’s spirit is finely touched. I should like to be sure they would come to you.’
‘Why are you not likely to know what becomes of me?’ said Esther, turning away her eyes in spite of his command. ‘Why should you not always be my father’s friend and mine?’
‘O, I shall go away as soon as I can to some large town,’ said Felix, in his more usual tone, — ‘some ugly, wicked, miserable place. I want to be a demagogue of a new sort; an honest one, if possible, who will tell the people they are blind and foolish, and neither flatter them nor fatten on them. I have my heritage — an order I belong to. I have the blood of a line of handicraftsmen in my veins, and I want to stand up for the lot of the handicraftsmen as a good lot, in which a man may be better trained to all the best functions of his nature than if he belonged to the grimacing set who have visiting-cards, and are proud to be thought richer than their neighbours.’
‘Would nothing ever make it seem right to you to change your mind?’ said Esther (she had rapidly woven some possibilities out of the new uncertainties in her own lot, though she would not for the world have had Felix know of her weaving). ‘Suppose, by some means or other, a fortune might come to you honourably — by marriage, or in any other unexpected way — would you see no change in your course?’
‘No,’ said Felix, peremptorily: ‘I will never be rich. I don’t count that as any peculiar virtue. Some men do well to accept riches, but that is not my inward vocation: I have no fellow-feeling with the rich as a class; the habits of their lives are odious to me. Thousands of men have wedded poverty because they expect to go to heaven for it; I don’t expect to go to heaven for it, but I wed it because it enables me to do what I most want to do on earth. Whatever the hopes for the world may be — whether great or small — I am a man of this generation; I will try to make life less bitter for a few within my reach. It is held reasonable enough to toil for the fortunes of a family, though it may turn to imbecility in the third generation. I choose a family with more chances in it.’
Esther looked before her dreamily till she said, ‘That seems a hard lot; yet it is a great one.’ She rose to walk back.
‘Then you don’t think I’m a fool,’ said Felix, loudly, starting to his feet, and then stooping to gather up his cap and stick.
‘Of course you suspected me of that stupidity.’
‘Well — women, unless they are Saint Theresas or Elizabeth Frys, generally think this sort of thing madness, unless when they read of it in the Bible.’
‘A woman can hardly ever choose in that way; she is dependent on what happens to her. She must take meaner things, because only meaner things are within her reach.’
‘Why, can you imagine yourself choosing hardship as the better lot?’ said Felix, looking at her with a sudden question in his eyes.
‘Yes, I can,’ she said, flushing over neck and brow.
Their words were charged with a meaning dependent entirely on the secret consciousness of each. Nothing had been said which was necessarily personal. They walked a few yards along the road by which they had come, without further speech, till Felix said gently, ‘Take my arm.’ She took it, and they walked home so, entirely without conversation. Felix was struggling as a firm man struggles with a temptation, seeing beyond it and disbelieving its lying promise. Esther was struggling as a woman struggles with the yearning for some expression of love, and with vexation under that subjection to a yearning which is not likely to be satisfied. Each was conscious of a silence which each was unable to break, till they entered Malthouse Lane, and were within a few yards of the minister’s door.
‘It is getting dusk,’ Felix then said; ‘will Mr Lyon be anxious about you?’
‘No, I think not. Lyddy would tell him that I went out with you, and that you carried a large stick,’ said Esther, with her light laugh.
Felix went in with Esther to take tea, but the conversation was entirely between him and Mr Lyon about the tricks of canvassing, and foolish personality of the placards, and the probabilities of Transome’s return, as to which Felix declared himself to have become indifferent. This scepticism made the minister uneasy: he had great belief in the old political watchwords, had preached that universal suffrage and no ballot were agreeable to the will of God, and liked to believe that a visible ‘instrument’ was forthcoming in the Radical candidate who had pronounced emphatically against Whig finality. Felix, being in a perverse mood, contended that universal suffrage would be equally agreeable to the devil; that he would change his politics a little, having a larger traffic, and see himself more fully represented in parliament.
‘Nay, my friend,’ said the minister, ‘you are again sporting with paradox; for you will not deny that you glory in the name of Radical, or Root-and-branch man, as they said in the great times when Nonconformity was in its giant youth.’
‘A Radical — yes; but I want to go to some roots a good deal lower down than the franchise.’
‘Truly there is a work within which cannot be dispensed with; but it is our preliminary work to free men from the stifled life of political nullity, and bring them into what Milton calls “the liberal air”, wherein alone can be wrought the final triumphs of the Spirit.’
‘With all my heart. But while Caliban is Caliban, though you multiply him by a million, he’ll worship every Trinculo that carries a bottle. I forget, though — you don’t read Shakspeare, Mr Lyon.’
‘I am bound to confess that I have so far looked into a volume of Esther’s as to conceive your meaning; but the fantasies therein were so little to be reconciled with a steady contemplation of that divine economy which is hidden from sense and revealed to faith, that I forbore the reading, as likely to perturb my ministrations.’
Esther sat by in unusual silence. The conviction that Felix willed her exclusion from his life was making it plain that something more than friendship between them was not so thoroughly out of the question as she had always inwardly asserted. In her pain that his choice lay aloof from her, she was compelled frankly to admit to herself the longing that it had been otherwise, and that he had entreated her to share his difficult life. He was like no one else to her: he had seemed to bring at once a law, and the love that gave strength to obey the law. Yet the next moment, stung by his independence of her, she denied that she loved him; she had only longed for a moral support under the negations of her life. If she were not to have that support, all effort seemed useless.
Esther had been so long used to hear the formulas of her father’s belief without feeling or understanding them, that they had lost all power to touch her. The first religious experience of her life — the first self-questioning, the first voluntary subjection, the first longing to acquire the strength of greater motives and obey the more strenuous rule — had come to her through Felix Holt. No wonder that she felt as if the loss of him were inevitable backsliding.
But was it certain that she should lose him? She did not believe that he was really indifferent to her.