Felix Holt Read online

  Sircome was an eminent miller who had considerable business transactions at the manor, and appreciated Mr Scales’s merits at a handsome percentage on the yearly account. He was a highly honourable tradesman, but in this and in other matters submitted to the institutions of his country; for great houses, as he observed, must have great butlers. He replied to his friend Crowder sententiously.

  ‘I say nothing. Before I bring words to market, I should like to see ’em a bit scarcer. There’s the land and there’s trade – I hold with both. I swim with the stream.’

  ‘Hey-day, Mr Sircome! that’s a Radical maxim,’ said Mr Christian, who knew that Mr Sircome’s last sentence was his favourite formula. ‘I advise you to give it up, else it will injure the quality of your flour.’

  ‘A Radical maxim!’ said Mr Sircome, in a tone of angry astonishment. ‘I should like to hear you prove that. It’s as old as my grandfather, anyhow.’

  ‘I’ll prove it in one minute,’ said the glib Christian. ‘Reform has set in by the will of the majority – that’s the rabble, you know; and the respectability and good sense of the country, which are in the minority, are afraid of Reform running on too fast. So the stream must be running towards Reform and Radicalism; and if you swim with it, Mr Sircome, you’re a Reformer and a Radical, and your flour is objectionable, and not full weight – and being tried by Scales, will be found wanting.’

  There was a roar of laughter. This pun upon Scales was highly appreciated by every one except the miller and the butler. The latter pulled down his waistcoat, and puffed and stared in rather an excited manner. Mr Christian’s wit, in general, seemed to him a poor kind of quibbling.

  ‘What a fellow you are for fence, Christian,’ said the gardener. ‘Hang me, if I don’t think you’re up to everything.’

  ‘That’s a compliment you might pay Old Nick, if you come to that,’ said Mr Sircome, who was in the painful position of a man deprived of his formula.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Mr Scales; ‘I’m no fool myself, and could parry a thrust if I liked, but I shouldn’t like it to be said of me that I was up to everything. I’ll keep a little principle if you please.’

  ‘To be sure,’ said Christian, ladling out the punch. ‘What would justice be without Scales?’

  The laughter was not quite so full-throated as before. Such excessive cleverness was a little Satanic.

  ‘A joke’s a joke among gentlemen,’ said the butler, getting exasperated; ‘I think there has been quite liberties enough taken with my name. But if you must talk about names, I’ve heard of a party before now calling himself a Christian, and being anything but it.’

  ‘Come, that’s beyond a joke,’ said the surgeon’s assistant, a fast man, whose chief scene of dissipation was the Manor. ‘Let it drop, Scales.’

  ‘Yes, I daresay it’s beyond a joke. I’m not a harlequin to talk nothing but jokes. I leave that to other Christians, who are up to everything, and have been everywhere – to the hulks,4 for what I know; and more than that, they come from nobody knows where, and try to worm themselves into gentlemen’s confidence, to the prejudice of their betters.’

  There was a stricter sequence in Mr Scales’s angry eloquence than was apparent – some chief links being confined to his own breast, as is often the case in energetic discourse. The company were in a state of expectation. There was something behind worth knowing, and something before them worth seeing. In the general decay of other fine British pugnacious sports, a quarrel between gentlemen was all the more exciting, and though no one would himself have liked to turn on Scales, no one was sorry for the chance of seeing him put down. But the amazing Christian was unmoved. He had taken out his handkerchief and was rubbing his lips carefully. After a slight pause, he spoke with perfect coolness.

  ‘I don’t intend to quarrel with you, Scales. Such talk as this is not profitable to either of us. It makes you purple in the face – you are apoplectic, you know – and it spoils good company. Better tell a few fibs about me behind my back – it will heat you less, and do me more harm. I’ll leave you to it; I shall go and have a game at whist with the ladies.’

  As the door closed behind the questionable Christian, Mr Scales was in a state of frustration that prevented speech. Every one was rather embarrassed.

  ‘That’s a most uncommon sort o’ fellow,’ said Mr Crowder, in an under-tone, to his next neighbour, the gardener. ‘Why, Mr Philip picked him up in foreign parts, didn’t he?’

  ‘He was a courier,’ said the gardener. ‘He’s had a deal of experience. And I believe, by what I can make out – for he’s been pretty free with me sometimes – there was a time when he was in that rank of life that he fought a duel.’

  ‘Ah! that makes him such a cool chap,’ said Mr Crowder.

  ‘He’s what I call an overbearing fellow,’ said Mr Sircome, also sotto voce, to his next neighbour, Mr Filmore, the surgeon’s assistant. ‘He runs you down with a sort of talk that’s neither here nor there. He’s got a deal too many samples in his pocket for me.’

  ‘All I know is, he’s a wonderful hand at cards,’ said Mr Filmore, whose whiskers and shirt-pin were quite above the average. ‘I wish I could play écarté as he does; it’s beautiful to see him; he can make a man look pretty blue – he’ll empty his pocket for him in no time.’

  ‘That’s none to his credit,’ said Mr Sircome.

  The conversation had in this way broken up into tête-à-tête, and the hilarity of the evening might be considered a failure. Still the punch was drunk, the accounts were duly swelled, and, notwithstanding the innovating spirit of the time, Sir Maximus Debarry’s establishment was kept up in a sound hereditary British manner.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Rumour doth double like the voice and echo.

  SHAKESPEARE

  The mind of a man is as a country which was once open to squatters, who have bred and multiplied and become masters of the land. But then happeneth a time when new and hungry comers dispute the land; and there is trial of strength, and the stronger wins. Nevertheless the first squatters be they who have prepared the ground, and the crops to the end will be sequent (though chiefly on the nature of the soil, as of light sand, mixed loam, or heavy clay, yet) somewhat on the primal labour and sowing.

  That talkative maiden, Rumour, though in the interest of art she is figured as a youthful winged beauty with flowing garments, soaring above the heads of men, and breathing world-thrilling news through a gracefully-curved trumpet, is in fact a very old maid, who puckers her silly face by the fireside, and really does no more than chirp a wrong guess or a lame story into the ear of a fellow-gossip; all the rest of the work attributed to her is done by the ordinary working of those passions against which men pray in the Litany, with the help of a plentiful stupidity against which we have never yet had any authorized form of prayer.

  When Mr Scales’s strong need to make an impressive figure in conversation, together with his very slight need of any other premise than his own sense of his wide general knowledge and probable infallibility, led him to specify five hundred thousand as the lowest admissible amount of Harold Transome’s commercially-acquired fortune, it was not fair to put this down to poor old Miss Rumour, who had only told Scales that the fortune was considerable. And again, when the curt Mr Sircome found occasion at Treby to mention the five hundred thousand as a fact that folks seemed pretty sure about, this expansion of the butler into ‘folks’ was entirely due to Mr Sircome’s habitual preference for words which could not be laid hold of or give people a handle over him. It was in this simple way that the report of Harold Transome’s fortune spread and was magnified, adding much lustre to his opinions in the eyes of Liberals, and compelling even men of the opposite party to admit that it increased his eligibility as a member for North Loamshire. It was observed by a sound thinker in these parts that property was ballast; and when once the aptness of that metaphor had been perceived, it followed that a man was not fit to navigate the sea of politics without a great deal of such bal
last; and that, rightly understood, whatever increased the expense of election, inasmuch as it virtually raised the property qualification, was an unspeakable boon to the country.

  Meanwhile the fortune that was getting larger in the imagination of constituents was shrinking a little in the imagination of its owner. It was hardly more than a hundred and fifty thousand; and there were not only the heavy mortgages to be paid off, but also a large amount of capital was needed in order to repair the farm-buildings all over the estate, to carry out extensive draining, and make allowances to incoming tenants, which might remove the difficulty of newly letting the farms in a time of agricultural depression. The farms actually tenanted were held by men who had begged hard to succeed their fathers in getting a little poorer every year, on land which was also getting poorer, where the highest rate of increase was in the arrears of rent, and where the master, in crushed hat and corduroys, looked pitiably lean and care-worn by the side of pauper labourers, who showed that superior assimilating power often observed to attend nourishment by the public money. Mr Goffe, of Rabbit’s End, had never had it explained to him that, according to the true theory of rent, land must inevitably be given up when it would not yield a profit equal to the ordinary rate of interest; so that from want of knowing what was inevitable, and not from a Titanic spirit of opposition, he kept on his land. He often said of himself, with a melancholy wipe of his sleeve across his brow, that he ‘didn’t know which-a-way to turn’; and he would have been still more at a loss on the subject if he had quitted Rabbit’s End with a waggonful of furniture and utensils, a file of receipts, a wife with five children, and a shepherd-dog in low spirits.

  It took no long time for Harold Transome to discover this state of things, and to see, moreover, that, except on the demesne immediately around the house, the timber had been mismanaged. The woods had been recklessly thinned, and there had been insufficient planting. He had not yet thoroughly investigated the various accounts kept by his mother, by Jermyn, and by Banks the bailiff; but what had been done with the large sums which had been received for timber was a suspicious mystery to him. He observed that the farm held by Jermyn was in first-rate order, that a good deal had been spent on the buildings, and that the rent had stood unpaid. Mrs Transome had taken an opportunity of saying that Jermyn had had some of the mortgage-deeds transferred to him, and that his rent was set against so much interest. Harold had only said, in his careless yet decisive way, ‘O, Jermyn be hanged! It seems to me if Durfey hadn’t died and made room for me, Jermyn would have ended by coming to live here, and you would have had to keep the lodge and open the gate for his carriage. But I shall pay him off – mortgages and all – by-and-by.1 I’ll owe him nothing – not even a curse.’ Mrs Transome said no more. Harold did not care to enter fully into the subject with his mother. The fact that she had been active in the management of the estate – had ridden about it continually, had busied herself with accounts, had been head-bailiff of the vacant farms, and had yet allowed things to go wrong – was set down by him simply to the general futility of women’s attempts to transact men’s business. He did not want to say anything to annoy her: he was only determined to let her understand, as quietly as possible, that she had better cease all interference.

  Mrs Transome did understand this; and it was very little that she dared to say on business, though there was a fierce struggle of her anger and pride with a dread which was nevertheless supreme. As to the old tenants, she only observed, on hearing Harold burst forth about their wretched condition, ‘that with the estate so burthened, the yearly loss by arrears could better be borne than the outlay and sacrifice necessary in order to let the farms anew’.

  ‘I was really capable of calculating, Harold,’ she ended, with a touch of bitterness. ‘It seems easy to deal with farmers and their affairs when you only see them in print, I daresay; but it’s not quite so easy when you live among them. You have only to look at Sir Maximus’s estate: you will see plenty of the same thing. The times have been dreadful, and old families like to keep their old tenants. But I daresay that is Toryism.’

  ‘It’s a hash of odds and ends, if that is Toryism, my dear mother. However, I wish you had kept three more old tenants; for then I should have had three more fifty-pound voters.2 And, in a hard run, one may be beaten by a head. But,’ Harold added, smiling and handing her a ball of worsted which had fallen, ‘a woman ought to be a Tory, and graceful, and handsome, like you. I should hate a woman who took up my opinions, and talked for me. I’m an Oriental, you know. I say, mother, shall we have this room furnished with rose-colour? I notice that it suits your bright grey hair.’

  Harold thought it was only natural that his mother should have been in a sort of subjection to Jermyn throughout the awkward circumstances of the family. It was the way of women, and all weak minds, to think that what they had been used to was inalterable, and any quarrel with a man who managed private affairs was necessarily a formidable thing. He himself was proceeding very cautiously, and preferred not even to know too much just at present, lest a certain personal antipathy he was conscious of towards Jermyn, and an occasional liability to exasperation, should get the better of a calm and clear-sighted resolve not to quarrel with the man while he could be of use. Harold would have been disgusted with himself if he had helped to frustrate his own purpose. And his strongest purpose now was to get returned for Parliament, to make a figure there as a Liberal member, and to become on all grounds a personage of weight in North Loamshire.

  How Harold Transome came to be a Liberal in opposition to all the traditions of his family, was a more subtle inquiry than he had ever cared to follow out. The newspapers undertook to explain it. The North Loamshire Herald witnessed with a grief and disgust certain to be shared by all persons who were actuated by wholesome British feeling, an example of defection in the inheritor of a family name which in times past had been associated with attachment to right principle, and with the maintenance of our constitution in Church and State; and pointed to it as an additional proof that men who had passed any large portion of their lives beyond the limits of our favoured country, usually contracted not only a laxity of feeling towards Protestantism, nay, towards religion itself – a latitudinarian spirit hardly distinguishable from atheism – but also a levity of disposition, inducing them to tamper with those institutions by which alone Great Britain had risen to her pre-eminence among the nations. Such men, infected with outlandish habits, intoxicated with vanity, grasping at momentary power by flattery of the multitude, fearless because godless, liberal because un-English, were ready to pull one stone from under another in the national edifice, till the great structure tottered to its fall. On the other hand, the Duffield Watchman saw in this signal instance of self-liberation from the trammels of prejudice, a decisive guarantee of intellectual pre-eminence, united with a generous sensibility to the claims of man as man, which had burst asunder, and cast off, by a spontaneous exertion of energy, the cramping out-worn shell of hereditary bias and class interest.

  But these large-minded guides of public opinion argued from wider data than could be furnished by any knowledge of the particular case concerned. Harold Transome was neither the dissolute cosmopolitan so vigorously sketched by the Tory Herald, nor the intellectual giant and moral lobster suggested by the liberal imagination of the Watchman. Twenty years ago he had been a bright, active, good-tempered lad, with sharp eyes and a good aim; he delighted in success and in predominance; but he did not long for an impossible predominance, and become sour and sulky because it was impossible He played at the games he was clever in, and usually won; all other games he let alone, and thought them of little worth. At home and at Eton he had been side by side with his stupid elder brother Durfey, whom he despised; and he very early began to reflect that since this Caliban in miniature was older than himself, he must carve out his own fortune. That was a nuisance; and on the whole the world seemed rather ill-arranged, at Eton especially, where there were many reasons why Harold made no great fig
ure. He was not sorry the money was wanting to send him to Oxford; he did not see the good of Oxford; he had been surrounded by many things during his short life, of which he had distinctly said to himself that he did not see the good, and he was not disposed to venerate on the strength of any good that others saw. He turned his back on home very cheerfully, though he was rather fond of his mother, and very fond of Transome Court, and the river where he had been used to fish; but he said to himself as he passed the lodge-gates, ‘I’ll get rich somehow, and have an estate of my own, and do what I like with it.’ This determined aiming at something not easy but clearly possible, marked the direction in which Harold’s nature was strong; he had the energetic will and muscle, the self-confidence, the quick perception, and the narrow imagination which make what is admiringly called the practical mind.

  Since then his character had been ripened by a various experience, and also by much knowledge which he had set himself deliberately to gain. But the man was no more than the boy writ large, with an extensive commentary. The years had nourished an inclination to as much opposition as would enable him to assert his own independence and power without throwing himself into that tabooed condition which robs power of its triumph. And this inclination had helped his shrewdness in forming judgments which were at once innovating and moderate. He was addicted at once to rebellion and to conformity, and only an intimate personal knowledge could enable any one to predict where his conformity would begin. The limit was not defined by theory, but was drawn in an irregular zigzag by early disposition and association; and his resolution, of which he had never lost hold, to be a thorough Englishman again some day, had kept up the habit of considering all his conclusions with reference to English politics and English social conditions. He meant to stand up for every change that the economical condition of the country required, and he had an angry contempt for men with coronets on their coaches, but too small a share of brains to see when they had better make a virtue of necessity. His respect was rather for men who had no coronets, but who achieved a just influence by furthering all measures which the common sense of the country, and the increasing self-assertion of the majority, peremptorily demanded. He could be such a man himself.