Felix Holt, the Radical Page 4

  CHAPTER III.

  'Twas town, yet country too: you felt the warmth Of clustering houses in the wintry time: Supped with a friend, and went by lantern home. Yet from your chamber window you could hear The tiny bleat of new-yeaned lambs, or see The children bend beside the hedgerow banks To pluck the primroses.

  Treby Magna, on which the Reform Bill had thrust the new honor of beinga polling-place, had been, at the beginning of the century, quite atypical old market-town, lying in pleasant sleepiness among greenpastures, with a rush-fringed river meandering through them. Itsprincipal street had various handsome and tall-windowed brick houseswith walled gardens behind them; and at the end, where it widened intothe market-place, there was the cheerful rough-stuccoed front of thatexcellent inn, the Marquis of Granby, where the farmers put up theirgigs, not only on fair and market days, but on exceptional Sundays whenthey came to church. And the church was one of those fine old Englishstructures worth travelling to see, standing in a broad churchyard witha line of solemn yew-trees beside it, and lifting a majestic tower andspire far above the red-and-purple roofs of the town. It was not largeenough to hold all the parishioners of a parish which stretched overdistant villages and hamlets; but then they were never so unreasonableas to wish to be all in at once, and had never complained that the spaceof a large side-chapel was taken up by the tombs of the Debarrys, andshut in by a handsome iron screen. For when the black Benedictinesceased to pray and chant in this church, when the Blessed Virgin and St.Gregory were expelled, the Debarrys, as lords of the manor, naturallycame next to Providence and took the place of the saints. Long beforethat time, indeed, there had been a Sir Maximus Debarry who had been atthe fortifying of the old castle, which now stood in ruins in the midstof the green pastures, and with its sheltering wall toward the northmade an excellent strawyard for the pigs of Wace & Co., brewers of thecelebrated Treby beer. Wace & Co. did not stand alone in the town asprosperous traders on a large scale, to say nothing of those who hadretired from business; and in no country town of the same small size asTreby was there a larger proportion of families who had handsome sets ofchina without handles, hereditary punch-bowls, and large silver ladleswith a Queen Anne's guinea in the centre. Such people naturally took teaand supped together frequently; and as there was no professional man ortradesman in Treby who was not connected by business, if not by blood,with the farmers of the district, the richer sort of these were muchinvited, and gave invitations in their turn. They played at whist, ateand drank generously, praised Mr. Pitt and the war as keeping up pricesand religion, and were very humorous about each other's property, havingmuch the same coy pleasure in allusions to their secret ability topurchase, as blushing lasses sometimes have in jokes about their secretpreferences. The rector was always of the Debarry family, associatedonly with county people, and was much respected for his affability; aclergyman who would have taken tea with the townspeople would have givena dangerous shock to the mind of a Treby churchman.

  Such was the old-fashioned, grazing, brewing, wool-packing,cheese-loading life of Treby Magna, until there befell new conditions,complicating its relation with the rest of the world, and graduallyawakening in it that higher consciousness which is known to bring higherpains. First came the canal; next, the working of the coal-mines atSproxton, two miles off the town; and thirdly, the discovery of a salinespring, which suggested to a too constructive brain the possibility ofturning Treby Magna into a fashionable watering-place. So daring an ideawas not originated by a native Trebian, but by a young lawyer who camefrom a distance, knew the dictionary by heart, and was probably anillegitimate son of somebody or other. The idea, although it promised anincrease of wealth to the town, was not well received at first; ladiesobjected to seeing "objects" drawn about in hand-carriages, the doctorforesaw the advent of unsound practitioners, and most retail tradesmenconcurred with him that new doings were usually for the advantage of newpeople. The more unanswerable reasoners urged that Treby had prosperedwithout baths, and it was yet to be seen how it would prosper with them;while a report that the proposed name for them was Bethesda Spa,threatened to give the whole affair a blasphemous aspect. Even SirMaximus Debarry, who was to have an unprecedented return for thethousands he would lay out on a pump-room and hotel, regarded the thingas a little too new, and held back for some time. But the persuasivepowers of the young lawyer, Mr. Matthew Jermyn, together with theopportune opening of a stone-quarry, triumphed at last; the handsomebuildings were erected, an excellent guide-book and descriptive cards,surmounted by vignettes, were printed, and Treby Magna became consciousof certain facts in its own history of which it had previously been incontented ignorance.

  But it was all in vain. The Spa, for some mysterious reason, did notsucceed. Some attributed the failure to the coal-mines and the canal;others to the peace, which had had ruinous effects on the country; andothers, who disliked Jermyn, to the original folly of the plan. Amongthese last was Sir Maximus himself, who never forgave the too persuasiveattorney: it was Jermyn's fault not only that a useless hotel had beenbuilt, but that he, Sir Maximus, being straitened for money, had at lastlet the building, with the adjacent land lying on the river, on a longlease, on the supposition that it was to be turned into a tapemanufactory--a bitter thing to any gentleman, and especially to therepresentative of one of the oldest families in England.

  In this way it happened that Treby Magna gradually passed from beingsimply a respectable market town--the heart of a great rural district,where the trade was only such as had close relations with the locallanded interest--and took on the more complex life brought by mines andmanufactures, which belong more directly to the great circulating systemof the nation than to the local system to which they had beensuperadded; and in this way it was that Trebian Dissent graduallyaltered its character. Formerly it had been of a quiescent, well-to-dokind, represented architecturally by a small, venerable, dark-pewedchapel, built by Presbyterians, but long occupied by a sparsecongregation of Independents, who were as little moved by doctrinal zealas their church-going neighbors, and did not feel themselves deficientin religious liberty, inasmuch as they were not hindered fromoccasionally slumbering in their pews, and were not obliged to goregularly to the weekly prayer-meeting. But when stone-pits andcoal-pits made new hamlets that threatened to spread up to the verytown, when the tape-weavers came with their news-reading inspectors andbook-keepers, the Independent chapel began to be filled with eager menand women, to whom the exceptional possession of religious truth was thecondition which reconciled them to a meagre existence, and made themfeel in secure alliance with the unseen but supreme rule of a world inwhich their own visible part was small. There were Dissenters in Trebynow who could not be regarded by the Church people in the light of oldneighbors to whom the habit of going to chapel was an innocent,unenviable inheritance along with a particular house and garden, atan-yard, or a grocery business--Dissenters who, in their turn, withoutmeaning to be in the least abusive, spoke of the high-bred rector as ablind leader of the blind. And Dissent was not the only thing that thetimes had altered; prices had fallen, poor-rates had risen, rent andtithe were not elastic enough, and the farmer's fat sorrow had becomelean; he began to speculate on causes, and to trace things back to thatcauseless mystery, the cessation of one-pound notes. Thus, whenpolitical agitation swept in a current through the country, Treby Magnawas prepared to vibrate. The Catholic Emancipation Bill opened the eyesof neighbors and made them aware how very injurious they were to eachother and to the welfare of mankind generally. Mr. Tiliot, the Churchspirit-merchant, knew now that Mr. Nuttwood, the obliging grocer, wasone of those Dissenters, Deists, Socinians, Papists, and Radicals, whowere in league to destroy the Constitution. A retired old Londontradesman, who was believed to understand politics, said that thinkingpeople must wish George III were alive again in all his early vigor ofmind: and even the farmers became less materialistic in their view ofcauses, and referred much to the agency of the devil and the IrishRomans. The rector, the Reverend
Augustus Debarry, really a finespecimen of the old-fashioned aristocratic clergyman, preaching shortsermons, understanding business, and acting liberally about his tithe,had never before found himself in collision with Dissenters; but now hebegan to feel that these people were a nuisance in the parish, that hisbrother Sir Maximus must take care lest they should get land to buildmore chapels, and that it might not have been a bad thing if the law hadfurnished him as a magistrate with a power of putting a stop to thepolitical sermons of the Independent preacher, which, in their way,were as pernicious sources of intoxication as the beerhouses. TheDissenters, on their side, were not disposed to sacrifice the cause oftruth and freedom to a temporizing mildness of language; but theydefended themselves from the charge of religious indifference, andsolemnly disclaimed any lax expectations that Catholics were likely tobe saved--urging, on the contrary, that they were not too hopeful aboutProtestants who adhered to a bloated and worldly Prelacy. Thus TrebyMagna, which had lived quietly through the great earthquakes of theFrench Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, which had remained unmoved bythe "Rights of Man," and saw little in Mr. Cobbett's "Weekly Register"except that he held eccentric views about potatoes, began at last toknow the higher pains of a dim political consciousness; and thedevelopment had been greatly helped by the recent agitation about theReform Bill. Tory, Whig, and Radical did not perhaps become clearer intheir definition of each other; but the names seemed to acquire sostrong a stamp of honor or infamy, that definitions would only haveweakened the impression. As to the short and easy method of judgingopinions by the personal character of those who held them, it was liableto be much frustrated in Treby. It so happened in that particular townthat the Reformers were not all of them large-hearted patriots or ardentlovers of justice; indeed, one of them, in the very midst of theagitation, was detected in using unequal scales--a fact to which manyTories pointed with disgust as showing plainly enough, without furtherargument, that the cry for a change in the representative system washollow trickery. Again, the Tories were far from being all oppressors,disposed to grind down the working classes into serfdom; and it wasundeniable that the inspector at the tape manufactory, who spoke withmuch eloquence on the extension of the suffrage, was a more tyrannicalpersonage than open-handed Mr. Wace, whose chief political tenet wasthat it was all nonsense to give men votes when they had no stake in thecountry. On the other hand there were some Tories who gave themselves agreat deal of leisure to abuse hypocrites, Radicals, Dissenters, andatheism generally, but whose inflamed faces, theistic swearing, andfrankness in expressing a wish to borrow, certainly did not mark themout strongly as holding opinions likely to save society.

  The Reformers had triumphed: it was clear that the wheels were goingwhither they were pulling, and they were in fine spirits for exertion.But if they were pulling toward the country's ruin, there was the moreneed for others to hang on behind and get the wheels to stick ifpossible. In Treby, as elsewhere, people were told they must "rally" atthe coming election but there was now a large number of waverers--menof flexible, practical minds, who were not such bigots as to cling toany views when a good tangible reason could be urged against them; whilesome regarded it as the most neighborly thing to hold a little with bothsides, and were not sure that they should rally or vote at all. Itseemed an invidious thing to vote for one gentleman rather than another.

  These social changes in Treby parish are comparatively public matters,and this history is chiefly concerned with the private lot of a few menand women; but there is no private life which has not been determined bya wider public life, from the time when the primeval milkmaid had towander with the wanderings of her clan, because the cow she milked wasone of a herd which had made the pastures bare. Even in thatconservatory existence where the fair Camellia is sighed for by thenoble young Pine-apple, neither of them needing to care about the frost,or rain outside, there is a nether apparatus of hot water pipes liableto cool down on a strike of the gardeners or a scarcity of coal. And thelives we are about to look back upon do not belong to those conservatoryspecies; they are rooted in the common earth, having to endure all theordinary chances of past and present weather. As to the weather of 1832,the Zadkiel of that time had predicted that the electrical condition ofthe clouds in the political hemisphere would produce unusualperturbations in organic existence, and he would perhaps have seen afulfillment of his remarkable prophecy in that mutual influence ofdissimilar destinies which we shall see gradually unfolding itself. Forif the mixed political conditions of Treby Magna had not been acted onby the passing of the Reform Bill, Mr. Harold Transome would not havepresented himself as a candidate for North Loamshire, Treby would nothave been a polling-place, Mr. Matthew Jermyn would not have been onaffable terms with a Dissenting preacher and his flock, and thevenerable town would not have been placarded with handbills, more orless complimentary and retrospective--conditions in this case essentialto the "where," and the "what," without which, as the learned know,there can be no event whatever.

  For example, it was through these conditions that a young man namedFelix Holt made a considerable difference in the life of HaroldTransome, though nature and fortune seemed to have done what they couldto keep the lots of the two men quite aloof from each other. Felix washeir to nothing better than a quack medicine; his mother lived up a backstreet in Treby Magna, and her sitting-room was ornamented with her besttea-tray and several framed testimonials to the virtues of Holt'sCathartic Lozenges and Holt's Restorative Elixir. There could hardlyhave been a lot less like Harold Transome's than this of the quackdoctor's son, except in the superficial facts that he called himself aRadical, that he was the only son of his mother, and that he had latelyreturned to his home with ideas and resolves not a little disturbing tothat mother's mind.

  But Mrs. Holt, unlike Mrs. Transome, was much disposed to reveal hertroubles, and was not without a counsellor into whose ear she could pourthem. On this second of September, when Mr. Harold Transome had had hisfirst interview with Jermyn, and when the attorney went back to hisoffice with new views of canvassing in his mind, Mrs. Holt had put onher bonnet as early as nine o'clock in the morning, and had gone to seethe Reverend Rufus Lyon, minister of the Independent Chapel usuallyspoken of as "Malthouse Yard."