“LET US MAKE OTHERS THANKFUL”
A man can scarcely harbor a more bitter thought than that he has lost
by foul play what fair play would have won for him. This for a week was
Lord Audley’s mood and position; for masterful as he was he owned the
power of Nemesis, he felt the force of tradition, nor, try as he might,
could he convince himself that in face of this oft-cited deed his
chance of retaining the title and property was anything but desperate.
He made the one attempt to see Mary of which we know; and had he seen
her he would have done his best to knot again the tie which he had cut.
But missing her by a hair’s breadth, and confronted by Toft who knew
all, he had found even his courage unequal to a second attempt. The
spirit in which Mary had faced the breach had shown his plan to be from
the first a counsel of despair, and despairing he let her go. In a dark
mood he sat down to wait for the next step on the enemy’s part, firmly
resolved that whatever form it might take he would contest the claim to
the bitter end.
And Stubbs was scarcely in happier case. At the time, and face to face
with Basset, he had borne up well, but the production of the fateful
deed had none the less fallen on him with stunning effect. He
appreciated—none better and more clearly now—what the effect of his
easiness would have been had Lord Audley not been engaged to his
cousin; nor did his negligence appear in a less glaring light because
his patron was to escape its worst results. He foresaw that whatever
befel he must suffer, and that the agency which his family had so long
enjoyed—that, that at any rate was forfeit.
This was enough to make him a most unhappy, a most miserable man. But
it did not stand alone. Everything seemed to him to be going wrong. All
good things, public and private, seemed to be verging on their end. The
world as he had known it for sixty years was crumbling about his ears.
It was time that he was gone.
Certainly the days of that Protection with which he believed the
welfare of the land to be bound up, were numbered. In the House Lord
George and Mr. Disraeli—those strangest of bedfellows!—might rage, the
old Protectionist party might foam, invective and sarcasm, taunt and
sneer might rain upon the traitor as he sat with folded arms and hat
drawn down to his eyes, rectors might fume and squires swear; the end
was certain, and Stubbs saw that it was. Those rascals in the North,
they and their greed and smoke, that stained the face of England, would
win and were winning. He had saved Riddsley by nine—but to what end?
What was one vote among so many? He thought of the nut-brown ale, the
teeming stacks, the wagoner’s home,
Hard-by, a cottage chimney smokes
From betwixt two aged oaks.
He thought of the sweet cow-stalls, the brook where he had bent his
first pin, and he sighed. Half the country folk would be ruined, and
Shoddy from Halifax and Brass from Bury would buy their lands and walk
in gaiters where better men had foundered. The country would be full of
new men—Peels!
Well, it would last his time. But some day there would rise another
Buonaparte and they would find Cobden with his calico millennium a poor
stay against starvation, his lean and flashy songs a poor substitute
for wheat. It was all money now; the kindly feeling, the Christmas
dole, the human ties, where father had worked for father and son for
son, and the thatch had covered three generations—all these were past
and gone. He found one fault, it is true, in the past. He had one
regret, as he looked back. The laborers’ wage had been too low; they
had been left outside the umbrella of Protection. He saw that now;
there was the weak point in the case. “That’s where they hit us,” he
said more than once, “the foundation was too narrow.” But the knowledge
came too late.
Naturally he buried his private mishap—and my lord’s—in silence. But
his mien was changed. He was an altered, a shaken man. When he passed
through the streets, he walked with his chin on his breast, his
shoulders bowed. He shunned men’s eyes. Then one day Basset entered his
office and for a long time was closeted with him.
When he left Stubbs left also, and his bearing was so subtly changed as
to impress all who met him; while Farthingale, stepping out in his
absence, drank his way through three brown brandies in a silence which
grew more portentous with every glass. At The Butterflies, whither the
lawyer hastened, Audley met him with moody and repellent eyes, and in
the first flush of the news which the lawyer brought refused to believe
it. It was not only that the tidings seemed too good to be true, the
relief from the nightmare which weighed upon him too great to be
readily accepted. But the thing that Mary had done was so far out of
his ken and so much beyond his understanding that he could not rise to
it, or credit it. Even when he at last took in the truth of the story
he put upon it the interpretation that was natural to him.
“It was a forgery!” he cried with an oath. “You may depend upon it, it
was a forgery and they discovered it.”
But Stubbs would not agree to that. Stubbs was very stout about it, and
giving details of his conversation with Basset gradually persuaded his
patron. In one way, indeed, the news coming through him wrought a
benefit which neither Mary nor Basset had foreseen. It once more
commended him to Audley, and by and by healed the breach which had
threatened to sever the long connection between the lawyer and
Beaudelays. If Stubbs’s opinion of my lord could never again be wholly
what it had been, if Audley still had hours of soreness when the
other’s negligence recurred to his mind, at least they were again at
one as to the future. They were once more free to look forward to a
time when a marriage with Lady Adela, or her like, would rebuild the
fortunes of the Great House. Of Audley, whose punishment if short had
been severe, one thing at least may be ventured with safety—and beyond
this we need not inquire; that to the end his first, last, greatest
thought would be—himself!
Late in June, the Corn Laws were repealed. On the same day Sir Robert
Peel, in the eyes of some the first, in the eyes of others the last of
men, was forced to resign. Thwarted by old friends and abandoned by new
ones, he fell by a manœuvre which even his enemies could not defend.
Whether he was more to be blamed for blindness than he was to be
praised for rectitude, are questions on which party spirit has much to
say, nor has history as yet pronounced a final decision. But if his
hand gave the victory to the class from which he sprang, he was at
least free from the selfishness of that class. He had ideals, he was a
man,
He nothing common did nor mean,
Upon that memorable scene,
But bowed his comely head,
Down as upon a bed.
Nor is it possible, even for those who do not agree with him, to think
of his dramatic fall without sympathy.
In the same week Basset and Mary were married. They spent their
honeymoon after a fashion of their own, for they travelled through the
north of England, and beginning with the improvements which Lord
Francis Egerton was making along the Manchester Canal, they continued
their quiet journey along the inland waterways which formed in the
’forties a link, now forgotten, between the great cities. In this
way—somewhat to the disgust of Mary’s new maid, whose name was
Joséphine—they visited strange things; the famous land-warping upon the
Humber, the Doncaster drainage system in Yorkshire, the Horsfall
dairies. They brought back to the old gabled house at Blore some ideas
which were new even to old Hayward—though the “Duke” would never have
admitted this.
“Now that we are not protected, we must bestir ourselves,” Basset said
on the last evening before their return. “I’ll inquire about a seat, if
you like,” he added reluctantly.
Mary was standing behind him. She put her hand on his shoulder. “You
are paying me out, Peter,” she said. “I know now that I don’t know as
much as I thought I knew.”
“Which means?” Basset said, smiling.
“That once I thought that nothing could be done without an earthquake.
I know now that it can be done with a spade.”
“So that where Mary was content with nothing but a gilt coach, Mrs.
Basset is content with a nutshell.”
“If you are in the nutshell,” Mary answered softly, “only—for what we
have received, Peter—let us make other people thankful.”
“We will try,” he answered.
THE END