THE LEADING ARTICLE AND MR. TIMOTHY TURBOT
Nevil declined to come to Steynham, clearly owing to a dread of hearing
Dr. Shrapnel abused, as Rosamund judged by the warmth of his written
eulogies of the man, and an ensuing allusion to Game. He said that he
had not made up his mind as to the Game Laws. Rosamund mentioned the
fact to Mr. Romfrey. “So we may stick by our licences to shoot
to-morrow,” he rejoined. Of a letter that he also had received from
Nevil, he did not speak. She hinted at it, and he stared. He would have
deemed it as vain a subject to discourse of India, or Continental
affairs, at a period when his house was full for the opening day of
sport, and the expectation of keeping up his renown for great bags on
that day so entirely occupied his mind. Good shots were present who had
contributed to the fame of Steynham on other opening days. Birds were
plentiful and promised not to be too wild. He had the range of the
Steynham estate in his eye, dotted with covers; and after Steynham,
Holdesbury, which had never yielded him the same high celebrity, but
both lay mapped out for action under the profound calculations of the
strategist, ready to show the skill of the field tactician. He could
not attend to Nevil. Even the talk of the forthcoming Elections, hardly
to be avoided at his table, seemed a puerile distraction. Ware the foe
of his partridges and pheasants, be it man or vermin! The name of
Shrapnel was frequently on the tongue of Captain Baskelett. Rosamund
heard him, in her room, and his derisive shouts of laughter over it.
Cecil was a fine shot, quite as fond of the pastime as his uncle, and
always in favour with him while sport stalked the land. He was in
gallant spirits, and Rosamund, brooding over Nevil’s fortunes, and
sitting much alone, as she did when there were guests in the house,
gave way to her previous apprehensions. She touched on them to Mr.
Stukely Culbrett, her husband’s old friend, one of those happy men who
enjoy perceptions without opinions, and are not born to administer
comfort to other than themselves. As far as she could gather, he
fancied Nevil Beauchamp was in danger of something, but he delivered
his mind only upon circumstances and characters: Nevil risked his luck,
Cecil knew his game, Everard Romfrey was the staunchest of mankind:
Stukely had nothing further to say regarding the situation. She asked
him what he thought, and he smiled. Could a reasonable head venture to
think anything in particular? He repeated the amazed, “You don’t say
so” of Colonel Halkett, on hearing the name of the new Liberal
candidate for Bevisham at the dinner-table, together with some of
Cecil’s waggish embroidery upon the theme.
Rosamund exclaimed angrily, “Oh! if I had been there he would not have
dared.”
“Why not be there?” said Stukely. “You have had your choice for a
number of years.”
She shook her head, reddening.
But supposing that she had greater privileges than were hers now? The
idea flashed. A taint of personal pique, awakened by the fancied
necessity for putting her devotedness to Nevil to proof, asked her if
she would then be the official housekeeper to whom Captain Baskelett
bowed low with affected respect and impertinent affability, ironically
praising her abroad as a wonder among women, that could at one time
have played the deuce in the family, had she chosen to do so.
“Just as you like,” Mr. Culbrett remarked. It was his ironical habit of
mind to believe that the wishes of men and women—women as well as
men—were expressed by their utterances.
“But speak of Nevil to Colonel Halkett,” said Rosamund, earnestly
carrying on what was in her heart. “Persuade the colonel you do not
think Nevil foolish—not more than just a little impetuous. I want that
marriage to come off! Not on account of her wealth. She is to inherit a
Welsh mine from her uncle, you know, besides being an only child.
Recall what Nevil was during the war. Miss Halkett has not forgotten
it, I am sure, and a good word for him from a man of the world would, I
am certain, counteract Captain Baskelett’s—are they designs? At any
rate, you can if you like help Nevil with the colonel. I am convinced
they are doing him a mischief. Colonel Halkett has bought an estate—and
what a misfortune that is!—close to Bevisham. I fancy he is Toryish.
Will you not speak to him? At my request? I am so helpless I could cry.
“Fancy you have no handkerchief,” said Mr. Culbrett, “and give up
scheming, pray. One has only to begin to scheme, to shorten life to
half-a-dozen hops and jumps. I could say to the colonel, ‘Young
Beauchamp’s a political cub: he ought to have a motherly wife.’”
“Yes, yes, you are right; don’t speak to him at all,” said Rosamund,
feeling that there must be a conspiracy to rob her of her proud
independence, since not a soul could be won to spare her from taking
some energetic step, if she would be useful to him she loved.
Colonel Halkett was one of the guests at Steynham who knew and
respected her, and he paid her a visit and alluded to Nevil’s
candidature, apparently not thinking much the worse of him. “We can’t
allow him to succeed,” he said, and looked for a smiling approval of
such natural opposition, which Rosamund gave him readily after he had
expressed the hope that Nevil Beauchamp would take advantage of his
proximity to Mount Laurels during the contest to try the hospitality of
the house. “He won’t mind meeting his uncle?” The colonel’s eyes
twinkled. “My daughter has engaged Mr. Romfrey and Captain Baskelett to
come to us when they have shot Holdesbury.”
And Captain Baskelett! thought Rosamund; her jealousy whispering that
the mention of his name close upon Cecilia Halkett’s might have a
nuptial signification.
She was a witness from her window—a prisoner’s window, her eager heart
could have termed it—of a remarkable ostentation of cordiality between
the colonel and Cecil, in the presence of Mr. Romfrey. Was it his
humour to conspire to hand Miss Halkett to Cecil, and then to show
Nevil the prize he had forfeited by his folly? The three were on the
lawn a little before Colonel Halkett’s departure. The colonel’s arm was
linked with Cecil’s while they conversed. Presently the latter received
his afternoon’s letters, and a newspaper. He soon had the paper out at
a square stretch, and sprightly information for the other two was
visible in his crowing throat. Mr. Romfrey raised the gun from his
shoulder-pad, and grounded it. Colonel Halkett wished to peruse the
matter with his own eyes, but Cecil could not permit it; he must read
it aloud for them, and he suited his action to his sentences. Had
Rosamund been accustomed to leading articles which are the composition
of men of an imposing vocabulary, she would have recognized and as good
as read one in Cecil’s gestures as he tilted his lofty stature forward
and back, marking his commas and semicolons with flapping of his
elbows, and all but doubling his body at his periods. Mr. Romfrey had
enough of it half-way down the column; his head went sharply to left
and right. Cecil’s peculiar foppish slicing down of his hand pictured
him protesting that there was more and finer of the inimitable stuff to
follow. The end of the scene exhibited the paper on the turf, and
Colonel Halkett’s hand on Cecil’s shoulder, Mr. Romfrey nodding some
sort of acquiescence over the muzzle of his gun, whether reflective or
positive Rosamund could not decide. She sent out a footman for the
paper, and was presently communing with its eloquent large type, quite
unable to perceive where the comicality or the impropriety of it lay,
for it would have struck her that never were truer things of Nevil
Beauchamp better said in the tone befitting them. This perhaps was
because she never heard fervid praises of him, or of anybody, delivered
from the mouth, and it is not common to hear Englishmen phrasing great
eulogies of one another. Still, as a rule, they do not object to have
it performed in that region of our national eloquence, the Press, by an
Irishman or a Scotchman. And what could there be to warrant Captain
Baskelett’s malicious derision, and Mr. Romfrey’s nodding assent to it,
in an article where all was truth?
The truth was mounted on an unusually high wind. It was indeed a
leading article of a banner-like bravery, and the unrolling of it was
designed to stir emotions. Beauchamp was the theme. Nevil had it under
his eyes earlier than Cecil. The paper was brought into his room with
the beams of day, damp from the presses of the _Bevisham Gazette_,
exactly opposite to him in the White Hart Hotel, and a glance at the
paragraphs gave him a lively ardour to spring to his feet. What
writing! He was uplifted as “The heroical Commander Beauchamp, of the
Royal Navy,” and “Commander Beauchamp, R.N., a gentleman of the highest
connections”: he was “that illustrious Commander Beauchamp, of our
matchless, navy, who proved on every field of the last glorious war of
this country that the traditional valour of the noble and indomitable
blood transmitted to his veins had lost none of its edge and weight
since the battle-axes of the Lords de Romfrey, ever to the fore, clove
the skulls of our national enemy on the wide and fertile campaigns of
France.” This was pageantry.
There was more of it. Then the serious afflatus of the article
condescended, as it were, to blow a shrill and well-known whistle:—the
study of the science of navigation made by Commander Beauchamp, R.N.,
was cited for a jocose warranty of a seaman’s aptness to assist in
steering the Vessel of the State. After thus heeling over, to tip a
familiar wink to the multitude, the leader tone resumed its fit
deportment. Commander Beauchamp, in responding to the invitation of the
great and united Liberal party of the borough of Bevisham, obeyed the
inspirations of genius, the dictates of humanity, and what he rightly
considered the paramount duty, as it is the proudest ambition, of the
citizen of a free country.
But for an occasional drop and bump of the sailing gasbag upon
catch-words of enthusiasm, which are the rhetoric of the merely windy,
and a collapse on a poetic line, which too often signalizes the
rhetorician’s emptiness of his wind, the article was eminent for
flight, sweep, and dash, and sailed along far more grandly than
ordinary provincial organs for the promoting or seconding of public
opinion, that are as little to be compared with the mighty metropolitan
as are the fife and bugle boys practising on their instruments round
melancholy outskirts of garrison towns with the regimental marching
full band under the presidency of its drum-major. No signature to the
article was needed for Bevisham to know who had returned to the town to
pen it. Those long-stretching sentences, comparable to the very ship
_Leviathan_, spanning two Atlantic billows, appertained to none but the
renowned Mr. Timothy Turbot, of the Corn Law campaigns, Reform
agitations, and all manifestly popular movements requiring the
heaven-endowed man of speech, an interpreter of multitudes, and a
prompter. Like most men who have little to say, he was an orator in
print, but that was a poor medium for him—his body without his fire.
Mr. Timothy’s place was the platform. A wise discernment, or else a
lucky accident (for he came hurriedly from the soil of his native isle,
needing occupation), set him on that side in politics which happened to
be making an established current and strong headway. Oratory will not
work against the stream, or on languid tides. Driblets of movements
that allowed the world to doubt whether they were so much movements as
illusions of the optics, did not suit his genius. Thus he was a
Liberal, no Radical, fountain. Liberalism had the attraction for the
orator of being the active force in politics, between two passive
opposing bodies, the aspect of either of which it can assume for a
menace to the other, Toryish as against Radicals; a trifle red in the
eyes of the Tory. It can seem to lean back on the Past; it can seem to
be amorous of the Future. It is actually the thing of the Present and
its urgencies, therefore popular, pouring forth the pure waters of
moderation, strong in their copiousness. Delicious and rapturous
effects are to be produced in the flood of a Liberal oration by a
chance infusion of the fierier spirit, a flavour of Radicalism. That is
the thing to set an audience bounding and quirking. Whereas if you
commence by tilling a Triton pitcher full of the neat liquor upon them,
you have to resort to the natural element for the orator’s art of
variation, you are diluted—and that’s bathos, to quote Mr. Timothy. It
was a fine piece of discernment in him. Let Liberalism be your feast,
Radicalism your spice. And now and then, off and on, for a change, for
diversion, for a new emotion, just for half an hour or so—now and then
the Sunday coat of Toryism will give you an air. You have only to
complain of the fit, to release your shoulders in a trice. Mr. Timothy
felt for his art as poets do for theirs, and considered what was best
adapted to speaking, purely to speaking. Upon no creature did he look
with such contempt as upon Dr. Shrapnel, whose loose disjunct audiences
he was conscious he could, giving the doctor any start he liked, whirl
away from him and have compact, enchained, at his first flourish; yea,
though they were composed of “the poor man,” with a stomach for the
political distillery fit to drain relishingly every private bogside or
mountain-side tap in old Ireland in its best days—the illicit, you
understand.
Further, to quote Mr. Timothy’s points of view, the Radical orator has
but two notes, and one is the drawling pathetic, and the other is the
ultra-furious; and the effect of the former we liken to the English
working man’s wife’s hob-set queasy brew of well-meant villany, that
she calls by the innocent name of tea; and the latter is to be blown,
asks to be blown, and never should be blown without at least seeming to
be blown, with an accompaniment of a house on fire. Sir, we must adapt
ourselves to our times. Perhaps a spark or two does lurk about our
house, but we have vigilant watchmen in plenty, and the house has been
pretty fairly insured. Shrieking in it is an annoyance to the inmates,
nonsensical; weeping is a sickly business. The times are against
Radicalism to the full as much as great oratory is opposed to extremes.
These drag the orator too near to the matter. So it is that one Radical
speech is amazingly like another—they all have the earth-spots. They
smell, too; they smell of brimstone. Soaring is impossible among that
faction; but this they can do, they can furnish the Tory his
opportunity to soar. When hear you a thrilling Tory speech that carries
the country with it, save when the incendiary Radical has shrieked? If
there was envy in the soul of Timothy, it was addressed to the fine
occasions offered to the Tory speaker for vindicating our ancient
principles and our sacred homes. He admired the tone to be assumed for
that purpose: it was a good note. Then could the Tory, delivering at
the right season the Shakesperian “_This England_...” and Byronic—“_The
inviolate Island_...” shake the frame, as though smiting it with the
tail of the gymnotus electricus. Ah, and then could he thump out his
Horace, the Tory’s mentor and his cordial, with other great ancient
comic and satiric poets, his old Port of the classical cellarage,
reflecting veneration upon him who did but name them to an audience of
good dispositions. The Tory possessed also an innate inimitably easy
style of humour, that had the long reach, the jolly lordly
indifference, the comfortable masterfulness, of the whip of a
four-in-hand driver, capable of flicking and stinging, and of being
ironically caressing. Timothy appreciated it, for he had winced under
it. No professor of Liberalism could venture on it, unless it were in
the remote district of a back parlour, in the society of a cherishing
friend or two, and with a slice of lemon requiring to be refloated in
the glass.
But gifts of this description were of a minor order. Liberalism gave
the heading cry, devoid of which parties are dogs without a scent,
orators mere pump-handles. The Tory’s cry was but a whistle to his
pack, the Radical howled to the moon like any chained hound. And no
wonder, for these parties had no established current, they were as
hard-bound waters; the Radical being dyked and dammed most soundly, the
Tory resembling a placid lake of the plains, fed by springs and no
confluents. For such good reasons, Mr. Timothy rejoiced in the happy
circumstances which had expelled him from the shores of his native isle
to find a refuge and a vocation in Manchester at a period when an
orator happened to be in request because dozens were wanted. That
centre of convulsions and source of streams possessed the statistical
orator, the reasoning orator, and the inspired; with others of quality;
and yet it had need of an ever-ready spontaneous imperturbable speaker,
whose bubbling generalizations and ability to beat the drum humorous
could swing halls of meeting from the grasp of an enemy, and then
ascend on incalescent adjectives to the popular idea of the sublime. He
was the artistic orator of Corn Law Repeal—the Manchester flood, before
which time Whigs were, since which they have walked like spectral
antediluvians, or floated as dead canine bodies that are sucked away on
the ebb of tides and flung back on the flow, ignorant whether they be
progressive or retrograde. Timothy Turbot assisted in that vast effort.
It should have elevated him beyond the editorship of a country
newspaper. Why it did not do so his antagonists pretended to know, and
his friends would smile to hear. The report was that he worshipped the
nymph Whisky.
Timothy’s article had plucked Beauchamp out of bed; Beauchamp’s card in
return did the same for him.
“Commander Beauchamp? I am heartily glad to make your acquaintance,
sir; I’ve been absent, at work, on the big business we have in common,
I rejoice to say, and am behind my fellow townsmen in this pleasure and
lucky I slept here in my room above, where I don’t often sleep, for the
row of the machinery—it’s like a steamer that won’t go, though it’s
always starting ye,” Mr. Timothy said in a single breath, upon entering
the back office of the _Gazette_, like unto those accomplished
violinists who can hold on the bow to finger an incredible number of
notes, and may be imaged as representing slow paternal Time, that rolls
his capering dot-headed generation of mortals over the wheel, hundreds
to the minute. “You’ll excuse my not shaving, sir, to come down to your
summons without an extra touch to the neck-band.”
Beauchamp beheld a middle-sized round man, with loose lips and pendant
indigo jowl, whose eyes twinkled watery, like pebbles under the
shore-wash, and whose neck-band needed an extra touch from fingers
other than his own.
“I am sorry to have disturbed you so early,” he replied.
“Not a bit, Commander Beauchamp, not a bit, sir. Early or late, and ay
ready—with the Napiers; I’ll wash, I’ll wash.”
“I came to speak to you of this article of yours on me. They tell me in
the office that you are the writer. Pray don’t ‘Commander’ me so
much.—It’s not customary, and I object to it.”
“Certainly, certainly,” Timothy acquiesced.
“And for the future, Mr. Turbot, please to be good enough not to allude
in print to any of my performances here and there. Your intentions are
complimentary, but it happens that I don’t like a public patting on the
back.”
“No, and that’s true,” said Timothy.
His appreciative and sympathetic agreement with these sharp strictures
on the article brought Beauchamp to a stop.
Timothy waited for him; then, smoothing his prickly cheek, remarked:
“If I’d guessed your errand, Commander Beauchamp, I’d have called in
the barber before I came down, just to make myself decent for a “first
introduction.”
Beauchamp was not insensible to the slyness of the poke at him. “You
see, I come to the borough unknown to it, and as quietly as possible,
and I want to be taken as a politician,” he continued, for the sake of
showing that he had sufficient to say to account for his hasty and
peremptory summons of the writer of that article to his presence. “It’s
excessively disagreeable to have one’s family lugged into notice in a
newspaper—especially if they are of different politics. _I_ feel it.”
“All would, sir,” said Timothy.
“Then why the deuce did you do it?”
Timothy drew a lading of air into his lungs. “Politics, Commander
Beauchamp, involves the doing of lots of disagreeable things to
ourselves and our relations; it’s positive. I’m a soldier of the Great
Campaign: and who knows it better than I, sir? It’s climbing the greasy
pole for the leg o’ mutton, that makes the mother’s heart ache for the
jacket and the nether garments she mended neatly, if she didn’t make
them. Mutton or no mutton, there’s grease for certain! Since it’s sure
we can’t be disconnected from the family, the trick is to turn the
misfortune to a profit; and allow me the observation, that an old
family, sir, and a high and titled family, is not to be despised for a
background of a portrait in naval uniform, with medal and clasps, and
some small smoke of powder clearing off over there:—that’s if we’re to
act sagaciously in introducing an unknown candidate to a borough that
has a sneaking liking for the kind of person, more honour to it. I’m a
political veteran, sir; I speak from experience. We must employ our
weapons, every one of them, and all off the grindstone.”
“Very well,” said Beauchamp. “Now understand; you are not in future to
employ the weapons, as you call them, that I have objected to.”
Timothy gaped slightly.
“Whatever you will, but no puffery,” Beauchamp added. “Can I by any
means arrest—purchase—is it possible, tell me, to lay an embargo—stop
to-day’s issue of the _Gazette?_”
“No more—than the bite of a mad dog,” Timothy replied, before he had
considered upon the monstrous nature of the proposal.
Beauchamp humphed, and tossed his head. The simile of the dog struck
him with intense effect.
“There’d be a second edition,” said Timothy, “and you might buy up
that. But there’ll be a third, and you may buy up that; but there’ll be
a fourth and a fifth, and so on ad infinitum, with the advertisement of
the sale of the foregoing creating a demand like a rageing thirst in a
shipwreck, in Bligh’s boat, in the tropics. I’m afraid, Com—Captain
Beauchamp, sir, there’s no stopping the Press while the people have an
appetite for it—and a Company’s at the back of it.”
“Pooh, don’t talk to me in that way; all I complain of is the figure
you have made of me,” said Beauchamp, fetching him smartly out of his
nonsense; “and all I ask of you is not to be at it again. Who would
suppose from reading an article like that, that I am a candidate with a
single political idea!”
“An article like that,” said Timothy, winking, and a little surer of
his man now that he suggested his possession of ideas, “an article like
that is the best cloak you can put on a candidate with too many of “em,
Captain Beauchamp. I’ll tell you, sir; I came, I heard of your
candidature, I had your sketch, the pattern of ye, before me, and I was
told that Dr. Shrapnel fathered you politically. There was my brief! I
had to persuade our constituents that you, Commander Beauchamp of the
Royal Navy, and the great family of the Earls of Romfrey, one of the
heroes of the war, and the recipient of a Royal Humane Society’s medal
for saving life in Bevisham waters, were something more than the
Radical doctor’s political son; and, sir, it was to this end, aim, and
object, that I wrote the article I am not ashamed to avow as mine, and
I do so, sir, because of the solitary merit it has of serving your
political interests as the liberal candidate for Bevisham by
counteracting the unpopularity of Dr. Shrapnel’s name, on the one part,
and of reviving the credit due to your valour and high bearing on the
field of battle in defence of your country, on the other, so that
Bevisham may apprehend, in spite of party distinctions, that it has the
option, and had better seize upon the honour, of making a M.P. of a
hero.”
Beauchamp interposed hastily: “Thank you, thank you for the best of
intentions. But let me tell you I am prepared to stand or fall with Dr.
Shrapnel, and be hanged to all that humbug.”
Timothy rubbed his hands with an abstracted air of washing. “Well,
commander, well, sir, they say a candidate’s to be humoured in his
infancy, for _he_ has to do all the humouring before he’s many weeks
old at it; only there’s the fact!—he soon finds out he has to pay for
his first fling, like the son of a family sowing his oats to reap his
Jews. Credit me, sir, I thought it prudent to counteract a bit of an
apothecary’s shop odour in the junior Liberal candidate’s address. I
found the town sniffing, they scented Shrapnel in the composition.”
“Every line of it was mine,” said Beauchamp.
“Of course it was, and the address was admirably worded, sir, I make
bold to say it to your face; but most indubitably it threatened
powerful drugs for weak stomachs, and it blew cold on votes, which are
sensitive plants like nothing else in botany.”
“If they are only to be got by abandoning principles, and by anything
but honesty in stating them, they may go,” said Beauchamp.
“I repeat, my dear sir, I repeat, the infant candidate delights in his
honesty, like the babe in its nakedness, the beautiful virgin in her
innocence. So he does; but he discovers it’s time for him to wear
clothes in a contested election. And what’s that but to preserve the
outlines pretty correctly, whilst he doesn’t shock and horrify the
optics? A dash of conventionalism makes the whole civilized world kin,
ye know. That’s the truth. You must appear to be one of them, for them
to choose you. After all, there’s no harm in a dyer’s hand; and, sir, a
candidate looking at his own, when he has won the Election...”
“Ah, well,” said Beauchamp, swinging on his heel, “and now I’ll take my
leave of you, and I apologize for bringing you down here so early.
Please attend to what I have said; it’s peremptory. You will give me
great pleasure by dining with me to-night, at the hotel opposite. Will
you? I don’t know what kind of wine I shall be able to offer you.
Perhaps you know the cellar, and may help me in that.”
Timothy grasped his hand, “With pleasure, Commander Beauchamp. They
have a bucellas over there that’s old, and a tolerable claret, and a
Port to be inquired for under the breath, in a mysteriously intimate
tone of voice, as one says, ‘I know of your treasure, and the corner
under ground where it lies.’ Avoid the champagne: ’tis the banqueting
wine. Ditto the sherry. One can drink them, one can drink them.”
“At a quarter to eight this evening, then,” said Nevil.
“I’ll be there at the stroke of the clock, sure as the date of a bill,”
said Timothy.
And it’s early to guess whether you’ll catch Bevisham or you won’t, he
reflected, as he gazed at the young gentleman crossing the road; but
female Bevisham’s with you, if that counts for much. Timothy confessed,
that without the employment of any weapon save arrogance and a look of
candour, the commander had gone some way toward catching the feminine
side of himself.