=The New Man at Littlehill.=
Market Denborough is not a large town. Perhaps it is none the worse
for that, and, if it be, there is compensation to be found in its
picturesqueness, its antiquity, and its dignity; for there has been a
town where it stands from time immemorial; it makes a great figure in
county histories and local guidebooks; it is an ancient corporation,
an assize town, and quarter-sessions borough. It does not grow, for
country towns, dependent solely on the support of the rural districts
surrounding, are not given to growing much nowadays. Moreover, the
Delanes do not readily allow new houses to be built, and if a man lives
in Market Denborough, he must be a roofless vagrant or a tenant of
Mr. Delane. It is not the place to make a fortune; but, on the other
hand, unusual recklessness is necessary to the losing of one there. If
the triumphs of life are on a small scale, the struggle for existence
is not very fierce, and a wise man might do worse than barter the
uncertain chances and precarious joys of a larger stage, to play a
modest, easy, quiet part on the little boards of Market Denborough.
It must not, however, be supposed that the lion and the lamb have quite
sunk their differences and lain down together at Market Denborough.
There, as elsewhere, the millennium tarries, and there are not wanting
fierce feuds, personal, municipal, nay, even, within the wide limits
of Mr. Delane's tolerance, political. If it were not so, the Mayor
would not have been happy, for the Mayor loved a fight; and Alderman
Johnstone, who was a Radical, would have felt his days wasted; and
the two gentlemen would not have been, as they continually were, at
loggerheads concerning paving contracts and kindred subjects. There was
no want of interests in life, if a man were ready to take his own part
and keep a sharp eye on the doings of his neighbor. Besides, the really
great events of existence happened at Market Denborough much as they
do in London; people were born, and married, and died; and while that
rotation is unchecked, who can be seriously at a loss for matter of
thought or topic of conversation?
As Mr. James Roberts, member of the Royal College of Surgeons, a thin
young man, with restless eyes and tight-shut lips, walked down High
Street one hot, sunny afternoon, it never entered his head that there
was not enough to think about in Market Denborough. Wife and child,
rent, rates and taxes, patients and prescriptions, the relation between
those old enemies, incomings and outgoings, here was food enough
for any man's meditations. Enough? Ay, enough and to spare of such
distasteful, insipid, narrow, soul-destroying stuff. Mr., or, to give
him the brevet rank all the town gave him. Dr. Roberts, hated these
sordid, imperious interests that gathered round him and hemmed him in,
shutting out all else--all dreams of ambition, all dear, long-harbored
schemes, all burning enthusiasms, even all chance of seeking deeper
knowledge and more commanding skill. Sadly and impatiently the doctor
shook his head, trying to put his visions on one side, and nail his
mind down to its work. His first task was to turn three hundred pounds
a year into six hundred pounds. It was hard it should be so, and he
chafed against necessity, forgetting, as perhaps he pardonably might,
that the need was the price he paid for wife and child. Yes, it was
hard; but so it was. If only more people would be--no, but if only more
people who were ill would call in Dr. Roberts! Then he could keep two
horses, and not have to "pad the hoof," as he phrased it to himself,
about sweltering streets or dusty lanes all the long afternoon, because
his one pony was tired out with carrying him in the morning to Dirkham,
a village five miles off, where he was medical officer at a salary of
forty pounds by the year. That was forty, and Ethel had a hundred,
and the profits from his paying patients (even if you allowed for the
medicine consumed by those who did not pay) were about a hundred and
fifty. But then the bills---- Oh, well, he must go on. The second horse
must wait, and that other dream of his, having an assistant, that must
wait, too. If he had an assistant, he would have some leisure for
research, for reading, for studying the political and social questions
where his real and engrossing interest lay. He could then take his part
in the mighty work of rousing----
Here his meditations were interrupted. He had reached, in his progress
down the street, a large plate-glass-windowed shop, the shop of a
chemist, and of no less a man than Mr. James Hedger, Mayor of Market
Denborough. The member of the lower branch of their common art was a
richer man than he who belonged to the higher, and when Mr. Hedger was
playfully charged with giving the young Doctor his medicines cheap, he
never denied the accusation. Anyhow, the two were good friends, and the
Mayor, who was surveying his dominions from his doorstep, broke in on
Dr. Roberts' train of thought with a cheerful greeting.
"Have you heard the news?" he asked.
"No; I've no time for the news. I always look to you for it, Mr. Mayor."
"It mostly comes round to me, being a center, like," said the Mayor.
"It's natural."
"Well, what is it this time?" asked the Doctor, calling up a show of
interest. He did not care much for Denborough news.
"Littlehill's let," replied the Mayor.
Littlehill, the subject of Philip Hume's half-ironical description,
was a good house, standing on rising ground about half a mile outside
the town. It belonged, of course, to Mr. Delane, and had stood empty
for more than a year. A tenant at Littlehill meant an increase of
custom for the tradespeople, and perchance for the doctors. Hence the
importance of the Mayor's piece of news.
"Indeed?" said Roberts. "Who's taken it?"
"Not much good--a young man, a bachelor," said the Mayor, shaking his
head. Bachelors do not require, or anyhow do not take, many chemist's
drugs. "Still, I hear he's well off, and p'r'aps he'll have people to
stop with him."
"What's his name?"
"Some name like Bannister. He's from London."
"What's he coming here for?" asked Roberts, who, if he had been a
well-to-do bachelor, would not have settled at Market Denborough.
"Why shouldn't he?" retorted the Mayor, who had never lived, or thought
of living, anywhere else.
"Well, I shouldn't have thought he'd have found much to do. He wouldn't
come in the summer for the hunting."
"Hunting? Not he! He's a literary gentleman--writes poetry and what
not."
"Poetry? Why, it's not Dale Bannister, is it?"
"Ay, that's the name."
"Dale Bannister coming to Littlehill! That is an honor for the town!"
"An honor? What do you mean, sir?"
"Why, he's a famous man, Mr. Mayor. All London's talking of him."
"I never heard his name in my life before," said the Mayor.
"Oh, he's a genius. His poems are all the rage. You'll have to read
them now."
"He's having a lot done up there," remarked the Mayor. "Johnstone's got
the job. Mr. Bannister don't know as much about Johnstone as some of
us."
"How should he?" said Roberts, smiling.
"Johnstone's buildin' 'im a room. It'll tumble down."
"Oh, come, Mr. Mayor, you're prejudiced."
"No man can say that of me, sir. But I knows--I know Johnstone, Doctor.
That's where it is!"
"Well, I hope Johnstone's room won't fall on him. We can't spare Dale
Bannister. Good-day, Mr. Mayor."
"Where are you goin'?"
"To Tom Steadman's."
"Is he bad again?" inquired the Mayor, with interest.
"Yes. He broke out last week, with the usual result."
"Broke out? Yes! He had two gallons of beer and a bottle o' gin off the
'Blue Lion' in one day, the landlord told me."
"They ought to go to prison for serving him."
"Well, well, a man drinks or he don't," said the Mayor tolerantly; "and
if he does, he'll get it some'ow. Good-day, sir."
The Doctor completed his rounds, including the soothing of Tom
Steadman's distempered imagination, and made his way home in quite
a flutter of excitement. Hidden away in his study, underneath
heavy medical works and voluminous medical journals, where the eye
of patients could not reach, nor the devastations of them that
tidy disturb, lay the two or three little volumes which held Dale
Bannister's poems. The Doctor would not have admitted that the poems
were purposely concealed, but he certainly did not display them
ostentatiously, and he undoubtedly told his wife, with much decision,
that he was sure they would not prove to her taste. Yet he himself
almost worshiped them; all the untamed revolt, the recklessness of
thought, the scorn of respectability, the scant regard to what the
world called propriety, which he had nourished in his own heart in
his youth, finding no expression for them, and from which the binding
chains of fate seemed now forever to restrain his spirit, were in those
three slim volumes. First came "The Clarion and other Poems," a very
small book, published by a very small firm--published for the author,
though the Doctor did not know this, and circulated at the expense of
the same; then "Sluggards," from a larger firm, the source of some
few guineas to Dale Bannister, of hundreds more if he had not sold
his copyright; and lastly, "The Hypocrite's Heaven," quite a lengthy
production, blazoning the name of the leading house of all the trade,
and bearing in its train a wealth of gold, and praise, and fame for the
author: yes, and of rebuke, remonstrance, blame, and hands uplifted
in horror at so much vice united to so much genius. Praise and rebuke
alike brought new bricks to build the pyramid of glory; and on the top
of it, an object of abhorrence and of worship, stood the young poet,
prodigally scattering songs, which, as one critic of position said of
them, should never have been written, but being written, could never
die. Certainly the coming of such a man to settle there was an event
for Market Denborough; it was a glorious chance for the poet's silent,
secret disciple. He would see the man; he might speak with him; if
fortune willed, his name might yet be known, for no merit of his, but
as that of Dale Bannister's friend.
Women have very often, and the best of women most often, a provoking
sedateness of mind. Mrs. Roberts had never read the poems. True, but
she had, of course, read about them, and about their author, and about
their certain immortality; yet she was distinctly more interested
in the tidings of Tom Steadman, a wretched dipsomaniac, than in the
unparalleled news about Dale Bannister. In her heart she thought the
Doctor a cleverer, as she had no doubt he was a better, man than
the poet, and the nearest approach she made to grasping the real
significance of the situation was when she remarked:
"It will be nice for him to find one man, at all events, who can
appreciate him."
The Doctor smiled; he was pleased--who would not be?--that his wife
should think first of the pleasure Dale Bannister would find in his
society. It was absurd, but it was charming of her, and as she sat on
the edge of his chair, he put his arm round his waist and said:
"I beat him in one thing, anyhow."
"What's that, Jim?"
"My wife. He has no wife like mine."
"Has he a wife at all?" asked Mrs. Roberts, with increased interest. A
wife was another matter.
"I believe not, but if he had----"
"Don't be silly. Did you leave Tom quiet?"
"Hang Tom! he deserves it. And give me my tea."
Then came the baby, and with it an end, for the time, of Dale
Bannister.