A jolly parson of the good old stock,
By birth a gentleman, yet homely too,
Suiting his phrase to Hodge and Margery
Whom he once christened, and has married since,
A little lax in doctrine and in life.
Not thinking God was captious in such things
As what a man might drink on holidays,
But holding true religion was to do
As you'd be done by--which could never mean
That he should preach three sermons in a week.
Harold Transome did not choose to spend the whole evening with his
mother. It was his habit to compress a great deal of effective
conversation into a short space of time, asking rapidly all the
questions he wanted to get answered, and diluting no subject with
irrelevancies, paraphrase, or repetitions. He volunteered no information
about himself and his past life at Smyrna, but answered pleasantly
enough, though briefly, whenever his mother asked for any detail. He was
evidently ill-satisfied as to his palate, trying red pepper to
everything, then asking if there were any relishing sauces in the house,
and when Hickes brought various home-filled bottles, trying several,
finding them failures, and finally falling back from his plate in
despair. Yet he remained good-humored, saying something to his father
now and then for the sake of being kind, and looking on with a pitying
shrug as he saw him watch Hickes cutting his food. Mrs. Transome thought
with some bitterness that Harold showed more feeling for her feeble
husband who had never cared in the least about him, than for her, who
had given him more than the usual share of mother's love. An hour after
dinner, Harold, who had already been turning over the leaves of his
mother's account-books, said--
"I shall just cross the park to the parsonage to see my uncle Lingon."
"Very well. He can answer more questions for you."
"Yes," said Harold, quite deaf to the innuendo, and accepting the words
as a simple statement of the fact. "I want to hear all about the game
and the North Loamshire hunt. I'm fond of sport; we had a great deal of
it at Smyrna, and it keeps down my fat."
The Reverend John Lingon became very talkative over his second bottle of
port, which was opened on his nephew's arrival. He was not curious about
the manners of Smyrna, or about Harold's experience, but he unbosomed
himself very freely as to what he himself liked and disliked, which of
the farmers he suspected of killing the foxes, what game he had bagged
that very morning, what spot he would recommend as a new cover, and the
comparative flatness of all existing sport compared with cock-fighting,
under which Old England had been prosperous and glorious, while, so far
as he could see, it had gained little by the abolition of a practice
which sharpened the faculties of men, gratified the instincts of the
fowl, and carried out the designs of heaven in its admirable device of
spurs. From these main topics, which made his points of departure and
return, he rambled easily enough at any new suggestion or query; so that
when Harold got home at a late hour, he was conscious of having gathered
from amidst the pompous full-toned triviality of his uncle's chat some
impressions, which were of practical importance. Among the rector's
dislikes, it appeared, was Mr. Matthew Jermyn.
"A fat-handed, glib-tongued fellow, with a scented cambric handkerchief;
one of your educated low-bred fellows; a foundling who got his Latin for
nothing at Christ's Hospital; one of your middle-class upstarts who want
to rank with gentlemen, and think they'll do it with kid gloves and new
furniture."
But since Harold meant to stand for the county, Mr. Lingon was equally
emphatic as to the necessity of his not quarrelling with Jermyn till the
election was over. Jermyn must be his agent; Harold must wink hard till
he found himself safely returned; and even then it might be well to let
Jermyn drop gently and raise no scandal. He himself had no quarrel with
the fellow: a clergyman should have no quarrels, and he made it a point
to be able to take wine with any man he met at table. And as to the
estate, and his sister's going too much by Jermyn's advice, he never
meddled with business: it was not his duty as a clergyman. That, he
considered, was the meaning of Melchisedec and the tithe, a subject,
into which he had gone to some depth thirty years ago, when he preached
the Visitation sermon.
The discovery that Harold meant to stand on the Liberal side--nay, that
he boldly declared himself a Radical--was rather startling; but to his
uncle's good-humor, beatified by the sipping of port-wine, nothing could
seem highly objectionable, provided it did not disturb that operation.
In the course of half an hour he had brought himself to see that
anything really worthy to be called British Toryism had been entirely
extinct since the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel had passed the
Catholic Emancipation Bill; that Whiggery, with its rights of man
stopping short at ten-pound householders, and its policy of pacifying a
wild beast with a bite, was a ridiculous monstrosity; that therefore,
since an honest man could not call himself a Tory, which it was, in
fact, as impossible to be now as to fight for the old Pretender, and
could still less become that execrable monstrosity a Whig, there
remained but one course open to him. "Why, lad, if the world was turned
into a swamp, I suppose we should leave off shoes and stockings, and
walk about like cranes"--whence it followed plainly enough that, in
these hopeless times, nothing was left to men of sense and good family
but to retard the national ruin by declaring themselves Radicals, and
take the inevitable process of changing everything out of the hands of
beggarly demagogues and purse-proud tradesmen. It is true the rector was
helped to this chain of reasoning by Harold's remarks; but he soon
became quite ardent in asserting the conclusion.
"If the mob can't be turned back, a man of family must try and head the
mob, and save a few homes and hearths, and keep the country up on its
last legs as long as he can. And you're a man of family, my lad--dash
it! You're a Lingon, whatever else you may be, and I'll stand by you.
I've no great interest; I'm a poor parson. I've been forced to give up
hunting; my pointers and a glass of good wine are the only decencies
becoming my station that I can allow myself. But I'll give you my
countenance--I'll stick to you as my nephew. There's no need for me to
change sides exactly. I was born a Tory, and I shall never be a bishop.
But if anybody says you're in the wrong, I shall say, 'My nephew is in
the right; he has turned Radical to save his country. If William Pitt
had been living now he'd have done the same; for what did he say when he
was dying? Not 'Oh, save my party!' but 'Oh, save my country, heaven!'
That was what they dinned in our ears about Peel and the Duke; and now
I'll turn it round upon them. They shall be hoist with their own petard.
Yes, yes, I'll stand by you."
Harold did not feel sure that his uncle would thoroughly retain this
satisfactory thread of argument in the uninspired hours of the morning;
but the old gentleman was sure to take the facts easily in the end, and
there was no fear of family coolness or quarrelling on this side. Harold
was glad of it. He was not to be turned aside from any course he had
chosen; but he disliked all quarrelling as an unpleasant expenditure of
energy that could have no good practical result. He was at once active
and luxurious; fond of mastery, and good-natured enough to wish that
every one about him should like his mastery; not caring greatly to know
other people's thoughts, and ready to despise them as blockheads if
their thoughts differed from his, and yet solicitous that they should
have no colorable reason for slight thoughts about _him_. The blockheads
must be forced to respect him. Hence, in proportion as he foresaw his
equals in the neighborhood would be indignant with him for his political
choice, he cared keenly about making a good figure before them in every
other way. His conduct as a landholder was to be judicious, his
establishment was to be kept up generously, his imbecile father treated
with careful regard, his family relations entirely without scandal. He
knew that affairs had been unpleasant in his youth--that there had been
ugly lawsuits--and that his scapegrace brother Durfey had helped to
lower still farther the depressed condition of the family. All this must
be retrieved, now that events had made Harold the head of the Transome
name.
Jermyn must be used for the election, and after that if he must be got
rid of, it would be well to shake him loose quietly; his uncle was
probably right on both these points. But Harold's expectation that he
should want to get rid of Jermyn was founded on other reasons than his
scented handkerchief and his charity-school Latin.
If the lawyer had been presuming on Mrs. Transome's ignorance as a
woman, and on the stupid rakishness of the original heir, the new heir
would prove to him that he had calculated rashly. Otherwise, Harold had
no prejudice against him. In his boyhood and youth he had seen Jermyn
frequenting Transome Court, but had regarded him with that total
indifference with which youngsters are apt to view those who neither
deny them pleasure nor give them any. Jermyn used to smile at him, and
speak to him affably; but Harold, half proud, half shy, got away from
such patronage as soon as possible; he knew Jermyn was a man of
business; his father, his uncle, and Sir Maximus Debarry did not regard
him as a gentleman and their equal. He had known no evil of the man; but
he saw now that if he were really a covetous upstart, there had been a
temptation for him in the management of the Transome affairs; and it was
clear that the estate was in a bad condition.
When Mr. Jermyn was ushered into the breakfast-room the next morning,
Harold found him surprisingly little altered by the fifteen years. He
was gray, but still remarkably handsome; fat, but tall enough to bear
that trial to man's dignity. There was as strong a suggestion of
toilette about him as if he had been five-and-twenty instead of nearly
sixty. He chose always to dress in black, and was especially addicted to
black satin waistcoats, which carried out the general sleekness of his
appearance; and this, together with his white, fat, but
beautifully-shaped hands, which he was in the habit of rubbing gently on
his entrance into a room, gave him very much the air of a lady's
physician. Harold remembered with some amusement his uncle's dislike of
those conspicuous hands; but as his own were soft and dimpled, and as he
too was given to the innocent practice of rubbing those members, his
suspicions were not yet deepened.
"I congratulate you, Mrs. Transome," said Jermyn, with a soft and
deferential smile, "all the more," he added, turning toward Harold, "now
I have the pleasure of actually seeing your son. I am glad to perceive
that an Eastern climate has not been unfavorable to him."
"No," said Harold, shaking Jermyn's hand carelessly, and speaking with
more than his usual brusqueness, "the question is, whether the English
climate will agree with me. It's deuced shifting and damp; and as for
the food, it would be the finest thing in the world for this country if
the southern cooks would change their religion, get persecuted, and fly
to England, as the old silk-weavers did."
"There are plenty of foreign cooks for those who are rich enough to pay
for them, I suppose," said Mrs. Transome, "but they are unpleasant
people to have about one's house."
"Gad! I don't think so," said Harold.
"The old servants are sure to quarrel with them."
"That's no concern of mine. The old servants will have to put up with my
man Dominic, who will show them how to cook and do everything else in a
way that will rather astonish them."
"Old people are not so easily taught to change all their ways, Harold."
"Well, they can give up and watch the young ones," said Harold, thinking
only at that moment of old Mrs. Hickes and Dominic. But his mother was
not thinking of them only.
"You have a valuable servant, it seems," said Jermyn, who understood
Mrs. Transome better than her son did, and wished to smoothen the
current of their dialogue.
"Oh, one of those wonderful southern fellows that make one's life easy.
He's of no country in particular. I don't know whether he's most of a
Jew, a Greek, an Italian, or a Spaniard. He speaks five or six
languages, one as well as another. He's cook, valet, major-domo, and
secretary all in one; and what's more, he's an affectionate fellow--I
can trust to his attachment. That's a sort of human specimen that
doesn't grow here in England, I fancy. I should have been badly off if I
could not have brought Dominic."
They sat down to breakfast with such slight talk as this going on. Each
of the party was preoccupied and uneasy. Harold's mind was busy
constructing probabilities about what he should discover of Jermyn's
mismanagement or dubious application of funds, and the sort of
self-command he must in the worst case exercise in order to use the man
as long as he wanted him. Jermyn was closely observing Harold with an
unpleasant sense that there was an expression of acuteness and
determination about him which would make him formidable. He would
certainly have preferred at that moment that there had been no second
heir of the Transome name to come back upon him from the East. Mrs.
Transome was not observing the two men; rather, her hands were cold, and
her whole person shaken by their presence; she seemed to hear and see
what they said and did with preternatural acuteness, and yet she was
also seeing and hearing what had been said and done many years before,
and feeling a dim terror about the future. There were piteous
sensibilities in this faded woman, who thirty-four years ago, in the
splendor of her bloom, had been imperious to one of these men, and had
rapturously pressed the other as an infant to her bosom, and now knew
that she was of little consequence to either of them.
"Well, what are the prospects about election?" said Harold, as the
breakfast was advancing. "There are two Whigs and one Conservative
likely to be in the field, I know. What is your opinion of the chances?"
Mr. Jermyn had a copious supply of words which often led him into
periphrase, but he cultivated a hesitating stammer, which, with a
handsome impassiveness of face, except when he was smiling at a woman,
or when the latent savageness of his nature was thoroughly roused, he
had found useful in many relations, especially in business. No one could
have found out that he was not at his ease. "My opinion," he replied,
"is in a state of balance at present. This division of the county, you
are aware, contains one manufacturing town of the first magnitude, and
several smaller ones. The manufacturing interest is widely dispersed. So
far--a--there is a presumption--a--in favor of the two Liberal
candidates. Still, with a careful canvass of the agricultural districts,
such as those we have round us at Treby Magna, I think--a--the
auguries--a--would not be unfavorable to the return of a Conservative. A
fourth candidate of good position, who should coalesce with Mr.
Debarry--a----"
Here Mr. Jermyn hesitated for the third time, and Harold broke in.
"That will not be my line of action, so we need not discuss it. If I put
up it will be as a Radical; and I fancy, in any county that would return
Whigs there would be plenty of voters to be combed off by a Radical who
offered himself with good pretensions."
There was the slightest possible quiver discernible across Jermyn's
face. Otherwise he sat as he had done before, with his eyes fixed
abstractedly on the frill of a ham before him, and his hand trifling
with his fork. He did not answer immediately, but, when he did, he
looked round steadily at Harold.
"I'm delighted to perceive that you have kept yourself so thoroughly
acquainted with English politics."
"Oh, of course," said Harold, impatiently. "I'm aware how things have
been going on in England. I always meant to come back ultimately. I
suppose I know the state of Europe as well as if I'd been stationary at
Little Treby for the last fifteen years. If a man goes to the East,
people seem to think he gets turned into something like the one-eyed
calender in the 'Arabian Nights!'"
"Yet I should think there are some things which people who have been
stationary at Little Treby could tell you, Harold," said Mrs. Transome.
"It did not signify about your holding Radical opinions at Smyrna; but
you seem not to imagine how your putting up as a Radical will affect
your position here, and the position of your family. No one will visit
you. And then--the sort of people who will support you! You really have
no idea what an impression it conveys when you say you are a Radical.
There are none of our equals who will not feel that you have disgraced
yourself."
"Pooh!" said Harold, rising and walking along the room.
But Mrs. Transome went on with growing anger in her voice--"It seems to
me that a man owes something to his birth and station, and has no right
to take up this notion or other, just as it suits his fancy; still less
to work at the overthrow of his class. That was what every one said of
Lord Grey, and my family at least is as good as Lord Grey's. You have
wealth now, and might distinguish yourself in the county; and if you had
been true to your colors as a gentleman, you would have had all the
greater opportunity, because the times are so bad. The Debarrys and Lord
Wyvern would have set all the more store by you. For my part, I can't
conceive what good you propose to yourself. I only entreat you to think
again before you take any decided step."
"Mother," said Harold, not angrily or with any raising of his voice, but
in a quick, impatient manner, as if the scene must be got through as
quickly as possible; "it is natural that you should think in this way.
Women, very properly, don't change their views, but keep to the notions
in which they have been brought up. It doesn't signify what they
think--they are not called upon to judge or to act. You must leave me to
take my own course in these matters, which properly belong to men.
Beyond that, I will gratify any wish you may choose to mention. You
shall have a new carriage and a pair of bays all to yourself; you shall
have the house done up in first-rate style, and I am not thinking of
marrying. But let us understand that there shall be no further collision
between us on subjects on which I must be master of my own actions."
"And you will put the crown to the mortifications of my life, Harold. I
don't know who would be a mother if she could foresee what a slight
thing she will be to her son when she is old."
Mrs. Transome here walked out of the room by the nearest way--the glass
door open toward the terrace. Mr. Jermyn had risen too, and his hands
were on the back of his chair. He looked quite impassive: it was not the
first time he had seen Mrs. Transome angry; but now, for the first time,
he thought the outburst of her temper would be useful to him. She, poor
woman, knew quite well that she had been unwise, and that she had been
making herself disagreeable to Harold to no purpose. But half the
sorrows of women would be averted if they could repress the speech they
know to be useless--nay, the speech they have resolved not to utter.
Harold continued his walking a moment longer, and then said to Jermyn--
"You smoke?"
"No, I always defer to the ladies. Mrs. Jermyn is peculiarly sensitive
in such matters, and doesn't like tobacco."
Harold, who, underneath all the tendencies which had made him a Liberal,
had intense personal pride, thought, "Confound the fellow--with his Mrs.
Jermyn! Does he think we are on a footing for me to know anything about
his wife?"
"Well, I took my hookah before breakfast," he said aloud, "so, if you
like, we'll go into the library. My father never gets up till midday, I
find."
"Sit down, sit down," said Harold, as they entered the handsome,
spacious library. But he himself continued to stand before a map of the
county which he had opened from a series of rollers occupying a
compartment among the bookshelves. "The first question, Mr. Jermyn, now
you know my intentions, is, whether you will undertake to be my agent in
this election, and help me through? There's no time to be lost, and I
don't want to lose my chance, as I may not have another for seven years.
I understand," he went on, flashing a look straight at Jermyn, "that you
have not taken any conspicuous course in politics, and I know that
Labron is agent for the Debarrys."
"Oh--a--my dear sir--a man necessarily has his political convictions,
but of what use is it for a professional man--a--of some education, to
talk of them in a little country town? There really is no comprehension
of public questions in such places. Party feeling, indeed, was quite
asleep here before the agitation about the Catholic Relief Bill. It is
true that I concurred with our incumbent in getting up a petition
against the Reform Bill, but I did not state my reasons. The weak points
in that Bill are--a--too palpable, and I fancy you and I should not
differ much on that head. The fact is, when I knew that you were to come
back to us, I kept myself in reserve, though I was much pressed by the
friends of Sir James Clement, the Ministerial candidate, who is----"
"However, you will act for me--that's settled?" said Harold.
"Certainly," said Jermyn, inwardly irritated by Harold's rapid manner of
cutting him short.
"Which of the Liberal candidates, as they call themselves, has the
better chance, eh?"
"I was going to observe that Sir James Clement has not so good a
chance as Mr. Garstin, supposing that a third Liberal candidate
presents himself. There are two senses in which a politician can be
liberal"--here Mr. Jermyn smiled--"Sir James Clement is a poor baronet,
hoping for an appointment, and can't be expected to be liberal in that
wider sense which commands majorities."
"I wish this man were not so much of a talker," thought Harold, "he'll
bore me. We shall see," he said aloud, "what can be done in the way of
combination. I'll come down to your office after one o'clock if it will
suit you?"
"Perfectly."
"Ah, and you'll have all the lists and papers and necessary information
ready for me there. I must get up a dinner for the tenants, and we can
invite whom we like besides the tenants. Just now, I'm going over one of
the farms on hand with the bailiff. By the way, that's a desperately bad
business, having three farms unlet--how comes that about, eh?"
"That is precisely what I wanted to say a few words about to you. You
have observed already how strongly Mrs. Transome takes certain things to
heart. You can imagine that she has been severely tried in many ways.
Mr. Transome's want of health; Mr. Durfey's habits--a----"
"Yes, yes."
"She is a woman for whom I naturally entertain the highest respect, and
she has had hardly any gratification for many years, except the sense of
having affairs to a certain extent in her own hands. She objects to
changes; she will not have a new style of tenants; she likes the old
stock of farmers who milk their own cows, and send their younger
daughters out to service: all this makes it difficult to do the best
with the estate. I am aware things are not as they ought to be, for, in
point of fact, improved agricultural management is a matter in which I
take considerable interest, and the farm which I myself hold on the
estate you will see, I think, to be in a superior condition. But Mrs.
Transome is a woman of strong feeling, and I would urge you, my dear
sir, to make the changes which you have, but which I had not the right
to insist on, as little painful to her as possible."
"I shall know what to do, sir, never fear," said Harold, much offended.
"You will pardon, I hope, a perhaps undue freedom of suggestion from a
man of my age, who has been so long in a close connection with the
family affairs--a--I have never considered that connection simply in a
light of business--a----"
"Damn him, I'll soon let him know that _I_ do," thought Harold. But in
proportion as he found Jermyn's manners annoying, he felt the necessity
of controlling himself. He despised all persons who defeated their own
projects by the indulgence of momentary impulses.
"I understand, I understand," he said aloud. "You've had more awkward
business on your hands than usually falls to the share of a family
lawyer. We shall set everything right by degrees. But now as to the
canvassing. I've made arrangements with a first-rate man in London, who
understands these matters thoroughly--a solicitor, of course--he has
carried no end of men into Parliament. I'll engage him to meet us at
Duffield--say when?"
The conversation after this was driven carefully clear of all angles,
and ended with determined amicableness. When Harold, in his ride an hour
or two afterward, encountered his uncle shouldering a gun, and followed
by one black and one liver-spotted pointer, his muscular person with its
red eagle face set off by a velveteen jacket and leather leggings, Mr.
Lingon's first question was--
"Well, lad, how have you got on with Jermyn?"
"Oh, I don't think I shall like the fellow. He's a sort of amateur
gentleman. But I must make use of him. I expect whatever I get out of
him will only be something short of fair pay for what he has got out of
us. But I shall see."
"Ay, ay, use his gun to bring down your game, and after that, beat the
thief with the butt end. That's wisdom and justice and pleasure all in
one--talking between ourselves as uncle and nephew. But I say, Harold, I
was going to tell you, now I come to think of it, this is rather a
nasty business, your calling yourself a Radical. I've been turning it
over in after-dinner speeches, but it looks awkward--it's not what
people are used to--it wants a good deal of Latin to make it go down. I
shall be worried about it at the sessions, and I can think of nothing
neat enough to carry about in my pocket by way of answer."
"Nonsense, uncle! I remember what a good speechifier you always were;
you'll never be at a loss. You only want a few more evenings to think of
it."
"But you'll not be attacking the Church and the institutions of the
country--you'll not be going those lengths; you'll keep up the bulwarks,
and so on, eh?"
"No, I shan't attack the Church, only the incomes of the bishops,
perhaps, to make them eke out the incomes of the poor clergy."
"Well, well, I have no objection to that. Nobody likes our bishop: he's
all Greek and greediness; too proud to dine with his own father. You may
pepper the bishops a little. But you'll respect the constitution handed
down, etc.--and you'll rally round the throne--and the King, God bless
him, and the usual toasts, eh?"
"Of course, of course. I am a Radical only in rooting out abuses."
"That's the word I wanted, my lad!" said the vicar, slapping Harold's
knee. "That's a spool to wind a speech on. Abuses is the very word; and
if anybody shows himself offended, he'll put the cap on for himself."
"I remove the rotten timbers," said Harold, inwardly amused, "and
substitute fresh oak, that's all."
"Well done, my boy! By George, you'll be a speaker! But I say, Harold, I
hope you've got a little Latin left. This young Debarry is a tremendous
fellow at the classics, and walks on stilts to any length. He's one of
the new Conservatives. Old Sir Maximus doesn't understand him at all."
"That won't do at the hustings," said Harold. "He'll get knocked off his
stilts pretty quickly there."
"Bless me! it's astonishing how well you're up in the affairs of the
country, my boy. But rub up a few quotations--'_Quod turpe bonis decebat
Crispinum_'--and that sort of thing--just to show Debarry what you could
do if you liked. But you want to ride on?"
"Yes; I have an appointment at Treby. Good-bye."
"He's a cleverish chap," muttered the vicar, as Harold rode away. "When
he's had plenty of English exercise, and brought out his knuckle a bit,
he'll be a Lingon again as he used to be. I must go and see how Arabella
takes his being a Radical. It's a little awkward; but a clergyman must
keep peace in a family. Confound it! I'm not bound to love Toryism
better than my own flesh and blood, and the manor I shoot over. That's a
heathenish, Brutus-like sort of thing, as if Providence couldn't take
care of the country without my quarrelling with my own sister's son!"