'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 being
a polling-place, had been, at the beginning of the century, quite a
typical old market-town, lying in pleasant sleepiness among green
pastures, with a rush-fringed river meandering through them. Its
principal street had various handsome and tall-windowed brick houses
with walled gardens behind them; and at the end, where it widened into
the market-place, there was the cheerful rough-stuccoed front of that
excellent inn, the Marquis of Granby, where the farmers put up their
gigs, not only on fair and market days, but on exceptional Sundays when
they came to church. And the church was one of those fine old English
structures worth travelling to see, standing in a broad churchyard with
a line of solemn yew-trees beside it, and lifting a majestic tower and
spire far above the red-and-purple roofs of the town. It was not large
enough to hold all the parishioners of a parish which stretched over
distant villages and hamlets; but then they were never so unreasonable
as to wish to be all in at once, and had never complained that the space
of a large side-chapel was taken up by the tombs of the Debarrys, and
shut in by a handsome iron screen. For when the black Benedictines
ceased to pray and chant in this church, when the Blessed Virgin and St.
Gregory were expelled, the Debarrys, as lords of the manor, naturally
came next to Providence and took the place of the saints. Long before
that time, indeed, there had been a Sir Maximus Debarry who had been at
the fortifying of the old castle, which now stood in ruins in the midst
of the green pastures, and with its sheltering wall toward the north
made an excellent strawyard for the pigs of Wace & Co., brewers of the
celebrated Treby beer. Wace & Co. did not stand alone in the town as
prosperous traders on a large scale, to say nothing of those who had
retired from business; and in no country town of the same small size as
Treby was there a larger proportion of families who had handsome sets of
china without handles, hereditary punch-bowls, and large silver ladles
with a Queen Anne's guinea in the centre. Such people naturally took tea
and supped together frequently; and as there was no professional man or
tradesman in Treby who was not connected by business, if not by blood,
with the farmers of the district, the richer sort of these were much
invited, and gave invitations in their turn. They played at whist, ate
and drank generously, praised Mr. Pitt and the war as keeping up prices
and religion, and were very humorous about each other's property, having
much the same coy pleasure in allusions to their secret ability to
purchase, as blushing lasses sometimes have in jokes about their secret
preferences. The rector was always of the Debarry family, associated
only with county people, and was much respected for his affability; a
clergyman who would have taken tea with the townspeople would have given
a 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 gradually
awakening in it that higher consciousness which is known to bring higher
pains. First came the canal; next, the working of the coal-mines at
Sproxton, two miles off the town; and thirdly, the discovery of a saline
spring, which suggested to a too constructive brain the possibility of
turning Treby Magna into a fashionable watering-place. So daring an idea
was not originated by a native Trebian, but by a young lawyer who came
from a distance, knew the dictionary by heart, and was probably an
illegitimate son of somebody or other. The idea, although it promised an
increase of wealth to the town, was not well received at first; ladies
objected to seeing "objects" drawn about in hand-carriages, the doctor
foresaw the advent of unsound practitioners, and most retail tradesmen
concurred with him that new doings were usually for the advantage of new
people. The more unanswerable reasoners urged that Treby had prospered
without 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 Sir
Maximus Debarry, who was to have an unprecedented return for the
thousands he would lay out on a pump-room and hotel, regarded the thing
as a little too new, and held back for some time. But the persuasive
powers of the young lawyer, Mr. Matthew Jermyn, together with the
opportune opening of a stone-quarry, triumphed at last; the handsome
buildings were erected, an excellent guide-book and descriptive cards,
surmounted by vignettes, were printed, and Treby Magna became conscious
of certain facts in its own history of which it had previously been in
contented ignorance.
But it was all in vain. The Spa, for some mysterious reason, did not
succeed. Some attributed the failure to the coal-mines and the canal;
others to the peace, which had had ruinous effects on the country; and
others, who disliked Jermyn, to the original folly of the plan. Among
these last was Sir Maximus himself, who never forgave the too persuasive
attorney: it was Jermyn's fault not only that a useless hotel had been
built, but that he, Sir Maximus, being straitened for money, had at last
let the building, with the adjacent land lying on the river, on a long
lease, on the supposition that it was to be turned into a tape
manufactory--a bitter thing to any gentleman, and especially to the
representative of one of the oldest families in England.
In this way it happened that Treby Magna gradually passed from being
simply a respectable market town--the heart of a great rural district,
where the trade was only such as had close relations with the local
landed interest--and took on the more complex life brought by mines and
manufactures, which belong more directly to the great circulating system
of the nation than to the local system to which they had been
superadded; and in this way it was that Trebian Dissent gradually
altered its character. Formerly it had been of a quiescent, well-to-do
kind, represented architecturally by a small, venerable, dark-pewed
chapel, built by Presbyterians, but long occupied by a sparse
congregation of Independents, who were as little moved by doctrinal zeal
as their church-going neighbors, and did not feel themselves deficient
in religious liberty, inasmuch as they were not hindered from
occasionally slumbering in their pews, and were not obliged to go
regularly to the weekly prayer-meeting. But when stone-pits and
coal-pits made new hamlets that threatened to spread up to the very
town, when the tape-weavers came with their news-reading inspectors and
book-keepers, the Independent chapel began to be filled with eager men
and women, to whom the exceptional possession of religious truth was the
condition which reconciled them to a meagre existence, and made them
feel in secure alliance with the unseen but supreme rule of a world in
which their own visible part was small. There were Dissenters in Treby
now who could not be regarded by the Church people in the light of old
neighbors to whom the habit of going to chapel was an innocent,
unenviable inheritance along with a particular house and garden, a
tan-yard, or a grocery business--Dissenters who, in their turn, without
meaning to be in the least abusive, spoke of the high-bred rector as a
blind leader of the blind. And Dissent was not the only thing that the
times had altered; prices had fallen, poor-rates had risen, rent and
tithe were not elastic enough, and the farmer's fat sorrow had become
lean; he began to speculate on causes, and to trace things back to that
causeless mystery, the cessation of one-pound notes. Thus, when
political agitation swept in a current through the country, Treby Magna
was prepared to vibrate. The Catholic Emancipation Bill opened the eyes
of neighbors and made them aware how very injurious they were to each
other and to the welfare of mankind generally. Mr. Tiliot, the Church
spirit-merchant, knew now that Mr. Nuttwood, the obliging grocer, was
one of those Dissenters, Deists, Socinians, Papists, and Radicals, who
were in league to destroy the Constitution. A retired old London
tradesman, who was believed to understand politics, said that thinking
people must wish George III were alive again in all his early vigor of
mind: and even the farmers became less materialistic in their view of
causes, and referred much to the agency of the devil and the Irish
Romans. The rector, the Reverend Augustus Debarry, really a fine
specimen of the old-fashioned aristocratic clergyman, preaching short
sermons, understanding business, and acting liberally about his tithe,
had never before found himself in collision with Dissenters; but now he
began to feel that these people were a nuisance in the parish, that his
brother Sir Maximus must take care lest they should get land to build
more chapels, and that it might not have been a bad thing if the law had
furnished him as a magistrate with a power of putting a stop to the
political sermons of the Independent preacher, which, in their way,
were as pernicious sources of intoxication as the beerhouses. The
Dissenters, on their side, were not disposed to sacrifice the cause of
truth and freedom to a temporizing mildness of language; but they
defended themselves from the charge of religious indifference, and
solemnly disclaimed any lax expectations that Catholics were likely to
be saved--urging, on the contrary, that they were not too hopeful about
Protestants who adhered to a bloated and worldly Prelacy. Thus Treby
Magna, which had lived quietly through the great earthquakes of the
French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, which had remained unmoved by
the "Rights of Man," and saw little in Mr. Cobbett's "Weekly Register"
except that he held eccentric views about potatoes, began at last to
know the higher pains of a dim political consciousness; and the
development had been greatly helped by the recent agitation about the
Reform Bill. Tory, Whig, and Radical did not perhaps become clearer in
their definition of each other; but the names seemed to acquire so
strong a stamp of honor or infamy, that definitions would only have
weakened the impression. As to the short and easy method of judging
opinions by the personal character of those who held them, it was liable
to be much frustrated in Treby. It so happened in that particular town
that the Reformers were not all of them large-hearted patriots or ardent
lovers of justice; indeed, one of them, in the very midst of the
agitation, was detected in using unequal scales--a fact to which many
Tories pointed with disgust as showing plainly enough, without further
argument, that the cry for a change in the representative system was
hollow trickery. Again, the Tories were far from being all oppressors,
disposed to grind down the working classes into serfdom; and it was
undeniable that the inspector at the tape manufactory, who spoke with
much eloquence on the extension of the suffrage, was a more tyrannical
personage than open-handed Mr. Wace, whose chief political tenet was
that it was all nonsense to give men votes when they had no stake in the
country. On the other hand there were some Tories who gave themselves a
great deal of leisure to abuse hypocrites, Radicals, Dissenters, and
atheism generally, but whose inflamed faces, theistic swearing, and
frankness in expressing a wish to borrow, certainly did not mark them
out strongly as holding opinions likely to save society.
The Reformers had triumphed: it was clear that the wheels were going
whither they were pulling, and they were in fine spirits for exertion.
But if they were pulling toward the country's ruin, there was the more
need for others to hang on behind and get the wheels to stick if
possible. In Treby, as elsewhere, people were told they must "rally" at
the coming election; but there was now a large number of waverers--men
of flexible, practical minds, who were not such bigots as to cling to
any views when a good tangible reason could be urged against them; while
some regarded it as the most neighborly thing to hold a little with both
sides, and were not sure that they should rally or vote at all. It
seemed 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 men
and women; but there is no private life which has not been determined by
a wider public life, from the time when the primeval milkmaid had to
wander with the wanderings of her clan, because the cow she milked was
one of a herd which had made the pastures bare. Even in that
conservatory existence where the fair Camellia is sighed for by the
noble young Pine-apple, neither of them needing to care about the frost,
or rain outside, there is a nether apparatus of hot water pipes liable
to cool down on a strike of the gardeners or a scarcity of coal. And the
lives we are about to look back upon do not belong to those conservatory
species; they are rooted in the common earth, having to endure all the
ordinary chances of past and present weather. As to the weather of 1832,
the Zadkiel of that time had predicted that the electrical condition of
the clouds in the political hemisphere would produce unusual
perturbations in organic existence, and he would perhaps have seen a
fulfillment of his remarkable prophecy in that mutual influence of
dissimilar destinies which we shall see gradually unfolding itself. For
if the mixed political conditions of Treby Magna had not been acted on
by the passing of the Reform Bill, Mr. Harold Transome would not have
presented himself as a candidate for North Loamshire, Treby would not
have been a polling-place, Mr. Matthew Jermyn would not have been on
affable terms with a Dissenting preacher and his flock, and the
venerable town would not have been placarded with handbills, more or
less complimentary and retrospective--conditions in this case essential
to 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 named
Felix Holt made a considerable difference in the life of Harold
Transome, though nature and fortune seemed to have done what they could
to keep the lots of the two men quite aloof from each other. Felix was
heir to nothing better than a quack medicine; his mother lived up a back
street in Treby Magna, and her sitting-room was ornamented with her best
tea-tray and several framed testimonials to the virtues of Holt's
Cathartic Lozenges and Holt's Restorative Elixir. There could hardly
have been a lot less like Harold Transome's than this of the quack
doctor's son, except in the superficial facts that he called himself a
Radical, that he was the only son of his mother, and that he had lately
returned to his home with ideas and resolves not a little disturbing to
that mother's mind.
But Mrs. Holt, unlike Mrs. Transome, was much disposed to reveal her
troubles, and was not without a counsellor into whose ear she could pour
them. On this second of September, when Mr. Harold Transome had had his
first interview with Jermyn, and when the attorney went back to his
office with new views of canvassing in his mind, Mrs. Holt had put on
her bonnet as early as nine o'clock in the morning, and had gone to see
the Reverend Rufus Lyon, minister of the Independent Chapel usually
spoken of as "Malthouse Yard."