"Rumor doth double like the voice and echo."--_Shakespeare._
The mind of a man is as a country which was once open to squatters,
who have bred and multiplied and become masters of the land. But
then happeneth a time when new and hungry comers dispute the land;
and there is trial of strength, and the stronger wins. Nevertheless
the first squatters be they who have prepared the ground, and the
crops to the end will be sequent (though chiefly on the nature of
the soil, as of light sand, mixed loam, or heavy clay, yet)
somewhat on the primal labor and sowing.
That talkative maiden, Rumor, though in the interest of art she is
figured as a youthful, winged beauty with flowing garments, soaring
above the heads of men, and breathing world-thrilling news through a
gracefully-curved trumpet, is in fact a very old maid, who puckers her
silly face by the fireside, and really does no more than chirp a wrong
guess or a lame story into the ear of a fellow gossip; all the rest of
the work attributed to her is done by the ordinary working of those
passions against which men pray in the Litany, with the help of a
plentiful stupidity against which we have never yet had any authorized
form of prayer.
When Mr. Scales's strong need to make an impressive figure in
conversation, together with his very slight need of any other premise
than his own sense of his wide general knowledge and probable
infallibility, led him to specify five hundred thousand as the lowest
admissible amount of Harold Transome's commercially-acquired fortune, it
was not fair to put this down to poor old Miss Rumor, who had only told
Scales that the fortune was considerable. And again, when the curt Mr.
Sircome found occasion at Treby to mention the five hundred thousand as
a fact that folks seemed pretty sure about, this expansion of the butler
into "folks" was entirely due to Mr. Sircome's habitual preference for
words which could not be laid hold of or give people a handle over him.
It was in this simple way that the report of Harold Transome's fortune
spread and was magnified, adding much lustre to his opinion in the eyes
of Liberals, and compelling even men of the opposite party to admit that
it increased his eligibility as a member for North Loamshire. It was
observed by a sound thinker in these parts that property was ballast;
and when once the aptness of that metaphor had been perceived, it
followed that a man was not fit to navigate the sea of politics without
a great deal of such ballast; and that, rightly understood, whatever
increased the expense of election, inasmuch as it virtually raised the
property qualification, was an unspeakable boon to the country.
Meanwhile the fortune that was getting larger in the imagination of
constituents was shrinking a little in the imagination of its owner. It
was hardly more than a hundred and fifty thousand; and there were not
only the heavy mortgages to be paid off, but also a large amount of
capital was needed in order to repair the farm-buildings all over the
estate, to carry out extensive drainage, and make allowances to
in-coming tenants, which might remove the difficulties of newly letting
the farms in a time of agricultural depression. The farms actually
tenanted were held by men who had begged hard to succeed their fathers
in getting a little poorer every year, on land which was also getting
poorer, where the highest rate of increase was in the arrears of rent,
and where the master, in crushed hat and corduroys, looked pitiably lean
and care-worn by the side of pauper laborers, who showed that superior
assimilating power often observed to attend nourishment by the public
money. Mr. Goffe, of Rabbit's End, had never had it explained to him
that, according to the true theory of rent, land must inevitably be
given up when it would not yield a profit equal to the ordinary rate of
interest; so that from want of knowing what was inevitable, and not from
a Titanic spirit of opposition, he kept on his land. He often said to
himself, with a melancholy wipe of his sleeve across his brow, that he
"didn't know which-a-way to turn"; and he would have been still more at
a loss on the subject if he had quitted Rabbit's End with a wagonful of
furniture and utensils, a file of receipts, a wife with five children,
and a shepherd dog in low spirits.
It took no long time for Harold Transome to discover this state of
things, and to see, moreover, that, except on the demesne immediately
around the house, the timber had been mismanaged. The woods had been
recklessly thinned, and there had been insufficient planting. He had not
yet thoroughly investigated the various accounts kept by his mother, by
Jermyn, and by Banks the bailiff; but what had been done with the large
sums which had been received for timber was a suspicious mystery to him.
He observed that the farm held by Jermyn was in first-rate order, that a
good deal had been spent on the buildings, and that the rent had stood
unpaid. Mrs. Transome had taken an opportunity of saying that Jermyn had
had some of the mortgage deeds transferred to him, and that his rent was
set against so much interest. Harold had only said, in his careless yet
decisive way, "Oh, Jermyn be hanged! It seems to me if Durfey hadn't
died and made room for me, Jermyn would have ended by coming to live
here, and you would have had to keep the lodge and open the gate for his
carriage. But I shall pay him off--mortgages and all--by-and-by. I'll
owe him nothing--not even a curse!" Mrs. Transome said no more. Harold
did not care to enter fully into the subject with his mother. The fact
that she had been active in the management of the estate--had ridden
about it continually, had busied herself with accounts, had been
head-bailiff of the vacant farms, and had yet allowed things to go
wrong--was set down by him simply to the general futility of women's
attempts to transact men's business. He did not want to say anything to
annoy her: he was only determined to let her understand, as quietly as
possible, that she had better cease all interference.
Mrs. Transome did understand this; and it was very little that she dared
to say on business, though there was a fierce struggle of her anger and
pride with a dread which was nevertheless supreme. As to the old
tenants, she only observed, on hearing Harold burst forth about their
wretched condition, "that with the estate so burdened, the yearly loss
by arrears could better be borne than the outlay and sacrifice necessary
in order to let the farms anew."
"I was really capable of calculating, Harold," she ended, with a touch
of bitterness. "It seems easy to deal with farmers and their affairs
when you only see them in print, I dare say; but it's not quite so easy
when you live among them. You have only to look at Sir Maximus's estate:
you will see plenty of the same thing. The times have been dreadful and
old families like to keep their old tenants. But I dare say that is
Toryism."
"It's a hash of odds and ends, if that is Toryism, my dear mother.
However, I wish you had kept three more old tenants; for then I should
have had three more fifty-pound voters. And, in a hard run, one may be
beaten by a head. But," Harold added, smiling and handing her a ball of
worsted which had fallen, "a woman ought to be a Tory, and graceful, and
handsome, like you. I should hate a woman who took up my opinions and
talked for me. I'm an Oriental, you know. I say, mother, shall we have
this room furnished with rose-color? I notice that it suits your bright
gray hair."
Harold thought it was only natural that his mother should have been in a
sort of subjection to Jermyn throughout the awkward circumstances of the
family. It was the way of women, and all weak minds, to think that what
they had been used to was unalterable, and any quarrel with a man who
managed private affairs was necessarily a formidable thing. He himself
was proceeding very cautiously, and preferred not even to know too much
just at present, lest a certain personal antipathy he was conscious of
toward Jermyn, and an occasional liability to exasperation, should get
the better of a calm and clear-sighted resolve not to quarrel with the
man while he could be of use. Harold would have been disgusted with
himself if he had helped to frustrate his own purpose. And his strongest
purpose now was to get returned for Parliament, to make a figure there
as a Liberal member, and to become on all grounds a personage of weight
in North Loamshire.
How Howard Transome came to be a Liberal in opposition to all the
traditions of his family, was a more subtle enquiry than he had ever
cared to follow out. The newspapers undertook to explain it. The _North
Loamshire Herald_ witnessed with a grief and disgust certain to be
shared by all persons who were actuated by wholesome British feeling, an
example of defection in the inheritor of a family name which in times
past had been associated with attachment to right principle, and with
the maintenance of our constitution in Church and State; and pointed to
it as an additional proof that men who had passed any large portion of
their lives beyond the limits of our favored country, usually contracted
not only a laxity of feeling toward Protestantism, nay, toward religion
itself--a latitudinarian spirit hardly distinguishable from atheism--but
also a levity of disposition, inducing them to tamper with those
institutions by which alone Great Britain had risen to her pre-eminence
among the nations. Such men, infected with outlandish habits,
intoxicated with vanity, grasping at momentary power by flattery of the
multitude, fearless because godless, Liberal because un-English, were
ready to pull one stone from under another in the national edifice, till
the great structure tottered to its fall. On the other hand, the
_Duffield Watchman_ saw in this signal instance of self-liberation from
the trammels of prejudice, a decisive guarantee of intellectual
pre-eminence, united with a generous sensibility to the claims of man as
man, which had burst asunder, and cast off, by a spontaneous exertion of
energy, the cramping out-worn shell of hereditary bias and class
interest.
But these large-minded guides of public opinion argued from wider data
than could be furnished by any knowledge of the particular case
concerned. Harold Transome was neither the dissolute cosmopolitan so
vigorously sketched by the Tory _Herald_, nor the intellectual giant and
moral lobster suggested by the Liberal imagination of the _Watchman_.
Twenty years ago he had been a bright, active, good-tempered lad, with
sharp eyes and a good aim; he delighted in success and in predominance;
but he did not long for an impossible predominance, and become sour and
sulky because it was impossible. He played at the games he was clever
in, and usually won; all other games he let alone, and thought them of
little worth. At home and at Eton he had been side by side with his
stupid elder brother Durfey, whom he despised; and he very early began
to reflect that since this Caliban in miniature was older than himself,
he must carve out his own fortune. That was a nuisance; and on the whole
the world seemed rather ill-arranged, at Eton especially, where there
were many reasons why Harold made no great figure. He was not sorry the
money was wanting to send him to Oxford; he did not see the good of
Oxford; he had been surrounded by many things during his short life, of
which he had distinctly said to himself that he did not see the good,
and he was not disposed to venerate on the strength of any good that
others saw. He turned his back on home very cheerfully, though he was
rather fond of his mother, and very fond of Transome Court, and the
river where he had been used to fish; but he said to himself as he
passed the lodge-gates, "I'll get rich somehow, and have an estate of my
own, and do what I like with it." This determined aiming at something
not easy but clearly possible, marked the direction in which Harold's
nature was strong; he had the energetic will and muscle, the
self-confidence, the quick perception, and the narrow imagination which
make what is admiringly called the practical mind.
Since then his character had been ripened by a various experience, and
also by much knowledge which he had set himself deliberately to gain.
But the man was no more than the boy writ large, with an extensive
commentary. The years had nourished an inclination to as much opposition
as would enable him to assert his own independence and power without
throwing himself into that tabooed condition which robs power of its
triumph. And this inclination had helped his shrewdness in forming
judgments which were at once innovating and moderate. He was addicted at
once to rebellion and to conformity, and only an intimate personal
knowledge could enable any one to predict where his conformity would
begin. The limit was not defined by theory, but was drawn in an
irregular zigzag by early disposition and association; and his
resolution, of which he had never lost hold, to be a thorough Englishman
again some day, had kept up the habit of considering all his conclusions
with reference to English politics and English social conditions. He
meant to stand up for every change that the economical condition of the
country required, and he had an angry contempt for men with coronets on
their coaches, but too small a share of brains to see when they had
better make a virtue of necessity. His respect was rather for men who
had no coronets, but who achieved a just influence by furthering all
measures which the common-sense of the country, and the increasing
self-assertion of the majority, peremptorily demanded. He could be such
a man himself.
In fact Harold Transome was a clever, frank, good-natured egoist; not
stringently consistent, but without any disposition to falsity; but with
a pride that was moulded in an individual rather than an hereditary
form; unspeculative, unsentimental, unsympathetic; fond of sensual
pleasures, but disinclined to all vice, and attached as a healthy,
clear-sighted person, to all conventional morality, construed with a
certain freedom, like doctrinal articles to which the public order may
require subscription. A character is apt to look but indifferently,
written out in this way. Reduced to a map, our premises seem
insignificant, but they make, nevertheless, a very pretty freehold to
live in and walk over; and so, if Harold Transome had been among your
acquaintances, and you had observed his qualities through the medium of
his agreeable person, bright smile, and a certain easy charm which
accompanies sensuousness when unsullied by coarseness--through the
medium also of the many opportunities in which he would have made
himself useful or pleasant to you--you would have thought him a good
fellow, highly acceptable as a guest, a colleague, or a brother-in-law.
Whether all mothers would have liked him as a son is another question.
It is a fact perhaps kept a little too much in the background, that
mothers have a self larger than their maternity, and that when their
sons have become taller than themselves, and are gone from them to
college or into the world, there are wide spaces of their time which are
not filled with praying for their boys, reading old letters, and envying
yet blessing those who are attending to their shirt-buttons. Mrs.
Transome was certainly not one of those bland, adoring, and gently
tearful women. After sharing the common dream that when a beautiful
man-child was born to her, her cup of happiness would be full, she had
travelled through long years apart from that child to find herself at
last in the presence of a son of whom she was afraid, who was utterly
unmanageable by her, and to whose sentiments in any given case she
possessed no key. Yet Harold was a kind son: he kissed his mother's
brow, offered her his arm, let her choose what she liked for the house
and garden, asked her whether she would have bays or grays for her new
carriage, and was bent on seeing her make as good a figure in the
neighborhood as any other woman of her rank. She trembled under this
kindness: it was not enough to satisfy her; still, if it should ever
cease and give place to something else--she was too uncertain about
Harold's feelings to imagine clearly what that something would be. The
finest threads, such as no eye sees, if bound cunningly about the
sensitive flesh, so that the movement to break them would bring torture,
may make a worse bondage than any fetters. Mrs. Transome felt the fatal
thread about her, and the bitterness of this helpless bondage mingled
itself with the new elegancies of the dining and drawing-rooms, and all
the household changes which Harold had ordered to be brought about with
magical quickness. Nothing was as she had once expected it would be. If
Harold had shown the least care to have her stay in the room with
him--if he had really cared for her opinion--if he had been what she had
dreamed he would be in the eyes of those people who had made her
world--if all the past could be dissolved, and leave no solid trace of
itself--mighty _ifs_ that were all impossible--she would have tasted
some joy; but now she began to look back with regret to the days when
she sat in loneliness among the old drapery, and still longed for
something that might happen. Yet, save in a bitter little speech, or in
a deep sigh, heard by no one besides Denner, she kept all these things
hidden in her heart, and went out in the autumn sunshine to overlook the
alterations in the pleasure-grounds very much as a happy woman might
have done. One day, however, when she was occupied in this way, an
occasion came on which she chose to express indirectly a part of her
inward care.
She was standing on the broad gravel in the afternoon; the long shadows
lay on the grass; the light seemed the more glorious because of the
reddened and golden trees. The gardeners were busy at their pleasant
work; the newly-turned soil gave out an agreeable fragrance; and little
Harry was playing with Nimrod round old Mr. Transome, who sat placidly
on a low garden-chair. The scene would have made a charming picture of
English domestic life, and the handsome, majestic, gray-haired woman
(obviously grandmamma) would have been especially admired. But the
artist would have felt it requisite to turn her face toward her husband
and little grandson, and to have given her an elderly amiability of
expression which would have divided remark with his exquisite rendering
of her Indian shawl. Mrs. Transome's face was turned the other way, and
for this reason she only heard an approaching step, and did not see
whose it was; yet it startled her: it was not quick enough to be her
son's step, and besides, Harold was away at Duffield. It was Mr.
Jermyn's.