I doe believe that, as the gall has severall receptacles in several
creatures, soe there's scarce any creature but hath that emunctorye
somewhere.--SIR THOMAS BROWNE.
Fancy what a game at chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and
intellects, more or less small and cunning: if you were not only
uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain about your
own; if your knight could shuffle himself on to a new square by the sly;
if your bishop, in disgust at your castling, could wheedle your pawns
out of their places; and if your pawns, hating you because they are
pawns, could make away from their appointed posts that you might get
checkmate on a sudden. You might be the longest-headed of deductive
reasoners, and yet you might be beaten by your own pawns. You would be
especially likely to be beat, if you depended arrogantly on your
mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with
contempt.
Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with the game a man has to
play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for his instruments.
He thinks himself sagacious, perhaps, because he trusts no bond except
that of self-interest: but the only self-interest he can safely rely on
is what seems to be such to the mind he would use or govern. Can he ever
be sure of knowing this?
Matthew Jermyn was under no misgivings as to the fealty of Johnson. He
had "been the making of Johnson"; and this seems to many men as a reason
for expecting devotion, in spite of the fact that they themselves,
though very fond of their own persons and lives, are not at all devoted
to the Maker they believe in. Johnson was a most serviceable
subordinate. Being a man who aimed at respectability, a family man, who
had a good church-pew, subscribed for engravings of banquet pictures
where there were portraits of political celebrities, and wished his
children to be more unquestionably genteel than their father, he
presented all the more numerous handles of worldly motive by which a
judicious superior might get a hold on him. But this useful regard to
respectability had its inconvenience in relation to such a superior: it
was a mark of some vanity and some pride, which, if they were not
touched just in the right handling-place, were liable to become raw and
sensitive. Jermyn was aware of Johnson's weaknesses, and thought he had
flattered them sufficiently. But on the point of knowing when we are
disagreeable, our human nature is fallible. Our lavender-water, our
smiles, our compliments, and other polite falsities, are constantly
offensive, when in the very nature of them they can only be meant to
attract admiration and regard. Jermyn had often been unconsciously
disagreeable to Johnson, over and above the constant offence of being an
ostentatious patron. He would never let Johnson dine with his wife and
daughters; he would not himself dine at Johnson's house when he was in
town. He often did what was equivalent to poohpoohing his conversation
by not even appearing to listen, and by suddenly cutting it short with a
query on a new subject. Jermyn was able and politic enough to have
commanded a great deal of success in his life, but he could not help
being handsome, arrogant, fond of being heard, indisposed to any kind of
comradeship, amorous and bland toward women, cold and self-contained
toward men. You will hear very strong denials that an attorney's being
handsome could enter into the dislike he excited; but conversation
consists a good deal in the denial of what is true. From the British
point of view masculine beauty is regarded very much as it is in the
drapery business:--as good solely for the fancy department--for young
noblemen, artists, poets, and the clergy. Some one who, like Mr. Lingon,
was disposed to revile Jermyn (perhaps it was Sir Maximus), had called
him "a cursed, sleek, handsome, long-winded, overbearing sycophant";
epithets which expressed, rather confusedly, the mingled character of
the dislike he excited. And serviceable John Johnson, himself sleek, and
mindful about his broadcloth and his cambric fronts, had what he
considered "spirit" enough within him to feel that dislike of Jermyn
gradually gathering force through years of obligation and subjection,
till it had become an actuating motive disposed to use an opportunity;
if it did not watch for one.
It was not this motive, however, but rather the ordinary course of
business, which accounted for Johnson's playing a double part as an
electioneering agent. What men do in elections is not to be classed
either among sins or marks of grace; it would be profane to include
business in religion, and conscience refers to failure, not to success.
Still, the sense of being galled by Jermyn's harness was an additional
reason for cultivating all relations that were independent of him; and
pique at Harold Transome's behavior to him in Jermyn's office perhaps
gave all the more zest to Johnson's use of his pen and ink when he wrote
a handbill in the service of Garstin, and Garstin's incomparable agent,
Putty, full of innuendoes against Harold Transome, as a descendant of
the Durfey-Transomes. It is a natural subject of self-congratulation to
a man, when special knowledge, gained long ago without any forecast,
turns out to afford a special inspiration in the present; and Johnson
felt a new pleasure in the consciousness that he of all people in the
world next to Jermyn had the most intimate knowledge of the Transome
affairs. Still better--some of these affairs were secrets of Jermyn's.
If in an uncomplimentary spirit he might have been called Jermyn's "man
of straw," it was a satisfaction to know that the unreality of the man
John Johnson was confined to his appearance in annuity deeds, and that
elsewhere he was solid, locomotive, and capable of remembering anything
for his own pleasure and benefit. To act with doubleness towards a man
whose conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it
deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.
By such causes it came to pass that Christian held in his hands a bill
in which Jermyn was playfully alluded to as Mr. German Cozen, who won
games by clever shuffling and odd tricks without any honor, and backed
Durfey's crib against Bycliffe--in which it was adroitly implied that
the so-called head of the Transomes was only the tail of the
Durfeys--and that some said the Durfeys would have died out and left
their nest empty if it had not been for their German Cozen.
Johnson had not dared to use any recollections except such as might
credibly exist in other minds besides his own. In the truth of the case,
no one but himself had the prompting to recall these out-worn scandals;
but it was likely enough that such foul-winged things should be revived
by election heats for Johnson to escape all suspicion.
Christian could gather only dim and uncertain inferences from this flat
irony and heavy joking; but one chief thing was clear to him. He had
been right in his conjecture that Jermyn's interest about Bycliffe had
its source in some claim of Bycliffe's on the Transome property. And
then, there was that story of the old bill-sticker's, which, closely
considered, indicated that the right of the present Transomes depended,
or, at least, had depended on the continuance of some other lives.
Christian in his time had gathered enough legal notions to be aware that
possession by one man sometimes depended on the life of another; that a
man might sell his own interest in property, and the interest of his
descendants, while a claim on that property would still remain to some
one else than the purchaser, supposing the descendants became extinct,
and the interests they had sold were at an end. But under what
conditions the claim might be valid or void in any particular case, was
all darkness to him. Suppose Bycliffe had any such claim on the Transome
estates: how was Christian to know whether at the present moment it was
worth anything more than a bit of rotten parchment? Old Tommy Trounsem
had said that Johnson knew all about it. But even if Johnson were still
above-ground--and all Johnsons are mortal--he might still be an
understrapper of Jermyn's, in which case his knowledge would be on the
wrong side of the hedge for the purposes of Henry Scaddon. His immediate
care must be to find out all he could about Johnson. He blamed himself
for not having questioned Tommy further while he had him at command; but
on this head the bill-sticker could hardly know more than the less
dilapidated denizens of Treby.
Now it had happened that during the weeks in which Christian had been at
work trying to solve the enigma of Jermyn's interest about Bycliffe,
Johnson's mind also had been somewhat occupied with suspicion and
conjecture as to new information on the subject of the old Bycliffe
claims which Jermyn intended to conceal from him. The letter which,
after his interview with Christian, Jermyn had written with a sense of
perfect safety to his faithful ally Johnson, was, as we know, written to
a Johnson who had found his self-love incompatible with that
faithfulness of which it was supposed to be the foundation. Anything
that the patron felt it inconvenient for his obliged friend and servant
to know, became by that very fact an object of peculiar curiosity. The
obliged friend and servant secretly doted on his patron's inconvenience,
provided that he himself did not share it; and conjecture naturally
became active.
Johnson's legal imagination, being very differently furnished from
Christian's, was at no loss to conceive conditions under which there
might arise a new claim on the Transome estates. He had before him the
whole history of the settlement of those estates made a hundred years
ago by John Justus Transome, entailing them, whilst in his possession,
on his son Thomas and his heirs-male, with remainder to the Bycliffes in
fee. He knew that Thomas, son of John Justus, proving a prodigal, had,
without the knowledge of his father, the tenant in possession, sold his
own and his descendants' rights to a lawyer-cousin named Durfey; that,
therefore, the title of the Durfey-Transomes, in spite of that old
Durfey's tricks to show the contrary, depended solely on the purchase of
the "base fee" thus created by Thomas Transome; and that the Bycliffes
were the "remainder men" who might fairly oust the Durfey-Transomes if
ever the issue of the prodigal Thomas went clean out of existence, and
ceased to represent a right which he had bargained away from them.
Johnson, as Jermyn's subordinate, had been closely cognizant of the
details concerning the suit instituted by successive Bycliffes, of whom
Maurice Christian Bycliffe was the last, on the plea that the extinction
of Thomas Transome's line had actually come to pass--a weary suit, which
had eaten into the fortunes of two families, and had only made the
cankerworms fat. The suit had closed with the death of Maurice Christian
Bycliffe in prison; but before his death, Jermyn's exertions to get
evidence that there was still issue of Thomas Transome's line surviving,
as a security of the Durfey title, had issued in the discovery of a
Thomas Transome at Littleshaw, in Stonyshire, who was the representative
of the pawned inheritance. The death of Maurice had made this discovery
useless--had made it seem the wiser part to say nothing about it; and
the fact had remained a secret known only to Jermyn and Johnson. No
other Bycliffe was known or believed to exist, and the Durfey-Transomes
might be considered safe, unless--yes, there was an "unless" which
Johnson could conceive: an heir or heiress of the Bycliffes--if such a
personage turned out to be in existence--might sometime raise a new and
valid claim when once informed that wretched old Tommy Trounsem the
bill-sticker, tottering drunkenly on the edge of the grave, was the last
issue remaining above-ground from that dissolute Thomas who played his
Esau part a century before. While the poor old bill-sticker breathed,
the Durfey-Transomes could legally keep their possession in spite of a
possible Bycliffe proved real; but not when the parish had buried the
bill-sticker.
Still, it is one thing to conceive conditions, and another to see any
chance of proving their existence. Johnson at present had no glimpse of
such a chance; and even if he ever gained the glimpse, he was not sure
that he should ever make any use of it. His enquiries of Medwin, in
obedience to Jermyn's letter, had extracted only a negative as to any
information possessed by the lawyers of Bycliffe concerning a marriage,
or expectation of offspring on his part. But Johnson felt not the less
stung by curiosity to know what Jermyn had found out: that he had found
something in relation to a possible Bycliffe, Johnson felt pretty sure.
And he thought with satisfaction that Jermyn could not hinder him from
knowing what he already knew about Thomas Transome's issue. Many things
might occur to alter his policy and give a new value to facts. Was it
certain that Jermyn would always be fortunate?
When greed and unscrupulousness exhibit themselves on a grand historical
scale, and there is a question of peace or war or amicable partition, it
often occurs that gentlemen of high diplomatic talents have their minds
bent on the same object from different points of view. Each, perhaps, is
thinking of a certain duchy or province, with a view to arranging the
ownership in such a way as shall best serve the purposes of the
gentleman with high diplomatic talents in whom each is more especially
interested. But these select minds in high office can never miss their
aims from ignorance of each other's existence or whereabouts. Their high
titles may be learned even by common people from every pocket almanac.
But with meaner diplomats, who might be mutually useful, such ignorance
is often obstructive. Mr. John Johnson and Mr. Christian, otherwise Mr.
Scaddon, might have had a concentration of purpose and an ingenuity of
device fitting them to make a figure in the parcelling of Europe, and
yet they might never have met, simply because Johnson knew nothing of
Christian, and because Christian did not know where to find Johnson.