His nature is too noble for the world:
He would not flatter Neptune for his trident,
Or Jove for his power to thunder. His heart's his mouth;
What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent;
And, being angry, doth forget that ever
He heard the name of death.--_Coriolanus._
Christian and Johnson did meet, however, by means that were quite
incalculable. The incident which brought them into communication was due
to Felix Holt, who of all men in the world had the least affinity either
for the industrious or the idle parasite.
Mr. Lyon had urged Felix to go to Duffield on the fifteenth of December
to witness the nomination of the candidates for North Loamshire. The
minister wished to hear what took place; and the pleasure of gratifying
him helped to outweigh some opposing reasons.
"I shall get into a rage at something or other," Felix had said. "I've
told you one of my weak points. Where I have any particular business, I
must incur the risks my nature brings. But I've no particular business
at Duffield. However, I'll make a holiday and go. By dint of seeing
folly, I shall get lessons in patience."
The weak point to which Felix referred was his liability to be carried
completely out of his own mastery by indignant anger. His strong health,
his renunciation of selfish claims, his habitual preoccupation with
large thoughts and with purposes independent of everyday casualties,
secured him a fine and even temper, free from moodiness or irritability.
He was full of long-suffering toward his unwise mother, who "pressed him
daily with her words and urged him, so that his soul was vexed;" he had
chosen to fill his days in a way that required the utmost exertion of
patience, that required those little rill-like outflowings of goodness
which in minds of great energy must be fed from deep sources of thought
and passionate devotedness. In this way his energies served to make him
gentle; and now, in this twenty-sixth year of his life, they had ceased
to make him angry, except in the presence of something that roused his
deep indignation. When once exasperated, the passionateness of his
nature threw off the yoke of a long-trained consciousness in which
thought and emotion had been more and more completely mingled, and
concentrated itself in a rage as ungovernable as that of boyhood. He was
thoroughly aware of the liability, and knew that in such circumstances
he could not answer for himself. Sensitive people with feeble frames
have often the same sort of fury within them; but they are themselves
shattered, and shatter nothing. Felix had a terrible arm: he knew that
he was dangerous; and he avoided the conditions that might cause him
exasperation as he would have avoided intoxicating drinks if he had been
in danger of intemperance.
The nomination-day was a great epoch of successful trickery, or, to
speak in a more parliamentary manner, of war-stratagem, on the part of
skilful agents. And Mr. Johnson had his share of inward chuckling and
self-approval, as one who might justly expect increasing renown, and be
some day in as general request as the great Putty himself. To have the
pleasure and the praise of electioneering ingenuity, and also to get
paid for it, without too much anxiety whether the ingenuity will achieve
its ultimate end, perhaps gives to some select persons a sort of
satisfaction in their superiority to their more agitated fellow-men that
is worthy to be classed with those generous enjoyments of having the
truth chiefly to yourself, and of seeing others in danger of drowning
while you are high and dry, which seem to have been regarded as unmixed
privileges by Lucretius and Lord Bacon.
One of Mr. Johnson's great successes was this. Spratt, the hated manager
of the Sproxton Colliery, in careless confidence that the colliers and
other laborers under him would follow his orders, had provided carts to
carry some loads of voteless enthusiasm to Duffield on behalf of
Garstin; enthusiasm which, being already paid for by the recognized
benefit of Garstin's existence as a capitalist with a share in the
Sproxton mines, was not to cost much in the form of treating. A
capitalist was held worthy of pious honor as the cause why workingmen
existed. But Mr. Spratt did not sufficiently consider that a cause which
was to be proved by argument or testimony is not an object of passionate
devotion to colliers: a visible cause of beer acts on them much more
strongly. And even if there had been any love of the far-off Garstin,
hatred of the too immediate Spratt would have been the stronger motive.
Hence Johnson's calculations, made long ago with Chubb, the remarkable
publican, had been well founded, and there had been diligent care to
supply treating at Duffield in the name of Transome. After the election
was over it was not improbable that there would be much friendly joking
between Putty and Johnson as to the success of this trick against
Putty's employer, and Johnson would be conscious of rising in the
opinion of his celebrated senior.
For the show of hands and the cheering, the hustling and the pelting,
the roaring and the hissing, the hard hits with small missiles and the
soft hits with small jokes, were strong enough on the side of Transome
to balance the similar "demonstrations" for Garstin, even with the
Debarry interest in his favor. And the inconvenient presence of Spratt
was easily got rid of by a dexterously-managed accident, which sent him
bruised and limping from the scene of action. Mr. Chubb had never before
felt so thoroughly that the occasion was up to a level with his talents,
while the clear daylight in which his virtue would appear when at the
election he voted, as his duty to himself bound him, for Garstin only,
gave him thorough repose of conscience.
Felix Holt was the only person looking on at the senseless exhibitions
of this nomination-day, who knew from the beginning the history of the
trick with the Sproxton men. He had been aware all along that the
treating at Chubb's had been continued, and that so far Harold
Transome's promise had produced no good fruits; and what he was
observing to-day, as he watched the uproarious crowd, convinced him that
the whole scheme would be carried out just as if he had never spoken
about it. He could be fair enough to Transome to allow that he might
have wished, and yet have been unable, with his notions of success, to
keep his promise; and his bitterness toward the candidate only took the
form of contemptuous pity; for Felix was not sparing in his contempt for
men who put their inward honor in pawn by seeking the prizes of the
world. His scorn fell too readily on the fortunate. But when he saw
Johnson passing to and fro, and speaking to Jermyn on the hustings, he
felt himself getting angry, and jumped off the wheel of the stationary
cart on which he was mounted, that he might no longer be in sight of
this man, whose vitiating cant had made his blood hot and his fingers
tingle on the first day of encountering him at Sproxton. It was a little
too exasperating to look at this pink-faced rotund specimen of
prosperity, to witness the power for evil that lay in his vulgar cant,
backed by another man's money, and to know that such stupid iniquity
flourished the flags of Reform, and Liberalism, and justice to the
needy. While the roaring and the scuffling were still going on, Felix,
with his thick stick in his hand, made his way through the crowd, and
walked on through the Duffield streets, till he came out on a grassy
suburb, where the houses surrounded a small common. Here he walked
about in the breezy air, and ate his bread and apples, telling himself
that this angry haste of his about evils that could only be remedied
slowly, could be nothing else than obstructive, and might some day--he
saw it so clearly that the thought seemed like a presentiment--be
obstructive of his own work.
"Not to waste energy, to apply force where it would tell, to do small
work close at hand, not waiting for speculative chances of heroism, but
preparing for them"--these were the rules he had been constantly urging
on himself. But what could be a greater waste than to beat a scoundrel
who had law and opodeldoc at command? After this meditation, Felix felt
cool and wise enough to return into the town, not, however, intending to
deny himself the satisfaction of a few pungent words wherever there was
place for them. Blows are sarcasms turned stupid: wit is a form of force
that leaves the limbs at rest.
Anything that could be called a crowd was no longer to be seen. The show
of hands having been pronounced to be in favor of Debarry and Transome,
and a poll having been demanded for Garstin, the business of the day
might be considered at an end. But in the street where the hustings were
erected, and where the great hotels stood, there were many groups, as
well as strollers and steady walkers to and fro. Men in superior
greatcoats and well-brushed hats were awaiting with more or less
impatience an important dinner, either at the Crown, which was Debarry's
house, or at the Three Cranes, which was Garstin's, or at the Fox and
Hounds, which was Transome's. Knots of sober retailers, who had already
dined, were to be seen at some shop-doors; men in very shabby coats and
miscellaneous head-coverings, inhabitants of Duffield and not county
voters, were lounging about in dull silence, or listening, some to a
grimy man in a flannel shirt, hatless and with turbid red hair, who was
insisting on political points with much more ease than had seemed to
belong to the gentlemen speakers on the hustings, and others to a Scotch
vendor of articles useful to sell, whose unfamiliar accent seemed to
have a guarantee of truth in it wanting as an association with everyday
English. Some rough-looking pipe-smokers, or distinguished
cigar-smokers, chose to walk up and down in isolation and silence. But
the majority of those who had shown a burning interest in the nomination
had disappeared, and cockades no longer studded a close-pressed crowd,
like, and also very unlike, meadow-flowers among the grass. The street
pavement was strangely painted with fragments of perishable missiles
ground flat under heavy feet: but the workers were resting from their
toil, and the buzz and tread and the fitfully discernible voices seemed
like stillness to Felix after the roar with which the wide space had
been filled when he left it.
The group round the speaker in the flannel shirt stood at the corner of
a side-street, and the speaker himself was elevated by the head and
shoulders above his hearers, not because he was tall, but because he
stood on a projecting stone. At the opposite corner of the turning was
the great inn of the Fox and Hounds, and this was the ultra-Liberal
quarter of the High street. Felix was at once attracted by this group;
he liked the look of the speaker, whose bare arms were powerfully
muscular, though he had the pallid complexion of a man who lives chiefly
amidst the heat of furnaces. He was leaning against the dark stone
building behind him with folded arms, the grimy paleness of his shirt
and skin standing out in high relief against the dark stone building
behind him. He lifted up one forefinger, and marked his emphasis with it
as he spoke. His voice was high and not strong, but Felix recognized the
fluency and the method of an habitual preacher or lecturer.
"It's the fallacy of all monopolists," he was saying. "We know what
monopolists are: men who want to keep a trade all to themselves, under
the pretence that they'll furnish the public with a better article. We
know what that comes to: in some countries a poor man can't afford to
buy a spoonful of salt, and yet there's salt enough in the world to
pickle every living thing in it. That's the sort of benefit monopolists
do to mankind. And these are the men who tell us we're to let politics
alone; they'll govern us better without our knowing anything about it.
We must mind our business; we are ignorant; we've no time to study great
questions. But I tell them this: the greatest question in the world is,
how to give every man a man's share in what goes on in life----"
"Hear, hear!" said Felix in his sonorous voice, which seemed to give a
new impressiveness to what the speaker had said. Every one looked at
him: the well-washed face and its educated expression along with a dress
more careless than that of most well-to-do workmen on a holiday, made
his appearance strangely arresting.
"Not a pig's share," the speaker went on, "not a horse's, not the share
of a machine fed with oil only to make it work and nothing else. It
isn't a man's share just to mind your pin-making, or your glass-blowing,
and higgle about your own wages, and bring up your family to be ignorant
sons of ignorant fathers, and no better prospect; that's a slave's
share; we want a freeman's share, and that is to think and speak and act
about what concerns us all, and see whether these fine gentlemen who
undertake to govern us are doing the best they can for us. They've got
the knowledge, say they. Very well, we've got the wants. There's many a
one would be idle if hunger didn't pinch him; but the stomach sets us to
work. There's a fable told where the nobles are the belly and the people
the members. But I make another sort of fable. I say, we are the belly
that feels the pinches, and we'll set these aristocrats, these great
people who call themselves our brains, to work at some way of satisfying
us a bit better. The aristocrats are pretty sure to try and govern for
their own benefit; but how are we to be sure they'll try and govern for
ours? They must be looked after, I think, like other workmen. We must
have what we call inspectors, to see whether the work's well done for
us. We want to send our inspectors to Parliament. Well, they say--you've
got the Reform Bill; what more can you want? Send your inspectors. But I
say, the Reform Bill is a trick--it's nothing but swearing-in special
constables to keep the aristocrats safe in their monopoly; it's bribing
some of the people with votes to make them hold their tongues about
giving votes to the rest. I say, if a man doesn't beg or steal, but
works for his bread, the poorer and the more miserable he is, the more
he'd need have a vote to send an inspector to Parliament--else the man
who is worst off is likely to be forgotten; and I say, he's the man who
ought to be first remembered. Else what does their religion mean? Why do
they build churches and endow them that their sons may get paid well for
preaching a Saviour, and making themselves as little like Him as can be?
If I want to believe in Jesus Christ, I must shut my eyes for fear I
should see a parson. And what's a bishop? A bishop's a person dressed
up, who sits in the House of Lords to help and throw out Reform Bills.
And because it's hard to get anything in the shape of a man to dress
himself up like that, and do such work, they have to give him a palace
for it, and plenty of thousands a-year. And then they cry out--'The
Church is in danger,'--'the poor man's Church.' And why is it the poor
man's Church? Because he can have a seat for nothing. I think it _is_
for nothing; for it would be hard to tell what he gets by it. If the
poor man had a vote in the matter, I think he'd choose a different sort
of Church to what that is. But do you think the aristocrats will ever
alter it, if the belly doesn't pinch them? Not they. It's part of their
monopoly. They'll supply us with our religion like everything else, and
get a profit on it. They'll give us plenty of heaven. We may have land
_there_. That's the sort of religion they like--a religion that gives us
workingmen heaven, and nothing else. But we'll offer to change with
them. We'll give them back some of their heaven, and take it out in
something for us and our children in this world. They don't seem to care
so much about heaven themselves till they feel the gout very bad; but
you won't get them to give up anything else, if you don't pinch 'em for
it. And to pinch them enough, we must get the suffrage, we must get
votes, that we may send the men to Parliament who will do our work for
us; and we must have Parliament dissolved every year, that we may change
our man if he doesn't do what we want him to do; and we must have the
country divided so that the little kings of the counties can't do as
they like, but must be shaken up in one bag with us. I say, if we
workingmen are ever to get a man's share, we must have universal
suffrage, and annual Parliaments, and the vote by ballot, and electoral
districts."
"No!--something else before all that," said Felix, again startling the
audience into looking at him. But the speaker glanced coldly at him and
went on.
"That's what Sir Francis Burdett went in for fifteen years ago; and it's
the right thing for us, if it was Tomfool who went in for it. You must
lay hold of such handles as you can. I don't believe much in Liberal
aristocrats; but if there's any fine carved gold-headed stick of an
aristocrat will make a broomstick of himself, I'll lose no time but I'll
sweep with him. And that's what I think about Transome. And if any of
you have acquaintance among county voters, give 'em a hint that you wish
'em to vote for Transome."
At the last word, the speaker stepped down from his slight eminence, and
walked away rapidly, like a man whose leisure was exhausted, and who
must go about his business. But he had left an appetite in his audience
for further oratory, and one of them seemed to express a general
sentiment as he hurried immediately to Felix, and said, "Come, sir, what
do you say?"
Felix did at once what he would very likely have done without being
asked--he stepped on the stone, and took off his cap by an instinctive
prompting that always led him to speak uncovered. The effect of his
figure in relief against the stone background was unlike that of the
previous speaker. He was considerably taller, his head and neck were
more massive, and the expression of his mouth and eyes was something
very different from the mere acuteness and rather hard-lipped antagonism
of the trades-union man. Felix Holt's face had the look of habitual
meditative abstraction from objects of mere personal vanity or desire,
which is the peculiar stamp of culture, and makes a very roughly-cut
face worthy to be called "the human face divine." Even lions and dogs
know a distinction between men's glances; and doubtless those Duffield
men, in the expectation with which they looked up at Felix, were
unconsciously influenced by the grandeur of his full yet firm mouth, and
the calm clearness of his gray eyes, which were somehow unlike what they
were accustomed to see along with an old brown velveteen coat, and an
absence of chin-propping. When he began to speak, the contrast of voice
was still stronger than that of appearance. The man in the flannel shirt
had not been heard--had probably not cared to be heard--beyond the
immediate group of listeners. But Felix at once drew the attention of
persons comparatively at a distance.
"In my opinion," he said, almost the moment after he was addressed,
"that was a true word spoken by your friend when he said the great
question was how to give every man a man's share in life. But I think he
expects voting to do more toward it than I do. I want the workingmen to
have power. I'm a workingman myself, and I don't want to be anything
else. But there are two sorts of power. There's a power to do
mischief--to undo what has been done with great expense and labor, to
waste and destroy, to be cruel to the weak, to lie and quarrel, and to
talk poisonous nonsense. That's the sort of power that ignorant numbers
have. It never made a joint stool or planted a potato. Do you think it's
likely to do much toward governing a great country, and making wise
laws, and giving shelter, food, and clothes to millions of men? Ignorant
power comes in the end to the same thing as wicked power; it makes
misery. It's another sort of power that I want us workingmen to have,
and I can see plainly enough that our all having votes will do little
toward it at present. I hope we, or the children that come after us,
will get plenty of political power some time. I tell everybody plainly,
I hope there will be great changes, and that some time, whether we live
to see it or not, men will have come to be ashamed of things they're
proud of now. But I should like to convince you that votes would never
give you political power worth having while things are as they are now,
and that if you go the right way to work you may get power sooner
without votes. Perhaps all you who hear me are sober men, who try to
learn as much of the nature of things as you can, and to be as little
like fools as possible. A fool or idiot is one who expects things to
happen that never can happen; he pours milk into a can without a bottom,
and expects the milk to stay there. The more of such vain expectations a
man has, the more he is a fool or idiot. And if any working man expects
a vote to do for him what it never can do, he's foolish to that amount,
if no more. I think that's clear enough, eh?"
"Hear, hear," said several voices, but they were not those of the
original group; they belonged to some strollers who had been attracted
by Felix Holt's vibrating voice, and were Tories from the Crown. Among
them was Christian, who was smoking a cigar with a pleasure he always
felt in being among people who did not know him, and doubtless took him
to be something higher than he really was. Hearers from the Fox and
Hounds also were slowly adding themselves to the nucleus. Felix,
accessible to the pleasure of being listened to, went on with more and
more animation: "The way to get rid of folly is to get rid of vain
expectations, and of thoughts that don't agree with the nature of
things. The men who have had true thoughts about water, and what it will
do when it is turned into steam and under all sorts of circumstances,
have made themselves a great power in the world: they are turning the
wheels of engines that will help to change most things. But no engines
would have done, if there had been false notions about the way water
would act. Now, all the schemes about voting, and districts, and annual
Parliaments, and the rest, are engines, and the water or steam--the
force that is to work them--must come out of human nature--out of men's
passions, feelings, desires. Whether the engines will do good work or
bad depends on these feelings; and if we have false expectations about
men's characters, we are very much like the idiot who thinks he'll carry
milk in a can without a bottom. In my opinion, the notions about what
mere voting will do are very much of that sort."
"That's very fine," said a man in dirty fustian, with a scornful laugh.
"But how are we to get the power without votes?"
"I'll tell you what's the greatest power under heaven," said Felix, "and
that is public opinion--the ruling belief in society about what is right
and what is wrong, what is honorable and what is shameful. That's the
steam that is to work the engines. How can political freedom make us
better, any more than a religion we don't believe in, if people laugh
and wink when they see men abuse and defile it? And while public opinion
is what it is--while men have no better beliefs about public duty--while
corruption is not felt to be a damning disgrace--while men are not
ashamed in Parliament and out of it to make public questions which
concern the welfare of millions a mere screen for their own petty
private ends,--I say, no fresh scheme of voting will much mend our
condition. For, take us workingmen of all sorts. Suppose out of every
hundred who had a vote there were thirty who had some soberness, some
sense to choose with, some good feeling to make them wish the right
thing for all. And suppose there were seventy out of the hundred who
were, half of them, not sober, who had no sense to choose one thing in
politics more than another, and who had so little good feeling in them
that they wasted on their own drinking the money that should have helped
to feed and clothe their wives and children; and another half of them
who, if they didn't drink, were too ignorant or stupid to see any good
for themselves better than pocketing a five-shilling piece when it was
offered them. Where would be the political power of the thirty sober
men? The power would lie with the seventy drunken and stupid votes; and
I'll tell you what sort of men would get the power--what sort of men
would end by returning whom they pleased to Parliament."
Felix had seen every face around him, and had particularly noticed a
recent addition to his audience; but now he looked about him, without
appearing to fix his glance on any one. In spite of his cooling
meditations an hour ago, his pulse was getting quickened by indignation,
and the desire to crush what he hated was likely to vent itself in
articulation. His tone became more biting.
"They would be men who would undertake to do the business for a
candidate, and return him: men who have no real opinions, but who pilfer
the words of every opinion, and turn them into a cant which will serve
their purpose at the moment; men who look out for dirty work to make
their fortunes by, because dirty work wants little talent and no
conscience; men who know all the ins and outs of bribery, because there
is not a cranny in their own souls where a bribe can't enter. Such men
as these will be the masters wherever there's a majority of voters who
care more for money, for drink, more for some mean little end which is
their own and nobody else's, than for anything that has ever been called
Right in the world. For suppose there's a poor voter named Jack, who has
seven children, and twelve or fifteen shillings a-week wages, perhaps
less. Jack can't read--I don't say whose fault that is--he never had the
chance to learn; he knows so little that he perhaps thinks God made the
poor-laws, and if anybody said the pattern of the work-house was laid
down in the Testament, he wouldn't be able to contradict them. What is
poor Jack likely to do when he sees a smart stranger coming to him, who
happens to be just one of these men that I say will be the masters till
public opinion gets too hot for them? He's a middle-sized man, we'll
say; stout, with coat upon coat of fine broadcloth, open enough to show
a fine gold chain: none of your dark, scowling men, but one with an
innocent pink-and-white skin and very smooth light hair--a most
respectable man, who calls himself a good, sound, well-known English
name--as Green, or Baker, or Wilson, or let us say, Johnson----"
Felix was interrupted by an explosion of laughter from a majority of the
bystanders. Some eyes had been turned on Johnson, who stood on the right
hand of Felix, at the very beginning of the description, and these were
gradually followed by others, till at last every hearer's attention was
fixed on him, and the first burst of laughter from the two or three who
knew the attorney's name, let every one sufficiently into the secret to
make the amusement common. Johnson, who had kept his ground till his
name was mentioned, now turned away, looking unusually white after being
unusually red, and feeling by an attorney's instinct for his
pocket-book, as if he felt it was a case for taking down the names of
witnesses.
All the well-dressed hearers turned away too, thinking they had had the
cream of the speech in the joke against Johnson, which, as a thing worth
telling, helped to recall them to the scene of dinner.
"Who is this Johnson?" said Christian to a young man who had been
standing near him, and had been one of the first to laugh. Christian's
curiosity had naturally been awakened by what might prove a golden
opportunity.
"Oh--a London attorney. He acts for Transome. That tremendous fellow at
the corner there is some red-hot Radical demagogue, and Johnson has
offended him, I suppose; else he wouldn't have turned in that way on a
man of their own party."
"I had heard there was a Johnson who was an understrapper of Jermyn's,"
said Christian.
"Well, so this man may have been for what I know. But he's a London man
now--a very busy fellow--on his own legs in Bedford Row. Ha, ha! it's
capital, though, when these Liberals get a slap in the face from the
workingmen they're so very fond of."
Another turn along the street enabled Christian to come to a resolution.
Having seen Jermyn drive away an hour before, he was in no fear: he
walked at once to the Fox and Hounds and asked to speak to Mr. Johnson.
A brief interview, in which Christian ascertained that he had before him
the Johnson mentioned by the bill-sticker, issued in the appointment of
a longer one at a later hour; and before they left Duffield they had
come not exactly to a mutual understanding, but to an exchange of
information mutually welcome.
Christian had been very cautious in the commencement, only intimating
that he knew something important which some chance hints had induced him
to think might be interesting to Mr. Johnson, but that this entirely
depended on how far he had a common interest with Mr. Jermyn. Johnson
replied that he had much business in which that gentleman was not
concerned, but that to a certain extent they had a common interest.
Probably then, Christian observed, the affairs of the Transome estate
were part of the business in which Mr. Jermyn and Mr. Johnson might be
understood to represent each other, in which case he need not detain Mr.
Johnson? At this hint Johnson could not conceal that he was becoming
eager. He had no idea what Christian's information was, but there were
many grounds on which Johnson desired to know as much as he could about
the Transome affairs independently of Jermyn. By little and little an
understanding was arrived at. Christian told of his interview with Tommy
Trounsem, and stated that if Johnson could show him whether the
knowledge could have any legal value, he could bring evidence that a
legitimate child of Bycliffe's existed: he felt certain of his fact, and
of his proof. Johnson explained, that in this case the death of the old
bill-sticker would give the child the first valid claim to the Bycliffe
heirship; that for his own part he should be glad to further a true
claim, but that caution would have to be observed. How did Christian
know that Jermyn, was informed on this subject? Christian, more and more
convinced that Johnson would be glad to counteract Jermyn at length
became explicit about Esther, but still withheld his own real name, and
the nature of his relations with Bycliffe. He said he would bring the
rest of his information when Mr. Johnson took the case up seriously, and
place it in the hands of Bycliffe's old lawyers--of course he would do
that? Johnson replied that he would certainly do that; but that there
were legal niceties which Mr. Christian was probably not acquainted
with; that Esther's claim had not yet accrued, and that hurry was
useless.
The two men parted, each in distrust of the other, but each well pleased
to have learned something. Johnson was not at all sure how he should
act, but thought it likely that events would soon guide him. Christian
was beginning to meditate a way of securing his own ends without
depending in the least on Johnson's procedure. It was enough for him
that he was now assured of Esther's legal claim on the Transome estates.