Felix Holt, The Radical Part 4

"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!"

CHAPTER III.

'Twas town, yet country too: you felt the warmth Of cl.u.s.tering 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 princ.i.p.al 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 paris.h.i.+oners 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 s.p.a.ce 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 blus.h.i.+ng la.s.ses sometimes have in jokes about their secret preferences. The rector was always of the Debarry family, a.s.sociated 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-fas.h.i.+oned, 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 ca.n.a.l; 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 fas.h.i.+onable 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 pract.i.tioners, 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 ca.n.a.l; 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 pa.s.sed 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 spa.r.s.e 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 t.i.the 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 Emanc.i.p.ation 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 Const.i.tution. 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-fas.h.i.+oned aristocratic clergyman, preaching short sermons, understanding business, and acting liberally about his t.i.the, 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 cla.s.ses 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sing of the Reform Bill, Mr. Harold Transome would not have presented himself as a candidate for North Loams.h.i.+re, 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 canva.s.sing 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."

CHAPTER IV.

"A pious and painful preacher."--FULLER.

Mr. Lyon lived in a small house, not quite so good as the parish clerk's, adjoining the entry which led to the Chapel Yard. The new prosperity of Dissent at Treby had led to an enlargement of the chapel, which absorbed all extra funds and left none for the enlargement of the minister's income. He sat this morning, as usual, in a low up-stairs room, called his study, which, by means of a closet capable of holding his bed, served also as a sleeping-room. The bookshelves did not suffice for his store of old books, which lay about him in piles so arranged as to leave narrow lanes between them; for the minister was much given to walking about during his hours of meditation, and very narrow pa.s.sages would serve for his small legs, unenc.u.mbered by any other drapery than his black silk stockings and the flexible, though prominent, bows of black ribbon that tied his knee-breeches. He was walking about now, with his hands clasped behind him, an att.i.tude in which his body seemed to bear about the same proportion to his head as the lower part of a stone Hermes bears to the carven image that crowns it. His face looked old and worn, yet the curtain of hair that fell from his bald crown and hung about his neck retained much of its original auburn tint, and his large, brown, short-sighted eyes were still clear and bright. At the first glance, every one thought him a very odd-looking rusty old man; the free-school boys often hooted after him, and called him "Revelations"; and to many respectable Church people, old Lyon's little legs and large head seemed to make Dissent additionally preposterous. But he was too short-sighted to notice those who t.i.ttered at him--too absent from the world of small facts and petty impulses in which t.i.tterers live. With Satan to argue against on matters of vital experience as well as of church government, with great texts to meditate on, which seemed to get deeper as he tried to fathom them, it had never occurred to him to reflect what sort of image his small person made on the retina of a light-minded beholder. The good Rufus had his ire and his egoism; but they existed only as the red heat which gave force to his belief and his teaching. He was susceptible concerning the true office of deacons in the primitive Church, and his small nervous body was jarred from head to foot by the concussion of an argument to which he saw no answer. In fact, the only moments when he could be said to be really conscious of his body, were when he trembled under the pressure of some agitating thought.

He was meditating on the text for his Sunday morning sermon, "And all the people said, Amen"--a mere mustard-seed of a text, which had split at first only into two divisions, "What was said," and "Who said it"; but these were growing into a many-branched discourse, and the preacher's eyes dilated, and a smile played about his mouth till, as his manner was, when he felt happily inspired, he had begun to utter his thoughts aloud in the varied measure and cadence habitual to him, changing from a rapid but distinct undertone to a loud emphatic _rallentando_.

"My brethren, do you think that great shout was raised in Israel by each man's waiting to say 'amen' till his neighbors had said amen? Do you think there will be a great shout for the right--the shout of a nation as of one man, rounded and whole, like the voice of the archangel that bound together all the listeners of earth and heaven--if every Christian of you peeps round to see what his neighbors in good coats are doing, or else puts his hat before his face that he may shout and never be heard?

But this is what you do: when the servant of G.o.d stands up to deliver his message, do you lay your souls beneath the Word as you set out your plants beneath the fallen rain? No; one of you sends his eyes to all corners, he smothers his soul with small questions, 'What does brother Y. think?' 'Is this doctrine high enough for brother Z.?' 'Will the church members be pleased?' And another----"

Here the door was opened, and old Lyddy, the minister's servant, put in her head to say, in a tone of despondency, finis.h.i.+ng with a groan, "Here is Mrs. Holt wanting to speak to you; she says she comes out of season, but she's in trouble."

"Lyddy," said Mr. Lyon, falling at once into a quiet conversational tone, "if you are wrestling with the enemy, let me refer you to Ezekiel the thirteenth and twenty-second, and beg of you not to groan. It is a stumbling-block and offence to my daughter; she would take no broth yesterday, because she said you had cried into it. Thus you cause the truth to be lightly spoken of, and make the enemy rejoice. If your faceache gives him an advantage, take a little warm ale with your meat--I do not grudge the money."

"If I thought my drinking warm ale would hinder poor dear Miss Esther from speaking light--but she hates the smell of it."

"Answer not again, Lyddy, but send up Mistress Holt to me."

Lyddy closed the door immediately.

"I lack grace to deal with these weak sisters," said the minister, again thinking aloud, and walking. "Their needs lie too much out of the track of my meditations, and take me often unawares. Mistress Holt is another who darkens counsel by words without knowledge, and angers the reason of the natural man. Lord, give me patience. My sins were heavier to bear than this woman's folly. Come in, Mrs. Holt--come in."

He hastened to disenc.u.mber a chair of Matthew Henry's Commentary, and begged his visitor to be seated. She was a tall elderly woman, dressed in black, with a light-brown front and a black band over her forehead.

She moved the chair a little and seated herself in it with some emphasis, looking fixedly at the opposite wall with a hurt and argumentative expression. Mr. Lyon had placed himself in the chair against his desk, and waited with the resolute resignation of a patient who is about to undergo an operation. But his visitor did not speak.

"You have something on your mind, Mrs. Holt?" he said, at last.

"Indeed I have, sir, else I shouldn't be here."

"Speak freely."

"It's well known to you, Mr. Lyon, that my husband, Mr. Holt, came from the north, and was a member in Malthouse Yard long before _you_ began to be pastor of it, which was seven year ago last Michaelmas. It's the truth, Mr. Lyon, and I'm not that woman to sit here and say it if it wasn't true."

"Certainly, it is true."

"And if my husband had been alive when you'd come to preach upon trial, he'd have been as good a judge of your gifts as Mr. Nuttwood or Mr.

Muscat, though whether he'd have agreed with some that your doctrine wasn't high enough, I can't say. For myself, I've my opinion about high doctrine."

"Was it my preaching you came to speak about?" said the minister, hurrying in the question.

"No, Mr. Lyon, I'm not that woman. But this I _will_ say, for my husband died before your time, that he had a wonderful gift in prayer, as the old members well know, if anybody likes to ask 'em, not believing my words, and he believed himself that the receipt for the Cancer Cure, which I've sent out in bottles till this very last April before September as now is, and have bottles standing by me--he believed it was sent to him in answer to prayer; and n.o.body can deny it, for he prayed most regular, and read out of the green baize Bible."

Mrs. Holt paused, appearing to think that Mr. Lyon had been successfully confuted, and should show himself convinced.

"Has any one been aspersing your husband's character?" said Mr. Lyon, with a slight initiative toward that relief of groaning for which he had reproved Lyddy.

"Sir, they daredn't. For though he was a man of prayer, he didn't want skill and knowledge to find things out for himself; and that's what I used to say to _my_ friends when they wondered at my marrying a man from Lancas.h.i.+re, with no trade nor fortune, but what he'd got in his head.

But my husband's tongue 'ud have been a fortune to anybody, and there was many a one said it was as good as a dose of physic to hear him talk; not but what that got him into trouble in Lancas.h.i.+re, but he always said, if the worst came to the worst, he could go and preach to the blacks. But he did better than that, Mr. Lyon, for he married me; and this I will say, that for age, and conduct, and managing----"

"Mistress Holt," interrupted the minister, "these are not the things whereby we may edify one another. Let me beg of you to be as brief as you can. My time is not my own."

"Well, Mr. Lyon, I've a right to my own character; and I'm one of your congregation, though I'm not a church member, for I was born in the General Baptist connection: and as for being saved without works, there's a many, I dare say, can't do without that doctrine; but I thank the Lord I never needed to put _my_self on a level with the thief on the cross. I've done _my_ duty, and more, if anybody comes to that; for I've gone without my bit of meat to make broth for a sick neighbor: and if there's any of the church members say they've done the same, I'd ask them if they had the sinking at the stomach as I have; for I've ever strove to do the right thing, and more, for good-natured I always was; and I little thought, after being respected by everybody, I should come to be reproached by my own son. And my husband said, when he was a-dying--'Mary,' he said, 'the Elixir, and the Pills, and the Cure will support you, for they've a great name in all the country round, and you'll pray for a blessing on them.' And so I've done, Mr. Lyon; and to say they're not good medicines, when they've been taken for fifty miles round by high and low, rich and poor, and n.o.body speaking against 'em but Dr. Lukin, it seems to me it's a flying in the face of Heaven; for if it was wrong to take the medicines, couldn't the blessed Lord have stopped it?"

Mrs. Holt was not given to tears; she was much sustained by conscious unimpeachableness, and by an argumentative tendency which usually checks the too great activity of the lachrymal gland; nevertheless her eyes had become moist, her fingers played on her knee in an agitated manner, and she finally plucked a bit of her gown and held it with great nicety between her thumb and finger. Mr. Lyon, however, by listening attentively, had begun partly to divine the source of her trouble.

"Am I wrong in gathering from what you say, Mistress Holt, that your son has objected in some way to your sale of your late husband's medicines?"

"Mr. Lyon, he's masterful beyond everything, and he talks more than his father did. I've got my reason, Mr. Lyon, and if anybody talks sense I can follow him; but Felix talks so wild, and contradicts his mother. And what do you think he says, after giving up his 'prentices.h.i.+p, and going off to study at Glasgow, and getting through all the bit of money his father saved for his bringing-up--what has all his learning come to? He says I'd better never open my Bible, for it's as bad poison to me as the pills are to half the people as swallow 'em. You'll not speak of this again, Mr. Lyon--I don't think ill enough of you to believe _that_. For I suppose a Christian can understand the word o' G.o.d without going to Glasgow, and there's texts upon texts about ointment and medicine, and there's one as might have been for a receipt of my husband's--it's just as if it was a riddle, and Holt's Elixir was the answer."

"Your son uses rash words, Mistress Holt," said the minister, "but it is quite true that we may err in giving a too private interpretation to the Scripture. The word of G.o.d has to satisfy the larger needs of His people, like the rain and the suns.h.i.+ne--which no man must think to be meant for his own patch of seed-ground solely. Will it not be well that I should see your son, and talk with him on these matters? He was at chapel, I observe, and I suppose I am to be his pastor."

"That was what I wanted to ask you, Mr. Lyon. For perhaps he'll listen to you, and not talk you down as he does his poor mother. For after we'd been to chapel, he spoke better of you than he does of most: he said you was a fine old fellow, and an old-fas.h.i.+oned Puritan--he uses dreadful language, Mr. Lyon; but I saw he didn't mean you ill, for all that. He calls most folks's religion rottenness; and yet another time he'll tell me I ought to feel myself a sinner, and do G.o.d's will and not my own.

But it's my belief he says first one thing and then another only to abuse his mother. Or else he's going off his head, and must be sent to a 'sylum. But if he writes to the _North Loams.h.i.+re Herald_ first, to tell everybody the medicines are good for nothing, how can I ever keep him and myself?"

"Tell him I shall feel favored if he will come and see me this evening,"