Sybil, or the Two Nations Part 59

"And what do they want?"

"Statement of grievances; high taxes and low prices; mild expostulations and gentle hints that they have been thrown over by their friends; Polish corn, Holstein cattle, and British income tax."

"Well you know what to say," said the gentleman in Downing Street. "Tell them generally that they are quite mistaken; prove to them particularly that my only object has been to render protection more protective, by making it practical and divesting it of the surplusage of odium; that no foreign corn can come in at fifty-five s.h.i.+llings; that there are not enough cattle in all Holstein to supply the parish of Pancras daily with beef-steaks; and that as for the income tax, they will be amply compensated for it by their diminished cost of living through the agency of that very tariff of which they are so superficially complaining."

"Their diminished cost of living!" said Mr Hoaxem a little confused.

"Would not that a.s.surance, I humbly suggest, clash a little with my previous demonstration that we had arranged that no reduction of prices should take place?"

"Not at all; your previous demonstration is of course true, but at the same time you must impress upon them the necessity of general views to form an opinion of particular instances. As for example a gentleman of five thousand pounds per annum pays to the income tax, which by the bye always call property tax, one hundred and fifty pounds a year. Well, I have materially reduced the duties on eight hundred articles. The consumption of each of those articles by an establishment of five thousand pounds per annum cannot be less than one pound per article. The reduction of price cannot be less than a moiety; therefore a saving of four hundred per annum; which placed against the deduction of the property tax leaves a clear increase of income of two hundred and fifty pounds per annum; by which you see that a property tax in fact increases income."

"I see," said Mr Hoaxem with an admiring glance. "And what am I to say to the deputation of the manufacturers of Mowbray complaining of the great depression of trade, and the total want of remunerating profits?"

"You must say exactly the reverse," said the gentleman in Downing Street. "Show them how much I have done to promote the revival of trade.

First of all in making provisions cheaper; cutting off at one blow half the protection on corn, as for example at this moment under the old law the duty on foreign wheat would have been twenty-seven s.h.i.+llings a quarter; under the new law it is thirteen. To be sure no wheat could come in at either price, but that does not alter the principle. Then as to live cattle, show how I have entirely opened the trade with the continent in live cattle. Enlarge upon this, the subject is speculative and admits of expensive estimates. If there be any dissenters on the deputation who having freed the negroes have no subject left for their foreign sympathies, hint at the tortures of the bullfight and the immense consideration to humanity that instead of being speared at Seville, the Andalusian Toro will probably in future be cut up at Smithfield. This cheapness of provisions will permit them to compete with the foreigner in all neutral markets, in time beat them in their own. It is a complete compensation too for the property tax, which impress upon them is a great experiment and entirely for their interests. Ring the changes on great measures and great experiments till it is time to go down and make a house. Your official duties of course must not be interfered with. They will take the hint. I have no doubt you will get through the business very well, Mr Hoaxem, particularly if you be 'frank and explicit;' that is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and to confuse the minds of others. Good morning!"

Book 6 Chapter 2

Two days after this conversation in Downing Street, a special messenger arrived at Marney Abbey from the Lord Lieutenant of the county, the Duke of Fitz-Aquitaine. Immediately after reading the despatch of which he was the bearer, there was a great bustle in the house; Lady Marney was sent for to her husband's library and there enjoined immediately to write various letters which were to prevent certain expected visitors from arriving; Captain Grouse was in and out the same library every five minutes, receiving orders and counter orders, and finally mounting his horse was flying about the neighbourhood with messages and commands.

All this stir signified that the Marney regiment of Yeomanry were to be called out directly.

Lord Marney who had succeeded in obtaining a place in the Household and was consequently devoted to the inst.i.tutions of the country, was full of determination to uphold them; but at the same time with characteristic prudence was equally resolved that the property princ.i.p.ally protected should be his own, and that the order of his own district should chiefly engage his solicitude.

"I do not know what the Duke means by marching into the disturbed districts," said Lord Marney to Captain Grouse. "These are disturbed districts. There have been three fires in one week, and I want to know what disturbance can be worse than that? In my opinion this is a mere anti-corn-law riot to frighten the government; and suppose they do stop the mills--what then? I wish they were all stopped, and then one might live like a gentleman again?"

Egremont, between whom and his brother a sort of bad-tempered good understanding had of late years to a certain degree flourished, in spite of Lord Marney remaining childless, which made him hate Egremont with double distilled virulence, and chiefly by the affectionate manoeuvres of their mother, but whose annual visits to Marney had generally been limited to the yeomanry week, arrived from London the same day as the letter of the Lord Lieutenant, as he had learnt that his brother's regiment, in which he commanded a troop, as well as the other yeomanry corps in the North of England, must immediately take the field.

Five years had elapsed since the commencement of our history, and they had brought apparently much change to the character of the brother of Lord Marney. He had become, especially during the last two or three years, silent and reserved; he rarely entered society; even the company of those who were once his intimates had ceased to attract him; he was really a melancholy man. The change in his demeanour was observed by all; his mother and his sister-in-law were the only persons who endeavoured to penetrate its cause, and sighed over the failure of their sagacity. Quit the world and the world forgets you; and Egremont would have soon been a name no longer mentioned in those brilliant saloons which he once adorned, had not occasionally a sensation, produced by an effective speech in the House of Commons, recalled his name to his old a.s.sociates, who then remembered the pleasant hours pa.s.sed in his society and wondered why he never went anywhere now.

"I suppose he finds society a bore," said Lord Eugene de Vere; "I am sure I do; but then what is a fellow to do? I am not in Parliament like Egremont. I believe, after all, that's the thing; for I have tried everything else and everything else is a bore."

"I think one should marry like Alfred Mountchesney," said Lord Milford.

"But what is the use of marrying if you do not marry a rich woman--and the heiresses of the present age will not marry. What can be more unnatural! It alone ought to produce a revolution. Why, Alfred is the only fellow who has made a coup; and then he has not got it down."

"She behaved in a most unprincipled manner to me--that Fitz-Warene,"

said Lord Milford, "always took my bouquets and once made me write some verses."

"By Jove!" said Lord Eugene, "I should like to see them. What a bore it must have been to write verses."

"I only copied them out of Mina Blake's alb.u.m: but I sent them in my own handwriting."

Baffled sympathy was the cause of Egremont's gloom. It is the secret spring of most melancholy. He loved and loved in vain. The conviction that his pa.s.sion, though hopeless, was not looked upon with disfavour, only made him the more wretched, for the disappointment is more acute in proportion as the chance is better. He had never seen Sybil since the morning he quitted her in Smith's Square, immediately before her departure for the North. The trial of Gerard had taken place at the a.s.sizes of that year: he had been found guilty and sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment in York Castle; the interference of Egremont both in the House of Commons and with the government saved him from the felon confinement with which he was at first threatened, and from which a.s.suredly state prisoners should be exempt. During this effort some correspondence had taken place between Egremont and Sybil, which he would willingly have encouraged and maintained; but it ceased nevertheless with its subject. Sybil, through the influential interference of Ursula Trafford, lived at the convent at York during the imprisonment of her father, and visited him daily.

The anxiety to take the veil which had once characterised Sybil had certainly waned. Perhaps her experience of life had impressed her with the importance of fulfilling vital duties. Her father, though he had never opposed her wish, had never encouraged it; and he had now increased and interesting claims on her devotion. He had endured great trials, and had fallen on adverse fortunes. Sybil would look at him, and though his n.o.ble frame was still erect and his countenance still displayed that mixture of frankness and decision which had distinguished it of yore, she could not conceal from herself that there were ravages which time could not have produced. A year and a half of imprisonment had shaken to its centre a frame born for action, and shrinking at all times from the resources of sedentary life. The disappointment of high hopes had jarred and tangled even the sweetness of his n.o.ble disposition. He needed solicitude and solace: and Sybil resolved that if vigilance and sympathy could soothe an existence that would otherwise be embittered, these guardian angels should at least hover over the life of her father.

When the term of his imprisonment had ceased, Gerard had returned with his daughter to Mowbray. Had he deigned to accept the offers of his friends, he need not have been anxious as to his future. A public subscription for his service had been collected: Morley, who was well to do in the world, for the circulation of the Mowbray Phalanx daily increased with the increasing sufferings of the people, offered his friend to share his house and purse: Hatton was munificent; there was no limit either to his offers or his proffered services. But all were declined; Gerard would live by labour. The post he had occupied at Mr Trafford's was not vacant even if that gentleman had thought fit again to receive him; but his reputation as a first-rate artizan soon obtained him good employment, though on this occasion in the town of Mowbray, which for the sake of his daughter he regretted. He had no pleasant home now for Sybil, but he had the prospect of one, and until he obtained possession of it, Sybil sought a refuge, which had been offered to her from the first, with her kindest and dearest friend; so that at this period of our history, she was again an inmate of the convent at Mowbray, whither her father and Morley had attended her the eve of the day she had first visited the ruins of Marney Abbey.

Book 6 Chapter 3

"I have seen a many things in my time Mrs Trotman," said Chaffing Jack as he took the pipe from his mouth in the silent bar room of the Cat and Fiddle; "but I never see any like this. I think I ought to know Mowbray if any one does, for man and boy I have breathed this air for a matter of half a century. I sucked it in when it tasted of primroses, and this tavern was a cottage covered with honeysuckle in the middle of green fields, where the lads came and drank milk from the cow with their la.s.ses; and I have inhaled what they call the noxious atmosphere, when a hundred chimneys have been smoking like one; and always found myself pretty well. Nothing like business to give one an appet.i.te. But when shall I feel peckish again, Mrs Trotman?"

"The longest lane has a turning they say, Mr Trotman."

"Never knew anything like this before," replied her husband, "and I have seen bad times: but I always used to say, 'Mark my words friends, Mowbray will rally.' My words carried weight, Mrs Trotman, in this quarter, as they naturally should, coming from a man of my experience,--especially when I gave tick. Every man I chalked up was of the same opinion as the landlord of the Cat and Fiddle, and always thought that Mowbray would rally. That's the killing feature of these times, Mrs Trotman, there's no rallying in the place."

"I begin to think it's the machines," said Mrs Trotman.

"Nonsense," said Mr Trotman; "it's the corn laws. The town of Mowbray ought to clothe the world with our resources. Why Shuffle and Screw can turn out forty mile of calico per day; but where's the returns? That's the point. As the American gentleman said who left his bill unpaid, 'Take my breadstuffs and I'll give you a cheque at sight on the Pennsylvanian Bank.'"

"It's very true," said Mrs Trotman. "Who's there?"

"Nothing in my way?" said a woman with a basket of black cherries with a pair of tin scales thrown upon their top.

"Ah! Mrs Carey," said Chaffing Jack, "is that you?"

"My mortal self, Mr Trotman, tho' I be sure I feel more like a ghost than flesh and blood."

"You may well say that Mrs Carey; you and I have known Mowbray as long I should think as any in this quarter--"

"And never see such times as these Mr Trotman, nor the like of such. But I always thought it would come to this; everything turned topsy-turvy as it were, the children getting all the wages, and decent folk turned adrift to pick up a living as they could. It's something of a judgment in my mind, Mr Trotman."

"It's the trade leaving the county, widow, and no mistake."

"And how shall we bring it back again?" said the widow; "the police ought to interfere."

"We must have cheap bread," said Mr Trotman.

"So they tell me," said the widow; "but whether bread be cheap or dear don't much signify, if we have nothing to buy it with. You don't want anything in my way, neighbour? It's not very tempting I fear," said the good widow, in a rather mournful tone: "but a little fresh fruit cools the mouth in this sultry time, and at any rate it takes me into the world. It seems like business, tho' very hard to turn a penny by; but one's neighbours are very kind, and a little chat about the dreadful times always puts me in spirits."

"Well, we will take a pound for the sake of trade, widow," said Mrs Trotman.

"And here's a gla.s.s of gin and water, widow," said Mr Trotman, "and when Mowbray rallies you shall come and pay for it."

"Thank you both very kindly," said the widow, "a good neighbour as our minister says, is the pool of Bethesda; and as you say, Mowbray will rally."

"I never said so," exclaimed Chaffing Jack interrupting her. "Don't go about for to say that I said Mowbray would rally. My words have some weight in this quarter widow; Mowbray rally! Why should it rally?

Where's the elements?"

"Where indeed?" said Devilsdust as he entered the Cat and Fiddle with Dandy Mick, "there is not the spirit of a louse in Mowbray."