"I don't intend to quarrel with you, Scales. Such talk as this is not profitable to either of us. It makes you purple in the face – you are apoplectic, you know – and it spoils good company. Better tell a few fibs about me behind my back – it will heat you less, and do me more harm. I'll leave you to it; I shall go and have a game of whist with the ladies."
As the door closed behind the questionable Christian, Mr. Scales was in a state of frustration that prevented speech. Every one was rather embarrassed.
"That's an uncommon sort o' fellow," said Mr. Crowder, in an undertone, to his next neighbor, the gardener. "Why, Mr. Philip picked him up in foreign parts, didn't he?"
"He was a courier," said the gardener. "He's had a deal of experience. And I believe, by what I can make out – for he's been pretty free with me sometimes – there was a time when he was in that rank of life that he fought a duel."
"Ah! that makes him such a cool chap," said Mr. Crowder.
"He's what I call an overbearing fellow," said Mr. Sircome, also sotto voce, to his next neighbor, Mr. Filmore, the surgeon's assistant. "He runs you down with a sort of talk that's neither here nor there. He's got a deal too many samples in his pocket for me."
"All I know is, he's a wonderful hand at cards," said Mr. Filmore, whose whiskers and shirt-pin were quite above the average. "I wish I could play écarté as he does; it's beautiful to see him; he can make a man look pretty blue; he'll empty his pocket for him in no time."
"That's none to his credit," said Mr. Sircome.
The conversation had in this way broken up into tête-à-tête, and the hilarity of the evening might be considered a failure. Still the punch was drunk, the accounts were duly swelled, and, notwithstanding the innovating spirit of the time, Sir Maximus Debarry's establishment was kept up in sound hereditary British manner.
CHAPTER VIII
"Rumor doth double like the voice and echo."
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.