CHAPTER III

CONTAINS BARONIAL VIEWS OF THE PRESENT TIME

Upon the word of honour of Rosamund, the letter to the officers of the

French Guard was posted.

'Post it, post it,' Everard said, on her consulting him, with the letter

in her hand. 'Let the fellow stand his luck.' It was addressed to the

Colonel of the First Regiment of the Imperial Guard, Paris. That

superscription had been suggested by Colonel Halkett. Rosamund was in

favour of addressing it to Versailles, Nevil to the Tuileries; but Paris

could hardly fail to hit the mark, and Nevil waited for the reply, half

expecting an appointment on the French sands: for the act of posting a

letter, though it be to little short of the Pleiades even, will stamp an

incredible proceeding as a matter of business, so ready is the ardent

mind to take footing on the last thing done. The flight of Mr.

Beauchamp's letter placed it in the common order of occurrences for the

youthful author of it. Jack Wilmore, a messmate, offered to second him,

though he should be dismissed the service for it. Another second would

easily be found somewhere; for, as Nevil observed, you have only to set

these affairs going, and British blood rises: we are not the people you

see on the surface. Wilmore's father was a parson, for instance. What did

he do? He could not help himself: he supplied the army and navy with

recruits! One son was in a marching regiment, the other was Jack, and

three girls had vowed never to quit the rectory save as brides of

officers. Nevil thought that seemed encouraging; we were evidently not a

nation of shopkeepers at heart; and he quoted sayings of Mr. Stukely

Culbrett's, in which neither his ear nor Wilmore's detected the

under-ring Stukely was famous for: as that England had saddled herself

with India for the express purpose of better obeying the Commandments in

Europe; and that it would be a lamentable thing for the Continent and our

doctrines if ever beef should fail the Briton, and such like. 'Depend

upon it we're a fighting nation naturally, Jack,' said Nevil. 'How can we

submit! . . . however, I shall not be impatient. I dislike duelling, and

hate war, but I will have the country respected.' They planned a defence

of the country, drawing their strategy from magazine articles by military

pens, reverberations of the extinct voices of the daily and weekly

journals, customary after a panic, and making bloody stands on spots of

extreme pastoral beauty, which they visited by coach and rail, looking

back on unfortified London with particular melancholy.

Rosamund's word may be trusted that she dropped the letter into a London

post-office in pursuance of her promise to Nevil. The singular fact was

that no answer to it ever arrived. Nevil, without a doubt of her honesty,

proposed an expedition to Paris; he was ordered to join his ship, and he

lay moored across the water in the port of Bevisham, panting for notice

to be taken of him. The slight of the total disregard of his letter now

affected him personally; it took him some time to get over this indignity

put upon him, especially because of his being under the impression that

the country suffered, not he at all. The letter had served its object:

ever since the transmission of it the menaces and insults had ceased.

But they might be renewed, and he desired to stop them altogether. His

last feeling was one of genuine regret that Frenchmen should have behaved

unworthily of the high estimation he held them in. With which he

dismissed the affair.

He was rallied about it when he next sat at his uncle's table, and had to

pardon Rosamund for telling.

Nevil replied modestly: 'I dare say you think me half a fool, sir. All I

know is, I waited for my betters to speak first. I have no dislike of

Frenchmen.'

Everard shook his head to signify, 'not half.' But he was gentle enough

in his observations. 'There's a motto, Ex pede Herculem. You stepped out

for the dogs to judge better of us. It's an infernally tripping motto for

a composite structure like the kingdom of Great Britain and Manchester,

boy Nevil. We can fight foreigners when the time comes.' He directed

Nevil to look home, and cast an eye on the cotton-spinners, with the

remark that they were binding us hand and foot to sell us to the biggest

buyer, and were not Englishmen but 'Germans and Jews, and quakers and

hybrids, diligent clerks and speculators, and commercial travellers, who

have raised a fortune from foisting drugged goods on an idiot

population.'

He loathed them for the curse they were to the country. And he was one of

the few who spoke out. The fashion was to pet them. We stood against

them; were halfhearted, and were beaten; and then we petted them, and bit

by bit our privileges were torn away. We made lords of them to catch

them, and they grocers of us by way of a return. 'Already,' said Everard,

'they have knocked the nation's head off, and dry-rotted the bone of the

people.'

'Don't they,' Nevil asked, 'belong to the Liberal party?'

'I'll tell you,' Everard replied, 'they belong to any party that upsets

the party above them. They belong to the GEORGE FOXE party, and my

poultry-roosts are the mark they aim at. You shall have a glance at the

manufacturing district some day. You shall see the machines they work

with. You shall see the miserable lank-jawed half-stewed pantaloons

they've managed to make of Englishmen there. My blood 's past boiling.

They work young children in their factories from morning to night. Their

manufactories are spreading like the webs of the devil to suck the blood

of the country. In that district of theirs an epidemic levels men like a

disease in sheep. Skeletons can't make a stand. On the top of it all they

sing Sunday tunes!'

This behaviour of corn-law agitators and protectors of poachers was an

hypocrisy too horrible for comment. Everard sipped claret. Nevil lashed

his head for the clear idea which objurgation insists upon implanting,

but batters to pieces in the act.

'Manchester's the belly of this country!' Everard continued. 'So long as

Manchester flourishes, we're a country governed and led by the belly. The

head and the legs of the country are sound still; I don't guarantee it

for long, but the middle's rapacious and corrupt. Take it on a question

of foreign affairs, it 's an alderman after a feast. Bring it upon home

politics, you meet a wolf.'

The faithful Whig veteran spoke with jolly admiration of the speech of a

famous Tory chief.

'That was the way to talk to them! Denounce them traitors! Up whip, and

set the ruffians capering! Hit them facers! Our men are always for the

too-clever trick. They pluck the sprouts and eat them, as if the loss of

a sprout or two thinned Manchester! Your policy of absorption is good

enough when you're dealing with fragments. It's a devilish unlucky thing

to attempt with a concrete mass. You might as well ask your head to

absorb a wall by running at it like a pugnacious nigger. I don't want you

to go into Parliament ever. You're a fitter man out of it; but if ever

you're bitten--and it's the curse of our country to have politics as well

as the other diseases--don't follow a flag, be independent, keep a free

vote; remember how I've been tied, and hold foot against Manchester. Do

it blindfold; you don't want counselling, you're sure to be right. I'll

lay you a blood-brood mare to a cabstand skeleton, you'll have an easy

conscience and deserve the thanks of the country.'

Nevil listened gravely. The soundness of the head and legs of the country

he took for granted. The inflated state of the unchivalrous middle,

denominated Manchester, terrified him. Could it be true that England was

betraying signs of decay? and signs how ignoble! Half-a-dozen crescent

lines cunningly turned, sketched her figure before the world, and the

reflection for one ready to die upholding her was that the portrait was

no caricature. Such an emblematic presentation of the land of his filial

affection haunted him with hideous mockeries. Surely the foreigner

hearing our boasts of her must compare us to showmen bawling the

attractions of a Fat Lady at a fair!

Swoln Manchester bore the blame of it. Everard exulted to hear his young

echo attack the cotton-spinners. But Nevil was for a plan, a system,

immediate action; the descending among the people, and taking an

initiative, LEADING them, insisting on their following, not standing

aloof and shrugging.

'We lead them in war,' said he; 'why not in peace? There's a front for

peace as well as war, and that's our place rightly. We're pushed aside;

why, it seems to me we're treated like old-fashioned ornaments! The fault

must be ours. Shrugging and sneering is about as honourable as blazing

fireworks over your own defeat. Back we have to go! that's the point,

sir. And as for jeering the cotton-spinners, I can't while they've the

lead of us. We let them have it! And we have thrice the stake in the

country. I don't mean properties and titles.'

'Deuce you don't,' said his uncle.

'I mean our names, our histories; I mean our duties. As for titles, the

way to defend them is to be worthy of them.'

'Damned fine speech,' remarked Everard. 'Now you get out of that trick of

prize-orationing. I call it snuffery, sir; it's all to your own nose!

You're talking to me, not to a gallery. "Worthy of them!" Caesar wraps

his head in his robe: he gets his dig in the ribs for all his

attitudinizing. It's very well for a man to talk like that who owns no

more than his barebodkin life, poor devil. Tall talk's his jewelry: he

must have his dandification in bunkum. You ought to know better. Property

and titles are worth having, whether you are "worthy of them" or a

disgrace to your class. The best way of defending them is to keep a

strong fist, and take care you don't draw your fore-foot back more than

enough.'

'Please propose something to be done,' said Nevil, depressed by the

recommendation of that attitude.

Everard proposed a fight for every privilege his class possessed. 'They

say,' he said, 'a nobleman fighting the odds is a sight for the gods: and

I wouldn't yield an inch of ground. It's no use calling things by fine

names--the country's ruined by cowardice. Poursuivez! I cry. Haro! at

them! The biggest hart wins in the end. I haven't a doubt about that. And

I haven't a doubt we carry the tonnage.'

'There's the people,' sighed Nevil, entangled in his uncle's haziness.

'What people?'

'I suppose the people of Great Britain count, sir.'

'Of course they do; when the battle's done, the fight lost and won.'

'Do you expect the people to look on, sir?'

'The people always wait for the winner, boy Nevil.'

The young fellow exclaimed despondingly, 'If it were a race!'

'It's like a race, and we're confoundedly out of training,' said Everard.

There he rested. A mediaeval gentleman with the docile notions of the

twelfth century, complacently driving them to grass and wattling them in

the nineteenth, could be of no use to a boy trying to think, though he

could set the youngster galloping. Nevil wandered about the woods of

Steynham, disinclined to shoot and lend a hand to country sports. The

popping of the guns of his uncle and guests hung about his ears much like

their speech, which was unobjectionable in itself, but not sufficient; a

little hard, he thought, a little idle. He wanted something, and wanted

them to give their time and energy to something, that was not to be had

in a market. The nobles, he felt sure, might resume their natural

alliance with the people, and lead them, as they did of old, to the

battle-field. How might they? A comely Sussex lass could not well tell

him how. Sarcastic reports of the troublesome questioner represented him

applying to a nymph of the country for enlightenment. He thrilled

surprisingly under the charm of feminine beauty. 'The fellow's sound at

bottom,' his uncle said, hearing of his having really been seen walking

in the complete form proper to his budding age, that is, in two halves.

Nevil showed that he had gained an acquaintance with the struggles of the

neighbouring agricultural poor to live and rear their children. His

uncle's table roared at his enumeration of the sickly little beings,

consumptive or bandy-legged, within a radius of five miles of Steynham.

Action was what he wanted, Everard said. Nevil perhaps thought the same,

for he dashed out of his mooning with a wave of the Tory standard,

delighting the ladies, though in that conflict of the Lion and the

Unicorn (which was a Tory song) he seemed rather to wish to goad the dear

lion than crush the one-horned intrusive upstart. His calling on the

crack corps of Peers to enrol themselves forthwith in the front ranks,

and to anticipate opposition by initiating measures, and so cut out that

funny old crazy old galleon, the People, from under the batteries of the

enemy, highly amused the gentlemen.

Before rejoining his ship, Nevil paid his customary short visit of

ceremony to his great-aunt Beauchamp--a venerable lady past eighty,

hitherto divided from him in sympathy by her dislike of his uncle

Everard, who had once been his living hero. That was when he was in

frocks, and still the tenacious fellow could not bear to hear his uncle

spoken ill of.

'All the men of that family are heartless, and he is a man of wood, my

dear, and a bad man,' the old lady said. 'He should have kept you at

school, and sent you to college. You want reading and teaching and

talking to. Such a house as that is should never be a home for you.' She

hinted at Rosamund. Nevil defended the persecuted woman, but with no

better success than from the attacks of the Romfrey ladies; with this

difference, however, that these decried the woman's vicious arts, and

Mistress Elizabeth Mary Beauchamp put all the sin upon the man. Such a

man! she said. 'Let me hear that he has married her, I will not utter

another word.' Nevil echoed, 'Married!' in a different key.

'I am as much of an aristocrat as any of you, only I rank morality

higher,' said Mrs. Beauchamp. 'When you were a child I offered to take

you and make you my heir, and I would have educated you. You shall see a

great-nephew of mine that I did educate; he is eating his dinners for the

bar in London, and comes to me every Sunday. I shall marry him to a good

girl, and I shall show your uncle what my kind of man-making is.'

Nevil had no desire to meet the other great-nephew, especially when he

was aware of the extraordinary circumstance that a Beauchamp great-niece,

having no money, had bestowed her hand on a Manchester man defunct,

whereof this young Blackburn Tuckham, the lawyer, was issue. He took his

leave of Mrs. Elizabeth Beauchamp, respecting her for her constitutional

health and brightness, and regretting for the sake of the country that

she had not married to give England men and women resembling her. On the

whole he considered her wiser in her prescription for the malady

besetting him than his uncle. He knew that action was but a temporary

remedy. College would have been his chronic medicine, and the old lady's

acuteness in seeing it impressed him forcibly. She had given him a

peaceable two days on the Upper Thames, in an atmosphere of plain good

sense and just-mindedness. He wrote to thank her, saying:

'My England at sea will be your parlour-window looking down the grass to

the river and rushes; and when you do me the honour to write, please tell

me the names of those wildflowers growing along the banks in Summer.' The

old lady replied immediately, enclosing a cheque for fifty pounds:

'Colonel Halkett informs me you are under a cloud at Steynham, and I have

thought you may be in want of pocket-money. The wild-flowers are

willowherb, meadow-sweet, and loosestrife. I shall be glad when you are

here in Summer to see them.'

Nevil despatched the following: 'I thank you, but I shall not cash the

cheque. The Steynham tale is this:

I happened to be out at night, and stopped the keepers in chase of a

young fellow trespassing. I caught him myself, but recognized him as one

of a family I take an interest in, and let him run before they came up.

My uncle heard a gun; I sent the head gamekeeper word in the morning to

out with it all. Uncle E. was annoyed, and we had a rough parting. If you

are rewarding me for this, I have no right to it.'

Mrs. Beauchamp rejoined: 'Your profession should teach you subordination,

if it does nothing else that is valuable to a Christian gentleman. You

will receive from the publisher the "Life and Letters of Lord

Collingwood," whom I have it in my mind that a young midshipman should

task himself to imitate. Spend the money as you think fit.'

Nevil's ship, commanded by Captain Robert Hall (a most gallant officer,

one of his heroes, and of Lancashire origin, strangely!), flew to the

South American station, in and about Lord Cochrane's waters; then as

swiftly back. For, like the frail Norwegian bark on the edge of the

maelstrom, liker to a country of conflicting interests and passions, that

is not mentally on a level with its good fortune, England was drifting

into foreign complications. A paralyzed Minister proclaimed it. The

governing people, which is looked to for direction in grave dilemmas by

its representatives and reflectors, shouted that it had been accused of

pusillanimity. No one had any desire for war, only we really had (and it

was perfectly true) been talking gigantic nonsense of peace, and of the

everlastingness of the exchange of fruits for money, with angels waving

raw-groceries of Eden in joy of the commercial picture. Therefore, to

correct the excesses of that fit, we held the standing by the Moslem, on

behalf of the Mediterranean (and the Moslem is one of our customers,

bearing an excellent reputation for the payment of debts), to be good,

granting the necessity. We deplored the necessity. The Press wept over

it. That, however, was not the politic tone for us while the Imperial

berg of Polar ice watched us keenly; and the Press proceeded to remind us

that we had once been bull-dogs. Was there not an animal within us having

a right to a turn now and then? And was it not (Falstaff, on a calm

world, was quoted) for the benefit of our constitutions now and then to

loosen the animal? Granting the necessity, of course. By dint of

incessantly speaking of the necessity we granted it unknowingly. The

lighter hearts regarded our period of monotonously lyrical prosperity as

a man sensible of fresh morning air looks back on the snoring bolster.

Many of the graver were glad of a change. After all that maundering over

the blessed peace which brings the raisin and the currant for the

pudding, and shuts up the cannon with a sheep's head, it became a

principle of popular taste to descant on the vivifying virtues of war;

even as, after ten months of money-mongering in smoky London, the citizen

hails the sea-breeze and an immersion in unruly brine, despite the cost,

that breeze and brine may make a man of him, according to the doctor's

prescription: sweet is home, but health is sweeter! Then was there

another curious exhibition of us. Gentlemen, to the exact number of the

Graces, dressed in drab of an ancient cut, made a pilgrimage to the icy

despot, and besought him to give way for Piety's sake. He, courteous,

colossal, and immoveable, waved them homeward. They returned and were

hooted for belying the bellicose by their mission, and interpreting too

well the peaceful. They were the unparalyzed Ministers of the occasion,

but helpless.

And now came war, the purifier and the pestilence.

The cry of the English people for war was pretty general, as far as the

criers went. They put on their Sabbath face concerning the declaration of

war, and told with approval how the Royal hand had trembled in committing

itself to the form of signature to which its action is limited. If there

was money to be paid, there was a bugbear to be slain for it; and a

bugbear is as obnoxious to the repose of commercial communities as rivals

are to kings.

The cry for war was absolutely unanimous, and a supremely national cry,

Everard Romfrey said, for it excluded the cotton-spinners.

He smacked his hands, crowing at the vociferations of disgust of those

negrophiles and sweaters of Christians, whose isolated clamour amid the

popular uproar sounded of gagged mouths.

One of the half-stifled cotton-spinners, a notorious one, a spouter of

rank sedition and hater of aristocracy, a political poacher, managed to

make himself heard. He was tossed to the Press for morsel, and tossed

back to the people in strips. Everard had a sharp return of appetite in

reading the daily and weekly journals. They printed logic, they printed

sense; they abused the treasonable barking cur unmercifully. They printed

almost as much as he would have uttered, excepting the strong salt of his

similes, likening that rascal and his crew to the American weed in our

waters, to the rotting wild bees' nest in our trees, to the worm in our

ships' timbers, and to lamentable afflictions of the human frame, and of

sheep, oxen, honest hounds. Manchester was in eclipse. The world of

England discovered that the peace-party which opposed was the actual

cause of the war: never was indication clearer. But my business is with

Mr. Beauchamp, to know whom, and partly understand his conduct in

after-days, it will be as well to take a bird'seye glance at him through

the war.

'Now,' said Everard, 'we shall see what staff there is in that fellow

Nevil.'

He expected, as you may imagine, a true young Beauchamp-Romfrey to be

straining his collar like a leash-hound.