Chapter 2

A jolly parson of the good old stock,
By birth a gentleman, yet homely too,
Suiting his phrase to Hodge and Margery
Whom he once christened, and has married since,
A little lax in doctrine and in life.
Not thinking God was captious in such things
As what a man might drink on holidays,
But holding true religion was to do
As you’d be done by—which could never mean
That he should preach three sermons in a week.
Harold Transome did not choose to spend the whole evening with his mother. It was his habit to compress a great deal of effective conversation into a short space of time, asking rapidly all the questions he wanted to get answered, and diluting no subject with irrelevancies, paraphrase, or repetitions. He volunteered no information about himself and his past life at Smyrna, but answered pleasantly enough, though briefly, whenever his mother asked for any detail. He was evidently ill-satisfied as to his palate, trying red pepper to everything, then asking if there were any relishing sauces in the house, and when Hickes brought various home-filled bottles, trying several, finding them failures, and finally falling back from his plate in despair. Yet he remained good-humored, saying something to his father now and then for the sake of being kind, and looking on with a pitying shrug as he saw him watch Hickes cutting his food. Mrs. Transome thought with some bitterness that Harold showed more feeling for her feeble husband who had never cared in the least about him, than for her, who had given him more than the usual share of mother’s love. An hour after dinner, Harold, who had already been turning over the leaves of his mother’s account-books, said—

“I shall just cross the park to the parsonage to see my uncle Lingon.”

“Very well. He can answer more questions for you.”

“Yes,” said Harold, quite deaf to the innuendo, and accepting the words as a simple statement of the fact. “I want to hear all about the game and the North Loamshire hunt. I’m fond of sport; we had a great deal of it at Smyrna, and it keeps down my fat.”

The Reverend John Lingon became very talkative over his second bottle of port, which was opened on his nephew’s arrival. He was not curious about the manners of Smyrna, or about Harold’s experience, but he unbosomed himself very freely as to what he himself liked and disliked, which of the farmers he suspected of killing the foxes, what game he had bagged that very morning, what spot he would recommend as a new cover, and the comparative flatness of all existing sport compared with cock-fighting, under which Old England had been prosperous and glorious, while, so far as he could see, it had gained little by the abolition of a practice which sharpened the faculties of men, gratified the instincts of the fowl, and carried out the designs of heaven in its admirable device of spurs. From these main topics, which made his points of departure and return, he rambled easily enough at any new suggestion or query; so that when Harold got home at a late hour, he was conscious of having gathered from amidst the pompous full-toned triviality of his uncle’s chat some impressions, which were of practical importance. Among the rector’s dislikes, it appeared, was Mr. Matthew Jermyn.

“A fat-handed, glib-tongued fellow, with a scented cambric handkerchief; one of your educated low-bred fellows; a foundling who got his Latin for nothing at Christ’s Hospital; one of your middle-class upstarts who want to rank with gentlemen, and think they’ll do it with kid gloves and new furniture.”

But since Harold meant to stand for the county, Mr. Lingon was equally emphatic as to the necessity of his not quarrelling with Jermyn till the election was over. Jermyn must be his agent; Harold must wink hard till he found himself safely returned; and even then it might be well to let Jermyn drop gently and raise no scandal. He himself had no quarrel with the fellow: a clergyman should have no quarrels, and he made it a point to be able to take wine with any man he met at table. And as to the estate, and his sister’s going too much by Jermyn’s advice, he never meddled with business: it was not his duty as a clergyman. That, he considered, was the meaning of Melchisedec and the tithe, a subject, into which he had gone to some depth thirty years ago, when he preached the Visitation sermon.

The discovery that Harold meant to stand on the Liberal side—nay, that he boldly declared himself a Radical—was rather startling; but to his uncle’s good-humor, beatified by the sipping of port-wine, nothing could seem highly objectionable, provided it did not disturb that operation. In the course of half an hour he had brought himself to see that anything really worthy to be called British Toryism had been entirely extinct since the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel had passed the Catholic Emancipation Bill; that Whiggery, with its rights of man stopping short at ten-pound householders, and its policy of pacifying a wild beast with a bite, was a ridiculous monstrosity; that therefore, since an honest man could not call himself a Tory, which it was, in fact, as impossible to be now as to fight for the old Pretender, and could still less become that execrable monstrosity a Whig, there remained but one course open to him. “Why, lad, if the world was turned into a swamp, I suppose we should leave off shoes and stockings, and walk about like cranes”—whence it followed plainly enough that, in these hopeless times, nothing was left to men of sense and good family but to retard the national ruin by declaring themselves Radicals, and take the inevitable process of changing everything out of the hands of beggarly demagogues and purse-proud tradesmen. It is true the rector was helped to this chain of reasoning by Harold’s remarks; but he soon became quite ardent in asserting the conclusion.

“If the mob can’t be turned back, a man of family must try and head the mob, and save a few homes and hearths, and keep the country up on its last legs as long as he can. And you’re a man of family, my lad—dash it! You’re a Lingon, whatever else you may be, and I’ll stand by you. I’ve no great interest; I’m a poor parson. I’ve been forced to give up hunting; my pointers and a glass of good wine are the only decencies becoming my station that I can allow myself. But I’ll give you my countenance—I’ll stick to you as my nephew. There’s no need for me to change sides exactly. I was born a Tory, and I shall never be a bishop. But if anybody says you’re in the wrong, I shall say, ‘My nephew is in the right; he has turned Radical to save his country. If William Pitt had been living now he’d have done the same; for what did he say when he was dying? Not ‘Oh, save my party!’ but ‘Oh, save my country, heaven!’ That was what they dinned in our ears about Peel and the Duke; and now I’ll turn it round upon them. They shall be hoist with their own petard. Yes, yes, I’ll stand by you.”

Harold did not feel sure that his uncle would thoroughly retain this satisfactory thread of argument in the uninspired hours of the morning; but the old gentleman was sure to take the facts easily in the end, and there was no fear of family coolness or quarrelling on this side. Harold was glad of it. He was not to be turned aside from any course he had chosen; but he disliked all quarrelling as an unpleasant expenditure of energy that could have no good practical result. He was at once active and luxurious; fond of mastery, and good-natured enough to wish that every one about him should like his mastery; not caring greatly to know other people’s thoughts, and ready to despise them as blockheads if their thoughts differed from his, and yet solicitous that they should have no colorable reason for slight thoughts about him. The blockheads must be forced to respect him. Hence, in proportion as he foresaw his equals in the neighborhood would be indignant with him for his political choice, he cared keenly about making a good figure before them in every other way. His conduct as a landholder was to be judicious, his establishment was to be kept up generously, his imbecile father treated with careful regard, his family relations entirely without scandal. He knew that affairs had been unpleasant in his youth—that there had been ugly lawsuits—and that his scapegrace brother Durfey had helped to lower still farther the depressed condition of the family. All this must be retrieved, now that events had made Harold the head of the Transome name.