Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (264 page)

‘Hooray ! ‘ said Tommy. ‘Let’s be off then.’

He was one of the thoroughly inured, originally hale drunkards, and did not easily lose his head or legs or the ordinary amount of method in his talk. Strangers often supposed that Tommy was tipsy when he had only taken what he called ‘one blessed pint’, chiefly from that glorious contentment with himself and his adverse fortunes which is not usually characteristic of the sober Briton. He knocked the ashes out of his pipe, seized his paste-vessel and his basket, and prepared to start, with a satisfactory promise that he could know what he was about.

The landlord and some others had confidently concluded that they understood all about Christian now. He was a Transome’s man, come to see after the bill-sticking in Transome’s interest. The landlord, telling his yellow wife snappishly to open the door for the gentleman, hoped soon to see him again.

‘This is a Transome’s house, sir,’ he observed, ‘in respect of entertaining customers of that colour. I do my duty as a publican, which, if I know it, is to turn back no genelman’s money. I say, give every genelman a chanch, and the more the merrier, in parl’ment and out of it. And if anybody says they want but two parl’ment men, I say it ‘ud be better for trade if there was six of ‘em, and voters according.’

‘Ay, ay,’ said Christian; ‘you’re a sensible man, landlord. You don’t mean to vote for Debarry then, eh?’

‘Not nohow,’ said the landlord, thinking that where negatives were good the more you heard of them the better.

As soon as the door had closed behind Christian and his new companion, Tommy said -

‘Now, master, if you’re to be my lantern, don’t you be a Jacky Lantern, which I take to mean one as leads you the wrong way. For I’ll tell you what - if you’ve had the luck to fall in wi’ Tommy Trounsem, don’t you let him drop.’

‘No, no - to be sure not,’ said Christian. ‘Come along here. We’ll go to the Back Brewery wall first.’

‘No, no; don’t you let me drop. Give me a shilling any day you like, and I’ll tell you more nor you’ll hear from Spilkins in a week. There isna many men like me. I carried pots for fifteen years off and on - what do you think o’ that now, for a man as might ha’ lived up there at Trounsem Park, and snared his own game? Which I’d ha’ done,’ said Tommy, wagging his head at Christian in the dimness undisturbed by gas. ‘None o’ your shooting for me - it’s two to one you’ll miss. Snaring’s more fishing-like. You bait your hook, and if it isna the fishes’ goodwill to come, that’s nothing again’ the sporting genelman. And that’s what I say by snaring.’

‘But if you’d a right to the Transome estate, how was it you were kept out of it, old boy? It was some foul shame or other, eh?’

‘It’s the law - that’s what it is. You’re a good sort o’ chap; I don’t mind telling you. There’s folks born to property, and there’s folks catch hold on it; and the law’s made for them as catch hold. I’m pretty deep; I see a good deal further than Spilkins. There was Ned Patch, the pedlar, used to say to me “You canna read, Tommy,” says he. “No; thank you,” says I; “I’m not going to crack my headpiece to make myself as big a fool as you.” I was fond o’ Ned. Many’s the pot we’ve had together.’

‘I see well enough you’re deep, Tommy. How came you to know you were born to property?’

‘It was the regester - the parish regester,’ said Tommy, with his knowing wag of the head, ‘that shows as you was born. I allays felt it inside me as I was somebody, and I could see other chaps thought it on me too; and so one day at Littleshaw, where I kept ferrets and a little bit of a public, there comes a fine man looking after me, and walking me up and down wi’ questions. And I made out from the clerk as he’d been at the regester; and I gave the clerk a pot or two, and he got it of our parson as the name o’ Trounsem was a great name hereabout. And I waits a bit for my fine man to come again. Thinks I, if there’s property wants a right owner, I shall be called for; for I didn’t know the law then. And I waited and waited, till I see’d no fun i’ waiting. So I parted wi’ my public and my ferrets - for she was dead a’ready, my wife was, and I hadn’t no cumbrance. And off I started a pretty long walk to this countryside, for I could walk for a wager in them days.’

‘Ah! well, here we are at the Back Brewery wall. Put down your paste and your basket now, old boy, and I’ll help you. You paste, and I’ll give you the bills, and then you can go on talking.’

Tommy obeyed automatically, for he was now carried away by the rare opportunity of talking to a new listener, and was only eager to go on with his story. As soon as his back was turned, and he was stooping over his paste-pot, Christian, with quick adroitness, exchanged the placards in his own bag for those in Tommys basket. Christian’s placards had not been printed at Treby, but were a new lot which had been sent from Duffield that very day - ‘highly spiced’, Quorlen had said, ‘coming from a pen that was up to that sort of thing’. Christian had read the first of the sheaf, and supposed they were all alike. He proceeded to hand one to Tommy, and said -

‘Here, old boy, paste this over the other. And so, when you got into this country-side, what did you do?’

‘Do? Why, I put up at a good public and ordered the best, for I’d a bit o’ money in my pocket; and I axed about, and they said to me, if it’s Trounsem business you’re after, you go to Lawyer Jermyn. And I went; and says I, going along, he’s maybe the fine man as walked me up and down. But no such thing. I’ll tell you what Lawyer Jermyn was. He stands you there, and holds you away from him wi’ a pole three yards long. He stares at you, and says nothing, till you feel like a Tomfool; and then he threats you to set the justice on you; and then he’s sorry for you, and hands you money, and preaches you a sarmint, and tells you you’re a poor man, and he’ll give you a bit of advice - and you’d better not be meddling wi’ things belonging to the law, else you’ll be catched up in a big wheel and fly to bits. And I went of a cold sweat, and I wished I might never come i’ sight o’ Lawyer Jermyn again. But he says, if you keep i’ this neighbourhood, behave yourself well, and I’ll pertect you. I were deep enough, but it’s no use being deep, ‘cause you can never know the law. And there’s times when the deepest fellow’s worst frightened.’

‘Yes, yes. There! Now for another placard. And so that was all?’

‘All?’ said Tommy, turning round and holding the pastebrush in suspense. ‘Don’t you be running too quick. Thinks I, “I’ll meddle no more. I’ve got a bit o’ money - I’ll buy a basket, and be a potman. It’s a pleasant life. I shall live at publics and see the world, and pick up ‘quaintance, and get a chanch penny.” But when I’d turned into the Red Lion, and got myself warm again wi’ a drop o’ hot, something jumps into my head. Thinks I, Tommy, you’ve done finely for yourself: you’re a rat as has broke up your house to take a journey, and show yourself to a ferret. And then it jumps into my head: I’d once two ferrets as turned on one another, and the little un killed the big un. Says I to the landlady, “Missis, could you tell me of a lawyer,” says I, “not very big or fine, but a second size - a pig-potato, like?” “That I can,” says she; “there’s one now in the bar-parlour.” “Be so kind as bring us together,” says I. And she cries out - I think I hear her now - “Mr Johnson ! “ And what do you think?’

At this crisis in Tommy’s story the grey clouds, which had been gradually thinning, opened sufficiently to let down the sudden moonlight, and show his poor battered old figure and face in the attitude and with the expression of a narrator sure of the coming effect on his auditor; his body and neck stretched a little on one side, and his paste-brush held out with an alarming intention of tapping Christian’s coat-sleeve at the right moment. Christian started to a safe distance, and said -

‘It’s wonderful. I can’t tell what to think.’

‘Then never do you deny Old Nick,’ said Tommy, with solemnity. ‘I’ve believed in him more ever since. Who was Johnson? Why, Johnson was the fine man as had walked me up and down with questions. And I out with it to him then and there. And he speaks me civil, and says, “Come away wi’ me, my good fellow.” And he told me a deal o’ law. And he says, whether you’re a Tommy Trounsem or no, it’s no good to you, but only to them as have got hold o’ the property. If you was a Tommy Trounsem twenty times over, it ‘ud be no good, for the law’s bought you out; and your life’s no good, only to them as have catched hold o’ the property. The more you live, the more they’ll stick in. Not as they want you now, says he - you’re no good to anybody, and you might howl like a dog for iver, and the law ‘ud take no notice on you. Says Johnson. I’m doing a kind thing by you, to tell you. For that’s the law. And if you want to know the law, master, you ask Johnson. I heard ‘em say after, as he was an understrapper at Jermyn’s. I’ve never forgot it from that day to this. But I saw clear enough, as if the law hadn’t been again’ me, the Trounsem estate ‘ud ha’ been mine. But folks are fools hereabouts, and I’ve left off talking. The more you tell ‘em the truth, the more they’ll niver believe you. And I went and bought my basket and the pots, and -’

‘Come, then, fire away,’ said Christian. ‘Here’s another placard.’

‘I’m getting a bit dry, master.’

‘Well, then, make haste, and you’ll have something to drink all the sooner.’

Tommy turned to his work again, and Christian, continuing his help, said, ‘And how long has Mr Jermyn been employing you?’

‘Oh, no particular time - off and on; but a week or two ago he sees me upo’ the road, and speaks to me uncommon civil, and tells me to go up to his office, and he’ll give me employ. And I was noways unwilling to stick the bills to get the family into parl’ment. For there’s no man can help the law. And the family’s the family, whether you carry pots or no. Master, I’m uncommon dry - my head’s a turning round - it’s talking so long on end.’

The unwonted excitement of poor Tommy’s memory was producing a reaction.

‘Well, Tommy,’ said Christian, who had just made a discovery among the placards which altered the bent of his thoughts, ‘you may go back to the Cross-Keys now, if you like; here’s a half-crown for you to spend handsomely. I can’t go back there myself just yet; but you may give my respects to Spilkins, and mind you paste the rest of the bills early to-morrow morning.

‘Ay, ay. But don’t you believe too much i’ Spilkins,’ said Tommy, pocketing the half-crown, and showing his gratitude by giving this advice - ‘he’s no harm much - but weak. He thinks he’s at the bottom o’ things because he scores you up. But I bear him no ill-will. Tommy Trounsem’s a good chap; and any day you like to give me half-a-crown, I’ll tell you the same story over again. Not now; I’m dry. Come, help me up wi’ these things; you’re a younger chap than me. Well, I’ll tell Spilkins you’ll come again another day.’

The moonlight, which had lit up poor Tommy’s oratorical attitude, had served to light up for Christian the print of the placards. He had expected the copies to be various, and had turned them half over at different depths of the sheaf before drawing out those he offered to the bill-sticker. Suddenly the clear light had shown him on one of them a name which was just then especially interesting to him, and all the more when occurring in a placard intended to dissuade the electors of North Loamshire from voting for the heir of the Transomes. He hastily turned over the lists that preceded and succeeded, that he might draw out and carry away all of this pattern; for it might turn out to be wiser for him not to contribute to the publicity of handbills which contained allusions to Bycliffe versus Transome. There were about a dozen of them; he pressed them together and thrust them into his pocket, returning all the rest to Tommy’s basket. To take away this dozen might not be to prevent similar bills from being posted up elsewhere, but he had reason to believe that these were all of the same kind which had been sent to Treby from Duffield.

Christian’s interest in his practical joke had died out like a morning rushlight. Apart from this discovery in the placards, old Tommy’s story had some indications in it that were worth pondering over. Where was that well-informed Johnson now? Was he still an understrapper of Jermyn’s?

With this matter in his thoughts, Christian only turned in hastily at Quorlen’s, threw down the black bag which contained the captured Radical handbills, said he had done the job, and hurried back to the Manor that he might study his problem.

CHAPTER 29

‘I doe believe that, as the gall has several receptacles in several creatures, soe there’s scarce any creature but hath that emunctorye somewhere.’ –

SIR THOMAS BROWNE
.

FANCY what a game at chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning: if you were not only uncertain about your adversary’s men, but a little uncertain also about your own; if your knight could shuffle himself on to a new square by the sly; if your bishop, in disgust at your castling, could wheedle your pawns out of their places; and if your pawns, hating you because they are pawns, could make away from their appointed posts that you might get checkmate on a sudden. You might be the longest-headed of deductive reasoners, and yet you might be beaten by your own pawns. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt.

Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with the game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for his instruments. He thinks himself sagacious, perhaps, because he trusts no bond except that of self-interest; but the only self-interest he can safely rely on is what seems to be such to the mind he would use or govern. Can he ever be sure of knowing this?

Matthew Jermyn was under no misgivings as to the fealty of Johnson. He had ‘been the making of Johnson’; and this seems to many men a reason for expecting devotion, in spite of the fact that they themselves, though very fond of their own persons and lives, are not at all devoted to the Maker they believe in. Johnson was a most serviceable subordinate. Being a man who aimed at respectability, a family man, who had a good church-pew, subscribed for engravings of banquet pictures where there were portraits of political celebrities, and wished his children to be more unquestionably genteel than their father, he presented all the more numerous handles of worldly motive by which a judicious superior might keep a hold on him. But this useful regard to respectability had its inconvenience in relation to such a superior: it was a mark of some vanity and some pride, which, if they were not touched just in the right handlling-place, were liable to become raw and sensitive. Jermyn was aware of Johnson’s weaknesses, and thought he had flattered them sufficiently. But on the point of knowing when we are disagreeable, our human nature is fallible. Our lavender-water, our smiles, our compliments, and other polite falsities, are constantly offensive, when in the very nature of them they can only be meant to attract admiration and regard. Jermyn had often been unconsciously disagreeable to Johnson, over and above the constant offence of being an ostentatious patron. He would never let Johnson dine with his wife and daughters; he would not himself dine at Johnson’s house when he was in town. He often did what was equivalent to pooh-poohing his conversation by not even appearing to listen, and by suddenly cutting it short with a query on a new subject. Jermyn was able and politic enough to have commanded a great deal of success in his life, but he could not help being handsome, arrogant, fond of being heard, indisposed to any kind of comradeship, amorous and bland towards women, cold and self-contained towards men. You will hear very strong denial that an attorney’s being handsome could enter into the dislike he excited; but conversation consists a good deal in the denial of what is true. From the British point of view masculine beauty is regarded very much as it is in the drapery business: as good solely for the fancy department - for young noblemen, artists, poets, and the clergy. Some one who, like Mr Lingon, was disposed to revile Jermyn (perhaps it was Sir Maximus), had called him ‘a cursed, sleek, handsome, long-winded, over-bearing sycophant;’ epithets which expressed, rather confusedly, the mingled character of the dislike he excited. And serviceable John Johnson, himself sleek, and mindful about his broadcloth and his cambric fronts, had what he considered ‘spirit’ enough within him to feel that dislike of Jermyn gradually gathering force through years of obligation and subjection, till it had become an actuating motive disposed to use an opportunity, if not to watch for one.

It was not this motive, however, but rather the ordinary course of business, which accounted for Johnson’s playing a double part as an electioneering agent. What men do in elections is not to be classed either among sins or marks of grace: it would be profane to include business in religion, and conscience refers to failure, not to success. Still, the sense of being galled by Jermyn’s harness was an additional reason for cultivating all relations that were independent of him; and pique at Harold Transome’s behaviour to him in Jermyn’s office perhaps gave all the more zest to Johnson’s use of his pen and ink when he wrote a handbill in the service of Garstin, and Garstin’s incomparable agent, Putty, full of innuendoes against Harold Transome, as a descendant of the Durfey-Transomes. It is a natural subject of self-congratulation to a man, when special knowledge, gained long ago without any forecast, turns out to afford a special inspiration in the present; and Johnson felt a new pleasure in the consciousness that he of all people in the world next to Jermyn had the most intimate knowledge of the Transome affairs. Still better - some of these affairs were secrets of Jermyn’s. If in an uncomplimentary spirit he might have been called Jermyn’s ‘man of straw’, it was a satisfaction to know that the unreality of the man John Johnson was confined to his appearance in annuity deeds, and that elsewhere he was solid, locomotive, and capable of remembering anything for his own pleasure and benefit. To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.

By such causes it came to pass that Christian held in his hands a bill in which Jermyn was playfully alluded to as Mr

German Cozen, who won games by clever shuffling and odd tricks without any honour, and backed Durfey’s crib against Bycliffe, - in which it was adroitly implied that the so-called head of the Transomes was only the tail of the Durfeys, - and that some said the Durfeys would have died out and left their nest empty if it had not been for their German Cozen.

Johnson had not dared to use any recollections except such as might credibly exist in other minds besides his own. In the truth of the case, no one but himself had the prompting to recall these outworn scandals; but it was likely enough that such foul-winged things should be revived by election heats for Johnson to escape all suspicion.

Christian could gather only dim and uncertain inferences from this ‘dat irony and heavy joking; but one chief thing was clear to him. He had been right in his conjecture that Jermyn’s interest about Bycliffe had its source in some claim of Bycliffe’s on the Transome property. And then, there was that story of the old bill-sticker’s, which, closely considered, indicated that the right of the present Transomes depended, or at least had depended, on the continuance of some other lives. Christian in his time had gathered enough legal notions to be aware that possession by one man sometimes depended on the life of another; that a man might sell his own interest in property, and the interest of his descendants, while a claim on that property would still remain to some one else than the purchaser, supposing the descendants became extinct, and the interest they had sold were at an end. But under what conditions the claim might be valid or void in any particular case, was all darkness to him. Suppose Bycliffe had any such claim on the Transome estates: how was Christian to know whether at the present moment it was worth anything more than a bit of rotten parchment? Old Tommy Trounsem had said that Johnson knew all about it. But even if Johnson were still above-ground - and all Johnsons are mortal - he might still be an understrapper of Jermyn’s, in which case his knowledge would be on the wrong side of the hedge for the purposes of Henry Scaddon. His immediate care must be to find out all he could about Johnson. He blamed himself for not having questioned Tommy further while he had him at command; but on this head the bill-sticker could hardly know more than the less dilapidated denizens of Treby.

Now it had happened that during the weeks in which Christian had been at work in trying to solve the enigma of Jermyn’s interest about Bycliffe, Johnson’s mind also had been somewhat occupied with suspicion and conjecture as to new information on the subject of the old Bycliffe claims which Jermyn intended to conceal from him. The letter which, after his interview with Christian, Jermyn had written with a sense of perfect safety to his faithful ally Johnson, was, as we know, written to a Johnson who had found his self-love incompatible with that faithfulness of which it was supposed to be the foundation. Anything that the patron felt it inconvenient for his obliged friend and servant to know, became by that very fact an object of peculiar curiosity. The obliged friend and servant secretly doted on his patron’s inconvenience, provided that he himself did not share it; and conjecture naturally became active.

Johnson’s legal imagination, being very differently furnished from Christian’s, was at no loss to conceive conditions under which there might arise a new claim on the Transome estates. He had before him the whole history of the settlement of those estates made a hundred years ago by John Justus Transome, entailing them, whilst in his possession, on his son Thomas and his heirs-male, with remainder to the Bycliffes in fee. He knew that Thomas, son of John Justus, proving a prodigal, had, without the knowledge of his father, the tenant in possession, sold his own and his descendants’ rights to a lawyer-cousin named Durfey; that, therefore, the title of the Durfey-Transomes, in spite of that old Durfey’s tricks to show the contrary, depended solely on the purchase of the ‘base fee’ thus created by Thomas Transome; and that the Bycliffes were the ‘remainder-men’ who might fairly oust the Durfey-Transomes if ever the issue of the prodigal Thomas went clean out of existence, and ceased to represent a right which he had bargained away from them.

Johnson, as Jermyn’s subordinate, had been closely cognisant of the details concerning the suit instituted by successive Bycliffes, of whom Maurice Christian Bycliffe was the last, on the plea that the extinction of Thomas Transome’s line had actually come to pass - a weary suit, which had eaten into the fortunes of two families, and had only made the cankerworms fat. The suit had closed with the death of Maurice Christian Bycliffe in prison; but before his death, Jermyn’s exertions to get evidence that there was still issue of Thomas Transome’s line surviving, as a security of the Durfey title, had issued in the discovery of a Thomas Transome at Littleshaw, in Stonyshire, who was the representative of a pawned inheritance. The death of Maurice had made this discovery useless - had made it seem the wiser part to say nothing about it; and the fact had remained a secret known only to Jermyn and Johnson. No other Bycliffe was known or believed to exist, and the Durfey-Transomes might be considered safe, unless - yes, there was an ‘unless’ which Johnson could conceive: an heir or heiress of the Bycliffes - if such a personage turned out to be in existence - might some time raise a new and valid claim when once informed that wretched old Tommy Trounsem the bill-sticker, tottering drunkenly on the edge of the grave, was the last issue remaining above ground from that dissolute Thomas who played his Esau part a century before. While the poor old bill-sticker breathed, the Durfey-Transomes could legally keep their possession in spite of a possible Bycliffe proved real; but not when the parish had buried the bill-sticker.

Still, it is one thing to conceive conditions, and another to see any chance of proving their existence. Johnson at present had no glimpse of such a chance; and even if he ever gained the glimpse, he was not sure that he should ever make any use of it. His inquiries of Medwin, in obedience to Jermyn’s letter, had extracted only a negative as to any information possessed by the lawyers of Bycliffe concerning a marriage, or expectation of offspring on his part. But Johnson felt not the less stung by curiosity to know what Jermyn had found out that he had found something in relation to a possible Bycliffe, Johnson felt pretty sure. And he thought with satisfaction that Jermyn could not hinder him from knowing what he already knew about Thomas Transome’s issue. Many things might occur to alter his policy and give a new value to facts. Was it certain that Jermyn would always be fortunate?

When greed and unscrupulousness exhibit themselves on a grand historical scale, and there is question of peace or war or amicable partition, it often occurs that gentlemen of high diplomatic talents have their minds bent on the same object from different points of view. Each, perhaps, is thinking of a certain duchy or province, with a view to arranging the ownership in such a way as shall best serve the purposes of the gentleman with high diplomatic talents in whom each is more especially interested. But these select minds in high office can never miss their aims from ignorance of each other’s existence or whereabouts. Their high titles may be learned even by common people from every pocket almanac.

But with meaner diplomatists, who might be mutually useful, such ignorance is often obstructive. Mr John Johnson and Mr Christian, otherwise Henry Scaddon, might have had a concentration of purpose and an ingenuity of device fitting them to make a figure in the parcelling of Europe, and yet they might never have met, simply because Johnson knew nothing of Christian, and because Christian did not know where to find Johnson.