'And I,' said Beauchamp. Some shadow of a frown crossed him; but Stukely Culbrett's humour seemed to be a refuge. 'Protestant parson-not clergy,' he corrected the colonel. 'Can't you hear Mr. Culbrett, Cecilia? The Protestant parson is the policeman set to watch over the respectability of the middle-class. He has sharp eyes for the sins of the poor. As for the rich, they support his church; they listen to his sermon—to set an example: discipline, colonel. You discipline the tradesman, who's afraid of losing your custom, and the labourer, who might be deprived of his bread. But the people? It's put down to the wickedness of human nature that the parson has not got hold of the people. The parsons have lost them by senseless Conservatism, because they look to the Tories for the support of their Church, and let the religion run down the gutters. And how many thousands have you at work in the pulpit every Sunday? I'm told the Dissenting ministers have some vitality.'
Colonel Halkett shrugged with disgust at the mention of Dissenters.
'And those thirty or forty thousand, colonel, call the men that do the work they ought to be doing demagogues. The parsonry are a power absolutely to be counted for waste, as to progress.'
Cecilia perceived that her father was beginning to be fretted.
She said, with a tact that effected its object: 'I am one who hear Mr.
Culbrett without admiring his wit.'
'No, and I see no good in this kind of Steynham talk,' Colonel Halkett said, rising. 'We're none of us perfect. Heaven save us from political parsons!'
Beauchamp was heard to utter, 'Humanity.'
The colonel left the room with Cecilia, muttering the Steynham tail to that word: 'tomtity,' for the solace of an aside repartee.
She was on her way to dress for church. He drew her into the library, and there threw open a vast placard lying on the table. It was printed in blue characters and red. 'This is what I got by the post this morning. I suppose Nevil knows about it. He wants tickling, but I don't like this kind of thing. It 's not fair war. It 's as bad as using explosive bullets in my old game.'
'Can he expect his adversaries to be tender with him?' Cecilia simulated vehemence in an underbreath. She glanced down the page:
'FRENCH MARQUEES' caught her eye.
It was a page of verse. And, oh! could it have issued from a Tory
Committee?
'The Liberals are as bad, and worse,' her father said.
She became more and more distressed. 'It seems so very mean, papa; so base. Ungenerous is no word for it. And how vulgar! Now I remember, Nevil said he wished to see Mr. Austin.'
'Seymour Austin would not sanction it.'
'No, but Nevil might hold him responsible for it.'
'I suspect Mr. Stukely Culbrett, whom he quotes, and that smoking-room lot at Lespel's. I distinctly discountenance it. So I shall tell them on Wednesday night. Can you keep a secret?'
'And after all Nevil Beauchamp is very young, papa!—of course I can keep a secret.'
The colonel exacted no word of honour, feeling quite sure of her.
He whispered the secret in six words, and her cheeks glowed vermilion.
'But they will meet on Wednesday after this,' she said, and her sight went dancing down the column of verse, of which the following trotting couplet is a specimen:—
'O did you ever, hot in love, a little British middy see,
Like Orpheus asking what the deuce to do without Eurydice?'
The middy is jilted by his FRENCH MARQUEES, whom he 'did adore,' and in his wrath he recommends himself to the wealthy widow Bevisham, concerning whose choice of her suitors there is a doubt: but the middy is encouraged to persevere:
'Up, up, my pretty middy; take a draught of foaming Sillery;
Go in and win the uriddy with your Radical artillery.'
And if Sillery will not do, he is advised, he being for superlatives, to try the sparkling Sillery of the Radical vintage, selected grapes.
This was but impudent nonsense. But the reiterated apostrophe to
'MY FRENCH MARQUEES' was considered by Cecilia to be a brutal offence.
She was shocked that her party should have been guilty of it. Nevil certainly provoked, and he required, hard blows; and his uncle Everard might be right in telling her father that they were the best means of teaching him to come to his understanding. Still a foul and stupid squib did appear to her a debasing weapon to use.
'I cannot congratulate you on your choice of a second candidate, papa,' she said scornfully.
'I don't much congratulate myself,' said the colonel.
'Here's a letter from Mrs. Beauchamp informing me that her boy Blackburn
will be home in a month. There would have been plenty of time for him.
However, we must make up our minds to it. Those two 'll be meeting on
Wednesday, so keep your secret. It will be out tomorrow week.'
'But Nevil will be accusing Mr. Austin.'
'Austin won't be at Lespel's. And he must bear it, for the sake of peace.'
'Is Nevil ruined with his uncle, papa?'
'Not a bit, I should imagine. It's Romfrey's fun.'
'And this disgraceful squib is a part of the fun?'
'That I know nothing about, my dear. I'm sorry, but there's pitch and tar in politics as well as on shipboard.'
'I do not see that there should be,' said Cecilia resolutely.
'We can't hope to have what should be.'
'Why not? I would have it: I would do my utmost to have it,' she flamed out.
'Your utmost?' Her father was glancing at her foregone mimicry of Beauchamp's occasional strokes of emphasis. 'Do your utmost to have your bonnet on in time for us to walk to church. I can't bear driving there.'
Cecilia went to her room with the curious reflection, awakened by what her father had chanced to suggest to her mind, that she likewise could be fervid, positive, uncompromising—who knows? Radicalish, perhaps, when she looked eye to eye on an evil. For a moment or so she espied within herself a gulf of possibilities, wherein black night-birds, known as queries, roused by shot of light, do flap their wings.—Her utmost to have be what should be! And why not?
But the intemperate feeling subsided while she was doing duty before her mirror, and the visionary gulf closed immediately.
She had merely been very angry on Nevil Beauchamp's behalf, and had dimly seen that a woman can feel insurgent, almost revolutionary, for a personal cause, Tory though her instinct of safety and love of smoothness make her.
No reflection upon this casual piece of self or sex revelation troubled her head. She did, however, think of her position as the friend of Nevil in utter antagonism to him. It beset her with contradictions that blew rough on her cherished serenity; for she was of the order of ladies who, by virtue of their pride and spirit, their port and their beauty, decree unto themselves the rank of princesses among women, before our world has tried their claim to it. She had lived hitherto in upper air, high above the clouds of earth. Her ideal of a man was of one similarly disengaged and lofty-loftier. Nevil, she could honestly say, was not her ideal; he was only her old friend, and she was opposed to him in his present adventure. The striking at him to cure him of his mental errors and excesses was an obligation; she could descend upon him calmly with the chastening rod, pointing to the better way; but the shielding of him was a different thing; it dragged her down so low, that in her condemnation of the Tory squib she found herself asking herself whether haply Nevil had flung off the yoke of the French lady; with the foolish excuse for the question, that if he had not, he must be bitterly sensitive to the slightest public allusion to her. Had he? And if not, how desperately faithful he was! or else how marvellously seductive she!
Perhaps it was a lover's despair that had precipitated him into the mire of politics. She conceived the impression that it must be so, and throughout the day she had an inexplicable unsweet pleasure in inciting him to argumentation and combating him, though she was compelled to admit that he had been colloquially charming antecedent to her naughty provocation; and though she was indebted to him for his patient decorum under the weary wave of the Reverend Mr. Brisk. Now what does it matter what a woman thinks in politics? But he deemed it of great moment. Politically, he deemed that women have souls, a certain fire of life for exercise on earth. He appealed to reason in them; he would not hear of convictions. He quoted the Bevisham doctor
'Convictions are generally first impressions that are sealed with later prejudices,' and insisted there was wisdom in it. Nothing tired him, as he had said, and addressing woman or man, no prospect of fatigue or of hopeless effort daunted him in the endeavour to correct an error of judgement in politics—his notion of an error. The value he put upon speaking, urging his views, was really fanatical. It appeared that he canvassed the borough from early morning till near midnight, and nothing would persuade him that his chance was poor; nothing that an entrenched Tory like her father, was not to be won even by an assault of all the reserve forces of Radical pathos, prognostication, and statistics.
Only conceive Nevil Beauchamp knocking at doors late at night, the sturdy beggar of a vote! or waylaying workmen, as he confessed without shame that he had done, on their way trooping to their midday meal; penetrating malodoriferous rooms of dismal ten-pound cottagers, to exhort bedraggled mothers and babes, and besotted husbands; and exposed to rebuffs from impertinent tradesmen; and lampooned and travestied, shouting speeches to roaring men, pushed from shoulder to shoulder of the mob! . . .
Cecilia dropped a curtain on her mind's picture of him. But the blinding curtain rekindled the thought that the line he had taken could not but be the desperation of a lover abandoned. She feared it was, she feared it was not. Nevil Beauchamp's foe persisted in fearing that it was not; his friend feared that it was. Yet why? For if it was, then he could not be quite in earnest, and might be cured. Nay, but earnestness works out its own cure more surely than frenzy, and it should be preferable to think him sound of heart, sincere though mistaken. Cecilia could not decide upon what she dared wish for his health's good. Friend and foe were not further separable within her bosom than one tick from another of a clock; they changed places, and next his friend was fearing what his foe had feared: they were inextricable.
Why had he not sprung up on a radiant aquiline ambition, whither one might have followed him, with eyes and prayers for him, if it was not possible to do so companionably? At present, in the shape of a canvassing candidate, it was hardly honourable to let imagination dwell on him, save compassionately.
When he rose to take his leave, Cecilia said, 'Must you go to Itchincope on Wednesday, Nevil?'
Colonel Halkett added: 'I don't think I would go to Lespel's if I were you. I rather suspect Seymour Austin will be coming on Wednesday, and that 'll detain me here, and you might join us and lend him an ear for an evening.'
'I have particular reasons for going to Lespel's; I hear he wavers toward a Tory conspiracy of some sort,' said Beauchamp.
The colonel held his tongue.
The untiring young candidate chose to walk down to Bevisham at eleven o'clock at night, that he might be the readier to continue his canvass of the borough on Monday morning early. He was offered a bed or a conveyance, and he declined both; the dog-cart he declined out of consideration for horse and groom, which an owner of stables could not but approve.
Colonel Halkett broke into exclamations of pity for so good a young fellow so misguided.
The night was moonless, and Cecilia, looking through the window, said whimsically, 'He has gone out into the darkness, and is no light in it!'
Certainly none shone. She however carried a lamp that revealed him footing on with a wonderful air of confidence, and she was rather surprised to hear her father regret that Nevil Beauchamp should be losing his good looks already, owing to that miserable business of his in Bevisham. She would have thought the contrary, that he was looking as well as ever.
'He dresses just as he used to dress,' she observed.
The individual style of a naval officer of breeding, in which you see neatness trifling with disorder, or disorder plucking at neatness, like the breeze a trim vessel, had been caught to perfection by Nevil Beauchamp, according to Cecilia. It presented him to her mind in a cheerful and a very undemocratic aspect, but in realizing it, the thought, like something flashing black, crossed her—how attractive such a style must be to a Frenchwoman!
'He may look a little worn,' she acquiesced.
CHAPTER XVIII
CONCERNING THE ACT OF CANVASSING
Tories dread the restlessness of Radicals, and Radicals are in awe of the organization of Tories. Beauchamp thought anxiously of the high degree of confidence existing in the Tory camp, whose chief could afford to keep aloof, while he slaved all day and half the night to thump ideas into heads, like a cooper on a cask:—an impassioned cooper on an empty cask! if such an image is presentable. Even so enviously sometimes the writer and the barrister, men dependent on their active wits, regard the man with a business fixed in an office managed by clerks. That man seems by comparison celestially seated. But he has his fits of trepidation; for new tastes prevail and new habits are formed, and the structure of his business will not allow him to adapt himself to them in a minute. The secure and comfortable have to pay in occasional panics for the serenity they enjoy. Mr. Seymour Austin candidly avowed to Colonel Halkett, on his arrival at Mount Laurels, that he was advised to take up his quarters in the neighbourhood of Bevisham by a recent report of his committee, describing the young Radical's canvass as redoubtable. Cougham he did not fear: he could make a sort of calculation of the votes for the Liberal thumping on the old drum of Reform; but the number for him who appealed to feelings and quickened the romantic sentiments of the common people now huddled within our electoral penfold, was not calculable. Tory and Radical have an eye for one another, which overlooks the Liberal at all times except when he is, as they imagine, playing the game of either of them.
'Now we shall see the passions worked,' Mr. Austin said, deploring the extension of the franchise.
He asked whether Beauchamp spoke well.
Cecilia left it to her father to reply; but the colonel appealed to her, saying, 'Inclined to dragoon one, isn't he?'
She did not think that. 'He speaks . . . he speaks well in conversation. I fancy he would be liked by the poor. I should doubt his being a good public speaker. He certainly has command of his temper: that is one thing. I cannot say whether it favours oratory. He is indefatigable. One may be sure he will not faint by the way. He quite believes in himself. But, Mr. Austin, do you really regard him as a serious rival?'
Mr. Austin could not tell. No one could tell the effect of an extended franchise. The untried venture of it depressed him. 'Men have come suddenly on a borough before now and carried it,' he said.
'Not a borough like Bevisham?'
He shook his head. 'A fluid borough, I'm afraid.'
Colonel Halkettt interposed: 'But Ferbrass is quite sure of his district.'
Cecilia wished to know who the man was, of the mediaevally sounding name.
'Ferbrass is an old lawyer, my dear. He comes of five generations of lawyers, and he 's as old in the county as Grancey Lespel. Hitherto he has always been to be counted on for marching his district to the poll like a regiment. That's our strength—the professions, especially lawyers.'
'Are not a great many lawyers Liberals, papa?'
'A great many barristers are, my dear.'
Thereat the colonel and Mr. Austin smiled together.
It was a new idea to Cecilia that Nevil Beauchamp should be considered by a man of the world anything but a well-meaning, moderately ridiculous young candidate; and the fact that one so experienced as Seymour Austin deemed him an adversary to be grappled with in earnest, created a small revolution in her mind, entirely altering her view of the probable pliability of his Radicalism under pressure of time and circumstances. Many of his remarks, that she had previously half smiled at, came across her memory hard as metal. She began to feel some terror of him, and said, to reassure herself: 'Captain Beauchamp is not likely to be a champion with a very large following. He is too much of a political mystic, I think.'
'Many young men are, before they have written out a fair copy of their meaning,' said Mr. Austin.
Cecilia laughed to herself at the vision of the fiery Nevil engaged in writing out a fair copy of his meaning. How many erasures! what foot- notes!
The arrangement was for Cecilia to proceed to Itchincope alone for a couple of days, and bring a party to Mount Laurels through Bevisham by the yacht on Thursday, to meet Mr. Seymour Austin and Mr. Everard Romfrey. An early day of the next week had been agreed on for the unmasking of the second Tory candidate. She promised that in case Nevil Beauchamp should have the hardihood to enter the enemy's nest at Itchincope on Wednesday, at the great dinner and ball there, she would do her best to bring him back to Mount Laurels, that he might meet his uncle Everard, who was expected there. At least he may consent to come for an evening,' she said. 'Nothing will take him from that canvassing. It seems to me it must be not merely distasteful . . . ?'
Mr. Austin replied: 'It 's disagreeable, but it's' the practice. I would gladly be bound by a common undertaking to abstain.'
'Captain Beauchamp argues that it would be all to your advantage. He says that a personal visit is the only chance for an unknown candidate to make the people acquainted with him.'
'It's a very good opportunity for making him acquainted with them; and I hope he may profit by it.'
'Ah! pah! "To beg the vote and wink the bribe,"' Colonel Halkett subjoined abhorrently:
"'It well becomes the Whiggish tribe
To beg the vote and wink the bribe."
Canvassing means intimidation or corruption.'
'Or the mixture of the two, called cajolery,' said Mr. Austin; 'and that was the principal art of the Whigs.'
Thus did these gentlemen converse upon canvassing.
It is not possible to gather up in one volume of sound the rattle of the knocks at Englishmen's castle-gates during election days; so, with the thunder of it unheard, the majesty of the act of canvassing can be but barely appreciable, and he, therefore, who would celebrate it must follow the candidate obsequiously from door to door, where, like a cross between a postman delivering a bill and a beggar craving an alms, patiently he attempts the extraction of the vote, as little boys pick periwinkles with a pin.
'This is your duty, which I most abjectly entreat you to do,' is pretty nearly the form of the supplication.
How if, instead of the solicitation of the thousands by the unit, the meritorious unit were besought by rushing thousands?—as a mound of the plains that is circumvented by floods, and to which the waters cry, Be thou our island. Let it be answered the questioner, with no discourteous adjectives, Thou fool! To come to such heights of popular discrimination and political ardour the people would have to be vivified to a pitch little short of eruptive: it would be Boreas blowing AEtna inside them; and we should have impulse at work in the country, and immense importance attaching to a man's whether he will or he won't—enough to womanize him. We should be all but having Parliament for a sample of our choicest rather than our likest: and see you not a peril in that?
Conceive, for the fleeting instants permitted to such insufferable flights of fancy, our picked men ruling! So despotic an oligarchy as would be there, is not a happy subject of contemplation. It is not too much to say that a domination of the Intellect in England would at once and entirely alter the face of the country. We should be governed by the head with a vengeance: all the rest of the country being base members indeed; Spartans—helots. Criticism, now so helpful to us, would wither to the root: fun would die out of Parliament, and outside of it: we could never laugh at our masters, or command them: and that good old-fashioned shouldering of separate interests, which, if it stops progress, like a block in the pit entrance to a theatre, proves us equal before the law, puts an end to the pretence of higher merit in the one or the other, and renders a stout build the safest assurance for coming through ultimately, would be transformed to a painful orderliness, like a City procession under the conduct of the police, and to classifications of things according to their public value: decidedly no benefit to burly freedom. None, if there were no shouldering and hustling, could tell whether actually the fittest survived; as is now the case among survivors delighting in a broad-chested fitness.
And consider the freezing isolation of a body of our quintessential elect, seeing below them none to resemble them! Do you not hear in imagination the land's regrets for that amiable nobility whose pretensions were comically built on birth, acres, tailoring, style, and an air? Ah, that these unchallengeable new lords could be exchanged for those old ones! These, with the traditions of how great people should look in our country, these would pass among us like bergs of ice—a pure Polar aristocracy, inflicting the woes of wintriness upon us. Keep them from concentrating! At present I believe it to be their honest opinion, their wise opinion, and the sole opinion common to a majority of them, that it is more salutary, besides more diverting, to have the fools of the kingdom represented than not. As professors of the sarcastic art they can easily take the dignity out of the fools' representative at their pleasure, showing him at antics while he supposes he is exhibiting an honourable and a decent series of movements. Generally, too, their archery can check him when he is for any of his measures; and if it does not check, there appears to be such a property in simple sneering, that it consoles even when it fails to right the balance of power. Sarcasm, we well know, confers a title of aristocracy straightway and sharp on the sconce of the man who does but imagine that he is using it. What, then, must be the elevation of these princes of the intellect in their own minds! Hardly worth bartering for worldly commanderships, it is evident.
Briefly, then, we have a system, not planned but grown, the outcome and image of our genius, and all are dissatisfied with parts of it; but, as each would preserve his own, the surest guarantee is obtained for the integrity of the whole by a happy adjustment of the energies of opposition, which—you have only to look to see—goes far beyond concord in the promotion of harmony. This is our English system; like our English pudding, a fortuitous concourse of all the sweets in the grocer's shop, but an excellent thing for all that, and let none threaten it. Canvassing appears to be mixed up in the system; at least I hope I have shown that it will not do to reverse the process, for fear of changes leading to a sovereignty of the austere and antipathetic Intellect in our England, that would be an inaccessible tyranny of a very small minority, necessarily followed by tremendous convulsions.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
A dash of conventionalism makes the whole civilized world kin
Aimlessness of a woman's curiosity
All concessions to the people have been won from fear
Appealed to reason in them; he would not hear of convictions
Automatic creature is subject to the laws of its construction
Beautiful servicelessness
Canvassing means intimidation or corruption
Comfortable have to pay in occasional panics for the serenity
Consult the family means—waste your time
Convictions are generally first impressions
Country can go on very well without so much speech-making
Crazy zigzag of policy in almost every stroke (of history)
Dialectical stiffness
Effort to be reticent concerning Nevil, and communicative
Give our consciences to the keeping of the parsons
Hates a compromise
Man owes a duty to his class
Mark of a fool to take everybody for a bigger fool than himself
Martyrs of love or religion are madmen
Never pretend to know a girl by her face
No stopping the Press while the people have an appetite for it
Oratory will not work against the stream, or on languid tides
Parliament, is the best of occupations for idle men
Protestant clergy the social police of the English middle-class
The defensive is perilous policy in war
The family view is everlastingly the shopkeeper's
The infant candidate delights in his honesty
There is no first claim
There's nothing like a metaphor for an evasion
They're always having to retire and always hissing
Those happy men who enjoy perceptions without opinions
Those whose humour consists of a readiness to laugh
Threatened powerful drugs for weak stomachs
To beg the vote and wink the bribe
We can't hope to have what should be
We have a system, not planned but grown
World cannot pardon a breach of continuity