Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  “Perhaps it is,” Basset said.

  Stubbs met his eye and took his meaning. Later the lawyer maintained that he had his suspicions from that moment. At the time he only answered, “Not in our day, Mr. Basset. Peel or Repeal, there’s no one has attacked the land yet but the land has broken them. And so it will be this time. John, the sooner those two are out of your house the better.”

  “But, dang me, sir, what am I to do?”

  “Put ‘em in the horse trough for what I care!” the lawyer replied. “Good-evening, Squire. I hope the Riddsley parliament mayn’t disturb you.”

  The landlord followed him out, after handing something through the hatch, which opened into the Snug. He left the hatch a little ajar when he had done so, and the voices of those who gathered there nightly, as to a club, reached Basset. At first he caught no more than a word here or there, but as the debate grew warm the speakers raised their voices.

  “All mighty fine,” some one said, laying down the law, “but you’re like the rest, you Manchester chaps. You’ve your eyes on your own rack and manger!”

  “I’m not denying it,” came the answer in a Lancashire accent, “I’m not saying that cheap bread won’t suit us. But it isn’t for that — —”

  “No, no, of course not,” the former speaker replied with heavy irony — Basset thought that the voice belonged to Hayward of the Leasows, a pompous old farmer, dubbed behind his back “The Duke.” “You don’t want low wages i’ your mills, of course!”

  “Cheap bread doesn’t make low wages,” the other rejoined. “That’s where you mistake, sir. Let me put it to you. You’ve known wheat high?”

  “It was seventy-seven shillings seven years back,” the farmer pronounced. “And I ha’ known it a hundred shillings a quarter for three years together.”

  “And I suppose the wages at that time were the highest you’ve ever known?”

  “Well, no,” the farmer admitted, “I’m not saying that.”

  “And seven years ago when wheat was seventy-seven — it is fifty-six now — were wages higher then than now?”

  “Well,” the Duke answered reluctantly, “I don’t know as they were, mister, not to take notice of.”

  “Think it out for yourself, sir,” the other replied. “I don’t think you’ll find that wages are highest when wheat is highest, nor lowest when wheat is lowest.”

  The farmer, more weighty than ready, snorted. But another speaker took up the cudgels. “Ay, but one minute,” he said. “It’s the price of wheat fixes the lowest wages. If it’s two pound of bread will keep a man fit to work — just keep him so and no more — it’s the price of bread fixes whether the lowest wages is eightpence a day or a shilling a day.”

  “Well, but — —”

  “Well, but by G — d, he’s got you there!” the Duke cried, and smacked his fat thigh in triumph. “We’ve some sense i’ Riddsley yet. Here’s your health and song, Dr. Pepper!” At which there was some laughter.

  “Well, sir, I’ll not say yes, nor no, to that,” the Lancashire man replied, as soon as he could get a hearing. “But, gentlemen, it’s not low wages we want. I’ll tell you the two things we do want, and why we want cheap bread; first, that your laborers after they have bought bread may have something over to buy our woollens, and our cottons, and your pots. And secondly, if we don’t take foreign wheat in payment how are foreigners to pay for our goods?”

  But at this half a dozen were up in arms. “How?” cried the Duke, “why wi’ money like honest men at home! But there it is! There’s the devil’s hoof! It’s foreign corn you’re after! And with foreign corn coming in at forty shillings where’ll we be?”

  “No wheat will ever be grown at that price,” declared the free trader with solemnity, “here or abroad!”

  “So you say!” cried Hayward. “But put it at forty-five. We’ll be on the rates, and our laborers, where’ll they be?”

  “I don’t like such talk in my house!” said Musters.

  “I’d certainly like an answer to that,” Pepper the surgeon said. “If the farmers are broke where’ll their laborers be but flocking to your mills to put down wages there!”

  “The laborers? Well, they’re protected now, that’s true.”

  “Lucky for them!” cried two or three.

  “They are protected now,” the stranger repeated slowly. “And I’ll tell you what one of them said to me last year. ‘I be protected,’ he said, ‘and I be starving!’”

  “Dang his impudence!” muttered old Hayward. “That’s the kind of thing they two Boshams at the Bridge talk. Firebrands they be!”

  But the shot had told; no one else spoke.

  “That man’s wages,” the Manchester man continued, “were six shillings a week — it was in Wiltshire. And you are protected too, sir,” he continued, turning suddenly on the Duke. “Have you made a fortune, sir, farming?”

  “I don’t know as I have,” the farmer answered sulkily — and in a lower voice, “Dang his impudence again!”

  “Why not? Because you are paying a protected rent. Because you pay high for feeding-stuff. Because you pay poor-rates so high you’d be better off paying double wages. There’s only one man benefits by the corn-tax, sir, there’s only one who is truly protected, and that is the landlord!”

  But to several in the room this was treason, and they cried out upon it. “Ay, that’s the bottom of it, mister,” one roared, “down with the landlords and up with the cotton lords!” “There’s your Reform Bill,” shouted another, “we’ve put the beggars on horseback, and none’s to ride but them now!” A third protested that cheap bread was a herring drawn across the track. “They’re for cheap bread for the poor man, but no votes! Votes would make him as good as them!”

  “Anyway,” the stranger replied patiently, “it’s clear that neither the farmer nor the laborer grows fat on Protection. Your wages are nine shillings — —”

  “Ten and eleven!” cried two or three.

  “And your farmers are smothered in rates. If that’s all you get by Protection I’d try another system.”

  “Anyways, I’ll ask you to try it out of my house,” Musters said. “I’ve a good landlord and I’ll not hear him abused!”

  “Hear! Hear! Musters! Quite right!”

  “I’ve not said an uncivil word,” the Manchester man rejoined. “I shall leave your house to-morrow, not an hour before. I’ll add only one word, gentlemen. Bread is the staff of life. Isn’t it the last thing you should tax?”

  “True,” Mr. Pepper replied. “But isn’t agriculture the staple industry? Isn’t it the base on which all other industries stand? Isn’t it the mainstay of the best constitution in the world? And wasn’t it the land that steadied England, and kept it clear of Bonaparte and Wooden Shoes — —”

  “Ay, wooden ships against wooden shoes for ever!” broke in old Hayward, in great excitement. “Where were the oaks grown as beat Bony! No, master, protect the oak and protect the wheat, and England’ll never lack ships nor meat! Your cotton-printers and ironfounders they’re great folks now, great folks, with their brass and their votes, and so they’ve a mind to upset the gentry. It’s the town against the country, and new money against the old acres that have fed us and our fathers before us world without end! But put one of my lads in your mills, and amid your muck, and in twelve months he’d not pitch hay, no not three hours of the day!”

  Basset could hear the free trader’s chair grate on the sanded floor as he pushed it back. “Well, gentlemen,” he said, “I’ll not quarrel with you. I wish you all the protection you deserve — and I think Sir Robert will give it you! For us, I’m not saying that we are not thinking of our own interests.”

  “Devil a doubt of that!” muttered the farmer.

  “And some of us may have been cold-shouldered by my lord. But you may take it from me that there’s some of us, too, are as anxious to better the poor man’s lot — ay, as Lord Ashley himself! That’s all! Good-night, gentlemen.”

  When
he was gone, “Gi’ me a coal for my pipe, John,” said the Duke. “I never heard the like of that in Riddsley. He’s a gallus glib chap that!”

  “I won’t say,” said Mr. Pepper cautiously, “that there’s nothing in it.”

  “Plenty in it for the cotton people and the coal people, and the potters. But not for us!”

  “But if Sir Robert sees it that way?” queried the surgeon, delicately.

  “Then if Sir Robert were member for Riddsley,” Hayward answered stubbornly, “he’d get his notice to quit, Dr. Pepper! You may bet your hat on that!”

  “There’s one got a lesson last night,” a new-comer chimed in. “Parson Colet got so beaten on the moor he’s in bed I am told. He’s been speaking free these last two months, and I thought he’d get it. Three lads from your part I am told, Hayward.”

  “Well, well!” the farmer replied with philosophy. “There’s good in Colet, and maybe it’ll be a lesson to him! Anyway, good or bad, he’s going.”

  “Going?” cried two or three, speaking at once.

  “I met Rector not two hours back. He’d a letter from Colet saying he was going to preach the same rubbish here as he’s fed ‘em with at Brown Heath — cheap bread and the rest of it. Rector’s been to him — he wouldn’t budge, and he got his notice to quit right straight. Rector was fit to burst when I saw him.”

  “Colet be a born fool!” cried Musters. “Who’s like to employ him after that? Wheat is tithe and the parsons are as fond of their tithe as any man. You may look a long way before you’ll find a parson that’s a repealer.”

  “Serves Colet right!” said one. “But I’m sorry for him all the same. There’s worse men than the Reverend Colet.”

  Basset could never say afterwards what moved him at this point, but whatever it was he got up and went out. The boots was lounging at the door of the inn. He asked the man where Mr. Colet lodged, and learning that it was in Stream Street, near the Maypole, he turned that way.

  CHAPTER XV

  STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

  Had any one told Basset, even that morning, that before night he would seek the advice of the Riddsley curate, he would have met the suggestion with unmeasured scorn. Probably he had not since his college days spent an hour in intimate talk with a man so far from him in fortune and position, and so unlike him in those things which bring men together. Nor in the act of approaching Colet — under the impulse of a few casual words and a sudden thought — was he able to understand or to justify himself.

  But when he rose to his feet after an hour spent beside the curate’s dingy hearth — over the barber’s shop in Stream Street — he did not need to justify the step. He had said little but he had heard much. Colet’s tongue had been loosened by the sacrifice he had made, and inspired by that love of his kind which takes refuge in the most unlikely shapes, he had poured forth at length his beliefs and his aspirations. And Basset, whose world had tottered since morning, for whom common things had lost their poise and life its wonted aspect, began to think that he had found in the other’s aims a new standpoint and the offer of a new beginning.

  The dip candles, which had been many times snuffed, were burning low when the two rose. The curate, whose pale cheeks matched his bandaged head, had a last word to say. “Of the need I am sure,” he repeated, as Basset’s eye sought the cheap clock on the mantelpiece. “If I have not proved that, the fault, sir, is mine. But the means — they are a question for you; almost any man may see them more clearly than I do. By votes, it may be, and so through the people working out their own betterment. Or by social measures, as Lord Ashley thinks, through the classes that are fitted by education to judge for all. Or by the wider spread, as I hold, of self-sacrifice by all for all — to me, the ideal. But of one thing I am convinced; that this tax upon the commonest food, which takes so much more in proportion from the poor than from the rich, is wrong. Certainly wrong, Mr. Basset, — unless the gain and the loss can be equally spread. That’s another matter.”

  “I will not say any more now,” Basset answered cautiously, “than that I am inclined to your view. But for yourself, are there not others who will not pay so dearly for maintaining it?”

  A redness spread over the curate’s long horse-face. “No, Mr. Basset,” he rejoined, “if I left my duty to others I should pay still more dearly. I am my own man. I will remain so.”

  “But what will you do when you leave here?” Basset inquired, casting his eyes round the shabby room. He did not see it as he had seen it on his entrance. He discerned that, small as it was, and shabby as it was, it might be a man’s home. “I fear that there are few incumbents who hold your views.”

  “There are absentees,” Colet replied with a smile, “who are not so particular; and in the north there are a few who think as I think. I shall not starve.”

  “I have an old house on the Derbyshire border twenty miles from here,” Basset said. “A servant and his wife keep it, and during some months of the year I live there. It is an out-of-the-way place, Mr. Colet, but it is at your service — if you don’t get work?”

  The curate seemed to shrink into himself. “I couldn’t trespass on you,” he said.

  “I hope you will,” Basset replied. “In the meantime, who was the man you quoted a few minutes ago?”

  “Francis Place. He is a good man though not as we” — he touched his threadbare cloth— “count goodness. He is something of a Socialist, something of a Chartist — he might frighten you, Mr. Basset. But he has the love of the people in him.”

  “I will see him.”

  “He has been a tailor.”

  That hit Basset fairly in the face. “Good heavens!” he said. “A tailor?”

  “Yes,” Colet replied, smiling. “But a very uncommon tailor. Let me tell you why I quoted him. Because, though he is not a Christian, he has ideals. He aims higher than he can shoot, while the aims of the Manchester League, though I agree with them upon the corn-tax, seem to me to be bounded by the material and warped by their own interests.”

  Basset nodded. “You have thought a good deal on these things,” he said.

  “I live among the poor. I have them always before me.”

  “And I have thought so little that I need time. You must think no worse of me if I wait a while. And now, good-night.”

  But the other did not take the hand held out to him. He was staring at the candle. “I am not clear that I have been quite frank with you,” he said awkwardly. “You have offered me the shelter of your house though I am a stranger, Mr. Basset, and though you must suspect that to harbor me may expose you to remark. Well, I may be tempted to avail myself of your kindness. But I cannot do so unless you know more of my circumstances.”

  “I know all that is necessary.”

  “You don’t know what I am going to tell you,” Colet persisted. “And I think that you should. I am going to marry the daughter of your uncle’s servant, Toft.”

  “Good Lord!” cried Basset. This was a second and more serious blow. It brought him down from the clouds.

  “That shocks you, Mr. Basset,” the curate continued with dignity, “that I should marry one in her position? Well, I am not called upon to justify it. Why I think her worthy, and more than worthy to share my life, is my business. I only trouble you with the matter because you have made me an offer which you might not have made had you known this.”

  Basset did not deny the fact. He could not, indeed. His taste, his prejudice, his traditions all had received a blow, all were up in arms; and, for the moment, at any rate he repented of his visit. He felt that in stepping out of the normal round he had made a mistake. He should have foreseen, he should have known that he would meet with such shocks. “You have certainly astonished me,” he said after a pause of dismay. “I cannot think the match suitable, Mr. Colet. May I ask if my uncle knows of this?”

  “Miss Audley knows of it.”

  “But — you cannot yourself think it suitable!”

  “I have,” Colet replied dryly, “or r
ather I had seventy pounds a year. What girl, born in comfort, gently bred, sheltered from childhood could I ask to share that? How could I, with so little in the present and no prospects, ask a gentlewoman to share my lot?”

  Basset did not reply, but he was not convinced. A clergyman to marry a servant, good and refined as Etruria was! It seemed to him to be unseemly, to be altogether wrong.

  Colet too was silent a moment. Then, “I am glad I have told you this,” he said. “I shall not now trespass on you. On the other hand, I hope that you may still do something — and with your name, you can do much — for the good cause. If rumor goes for anything, many will in the next few months examine the ground on which they stand. It will be much, if what I have said has weight with you.”

  He spoke with constraint, but he spoke like a man, and Basset owned his equality while he resented it. He felt that he ought to renew his offer of hospitality, but he could not — reserve and shyness had him again in their grip. He muttered something about thinking it over, added a word or two of thanks — which were cut short by the flickering out of the candle — and a minute later he was in the dark deserted street, and walking back to his inn — not over well content with himself, if the truth be told.

  Either he should not have gone, he felt, or he should have gone the whole way, sunk his ideas of caste, and carried the thing through. What was it to him if the man was going to marry a servant?

  But that was a detail. The main point was that he should not have gone. It had been a foolish impulse — he saw it now — which had taken him to the barber’s shop; and one which he might have known that he would repent. He ought to have foreseen that he could not place himself on Colet’s level without coming into collision with him; that he could not draw wisdom from him without paying toll.

  An impossible person, he thought, a man of ideas quite unlike his own! And yet the man had spoken well and ably, and spoken from experience. He had told the things that he had seen as he passed from house to house, hard, sad facts, the outcome of rising numbers and falling wages, of over-production, of mouths foodless and unwanted. And all made worse, as he maintained, by this tax on bread, that barely touched the rich man’s income, yet took a heavy toll from the small wage.