Yeast: a Problem

CHAPTER XI: THUNDERSTORM THE FIRST

But what had become of the ‘bit of writing’ which Harry Verney, by the instigation of his evil genius, had put into the squire’s fly-book?  Tregarva had waited in terrible suspense for many weeks, expecting the explosion which he knew must follow its discovery.  He had confided to Lancelot the contents of the paper, and Lancelot had tried many stratagems to get possession of it, but all in vain.  Tregarva took this as calmly as he did everything else.  Only once, on the morning of the éclaircissement between Lancelot and Argemone, he talked to Lancelot of leaving his place, and going out to seek his fortune; but some spell, which he did not explain, seemed to chain him to the Priory.  Lancelot thought it was the want of money, and offered to lend him ten pounds whenever he liked; but Tregarva shook his head.

‘You have treated me, sir, as no one else has done—like a man and a friend; but I am not going to make a market of your generosity.  I will owe no man anything, save to love one another.’

‘But how do you intend to live?’ asked Lancelot, as they stood together in the cloisters.

‘There’s enough of me, sir, to make a good navigator if all trades fail.’

‘Nonsense! you must not throw yourself away so.’

‘Oh, sir, there’s good to be done, believe me, among those poor fellows.  They wander up and down the land like hogs and heathens, and no one tells them that they have a soul to be saved.  Not one parson in a thousand gives a thought to them.  They can manage old folks and little children, sir, but, somehow, they never can get hold of the young men—just those who want them most.  There’s a talk about ragged schools, now.  Why don’t they try ragged churches, sir, and a ragged service?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Why, sir, the parsons are ready enough to save souls, but it must be only according to rule and regulation.  Before the Gospel can be preached there must be three thousand pounds got together for a church, and a thousand for an endowment, not to mention the thousand pounds that the clergyman’s education costs: I don’t think of his own keep, sir; that’s little enough, often; and those that work hardest get least pay, it seems to me.  But after all that expense, when they’ve built the church, it’s the tradesmen, and the gentry, and the old folk that fill it, and the working men never come near it from one year’s end to another.’

‘What’s the cause, do you think?’ asked Lancelot, who had himself remarked the same thing more than once.

‘Half of the reason, sir, I do believe, is that same Prayer-book.  Not that the Prayer-book ain’t a fine book enough, and a true one; but, don’t you see, sir, to understand the virtue of it, the poor fellows ought to be already just what you want to make them.’

‘You mean that they ought to be thorough Christians already, to appreciate the spirituality of the liturgy.’

‘You’ve hit it, sir.  And see what comes of the present plan; how a navvy drops into a church by accident, and there he has to sit like a fish out of water, through that hour’s service, staring or sleeping, before he can hear a word that he understands; and, sir, when the sermon does come at last, it’s not many of them can make much out of those fine book-words and long sentences.  Why don’t they have a short simple service, now and then, that might catch the ears of the roughs and the blowens, without tiring out the poor thoughtless creatures’ patience, as they do now?’

‘Because,’ said Lancelot,—‘because—I really don’t know why.—But I think there is a simpler plan than even a ragged service.’

‘What, then, sir?’

‘Field-preaching.  If the mountain won’t come to Mahomet, let Mahomet go to the mountain.’

‘Right, sir; right you are.  “Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in.”  And why are they to speak to them only one by one?  Why not by the dozen and the hundred?  We Wesleyans know, sir,—for the matter of that, every soldier knows,—what virtue there is in getting a lot of men together; how good and evil spread like wildfire through a crowd; and one man, if you can stir him up, will become leaven to leaven the whole lump.  Oh why, sir, are they so afraid of field-preaching?  Was not their Master and mine the prince of all field-preachers?  Think, if the Apostles had waited to collect subscriptions for a church before they spoke to the poor heathens, where should we have been now?’

Lancelot could not but agree.  But at that moment a footman came up, and, with a face half laughing, half terrified, said,—

‘Tregarva, master wants you in the study.  And please, sir, I think you had better go in too; master knows you’re here, and you might speak a word for good, for he’s raging like a mad bull.’

‘I knew it would come at last,’ said Tregarva, quietly, as he followed Lancelot into the house.

It had come at last.  The squire was sitting in his study, purple with rage, while his daughters were trying vainly to pacify him.  All the men-servants, grooms, and helpers, were drawn up in line along the wall, and greeted Tregarva, whom they all heartily liked, with sly and sorrowful looks of warning,

‘Here, you sir; you—, look at this!  Is this the way you repay me?  I, who have kept you out of the workhouse, treated you like my own child?  And then to go and write filthy, rascally, Radical ballads on me and mine!  This comes of your Methodism, you canting, sneaking hypocrite!—you viper—you adder—you snake—you—!’  And the squire, whose vocabulary was not large, at a loss for another synonym, rounded off his oration by a torrent of oaths; at which Argemone, taking Honoria’s hand, walked proudly out of the room, with one glance at Lancelot of mingled shame and love.  ‘This is your handwriting, you villain! you know it’ (and the squire tossed the fatal paper across the table); ‘though I suppose you’ll lie about it.  How can you depend on fellows who speak evil of their betters?  But all the servants are ready to swear it’s your handwriting.’

‘Beg your pardon, sir,’ interposed the old butler, ‘we didn’t quite say that; but we’ll all swear it isn’t ours.’

‘The paper is mine,’ said Tregarva.

‘Confound your coolness!  He’s no more ashamed of it than—Read it out, Smith, read it out every word; and let them all hear how this pauper, this ballad-singing vagabond, whom I have bred up to insult me, dares to abuse his own master.’

‘I have not abused you, sir,’ answered Tregarva.  ‘I will be heard, sir!’ he went on in a voice which made the old man start from his seat and clench his fist but he sat down again.  ‘Not a word in it is meant for you.  You have been a kind and a good master to me.  Ask where you will if I was ever heard to say a word against you.  I would have cut off my right hand sooner than write about you or yours.  But what I had to say about others lies there, and I am not ashamed of it.’

‘Not against me?  Read it out, Smith, and see if every word of it don’t hit at me, and at my daughters, too, by—, worst of all!  Read it out, I say!’

Lancelot hesitated; but the squire, who was utterly beside himself, began to swear at him also, as masters of hounds are privileged to do; and Lancelot, to whom the whole scene was becoming every moment more and more intensely ludicrous, thought it best to take up the paper and begin:—

‘You villain!’ interposed the squire, ‘when did I ever sell a head of game?’

‘And yet he has the impudence to say he don’t mean me!’ grumbled the old man.  Tregarva winced a good deal—as if he knew what was coming next; and then looked up relieved when he found Lancelot had omitted a stanza—which I shall not omit.

‘Surely, sir,’ said Lancelot, ‘you cannot suppose that this latter part applies to you. or your family?’

‘If it don’t, it applies to half the gentlemen in the vale, and that’s just as bad.  What right has the fellow to speak evil of dignities?’ continued he, quoting the only text in the Bible which he was inclined to make a ‘rule absolute.’  ‘What does such an insolent dog deserve?  What don’t he deserve, I say?’

‘I think,’ quoth Lancelot, ambiguously, ‘that a man who can write such ballads is not fit to be your gamekeeper, and I think he feels so himself;’ and Lancelot stole an encouraging look at Tregarva.

‘And I say, sir,’ the keeper answered, with an effort, ‘that I leave Mr. Lavington’s service here on the spot, once and for all.’

‘And that you may do, my fine fellow!’ roared the squire.  ‘Pay the rascal his wages, steward, and then duck him soundly in the weir-pool.  He had better have stayed there when he fell in last.’

‘So I had, indeed, I think.  But I’ll take none of your money.  The day Harry Verney was buried I vowed that I’d touch no more of the wages of blood.  I’m going, sir; I never harmed you, or meant a hard word of all this for you, or dreamt that you or any living soul would ever see it.  But what I’ve seen myself, in spite of myself, I’ve set down here, and am not ashamed of it.  And woe,’ he went on with an almost prophetic solemnity in his tone and gesture—‘woe to those who do these things! and woe to those also who, though they dare not do them themselves, yet excuse and defend them who dare, just because the world calls them gentlemen, and not tyrants and oppressors.’

He turned to go.  The squire, bursting with passion, sprang up with a terrible oath, turned deadly pale, staggered, and dropped senseless on the floor.

They all rushed to lift him up.  Tregarva was the first to take him in his arms and place him tenderly in his chair, where he lay back with glassy eyes, snoring heavily in a fit of apoplexy.

‘Go; for God’s sake, go,’ whispered Lancelot to the keeper, ‘and wait for me at Lower Whitford.  I must see you before you stir.’

The keeper slipped away sadly.  The ladies rushed in—a groom galloped off for the doctor—met him luckily in the village, and, in a few minutes, the squire was bled and put to bed, and showed hopeful signs of returning consciousness.  And as Argemone and Lancelot leant together over his pillow, her hair touched her lover’s, and her fragrant breath was warm upon his cheek; and her bright eyes met his and drank light from them, like glittering planets gazing at their sun.

The obnoxious ballad produced the most opposite effects on Argemone and on Honoria.  Argemone, whose reverence for the formalities and the respectabilities of society, never very great, had, of late, utterly vanished before Lancelot’s bad counsel, could think of it only as a work of art, and conceived the most romantic longing to raise Tregarva into some station where his talents might have free play.  To Honoria, on the other hand, it appeared only as a very fierce, coarse, and impertinent satire, which had nearly killed her father.  True, there was not a thought in it which had not at some time or other crossed her own mind; but that made her dislike all the more to see those thoughts put into plain English.  That very intense tenderness and excitability which made her toil herself among the poor, and had called out both her admiration of Tregarva and her extravagant passion at his danger, made her also shrink with disgust from anything which thrust on her a painful reality, which she could not remedy.  She was a staunch believer, too, in that peculiar creed which allows every one to feel for the poor, except themselves, and considers that to plead the cause of working-men is, in a gentleman, the perfection of virtue, but in a working-man himself, sheer high treason.  And so beside her father’s sick-bed she thought of the keeper only as a scorpion whom she had helped to warm into life; and sighing assent to her mother, when she said, ‘That wretch, and he seemed so pious and so obliging! who would have dreamt that he was such a horrid Radical?’ she let him vanish from her mind and out of Whitford Priors, little knowing the sore weight of manly love he bore with him.