Kept (27 page)

And then there came one of those unfortunate mischances that no amount of civility or discretion can ever quite forestall, when a man happens to overhear something said of him which it were better that he should not. It happened in this way. The meeting of the board having broken up, John Carstairs and certain other gentlemen had quitted the room in which it had been held, leaving Mr. Bounderby and the Earl of——and two or three other persons talking at its further end. Halfway down the staircase leading back to his own room, Carstairs realised that he had left a certain document, a document moreover that he should not let out of his keeping, in the committee room. Hastening back to retrieve it, he arrived in the doorway at the precise moment when Mr. Bounderby remarked to the Earl of——that he felt Mr. Carstairs would hardly do and that there was a want of—what there was a want of, Mr. Carstairs did not linger to hear. He knew that the men inside the room were not yet aware of his coming and that it was best for all parties that it should remain so. Therefore he went back downstairs with as cheerful a smile as he could muster and rallied the Honourable Mr. Cadnam about his attendance at Lady Jane’s ball, but I do not think he liked it. At first he tried to make light of his eavesdropping, assuring himself that the subject under discussion was something merely trivial, but a precise recollection of Mr. Bounderby’s words, which had been spoken with absolute clarity, served only to convince him of the futility of this exercise and he grew gloomier still.

And then there came the second jolt at his arm, which was administered by a gentleman named Dennison. Now, as has been mentioned, John Carstairs was a political young man. Just at this moment he had his eye on the borough of Southwark, where a sitting member had died and the writ for a by-election was shortly to be moved in the House. The late Mr. Jones had been a Liberal, but it was reckoned by those who knew about such things that now was the moment when a Conservative, nailing his colours to the mast of Queen, Country
and Constitution, could rise up and drive the armies of Southwark Liberalism into the Thames. John Carstairs had for some time thought that he might be that Conservative, and in this way he had contracted if not an alliance then an understanding with Mr. Dennison, who, though employed as an attorney, was known to act as the party’s agent in the Borough. Mr. Dennison was a short, ill-favoured man of fifty with a pronounced air of cockney in his speech and a habit of cracking his knuckles when he talked. Nonetheless, he was esteemed in the circles in which John Carstairs moved as an infallible barometer of the Southwark political weather. If Mr. Dennison said that such and such a thing would do, it would do. If he said that it would not do, then it would not. While Mr. Jones, MP, had lived, Mr. Dennison had frankly despaired of unseating him. Now he was dead, he gave it to be known that he thought his Liberal successor would not have it all his own way.

All this necessarily made Mr. Dennison a source of great fascination to John Carstairs. Mr. Disraeli himself would perhaps not have been received with the deference extended to the Southwark attorney when he arrived at the Board of Trade that afternoon. The fire was instantly poked up, the inky clerk despatched on a fictitious errand and the Honourable Mr. Cadnam positively compelled to go and kick his heels in the newspaper reading room downstairs. Mr. Dennison was not insensible of these courtesies and sat smoking the cigar that John Carstairs had offered him and kicking his little legs beneath his chair in a state of some satisfaction.

“Well now,” he said at length, casting his eye once or twice around the room, “this is all very pleasant, is it not?”

“Yes indeed—if you like that kind of thing.”

“You’d have to give it all up, you know, if you were elected.” And here Mr. Dennison’s knuckles went off like a pair of nutcrackers. “Gentlemen as works in public offices can’t sit in the House as well. But no doubt you’re aware of that.”

John Carstairs signified that he was, smiling keenly as he did. In his heart of hearts he abominated Mr. Dennison’s locution and his knucklecracking, but knowing the man to be an embodiment of Southwark
Conservatism, he was anxious to humour him. In fact, had Dennison wished to be introduced to Mr. Bounderby or taken to dine with the Earl of——, I think John Carstairs would have managed it somehow. Now, however, he merely nodded, shifted his eyes from their contemplation of the cuff of Mr. Dennison’s shirt and remarked, “I suppose we are all right for—for the Borough?”

“Well,” said Mr. Dennison, very affably and turning round his chair until his feet were very nearly in the fire. “It depends on what you mean by all right. There is Sir Charles Devonish, as used to be the member for Chatteris, that is spending a deal of money.”

“But Sir Charles has no connection with the place!”

“I don’t say he has, and I don’t say he hasn’t. I was merely saying that he was a-spending of a great deal of money. And then there’s that Mr. Honeyman—you’ll have heard of him no doubt, sir—as is a brewer, which the publicans always like.”

“D——all brewers!”

“Quite so, sir. But it’s the publicans that win elections as you very well know.” Here Mr. Dennison’s knuckles cracked like a pistol shot. “And then there’s yourself, sir.”

“Certainly there is myself.”

Dennison examined the young man shrewdly. Although he enjoyed John Carstairs’s society, appreciated the fire that was stoked to warm his feet, the cigar that was proffered for his relaxation and even the occasional glimpse of the Honourable Mr. Cadnam, he was at heart a realist.

“We-ell,” he remarked eventually. “There is yourself, sir, as you say. And if the honour was mine to dispense, sir, you should have the nomination straightaway, indeed you should. But there are folk in the Borough that say you are not quite…”

“Not quite what?”

“Not quite in earnest.” And here Mr. Dennison cast the root of his cigar regretfully into the fire and shifted his toes ever so slightly away from its fulcrum.

“Not in earnest! You may take it from me that I am very much in earnest!”

“That’s what I have told them, sir. Time and again,” observed Mr.
Dennison, who was not of course under any obligation to tell the exact truth in his dealings with his young friend. “But there’s that Sir Charles a-spending of his money so very free, and they do say of Mr. Honeyman that he owns some of the publicans’ leases.”

After this remark it was clear to John Carstairs that his chances of capturing the Borough’s nomination were almost nil, and that Mr. Dennison knew they were nil. He was also aggrieved at the thought of the various moneys previously advanced to Mr. Dennison under the guise of “expenses” and the idea that he had, in effect, been hoodwinked. Nonetheless, it behoved him to be civil to the man, and Mr. Dennison, consequently, was waved out of the room with all the deference due to his position, nearly colliding as he did so with the Honourable Mr. Cadnam, who, his intellect exhausted by the pleasures of the newspaper reading room, had determined to make his way back to his desk.

“Upon my honour,” Mr. Cadnam observed, a few minutes having elapsed after Mr. Dennison’s departure, “but I should say that you were in the most devilish bad temper.”

“I should say that you were probably correct.”

After this nothing more was said between them. Yet seated at his desk, his eye fixed on the chair from which Dennison had pronounced his verdict, John Carstairs seethed with vexation. To have private misgivings over your want of resolution is one thing. To have them confirmed, twice, by others in the space of a few moments is another. The consequence was that he was perfectly savage to those employees of the Board of Trade who crossed his path for the remainder of the afternoon, snapped at the messenger boy, frowned at the clerk and was even frosty to Mr. Bounderby when that gentleman arrived in the room with some chance enquiry.

“I say,” Mr. Cadnam remarked, as they strolled together down the staircase at the conclusion of the day’s business, “you look dreadfully fierce, you know.”

John Carstairs laughed. “Do I? I imagine I shall probably eat someone before the evening is done. But don’t worry, Caddy, it shan’t be you.”

And yet John Carstairs did not eat anyone. Instead he went off to his club, listened very meekly to the advice of the steward and ate his
dinner in silence, musing all the while on his opportunities. It was his duty, he told himself, to make some bold stroke, and yet he did not at all know how to proceed. Reviewing each of the areas in which he imagined that he had failed—the matter of Mrs. Ireland, his position at the Board of Trade and his prospects for the Southwark nomination—he could conceive of no step that it would benefit him to take. Thinking again of these annoyances, he began to brood, curiously enough, on the morning’s letter from Mr. Crabbe. This, in truth, he had not quite liked, feeling that gentlemen who met in society should not address each other in this peremptory way. Quite by chance, as he sat pondering this injustice, a legal friend—not one who hailed from Lincoln’s Inn, but one who at any rate would know of Mr. Crabbe and his doings—passed by his table.

“Carstairs! How are you? You are coming out for Southwark, I hear.”

“Well…perhaps. It is not quite settled. Look—have you a moment? There is something I particularly wish to ask.”

“Very well—fire away.”

And so, rather to his own surprise, John Carstairs found himself outlining the tale of his mother’s visit to Norfolk in pursuit of Mrs. Ireland and his dealings with Mr. Crabbe. It was not by any means the whole tale, but it was sufficient to interest the legal friend, who further excited John Carstairs’s regard by appearing to know certain of the details already.

“The beautiful widow languishing with her Bluebeard? Then I have heard something of that.”

“And what do you think is Crabbe’s game?”

John Carstairs’s friend smiled a smile of the blandest legal diffidence. “Crabbe? Crabbe, my boy, is the most respectable old legal gentleman who ever pulled on a wig or took a marquis’s instructions. All the same, I heard a rumour—just a rumour, mind—that he was sailing rather too close to the wind in one or two quarters. But I had better say no more.”

“No, perhaps you had better not,” murmured John Carstairs, wishing on the contrary that he would say a dozen things.

The friend drifted away, the club began to fill up with people and
the air turn blue with tobacco smoke, and John Carstairs found himself playing whist with three or four men whose company he would customarily have shunned. Nonetheless, beneath the placid exterior presented to his fellow cardplayers, he was exultant. If the enquiry about Mr. Crabbe was not a display of resolve, he asked himself, then what was?

FROM THE DIARY OF THE REV. JOSIAH CRAWLEY, CURATE OF EASTON

21 November 1865

The winter has set in early. Holly berries &c. well advanced, which the people say is a sure sign. Today, walking in the lanes, I saw a shrike pecking out the brains of a dead mouse which it had conveyed to the top of a fence post. I am not, I believe, a credulous man, but this sight—the solitude of the place, the eager, repetitive motions of the bird’s beak—filled me with superstitious dread.

 

25 November 1865

To my surprise, a note from Dixey inviting me to call. The year has brought a great change in him: he seems altogether more bowed and grey-haired than I remembered. On my enquiring why I had not seen him at church, he replied ambiguously. Having drunk a glass of Madeira, we sat in his study: a most curious place attesting to Dixey’s scientific interests. At one point, drawing to my attention the corpse of a toad which lay on a dissecting tray, its limbs pinned back and the vital organs exposed, he asked: did I believe that animals were sentient? I replied that it seemed to me that animals perceived the world as we did ourselves, though in necessarily diminished fashion, that an ox, for example, could mourn the loss of its master but that its grief was not a human grief. The Hall very silent and gloomy, I find, the
pathways ragged and overgrown, a great howling of the wind forever rising at the glass.

 

27 November 1865

I have resolved to put aside my
Defence of Episcopacy,
which avails me naught.

 

1 December 1865

To Ely this forenoon, at the invitation of Mr. Marjoribanks. A dull journey by long, narrow roads, the fens stretching out on all sides as far as the eye can see. Much oppressed, I fear, by the bleakness of the region. The Deanery decidedly feminine in its accoutrements, though I believe Mr. Marjoribanks to be a widower. Much good talk, an oasis of sweet water after the desert in which I have lived of late. Great crowd of persons, most of them unknown to me. Amongst the women, Miss Marjoribanks by far the most agreeable.

 

5 December 1865

Again at the Hall. Dixey confined to chair by some unspecified ailment (arthritis? Certainly his hands are very gnarled and swollen) yet received me civilly. The footman much in evidence, plumping his cushions, arranging footstools, &c. Pressed to examine several of Dixey’s specimens, viz., the body of a mart, very lithe and dextrous it must have been in life, which Dixey said had been procured for him lately in Inverness-shire. Also two eggs of the osprey, from the same source. Apparently Dixey pays as much as five pounds for such things, wh. seems to me robbery. Dixey enquired, did I not admit the value of science? I replied that with any branch of study seeming to exalt our understanding of God’s universe I was, of course, in sympathy, but
that there were some things it were better not to know. More talk of Mr. Gosse, Lyell, the secrets of the stones, &c.

 

6 December 1865

Fearful that I had offended Dixey, yet a civil note from the footman bidding me to dine. He is much recovered from his afflictions.

 

9 December 1865

Saw Dixey out walking in the lanes. Quite on our old footing.

 

26 December 1865

Ely. Afternoon service. Deanery party. Blind man’s buff. Miss Marjoribanks.

 

3 January 1865

Ely.

 

10 January 1866

I waste my time in this place. A congregation of a hundred peasants, and not one who attends my discourse. My heart elsewhere. Resolved to write to Cousin Richard, to see if he may do something for me.

 

13 January 1866

A. in London, visiting her aunt. Took out my prize poem, “Alaric,”
wh. I wrote at Oxford, and meditated on sending it to a publisher. It has a spirit that, in my present state, is quite intolerable.

 

15 January 1866

To luncheon at the Hall. Found there Mr. Conolly, the mad-doctor, with whom Dixey seems very intimate. A bleak, mournful day, the air filled with the cries of Dixey’s hounds, a sad-looking maidservant hanging out washing above the currant bushes, &c. The interior smelling strongly of damp. Dixey says that no fire can ever heat the place. I was pleased to find that Mr. Conolly recollected me, enquired courteously of my prospects. The talk at luncheon, concerning Conolly’s professional occupations, somewhat abstruse. He believes that the insane, rather than undergoing forcible restraint, should rather be confined with the maximum freedom of movement, &c., that such comparative liberty is an essential part of their cure. Dixey greatly interested in this, providing several illustrations from his own experience, the effect curiously resembling a couple of medical men talking shop. Yet such was their enthusiasm that I did not feel in the least excluded.

All this—the luncheon itself, professional talk, &c.—necessarily cast into shade by an event that occurred during the dessert, one that, even now, I find myself curiously reluctant to set down…

 

Mr. Marjoribanks, the Dean of Ely, was a man approaching sixty, very hale, somewhat austere in the view of himself that he offered the world but, it was said, of a kindly and charitable disposition. He had been Dean for a dozen years and, living frugally yet not meanly, with an eye for those ecclesiastical perquisites which were his by right, was thought to have amassed a considerable fortune. If Mr. Marjoribanks was immediately conspicuous in the neighbourhood, it was not for the excellence of his sermons, or for the disinterestedness of his patronage, but for the doctrinal position he occupied in the church he served.
The Dean was a clerical conservative, and of such a deep-dyed and Imperial blue that more than one clergyman whom the world names as a conservative quaked in his shoes when led into that gentleman’s presence. Catholics he necessarily detested, indeed the prospect of any kind of Roman emancipation filled him with horror. Methodists, Congregationalists and Quakers, any worshipper, in fact, existing beyond the confines of the Anglican communion, he would, I think, have had prohibited by law. And yet the Dean’s vigilant eye was turned as much on his own congregation as on those outside it. Ritualism, Puseyism and the Oxford movement he held in the deepest contempt. It was the same with the albs and copes and birettas in which the contemporary clergyman so innocently delights. Mr. Marjoribanks conducted his services in a plain Geneva surplice and made very savage remarks about “weak minds engrossed in coloured scarves.” All this, while tolerated and indeed approved in the fastness of Ely, was nonetheless thought to have wounded his chances of greater preferment in the Church, and it was said that the Dean was not only a hale man and a wealthy man but also a disappointed one.

Mr. Marjoribanks’s wife had died early—a circumstance that was thought to have contributed to his austerity—leaving him with the care of two infant daughters. He had not remarried, believing that their upbringing was a task best accomplished according to his own design. All this had happened twenty years ago, and the daughters were now grown into blooming young women. The elder was by this time married to a brewer in the vicinity of Cambridge and rarely seen at her father’s house, but the younger, now aged five-and-twenty, remained its solitary female ornament. Seeking to describe Miss Amelia Marjoribanks, I can only say that she was everything that a dean’s daughter should be: pious, God-fearing, discreet, attentive to her father’s wants and tolerant of his prejudices. She was also, having had the domestic affairs of the Deanery in her hands since the age of eighteen, not a little imperious, or at any rate used to having her commands obeyed, and in addition was doted on by her clerical parent. Some observers of Mr. Marjoribanks’s dealings with the fair Amelia—and fair she undoubtedly was—would have gone further even than this and maintained that the Dean was afraid of his daughter. This, no doubt, was an exag
geration—Mr. Marjoribanks was not a man disposed to fear anyone, and certainly not the young woman who stirred his tea in the morning and brought him his slippers at night—but it was noticeable that he consulted her in everything and in general deferred to her opinion in much the same way that, twenty years before, he had deferred to the opinion of his late and lamented wife.

The Deanery at Ely was not in those days very commodious, but it was certainly very comfortable. In particular, there was a rose garden extending half the length of the back terrace, in sight of the great cathedral spire, whose blooms Mr. Marjoribanks delighted to inspect as he looked out each morning from the window of his breakfast parlour. He was looking out of the breakfast parlour window now, although the month was February and there were no blooms to be seen. His daughter sat before him at the breakfast table with a piece of crumbled toast in her hand, which, it must be said, she had ceased to eat some moments before. Whatever else her expression may have hinted, it did not suggest that her father was afraid of her.

“Do you intend to marry this man, my dear?”

“If it comes to that, Papa, he has not asked me.”

“Perhaps he has not.” As he said this, the Dean made a little motion with his hands, implying that men who asked and men who did not ask his daughter to marry them were each guilty of the gravest discourtesy. “As you know, I am the last person in the world to interfere in matters of this kind. (This was not true. The Dean had interfered repeatedly in the affair of the elder Miss Marjoribanks and the brewer.) “But people will talk. Why only yesterday I had Mrs. Delingpole”—Mrs. Delingpole was the wife of the Precentor—“ask me what I thought of dear Mr. Crawley, and could not something be done for him.”

“Well, it is very disagreeable of people. Mr. Crawley has not spoken a word to me that he might not have spoken with perfect propriety to any other woman.”

“Nevertheless, my dear…”

“Nevertheless, fiddlestick, Papa.”

Notwithstanding the spiritedness with which Miss Marjoribanks, into whose face a fine red colour had come, pronounced this remark, it was clear to her, as it was to her father, that the conversation could
not be allowed to stop at this juncture. Accordingly, she poured herself another cup of tea, disposed of the toast onto her plate and searched about in her mind for another means of defending herself.

“It is especially disagreeable of people, Papa, when one thinks of Mr. Crawley’s position. He is the kind of man whom most young women would be glad to marry. To be sure, he is only a curate, but he was a Fellow of his college and, I believe, highly thought of, and they say that his cousin the Earl may very well do something for him.”

“His cousin the Earl has no more benefices to dispense than you have, my dear.”

“Gracious, Papa! As if an earl couldn’t do something for his cousin if he had a mind to.”

When he heard this, Mr. Marjoribanks knew in his heart that his daughter was going to marry Mr. Crawley. However, he was careful not to say as much. He merely remarked what he believed to be the truth, that Mr. Crawley appeared to be an able young clergyman and an excellent minister to his flock. Whereupon the breakfast table colloquy broke up, the Dean retiring to his study and his daughter departing to the kitchen and a half hour’s conversation with the cook, which I fear that lady did not much enjoy.

Mr. Marjoribanks was, according to his lights, an honourable man. He knew that it required him to make various enquiries concerning this suitor of his daughter’s. He was, at the same time, honest enough to admit that his principal objection to any suggested match was his own convenience. Austere though he was, the Dean liked very much having his daughter to stir his tea, fetch his slippers and scold his servants, and though the tea might be stirred and the slippers fetched in her absence, he told himself that the hearts that accomplished these tasks would not be as true. A less honourable man would have proceeded by subterfuge, but this was alien to the Dean’s nature. He began, consequently, by taking down a certain clerical directory from the shelf above his desk and seeing what it had to say. Here he learned what he might very well have expected: that Mr. Crawley came of good family, had earned high honours at Oxford, been elected to a fellowship at his college and was, in short, a paragon. Still, though, Mr. Marjoribanks laid down the directory with a sigh. He felt that in the matter of Mr.
Crawley, and his visits to the Deanery, and his cousin the Earl, he was being outmanoeuvred.

It happened, however, that the next hour brought a visitor to Mr. Marjoribanks, one of the dozens who waited on him during the course of his working day. This was a gentleman named the Reverend Dalrymple, who, by chance, inhabited a parish on the east side of the county, a dozen miles from Mr. Crawley’s cure. Accordingly the Dean welcomed Mr. Dalrymple with the greatest cordiality, attended to whatever matter he had brought before him, and then said:

“What, pray, do you think of your neighbour Mr. Crawley?”

“Mr. Crawley of Lower Easton? A very amiable young man, I should say. But I believe I should congratulate you, Mr. Dean.”