the belly of this country!’ Everard continued. ‘So long as Manchester flourishes, we’re a country governed and led by the belly. The head and the legs of the country are sound still; I don’t guarantee it for long, but the middle’s rapacious and corrupt. Take it on a question of foreign affairs, it ‘s an alderman after a feast. Bring it upon home politics, you meet a wolf.’
The faithful Whig veteran spoke with jolly admiration of the speech of a famous Tory chief.
‘That was the way to talk to them! Denounce them traitors! Up whip, and set the ruffians capering! Hit them facers! Our men are always for the too-clever trick. They pluck the sprouts and eat them, as if the loss of a sprout or two thinned Manchester! Your policy of absorption is good enough when you’re dealing with fragments. It’s a devilish unlucky thing to attempt with a concrete mass. You might as well ask your head to absorb a wall by running at it like a pugnacious nigger. I don’t want you to go into Parliament ever. You’re a fitter man out of it; but if ever you’re bitten—and it’s the curse of our country to have politics as well as the other diseases—don’t follow a flag, be independent, keep a free vote; remember how I’ve been tied, and hold foot against Manchester. Do it blindfold; you don’t want counselling, you’re sure to be right. I’ll lay you a blood-brood mare to a cabstand skeleton, you’ll have an easy conscience and deserve the thanks of the country.’
Nevil listened gravely. The soundness of the head and legs of the country he took for granted. The inflated state of the unchivalrous middle, denominated Manchester, terrified him. Could it be true that England was betraying signs of decay? and signs how ignoble! Half-a-dozen crescent lines cunningly turned, sketched her figure before the world, and the reflection for one ready to die upholding her was that the portrait was no caricature. Such an emblematic presentation of the land of his filial affection haunted him with hideous mockeries. Surely the foreigner hearing our boasts of her must compare us to showmen bawling the attractions of a Fat Lady at a fair!
Swoln Manchester bore the blame of it. Everard exulted to hear his young echo attack the cotton-spinners. But Nevil was for a plan, a system, immediate action; the descending among the people, and taking an initiative, LEADING them, insisting on their following, not standing aloof and shrugging.
‘We lead them in war,’ said he; ‘why not in peace? There’s a front for peace as well as war, and that’s our place rightly. We’re pushed aside; why, it seems to me we’re treated like old-fashioned ornaments! The fault must be ours. Shrugging and sneering is about as honourable as blazing fireworks over your own defeat. Back we have to go! that’s the point, sir. And as for jeering the cotton-spinners, I can’t while they’ve the lead of us. We let them have it! And we have thrice the stake in the country. I don’t mean properties and titles.’
‘Deuce you don’t,’ said his uncle.
‘I mean our names, our histories; I mean our duties. As for titles, the way to defend them is to be worthy of them.’
‘Damned fine speech,’ remarked Everard. ‘Now you get out of that trick of prize-orationing. I call it snuffery, sir; it’s all to your own nose! You’re talking to me, not to a gallery. “Worthy of them!” Caesar wraps his head in his robe: he gets his dig in the ribs for all his attitudinizing. It’s very well for a man to talk like that who owns no more than his barebodkin life, poor devil. Tall talk’s his jewelry: he must have his dandification in bunkum. You ought to know better. Property and titles are worth having, whether you are “worthy of them” or a disgrace to your class. The best way of defending them is to keep a strong fist, and take care you don’t draw your fore-foot back more than enough.’
‘Please propose something to be done,’ said Nevil, depressed by the recommendation of that attitude.
Everard proposed a fight for every privilege his class possessed. ‘They say,’ he said, ‘a nobleman fighting the odds is a sight for the gods: and I wouldn’t yield an inch of ground. It’s no use calling things by fine names—the country’s ruined by cowardice. Poursuivez! I cry. Haro! at them! The biggest hart wins in the end. I haven’t a doubt about that. And I haven’t a doubt we carry the tonnage.’
‘There’s the people,’ sighed Nevil, entangled in his uncle’s haziness.
‘What people?’
‘I suppose the people of Great Britain count, sir.’
‘Of course they do; when the battle’s done, the fight lost and won.’
‘Do you expect the people to look on, sir?’
‘The people always wait for the winner, boy Nevil.’
The young fellow exclaimed despondingly, ‘If it were a race!’
‘It’s like a race, and we’re confoundedly out of training,’ said Everard.
There he rested. A mediaeval gentleman with the docile notions of the twelfth century, complacently driving them to grass and wattling them in the nineteenth, could be of no use to a boy trying to think, though he could set the youngster galloping. Nevil wandered about the woods of Steynham, disinclined to shoot and lend a hand to country sports. The popping of the guns of his uncle and guests hung about his ears much like their speech, which was unobjectionable in itself, but not sufficient; a little hard, he thought, a little idle. He wanted something, and wanted them to give their time and energy to something, that was not to be had in a market. The nobles, he felt sure, might resume their natural alliance with the people, and lead them, as they did of old, to the battle-field. How might they? A comely Sussex lass could not well tell him how. Sarcastic reports of the troublesome questioner represented him applying to a nymph of the country for enlightenment. He thrilled surprisingly under the charm of feminine beauty. ‘The fellow’s sound at bottom,’ his uncle said, hearing of his having really been seen walking in the complete form proper to his budding age, that is, in two halves. Nevil showed that he had gained an acquaintance with the struggles of the neighbouring agricultural poor to live and rear their children. His uncle’s table roared at his enumeration of the sickly little beings, consumptive or bandy-legged, within a radius of five miles of Steynham. Action was what he wanted, Everard said. Nevil perhaps thought the same, for he dashed out of his mooning with a wave of the Tory standard, delighting the ladies, though in that conflict of the Lion and the Unicorn (which was a Tory song) he seemed rather to wish to goad the dear lion than crush the one-horned intrusive upstart. His calling on the crack corps of Peers to enrol themselves forthwith in the front ranks, and to anticipate opposition by initiating measures, and so cut out that funny old crazy old galleon, the People, from under the batteries of the enemy, highly amused the gentlemen.
Before rejoining his ship, Nevil paid his customary short visit of ceremony to his great-aunt Beauchamp—a venerable lady past eighty, hitherto divided from him in sympathy by her dislike of his uncle Everard, who had once been his living hero. That was when he was in frocks, and still the tenacious fellow could not bear to hear his uncle spoken ill of.
‘All the men of that family are heartless, and he is a man of wood, my dear, and a bad man,’ the old lady said. ‘He should have kept you at school, and sent you to college. You want reading and teaching and talking to. Such a house as that is should never be a home for you.’ She hinted at Rosamund. Nevil defended the persecuted woman, but with no better success than from the attacks of the Romfrey ladies; with this difference, however, that these decried the woman’s vicious arts, and Mistress Elizabeth Mary Beauchamp put all the sin upon the man. Such a man! she said. ‘Let me hear that he has married her, I will not utter another word.’ Nevil echoed, ‘Married!’ in a different key.
‘I am as much of an aristocrat as any of you, only I rank
