George Eliot - Felix Holt, the Radical

There was a roar of laughter. This pun upon Scales was highly appreciated by every one except the miller and butler. The latter pulled down his waistcoat, and puffed and stared in rather an excited manner. Mr. Christian's wit, in general, seemed to him a poor kind of quibbling.

"What a fellow you are for fence, Christian," said the gardener. "Hang me, if I don't think you're up to everything."

"That's a compliment you might pay Old Nick, if you come to that," said Mr. Sircome, who was in the painful position of a man deprived of his formula.

"Yes, yes," said Mr. Scales; "I'm no fool myself, and could parry a thrust if I liked, but I shouldn't like it to be said of me that I was up to everything. I'll keep a little principle if you please."

"To be sure," said Christian, ladling out the punch. "What would justice be without Scales?"

The laughter was not quite so full-throated as before. Such excessive cleverness was a little Satanic.

"A joke's a joke among gentlemen," said the butler, getting exasperated; "I think there has been quite liberties enough taken with my name. But if you must talk about names, I've heard of a party before now calling himself a Christian, and being anything but it."

"Come, that's beyond a joke," said the surgeon's assistant, a fast man, whose chief scene of dissipation was the manor. "Let it drop, Scales."

"Yes, I dare say it's beyond a joke. I'm not a harlequin to talk nothing but jokes. I leave that to other Christians, who are up to everything, and have been everywhere – to the hulks, for what I know; and more than that, they come from nobody knows where, and try to worm themselves into gentlemen's confidence, to the prejudice of their betters."

There was a stricter sequence in Mr. Scales's angry eloquence than was apparent – some chief links being confined to his own breast, as is often the case in energetic discourse. The company were in a state of expectation. There was something behind worth knowing, and something before them worth seeing. In the general decay of other fine British pugnacious sports, a quarrel between gentlemen was all the more exciting, and though no one would himself have liked to turn on Scales, no one was sorry for the chance of seeing him put down. But the amazing Christian was unmoved. He had taken out his handkerchief and was rubbing his lips carefully. After a slight pause, he spoke with perfect coolness.

"I don't intend to quarrel with you, Scales. Such talk as this is not profitable to either of us. It makes you purple in the face – you are apoplectic, you know – and it spoils good company. Better tell a few fibs about me behind my back – it will heat you less, and do me more harm. I'll leave you to it; I shall go and have a game of whist with the ladies."

As the door closed behind the questionable Christian, Mr. Scales was in a state of frustration that prevented speech. Every one was rather embarrassed.

"That's an uncommon sort o' fellow," said Mr. Crowder, in an undertone, to his next neighbor, the gardener. "Why, Mr. Philip picked him up in foreign parts, didn't he?"

"He was a courier," said the gardener. "He's had a deal of experience. And I believe, by what I can make out – for he's been pretty free with me sometimes – there was a time when he was in that rank of life that he fought a duel."

"Ah! that makes him such a cool chap," said Mr. Crowder.

"He's what I call an overbearing fellow," said Mr. Sircome, also sotto voce , to his next neighbor, Mr. Filmore, the surgeon's assistant. "He runs you down with a sort of talk that's neither here nor there. He's got a deal too many samples in his pocket for me."

"All I know is, he's a wonderful hand at cards," said Mr. Filmore, whose whiskers and shirt-pin were quite above the average. "I wish I could play écarté as he does; it's beautiful to see him; he can make a man look pretty blue; he'll empty his pocket for him in no time."

"That's none to his credit," said Mr. Sircome.

The conversation had in this way broken up into tête-à-tête , and the hilarity of the evening might be considered a failure. Still the punch was drunk, the accounts were duly swelled, and, notwithstanding the innovating spirit of the time, Sir Maximus Debarry's establishment was kept up in sound hereditary British manner.

"Rumor doth double like the voice and echo."

The mind of a man is as a country which was once open to squatters, who have bred and multiplied and become masters of the land. But then happeneth a time when new and hungry comers dispute the land; and there is trial of strength, and the stronger wins. Nevertheless the first squatters be they who have prepared the ground, and the crops to the end will be sequent (though chiefly on the nature of the soil, as of light sand, mixed loam, or heavy clay, yet) somewhat on the primal labor and sowing.

That talkative maiden, Rumor, though in the interest of art she is figured as a youthful, winged beauty with flowing garments, soaring above the heads of men, and breathing world-thrilling news through a gracefully-curved trumpet, is in fact a very old maid, who puckers her silly face by the fireside, and really does no more than chirp a wrong guess or a lame story into the ear of a fellow gossip; all the rest of the work attributed to her is done by the ordinary working of those passions against which men pray in the Litany, with the help of a plentiful stupidity against which we have never yet had any authorized form of prayer.

When Mr. Scales's strong need to make an impressive figure in conversation, together with his very slight need of any other premise than his own sense of his wide general knowledge and probable infallibility, led him to specify five hundred thousand as the lowest admissible amount of Harold Transome's commercially-acquired fortune, it was not fair to put this down to poor old Miss Rumor, who had only told Scales that the fortune was considerable. And again, when the curt Mr. Sircome found occasion at Treby to mention the five hundred thousand as a fact that folks seemed pretty sure about, this expansion of the butler into "folks" was entirely due to Mr. Sircome's habitual preference for words which could not be laid hold of or give people a handle over him. It was in this simple way that the report of Harold Transome's fortune spread and was magnified, adding much lustre to his opinion in the eyes of Liberals, and compelling even men of the opposite party to admit that it increased his eligibility as a member for North Loamshire. It was observed by a sound thinker in these parts that property was ballast; and when once the aptness of that metaphor had been perceived, it followed that a man was not fit to navigate the sea of politics without a great deal of such ballast; and that, rightly understood, whatever increased the expense of election, inasmuch as it virtually raised the property qualification, was an unspeakable boon to the country.

Meanwhile the fortune that was getting larger in the imagination of constituents was shrinking a little in the imagination of its owner. It was hardly more than a hundred and fifty thousand; and there were not only the heavy mortgages to be paid off, but also a large amount of capital was needed in order to repair the farm-buildings all over the estate, to carry out extensive drainage, and make allowances to in-coming tenants, which might remove the difficulties of newly letting the farms in a time of agricultural depression. The farms actually tenanted were held by men who had begged hard to succeed their fathers in getting a little poorer every year, on land which was also getting poorer, where the highest rate of increase was in the arrears of rent, and where the master, in crushed hat and corduroys, looked pitiably lean and care-worn by the side of pauper laborers, who showed that superior assimilating power often observed to attend nourishment by the public money. Mr. Goffe, of Rabbit's End, had never had it explained to him that, according to the true theory of rent, land must inevitably be given up when it would not yield a profit equal to the ordinary rate of interest; so that from want of knowing what was inevitable, and not from a Titanic spirit of opposition, he kept on his land. He often said to himself, with a melancholy wipe of his sleeve across his brow, that he "didn't know which-a-way to turn"; and he would have been still more at a loss on the subject if he had quitted Rabbit's End with a wagonful of furniture and utensils, a file of receipts, a wife with five children, and a shepherd dog in low spirits.