21477152 B 1876 Feb. 13 BY GEORGE ELIOT. FELIX HOLT, THE RADICAL 8vo, Paper, 75 cents. ADAM BEDE. 12m0, Cloth, $1 50. THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. 12mo, Clath, $1 50; 8vo, Paper, 75 cents. SILAS MARNER. 12mo, Cloth, $1 50. ROMOLA. 8vo, Cloth, $2 00. SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE. 8vo, Paper, 75 cents. Sent by Mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States, on receipt of the Price. FELIX HOLT, THE RADICAL. INTRODUCTION. corn-ricks clustered near the long roofs of some midland homestead, he saw the full-uddered cows FIVE-AND-THIRTY years ago the glory had not driven from their pasture to the early milking. yet departed from the old coach-roads: the great Perhaps it was the shepherd, head-servant of the road-side inns were still brilliant with well-pol- | farm, who drove them, his sheep-dog following ished tankards, the smiling glances of pretty with a heedless, unofficial air as of a beadle in barmaids, and the repartees of jocose hostlers; undress. The shepherd with a slow and slouchthe mail still announced itself by the merry ing walk, timed by the walk of grazing beasts, notes of the horn; the hedge-cutter or the rick- moved aside, as if unwillingly, throwing out a thatcher might still know the exact hour by the monosyllabic hint to his cattle; his glance, acunfailing yet otherwise meteoric apparition of customed to rest on things very near the earth, the pea-green Tally-ho or the yellow Independ- seemed to lift itself with difficulty to the coachent; and elderly gentlemen in pony-chaises, man. Mail or stage coach for him belonged to quartering nervously to make way for the roll- that mysterious distant system of things called ing, swinging swiftness, had not ceased to remark"Gover'ment," which, whatever it might be, that times were finely changed since they used to see the pack-horses and hear the tinkling of their bells on this very highway. was no business of his, any more than the most But In those days there were pocket-boroughs, a Birmingham unrepresented in Parliament and compelled to make strong representations out of it, unrepealed corn-laws, three-and-sixpenny letters, a brawny and many-breeding pauperism, and other departed evils; but there were some pleasant things, too, which have also departed. Non omnia grandior ætas quæ fugiamus habet, says the wise goddess: you have not the best of it in all things, oh youngsters! the elderly man has his enviable memories, and not the least of them is the memory of a long journey in mid-spring or autumn on the outside of a stage-coach. Posterity may be shot, like a bullet, through a tube, by atmospheric pressure from Winchester to Newcastle that is a fine result to have among our hopes; but the slow, old-fashioned way of get-gathering the plenteous crabs. It was worth the ting from one end of our country to the other is journey only to see those hedgerows, the liberal the better thing to have in the memory. The homes of unmarketable beauty-of the purpletube-journey can never lend much to picture and blossomed ruby-berried nightshade, of the wild narrative; it is as barren as an exclamatory O! convolvulus climbing and spreading in tendriled Whereas the happy outside passenger seated on strength till it made a great curtain of pale-green the box from the dawn to the gloaming gath- hearts and white trumpets, of the many-tubed ered enough stories of English life, enough of honey-suckle, which, in its most delicate fraEnglish labors in town and country, enough as-grance, hid a charm more subtle and penetrapects of earth and sky, to make episodes for a ting than beauty. Even if it were winter the modern Odyssey. Suppose only that his jour- hedgerows showed their coral, the scarlet haws, ney took him through that central plain, watered the deep-crimson hips, with lingering brown leaves at one extremity by the Avon, at the other by to make a resting-place for the jewels of the hoarthe Trent. As the morning silvered the mead- frost. Such hedgerows were often as tall as the ows with their long lines of bushy willows mark- laborers' cottages dotted along the lanes, or clusing the water-courses, or burnished the golden 'tered into a small hamlet, their little dingy win dows telling, like thick-filmed eyes, of nothing | lets and villages. Here were powerful men walk but the darkness within. The passenger on the ing queerly with knees bent outward from squatcoach-box, bowled along above such a hamlet, ting in the mine, going home to throw themsaw chiefly the roofs of it: probably it turned its selves down in their blackened flannel and sleep back on the road, and seemed to lie away from through the daylight, then rise and spend much every thing but its own patch of earth and sky, of their high wages at the ale-house with their away from the parish church by long fields and fellows of the Benefit Club; here the pale, eager green lanes, away from all intercourse except faces of hand-loom weavers, men and women, that of tramps. If its face could be seen it haggard from sitting up late at night to finish was most likely dirty; but the dirt was Protest- the week's work, hardly begun till the Wednesant dirt, and the big, bold, gin-breathing tramps day. Every where the cottages and the small were Protestant tramps. There was no sign of children were dirty, for the languid mothers superstition near, no crucifix or image to indi- gave their strength to the loom-pious Dissentcate a misguided reverence: the inhabitants were ing women, perhaps, who took life patiently, probably so free from superstition that they were and thought that salvation depended chiefly on in much less awe of the parson than of the over-predestination, and not at all on cleanliness. Yet they were saved from the excesses of Protestantism by not knowing how to read, and by the absence of hand-looms and mines to be the pioneers of Dissent: they were kept safely in the via media of indifference, and could have registered themselves in the census by a big black mark as members of the Church of England. seer. The gables of Dissenting chapels now made a visible sign of religion, and of a meeting-place to counterbalance the ale-house, even in the hamlets; but if a couple of old termagants were seen tearing each other's caps, it was a safe conclusion that, if they had not received the sacraments of the Church, they had not at least given But there were trim, cheerful villages, too, in to schismatic rites, and were free from the with a neat or handsome parsonage and gray errors of Voluntaryism. The breath of the manchurch set in the midst; there was the pleasant ufacturing town, which made a cloudy day and tinkle of the blacksmith's anvil, the patient cart- a red gloom by night on the horizon, diffused horses waiting at his door; the basket-maker itself over all the surrounding country, filling peeling his willow wands in the sunshine; the the air with eager unrest. Here was a populawheel-wright putting the last touch to a blue tion not convinced that old England was as good cart with red wheels; here and there a cottage as possible; here were multitudinous men and with bright, transparent windows showing pots women aware that their religion was not exactly full of blooming balsams or geraniums, and lit- the religion of their rulers, who might therefore tle gardens in front, all double-daisies or dark be better than they were, and who, if better, wall-flowers; at the well clean and comely wo- might alter many things which now made the men carrying yoked buckets, and toward the world perhaps more painful than it need be, and free-school small Britons dawdling on, and hand- certainly more sinful. Yet there were the gray ling their marbles in the pockets of unpatched steeples, too, and the church-yards, with their corduroys adorned with brass buttons. The grassy mounds and venerable head-stones, sleepland around was rich and marly; great corn- ing in the sunlight; there were broad fields and stacks stood in the rick-yards-for the rick-burn-homesteads, and fine old woods covering a risers had not found their way hither; the home-ing ground, or stretching far by the road-side, steads were those of rich farmers who paid no allowing only peeps at the park and mansion rent, or had the rare advantage of a lease, and which they shut in from the working-day world. could afford to keep their corn till prices had In these midland districts the traveler passed risen. The coach would be sure to overtake rapidly from one phase of English life to anothsome of them on their way to their outlying er: after looking down on a village dingy with fields or to the market-town, sitting heavily on coal-dust, noisy with the shaking of looms, he their well-groomed horses, or weighing down might skirt a parish all of fields, high hedges, one side of an olive-green gig. They probably and deep-rutted lanes; after the coach had ratthought of the coach with some contempt, as an tled over the pavement of a manufacturing town, accommodation for people who had not their the scene of riots and trades-union meetings, it own gigs, or who, wanting to travel to London would take him in another ten minutes into a and such distant places, belonged to the trading rural region, where the neighborhood of the and less solid part of the nation. The passen-town was only felt in the advantages of a near ger on the box could see that this was the dis- market for corn, cheese, and hay, and where trict of protuberant optimists, sure that old En-men with a considerable banking account were gland was the best of all possible countries, and accustomed to say that "they never meddled that if there were any facts which had not fall-with politics themselves." The busy scenes of en under their own observation they were facts the shuttle and the wheel, of the roaring furnot worth observing: the district of clean little nace, of the shaft and the pulley, seemed to make market-towns without manufactures, of fat liv- but crowded nests in the midst of the largeings, an aristocratic clergy, and low poor-rates. spaced, slow-moving life of homesteads and farBut as the day wore on the scene would change: away cottages and oak-sheltered parks. Lookthe land would begin to be blackened with coal-ing at the dwellings scattered among the woody pits, the rattle of hand-looms to be heard in ham-flats and the plowed uplands, under the low gray sky which overhung them with an unchanging | stories of their extravagant or stingy housekeepstillness as if Time itself were pausing, it was ing; whom they had married, whom they had easy for the traveler to conceive that town and horsewhipped, whether they were particular about country had no pulse in common, except where preserving their game, and whether they had had the hand-looms made a far-reaching, straggling much to do with canal companies. About any fringe about the great centres, of manufacture; actual landed proprietor he could also tell wheththat till the agitation about the Catholics in '29, er he was a Reformer or an Anti-Reformer. rural Englishmen had hardly known more of That was a distinction which had “turned up” Catholics than of the fossil mammals; and that in latter times, and along with it the paradox, their notion of Reform was a confused combina- very puzzling to the coachman's mind, that there tion of rick-burners, trades-unions, Nottingham were men of old family and large estate who riots, and in general whatever required the call-voted for the Bill. He did not grapple with ing-out of the yeomanry. It was still easier to the paradox; he let it pass, with all the discreetsee that, for the most part, they resisted the rota-ness of an experienced theologian or learned tion of crops and stood by their fallows: and the scholiast, preferring to point his whip at some coachman would perhaps tell how in one parish object which could raise no questions. an innovating farmer, who talked of Sir Humphrey Davy, had been fairly driven out by popular dislike, as if he had been a confounded Radical; and how, the parson having one Sunday preached from the words "Plow up the falLow-ground of your hearts," the people thought he had made the text out of his own head, otherwise it would never have come "so pat" on a matter of business; but when they found it in the Bible at home, some said it was an argument for fallows (else why should the Bible mention fallows?), but a few of the weaker sort were shaken, and thought it was an argument that fallows should be done away with, else the Bible would have said, “Let your hearts lie fallow;" and the next morning the parson had a stroke of apoplexy, which, as coincident with a dispute about fallows, so set the parish against the innovating farmer and the rotation of crops, that he could stand his ground no longer, and transferred his lease. The coachman was an excellent traveling companion and commentator on the landscape: he could tell the names of sites and persons, and explain the meaning of groups, as well as the shade of Virgil in a more memorable journey; he had as many stories about parishes, and the men and women in them, as the Wanderer in the "Excursion," only his style was different. His view of life had originally been genial, and such as became a man who was well-warmed within and without, and held a position of easy, undisputed authority; but the recent initiation of Railways had embittered him: he now, as in a perpetual vision, saw the ruined country strewn with shattered limbs, and regarded Mr. Huskisson's death as a proof of God's anger against Stephenson. "Why, every inn on the road would be shut up!" and at that word the coachman looked before him with the blank gaze of one who had driven his coach to the outermost edge of the universe, and saw his leaders plunging into the abyss. Still he would soon relapse from the high prophetic strain to the familiar one of narrative. He knew whose the land was wherever he drove; what noblemen had halfruined themselves by gambling; who made handsome returns of rent; and who was at daggersdrawn with his eldest son. He perhaps remembered the fathers of actual baronets, and knew No such paradox troubled our coachman when, leaving the town of Treby Magna behind him, he drove between the hedges for a mile or so, crossed the queer long bridge over the river Lapp, and then put his horses to a swift gallop up the hill by the low-nestled village of Little Treby, till they were on the fine level road, skirted on one side by grand larches, oaks, and wych elms, which sometimes opened so far as to let the traveler see that there was a park behind them. How many times in the year, as the coach rolled past the neglected-looking lodges which interrupted the screen of trees, and showed the river winding through a finely-timbered park, had the coachman answered the same questions, or told the same things without being questioned! That?-oh, that was Transome Court, a place there had been a fine sight of lawsuits about. Generations back the heir of the Transome name had somehow bargained away the estate, and it fell to the Durfeys, very distant connections, who only called themselves Transomes because they had got the estate. But the Durfeys' claim had been disputed over and over again; and the coachman, if he had been asked, would have said, though he might have to fall down dead the next minute, that property didn't always get into the right hands. However, the lawyers had found their luck in it; and people who inherited estates that were lawed about often lived in them as poorly as a mouse in a hollow cheese; and, by what he could make out, that had been the way with these present Durfeys, or Transomes, as they called themselves. As for Mr. Transome, he was as poor, half-witted a fellow as you'd wish to see; but she was master, had come of a high family, and had a spirit-you might see it in her eye and the way she sat her horse. Forty years ago, when she came into this country, they said she was a pictur'; but her family was poor, and so she took up with a hatchet-faced fellow like this Transome. And the eldest son had been just such another as his father, only worse-a wild sort of half-natural, who got into bad company. They said his mother hated him and wished him dead; for she'd got another son, quite of a different cut, who had gone to foreign parts when he was a youngster, and she wanted her favorite to be heir. But heir or no heir, Lawyer CHAPTER I. He left me when the down upon his lip Lay like the shadow of a hovering kiss. "Beautiful mother, do not grieve," he said; However, Lawyer Jer-"I will be great, and build our fortunes high, And you shall wear the longest train at court, And look so queenly, all the lords shall say, Jermyn had had his picking out of the estate. Not a door in his big house but what was the finest polished oak, all got off the Transome estate. If any body liked to believe he paid for it they were welcome. myn had sat on that box-seat many and many a time. He had made the wills of most people thereabout. The coachman would not say that Lawyer Jermyn was not the man he would choose to make his own will some day. It was not so well for a lawyer to be overhonest, else he might not be up to other people's tricks. And as for the Transome business, there had been ins and outs in time gone by, so that you couldn't look into it straight backward. At this Mr. Sampson (every body in North Loamshire knew Sampson's coach) would screw his features into a grimace expressive of entire neutrality, and appear to aim his whip at a particular spot on the horse's flank. If the passenger was curious for further knowledge concerning the Transome affairs, Sampson would shake his head and say there had been fine stories in his time; but he never condescended to state what the stories were. Some attributed this reticence to a wise incredulity, others to a want of memory, others to simple ignorance. But at least Sampson was right in saying that there had been fine stories-meaning, ironically, stories not altogether creditable to the parties concerned. And such stories often come to be fine in a sense that is not ironical. For there is seldom any wrong-doing which does not carry along with it some downfall of blindly-climbing hopes, some hard entail of suffering, some quickly-satiated desire that survives, with the life in death of old paralytic vice, to see itself cursed by its woeful progeny-some tragic mark of kinship in the one brief life to the far-stretching life that went before, and to the life that is to come after, *such as has raised the pity and terror of men ever since they began to discern between will and destiny. But these things are often unknown to the world; for there is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer-committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear. The poets have told us of a dolorous enchanted forest in the under world. The thorn-bushes there, and the thick-barked stems, have human histories hidden in them; the power of unuttered cries dwells in the passionless-seeming branches, and the red warm blood is darkly feeding the quivering nerves of a sleepless memory that watches through all dreams. These things are a parable. She is a royal changeling: there's some crown Lacks the right head, since hers wears naught but braids."" Oh, he is coming now-but I am gray: And he On the 1st of September, in the memorable year 1832, some one was expected at Transome Court. As early as two o'clock in the afternoon the aged lodge-keeper had opened the heavy gate, green as the tree trunks were green with nature's powdery paint, deposited year after year. Already in the village of Little Treby, which lay on the side of a steep hill not far off the lodge gates, the elder matrons sat in their best gowns at the few cottage doors bordering the road, that they might be ready to get up and make their courtesy when a traveling-carriage should come in sight; and beyond the village several small boys were stationed on the look-out, intending to run a race to the barn-like old church, where the sexton waited in the belfry ready to set the one bell in joyful agitation just at the right moment. The old lodge-keeper had opened the gate and left it in the charge of his lame wife, because he was wanted at the Court to sweep away the leaves and perhaps to help in the stables. For though Transome Court was a large mansion, built in the fashion of Queen Anne's time, with a park and grounds as fine as any to be seen in Loamshire, there were very few servants about it. Especially, it seemed, there must be a lack of gardeners; for, except on the terrace surrounded with a stone parapet in front of the house, where there was a parterre kept with some neatness, grass had spread itself over the gravel-walks and over all the low mounds once carefully cut as black beds for the shrubs and larger plants. Many of the windows had the shutters closed, and under the grand Scotch fir that stooped toward one corner the brown fir-needles of many years lay in a small stone balcony in front of two such darkened windows. All round, I near and far, there were grand trees, motionless in the still sunshine, and, like all large motionless things, seeming to add to the stillness. Here and there a leaf fluttered down ;, petals fell in a silent shower; a heavy moth floated by, and, when it settled, seemed to fall wearily; the tiny birds alighted on the walks, and hopped about in perfect tranquillity; even a stray rabbit sat nibbling a leaf that was to its liking, in the middle of a grassy space, with an air that seemed quite impudent in so timid a creature. sound was to be heard louder than a sleepy hum, and the soft monotony of running water hurrying on to the river that divided the park. Standing on the south or east side of the house, you would never have guessed that an arrival was expected. both No But on the west side, where the carriage en |