Felix Holt

by George Eliot

  ‘Yes, he has told me everything.’

  ‘About his proceedings against me? and the reason he stopped them?’

  ‘Yes: have you had notice that he has begun them again?’

  ‘No,’ said Jermyn, with a very unpleasant sensation.

  ‘Of course he will now,’ said Mrs Transome. ‘There is no reason in his mind why he should not.’

  ‘Has he resolved to risk the estate then?’

  ‘He feels in no danger on that score. And if there were, the danger doesn’t depend on you. The most likely thing is, that he will marry this girl.’

  ‘He knows everything then?’ said Jermyn, the expression of his face getting clouded.

  ‘Everything. It’s of no use for you to think of mastering him: you can’t do it. I used to wish Harold to be fortunate – and he is fortunate,’ said Mrs Transome, with intense bitterness. ‘It’s not my star that he inherits.’

  ‘Do you know how he came by the information about this girl?’

  ‘No; but she knew it all before we spoke to her. It’s no secret.’

  Jermyn was confounded by this hopeless frustration to which he had no key. Though he thought of Christian, the thought shed no light; but the more fatal point was clear: he held no secret that could help him.

  ‘You are aware that these Chancery proceedings may ruin me?’

  ‘He told me they would. But if you are imagining that I can do anything, dismiss the notion. I have told him as plainly as I dare that I wish him to drop all public quarrel with you, and that you could make an arrangement without scandal. I can do no more. He will not listen to me; he doesn’t mind about my feelings. He cares more for Mr Transome than he does for me.3 He will not listen to me any more than if I were an old ballad-singer.’

  ‘It’s very hard on me, I know,’ said Jermyn, in the tone with which a man flings out a reproach.

  ‘I besought you three months ago to bear anything rather than quarrel with him.’

  ‘I have not quarrelled with him. It is he who has been always seeking a quarrel with me. I have borne a good deal – more than any one else would. He set his teeth against me from the first.’

  ‘He saw things that annoyed him; and men are not like women,’ said Mrs Transome. There was a bitter innuendo in that truism.

  ‘It’s very hard on me – I know that,’ said Jermyn, with an intensification of his previous tone, rising and walking a step or two, then turning and laying his hand on the back of the chair. ‘Of course the law in this case can’t in the least represent the justice of the matter. I made a good many sacrifices in times past. I gave up a great deal of fine business for the sake of attending to the family affairs, and in that lawsuit they would have gone to rack and ruin if it hadn’t been for me.’

  He moved away again, laid down his hat, which he had been previously holding, and thrust his hands into his pockets as he returned. Mrs Transome sat motionless as marble, and almost as pale. Her hands lay crossed on her knees. This man, young, slim, and graceful, with a selfishness which then took the form of homage to her, had at one time kneeled to her and kissed those hands fervently; and she had thought there was a poetry in such passion beyond any to be found in everyday domesticity.

  ‘I stretched my conscience a good deal in that affair of Bycliffe, as you know perfectly well. I told you everything at the time. I told you I was very uneasy about those witnesses, and about getting him thrown into prison. I know it’s the blackest thing anybody could charge me with, if they knew my life from beginning to end; and I should never have done it, if I had not been under an infatuation such as makes a man do anything. What did it signify to me about the loss of the law-suit? I was a young bachelor – I had the world before me.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Transome, in a low tone. ‘It was a pity you didn’t make another choice.’

  ‘What would have become of you?’ said Jermyn, carried along a climax, like other self-justifiers. ‘I had to think of you. You would not have liked me to make another choice then.’

  ‘Clearly,’ said Mrs Transome, with concentrated bitterness, but still quietly; ‘the greater mistake was mine.’

  Egoism is usually stupid in a dialogue; but Jermyn’s did not make him so stupid that he did not feel the edge of Mrs Transome’s words. They increased his irritation.

  ‘I hardly see that,’ he replied, with a slight laugh of scorn. ‘You had an estate and a position to save, to go no farther. I remember very well what you said to me – “A clever lawyer can do anything if he has the will; if it’s impossible, he will make it possible. And the property is sure to be Harold’s some day.” He was a baby then.’

  ‘I remember most things a little too well: you had better say at once what is your object in recalling them.’

  ‘An object that is nothing more than justice. With the relation I stood in, it was not likely I should think myself bound by all the forms that are made to bind strangers. I had often immense trouble to raise the money necessary to pay off debts and carry on the affairs; and, as I said before, I had given up other lines of advancement which would have been open to me if I had not stayed in this neighbourhood at a critical time when I was fresh to the world. Anybody who knew the whole circumstances would say that my being hunted and run down on the score of my past transactions with regard to the family affairs, is an abominably unjust and unnatural thing.’

  Jermyn paused a moment, and then added, ‘At my time of life … and with a family about me – and after what has passed … I should have thought there was nothing you would care more to prevent.’

  ‘I do care. It makes me miserable. That is the extent of my power – to feel miserable.’

  ‘No, it is not the extent of your power. You could save me if you would. It is not to be supposed that Harold would go on against me … if he knew the whole truth.’

  Jermyn had sat down before he uttered the last words. He had lowered his voice slightly. He had the air of one who thought that he had prepared the way for an understanding. That a man with so much sharpness, with so much suavity at command – a man who piqued himself on his persuasiveness towards women, – should behave just as Jermyn did on this occasion, would be surprising, but for the constant experience that temper and selfish insensibility will defeat excellent gifts – will make a sensible person shout when shouting is out of place, and will make a polished man rude when his polish might be of eminent use to him.

  As Jermyn, sitting down and leaning forward with an elbow on his knee, uttered his last words – ‘if he knew the whole truth’ – a slight shock seemed to pass through Mrs Transome’s hitherto motionless body, followed by a sudden light in her eyes, as in an animal’s about to spring.

  ‘And you expect me to tell him?’ she said, not loudly, but yet with a clear metallic ring in her voice.

  ‘Would it not be right for him to know?’ said Jermyn, in a more bland and persuasive tone than he had yet used.

  Perhaps some of the most terrible irony of the human lot is this of a deep truth coming to be uttered by lips that have no right to it.

  ‘I will never tell him!’ said Mrs Transome, starting up, her whole frame thrilled with a passion that seemed almost to make her young again. Her hands hung beside her clenched tightly, her eyes and lips lost the helpless repressed bitterness of discontent, and seemed suddenly fed with energy. ‘You reckon up your sacrifices for me: you have kept a good account of them, and it is needful; they are some of them what no one else could guess or find out. But you made your sacrifices when they seemed pleasant to you; when you told me they were your happiness; when you told me that it was I who stooped, and I who bestowed favours.’

  Jermyn rose too, and laid his hand on the back of the chair. He had grown visibly paler, but seemed about to speak.

  ‘Don’t speak!’ Mrs Transome said peremptorily. ‘Don’t open your lips again. You have said enough; I will speak now. I have made sacrifices too, but it was when I knew that they were not my happiness. It was after I saw that I had
stooped – after I saw that your tenderness had turned into calculation – after I saw that you cared for yourself only, and not for me. I heard your explanations – of your duty in life – of our mutual reputation – of a virtuous young lady attached to you. I bore it; I let everything go; I shut my eyes; I might almost have let myself starve, rather than have scenes of quarrel with the man I had loved, in which I must accuse him of turning my love into a good bargain.’ There was a slight tremor in Mrs Transome’s voice in the last words, and for a moment she paused; but when she spoke again it seemed as if the tremor had frozen into a cutting icicle.4 ‘I suppose if a lover picked one’s pocket, there’s no woman would like to own it. I don’t say I was not afraid of you: I was afraid of you, and I know now I was right.’

  ‘Mrs Transome,’ said Jermyn, white to the lips, ‘it is needless to say more. I withdraw any words that have offended you.’

  ‘You can’t withdraw them. Can a man apologize for being a dastard?… And I have caused you to strain your conscience, have I? – it is I who have sullied your purity? I should think the demons have more honour – they are not so impudent to one another. I would not lose the misery of being a woman, now I see what can be the baseness of a man. One must be a man – first to tell a woman that her love has made her your debtor, and then ask her to pay you by breaking the last poor threads between her and her son.’

  ‘I do not ask it,’ said Jermyn, with a certain asperity. He was beginning to find this intolerable. The mere brute strength of a masculine creature rebelled. He felt almost inclined to throttle the voice out of this woman.

  ‘You do ask it: it is what you would like. I have had a terror on me lest evil should happen to you. From the first, after Harold came home, I had a horrible dread. It seemed as if murder might come between you – I didn’t know what. I felt the horror of his not knowing the truth. I might have been dragged at last, by my own feeling – by my own memory – to tell him all, and make him as well as myself miserable, to save you.’

  Again there was a slight tremor, as if at the remembrance of womanly tenderness and pity. But immediately she launched forth again.

  ‘But now you have asked me, I will never tell him! Be ruined – no – do something more dastardly to save yourself. If I sinned, my judgment went beforehand – that I should sin for a man like you.’

  Swiftly upon those last words Mrs Transome passed out of the room. The softly-padded door closed behind her making no noise, and Jermyn found himself alone.

  For a brief space he stood still. Human beings in moments of passionate reproach and denunciation, especially when their anger is on their own account, are never so wholly in the right that the person who has to wince cannot possibly protest against some unreasonableness or unfairness in their outburst. And if Jermyn had been capable of feeling that he had thoroughly merited this infliction, he would not have uttered the words that drew it down on him. Men do not become penitent and learn to abhor themselves by having their backs cut open with the lash; rather, they learn to abhor the lash. What Jermyn felt about Mrs Transome when she disappeared was, that she was a furious woman – who would not do what he wanted her to do. And he was supported as to his justifiableness by the inward repetition of what he had already said to her: it was right that Harold should know the truth. He did not take into account (how should he?) the exasperation and loathing excited by his daring to urge the plea of right. A man who had stolen the pyx,5 and got frightened when justice was at his heels, might feel the sort of penitence which would induce him to run back in the dark and lay the pyx where the sexton might find it; but if in doing so he whispered to the Blessed Virgin that he was moved by considering the sacredness of all property, and the peculiar sacredness of the pyx, it is not to be believed that she would like him the better for it. Indeed, one often seems to see why the saints should prefer candles to words, especially from penitents whose skin is in danger. Some salt of generosity would have made Jermyn conscious that he had lost the citizenship which authorized him to plead the right; still more, that his self-vindication to Mrs Transome would be like the exhibition of a brand-mark, and only show that he was shame-proof. There is heroism even in the circles of hell for fellow-sinners who cling to each other in the fiery whirlwind and never recriminate.6 But these things, which are easy to discern when they are painted for us on the large canvass of poetic story, become confused and obscure even for well-read gentlemen when their affection for themselves is alarmed by pressing details of actual experience. If their comparison of instances is active at such times, it is chiefly in showing them that their own case has subtle distinctions from all other cases, which should free them from unmitigated condemnation.

  And it was in this way with Matthew Jermyn. So many things were more distinctly visible to him, and touched him more acutely, than the effect of his acts or words on Mrs Transome’s feelings! In fact – he asked, with a touch of something that makes us all akin – was it not preposterous, this excess of feeling on points which he himself did not find powerfully moving? She had treated him most unreasonably. It would have been right for her to do what he had – not asked, but only hinted at in a mild and interrogatory manner. But the clearest and most unpleasant result of the interview was, that this right thing which he desired so much would certainly not be done for him by Mrs Transome.

  As he was moving his arm from the chair-back, and turning to take his hat, there was a boisterous noise in the entrance-hall; the door of the small drawing-room, which had closed without latching, was pushed open, and old Mr Transome appeared with a face of feeble delight, playing horse to little Harry, who roared and flogged behind him, while Moro yapped in a puppy voice at their heels. But when Mr Transome saw Jermyn in the room he stood still in the doorway, as if he did not know whether entrance were permissible. The majority of his thoughts were but ravelled threads of the past. The attorney came forward to shake hands with due politeness, but the old man said, with a bewildered look, and in a hesitating way,

  ‘Mr Jermyn? – why – why – where is Mrs Transome?’

  Jermyn smiled his way out past the unexpected group; and little Harry, thinking he had an eligible opportunity, turned round to give a parting stroke on the stranger’s coat-tails.

  CHAPTER XLIII

  Whichever way my days decline,

  I felt and feel, though left alone,

  His being working in mine own,

  The footsteps of his life in mine.

  Dear friend, far off, my lost desire,

  So far, so near, in woe and weal;

  O, loved the most when most I feel

  There is a lower and a higher!

  TENNYSON: In Memoriam

  After that morning on which Esther found herself reddened and confused by the sense of having made a distant allusion to Felix Holt, she felt it impossible that she should even, as she had sometimes intended, speak of him explicitly to Harold, in order to discuss the probabilities as to the issue of his trial. She was certain she could not do it without betraying emotion, and there were very complex reasons in Esther’s mind why she could not bear that Harold should detect her sensibility on this subject. It was not only all the fibres of maidenly pride and reserve, of a bashfulness undefinably peculiar towards this man, who, while much older than herself, and bearing the stamp of an experience quite hidden from her imagination, was taking strongly the aspect of a lover – it was not only this exquisite kind of shame which was at work within her: there was another sort of susceptibility in Esther, which her present circumstances tended to encourage, though she had come to regard it as not at all lofty, but rather as something which condemned her to littleness in comparison with a mind she had learned to venerate. She knew quite well that, to Harold Transome, Felix Holt was one of the common people who could come into question in no other than a public light. She had a native capability for discerning that the sense of ranks and degrees has its repulsions corresponding to the repulsions dependent on difference of race and colour; and she rememb
ered her own impressions too well not to foresee that it would come on Harold Transome as a shock, if he suspected there had been any love-passages between her and this young man, who to him was of course no more than any other intelligent member of the working class. ‘To him,’ said Esther to herself, with a reaction of her newer, better pride, ‘who has not had the sort of intercourse in which Felix Holt’s cultured nature would have asserted its superiority.’ And in her fluctuations on this matter, she found herself mentally protesting that, whatever Harold might think, there was a light in which he was vulgar compared with Felix. Felix had ideas and motives which she did not believe that Harold could understand. More than all, there was this test: she herself had no sense of inferiority and just subjection when she was with Harold Transome; there were even points in him for which she felt a touch, not of angry, but of playful scorn; whereas with Felix she had always a sense of dependence and possible illumination. In those large, grave, candid grey eyes of his, love seemed something that belonged to the high enthusiasm of life, such as might now be for ever shut out from her.

  All the same, her vanity winced at the idea that Harold should discern what, from his point of view, would seem like a degradation of her taste and refinement. She could not help being gratified by all the manifestations from those around her that she was thought thoroughly fitted for a high position – could not help enjoying, with more or less keenness, a rehearsal of that demeanour amongst luxuries and dignities which had often been a part of her daydreams, and the rehearsal included the reception of more and more emphatic attentions from Harold, and of an effusiveness in his manners, which, in proportion as it would have been offensive if it had appeared earlier, became flattering as the effect of a growing acquaintance and daily contact. It comes in so many forms in this life of ours – the knowledge that there is something sweetest and noblest of which we despair, and the sense of something present that solicits us with an immediate and easy indulgence. And there is a pernicious falsity in the pretence that a woman’s love lies above the range of such temptations.