John Halifax, Gentleman

by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

  The spring of 1812 was an era long remembered in our family. Scarlet fever went through the house—safely, but leaving much care behind. When at last they all came round, and we were able to gather our pale little flock to a garden feast, under the big old pear-tree, it was with the trembling thankfulness of those who have gone through great perils, hardly dared to be recognized as such till they were over.

  “Ay, thank God it is over!” said John, as he put his arm round his wife, and looked in her worn face, where still her own smile lingered—her bright, brave smile, that nothing could ever drive away. “And now we must try and make a little holiday for you.”

  “Nonsense! I am as well as possible. Did not Dr. Jessop tell me, this morning, I was looking younger than ever? I—a mother of a family, thirty years old? Pray, Uncle Phineas, do I look my age?”

  I could not say she did not—especially now. But she wore it so gracefully, so carelessly, that I saw—ay, and truly her husband 287saw—a sacred beauty about her jaded cheek, more lovely and lovable than all the bloom of her youth. Happy woman! who was not afraid of growing old.

  “Love”—John usually called her “Love”—putting it at the beginning of a sentence, as if it had been her natural Christian name—which, as in all infant households, had been gradually dropped or merged into the universal title of “Mother.” My name for her was always emphatically “The Mother”—the truest type of motherhood I ever knew.

  “Love,” her husband began again, after a long look in her face—ah, John, thine was altered too, but himself was the last thing he thought of—“say what you like—I know what we’ll do: for the children’s sake. Ah, that’s her weak point;—see, Phineas, she is yielding now. We’ll go for three months to Longfield.”

  Now Longfield was the Utopia of our family, old and young. A very simple family we must have been—for this Longfield was only a small farm-house, about six miles off, where once we had been to tea, and where ever since we had longed to live. For, pretty as our domain had grown, it was still in the middle of a town, and the children, like all naturally-reared children, craved after the freedom of the country—after corn-fields, hay-fields, nuttings, blackberryings— delights hitherto known only at rare intervals, when their father could spare a whole long day, and be at once the sun and the shield of the happy little band.

  “Hearken, children! father says we shall go for three whole months to live at Longfield.”

  The three boys set up a shout of ecstacy.

  “I’ll swim boats down the stream, and catch and ride every one of the horses. Hurrah!” shouted Guy.

  “And I’ll see after the ducks and chickens, and watch all the threshing and winnowing,” said Edwin, the practical and grave.

  288“And I’ll get a ’ittle ’amb to p’ay wid me,” lisped Walter—still “the baby”—or considered such, and petted accordingly.

  “But what does my little daughter say?” said the father, turning—as he always turned, at the lightest touch of those soft, blind fingers, creeping along his coat sleeve. “What will Muriel do at Longfield?”

  “Muriel will sit all day and hear the birds sing.”

  “So she shall, my blessing!” He often called her his “blessing,” which in truth she was. To see her now leaning her cheek against his—the small soft face, almost a miniature of his own, the hair, a paler shade of the same bright colour, curling in the same elastic rings—they looked less like ordinary father and daughter, than like a man and his good angel; the visible embodiment of the best half of his soul. So she was ever to him, this child of his youth—his first-born and his dearest.

  The Longfield plan being once started, father and mother and I began to consult together as to ways and means; what should be given up, and what increased, of our absolute luxuries, in order that the children might this summer—possibly every summer—have the glory of “living in the country.” Of these domestic consultations there was never any dread, for they were always held in public. There were no secrets in our house. Father and mother, though sometimes holding different opinions, had but one thought, one aim—the family good. Thus, even in our lowest estate there had been no bitterness in our poverty; we met it, looked it in the face, often even laughed at it. For it bound us all together, hand in hand; it taught us endurance, self-dependence, and, best of all lessons, self-renunciation. I think, one’s whole after-life is made easier and more blessed by having known what it was to be very poor when one was young.

  Our fortunes were rising now, and any little pleasure did not take near so much contrivance. We found we could manage the Longfield visit—ay, and a horse for John to ride to and fro—without 289any worse sacrifice than that of leaving Jenny—now Mrs. Jem Watkins, but our cook still—in the house at Norton Bury, and doing with one servant instead of two. Also, though this was not publicly known till afterwards, by the mother’s renouncing a long-promised silk dress—the only one since her marriage, in which she had determined to astonish John by choosing the same colour as that identical grey gown he had seen hanging up in the kitchen at Enderley.

  “But one would give up anything,” she said, “that the children might have such a treat, and that father might have rides backwards and forwards through green lanes all summer. Oh, how I wish we could always live in the country!”

  “Do you?” And John looked—much as he had looked at long-tailed grey ponies in his bridegroom days—longing to give her every thing she desired. “Well, perhaps, we may manage it some time.”

  “When our ship comes in—namely, that money which Richard Brithwood will not pay, and John Halifax will not go to law to make him. Nay, father dear, I am not going to quarrel with any one of your crotchets.” She spoke with a fond pride, as she did always, even when arguing against the too Quixotic carrying out of the said crotchets. “Perhaps, as the reward of forbearance, the money will come some day when we least expect it; then John shall have his heart’s desire, and start the cloth-mills at Enderley.”

  John smiled, half-sadly. Every man has a hobby—this was his, and had been for fifteen years. Not merely the making a fortune, as he still firmly believed it could be made, but the position of useful power, the wide range of influence, the infinite opportunities of doing good.

  “No, love; I shall never be ‘patriarch of the valley,’ as Phineas used to call it. The yew-hedge is too thick for me, eh, Phineas?”

  “No!” cried Ursula—we had told her this little incident of our boyhood—“you have got half through it already. Everybody 290in Norton Bury knows and respects you. I am sure, Phineas, you might have heard a pin fall at the meeting last night when he spoke against hanging the Luddites. And such a shout as rose when he ended—oh, how proud I was!”

  “Of the shout, love?”

  “Nonsense!—but of the cause of it. Proud to see my husband defending the poor and the oppressed—proud to see him honoured and looked up to, more and more every year, till—”

  “Till it may come at last to the prophecy in your birthday verse—‘Her husband is known in the gates; he sitteth among the elders of the land.’”

  Mrs. Halifax laughed at me for reminding her of this, but allowed that she would not dislike its being fulfilled.

  “And it will be too. He is already ‘known in the gates’; known far and near. Think how many of our neighbours come to John to settle their differences, instead of going to law! And how many poachers has he not persuaded out of their dishonest—”

  “Illegal,” corrected John.

  “Well, their illegal ways, and made decent, respectable men of them! Then, see how he is consulted, and his opinion followed, by rich folk as well as poor folk, all about the neighbourhood. I am sure John is as popular, and has as much influence, as many a member of parliament.”

  John smiled with an amused twitch about his mouth, but he said nothing. He rarely did say anything about himself—not even in his own household. The glory of his life was its unconsciousness—like our own silent Severn, however broad and grand
its current might be, that course seemed the natural channel into which it flowed.

  “There’s Muriel,” said the father, listening.

  Often thus the child slipped away, and suddenly we heard all over the house the sweet sounds of “Muriel’s voice,” as some one had called the old harpsichord. When almost a baby she 291would feel her way to it, and find out first harmonies, then tunes, with that quickness and delicacy of ear peculiar to the blind.

  “How well she plays! I wish I could buy her one of those new instruments they call ‘pianofortes;’ I was looking into the mechanism of one the other day.”

  “She would like an organ better. You should have seen her face in the Abbey church this morning.”

  “Hark! she has stopped playing. Guy, run and bring your sister here,” said the father, ever yearning after his darling.

  Guy came back with a wonderful story of two gentlemen in the parlour, one of whom had patted his head—“Such a grand gentleman, a great deal grander than father!”

  That was true, as regarded the bright nankeens, the blue coat with gold buttons, and the showiest of cambric kerchiefs swathing him up to the very chin. To this “grand” personage John bowed formally, but his wife flushed up in surprised recognition.

  “It is so long since I had the happiness of meeting Miss March, that I conclude Mrs. Halifax has forgotten me?”

  “No, Lord Luxmore, allow me to introduce my husband.”

  And, I fancied, some of Miss March’s old hauteur returned to the mother’s softened and matronly mien;—pride, but not for herself or in herself, now. For, truly, as the two men stood together—though Lord Luxmore had been handsome in his youth, and was universally said to have as fine manners as the Prince Regent himself—any woman might well have held her head loftily, introducing John Halifax as “my husband.”

  Of the two, the nobleman was least at his ease, for the welcome of both Mr. and Mrs. Halifax, though courteous, was decidedly cold. They did not seem to feel—and, if rumour spoke true, I doubt if any honest, virtuous, middle-class fathers and mothers would have felt—that their house was greatly honoured or sanctified by the presence of the Earl of Luxmore.

  292But the nobleman was, as I have said, wonderfully fine-mannered. He broke the ice at once.

  “Mr. Halifax, I have long wished to know you. Mrs. Halifax, my daughter encouraged me to pay this impromptu visit.”

  Here ensued polite inquiries after Lady Caroline Brithwood; we learned that she was just returned from abroad, and was entertaining, at the Mythe House, her father and brother.

  “Pardon—I was forgetting my son—Lord Ravenel.”

  The youth thus presented merely bowed. He was about eighteen or so, tall and spare, with thin features and large soft eyes. He soon retreated to the garden-door, where he stood, watching the boys play, and shyly attempting to make friends with Muriel.

  “I believe Ravenel has seen you years ago, Mrs. Halifax. His sister made a great pet of him as a child. He has just completed his education—at the College of St. Omer, was it not, William?”

  “The Catholic college of St. Omer,” repeated the boy.

  “Tut—what matters!” said the father, sharply. “Mr. Halifax, do not imagine we are a Catholic family still. I hope the next Earl of Luxmore will be able to take the oaths and his seat, whether or no we get Emancipation. By the by, you uphold the Bill?”

  John assented; expressing his conviction, then unhappily a rare one, that every one’s conscience is free; and that all men of blameless life ought to be protected by, and allowed to serve, the state, whatever be their religious opinions.

  “Mr. Halifax, I entirely agree with you. A wise man esteems all faiths alike worthless.”

  “Excuse me, my lord, that was the very last thing I meant to say. I hold every man’s faith so sacred, that no other man has a right to interfere with it, or to question it. The matter lies solely between himself and his Maker.”

  “Exactly! What facility of expression your husband has, 293Mrs. Halifax! He must be—indeed, I have heard he is—a first-rate public speaker.”

  The wife smiled, wife-like; but John said, hurriedly:

  “I have no pretention or ambition of the kind. I merely now and then try to put plain truths, or what I believe to be such, before the people, in a form they are able to understand.”

  “Ay, that is it. My dear sir, the people have no more brains than the head of my cane (his Royal Highness’s gift, Mrs. Halifax); they must be led or driven, like a flock of sheep. We”—a lordly “we!”—“are their proper shepherds. But, then, we want a middle class—at least, an occasional voice from it, a—”

  “A shepherd’s dog, to give tongue,” said John, dryly. “In short, a public orator. In the House, or out of it?”

  “Both.” And the earl tapped his boot with that royal cane, smiling. “Yes; I see you apprehend me. But, before we commence that somewhat delicate subject, there was another on which I desired my agent, Mr. Brown, to obtain your valuable opinion.”

  “You mean, when, yesterday, he offered me, by your lordship’s express desire, the lease, lately fallen in, of your cloth-mills at Enderley?”

  Now, John had not told us that!—why, his manner too plainly showed.

  “And all will be arranged, I trust? Brown says you have long wished to take the mills; I shall be most happy to have you for a tenant.”

  “My lord, as I told your agent, it is impossible. We will say no more about it.”

  John crossed over to his wife with a cheerful air. She sat looking grave and sad.

  Lord Luxmore had the reputation of being a keen-witted, diplomatic personage; undoubtedly he had, or could assume, that winning charm of manner which had descended in perfection to his daughter. Both qualities it pleased him to exercise 294now. He rose, addressing with kindly frankness the husband and wife.

  “If I may ask—being a most sincere well-wisher of yours, and a sort of connection of Mrs. Halifax’s, too—why is it impossible?”

  “I have no wish to disguise the reason: it is because I have no capital.”

  Lord Luxmore looked surprised. “Surely—excuse me, but I had the honour of being well acquainted with the late Mr. March—surely, your wife’s fortune—”

  Ursula rose, in her old impetuous way—“His wife’s fortune! (John, let me say it!—I will, I must!)—of his wife’s fortune, Lord Luxmore, he has never received one farthing. Richard Brithwood keeps it back; and my husband would work day and night for me and our children rather than go to law.”

  “Oh! on principle, I suppose? I have heard of such opinions,” said the earl, with the slightest perceptible sneer. “And you agree with him?”

  “I do, heartily. I would rather we lived poor all our days than that he should wear his life out, trouble his spirit, perhaps even soil his conscience, by squabbling with a bad man over money matters.”

  It was good to see Ursula as she spoke; good to see the look that husband and his wife interchanged—husband and wife, different in many points, yet so blessedly, so safely ONE! Then John said, in his quiet way,

  “Love, perhaps another subject than our own affairs would be more interesting to Lord Luxmore.”

  “Not at all—not at all!” And the earl was evidently puzzled and annoyed. “Such extraordinary conduct,” he muttered: “so very— ahem!—unwise. If the matter were known—caught up by those newspapers—I must really have a little conversation with Brithwood.”

  The conversation paused, and John changed it entirely by making some remarks on the present minister, Mr. Perceval.

  295“I liked his last speech much. He seems a clear-headed, honest man, for all his dogged opposition to the Bill.”

  “He will never oppose it more.”

  “Nay, I think he will, my lord—to the death.”

  “That may be—and yet—” his lordship smiled. “Mr. Halifax, I have just had news by a carrier pigeon—my birds fly well—most important news for us and our party. Yesterday, in the lobby of th
e House of Commons, Mr. Perceval was shot.”

  We all started. An hour ago we had been reading his speech. Mr. Perceval shot!

  “Oh, John,” cried the mother, her eyes full of tears; “his poor wife—his fatherless children!”

  And for many minutes they stood, hearing the lamentable history, and looking at their little ones at play in the garden; thinking, as many an English father and mother did that day, of the stately house in London, where the widow and orphans bewailed their dead. He might or might not be a great statesman, but he was undoubtedly a good man; many still remember the shock of his untimely death, and how, whether or not they liked him living, all the honest hearts of England mourned for Mr. Perceval.

  Possibly that number did not include the Earl of Luxmore.

  “Requiescat in pace! I shall propose the canonization of poor Bellingham. For now Perceval is dead there will be an immediate election; and on that election depends Catholic Emancipation. Mr. Halifax,” turning quickly round to him, “you would be of great use to us in parliament.”

  “Should I?”

  “Will you—I like plain speaking—will you enter it?”

  Enter parliament! John Halifax in parliament! His wife and I were both astounded by the suddenness of the possibility; which, however, John himself seemed to receive as no novel idea.

  Lord Luxmore continued. “I assure you nothing is more 296easy; I can bring you in at once, for a borough near here—my family borough.”

  “Which you wish to be held by some convenient person till Lord Ravenel comes of age? So Mr. Brown informed me yesterday.”

  Lord Luxmore slightly frowned. Such transactions, as common then in the service of the country as they still are in the service of the Church, were yet generally glossed over, as if a certain discredit attached to them. The young lord seemed to feel it; at sound of his name he turned round to listen, and turned back again, blushing scarlet. Not so the earl, his father.