Ralph the Heir Part 19

"He was always with you."

"Well;--yes; that is, I could be always with him,--almost always.

He was so fond of society that he would never be alone. We had a great rambling house, always full of people. If he could see people pleasant and laughing, that was all that he wanted. It is hard to say what is best."

"Papa is as good to us as ever he can be."

"So was my papa good to me,--in his way; but, oh dear, the people that used to come there! Poor papa! He used to say that hospitality was his chief duty. I sometimes used to think that the world would be much pleasanter and better if there was no such thing as hospitality;--if people always eat and drank alone, and lived as uncle does, in his chambers. There would not be so much money wasted, at any rate."

"Papa never wastes any money," said Patience,--"though there never was a more generous man."

Ralph Newton,--Ralph of the Priory,--came to dinner, and Miss Spooner was asked to meet him. It might have been supposed that a party so composed would not have been very bright, but the party at the villa went off very satisfactorily. Ralph made himself popular with everybody. He became very popular with Sir Thomas by the frank and easy way in which he spoke of the family difficulties at Newton. "I wish my namesake knew my father," he said, when he was alone with the lawyer after dinner. He never spoke of either of these Newtons as his cousins, though to Gregory, whom he knew well and loved dearly, he would declare that from him he felt ent.i.tled to exact all the dues of cousinship.

"It would be desirable," said Sir Thomas.

"I never give it up. You know my father, I dare say. He thought his brother interfered with him, and I suppose he did. But a more affectionate or generous man never lived. He is quite as fond of Gregory as he is of me, and would do anything on earth that Gregory told him. He is rebuilding the chancel of the church just because Gregory wishes it. Some day I hope they may be reconciled."

"It is hard to get over money difficulties," said Sir Thomas.

"I don't see why there should be money difficulties," said Ralph. "As far as I am concerned there need be none."

"Ralph Newton has made money difficulties," said Sir Thomas. "If he had been careful with his own fortune there would have been no question as to the property between him and your father."

"I can understand that;--and I can understand also my father's anxiety, though I do not share it. It would be better that my namesake should have the estate. I can see into these matters quite well enough to know that were it to be mine there would occur exactly that which my father wishes to avoid. I should be the owner of Newton Priory, and people would call me Mr. Newton. But I shouldn't be Newton of Newton. It had better go to Ralph. I should live elsewhere, and people would not notice me then."

Sir Thomas, as he looked up at the young man, leaning back in his arm-chair and holding his gla.s.s half full of wine in his hand, could not but tell himself that the greater was the pity. This off-shoot of the Newton stock, who declared of himself that he never could be Newton of Newton, was a fine, manly fellow to look at,--not handsome as was Ralph the heir, not marked by that singular mixture of gentleness, intelligence, and sweetness which was written, not only on the countenance, but in the demeanour and very step of Gregory; but he was a bigger man than either of them, with a broad chest, and a square brow, and was not without that bright gleam of the Newton blue eye, which characterised all the family. And there was so much of the man in him;--whereas, in manhood, Ralph the heir had certainly been deficient. "Ralph must lie on the bed that he has made," said Sir Thomas. "And you, of course, will accept the good things that come in your way. As far as I can see at present it will be best for Ralph that your father should redeem from him a portion, at least, of the property. The girls are waiting for us to go out, and perhaps you will like a cigar on the lawn."

It was clear to every one there to see that this other Newton greatly admired the West Indian cousin. And Mary, with this newcomer, seemed to talk on easier terms than she had ever done before since she had been at Fulham. She smiled, and listened, and was gracious, and made those pleasant little half-affected sallies which girls do make to men when they know that they are admired, and are satisfied that it should be so. All the story had been told to her, and it might be that the poor orphan felt that she was better fitted to a.s.sociate with the almost nameless one than with the true heir of the family.

Mr. Newton, when he got up to leave them, asked permission to come again, and left them all with a pleasant air of intimacy. Two boats had pa.s.sed them, racing on the river, almost close to the edge of their lawn, and Newton had offered to bet with Mary as to which would first reach the bridge. "I wish you had taken my wager, Miss Bonner,"

he said, "because then I should have been bound to come back at once to pay you." "That's all very well, Mr. Newton," said Mary, "but I have heard of gentlemen who are never seen again when they lose."

"Mr. Newton is unlike that, I'm sure," said Clary; "but I hope he'll come again at any rate." Newton promised that he would, and was fully determined to keep his promise when he made it.

"Wouldn't it be delightful if they were to fall in love with each other and make a match of it?" said Clary to her sister.

"I don't like to plot and plan such things," said Patience.

"I don't like to scheme, but I don't see any harm in planning. He is ever so nice,--isn't he?"

"I thought him very pleasant."

"Such an open-spoken, manly, free sort of fellow. And he'll be very well off, you know."

"I don't know;--but I dare say he will," said Patience.

"Oh yes, you do. Poor Ralph, our Ralph, is a spendthrift, and I shouldn't wonder if this one were to have the property after all.

And then his father is very rich. I know that because Gregory told me. Dear me! wouldn't it be odd if we were all three to become Mrs.

Newtons?"

"Clary, what did I tell you?"

"Well; I won't. But it would be odd,--and so nice, at least I think so. Well;--I dare say I ought not to say it. But then I can't help thinking it,--and surely I may tell you what I think."

"I would think it as little as I could, dear."

"Ah, that's very well. A girl can be a hypocrite if she pleases, and perhaps she ought. Of course I shall be a hypocrite to all the world except you. I tell you what it is, Patty;--you make me tell you everything, and say that of course you and I are to tell everything,--and then you scold me. Don't you want me to tell you everything?"

"Indeed I do;--and I won't scold you. Dear Clary, do I scold you?

Wouldn't I give one of my eyes to make you happy?"

"That's quite a different thing," said Clarissa.

Three days afterwards Mr. Ralph Newton;--it is hoped that the reader may understand the attempts which are made to designate the two young men;--Mr. Ralph Newton appeared again at Popham Villa. He came in almost with the gait of an old friend, and brought some fern leaves, which he had already procured from Hampshire, in compliance with a promise which he had made to Patience Underwood. "That's what we call the hart's tongue," said he, "though I fancy they give them all different names in different places."

"It's the same plant as ours, Mr. Newton,--only yours is larger."

"It's the ugliest of all the ferns," said Clary.

"Even that's a compliment," said Newton. "It's no use transplanting them in this weather, but I'll send you a basket in October. You should come down to Newton and see our ferns. We think we're very pretty, but because we're so near, n.o.body comes to see us." Then he fell a-talking with Mary Bonner, and stayed at the villa nearly all the afternoon. For a moment or two he was alone with Clarissa, and at once expressed his admiration. "I don't think I ever saw such perfect beauty as your cousin's," he said.

"She is handsome."

"And then she is so fair, whereas everybody expects to see dark eyes and black hair come from the West Indies."

"But Mary wasn't born there."

"That doesn't matter. The mind doesn't travel back as far as that.

A negro should be black, and an American thin, and a French woman should have her hair dragged up by the roots, and a German should be broad-faced, and a Scotchman red-haired,--and a West Indian beauty should be dark and languishing."

"I'll tell her you say so, and perhaps she'll have herself altered."

"Whatever you do, don't let her be altered," said Mr. Newton. "She can't be changed for the better."

"I am quite sure he is over head and ears in love," said Clarissa to Patience that evening.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE CHESHIRE CHEESE.

"Labour is the salt of the earth, and Capital is the sworn foe to Labour." Hear, hear, hear, with the clattering of many gla.s.ses, and the smashing of certain pipes! Then the orator went on. "That Labour should be the salt of the earth has been the purpose of a beneficent Creator;--that Capital should be the foe to Labour has been man's handywork. The one is an eternal decree, which nothing can change,--which neither the good nor the evil done by man can affect.

The other is an evil ordinance, the fruit of man's ignorance and within the scope of man's intellect to annul." Mr. Ontario Moggs was the orator, and he was at this moment addressing a crowd of sympathising friends in the large front parlour of the Cheshire Cheese. Of all those who were listening to Ontario Moggs there was not probably one who had reached a higher grade in commerce than that of an artizan working for weekly wages;--but Mr. Moggs was especially endeared to them because he was not an artizan working for weekly wages, but himself a capitalist. His father was a master bootmaker on a great scale;--for none stood much higher in the West-end trade than b.o.o.by and Moggs; and it was known that Ontario was the only child and heir, and as it were sole owner of the shoulders on which must some day devolve the mantle of b.o.o.by and Moggs. b.o.o.by had long been gathered to his fathers, and old Moggs was the stern opponent of strikes. What he had lost by absolutely refusing to yield a point during the last strike among the shoemakers of London no one could tell. He had professed aloud that he would sooner be ruined, sooner give up his country residence at Shepherd's Bush, sooner pull down the honoured names of b.o.o.by and Moggs from over the shop-window in Old Bond Street, than allow himself to be driven half an inch out of his course by men who were attempting to dictate to him what he should do with his own. In these days of strikes Moggs would look even upon his own workmen with the eyes of a Coriola.n.u.s glaring upon the disaffected populace of Rome. Mr. Moggs senior would stand at his shop-door, with his hand within his waistcoat, watching the men out on strike who were picketing the streets round his shop, and would feel himself every inch a patrician, ready to die for his order. Such was Moggs senior. And Moggs junior, who was a child of Capital, but whose heirship depended entirely on his father's will, harangued his father's workmen and other workmen at the Cheshire Cheese, telling them that Labour was the salt of the earth, and that Capital was the foe to Labour! Of course they loved him. The demagogue who is of all demagogues the most popular, is the demagogue who is a demagogue in opposition to his apparent nature. The radical Earl, the free-thinking parson, the squire who won't preserve, the tenant who defies his landlord, the capitalist with a theory for dividing profits, the Moggs who loves a strike,--these are the men whom the working men delight to follow. Ontario Moggs, who was at any rate honest in his philanthropy, and who did in truth believe that it was better that twenty real bootmakers should eat beef daily than that one so-called bootmaker should live in a country residence,--who believed this and acted on his belief, though he was himself not of the twenty, but rather the one so-called bootmaker who would suffer by the propagation of such a creed,--was beloved and almost worshipped by the denizens of the Cheshire Cheese. How far the real philanthropy of the man may have been marred by an uneasy and fatuous ambition; how far he was carried away by a feeling that it was better to make speeches at the Cheshire Cheese than to apply for payment of money due to his father, it would be very hard for us to decide. That there was an alloy even in Ontario Moggs is probable;--but of this alloy his hearers knew nothing. To them he was a perfect specimen of that combination, which is so grateful to them, of the rich man's position with the poor man's sympathies. Therefore they clattered their gla.s.ses, and broke their pipes, and swore that the words he uttered were the kind of stuff they wanted.

"The battle has been fought since man first crawled upon the earth,"

continued Moggs, stretching himself to his full height and pointing to the farthest confines of the inhabited globe;--"since man first crawled upon the earth." There was a sound in that word "crawl"

typical of the abject humility to which working shoemakers were subjected by their employers, which specially aroused the feelings of the meeting. "And whence comes the battle?" The orator paused, and the gla.s.ses were jammed upon the table. "Yes,--whence comes the battle, in fighting which hecatombs of honest labourers have been crushed till the sides of the mountains are white with their bones, and the rivers run foul with their blood? From the desire of one man to eat the bread of two?" "That's it," said a lean, wizened, pale-faced little man in a corner, whose trembling hand was resting on a beaker of gin and water. "Yes, and to wear two men's coats and trousers, and to take two men's bedses and the wery witals out of two men's bodies. D---- them!" Ontario, who understood something of his trade as an orator, stood with his hand still stretched out, waiting till this ebullition should be over. "No, my friend," said he, "we will not d.a.m.n them. I for one will d.a.m.n no man. I will simply rebel.

Of all the sacraments given to us, the sacrament of rebellion is the most holy." Hereupon the landlord of the Cheshire Cheese must have feared for his tables, so great was the applause and so tremendous the thumping;--but he knew his business, no doubt, and omitted to interfere. "Of Rebellion, my friends," continued Ontario, with his right hand now gracefully laid across his breast, "there are two kinds,--or perhaps we may say three. There is the rebellion of arms, which can avail us nothing here." "Perhaps it might tho'," said the little wizened man in a corner, whose gin and water apparently did not comfort him. To this interruption Ontario paid no attention. "And there is the dignified and slow rebellion of moral resistance;--too slow I fear for us." This point was lost upon the audience, and though the speaker paused, no loud cheer was given. "It's as true as true," said one man; but he was a vain fellow, simply desirous of appearing wiser than his comrades. "And then there is the rebellion of the Strike;" now the clamour of men's voices, and the kicking of men's feet, and the thumping with men's fists became more frantic than ever;"--the legitimate rebellion of Labour against its tyrant.