‘I also could speak as ye do; if your soul were in my soul’s stead, I could heap up words against you, and shake mine head at you.’ — Book of Job.
IN the interval since Esther parted with Felix Holt on the day of the riot, she had gone through so much emotion, and had already had so strong a shock of surprise, that she was prepared to receive any new incident of an unwonted kind with comparative equanimity.
When Mr Lyon had got home again from his preaching excursion, Felix was already on his way to Loamford Jail. The little minister was terribly shaken by the news. He saw no clear explanation of Felix Holt’s conduct; for the statements Esther had heard were so conflicting that she had not been able to gather distinctly what had come out in the examination by the magistrates. But Mr Lyon felt confident that Felix was innocent of any wish to abet a riot or the infliction of injuries; what he chiefly feared was that in the fatal encounter with Tucker he had been moved by a rash temper, not sufficiently guarded against by a prayerful and humble spirit.
‘My poor young friend is being taught with mysterious severity the evil of a too confident self-reliance,’ he said to Esther, as they sat opposite to each other, listening and speaking sadly.
‘You will go and see him, father?’
‘Verily will I. But I must straightway go and see that poor afflicted woman, whose soul is doubtless whirled about in this trouble like a shapeless and unstable thing driven by divided winds.’ Mr Lyon rose and took his hat hastily, ready to walk out, with his greatcoat flying open and exposing his small person to the keen air.
‘Stay, father, pray, till you have had some food,’ said Esther, putting her hand on his arm. ‘You look quite weary and shattered.’
‘Child, I cannot stay. I can neither eat bread nor drink water till I have learned more about this young man’s deeds, what can be proved and what cannot be proved against him. I fear he has none to stand by him in this town, for even by the friends of our church I have been oft times rebuked because he seemed dear to me. But, Esther, my beloved child —’
Here Mr Lyon grasped her arm, and seemed in the need of speech to forget his previous haste. ‘I bear in mind this: the Lord knoweth them that are His; but we — we are left to judge by uncertain signs, that so we may learn to exercise hope and faith towards one another; and in this uncertainty I cling with awful hope to those whom the world loves not because their conscience, albeit mistakenly, is at war with the habits of the world. Our great faith, my Esther, is the faith of martyrs: I will not lightly turn away from any man who endures harshness because he will not lie; nay, though I would not wantonly grasp at ease of mind through an arbitrary choice of doctrine, I cannot but believe that the merits of the divine sacrifice are wider than our utmost charity. I once believed otherwise — but not now, not now.’
The minister paused, and seemed to be abstractedly gazing at some memory: he was always liable to be snatched away by thoughts from the pursuit of a purpose which had seemed pressing. Esther seized the opportunity and prevailed on him to fortify himself with some of Lyddy’s porridge before he went out on his tiring task of seeking definite trustworthy knowledge from the lips of various witnesses, beginning with that feminine darkener of counsel, poor Mrs Holt.
She, regarding all her trouble about Felix in the light of a fulfilment of her own prophecies, treated the sad history with a preference for edification above accuracy, and for mystery above relevance, worthy of a commentator on the Apocalypse. She insisted chiefly, not on the important facts that Felix had sat at his work till after eleven, like a deaf man, had rushed out in surprise and alarm, had come back to report with satisfaction that things were quiet, and had asked her to set by his dinner for him — facts which would tell as evidence that Felix was disconnected with any project of disturbances, and was averse to them. These things came out incidentally in her long plaint to the minister — but what Mrs Holt felt it essential to state was, that long before Michaelmas was turned, sitting in her chair, she had said to Felix that there would be a judgment on him for being so certain sure about the pills and the elixir.
‘And now, Mr Lyon,’ said the poor woman, who had dressed herself in a gown previously cast off, a front all out of curl, and a cap with no starch in it, while she held little coughing Job on her knee, — ‘and now you see — my words have come true sooner than I thought they would. Felix may contradict me if he will; but there he is in prison, and here am I, with nothing in the world to bless myself with but half-a-crown a-week as I’ve saved by my own scraping and this house I’ve got to pay rent for. It’s not me has done wrong. Mr Lyon; there’s nobody can say it of me — not the orphin child on my knee is more innicent o’ riot and murder and anything else as is bad. But when you’ve got a son so masterful and stopping medicines as providence has sent, and his betters have been taking up and down the country since before he was a baby, it’s o’ no use being good here below. But he was a baby, Mr Lyon, and I gave him the breast,’ — here poor Mrs Holt’s motherly love overcame her expository eagerness, and she fell more and more to crying as she spoke — ‘And to think there’s folks saying now as he’ll be transported, and his hair shaved off, and the treadmill, and everything. O dear!’
As Mrs Holt broke off into sobbing, little Job also, who had got a confused yet profound sense of sorrow, and of Felix being hurt and gone away, set up a little wail of wondering misery.
‘Nay, Mistress Holt,’ said the minister soothingly, ‘enlarge not your grief by more than warrantable grounds. I have good hope that my young friend your son will be delivered from any severe consequences beyond the death of the man Tucker, which I fear will ever be a sore burthen on his memory. I feel confident that a jury of his countrymen will discern between misfortune or it may be misjudgment, and an evil will, and that he will be acquitted of any grave offence.’
‘He never stole anything in his life, Mr Lyon,’ said Mrs Holt, reviving. ‘Nobody can throw it in my face as my son ran away with money like the young man at the bank — though he looked most respectable, and far different on a Sunday to what Felix ever did. And I know it’s very hard fighting with constables; but they say Tucker’s wife’ll be a deal better off than she was before, for the great folks’ll pension her, and she’ll be put on all the charities, and her children at the Free School, and everything. Your trouble’s easy borne when everybody gives it a lift for you; and if judge and jury wants to do right by Felix, they’ll think of his poor mother, with the bread took out of her mouth, all but half-a-crown a-week and furniture — which, to be sure, is most excellent, and of my own buying — and got to keep this orphin child as Felix himself brought on me. And I might send him back to his old grandfather on parish pay, but I’m not that woman, Mr Lyon; I’ve a tender heart. And here’s his little feet and toes, like marbil; do but look’ — here Mrs Holt drew off Job’s sock and shoe, and showed a well-washed little foot — ‘and you’ll perhaps say I might take a lodger; but it’s easy talking; it isn’t everybody at a loose-end wants a parlour and a bedroom; and if anything bad happens to Felix, I may as well go and sit in the parish pound, and nobody to buy me out; for it’s beyond everything how the church members find fault with my son. But I think they might leave his mother to find fault; for queer and masterful he might be, and flying in the face of the very Scripture about the physic, but he was most clever beyond anything — that I will say — and was his own father’s lawful child, and me his mother, that was Mary Wall thirty years before ever I married his father.’ Here Mrs Holt’s feelings again became too much for her, but she struggled on to say, sobbingly, ‘And if they’re to transport him, I should like to go to the prison and take the orphin child; for he was most fond of having him on his lap, and said he’d never marry; and there was One above overheard him, for he’s been took at his word.’
Mr Lyon listened with low groans, and then tried to comfort her by saying that he would himself go to Loamford as soon as possible, and would give his soul no rest till he had done all he could do for Felix.
On one point Mrs Holt’s plaint tallied with his own forebodings, and he found them verified: the state of feeling in Treby among the Liberal dissenting flock was unfavourable to Felix. None who had observed his conduct from the windows saw anything tending to excuse him, and his own account of his motives, given on his examination, was spoken of with head-shaking; if it had not been for his habit of always thinking himself wiser than other people, he would never have entertained such a wild scheme. He had set himself up for something extraordinary, and had spoken ill of respectable tradespeople. He had put a stop to the making of saleable drugs, contrary to the nature of buying and selling, and to a due reliance on what providence might effect in the human inside through the instrumentality of remedies unsuitable to the stomach, looked at in a merely secular light; and the result was what might have been expected. He had brought his mother to poverty, and himself into trouble. And what for? He had done no good to ‘the cause’; if he had fought about churchrates, or had been worsted in some struggle in which he was distinctly the champion of Dissent and Liberalism, his case would have been one for gold, silver, and copper subscriptions, in order to procure the best defence; sermons might have been preached on him, and his name might have floated on flags from Newcastle to Dorchester. But there seemed to be no edification in what had befallen Felix. The riot at Treby, ‘turn it which way you would,’ as Mr Muscat observed, was no great credit to Liberalism; and what Mr Lyon had to testify as to Felix Holt’s conduct in the matter of the Sproxton men, only made it clear that the defence of Felix was the accusation of his party. The whole affair, Mr Nuttwood said, was dark and inscrutable, and seemed not to be one in which the interference of God’s servants would tend to give the glory where the glory was due. That a candidate for whom the richer church members had all voted should have his name associated with the encouragement of drunkenness, riot, and plunder, was an occasion for the enemy to blaspheme; and it was not clear how the enemy’s mouth would be stopped by exertions in favour of a rash young man, whose interference had made things worse instead of better. Mr Lyon was warned lest his human partialities should blind him to the interests of truth; it was God’s cause that was endangered in this matter.
The little minister’s soul was bruised; he himself was keenly alive to the complication of public and private regards in this affair, and suffered a good dea............