CHAPTER I—REUBEN’S SEAL
EVEN to-day a man may be a Jacobite if he likes to be a Jacobite just as he may read the Morning Post, and in the day when Reuben Hepplestall was young there was a variety of reasons for being Jacobite, though most of them were romantic and sentimental rather than practical or good sense, and Hepplestall’s reason was rank absurdity because it was absurdity unredeemed by conviction. He was Jacobite because Sir Harry Whitworth was Hanoverian, from hatred of Sir Harry, not from love of the Stuarts; but Hepplestall was young and as a general principle perversity in youth is better than perversity in age, leaving the longer time for correction.
Certainly, Hepplestall’s was a risky game, which may have had attractiveness for him. He was strong, even in perversity, and having set his hand to the plow, did not rest until he found himself accepted as a power in the inner councils of the local Jacobites; but there was something nourishing to his self-importance in this furtive prominence and he savored the hazards of it not only because it marked to himself his difference from the hard drinking sportsmen of Sir Harry’s set, but as a mental exercise. He took a gambler’s risk in a gambling age, backing his vigilance against all comers, feeling that to touch the fringe of intrigue lifted him above a society which exercised its gullet more than its wits. His secret, especially a dangerous secret, flattered lus sense of superiority.
In sober fact young Hepplestall was intellectually superior to his contemporaries and, aware of it, resented the deference they paid to Sir Harry, the man of acres, the Beau, the Corinthian, the frequenter of White’s and Almack’s, leader unchallenged of local society. By his clandestine unorthodoxy, by his perpetual balancing on a tight-rope, he expressed to himself his opposition to Sir Harry; and there was Dorothy Verners, predestined in the eyes of the county for Sir Harry, waiting only for a question which would have the force of a command. Reuben had, in secret, his own idea of the future of Dorothy Verners. He aspired where he knew himself fitted to aspire, but the county would have dissolved in contemptuous guffaws at the thought of Reuben Hepplestall in the character of rival to Sir Harry. He brooded darkly in rebellion, outwardly accepting Whitworth’s social despotism, inwardly a choked furnace of ambition.
It was little Bantison who involuntarily played the god in the machine and died that the Hepplestalls might be cotton lords in Lancashire. Bantison was not prepossessing; a short man, gross of body with a face like raw beef and hands offensively white, dressed in his clerical coat on which spatters of snuff and stains of wine smirked like a blasphemy, endowed with fine capacity for other people’s Burgundy and distinguished by an eye that earned him, by reason rather of alertness than deformity, the nickname of “Swivel-Eyed Jack.” Some vicars, like Goldsmith’s, were content with forty pounds a year; the Reverend Mr. Bantison had that limited stipend with unlimited desires, and contrived by the use of his alert eye and the practice of discreet blackmail to lead a bachelor life of reasonable amplitude. Not to be nice about the fellow, he was as unprincipled a wolf as ever masqueraded in a sheepskin; but he is not to infest this narrative for long.
They were at table at Sir Harry Whitworth’s, who dined at six o’clock, latish, as became a man of fashion. There was acquiescence in that foible, but no imitation of a habit which was held to be an arbitrary encroachment on the right to drink. The ladies had, in strict moderation, to be treated civilly—at any rate, the ladies had to eat—so that Sir Harry’s guests rarely drew up to the mahogany for the serious entertainment of the evening before eight o’clock, and a man of a position less assured than his would have been suspected of meanness and too great care for the contents of his cellar. But Whitworth was Whitworth and they shrugged their shoulders. After all, with good will and good liquor one can achieve geniality in an evening not beginning (for serious purposes) until eight.
The ladies dismissed to tea and to whatever insipid joys the drawing-room might hold, the men addressed themselves with brisk resolution to the task of doing noble justice to the best cellar in the county. They were there, candidly and purposefully, to drink, and it was never too late to mend sobriety, but under Sir Harry’s roof the process had formality and the unbuttoned rusticity of native debauchery must be disciplined to the restraint of ordered toasts. A pedantic host, this young baronet, but his wines had quality, and they submitted with what patience they could summon to his idiosyncrasy. There were no laggards when Sir Harry bid them to his board.
Ignoring the parson—which, mostly, was what parsons were for and certainly made no breach of etiquette—Sir Harry himself gave the toast of “The King” with a faintly challenging air habitual to him but démodé. Lancashire sentiment had veered since the forty-five and there was now no need, especially in Whitworth’s company, to emphasize a loyalty they all shared. It was not a fervent loyalty and no one was expected to be exuberant about the Hanoverians, but bygones were bygones, and one took the court one found as one took the climate.
But did one? Did every one? Did, in especial, Reuben Hepplestall, whom Mr. Bantison watched so narrowly as he drank to the King? To Bantison the enigmatic was a provocation and a hope and as a specialist in enigmas he had his private notion that the whole of Hepplestall was not apparent on the surface: he nursed suspicion, precious because marketable if confirmed, that here was one who conserved the older loyalty, and he watched as he had watched before. Finger-glasses were on the table, but so crude a confession of faith as to pass his wine over the water was neither expected nor forthcoming and Hepplest all’s gesture, except that it repeated one which Bantison had noted mentally when “The King” had been toasted on other occasions, was so nearly imperceptible as to seem unlikely to have significance. But it was a repetition, and did the repetition imply a ritual? It was improbable. The risk was high, the gain non-existent, the defiance in such company too blunt, the whole idea of expressing, however subtly, a rebellion in a house of loyalists was unreasonable. Still, as Reuben raised his glass, it hovered for an instant in the air, it made, ever so slightly, a pause and (was it?) an obeisance which seemed directed to his, fob; and when Mr. Bantison sat down he frowned meditatively at the pools of mellow light reflected from the candles on the table and his face puckered into evil wrinkles till he looked like an obscene animal snarling to its spring; but that is only to say Mr. Bantison was thinking unusually hard.
He was thinking of young men, their follies, their unreasoning audacities and how these things happened by the grace of Providence to benefit their wise elders. His face at its best, when he was doing something agreeable like savoring Burgundy or (if so innocent an action is to be conceived of him) when he smelled a violet, was a mask of malice; it was horrible now as he weighed his chances of dealing to his profit with Reuben. Whether he was right or wrong in his particular suspicion, there was plainly something of the exceptional about this dark young man. Hepplestall, considered as prey, struck him as a tough, tooth-breaking victim, and Mr. Bantison had not the least desire to break his teeth. He decided not to hazard their soundness—their whiteness was remarkable—upon what was still conjecture. He wanted many things which money would buy, but an orange already in his blackmailing grip was yielding good juice and every circumstance conspired with the excellence of Sir Harry’s Burgundy to persuade him to delay. His needs were not urgent. And yet, and yet—