Heathcote naturally saw in his nearest neighbour, a free selector, Giles Medlicot, a man fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils, and of affections dark as Erebus.[31] Soon there comes a great and dangerous drought. The sheep farmers are on the watch day and night against one of those prairie fires that would, in a few minutes, destroy all their flocks’ food. Heathcote, ready to think all evil of the detested interloper, without any reason suspects the free selector, Medlicot, of a design to burn his farm and stock. Of course he is wrong; and no flames, by whomsoever kindled, burst out on his property, at least for the present. Eventually, however, there comes on him the fiery foe, more dreaded by the pastoral squatter than pestilence or famine. Then the gratuitously accused Medlicot proves Heathcote’s true friend; and by his own courage and skill keeps the outbreak within narrower limits than Heathcote had ever hoped. A large portion of the farm buildings and plant is thus saved. The story ends with the reconciliation of the two men so long and irrationally kept apart by mutual mistrust. Medlicot’s marriage to Heathcote’s sister-in-law is the seal and fruit of a new friendship.
The plot is too slight and the narrative too short to afford room for much character creation. To those who follow, as is being done in these pages, Trollope’s industrial course, the book has an interest quite independent of its actual contents. It was written by Trollope in his sixtieth year. Of the other colonial novelists already mentioned, Charles Reade had not long turned forty when he published It’s Never Too Late To Mend, and Henry Kingsley was under thirty at the time of writing Geoffrey Hamlyn. This is the book whose glowing wealth of local colour, scenic word-painting, and keen appreciation of Antipodean character won for it the praise of an Australian epic. Kingsley’s and Reade’s romances of life on the other side of the world were followed in 1866 by Hugh Nisbet’s Australian stories. These three writers present a spirited and complete panorama of colonial existence, character, and manner. All wrote in the very prime of their powers, but none enlivened his subjects with a stronger glow of fancy or handled them with more sureness and strength than, at the age of three-score, was shown by Trollope in describing the fight with the flames in his Harry Heathcote of Gangoil. This novel, like its colonial successor five years later, John Caldigate, shows, better than could be done by pages of biographical detail, that, after more than half a century of exacting and incessant work, its author’s power of accurately observing and mastering in their full significance new facts or ideas remained practically unimpaired.
The home and the life to which Trollope returned in England during December, 1872, were not the same as he had left behind him when embarking a year and a half earlier on the Great Britain for his colonial voyage. The pleasant house at Waltham Cross, with its roomy and always well-filled stables, its many hospitalities and its comparative nearness to the meets of the Essex Hounds, was exchanged for the abode in Montagu Square. Here Trollope passed the later portion of his London life. Here too, on settling himself, he began to live with the personages of the Australian goldfields story that was to appear in 1879. Long before then, however, he had become sufficiently intimate with other creations of his fancy to put them into print. An old friend, Lizzie, (Lady Eustace), received his first attention; in 1873 came The Eustace Diamonds. This novel, like The Belton Estate, had first been written for The Fortnightly Review. Its leading figure casually reappears in later works, especially in The Prime Minister, where Ferdinand Lopez shows at once his scoundrelism and ignorance of the world in making certain absurd proposals to an attractive, vivacious, but particularly wide-awake lady. What Lizzie Eustace is in The Prime Minister, she had shown herself before in The Eustace Diamonds.
This rich, personable, and clever heroine labours under one weakness: she can never speak the truth. As Lizzie Greystock, she made a brilliant marriage with an elderly and opulent baronet. She had not passed her first youth when she was left a widow more than comfortably provided for. Amongst her husband’s personal estate is a magnificent diamond necklace worth £20,000, an heirloom which, at his express wish, the lady used to wear. To this precious ornament the dead baronet’s nearest relations disputed her claim, on the ground that as a family possession it was not his to give. “But,” replied her ladyship, “he gave it to me for my very own, telling me that my appearance with it would be the best of all tributes to his memory.” Lady Eustace no more expected this account of the matter to be believed than she believed it herself. To one thing, however, she had made up her mind: no one should take the costly trinket out of her hands. Consequently wherever she goes it accompanies her.
During one journey she believes she has lost it and gives the alarm. Soon, however, she recovers her treasure, but does not impart the fact to the police, whom she has caused to raise a hue and cry. One day the necklace is really stolen, and the constables, having obtained a clue, succeed in placing themselves on its track. Restoration is followed by exposure; Lizzie Eustace’s marriage connections persevere with their purpose of regaining for themselves the late baronet’s alleged gift to his wife. Lady Eustace’s besetting weaknesses do not prevent her good looks and captivating manners from attracting suitors for her hand. Amongst these are Frank Greystock, one of Trollope’s most conventional and least interesting specimens of gilded youth; Lord Fawn, a titled booby, afterwards promoted to a place among the lay figures in the parliamentary sketches; and another sprig of nobility, Lord George de Bruce Carruthers, of doubtful reputation and of a bold, bad, buccaneer appearance. Each of these, however, when it comes to the point, fights off; Lizzie Eustace, to her chagrin, is left without one of the trousered sex in tow. At this extremity, there appears on the scene an ecclesiastical candidate for what she is pleased to call her heart. This white-chokered adventurer is the Rev. Joseph Emilius, partly Jew, partly Pole, and wholly scamp, being, in fact, the popular preacher who in Phineas Redux commits the murder of Mr. Bonteen, on suspicion of which Phineas is arrested. But by that time Emilius, having served his turn, has ceased to be Lady Eustace’s second husband in anything but name.
Unlike Gladstone, Disraeli did not consume much contemporary fiction, parrying any questions on the subject with, “when I want to read a novel, I write one.” Nor, except to Matthew Arnold, did he often talk to authors about their works. But soon after the appearance of The Eustace Diamonds, meeting Trollope at Lord Stanhope’s dinner-table, the great man said to our novelist, “I have long known, Mr. Trollope, your churchmen and churchwomen; may I congratulate you on the same happy lightness of touch in the portrait of your new adventuress?” By 1879, some five years after Harry Heathcote of Gangoil, there had been completed the process of incubation, resulting in the second of the two colonial stories, John Caldigate.
That novel, chiefly written during the voyage to South Africa, presently to be mentioned, had for its scene the Australian gold-diggings. We have long since seen how, during his Harrow days, Anthony Trollope, as a day boy, lived with his father at Julians. Of that there is some reminiscence in the intercourse under the old family roof between the actual owner of the Cambridgeshire estate called Folking and his heir. The two have hot words; the quarrel ends in John’s selling the right of entail to his father for a lump sum in hard cash. With this he pays his debts. Together with an old college friend, Dick Shand, he sets off for the Australian goldfields.
The girl he loves has been left behind him, but on his way out he is ensnared by Mrs. Smith, a mysterious lady with a past, fascinating by her manner rather than her beauty, and now provided by her relatives with a passage out that she may not get into mischief nearer home. Some time after their arrival at the diggings, Dick Shand, whose weakness has always been drink, breaks out and disappears, leaving no trace behind. Caldigate perseveres, finds first one nugget, then another. At this rate he by and by comes back a rich man. The first thing done by the masterful and newly-fledged young Crœsus is to seek and obtain reconciliation with his equally masterful father. Next, having borne down her mother’s fierce opposition, he marries his boyhood’s flame, Hester Bolton, the daughter of his father’s banker.
The young couple’s wedded happiness is interrupted by the appearance of Mrs. Smith, together with John Caldigate’s old goldfield pals, Tom Crinkett and Mick Maggott. These have bought Caldigate’s claim for a large sum, only to find the gold suddenly give out. Hence their demand for half the purchase-money’s (£20,000) return, under threat of a charge of bigamy for having married Hester while an earlier wife, Mrs. Smith, was yet alive. Thoroughly scared, Caldigate places his affairs in a solicitor’s hands, but commits the fatal mistake of paying as hush-money the £20,000 demanded by the conspirators. This, of course, tells heavily against him at the trial, and he has to face other evidence, at least as damning. The charge of bigamy, on which the trial takes place, is supported by an envelope addressed in John Caldigate’s writing to Mrs. John Caldigate. As to this, Caldigate admits having once written the words in jest, but denies having sent the envelope, which, it must be added, bears the Post Office stamp. In the face of such evidence the jury could do nothing but convict. After the verdict, Hester finds herself a wife without a husband; her refusal to return home is followed by her capture, and forcible detention beneath the parental roof. But now there begins a sequence of events, all combining to establish John Caldigate’s innocence and to promise liberation from prison.
In manipulating the official details that are to make John Caldigate a free man, Trollope shows the same painstaking ingenuity as he had done during his term of Irish duty in bringing to light the frauds of the Connemara postmaster. An amusingly acute Post Office clerk proves the stamp on the envelope to have been manufactured after the date recorded in the stamp. It was, therefore, a clear case of fake. Next, Dick Shand surprises everyone by coming home to depose on oath that the alleged marriage could not by any possibility have taken place at the time alleged. Finally, the conspirators quarrel over their respective shares in the £20,000, whose payment so disastrously incriminated Caldigate. One of the gang turns Queen’s evidence; doing so, he secures the release of the prisoner, who returns to his faithful wife.