“Mr De Wit and I were riding abreast, and without any escort, having left them far behind, when, seeing rather a large cortege filling up the road as we turned an angle, we drew to one side of the road in single file. No sooner did the leading officer observe the movement than he instantly began to swagger, and motioned all the train to spread themselves over the whole road; so that all we gained by our consideration and courtesy was to run the risk of being pushed into the ditch by an insolent subordinate.”
Runners always precede these trains, calling upon the people to prostrate themselves; and the nobles are so accustomed to this act of homage that a European refusing to perform it incurs a great risk. Our author enters into great detail in the account he gives us of the habits and mode of life of the common people, for they alone come under the observation of the stranger; and we may regard the work before us as the most exhaustive description of the country and the people which we could expect from the pen of a foreigner. It is, moreover, admirably illustrated, and the reader cannot fail to rise from its perusal more thoroughly enlightened in all that concerns the singular people of whom it treats, than he could hope to be by all the previous works which have appeared on the same subject from the days of the Jesuit fathers. We had marked many passages illustrative of the everyday life of the Japanese, and some graphic descriptions of those scenes which are most characteristic and remarkable; but we have dwelt so long on the political considerations which have been suggested to us by the remarks of the author, that we can only commend his social sketches to the notice of the reader. The account of Sir Rutherford’s audience with the Tycoon is highly entertaining, and the effect of the actual ceremony must have been ridiculous in the extreme. The attitude of a Japanese in the presence of a superior almost amounts to prostration. In one room were “more than a hundred officers in grand official costume, all kneeling, five and six deep, in rows, perfectly mute, and immovable as statues, their heads just raised from the floor.” This attitude, when adopted by a crowd, is rather striking, perhaps, than ludicrous; but when the crowd begin to walk, the effect must be eminently absurd:—
“The most singular part of the whole costume, and that which, added to the head-gear, gave an irresistibly comic air to the whole presentment, was the immeasurable prolongation of the silk trousers. These, instead of stopping short at the heels, are unconscionably lengthened, and left to trail two or three feet behind them, so that their feet, as they advanced, seemed pushed into what should have been the knees of their garments; besides this, they often shuffle on their hands and knees.”
The performances of the jugglers, wrestlers, and top-spinners in Japan have already been constantly alluded to, but our author’s experiences surpass those of former spectators:—
“One of the most delicate of the performances consisted in making a top spin on the left hand, run up round the edge of the robe at the back of the neck, and down the other arm into the palm of the right hand, still spinning. Another, again, was to toss a spinning-top into the air and catch it on the hem of the sleeve without letting it fall. A third was to fling it high in the air and catch it on the bowl or the angle of a Japanese pipe, pass it behind the back, flinging it to the front, and then catch it again.”
Certainly an importation of Japanese top-spinners would make the fortune of any Barnum who could induce them to leave their country with the certainty of their being obliged to rip themselves up on their return. Let us hope that the discontinuance of this last trick may be one of the first-fruits of the introduction of Western civilisation into Japan.
MRS CLIFFORD’S MARRIAGE.
PART II.
CHAPTER VI.—THE RESULT.
When the newly married people returned home, after an absence of about two months, the new rule soon but gradually made itself felt at Fontanel. Though Mr Summerhayes had for a long time been the inspiring influence there, there was still all the difference between his will as interpreted by Mrs Clifford and his will as accomplished by himself. Of the two, it must be allowed that the retainers of the family preferred the cordial, kind, inconsistent sway of poor Mary to the firm and steady government of her new husband; and then everybody had acknowledged her right to rule, which came by nature, while every soul secretly rebelled against his, which was a kind of contradiction to nature. Mr Summerhayes’s path was not strewn with roses when he came back to Fontanel; then, for the first time, he had the worst of it. After she was fairly married, and everything concluded beyond the possibility of change, Mary, like a true woman, had found it quite possible to forget all her previous doubts and difficulties, and to conclude, with that simple philosophy which carries women of her class through so many troubles, that now everything must come right. It was no embarrassing new affection now, but acknowledged duty, that bound her to her husband, and she would not contemplate the possibility of this duty clashing with her former duties. So she came home, having fully regained the composure of her mind, very happy to see her children again, and utterly forgetting that they had not yet become accustomed, as she had, to look upon “Cousin Tom” as the head of the house. But it was now that gentleman’s turn to suffer the pains and penalties of the new position which he had taken upon himself. He was fully conscious of all the troubled sidelong glances out of Loo’s brown eyes; and when Charley burst into the house in schoolboy exuberance at Easter, for his few days of holiday, Mr Summerhayes noted the gulp in the throat of the Etonian, when he found it necessary to ask the new master of the house about something hitherto settled between himself and the old groom, with perhaps a reference to the indulgent mother, who could never bear to deprive her boy of any pleasure. Mr Summerhayes let Charley have his will with the best grace in the world, but still saw and remarked that knot of discontent in the boy’s throat—that apple of Adam, which Charley swallowed, consciously, yet, as he himself thought, unobserved by any man. The younger children were perhaps still more difficult to deal with; for it was hard to teach them that Mr Summerhayes was no longer Cousin Tom, to be romped with, but that it was necessary to be quiet and good, and not to disturb the meditations of the head of the house. True, it fell to Mary’s lot to impress this fact upon the rebellious consciousness of Harry and little Alf; but Mr Summerhayes, who at that particular period of his life was all eyes and ears, and missed nothing, did not fail to have the benefit. Then some of the servants were petulant—some were insolent, presuming on their old favour with their mistress—some resigned altogether when they knew “how things was agoing to be;” the most part sneaked and gave in, with secret reflections, every one of which was guessed and aggravated by the new master. It is easy to see that his position had its difficulties and disagreeables; but, to do Mr Summerhayes justice, he behaved with great temper and forbearance in this troublesome crisis. He made it apparent to everybody that he was not to be trifled with; but, at the same time, pretended not to see the little petulancies which were in reality so distinctly apparent to him, and which galled him so much. He swallowed many a mortification just then more bitter and stinging than Charley’s soon-forgotten gulp of boyish pride; and steadily and gradually, without any one knowing much about it, the new master of Fontanel won the day.
He was a man whose previous life had, to a considerable extent, belied his real character. He had lived idly and without any apparent ambition during these forty years, contenting himself apparently, for the last ten, with his dreary old manor-house and spare income. But this was not because he was of a light and easy temper, or satisfied with his lot. He was active enough in reality, now that he had affairs in his hands of sufficient magnitude to occupy him—and thoughtful enough to keep his purposes locked in his own heart, from which they came forth in act and deed, only when full fledged and ready for the gaze of the world. The house of Fontanel gradually recognised the hand of the master. Without any visible coercion upon Mary, the open, liberal, hospitable house came by imperceptible degrees under that stern regime which had made life possible at the manor-house upon the much diminished means of the Summerhayes’. The process was like nothing so much as the change of a ship’s course in a stormy sea. The vessel wavered, reeled for a moment as the helm went round in the new direction, but next minute had righted herself, and was ploughing steadily on in her new course, leaving the ignorant passengers below in total unconsciousness of anything that had happened, except that momentary stagger and uncertainty which it was so easy to account for. Mary was not cut down, either in her hospitalities or charities—or at least, if she was, did not know it; but before a year had elapsed, the expenditure in Fontanel house was smaller, and the expenditure on Fontanel estate greater than it had ever been in the memory of man. Mr Summerhayes was an enterprising and enlightened landlord. He took up the Home Farm with such energy that every tenant-farmer within twenty miles learned, or ought to have learned, the salutary lesson; and he gave loans and bonuses upon improvement, such as suggested to the unimproving sundry sarcasms as to the facility with which men parted with other people’s money. If it had been his own, instead of belonging to his wife and her children, it would have made a difference, people said; but then it was only the unprogressive, whom Mr Summerhayes decidedly snubbed and disapproved of, who made that ill-natured remark. To tell the truth, however, when he set out upon this active career, which was so unlike his former life, Mr Summerhayes of Fontanel became much less popular in the county than the poor squire at the manor had been in old days. Perhaps, in the change from poverty to wealth, he carried things with too high a hand. Perhaps he failed to recognise his own position as an interloper, and acted the master too completely to please the popular fancy. At all events, nobody was satisfied—not even his sisters in the old house, which they had all to themselves; certainly not the little community in his present home, which obeyed and feared and suspected him—perhaps not even his wife.