Felix Holt | Page 4

it
the paradox, very puzzling to the coachman's mind, that there were men
of old family and large estate who voted for the Bill. He did not grapple
with the paradox; he let it pass, with all the discreetness of an

experienced theologian or learned scholiast, preferring to point his
whip at some object which could raise no questions.
No such paradox troubled our coachman when, leaving the town of
Treby Magna behind him, he drove between the hedges for a mile or so,
crossed the queer long bridge over the river Lapp, and then put his
horses to a swift gallop up the hill by the low-nestled village of Little
Treby, till they were on the fine level road, skirted on one side by grand
larches, oaks, and wych elms, which sometimes opened so far as to let
the traveller see that there was a park behind them.
How many times in the year, as the coach rolled past the
neglected-looking lodges which interrupted the screen of trees, and
showed the river winding through a finely-timbered park, had the
coachman answered the same questions, or told the same things
without being questioned! That? - oh, that was Transome Court, a place
there had been a fine sight of lawsuits about. Generations back, the heir
of the Transome name had somehow bargained away the estate'ø and it
fell to the Durfeys, very distant connections, who only called
themselves Transomes because they had got the estate. But the Durfeys'
claim had been disputed over and over again; and the coachman, if he
had been asked, would have said, though he might have to fall down
dead the next minute, that property didn't always get into the right
hands. However, the lawyers had found their luck in it; and people who
inherited estates that were lawed about often lived in them as poorly as
a mouse in a hollow cheese; and, by what he could make out, that had
been the way with these present Durfeys, or Transomes, as they called
themselves. As for Mr Transome, he was as poor, half-witted a fellow
as you'd wish to see; but she was master, had come of a high family,
and had a spirit - you might see it in her eye and the way she sat her
horse. Forty years ago, when she came into this country, they said she
was a pictur'; but her family was poor, and so she took up with a
hatchet-faced fellow like this Transome. And the eldest son had been
just such another as his father, only worse - a wild sort of half-natural,
who got into bad company. They said his mother hated him andwished
him dead; for she'd got another son, quite of a different cut, who had
gone to foreign parts when he was a youngster, and she wanted her

favourite to be heir. But heir or no heir, Lawyer Jermyn had had his
picking out of the estate. Not a door in his big house but what was the
finest polished oak, all got off the Transome estate. If anybody liked to
believe he paid for it, they were welcome. However, Lawyer Jermyn
had sat on that box-seat many and many a time. He had made the wills
of most people thereabout. The coachman would not say that Lawyer
Jermyn was not the man he would choose to make his own will some
day. It was not so well for a lawyer to be over-honest, else he might not
be up to other people's tricks. And as for the Transome business, there
had been ins and outs in time gone by, so that you couldn't look into it
straight backward. At this Mr Sampson (everybody in North Loamshire
knew Sampson's coach) would screw his features into a grimace
expressive of entire neutrality, and appear to aim his whip at a
particular spot on the horse's flank. If the passenger was curious for
further knowledge concerning the Transome affairs, Sampson would
shake his head and say there had been fine stories in his time; but he
never condescended to state what the stories were. Some attributed this
reticence to a wise incredulity, others to a want of memory, others to
simple ignorance. But at least Sampson was right in saying that there
had been fine stories - meaning, ironically, stories not altogether
creditable to the parties concerned.
And such stories often come to be fine in a sense that is not ironical.
For there is seldom any wrong-doing which does not carry along with it
some downfall of blindly-climbing hopes, some hard entail of suffering,
some quicklysatiated desire that survives, with the life in death of old
paralytic vice, to see itself cursed by its woeful progeny - some tragic
mark of kinship in one brief