The Three Clerks by Anthony Trollope

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'You must manage him,' said Harry.

'That is much easier said than done,' replied Alaric. 'I wish you
had the task instead of me.'

'So do not I. Sir Gregory, when he chose you, knew what he was
about.'

'Upon my word, Harry, you are full of compliments to-day. I
really ought to take my hat off.'

'No, I am not; I am in no mood for compliments. I know very well
what stuff you are made of. I know your superiority to myself. I
know you will be selected to go up over all our heads. I feel all
this; and Alaric, you must not be surprised that, to a certain
degree, it is painful to me to feel it. But, by God's help I will
get over it; and if you succeed it shall go hard with me, but I
will teach myself to rejoice at it. Look at that fawn there,'
said he, turning away his face to hide the tear in his eye, 'did
you ever see more perfect motion?'

Alaric was touched; but there was more triumph than sympathy in
his heart. It was sweet, much too sweet, to him to hear his
superiority thus acknowledged. He was superior to the men who
worked round him in his office. He was made of a more plastic
clay than they, and despite the inferiority of his education, he
knew himself to be fit for higher work than they could do. As the
acknowledgement was made to him by the man whom, of those around
him, he certainly ranked second to himself, he could not but feel
that his heart's blood ran warm within him, he could not but
tread with an elastic step.

But it behoved him to answer Harry, and to answer him in other
spirit than this.

'Oh, Harry,' said he, 'you have some plot to ruin me by my own
conceit; to make me blow myself out and destroy myself, poor frog
that I am, in trying to loom as largely as that great cow, Fidus
Neverbend. You know I am fully conscious how much inferior my
education has been to yours.'

'Education is nothing,' said Harry.

Education is nothing! Alaric triumphantly re-echoed the words in
his heart--'Education is nothing--mind, mind is everything; mind
and the will.' So he expressed himself to his own inner self; but
out loud he spoke much more courteously.

'It is the innate modesty of your own heart, Harry, that makes
you think so highly of me and so meanly of yourself. But the
proof of what we each can do is yet to be seen. Years alone can
decide that. That your career will be honourable and happy, of
that I feel fully sure! I wish I were as confident of mine.'

'But, Alaric,' said Norman, going on rather with the thread of
his own thoughts, than answering or intending to answer what the
other said, 'in following up your high ambition--and I know you
have a high ambition--do not allow yourself to believe that the
end justifies the means, because you see that men around you act
as though they believed so.'

'Do I do so--do I seem to do so?' said Alaric, turning sharply
round.

'Don't be angry with me, Alaric; don't think that I want to
preach; but sometimes I fancy, not that you do so, but that your
mind is turning that way; that in your eager desire for
honourable success you won't scrutinize the steps you will have
to take.'

'That I would get to the top of the hill, in short, even though
the hillside be miry. Well, I own I wish to get to the top of the
hill.'

'But not to defile yourself in doing so.'

'When a man comes home from a successful chase, with his bag well
stuffed with game, the women do not quarrel with him because
there is mud on his gaiters.'

'Alaric, that which is evil is evil. Lies are evil--'

'And am I a liar?'

'Heaven forbid that I should say so: heaven forbid that I should
have to think so! but it is by such doctrines as that that men
become liars.'

'What! by having muddy gaiters?'

'By disregarding the means in looking to the end.'

'And I will tell you how men become mere vegetables, by filling
their minds with useless--needless scruples--by straining at
gnats--'

'Well, finish your quotation,' said Harry.

'I have finished it; in speaking to you I would not for the world
go on, and seem to insinuate that you would swallow a camel. No
insinuation could be more base or unjust. But, nevertheless, I
think you may be too over-scrupulous. What great man ever rose to
greatness,' continued Alaric, after they had walked nearly the
length of the building in silence, 'who thought it necessary to
pick his steps in the manner you have described?'

'Then I would not be great,' said Harry.

'But, surely, God intends that there shall be great men on the
earth?'

'He certainly wishes that there should be good men,' said Harry.

'And cannot a man be good and great?'

'That is the problem for a man to solve. Do you try that. Good
you certainly can be, if you look to Him for assistance. Let that
come first; and then the greatness, if that be possible.'

'It is all a quibble about a word,' said Alaric. 'What is good?
David was a man after God's own heart, and a great man too, and
yet he did things which, were I to do, I should be too base to
live. Look at Jacob--how did he achieve the tremendous rights of
patriarchal primogeniture? But, come, the policemen are trying to
get rid of us; it is time for us to go,' and so they left the
building, and passed the remainder of the evening in concord
together--in concord so soon to be dissolved, and, ah! perhaps
never to be renewed.

On the next morning Alaric and his new companion met each other
at an early hour at the Paddington station. Neverbend was rather
fussy with his dispatch-box, and a large official packet, which
an office messenger, dashing up in, a cab, brought to him at the
moment of his departure. Neverbend's enemies were wont to declare
that a messenger, a cab, and a big packet always rushed up at the
moment of his starting on any of his official trips. Then he had
his ticket to get and his _Times_ to buy, and he really had
not leisure to do more than nod at Alaric till he had folded his
rug around him, tried that the cushion was soft enough, and
completed his arrangements for the journey.

'Well, Mr. Tudor,' at last he said, as soon as the train was in
motion, 'and how are you this morning--ready for work, I hope?'

'Well, not exactly at this moment,' said Alaric. 'One has to get
up so early for these morning trains.'

'Early, Mr. Tudor! my idea is that no hour should be considered
either early or late when the Crown requires our services.'

'Just at present the Crown requires nothing else of us, I
suppose, but that we should go along at the rate of forty miles
an hour.'

'There is nothing like saving time,' said Neverbend. 'I know you
have, as yet, had no experience in these sort of cases, so I have
brought you the papers which refer to a somewhat similar matter
that occurred in the Forest of Dean. I was sent down there, and
that is the report which I then wrote. I propose to take it for
the model of that which we shall have to draw up when we return
from Tavistock;' and as he spoke he produced a voluminous
document, or treatise, in which he had contrived to render more
obscure some matter that he had been sent to clear up, on the
Crown property in the Forest of Dean.

Now Alaric had been told of this very report, and was aware that
he was going to Tavistock in order that the joint result of his
and Mr. Neverbend's labours might be communicated to the Crown
officers in intelligible language.

The monster report before him contained twenty-six pages of close
folio writing, and he felt that he really could not oblige Mr.
Neverbend by reading it.

'Forest of Dean! ah, that's coal, is it not?' said Alaric. 'Mary
Jane seems to be exclusively in the tin line. I fear there will
be no analogy.'

'The cases are in many respects similar,' said Neverbend, 'and
the method of treating them----'

'Then I really cannot concur with you as to the propriety of my
reading it. I should feel myself absolutely wrong to read a word
of such a report, for fear I might be prejudiced by your view of
the case. It would, in my mind, be positively dishonest in me to
encourage any bias in my own feelings either on one side or the
other.'

'But really, Mr. Tudor----'

'I need not say how much personal advantage it would be to me to
have the benefit of your experience, but my conscience tells me
that I should not do it--so I think I'll go to sleep.'

Mr. Neverbend did not know what to make of his companion; whether
to admire the high tone of his official honesty, or to reprobate
his idleness in refusing to make himself master of the report.
While he was settling the question in his own mind, Tudor went to
sleep, and did not wake till he was invited to partake of ten
minutes' refreshment at Swindon.

'I rather think,' said Mr. Neverbend, 'that I shall go on to
Tavistock to-night.'

'Oh! of course,' said Alaric. 'I never for a moment thought of
stopping short of it;' and, taking out a book, he showed himself
disinclined for further conversation.

'Of course, it's open to me to do as I please in such a matter,'
said Neverbend, continuing his subject as soon as they reached
the Bristol station, 'but on the whole I rather think we had
better go on to Tavistock to-night.'

'No, I will not stop at Plymouth,' he said, as he passed by
Taunton; and on reaching Exeter he declared that he had fully
made up his mind on the subject.

'We'll get a chaise at Plymouth,' said Alaric.

'I think there will be a public conveyance,' said Neverbend.

'But a chaise will be the quickest,' said the one.

'And much the dearest,' said the other.

'That won't signify much to us,' said Alaric; 'we shan't pay the
bill.'

'It will signify a great deal to me,' said Neverbend, with a look
of ferocious honesty; and so they reached Plymouth.

On getting out of the railway carriage, Alaric at once hired a
carriage with a pair of horses; the luggage was strapped on, and
Mr. Neverbend, before his time for expostulation had fairly come,
found himself posting down the road to Tavistock, followed at a
respectful distance by two coaches and an omnibus.

They were soon drinking tea together at the Bedford Hotel, and I
beg to assure any travelling readers that they might have drunk
tea in a much worse place. Mr. Neverbend, though he made a great
struggle to protect his dignity, and maintain the superiority of
his higher rank, felt the ground sinking from beneath his feet
from hour to hour. He could not at all understand how it was, but
even the servants at the hotel seemed to pay more deference to
Tudor than to him; and before the evening was over he absolutely
found himself drinking port wine negus, because his colleague had
ordered it for him.

'And now,' said Neverbend, who was tired with his long journey,
'I think I'll go to bed.'

'Do,' said Alaric, who was not at all tired, 'and I'll go through
this infernal mass of papers. I have hardly looked at them yet.
Now that I am in the neighbourhood I shall better understand the
strange names.'

So Alaric went to work, and studied the dry subject that was
before him. It will luckily not be necessary for us to do so
also. It will be sufficient for us to know that Wheal Mary Jane
was at that moment the richest of all the rich mines that had
then been opened in that district; that the, or its, or her
shares (which is the proper way of speaking of them I am
shamefully ignorant) were at an enormous premium; that these two
Commissioners would have to see and talk to some scores of loud
and angry men, deeply interested in their success or failure, and
that that success or failure might probably in part depend on the
view which these two Commissioners might take.

CHAPTER VIII

THE HON. UNDECIMUS SCOTT

The Hon. Undecimus Scott was the eleventh son of the Lord
Gaberlunzie. Lord Gaberlunzie was the representative of a very
old and very noble race, more conspicuous, however, at the
present time for its age and nobility than for its wealth. The
Hon. Undecimus, therefore, learnt, on arriving at manhood, that
he was heir only to the common lot of mortality, and that he had
to earn his own bread. This, however, could not have surprised
him much, as nine of his brethren had previously found themselves
in the same condition.

Lord Gaberlunzie certainly was not one of those wealthy peers who
are able to make two or three elder sons, and after that to
establish any others that may come with comfortable younger
children's portions. The family was somewhat accustomed to the
_res angusta domi_; but they were fully alive to the fact,
that a noble brood, such as their own, ought always to be able to
achieve comfort and splendour in the world's broad field, by due
use of those privileges which spring from a noble name. Cauldkail
Castle, in Aberdeenshire, was the family residence; but few of
the eleven young Scotts were ever to be found there after
arriving at that age at which they had been able to fly from the
paternal hall.

It is a terrible task, that of having to provide for eleven sons.
With two or three a man may hope, with some reasonable chance of
seeing his hope fulfilled, that things will go well with him, and
that he may descend to his grave without that worst of wretchedness,
that gnawing grief which comes from bad children. But who can hope
that eleven sons will all walk in the narrow path?

Had Lord Gaberlunzie, however, been himself a patriarch, and
ruled the pastoral plains of Palestine, instead of the bleak
mountains which surround Cauldkail Castle, he could not have been
more indifferent as to the number of his sons. They flew away,
each as his time came, with the early confidence of young birds,
and as seldom returned to disturb the family nest.

They were a cannie, comely, sensible brood. Their father and
mother, if they gave them nothing else, gave them strong bodies
and sharp brains. They were very like each other, though always
with a difference. Red hair, bright as burnished gold; high, but
not very high, cheek bones; and small, sharp, twinkling eyes,
were the Gaberlunzie personal characteristics. There were three
in the army, two in the navy, and one at a foreign embassy; one
was at the diggings, another was chairman of a railway company,
and our own more particular friend, Undecimus, was picking up
crumbs about the world in a manner that satisfied the paternal
mind that he was quite able to fly alone.

There is a privilege common to the sons of all noble lords, the
full value of which the young Scotts learnt very early in life--
that of making any woman with a tocher an honourable lady. 'Ye
maun be a puir chiel, gin ye'll be worth less than ten thoosand
pound in the market o' marriage; and ten thoosand pound is a
gawcey grand heritage!' Such had been the fatherly precept which
Lord Gaberlunzie had striven to instil into each of his noble
sons; and it had not been thrown away upon them. One after the
other they had gone forth into the market-place alluded to, and
had sold themselves with great ease and admirable discretion.
There had been but one Moses in the lot: the Hon. Gordon Hamilton
Scott had certainly brought home a bundle of shagreen spectacle
cases in the guise of a widow with an exceedingly doubtful
jointure; doubtful indeed at first, but very soon found to admit
of no doubt whatever. He was the one who, with true Scotch
enterprise, was prosecuting his fortunes at the Bendigo diggings,
while his wife consoled herself at home with her title.

Undecimus, with filial piety, had taken his father exactly at his
word, and swapped himself for L10,000. He had, however, found
himself imbued with much too high an ambition to rest content
with the income arising from his matrimonial speculation. He had
first contrived to turn his real L10,000 into a fabulous L50,000,
and had got himself returned to Parliament for the Tillietudlem
district burghs on the credit of his great wealth; he then set
himself studiously to work to make a second market by placing his
vote at the disposal of the Government.

Nor had he failed of success in his attempt, though he had
hitherto been able to acquire no high or permanent post. He had
soon been appointed private secretary to the First Lord of the
Stannaries, and he found that his duty in this capacity required
him to assist the Government whip in making and keeping houses.
This occupation was congenial to his spirit, and he worked hard
and well at it; but the greatest of men are open to the tainting
breath of suspicion, and the Honourable Undecimus Scott, or Undy
Scott, as he was generally now called, did not escape. Ill-
natured persons whispered that he was not on all occasions true
to his party; and once when his master, the whip-in-chief,
overborne with too much work, had been tempted to put himself to
bed comfortably in his own house, instead of on his usual
uneasy couch behind the Speaker's chair, Undy had greatly failed.
The leader of a party whose struggles for the religion of his
country had hitherto met but small success, saw at a glance the
opportunity which fortune had placed in his way; he spied with
eagle eye the nakedness of that land of promise which is
compressed in the district round the Treasury benches; the barren
field before him was all his own, and he put and carried his
motion for closing the parks on Sundays.

He became a hero; but Undy was all but undone. The highest hope
of the Sabbatarian had been to address an almost empty house for
an hour and a half on this his favourite subject. But the chance
was too good to be lost; he sacrificed his oratorical longings on
the altar of party purpose, and limited his speech to a mere
statement of his motion. Off flew on the wings of Hansom a
youthful member, more trusty than the trusted Undy, to the abode
of the now couchant Treasury Argus. Morpheus had claimed him all
for his own. He was lying in true enjoyment, with his tired limbs
stretched between the unaccustomed sheets, and snoring with free
and sonorous nose, restrained by the contiguity of no Speaker's
elbow. But even in his deepest slumber the quick wheels of the
bounding cab struck upon the tympanum of his anxious ear. He
roused himself as does a noble watch-dog when the 'suspicious
tread of theft' approaches. The hurry of the jaded horse, the
sudden stop, the maddened furious knock, all told a tale which
his well-trained ear only knew too well. He sat up for a moment,
listening in his bed, stretched himself with one involuntary
yawn, and then stood upright on the floor. It should not at any
rate be boasted by any one that he had been found in bed.

With elastic step, three stairs at a time, up rushed that young
and eager member. It was well for the nerves of Mrs. Whip Vigil
that the calls of society still held her bound in some distant
brilliant throng; for no consideration would have stopped the
patriotic energy of that sucking statesman. Mr. Vigil had already
performed the most important act of a speedy toilet, when his
door was opened, and as his young friend appeared was already
buttoning his first brace.

'Pumpkin is up!' said the eager juvenile,' and we have only five
men in the house.'

'And where the devil is Undy Scott?' said the Right Hon. Mr.
Vigil.

'The devil only knows,' said the other.

'I deserve it for trusting him,' said the conscience-stricken but
worthy public servant. By this time he had on his neckcloth and
boots; in his eager haste to serve his country he had forgotten
his stockings. 'I deserve it for trusting him--and how many men
have they?'

'Forty-one when I left.'

'Then they'll divide, of course?'

'Of course they will,' said the promising young dove of the
Treasury.

And now Mr. Whip Vigil had buttoned on that well-made frock with
which the Parliamentary world is so conversant, and as he
descended the stairs, arranged with pocket-comb his now grizzling
locks. His well-brushed hat stood ready to his touch below, and
when he entered the cab he was apparently as well dressed a
gentleman as when about three hours after noon he may be seen
with slow and easy step entering the halls of the Treasury
chambers.

But ah! alas, he was all too late. He came but to see the ruin
which Undy's defection had brought about. He might have taken his
rest, and had a quiet mind till the next morning's _Times_
revealed to him the fact of Mr. Pumpkin's grand success. When he
arrived, the numbers were being taken, and he, even he, Mr. Whip
Vigil, he the great arch-numberer, was excluded from the number
of the counted. When the doors were again open the Commons of
England had decided by a majority of forty-one to seven that the
parks of London should, one and all, be closed on Sundays; and
Mr. Pumpkin had achieved among his own set a week's immortality.

'We mustn't have this again, Vigil,' said a very great man the
next morning, with a good-humoured smile on his face, however, as
he uttered the reprimand. 'It will take us a whole night, and God
knows how much talking, to undo what those fools did yesterday.'

Mr. Vigil resolved to leave nothing again to the unassisted
industry or honesty of Undy Scott, and consequently that
gentleman's claims on his party did not stand so highly as they
might have done but for this accident. Parliament was soon
afterwards dissolved, and either through the lukewarm support of
his Government friends, or else in consequence of his great
fortune having been found to be ambiguous, the independent
electors of the Tillietudlem burghs took it into their heads to
unseat Mr. Scott. Unseated for Tillietudlem, he had no means of
putting himself forward elsewhere, and he had to repent, in the
sackcloth and ashes of private life, the fault which had cost him
the friendship of Mr. Vigil.

His life, however, was not strictly private. He had used the
Honourable before his name, and the M.P. which for a time had
followed after it, to acquire for himself a seat as director at a
bank board. He was a Vice-President of the Caledonian, English,
Irish, and General European and American Fire and Life Assurance
Society; such, at least, had been the name of the joint-stock
company in question when he joined it; but he had obtained much
credit by adding the word 'Oriental,' and inserting it after the
allusion to Europe; he had tried hard to include the fourth
quarter of the globe; but, as he explained to some of his
friends, it would have made the name too cumbrous for the
advertisements. He was a director also of one or two minor
railways, dabbled in mining shares, and, altogether, did a good
deal of business in the private stock-jobbing line.

In spite of his former delinquencies, his political friends did
not altogether throw him over. In the first place, the time might
come when he would be again useful, and then he had managed to
acquire that air and tact which make one official man agreeable
to another. He was always good-humoured; when in earnest, there
was a dash of drollery about him; in his most comic moods he ever
had some serious purpose in view; he thoroughly understood the
esoteric and exoteric bearings of modern politics, and knew well
that though he should be a model of purity before the public, it
did not behove him to be very strait-laced with his own party. He
took everything in good part, was not over-talkative, over-
pushing, or presumptuous; he felt no strong bias of his own; had
at his fingers' ends the cant phraseology of ministerial
subordinates, and knew how to make himself useful. He knew also--
a knowledge much more difficult to acquire--how to live among
men so as never to make himself disagreeable.

But then he could not be trusted! True. But how many men in his
walk of life can be trusted? And those who can--at how terribly
high a price do they rate their own fidelity! How often must a
minister be forced to confess to himself that he cannot afford to
employ good faith! Undy Scott, therefore, from time to time,
received some ministerial bone, some Civil Service scrap of
victuals thrown to him from the Government table, which, if it
did not suffice to maintain him in all the comforts of a Treasury
career, still preserved for him a connexion with the Elysium of
public life; gave him, as it were, a link by which he could hang
on round the outer corners of the State's temple, and there watch
with advantage till the doors of Paradise should be re-opened to
him. He was no Lucifer, who, having wilfully rebelled against the
high majesty of Heaven, was doomed to suffer for ever in
unavailing, but still proud misery, the penalties of his asserted
independence; but a poor Peri, who had made a lapse and thus
forfeited, for a while, celestial joys, and was now seeking for
some welcome offering, striving to perform some useful service,
by which he might regain his lost glory.

The last of the good things thus tendered to him was not yet all
consumed. When Mr. Hardlines, now Sir Gregory, was summoned to
assist at, or rather preside over, the deliberations of the
committee which was to organize a system of examination for the
Civil Service, the Hon. U. Scott had been appointed secretary to
that committee. This, to be sure, afforded but a fleeting moment
of halcyon bliss; but a man like Mr. Scott knew how to prolong
such a moment to its uttermost stretch. The committee had ceased
to sit, and the fruits of their labour were already apparent in
the establishment of a new public office, presided over by Sir
Gregory; but still the clever Undy continued to draw his salary.