Sir James Chettam

“ Chad will be, so far as capacity is concerned,” he went on, “the man to do it.”
“Where did he get his capacity,” Jim asked, “over here?”
“He didn’t get it over here, and the wonderful thing is that over here he hasn’t inevitably lost it. He has a natural turn for business, an extraordinary head. He comes by that,” Strether explained, “honestly enough. He’s in that respect his father’s son, and also—for she’s wonderful in her way too—his mother’s. He has other tastes and other tendencies; but Mrs. Newsome and your wife are quite right about his having that. He’s very remarkable.” ”

“ He is but a young man yet; but seldom has it happened that one so young has exhibited such mature intellectual powers, and such firm decision in the management of the most delicate cases. A gallant soldier, a wise ruler, and a genial friend, Lord Chetwynde will be missed in all those departments of public and private life of which he has been so conspicuous an ornament. ”

“ He loves another!
At length, one day, Lord Chetwynde began to speak to her more directly about his plans. He had made up his mind to make them known to her, and so he availed himself of the first opportunity.
"I must soon take my departure, Lady Chetwynde," said he, as he plunged at once into the midst of affairs. "I have made up my mind to go to Italy next week. As I intend to return to India I shall not go back to England again. All my business affairs are in the hands of my solicitors, and they will arrange all that I wish to be done." ”

“ He was interred in the Deansgate burial ground; a stone marks his corporeal resting-place, and the Society's register of deaths records that "he was a minister, and travelled in Ireland and Scotland."
John Abraham had, in addition to his son, Daniel, a daughter, Mary, who became the wife of Edward Chetham, of Cheetham, Nuthurst, and, ultimately, of Turton Tower, the representative of Manchester's great benefactor, Humphrey Chetham, the founder of the hospital and library which bears his name, and from the [Pg 49] marriage descends the present Right Hon. ”

“ His services were publicly recognised in 1881 by the presentation to the Athenæum of his marble medallion bust, along with those of his co-founders, Richard Cobden and James Heywood, F.R.S. When the Chetham Society was founded in 1843 he became one of its earliest members, and was elected its treasurer, subsequently exchanging that office for the honorary secretaryship. ”

“ Is it so very extraordinary that a man with a head like a turnip and a soul like a spider's web should not find his strength equal to a confounding change of fortunes? Is it, in short, so very extraordinary that James Chadd should lose his wits from excitement?"
"It would not be extraordinary in the least" answered Basil, with placidity. "It would not be extraordinary in the least," he repeated, "if the professor had gone mad. ”

“ He glanced at such a contingency, but it failed to hold him long when once he had reflected that he would have been silly, in this case, with Maria Gostrey and little Bilham, with Madame de Vionnet and little Jeanne, with Lambert Strether, in fine, and above all with Chad Newsome himself. Wouldn’t it be found to have made more for reality to be silly with these persons than sane with Sarah and Jim? ”

“ The grim face of the spinster betrayed a great deal of pleasure and a great deal of pathos also. “I believe it's true,” she said. “If it is, it will not only be great glory which women, I assure you, feel a great deal, but great relief, which they feel more; relief from worry from a lot of things. James' health has never been good, and while we are as poor as we are he had to do journalism and coaching, in addition to his own dreadful grinding notions and discoveries, which he loves more than man, woman, or child. ”

“ His only answer was to shoot the leg straight at right angles to the other, as if pointing to the other with his toe to the wall. He was still looking quite gravely at the fireplace.
“'James, what is the matter?' I cried, for I was thoroughly frightened. James gave three kicks in the air with the right leg, flung up the other, gave three kicks in the air with it also and spun round like a teetotum the other way. 'Are you mad?' I cried. 'Why don't you answer me?' He had come to a standstill facing me, and was looking at me as he always does, with his lifted eyebrows and great spectacled eyes. ”

“ Lord Chetwynde, himself intellectual, recognized and respected the brilliant intellect of his companion. He saw that the woman who had saved his life at the risk of her own, who had dropped down senseless at his bedside, overworn with duties self-imposed through love for him--the woman who had overwhelmed him with obligations of gratitude--could also dazzle him with her intellectual brilliancy, and surpass him in familiarity with the greatest geniuses of modern times. ”

“ It's an art like another, and infinite like all the arts." He went on as if for the joke of it—almost as if his friend's face amused him. "In the hands, naturally, of a master. The right man must take hold. With him to work it—c'est un monde!"
Strether had watched him quite as if, there on the pavement, without a pretext, he had begun to dance a fancy step. "Is what you're thinking of that you yourself, in the case you have in mind, would be the right man?"
Chad had thrown back his light coat and thrust each of his thumbs into an armhole of his waistcoat ”

“ Again the divided counsels of the Cheshire men were displayed. While Lord Delamere was raising a great force to support Dutch William, marching south to meet him, Lord Molyneux and Lord Acton seized Chester for King James. Happily no fighting was needed.
When James II. landed in Ireland in the spring of 1689 a large army was collected to oppose him. It was led by the Duke Schomberg, and suffered severely in camp during the ensuing winter for want of conveniences and even necessaries. Most of the army encamped for a week at Neston, and then embarked at Highlake (Hoylake) for Ireland. ”

“ But we feel as we read that the man has not arrived at his view of truth without much labour, that we are witnessing an endeavour to escape from the coils of doubt, and that we have a victor who has faced and fought his troubles and difficulties.”
I may state that we had an interesting conversation with the sexton at Clevedon, Augustus James. He had held the office for about eighteen years, and perfectly remembered the interment of Arthur Hallam. His father, who was sexton for forty-three years, made the vault, and officiated at the burial. ”

“ All the same,” he wound up, “I assure you I don’t say a word against it—for himself, I mean—to Chad. I seem to see it as much the best thing for him. You see he’s not happy.”
“Do I?”—Strether stared. “I’ve been supposing I see just the opposite—an extraordinary case of the equilibrium arrived at and assured.”
“Oh there’s a lot behind it.”
“Ah there you are!” Strether exclaimed. “That’s just what I want to get at. You speak of your familiar volume altered out of recognition. Well, who’s the editor?”
Little Bilham looked before him a minute in silence. “He ought to get married. ”

“ What it expressed at midnight in the gas-glaring bedroom at Chester was that the subject of it had, at the end of years, barely escaped, by flight in time, a general nervous collapse. But this very proof of the full life, as the full life was understood at Milrose, would have made to Strether’s imagination an element in which Waymarsh could have floated easily had he only consented to float. Alas nothing so little resembled floating as the rigour with which, on the edge of his bed, he hugged his posture of prolonged impermanence. ”

“ Strether found himself in possession as he never yet had been; he had been there alone, had turned over books and prints, had invoked, in Chad's absence, the spirit of the place, but never at the witching hour, and never with a relish quite so like a pang.
He spent a long time on the balcony; he hung over it as he had seen little Bilham hang the day of his first approach, as he had seen Mamie hang over her own the day little Bilham himself might have seen her from below; he passed back into the rooms, the three that occupied the front and that communicated by wide doors ”

“ I think it will be Jim who'll do it."
She wondered. "Get hold of him?"
"No; just the other thing. Counteract Sarah's spell." And he showed now—our friend—how far he had worked it out. "Jim's intensely cynical."
"Oh dear Jim!" Mme. de Vionnet vaguely smiled.
"Yes, literally, dear Jim! He's awful. What he wants,—heaven forgive him—is to help us."
"You mean"—she was eager—"help me?"
"Well, Chad and me in the first place. But he throws you in too, though without, as yet, seeing you much. Only, so far as he does see you—if you don't mind—he sees you as very advanced." ”

“ Strether went on after a moment. But he had the next minute an inconsequent question. “How comes Chad so mixed up, anyway?”
“Ah, ah, ah!”—and little Bilham fell back on his cushions.
It reminded our friend of Miss Barrace, and he felt again the brush of his sense of moving in a maze of mystic closed allusions. Yet he kept hold of his thread. “Of course I understand really; only the general transformation makes me occasionally gasp. ”

“ Brougham is from the North of England, but he was educated in Edinburgh, and represents that school of politics and political economy in the House. He differs from Sir James Mackintosh in this, that he deals less in abstract principles, and more in individual details. He makes less use of general topics, and more of immediate facts. Sir James is better acquainted with the balance of an argument in old authors; Mr. Brougham with the balance of power in Europe. If the first is better versed in the progress of history, no man excels the last in a knowledge of the course of exchange. ”

“ There had already been things in respect to which he knew himself tempted by this perversity. If Waymarsh thought them bad he should at least have his reason for his discomfort; so Strether showed them as worse. Still, he was now, in his way, sincerely perplexed.
Chad had been absent from the Boulevard Malesherbes—was absent from Paris altogether; he had learned that from the concierge, but had nevertheless gone up, and gone up—there were no two ways about it—from an uncontrollable, a really, if one would, depraved curiosity. ”

“ Strether at all events presently pursued, “of course what it has done for him—that is as to how it has so wonderfully worked—isn’t a thing I pretend to understand. I’ve to take it as I find it. There he is.”
“There he is!” little Bilham echoed. “And it’s really and truly she. I don’t understand either, even with my longer and closer opportunity. But I’m like you,” he added; “I can admire and rejoice even when I’m a little in the dark. ”

“ If the equilibrium might only prevail! Sarah was out with Waymarsh, Mamie was out with Chad, and Jim was out alone. Later on indeed he himself was booked to Jim, was to take him that evening to the Varieties—which Strether was careful to pronounce as Jim pronounced them.
Miss Gostrey drank it in. “What then to-night do the others do?”
“Well, it has been arranged. Waymarsh takes Sarah to dine at Bignon’s.”
She wondered. “And what do they do after? They can’t come straight home.” ”

“ I've made Chad do it."
"That you decline to come? "
"That he declines. We had it out this morning, and I brought him round. He had come in before I was down to tell me he was ready—ready, I mean, to return. And he went off, after ten minutes with me, to say he wouldn't."
Miss Gostrey followed with intensity. "Then you've stopped him?"
Strether settled himself afresh in his chair. "I've stopped him. That is for the time. That"—he gave it to her more vividly—"is where I am."
"I see, I see. But where is Mr. Newsome? He was ready," she asked, "to go?" ”

“ Here he indulged in his favourite pursuit of landscape-gardening, sometimes even 'planting by torchlight, as his peremptory and impatient temper could brook no delay' (Walpole Memoirs of the Reign of George III, iii. 30) . From 1759 to 1761 Chatham lived in the house (now numbered 10) in St. James's Square which was occupied by Mr. Gladstone in the parliamentary session of 1890. On resigning office in October 1761 Chatham gave up his town house in St. James's Square, and resolved to live entirely at Hayes. Sir William Pynsent, an eccentric Somersetshire baronet, who died on 12 Jan. ”

“ During the seven years which Sir James had passed in India, this was the turn that had been taking place in affairs and opinions. It is hardly possible to conceive any change more calculated to carry along with it a mild and intelligent philosopher, to whom fanaticism of all kinds was hateful. ”

“ How James will take it depends very much on James. How he will hail this happy confirmation of his own early opinions will depend on whether James is an unusually patient and charitable person. And James is not. He is unfortunately the very man, of all men in the world, to drop his own original agreement and everything else into the black abyss of disdain, which now divides him from the man who has the impudence to agree with him. He is the very man to say he will have nothing to do with his own original notion, because it is now the belated notion of a fool. ”

“ For a few moments they stood looking at one another, not yet able to realize the full weight of the happiness that had come so suddenly. And as they looked, each could read in the face of the other all the soul of each, which was made manifest, and the full, unrestrained expression of the longing which each had felt.
Lord Chetwynde folded her in his arms.
"What is all this?" he said, in a low voice. "What can it mean? I can not yet believe it; can you? What, my darling, are we not to have our stolen interviews any more? Have we no longer our great secret to keep? Are you really mine? ”