Chapter VI: The élite of Redcastle

Redcastle is a country town. It is not a manufacturing town, or a seaport, or a garrison town, or a settlement in any manner designed to be of wide and general use to society. It exists for itself alone, and is exclusive to a fault. It is on the high road to nowhere. Erase it from the map of England to-morrow, and nobody but its own inhabitants would be the worse off for its evanishment. It produces nothing but elderly people with limited incomes, and scandal. For the cultivation of this last article Redcastle is like a mushroom bed in a cellar, a dark corner of the land in which fungi abound and flourish.

It is not a bad town in which to enjoy a brief span of repose from the turmoil and bustle of the industrial and commercial world;--the world of labour and pleasure, profit, loss, and pain. Not a bad old town in which to dream away a joyless, painless old age. But to live in Redcastle, to bound one’s hopes within its brick and mortar confines, to regulate one’s life by its petty proprieties and narrow creed! Heaven pity that wretch to whom destiny flings the lot of life-long bondage in Redcastle.

It is a clean old town. Scarcely in laborious Holland, where the servant maids scrub the chimney-pots and pipe clay the gutters, would you find a cleaner. A rainy day, which makes mud and slush in busier places, only washes down and renovates Redcastle. The one wide street, with its massive old brick houses, square, and strong, and substantial--the historic gateway, which divides the one street into two, Below Bar and Above Bar--and the fine old Coach and Horses Inn, where seldom coaches or horses are seen to stop, the inn which, save for the mildest indulgence in billiards, and brandy and soda among the youth of the town, seems to exist rather as a part and parcel of Redcastle, an institution essential to the honour and glory of the town, than for any commercial purpose, since it appears morally impossible that the establishment can be self-supporting,--all these are the pink of cleanliness. The pretty little minster, more architecturally perfect than many a grander fane, looks as if it were kept under a glass shade. The market-place presents on off days a broad expanse of spotless pavement blinking and smiling up at the sun. The turnpike road on which Redcastle lies is one of the best in Yorkshire; the narrow lanes and by-streets leading up to that broad stretch of common land known as Redcastle Woods, apparently for the sole reason that it is barren of anything taller than a hazel-bush, are innocent of mud or smoke. The scanty suburbs of the town present a sprinkling of smallish houses, for the most part uninteresting of aspect, but all scrupulously clean. Those modern edifices, the Wesleyan Chapel, the Independent Chapel, and that masonic temple the Athena Lodge, are of whitest freestone, with shining windows, and hearthstoned steps embellishing their classic porticoes.

Redcastle, producing nothing, and offering no attraction to visitors, is naturally not a wealthy settlement. The rich inhabitants of Redcastle can be counted on the fingers of a single hand. Yet there is perhaps no town in England in which respect for wealth is more deeply implanted in the human mind. It is a saying of the profane that twopence halfpenny will not consort with twopence in Redcastle, but this is not a true saying, for more than it worships wealth does Redcastle worship appearances, and if A, with twopence, can put on the semblance of threepence, he shall be assuredly held higher than C, who lacks the art to obtain as much show out of twopence halfpenny.

The _élite_ of Redcastle--that is to say, persons of fixed income or established professional earning, ranging from eight to eighteen hundred per annum--live within a narrow circle. The houses immediately below Bar, and the houses immediately above Bar, shelter the aristocracy of the town. Below Bar, grave old red brick houses of the early Georgian period, roomy, and comfortable within, respectable of aspect without; above Bar, houses of a more modern date, stone façades, French windows, porches, verandahs, larger gardens, and ostentatious stabling, rarely used, save for the accommodation of a pony chaise, like one of Falstaff’s buck baskets.

Within this charmed circle, in the largest of the stone-fronted houses above Bar, resides Colonel Stormont, who enjoys the privileges of retirement and half-pay, cheered by the society of his wife and family, the family consisting of a grown-up son and two grown-up daughters who, of various views upon other questions, are at one in the opinion that Redcastle was called into being for their especial behoof, and who regulate their conduct by that idea.

Colonel and Mrs. Stormont take the lead in Redcastle society. Their names are at the head of the croquet and archery club, which black-balls every one who is suspected of having once had a cousin connected with trade. They are chief patrons of the assize and masonic balls. They sanctify the more chaste and classic of the Redcastle concerts with their august presence, or, at least, Mrs. Stormont allows her name to grace the list of patronesses, and add a lustre to the programme of the evening’s harmony. If St. Cecilia had come to life again she could hardly have been in more request among the concert-givers than Mrs. Stormont, who scarcely knows Mozart from Offenbach, or Beethoven from Brinley Richards.

To offend Colonel and Mrs. Stormont would be to be at war with Redcastle; and it is doubtful if any one so unfortunately placed could continue to reside in the town. He would be obliged to depart, exiled by that awful ban; like Ovid from Rome, or Dante from Florence.

In the large stucco-fronted house with the Norman turret resides Mr. Marlin Spyke, the great shipbuilder of Krampston-on-Tybur. Mr. and Mrs. Spyke live with some splendour, but a self-contained kind of life, not conducive to wide popularity. They receive very little company, their names grace the subscription list of no local charity, they patronize no local entertainment, they attend no masonic or benevolent ball. They are negatively great, and will be remembered when they are dead for the many noble deeds they have not done.

After the Stormonts and the Marlin Spykes come the professional classes below Bar; Mr. Jewson, the chief local solicitor and vestry clerk; Dr. Mitsand, an elderly man of some distinction, being one of the army surgeons who endured and ameliorated the miseries of the Crimean war; Mr. Groshen, the banker; Mr. Farrer, the curate; and a few others, whom it is needless to particularize. On the outskirts of the town reside three or four gentlemen who derive their income from houses or lands, are more rustic in their bearing and attire than the inhabitants of the citadel, and in a general way give themselves airs, as affecting to belong to the county families. Afar off in their various fastnesses, isolated, inaccessible, unapproachable, live the county families. A few of them are on visiting terms with the Stormonts, Dr. Mitsand, and the clergy of Redcastle; but they regard the town otherwise as a depôt for groceries and draperies, and a centre of Radicalism for the lower classes. Their big family landaus, with tall, slab-sided horses and brass harness, pervade the street on fine afternoons; their sons trot briskly through the quiet town on hunting mornings in well-worn pink. They turn out occasionally for a concert, and take care to testify by loud talk and laughter among themselves, and a supercilious contemplation of the rest of the audience through eye-glasses, that they hold themselves as creatures apart from the townspeople.

Within ten miles of Redcastle is that thriving seaport, Krampston-on-Tybur, famous for ship-building, ropemaking, linseed crushing, sugar baking, and general exportation and importation. Krampston has noisy, bustling streets, miles of quays, labyrinths of docks, drawbridges that arrest the pedestrian at every turn, so intersected is the land by narrow inlets of water. Krampston has very little ‘society,’ in the Redcastle sense of that word, but it has commercial activity, the vigorously throbbing pulse of active and useful life, name, and place and power in the world. The word ‘Krampston’ branded on bale or packing-case is familiar in Buenos Ayres or Sierra Leone, in Pernambuco or Timbuctoo, while the name of Redcastle is hardly known out of the post office or British Gazetteer.

Among the _élite_ of Redcastle--the archons--the equestrian order--Robert Faunthorpe, surgeon and parish doctor, has no place. The _élite_ give him good-day when they meet him trudging toilfully above or below Bar, or trotting meekly along one of the lanes on his unkempt pony. Good, easy-going little man, ever ready to help the helpless to whom he ministers, often squeezing a shilling or a sixpence out of his ill-furnished purse where he feels that drugs alone are of no avail. Kindly gentleman though he is, the _élite_ of Redcastle cannot recognise him as a member of their order. He lives in a shabby red house at the fag-end of the town, grooms his pony, digs in the garden, keeps one old woman-servant of eccentric aspect; he takes snuff inordinately--perhaps it is his only consolation--and the normal shabbiness of his clothes is enhanced by the process. His existence is altogether unorthodox. He is beyond the pale.

True that he has reared three orphan nieces, the children of a brother who died penniless ten years ago; and it is hardly to be supposed that this act of benevolence has not cost him as much as the maintenance of a groom and gardener. But Redcastle cannot recognise these small charities. They judge a man as they judge his house, by the front which he presents to the world. They would recognise the groom and gardener as elements of social status. They smile gently at the idea of the three orphan nieces as a harmless eccentricity of that eccentric little man, Dr. Faunthorpe.

Happily Robert Faunthorpe, M.R.C.S., and Dr. by courtesy, is of all men the last to regret that social heaven to which he has never ascended. He sees Colonel and Mrs. Stormont, Dr. Mitsand, and Mr. and Mrs. Groshen revolving in their orbits as he sees the planets, and envies them no more. The idea that they do him any unkindness by not inviting him to their dinner parties, by not extending the hand of friendship to his fatherless nieces, never enters his mind. He is so simple-minded a little man that he is content to go his way and let other people go theirs.

An eccentric, evidently, as Redcastle opines.