Added to all this was a private rankling sore in regard to Goarly and Bearside. He had now learned nearly all the truth about Goarly, and had learned also that Bearside had known the whole when he had last visited that eminent lawyer’s office. Goarly had deserted his supporters and had turned evidence against Scrobby, his partner in iniquity. That Goarly was a rascal the Senator had acknowledged. So far the general opinion down in Rufford had been correct. But he could get nobody to see—or at any rate could get nobody to acknowledge—that the rascality of Goarly had had nothing to do with the question as he had taken it up. The man’s right to his own land—his right to be protected from pheasants and foxes, from horses and hounds—was not lessened by the fact that he was a poor ignorant squalid dishonest wretch. Mr. Gotobed had now received a bill from Bearside for £42 7s. 9d. for costs in the case, leaving after the deduction of £15 already paid a sum of £27 7s. 9d. stated to be still due. And this was accompanied by an intimation that as he, Mr. Gotobed, was a foreigner soon about to leave the country, Mr. Bearside must request that his claim might be settled quite at once. No one could be less likely than our Senator to leave a foreign country without paying his bills. He had quarrelled with Morton—who also at this time was too ill to have given him much assistance. Though he had become acquainted with half Dillsborough, there was nobody there to whom he could apply. Thus he was driven to employ a London attorney, and the London attorney told him that he had better pay Bearside;—the Senator remembering at the time that he would also have to pay the London attorney for his advice. He gave this second lawyer authority to conclude the matter, and at last Bearside accepted £20. When the London attorney refused to take anything for his trouble, the Senator felt such conduct almost as an additional grievance. In his existing frame of mind he would sooner have expended a few more dollars than be driven to think well of anything connected with English law.
It was immediately after he had handed over the money in liquidation of Bearside’s claim that he sat down to write a further letter to his friend and correspondent Josiah Scroome. His letter was not written in the best of tempers; but still, through it all, there was a desire to be just, and an anxiety to abstain from the use of hard phrases. The letter was as follows;—
Fenton’s Hotel, St. James’ Street, London,
Feb. 12, 187‒.My dear Sir,
Since I last wrote I have had much to trouble me and little perhaps to compensate me for my trouble. I told you, I think, in one of my former letters that wherever I went I found myself able to say what I pleased as to the peculiarities of this very peculiar people. I am not now going to contradict what I said then. Wherever I go I do speak out, and my eyes are still in my head and my head is on my shoulders. But I have to acknowledge to myself that I give offence. Mr. Morton, whom you knew at the British Embassy in Washington—and who I fear is now very ill—parted from me, when last I saw him, in anger because of certain opinions I had expressed in a clergyman’s house, not as being ill-founded but as being antagonistic to the clergyman himself. This I feel to be unreasonable. And in the neighbourhood of Mr. Morton’s house, I have encountered the ill will of a great many—not for having spoken untruth, for that I have never heard alleged—but because I have not been reticent in describing the things which I have seen.
I told you, I think, that I had returned to Mr. Morton’s neighbourhood with the view of defending an oppressed man against the power of the lord who was oppressing him. Unfortunately for me the lord, though a scapegrace, spends his money freely and is a hospitable kindly-hearted honest fellow; whereas the injured victim has turned out to be a wretched scoundrel. Scoundrel though he is, he has still been ill used; and the lord, though good-natured, has been a tyrant. But the poor wretch has thrown me over and sold himself to the other side and I have been held up to ignominy by all the provincial newspapers. I have also had to pay through the nose $175 for my quixotism—a sum which I cannot very well afford. This money I have lost solely with the view of