“No; I shall expect no dinner; only some food in the rough. You may boil that in the copper too if you like it.”
“You know, my dear, you don’t like anything boiled.”
“As for that, Molly, I don’t suppose any of them like it. They’d all prefer roast mutton.”
“The copper will be your two mites,” whispered the niece.
“Only I have not thrown them in of my own accord,” said Mrs. Granger.
Mr. Frew, who was living in Liverpool, always came over to Plumstock on Friday evening, and spent Saturday and Sunday with the rector and his family. For him those Saturdays were happy days, for Frederick F. Frew was a good lover. He liked to be with Nora, to walk with her, and to talk with her; he liked to show her that he loved her, and to make himself gracious and pleasant. I am not so sure that his coming was equally agreeable to Mr. Granger. Mr. Frew would talk about American politics, praising the feeling and spirit of his countrymen in the North; whereas Mr. Granger, when driven into the subject, was constrained to make a battle for the South. All his prejudices, and what he would have called his judgment, went with the South, and he was not ashamed of his opinion; but he disliked arguing with Frederic F. Frew. I fear it must be confessed that Frederic F. Frew was too strong for him in such arguments. Why it should be so I cannot say; but an American argues more closely on politics than does an Englishman. His convictions are not the truer on that account; very often the less true, as are the conclusions of a logician, because he trusts to syllogisms which are often false, instead of to the experience of his life and daily workings of his mind. But though not more true in his political convictions than an Englishman, he is more unanswerable, and therefore Mr. Granger did not care to discuss the subject of the American war with Frederic F. Frew.
“It riles me,” Frew said, as he sat after dinner in the Plumstock drawing-room on the Friday evening before Christmas Day, “to hear your folks talking of our elections. They think the war will come to an end, and the rebels of the South have their own way, because the Democrats have carried their ticket.”
“It will have that tendency,” said the parson.
“Not an inch; any more than your carrying the Reform Bill or repealing the Corn Laws had a tendency to put down the throne. It’s the same sort of argument. Your two parties were at daggers drawn about the Reform Bill; but that did not cause you to split on all other matters.”
“But the throne wasn’t in question,” said the parson.
“Nor is the war in question; not in that way. The most popular Democrat in the States at this moment is McClellan.”
“And they say no one is so anxious to see the war ended.”
“Whoever says so slanders him. If you don’t trust his deeds, look at his words.”
“I believe in neither,” said the parson.
“Then put him aside as a nobody. But you can’t do that, for he is the man whom the largest party in the Northern States trusts most implicitly. The fact is, Sir,” and Frederic F. Frew gave the proper twang to the last letter of the last word, “you, none of you here, understand our politics. You can’t realise the blessing of a—”
“Molly, give me some tea,” said the rector in a loud voice. When matters went as far as this he did not care by what means he stopped the voice of his future relative.
“All I say is this,” continued Frew, “you will find out your mistake if you trust to the Democratic elections to put an end to the war, and bring cotton back to Liverpool.”
“And what is to put an end to the war?” asked Nora.
“Victory and union,” said Frederic F. Frew.
“Exhaustion,” said Charley, from Oxford.
“Compromise,” said Bobby, from Liverpool.
“The Lord Almighty, when He shall have done His work,” said the parson. “And, in the meantime, Molly, do you keep plenty of fire under the kitchen boiler.”
That was clearly the business of the present hour, for all in Mr. Granger’s part of the country;—we may say, indeed, for all on Mr. Granger’s side of the water. It mattered little, then, in Lancashire, whether New York might have a Democratic or a Republican governor. The old cotton had been burned; the present crop could not be garnered; the future crop—the crop which never would be future, could not get itself sown.
Mr. Granger might be a slow politician, but he was a practical man, understanding the things immediately around him; and they all were aware, Frederic F. Frew with the rest of them, that he was right when he bade his wife keep the fire well hot beneath the kitchen boiler.
“Isn’t it almost wicked to be married in such a time as this?” It was much later in the evening when Nora, still troubled in her mind about her widow’s mite, whispered these words into her lover’s ears. If she were to give up her lover for twelve months, would not that be a throwing in of something to the treasury from off her own back and out of her own mouth? But then this matter of her marriage had been so fully settled that she feared to think of disturbing it. He would never consent to such a postponement. And then the offering, to be of avail for her, must be taken from her own back, not from his; and Nora had an idea that in the making of such an offering as that suggested, Mr. Frederic F. Frew would conceive
