the price of ascertaining that he was not to sit in the next
parliament, without useless grumbling. But the disappointments of life can
never, any more than its pleasures, be estimated singly; and the healthiest and
most agreeable of men is exposed to that coincidence of various vexations, each
heightening the effect of the other, which may produce in him something
corresponding to the spontaneous and externally unaccountable moodiness of the
morbid and disagreeable.
    Harold might not have grieved much at a small riot in Treby, even if it had
caused some expenses to fall on the county; but the turn which the riot had
actually taken, was a bitter morsel for rumination, on more grounds than one.
However the disturbances had arisen and been aggravated - and probably no one
knew the whole truth on these points - the conspicuous, gravest incidents had
all tended to throw the blame on the Radical party, that is to say, on Transome
and on Transome's agents; and so far the candidateship and its results had done
Harold dishonour in the county: precisely the opposite effect to that which was
a dear object of his ambition. More than this, Harold's conscience was active
enough to be very unpleasantly affected by what had befallen Felix Holt. His
memory, always good, was particularly vivid in its retention of Felix Holt's
complaint to him about the treating of the Sproxton men, and of the subsequent
irritating scene in Jermyn's office when the personage with the inauspicious
name of Johnson had expounded to him the impossibility of revising an
electioneering scheme once begun, and of turning your vehicle back when it had
already begun to roll downhill. Remembering Felix Holt's words of indignant
warning about hiring men with drink in them to make a noise, Harold could not
resist the urgent impression that the offences for which Felix was committed
were fatalities, not brought about by any willing co-operation of his with the
rioters, but arising probably from some ill-judged efforts to counteract their
violence. And this impression, which insisted on growing into a conviction,
became in one of its phases an uneasy sense that he held evidence which would at
once tend to exonerate Felix, and to place himself and his agents in anything
but a desirable light. It was likely that some one else could give equivalent
evidence in favour of Felix - the little talkative Dissenting preacher, for
example; but, anyhow, the affair with the Sproxton men would be ripped open and
made the worst of by the opposite parties. The man who has failed in the use of
some indirectness, is helped very little by the fact that his