Chippinge Borough

BY

STANLEY J. WEYMAN

Author of “The Long Night,” Etc.

NEW YORK
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.
MCMVI

Copyright, 1906, by
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.

Copyright, 1905, 1905, by Stanley J. Weyman.

CHIPPINGE BOROUGH

I
THE DISSOLUTION

Boom!

It was April 22, 1831, and a young man was walking down Whitehall in the direction of Parliament Street. He wore shepherd’s plaid trousers and the swallow-tail coat of the day, with a figured muslin cravat wound about his wide-spread collar. He halted opposite the Privy Gardens, and, with his face turned skywards, listened until the sound of the Tower guns smote again on the ear and dispelled his doubts. To the experienced, his outward man, neat and modestly prosperous, denoted a young barrister of promise or a Treasury clerk. His figure was good, he was above the middle height, and he carried himself with an easy independence. He seemed to be one who both held a fair opinion of himself and knew how to impress that opinion on his fellows; yet was not incapable of deference where deference was plainly due. He was neither ugly nor handsome, neither slovenly nor a petit-maître; indeed, it was doubtful if he had ever seen the inside of Almack’s. But his features were strong and intellectual, and the keen grey eyes which looked so boldly on the world could express both humour and good humour. In a word, this young man was one upon whom women, even great ladies, were likely to look with pleasure, and one woman—but he had not yet met her—with tenderness.

Boom!

He was only one among a dozen, who within the space of a few yards had been brought to a stand by the sound; who knew what the salute meant, and in their various ways were moved by it. The rumour which had flown through the town in the morning that the King was about to dissolve his six-months-old Parliament was true, then! so true that already in the clubs, from Boodle’s to Brooks’s, men were sending off despatches, while the long arms of the semaphore were carrying the news to the Continent. Persons began to run by Vaughan—the young man’s name was Arthur Vaughan; and behind him the street was filling with a multitude hastening to see the sight, or so much of it as the vulgar might see. Some ran towards Westminster without disguise. Some, of a higher station, walked as fast as dignity and their strapped trousers permitted; while others again, who thought themselves wiser than their neighbours, made quickly for Downing Street and the different openings which led into St. James’s Park, in the hope of catching a glimpse of the procession before the crowd about the Houses engulfed it.

Nine out of ten, as they ran or walked—nay, it might be said more truly, ninety-nine out of a hundred—evinced a joy quite out of the common, and such as no political event of these days produces. One cried, “Hip! Hip! Hip!”; one flung up his cap; one swore gaily. Strangers told one another that it was a good thing, bravely done! And while the whole of that part of the town seemed to be moving towards the Houses, the guns boomed on, proclaiming to all the world that the unexpected had happened; that the Parliament which had passed the People’s Bill by one—a miserable one in the largest House which had ever voted—and having done that, had shelved it by some shift, some subterfuge, was meeting the fate which it deserved.

No man, be it noted, called the measure the Reform Bill, or anything but the Bill, or, affectionately, the People’s Bill. But they called it that repeatedly, and in their enthusiasm, exulted in the fall of its enemies as in a personal gain. And though here and there amid the general turmoil a man of mature age stood aside and scowled on the crowd as it swept vociferating by him, such men were but as straws in a backwater of the stream—powerless to arrest the current, and liable at any moment to be swept within its influence.

That generation had seen many a coach start laurel-clad from St. Martin’s and listened many a time to the salvoes that told of victories in France or Flanders. But it was no exaggeration to say that even Waterloo had not flung abroad more general joy, nor sown the dingy streets with brighter faces, than this civil gain. For now—now, surely—the People’s Bill would pass, and the people be truly represented in Parliament! Now, for certain, the Bill’s ill-wishers would get a fall! And if every man—about which some doubts were whispered even in the public-houses—did not get a vote which he could sell for a handful of gold, as his betters had sold their votes time out of mind, at least there would be beef and beer for all! Or, if not that, something indefinite, but vastly pleasant. Few, indeed, knew precisely what they wished and what they were going to gain, but

Hurrah for Mr. Brougham!
Hurrah for Gaffer Grey!
Hurrah for Lord John!

Hurrah, in a word, for the Ministry, hurrah for the Whigs! And above all, three cheers for the King, who had stood by Lord Grey and dissolved this niggling, hypocritical Parliament of landowners.

Meanwhile the young man who has been described resumed his course; but slowly, and without betraying by any marked sign that he shared the general feeling. Still, he walked with his head a little higher than before; he seemed to sniff the battle; and there was a light in his eyes as if he saw a wider arena before him. “It is true, then,” he muttered. “And for to-day I shall have my errand for my pains. He will have other fish to fry, and will not see me. But what of that! Another day will do as well.”

At this moment a ragamuffin in an old jockey-cap attached himself to him, and, running beside him, urged him to hasten.

“Run, your honour,” he croaked in gin-laden accents, “and you’ll ’ave a good place! And I’ll drink your honour’s health, and Billy the King’s! Sure he’s the father of his country, and seven besides. Come on, your honour, or they’ll be jostling you!”

Vaughan glanced down and shook his head. He waved the man away.

But the lout looked only to his market, and was not easily repulsed. “He’s there, I tell you,” he persisted. “And for threepence I’ll get you to see him. Come on, your honour! It’s many a Westminster election I’ve seen, and beer running, from Mr. Fox, that was the gentleman had always a word for the poor man, till now, when maybe it’s your honour’s going to stand! Anyway, it’s, Down with the mongers!”

A man who was clinging to the wall at the corner of Downing Street waved his broken hat round his head. “Ay, down with the borough-mongers!” he cried. “Down with Peel! Down with the Dook! Down with ’em all! Down with everybody!”

“And long live the Bill!” cried a man of more respectable appearance as he hurried by. “And long live the King, God bless him!”

“They’ll know what it is to balk the people now,” chimed in a fourth. “Let ’em go back and get elected if they can. Ay, let ’em!”

“Ay, let ’em! Mr. Brougham’ll see to that!” shouted the other. “Hurrah for Mr. Brougham!”

The cry was taken up by the crowd, and three cheers were given for the Chancellor, who was so well known to the mob by the style under which he had been triumphantly elected for Yorkshire that his peerage was ignored.

Vaughan, however, heard but the echo of these cheers. Like most young men of his time, he leant to the popular side. But he had no taste for the populace in the mass; and the sight of the crowd, which was fast occupying the whole of the space before Palace Yard and even surging back into Parliament Street, determined him to turn aside. He shook off his attendant and, crossing into Whitehall Place, walked up and down, immersed in his reflections.

He was honestly ambitious, and his thoughts turned naturally on the influence which this Bill—which must create a new England, and for many a new world—was likely to have on his own fortunes. The owner of a small estate in South Wales, come early to his inheritance, he had sickened of the idle life of an officer in peacetime; and after three years of service, believing himself fit for something higher, he had sold his commission and turned his mind to intellectual pursuits. He hoped that he had a bent that way; and the glory of the immortal three, who thirty years before had founded the “Edinburgh Review,” and, by so doing, made this day possible, attracted him. Why should not he, as well as another, be the man who, in the Commons, the cockpit of the nation, stood spurred to meet all comers—in an uproar which could almost be heard where he walked? Or the man who, in the lists of Themis, upheld the right of the widow and the poor man’s cause, and to whom judges listened with reluctant admiration? Or best of all, highest of all, might he not vie with that abnormal and remarkable man who wore at once the three crowns, and whether as Edinburgh Reviewer, as knight of the shire for York, or as Chancellor of England, played his part with equal ease? To be brief, it was prizes such as these, distant but luminous, that held his eyes, incited him to effort, made him live laborious days. He believed that he had ability, and though he came late to the strife, he brought his experience. If men living from hand to mouth and distracted by household cares could achieve so much, why should not he who had his independence and his place in the world? Had not Erskine been such another? He, too, had sickened of barrack life. And Brougham and the two Scotts, Eldon and Stowell. To say nothing of this young Macaulay, whose name was beginning to run through every mouth; and of a dozen others who had risen to fame from a lower and less advantageous station.

The goal was distant, but it was glorious. Nor had the eighteen months which he had given to the study of the law, to attendance at the Academic and at a less ambitious debating society, and to the output of some scientific feelers, shaken his faith in himself. He had not yet thought of a seat at St. Stephen’s; for no nomination had fallen to him, nor, save from one quarter, was likely to fall. And his income, some six hundred a year, though it was ample for a bachelor, would not stretch to the price of a seat at five thousand for the Parliament, or fifteen hundred for the Session—the quotations which had ruled of late. A seat some time, however, he must have; it was a necessary stepping-stone to the heights he would gain. And the subject in his mind as he paced Whitehall Place was the abolition of the close boroughs and the effect which the transfer of electoral power to the middle-class would have on his chances.

A small thing—no more than a quantity of straw laid thickly before one of the houses—brought his thoughts down to the present. By a natural impulse he raised his eyes to the house; by a coincidence, less natural, a hand, even as he looked, showed itself behind one of the panes of a window on the first floor, and drew down the blind. Vaughan stood after that, fascinated, and watched the lowering of blind after blind. And the solemn contrast between his busy thoughts and that which had even then happened in the house—between that which lay behind the darkened windows and the bright April sunshine about him, the twittering of the sparrows in the green, and the tumult of distant cheering—went home to him.

He thought of the lines, so old and so applicable:

Omnes eodem cogimur, omnium
Versatur urna, serius, ocius,

Sors exitura, et nos in æternum

Exilium impositura cymbæ.

He was still rolling the words on his tongue with that love of the classical rhythm which was a mark of his day—and returns no more than the taste for the prize-ring which was coeval with it—when the door of the house opened and a man came clumsily and heavily out, closed the door behind him, and, with his head bent low and the ungainly movements of an automaton, made off down the street.

The man was very stout as well as tall, his dress slovenly and disordered. His hat was pulled awry over his eyes, and his hands were plunged deep in his breeches pockets. Vaughan saw so much. Then the door opened again, and a face, unmistakably that of a butler, looked out.

The servant’s eyes met his, and though the man neither spoke nor beckoned, his eyes spoke for him. Vaughan crossed the way to him. “What is it?” he asked.

The man was blubbering. “Oh, Lord; oh, Lord!” he said. “My lady’s gone not five minutes, and he’ll not be let nor hindered! He’s to the House, and if the crowd set upon him he’ll be murdered. For God’s sake, follow him, sir! He’s Sir Charles Wetherell, and a better master never walked, let them say what they like. If there’s anybody with him, maybe they’ll not touch him.”

“I will follow him,” Vaughan answered. And he hastened after the stout man, who had by this time reached the corner of the street.

Vaughan was surprised that he had not recognised Wetherell. For in every bookseller’s window caricatures of the “Last of the Boroughbridges,” as the wits called him, after the pocket borough for which he sat, were plentiful as blackberries. Not only was he the highest of Tories, but he was a martyr in their cause; for, Attorney-General in the last Government, he had been dismissed for resisting the Catholic Claims. Since then he had proved himself, of all the opponents of the Bill, the most violent, the most witty, and, with the exception of Croker perhaps, the most rancorous. At this date he passed for the best hated man in England; and representative to the public mind of all that was old-fashioned and illiberal and exclusive. Vaughan knew, therefore, that the servant’s fears were not unfounded, and with a heart full of pity—for he remembered the darkened house—he made after him.

By this time Sir Charles was some way ahead and already involved in the crowd. Fortunately the throng was densest opposite Old Palace Yard, whence the King was in the act of departing; and the space before the Hall and before St. Stephen’s Court—the buildings about which abutted on the river—though occupied by a loosely moving multitude, and presenting a scene of the utmost animation, was not impassable. Sir Charles was in the heart of the crowd before he was recognised; and then his stolid unconsciousness and the general good-humour, born of victory, served him well. He was too familiar a figure to pass altogether unknown; and here and there a man hissed him. One group turned and hooted after him. But he was within a dozen yards of the entrance of St. Stephen’s Court, with Vaughan on his heels, before any violence was offered. There a man whom he happened to jostle recognised him and, bawling abuse, pushed him rudely; and the act might well have been the beginning of worse things. But Vaughan touched the man on the shoulder and looked him in the face. “I shall know you,” he said quietly. “Have a care!” And the fellow, intimidated by his words and his six feet of height, shrank into himself and stood back.

Wetherell had barely noticed the rudeness. But he noted the intervention by a backward glance. “Much obliged,” he grunted. “Know you, too, again, young gentleman.” And he went heavily on and passed out of the crowd into the court, followed by a few scattered hisses.

Behind the officers of the House who guarded the entrance a group of excited talkers were gathered. They were chiefly members who had just left the House and had been brought to a stand by the sight of the crowd. On seeing Wetherell, surprise altered their looks. “Good G—d!” cried one, stepping forward. “You’ve come down, Wetherell?”

“Ay,” the stricken man answered without lifting his eyes or giving the least sign of animation. “Is it too late?”

“By an hour. There’s nothing to be done. Grey and Bruffam have got the King body and soul. He was so determined to dissolve, he swore that he’d come down in a hackney-coach rather than not come. So they say!”

“Ay!”

“But I hope,” a second struck in, in a tone of solicitude, “that as you are here, Lady Wetherell has rallied.”

“She died a quarter of an hour ago,” he muttered. “I could do no more. I came here. But as I am too late, I’ll go back.”

Yet he stood awhile, as if he had no longer anything to draw him one way more than another; with his double chin and pendulous cheeks resting on his breast and his leaden eyes sunk to the level of the pavement. And the others stood round him with shocked faces, from which his words and manner had driven the flush of the combat. Presently two members, arguing loudly, came up, and were silenced by a glance and a muttered word. The ungainly attitude, the ill-fitting clothes, did but accentuate the tragedy of the central figure. They knew—none better—how fiercely, how keenly, how doggedly he had struggled against death, against the Bill.

And yet, had they thought of it, the vulgar caricatures that had hurt her, the abuse that had passed him by to lodge in her bosom, would hurt her no more!

Meanwhile, Vaughan, as soon as he had seen Sir Charles within the entrance reserved for members, had betaken himself to the main door of the Hall, a few paces to the westward. He had no hope that he would now be able to perform the errand on which he had set forth; for the Chancellor, for certain, would have other fish to fry and other people to see. But he thought that he would leave a card with the usher, so that Lord Brougham might know that he had not failed to come, and might make a fresh appointment if he still wished to see him.

Of the vast congeries of buildings which then encased St. Stephen’s Chapel and its beautiful but degraded cloisters, little more than the Hall is left to us. The Hall we have, and in the main in the condition in which the men of that generation viewed it; as Canning viewed it, when with death in his face he paced its length on Peel’s arm, and suspecting, perhaps, that they two would meet no more, proved to all men the good-will he bore his rival. Those among us whose memories go back a quarter of a century, and who can recall its aspect in term-time, with three score barristers parading its length, and thrice as many suitors and attorneys darting over its pavement—all under the lofty roof which has no rival in Europe—will be able to picture it as Vaughan saw it when he entered. To the bustle attending the courts of law was added on this occasion the supreme excitement of the day. In every corner, on the steps of every court, eager groups wrangled and debated; while above the hubbub of argument and the trampling of feet, the voices of ushers rose monotonously, calling a witness or enjoining order.

Vaughan paused beside the cake-stall at the door and surveyed the scene. As he stood, one of two men who were pacing near saw him, and with a whispered word left his companion and came towards him.

“Mr. Vaughan,” he said, extending his hand with bland courtesy, “I hope you are well. Can I do anything for you? We are dissolved, but a frank is a frank for all that—to-day.”

“No, I thank you,” Vaughan answered. “The truth is, I had an appointment with the Chancellor for this afternoon. But I suppose he will not see me now.”

The other’s eyebrows met, with the result that his face looked less bland. He was a small man, with keen dark eyes and bushy grey whiskers, and an air of hawk-like energy which sixty years had not tamed. He wore the laced coat of a sergeant at law, powdered on the shoulders, as if he had but lately and hurriedly cast off his wig. “Good G—d!” he said. “With the Chancellor!” And then, pulling himself up, “But I congratulate you. A student at the Bar, as I believe you are, Mr. Vaughan, who has appointments with the Chancellor, has fortune indeed within his grasp.”

Vaughan laughed. “I fear not,” he said. “There are appointments and appointments, Sergeant Wathen. Mine is not of a professional nature.”

Still the sergeant’s face, do what he would, looked grim. He had his reasons for disliking what he heard. “Indeed!” he said drily. “Indeed! But I must not detain you. Your time,” with a faint note of sarcasm, “is valuable.” And with a civil salutation the two parted.

Wathen went back to his companion. “Talk of the Old One!” he said. “Do you know who that is?”

“No,” the other answered. They had been discussing the coming election. “Who is it?”

“One of my constituents.”

His friend laughed. “Oh, come,” he said. “I thought you had but one, sergeant—old Vermuyden.”

“Only one,” Wathen answered, his eyes travelling from group to group, “who counts; or rather, who did count. But thirteen who poll. And that’s one of them.” He glanced frowning in the direction which Vaughan had taken. “And what do you think his business is here, confound him?”

“What?”

“An appointment with old Wicked Shifts.”

“With the Chancellor? Pheugh!”

“Ay,” the sergeant answered morosely, “you may whistle. There’s some black business on foot, you may depend upon it. And ten to one it’s about my seat. He’s a broom,” he continued, tugging at the whiskers which the late King had stamped with the imprimatur of fashion, “that will make a clean sweep of us if we don’t take care. Whatever he does, there’s something behind it. Some bedchamber plot, or some intrigue to get A. out and put B. in. If it was a charwoman’s place he wanted, he’d not ask for it and get it. That wouldn’t please him. But he’d tunnel and tunnel and tunnel—and so he’d get it.”

“Still,” the other replied, with secret amusement—for he had no seat, and the woes of our friends, especially our better-placed friends, have their comic side—“I thought that you had a safe thing, Wathen? That old Vermuyden’s nomination at Chippinge was as good as an order on the Bank of England?”

“It was,” Wathen answered drily. “But with the country wild for the Bill, there’s no saying what may happen anywhere. Safe!” he continued, with a snarl. “Was there ever a safer seat than Westbury? Or a man who had a place in better order than old Lopes, who owned it, and died last month; taken from the evil to come, Jekyll said, for he never could have existed in a world without rotten boroughs! It’s not far from Chippinge, so I know—know it well. And I tell you his system was beautiful—beautiful! Yet when Peel was there—after he had rattled on the Catholic Claims and been thrown out at Oxford, Lopes made way for him, you remember?—he would not have got in, no, by G—d, he wouldn’t have got in if there had been a man against him. And the state in which the country was then, though there was a bit of a Protestant cry, too, wasn’t to compare with what it will be now. That man”—he shook his fist stealthily in the direction of the Chancellor’s Court—“has lighted a fire in England that will never be put out till it has consumed King, Lords, and Commons—ay, every stick and stone of the old Constitution. You take my word for it. And to think—to think,” he added still more savagely, “that it is the Whigs have done this. The Whigs! who own more than half the land in the country; who are prouder and stiffer than old George the Third himself; who wouldn’t let you nor me into their Cabinet to save our lives. By the Lord,” he concluded with gusto, “they’ll soon learn the difference!”

“In the meantime—there’ll be dead cats and bad eggs flying, you think?”

Wathen groaned. “If that were the end of it,” he said, “I’d not mind.”

“Still, with it all, you are pretty safe, I suppose?”

“With that fellow closeted with the Chancellor? No, no!”

“Who is the young spark!” the other asked carelessly. “He looked a decentish kind of fellow. A little of the prig, perhaps.”

“He’s that!” Wathen answered. “A d——d prig. What’s more, a cousin of old Vermuyden’s. And what’s worse, his heir. That’s why they put him in the corporation and made him one of the thirteen. Thought the vote safe in the family, you see? And cheaper?” He winked. “But there’s no love lost between him and old Sir Robert. A bed for a night once a year, and one day in the season among the turnips, and glad to see your back, my lad! That’s about the position. Now I wonder if Brougham is going to try—but Lord! there’s no guessing what is in that man’s head! He’s fuller of mischief than an egg of meat!”

The other was about to answer when one of the courts, in which a case of some difficulty had caused a late sitting, discharged its noisy, wrangling, perspiring crowd. The two stepped aside to avoid the evasion, and did not resume their talk. Wathen’s friend made his way out by the main door near which they had been standing; while the sergeant, with looks which mirrored the gloom that a hundred Tory faces wore on that day, betook himself to the robing-room. There he happened upon another unfortunate. They fell to talking, and their talk ran naturally upon the Chancellor, upon old Grey’s folly in letting himself be led by the nose by such a rogue; finally, upon the mistakes of their own party. They differed on the last topic, and in that natural and customary state we may leave them.

II
THE SPIRIT OF THE STORM

The Court of Chancery, the preserve for nearly a quarter of a century of Eldon and Delay, was the farthest from the entrance on the right-hand side of the Hall—a situation which enabled the Chancellor to pass easily to that other seat of his labours, the Woolsack. Two steps raised the Tribunals of the Common Law above the level of the Hall. But as if to indicate that this court was not the seat of anything so common as law, but was the shrine of that more august conception, Patronage, and the altar to which countless divines of the Church of England looked with unwinking devotion, a flight of six or eight steps led up to the door.

The privacy thus secured had been much to the taste of Lord Eldon. Doubt and delay flourish best in a close and dusty atmosphere; and if ever there was a man to whom that which was was right, it was “Old Bags.” Nor had Lord Lyndhurst, his immediate successor, quarrelled with an arrangement which left him at liberty to devote his time to society and his beautiful wife. But the man who now sat in the marble chair was of another kind from either of these. His worst enemy could not lay dulness to his charge; nor could he who lectured the Whitbreads on brewing, who explained their art to opticians, who vied with Talleyrand in the knowledge of French literature, who wrote eighty articles for the first twenty numbers of the “Edinburgh Review,” be called a sluggard. Confident of his powers, Brougham loved to display them; and the wider the arena the better he was pleased. His first sitting had been graced by the presence of three royal dukes, a whole Cabinet, and a score of peers in full dress. Having begun thus auspiciously, he was not the man to vegetate in the gloom of a dry-as-dust court, or to be content with an audience of suitors, whom equity, blessed word, had long stripped of their votes.

Again and again during the last six months, by brilliant declamations or by astounding statement, he had filled his court to the last inch. The lions in the Tower, the tombs in the Abbey, the New Police—all were deserted; and countryfolk flocked to Westminster, not to hear the judgments of the highest legal authority in the land, but to see with their own eyes the fugleman of reform—the great orator, whose voice, raised at the Yorkshire election, had found an echo that still thundered in the ears and the hearts of England.

“I am for Reform!” he had said in the castle yard of York; and the people of England had answered: “So are we; and we will have it, or——”

The lacuna they had filled, not with words, but with facts stronger than words—with the flames of Kentish farmhouses and Wiltshire factories; with political unions counting their numbers by scores of thousands; with midnight drillings and vague and sullen murmurings; above all, with the mysterious terror of some great change which was to come—a terror that shook the most thoughtless and affected even the Duke, as men called the Duke of Wellington in that day. For was not every crown on the Continent toppling?

Vaughan did not suppose that, in view of the startling event of the day, he would be admitted. But the usher, who occupied a high stool outside the great man’s door, no sooner read his card than he slid to the ground. “I think his lordship will see you, sir,” he murmured blandly; and he disappeared.

He was back on the instant, and, beckoning to Vaughan to follow him, he proceeded some paces along a murky corridor, which the venerable form of Eldon seemed still to haunt. Opening a door, he stood aside.

The room which Vaughan saw before him was stately and spacious, and furnished with quiet richness. A deep silence, intensified by the fact that the room had no windows, but was lighted from above, reigned in it—and a smell of law-calf. Here and there on a bookcase or a pedestal stood a marble bust of Bacon, of Selden, of Blackstone. And for a moment Vaughan fancied that these were its only occupants. On advancing further, however, he discovered two persons, who were writing busily at separate side-tables; and one of them looked up and spoke.

“Your pardon, Mr. Vaughan!” he said. “One moment, if you please!”

He was almost as good as his word, for less than a minute later he threw down the pen, and rose—a gaunt figure in a black frockcoat, and with a black stock about his scraggy neck—and came to meet his visitor.

“I fear that I have come at an untimely moment, my lord,” Vaughan said, a little awed in spite of himself by what he knew of the man.

But the other’s frank address put him at once at his ease. “Politics pass, Mr. Vaughan,” the Chancellor answered lightly, “but science remains.” He did not explain, as he pointed to a seat, that he loved, above all things, to produce startling effects; to dazzle by the ease with which he flung off one part and assumed another.

Henry Brougham—so, for some time after his elevation to the peerage, he persisted in signing himself—was at this time at the zenith of his life, as of his fame. Tall, but lean and ungainly, with a long neck and sloping shoulders, he had one of the strangest faces which genius has ever worn. His clownish features, his high cheek-bones, and queer bulbous nose are familiar to us; for, something exaggerated by the caricaturist, they form week by week the trailing mask which mars the cover of “Punch.” Yet was the face, with all its ugliness, singularly mobile; and the eyes, the windows of that restless and insatiable soul, shone, sparkled, laughed, wept, with incredible brilliance. That which he did not know, that which his mind could not perform—save sit still and be discreet—no man had ever discovered. And it was the knowledge of this, the sense of the strange and almost uncanny versatility of the man, which for a moment overpowered Vaughan.

The Chancellor seated himself opposite his visitor, and placed a hand on each of his wide-spread knees. He smiled.

“My friend,” he said, “I envy you.”

Vaughan coloured shyly. “Your lordship has little cause,” he answered.

“Great cause,” was the reply, “great cause! For as you are I was—and,” he chuckled, as he rocked himself to and fro, “I have not found life very empty or very unpleasant. But it was not to tell you this that I asked you to wait on me, Mr. Vaughan, as you may suppose. Light! It is a singular thing that you at the outset of your career—even as I thirty years ago at the same point of mine—should take up such a parergon, and alight upon the same discovery.”

“I do not think I understand.”

“In your article on the possibility of the permanence of reflection—to which I referred in my letter, I think?”

“Yes, my lord, you did.”

“You have restated a fact which I maintained for the first time more than thirty years ago! In my paper on colours, read before the Royal Society in—I think it was ’96.”

Vaughan stared. His colour rose slowly. “Indeed?” he said, in a tone from which he vainly strove to banish incredulity.

“You have perhaps read the paper?”

“Yes, I have.”

The Chancellor chuckled. “And found nothing of the kind in it?” he said.

Vaughan coloured still more deeply. He felt that the position was unpleasant. “Frankly, my lord, if you ask me, no.”

“And you think yourself,” with a grin, “the first discoverer?”

“I did.”

Brougham sprang like a boy to his feet, and whisked his long, lank body to a distant bookshelf. Thence he took down a much-rubbed manuscript book. As he returned he opened this at a place already marked, and, laying it on the table, beckoned to the young man to approach. “Read that,” he said waggishly, “and confess, young sir, that there were chiefs before Agamemnon.”

Vaughan stooped over the book, and having read looked up in perplexity. “But this passage,” he said, “was not in the paper read before the Royal Society in ’96?”

“In the paper read? No. Nor yet in the paper printed? There, too, you are right. And why? Because a sapient dunder-head who was in authority requested me to omit this passage. He did not believe that light passing through a small hole in the window-shutter of a darkened room impresses a view of external objects on white paper; nor that, as I suggested, the view might be made permanent if cast instead on ivory rubbed with nitrate of silver!”

Vaughan was dumbfounded, and perhaps a little chagrined. “It is most singular!” he said.

“Do you wonder now that I could not refrain from sending for you?”

“I do not, indeed.”

The Chancellor patted him kindly on the shoulder, and by a gesture made him resume his seat. “No, I could not refrain,” he continued; “the coincidence was too remarkable. If you come to sit where I sit, the chance will be still more singular.”

Vaughan coloured with pleasure. “Alas!” he said, smiling, “one swallow, my lord, does not made a summer.”

“Ah, my friend,” with a benevolent look. “But I know more of you than you think. You were in the service, I hear, and left it. Cedant arma togæ, eh?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I, too, after a fashion. Thirty years ago I served a gun with Professor Playfair in the Volunteer Artillery of Edinburgh. God knows,” he continued complacently, “if I had gone on with it, where I should have landed! Where the Duke is, perhaps! More surprising things have happened.”

Vaughan did not know whether to take this, which was gravely and even sentimentally spoken, for jest or earnest. He did not speak. And Brougham, seated in his favourite posture, with a hand on either knee, his lean body upright, and the skirts of his black coat falling to the floor on either side of him, resumed. “I hear, too, that you have done well at the Academic,” he said, “and on the right side, Mr. Vaughan. Light? Ay, always light, my friend, always light! Let that be our motto. For myself,” he continued earnestly, “I have taken it in hand that this poor country shall never lack light again; and by God’s help and Johnny Russell’s Bill I’ll bring it about! And not the phosphorescent light of rotten boroughs and corrupt corporations, Mr. Vaughan. No, nor the blaze of burning stacks, kindled by wretched, starving, ignorant—ay, above all, Mr. Vaughan, ignorant men! But the light of education, the light of a free Press, the light of good government and honest representation; so that, whatever they lack, henceforth they shall have voices and means and ways to make their wants known. You agree with me? But I know you do, for I hear how well you have spoken on that side. Mr. Cornelius,” turning and addressing the gentleman who still continued to write at his table, “who was it told us of Mr. Vaughan’s speech at the Academic?”

“I don’t know,” Mr. Cornelius answered gruffly.

“No?” the Chancellor said, not a whit put out. “He never knows anything!” And then, throwing one knee over the other, he regarded Vaughan with closer attention. “Mr. Vaughan,” he said, “have you ever thought of entering Parliament?”

Vaughan’s heart bounded, and his face betrayed his emotions. Good heavens, was the Chancellor about to offer him a Government seat? He scarcely knew what to expect or what to say. The prospect, suddenly opened, blinded him. He muttered that he had not as yet thought of it.

“You have no connection,” Brougham continued, “who could help you to a seat? For if so, now is the time. Presently there will be a Reformed Parliament and a crowd of new men, and the road will be blocked by the throng of aspirants. You are not too young. Palmerston was not so old when Perceval offered him a seat in the Cabinet.”

The words, the tone, the assumption that such things were for him—that he had but to hold out his hand and they would fall into it—dropped like balm into the young man’s soul. Yet he was not sure that the other was serious, and he made a tremendous effort to hide the emotion he felt. “I am afraid,” he said, with a forced smile, “that I, my lord, am not Lord Palmerston.”

“No?” Brougham answered with a faint sneer. “But not much the worse for that, perhaps. So that if you have any connection who commands a seat, now is the time.”

Vaughan shook his head. “I have none,” he said, “except my cousin, Sir Robert Vermuyden.”

“Vermuyden of Chippinge?” the Chancellor exclaimed, in a voice of surprise.

“The same, my lord.”

“Good G—d!” Brougham cried. It was not a mealy-mouthed age. And he leant back and stared at the young man. “You don’t mean to say that he is your cousin?”

“Yes.”

The Chancellor laughed grimly. “Oh, dear, dear!” he said. “I am afraid that he won’t help us much. I remember him in the House—an old high and dry Tory. I am afraid that, with your opinions, you’ve not much to expect of him. Still—Mr. Cornelius,” to the gentleman at the table, “oblige me with Oldfield’s ‘House of Commons,’ the Wiltshire volume, and the private Borough List. Thank you. Let me see—ah, here it is!”

He proceeded to read in a low tone, skipping from heading to heading: “Chippinge, in the county of Wilts, has returned two members since the twenty-third of Edward III. Right of election in the Alderman and the twelve capital burgesses, who hold their places for life. Number of voters, thirteen. Patron, Sir Robert Vermuyden, Bart., of Stapylton House.

“Umph, as I thought,” he continued, laying down the book. “Now what does the list say?” And, taking it in turn from his knee, he read:

“In Schedule A for total disfranchisement, the population under 2000. Present members, Sergeant Wathen and Mr. Cooke, on nomination of Sir Robert Vermuyden; the former to oblige Lord Eldon, the latter by purchase. Both opponents of Bill; nothing to be hoped from them. The Bowood interest divides the corporation in the proportion of four to nine, but has not succeeded in returning a member since the election of 1741—on petition. The heir to the Vermuyden interest is——” He broke off sharply, but continued to study the page. Presently he looked over it.

“Are you the Mr. Vaughan who inherits?” he asked gravely.

“The greater part of the estates—yes.”

Brougham laid down the book and rubbed his chin. “Under those circumstances,” he said, after musing a while, “don’t you think that your cousin could be persuaded to return you as an independent member?”

Vaughan shook his head with decision.

“The matter is important,” the Chancellor continued slowly, and as if he weighed his words. “I cannot precisely make a promise, Mr. Vaughan; but if your cousin could see the question of the Bill in another light, I have little doubt that any object in reason could be secured for him. If, for instance, it should be necessary in passing the Bill through the Upper House to create new—eh?”

He paused, looking at Vaughan, who laughed outright. “Sir Robert would not cross the park to save my life, my lord,” he said. “And I am sure he would rather hang outside the White Lion in Chippinge marketplace than resign his opinions or his borough!”

“He’ll lose the latter, whether or no,” Brougham answered, with a touch of irritation. “Was there not some trouble about his wife? I think I remember something.”

“They were separated many years ago.”

“She is alive, is she not?”

“Yes.”

Brougham saw, perhaps, that the subject was not palatable, and he abandoned it. With an abrupt change of manner he flung the books from him with the recklessness of a boy, and raised his sombre figure to its height. “Well, well,” he said, “I hoped for better things; but I fear, as Tommy Moore sings—

“He’s pledged himself, though sore bereft

Of ways and means of ruling ill,

To make the most of what are left

And stick to all that’s rotten still!

And by the Lord, I don’t say that I don’t respect him. I respect every man who votes honestly as he thinks.” And grandly, with appropriate gestures, he spouted:

“Who spurns the expedient for the right

Scorns money’s all-attractive charms,

And through mean crowds that clogged his flight

Has nobly cleared his conquering arms.

That’s the Attorney-General’s. He turns old Horace well, doesn’t he?”

Vaughan coloured. Young and candid, he could not bear the thought of taking credit where he did not deserve it. “I fear,” he said awkwardly, “that would bear rather hardly on me if we had a contest at Chippinge, my lord. Fortunately it is unlikely.”

“How would it bear hardly on you?” Brougham asked, with interest.

“I have a vote.”

“You are one of the twelve burgesses?” in a tone of surprise.

“Yes, by favour of Sir Robert.”

The Chancellor, smiling gaily, shook his head. “No,” he said, “no; I do not believe you. You do yourself an injustice. Leave that sort of thing to older men, to Lyndhurst, if you will, d——d Jacobin as he is, preening himself in Tory feathers, and determined whoever’s in he’ll not be out; or to Peel. Leave it! And believe me you’ll not repent it. I,” he continued loftily, “have seen fifty years of life, Mr. Vaughan, and lived every year of them and every day of them, and I tell you that the thing is too dearly bought at that price.”

Vaughan felt himself rebuked; but he made a fight. “And yet,” he said, “are there no circumstances, my lord, in which such a vote may be justified?”

“A vote against your conscience—to oblige someone?”

“Well, yes.”

“A Jesuit might justify it. There is nothing which a Jesuit could not justify, I suppose. But though no man was stronger for the Catholic Claims than I was, I do not hold a Jesuit to be a man of honour. And that is where the difference lies. There! But,” he continued, with an abrupt change from the lofty to the confidential, “let me tell you a fact, Mr. Vaughan. In ’29—was it in April or May of ’29, Mr. Cornelius?”

“I don’t know to what you refer,” Mr. Cornelius grunted.

“To be sure you don’t,” the Chancellor replied, without any loss of good-humour; “but in April or May of ’29, Mr. Vaughan, the Duke offered me the Rolls, which is £7000 a year clear for life, and compatible with a seat in the Commons. It would have suited me better in every way than the Seals and the House of Lords. It was the prize, to be frank with you, at which I was aiming; and as at that time the Duke was making his right-about-face on the Catholic question, and was being supported by our side, I might have accepted it with an appearance of honour and consistency. But I did not accept it. I did not, though my refusal injured myself, and did no one any good. But there, I am chattering.” He broke off, with a smile, and held out his hand. “However,

“Est et fideli tuta silentio
Merces!

You won’t forget that, I am certain. And you may be sure I shall remember you. I am pleased to have made your acquaintance, Mr. Vaughan. Decide on the direction, politics or the law, in which you mean to push, and some day let me know. In the meantime follow the light! Light, more light! Don’t let them lure you back into old Giant Despair’s cave, or choke you with all the dead bones and rottenness and foulness they keep there, and that, by God’s help, I’ll sweep out of the world before it’s a year older!”

And still talking, he saw Vaughan, who was murmuring his acknowledgments, to the door.

When that had closed on the young man Brougham came back, and, throwing wide his arms, yawned prodigiously. “Now,” he said, “if Lansdowne doesn’t effect something in that borough, I am mistaken.”

“Why,” Cornelius muttered curtly, “do you trouble about the borough? Why don’t you leave those things to the managers?”

“Why? Why, first because the Duke did that last year, and you see the result—he’s out and we’re in. Secondly, Corny, because I am like the elephant’s trunk, that can tear down a tree or pick up a pin.”

“But in picking up a pin,” the other grunted, “it picks up a deal of something else.”

“Of what?”

“Dirt!”

“Old Pharisee!” the Chancellor cried.

Mr. Cornelius threw down his pen, and, turning in his seat, opened fire on his companion. “Dirt!” he reiterated sternly. “And for what? What will be the end of it when you have done all for them, clean and dirty? They’ll not keep you. They use you now, but you’re a new man. What, you—you think to deal on equal terms with the Devonshires and the Hollands, the Lansdownes and the Russells! Who used Burke, and when they had squeezed him tossed him aside? Who used Tierney till they wore him and his fortune out? Who would have used Canning, but he did not trust them, and so they worried him—though they were all dumb dogs before him—to his death. Ay, and presently, when you have served their turn, they will cast you aside.”

“They will not dare!” Brougham cried.

“Pshaw! You are Samson, but you are shorn of your strength. They have been too clever for you. While you were in the Commons they did not dare. Harry Brougham was their master. So they lured you, poor fool, into the trap, into the Lords, where you may spout, and spout, and spout, and it will have as much effect as the beating of a bird’s wings against the bars of its cage!”

“They will not dare!” Brougham reiterated.

“You will see. They will throw you aside.”

Brougham walked up and down the room, his eyes glittering, his quaint, misshapen features working passionately.

“They will throw you aside,” Mr. Cornelius repeated, watching him keenly. “You are a man of the people. You are in earnest. You are honestly in favour of retrenchment, of education, of reform. But to these Whigs—save and except to Althorp, who is that lusus naturæ, an honest man, and to Johnny Russell, who is a fanatic—these are but catchwords, stalking-horses, the means by which, after the dull old fashion of their fathers and their grandfathers and their great-grandfathers, they think to creep into power. Reform, if reform means the representation of the people by the people, the rule of the people by the people, or by any but the old landed families—why, the very thought would make them sick!”

Brougham stopped in his pacing to and fro. “You are right,” he said sombrely.

“You acknowledge it?”

“I have known it—here!” And, drawing himself to his full height, he clapped his hand to his breast. “I have known it here for months. Ay, and though I have sworn to myself that they would not dare to treat me as they treated Burke, and Sheridan, and Tierney, and as they would have treated Canning, I knew it was a lie, my lad; I knew they would. My mother—ay, my old mother, sitting by the chimneyside, out of the world there, knew it, and warned me.”

“Then why did you go into the Lords?” Cornelius asked. “Why be lured into the gilded cage, where you are helpless?”

“Because, mark you,” Brougham replied sternly, “if I had not, they had not brought in this Bill. And we had waited, and the people had waited, another twenty years, maybe!”

“And so you went into the prison-house shorn of your strength?”

Brougham looked at him with a gleam of ferocity in his brilliant eyes. “Ay,” he said, “I did. And by that act,” he continued, stretching his long arms to their farthest extent, “mark you, mark you, never forget it, I avenged all—not only all I may suffer at their hands, but all that every slave who ever ground in their mill has suffered, the slights, the grudged meticulous office, the one finger lent to shake—all, all! I went into the prison-house, but when I did so I laid my hands upon the pillars. And their house falls, falls. I hear it—I hear it falling even now about their ears. They may throw me aside. But the house is falling, and the great Whig families—pouf!—they are not in the heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the water that is under the earth. You call Reform their stalking-horse? Ay, but it is into their own Troy that they have dragged it; and the clatter of strife which you hear is the death-knell of their power. They have let in the waves of the sea, and dream fondly that they can say where they shall stop and what they shall not touch. They may as well speak to the tide when it flows; they may as well command the North Sea in its rage; they may as well bid Hume be silent, or Wetherell be sane. You say I am spent, Cornelius; and so I am, it may be. I know not. But this I know. Never again will the families say ‘Go!’ and he goeth, and ‘Do!’ and he doeth, as in the old world that is passing—passing even at this minute, passing with the Bill. No,” he continued, flinging out his arms with passion; “for when they thought to fool me, and to shut me dumb among dumb things behind the gilded wires, I knew—I knew that I was dragging down their house upon their heads.”

Mr. Cornelius stared at him. “By G—d!” he said, “I believe you are right. I believe that you are a cleverer man than I thought you were.”

III
TWO LETTERS

The Hall was empty when Vaughan came forth; and as the young man strode down its echoing length there was nothing save his own footsteps on the pavement to distract his mind from the scene in which he had taken part. He was excited and a little uplifted, as was natural. The promises made, if they were to be counted as promises, were of the vague and indefinite character which it is as easy to evade as to fulfil. But the Chancellor had spoken to him as to an equal and treated him as one who had but to choose a career to succeed in it, and to win the highest prizes which it could bestow. This was flattering; nor was it to a young man who had little experience of the world, less flattering to be deemed the owner of a stake in the country, and a person through whom offers of the most confidential and important character might be properly made.

He walked to his rooms in Bury Street with a pleasant warmth at his heart. And at the Academic that evening, where owing to the events of the day there was a fuller house than had ever been known, and a fiercer debate, he championed the Government and upheld the dissolution in a speech which not only excelled his previous efforts, but was a surprise to those who knew him best. Afterwards he recognised that his peroration had been only a paraphrase of Brougham’s impassioned “Light! More Light!” and that the whole owed more than he cared to remember to the same source. But, after all, why not? It was not to be expected that he could at once rise to the heights of the greatest of living orators. And it was much that he had made a hit; that as he left the room he was followed by all eyes.

Nor did a qualm worthy of the name trouble him until the morning of the 27th, five days later—a Wednesday. Then he found beside his breakfast plate two letters bearing the postmark of Chippinge.

“What’s afoot?” he muttered. But he had a prevision before he broke the seal of the first. And the contents bore out his fears. The letter ran thus:

“Stapylton, Chippinge.

“Dear Sir—I make no apology for troubling you in a matter in which your interest is second only to mine and which is also of a character to make apology beside the mark. It has not been necessary to require your presence at Chippinge upon the occasion of former elections. But the unwholesome ferment into which the public mind has been cast by the monstrous proposals of Ministers has nowhere been more strongly exemplified than here, by the fact that, for the first time in half a century, the right of our family to nominate the members for the Borough is challenged. Since the year 1783 no serious attempt has been made to disturb the Vermuyden interest. And I have yet to learn that—short of this anarchical Bill, which will sweep away all the privileges attaching to property—such an attempt can be made with any chance of success.

“I am informed nevertheless that Lord Lansdowne, presuming on a small connection in the Corporation, intends to send at least one candidate to the poll. Our superiority is so great that I should not, even so, trouble you to be present, were it not an object to discourage these attempts by the exhibition of our full strength, and were it not still more important to do so at a time when the existence of the Borough itself is at stake.

“Isaac White will apprise you of the arrangements to be made and will keep you informed of all matters which you should know. Be good enough to let Mapp learn the day and hour of your arrival, and he will see that the carriage and servants meet the coach at Chippenham. Probably you will come by the York House. It is the most convenient.

“I have the honour to be

“Your sincere kinsman,

“Robert Vermuyden.

“To Arthur Vermuyden Vaughan, Esquire,
“17 Bury Street, St. James’s.”

Vaughan’s face grew long, and his fork hung suspended above his plate, as he perused the old gentleman’s epistle. When all was read he laid it down, and whistled. “Here’s a fix!” he muttered. And he thought of his speech at the Academic; and for the first time he was sorry that he had made it. “Here’s a fix!” he repeated. “What’s to be done?”

He was too much disturbed to go on with his breakfast, and he tore open the other letter. It was from Isaac White, his cousin’s attorney and agent. It ran thus:

“High Street, Chippinge,

“April 25, 1831.

“Chippinge Parliamentary Election.

“Sir.—I have the honour to inform you, as upon former occasions, that the writ in the above is expected and that Tuesday the 3rd day of May will be appointed for the nomination. It has not been needful to trouble you heretofore, but on this occasion I have reason to believe that Sir Robert Vermuyden’s candidates will be opposed by nominees in the Bowood Interest, and I have therefore, honoured Sir, to intimate that your attendance will oblige.

“The Vermuyden dinner will take place at the White Lion on Monday the 2nd, when the voters and their friends will sit down at 5 P. M. The Alderman will preside, and Sir Robert hopes that you will be present. The procession to the Hustings will leave the White Lion at ten on Tuesday the 3d, and a poll, if demanded, will be taken after the usual proceedings.

“Any change in the order of the arrangements will be punctually communicated to you.

“I have the honour to be, Sir,

“Your humble obedient servant,

“Isaac White.

“Arthur V. Vaughan, Esq.,
(late H.M.’s 14th Dragoons),

“17 Bury Street, London.”

Vaughan flung the letter down and resumed his breakfast moodily. It was a piece of shocking ill-fortune, that was all there was to be said.

Not that he really regretted his speech! It had committed him a little more deeply, but morally he had been committed before. It is a poor conscience that is not scrupulous in youth; and he was convinced, or almost convinced, that if he had never seen the Chancellor he would still have found it impossible to support Sir Robert’s candidates.

For he was sincere in his support of the Bill; a little because it flattered his intellect to show himself above the prejudices of the class to which he belonged; more, because he was of an age to view with resentment the abuses which the Bill promised to sweep away. A Government truly representative of the people, such as this Bill must create, would not tolerate the severities which still disgraced the criminal law. It would not suffer the heartless delays which made the name of Chancery synonymous with ruin. Under it spring-guns and man-traps would no longer scare the owner from his own coverts. The poor would be taught, the slave would be freed. Above all, whole classes of the well-to-do would no longer be deprived of a voice in the State. No longer would the rights of one small class override the rights of all other classes.

He was at an age, in a word, when hope invites to change; and he was for the Bill. “Ay, by Jove, I am!” he muttered, casting the die in fancy, “and I’ll not be set down! It will be awkward! It will be odious! But I must go through with it!”

Still, he was sorry. He sprang from the class which had profited by the old system—that system under which some eight-score men returned a majority of the House of Commons. He had himself the prospect of returning two members. He could, therefore enter, to a degree—at times to a greater degree than he liked,—into the feelings with which the old-fashioned and the interested, the prudent and the timid, viewed a change so great and so radical. But his main objection was personal. He hated the necessity which forced him to cross the wishes and to trample on the prejudices of an old man whom he regarded with respect, and even with reverence: a solitary old man, the head of his family, to whom he owed the very vote he must withhold; and who would hardly, even by the logic of facts, be brought to believe that one of his race and breeding could turn against him.

Still it must be done; the die was cast. The sooner, therefore, it was done, the better. He would go down to Stapylton at once, while his courage was high; and he would tell Sir Robert. Then, whatever came of it, he would have nothing with which to reproach himself. In the heat of resolve he felt very brave and very virtuous; and the moment he rose from breakfast he went to the coach office, and finding that the York House, the fashionable Bath, coach was full for the following day, he booked an outside seat on the Bristol White Lion Coach, which also passed through Chippenham. From Chippenham, Chippinge is distant a short nine miles.

That evening proved to be memorable; for the greater part of London was illuminated by the Reformers in honour of the Dissolution; not without rioting and drunkenness, violence on the part of the mob, and rage on the side of the minority. When Vaughan passed through the streets before six next morning, on his way to the White Horse Cellars, traces of the night’s work still remained; and where the early sun fell on them showed ugly and grisly and menacing enough. A moderate reformer might well have blenched at the sight, and questioned—as many did question—whither this was tending. But Vaughan was late; the coach, one out of three which were waiting to start, was horsed. He had only eyes, as he came hurriedly up, for the seat he had reserved behind the coachman.

It was empty, and so far his fears were vain. But it annoyed him to find that his next-door neighbour was a young lady travelling alone. She had the seat on the near side.

He climbed up quickly, and to reach his place had to pass before her. The space between the seat and the coachman’s box was narrow, and as she rose to allow him to pass she glanced up. Their eyes met; Vaughan raised his hat in mute apology, and took his seat. He said no word. But a miracle had happened, as miracles do happen, when the world is young. In his mind, as he sat down, he was not repeating, “What a nuisance!” but was saying, “What eyes! What a face! And, oh, heaven, what beauty! What blush-rose cheeks! What a lovely mouth!”

For ’twas from eyes of liquid blue

A host of quivered Cupids flew,

And now his heart all bleeding lies

Beneath the army of the eyes.

He gazed gravely at the group of watermen and night-birds who stood in the roadway below waiting to see the coach start. And apparently he was unmoved. Apparently he was the same Arthur Vermuyden Vaughan who had passed round the boot of the coach to reach the ladder and his place. But he was not the same. His thoughts were no longer querulous, full of the haste he had made, and the breakfast he had to make; but of a pair of gentle eyes which had looked for one instant into his, of a modest face, sweet and shy, of a Quaker-like bonnet that ravished as no other bonnet had ever ravished the most susceptible!

He was still gazing at the group of loiterers, without seeing them, when he became aware that an elderly woman plainly but respectably dressed, who was standing by the forewheel of the coach, was looking up at him, and trying to attract his attention. Seeing that she had caught his eye she spoke:

“Gentleman! Gentleman!” she said—but in a restrained voice, as if she did not wish to be generally heard. “The young lady’s address! Please say that she’s not left it! For the laundress!”

He turned and made sure that there was only one of the sex on the coach. Then—to be honest, not without a tiny flutter at his heart—he addressed his neighbour. “Pardon me,” he said “but there is someone below who wants your address.”

She turned her eyes on him and his heart gave a perceptible jump. “My address?” she echoed in a voice as sweet as her face. “I think that there must be some mistake.” And then for a moment she looked at him as if she doubted his intentions.

The doubt was intolerable. “It’s for the laundress,” he said. “See, there she is!”

The girl rose to look over the side of the coach and perforce leant across him. He saw that she had the slenderest waist and the prettiest figure—he had every opportunity of seeing. Then the coach started with a jerk, and if she had not steadied herself by laying her hand on his shoulder, she must have relapsed on his knees. As it was she fell back safely into her seat. She blushed.

“I beg your pardon,” she said.

But he was looking back. He had his eye on the woman, who remained in the roadway, pointing after the coach and apparently asking a bystander some question respecting it—perhaps where it stopped. “There she is!” he exclaimed. “The woman with the umbrella! She is pointing after us.”

His neighbour looked back but made nothing of it. “I know no one in London,” she said a little primly—but with sweet primness—“except the lady at whose house I stayed last night. And she is not able to leave the house. It must be a mistake.” And with a gentle reserve which had in it nothing of coquetry, she turned her face from him.

Tantivy! Tantivy! Tantivy! They were away, bowling down the slope of broad empty Piccadilly with the four nags trotting merrily, and the April sun gilding the roofs of the houses, and falling aslant on the verdure of the Green Park. Then merrily up the rise to Hyde Park Corner, where the new Grecian Gates looked across at the equally new arch on Constitution Hill; and where Apsley House, the residence of “the Duke,” hiding with its new coat of Bath stone the old brick walls, peeped through the trees at the statue of Achilles, erected ten years back in the Duke’s honour.

But, alas! what was this? Wherefore the crowd that even at this early hour was large enough to fill the roadway and engage the attention of the New Police? Vaughan looked and saw that every blind in Apsley House was lowered, and that more than half of the windows were shattered. And the little French gentleman who, to the coachman’s disgust, had taken the box-seat, saw it too; nay, had seen it before, for he had come that way to the coach office. He pointed to the silent, frowning mansion, and snapped his fingers.

“That is your reward for your Vellington!” he cried, turning in his excitement to the two behind him. “And his lady, I am told, she lie dead behind the broken vindows! They did that last night, your canaille! But he vill not forget! And when the refolution come—bah—he vill have the iron hand! He vill be the Emperor and he vill repay!”

No one answered; they treated him with silent British scorn. But they one and all stared back at the scene, at the grim blind house in the early sunshine, and the gaping crowd—as long as it remained in sight. And some, no doubt, pondered the sight. But who, with a pretty face beside him and a long day’s drive before him, a drive by mead and shining river, over hill and down, under the walls of grey churches and by many a marketplace and cheery inn-yard—who would long dwell on changes past or to come? Or fret because in the womb of time might lie that “refolution” of which the little Frenchman spoke?

IV
TANTIVY! TANTIVY! TANTIVY!

The White Lion coach was a light coach carrying only five passengers outside, and merrily it swept by Kensington Church, whence the travellers had a peep of Holland House—home of the Whigs—on their right. And then in a twinkling they were swinging through Hammersmith, where the ale-houses were opening and lusty girls were beginning to deliver the milk. They passed through Turnham, through Brentford, awakening everywhere the lazy with the music of their horn. They saw Sion House on their left, and on their right had a glimpse of the distant lawns of Osterley—the seat of Lady Jersey, queen of Almack’s, and the Holland’s rival. Thence they travelled over Hounslow Heath, and by an endless succession of mansions and lawns and orchards rich at this season with apple blossom, and framing here and there a view of the sparkling Thames.

Vaughan breathed the air of spring and let his eyes dwell on scene after scene; and he felt that it was good to be young and to sit behind fast horses. He stole a glance at his neighbour and judged by the brightness of her eyes, her parted lips and rapt expression, that she felt with him. And he would have said something to her, but he could think of nothing worthy of her. At last:

“It’s a beautiful morning,” he ventured, and cursed his vapidity.

But she did not seem to find bathos in the words. “It is, indeed!” she answered with an enthusiasm which showed that she had forgotten her doubts of him. “And,” she added simply, “I have not been on a coach since I was a child!”

“Not on a coach?” he cried in astonishment.

“No. Except on the Clapham Stage. And that is not a coach like this!”

“No, perhaps it is not,” he said. And he thought of her, and—oh, Lord!—of Clapham! And yet after all there was something about her, about her grey, dove-like dress and her gentleness, which smacked of Clapham. He wondered who she was and what she was; and he was still wondering when she turned her eyes on him, and, herself serenely unconscious, sent a tiny shock through him.

“I enjoy it the more,” she said, “because I—I am not usually free in the morning.”

“Oh, yes!”

He could say no more; not another word. It was the stupidest thing in the world, but he was tongue-tied. Seeing, however, that she had turned from him and was absorbed in the view of Windsor rising stately amid its trees, he had the cleverness to steal a glance at the neat little basket which nestled at her feet. Surreptitiously he read the name on the label.

Mary Smith

Miss Sibson’s

Queen’s Square, Bristol.

Mary Smith! Just Mary Smith! For the moment—it is not to be denied—he was sobered by the name. It was not a romantic name. It was anything but high-sounding. The author of “Tremayne” or “De Vere,” nay, the author of “Vivian Grey”—to complete the trio of novels which were in fashion at the time—would have turned up his nose at it. But what did it matter? He desired no more than to make himself agreeable for the few hours which he and this beautiful creature must pass together—in sunshine and with the fair English landscape gliding by them. And that being so, what need he reck what she called herself or whence she came. It was enough that under her modest bonnet her ears were shells and her eyes pure cornflowers, and that a few pleasant words, a little April dalliance—if only that Frenchman would cease to peep behind him and grin—would harm neither the one nor the other.

But opportunities let slip do not always recur. As he turned to address her they rose the ascent of Maidenhead Bridge, had on either hand a glimpse of the river framed in pale green willows, and halted with sweating horses before the King’s Arms. The boots advanced, amid a group of gazers, and reared a ladder against the coach. “Half an hour for breakfast, gentlemen!” he cried briskly. And through the windows of the inn the travellers had a view of a long table whereat the passengers on the up night-coach were already feasting.

Our friends hastened to descend, but not so fast that Vaughan failed to note the girl’s look of uncertainty, almost of distress. He guessed that she was not at ease in a scene so bustling and so new to her. And the thought gave him the courage that he needed.

“Will you allow me to find you a place at the table?” he said. “I know this inn and they know me. Guard, the ladder here!” And he took her hand—oh, such a little, little hand!—and aided her in her descent.

“Will you follow me?” he said. And he made way for her through the knot of starers who cumbered the doorway. But once in the coffee-room he had, cunning fellow, an inspiration. “Find this lady a seat!” he commanded one of the attendant damsels. And when he had seen her seated and the coffee set before her, he took himself deliberately to the other end of the room. But whether he did so out of pure respect for her feelings, or because he thought—and hugged himself on the thought—that he would be missed, he did not himself know. Nor was he so much a captive, though he counted how many rolls she ate, and looked a dozen times to see if she looked at him, as to be unable to make an excellent breakfast.

The cheery, noisy throng at the tables, the brisk coming and going of the servants, the smell of hot coffee, the open windows, and the sunshine outside—where the fresh team of the up night-coach were already tossing their heads impatiently—he wondered how it all struck her, new to such scenes and to this side of life. And then while he wondered he saw that she had risen from the table and was going out with one of the waiting-maids. To reach the door she had to pass near him; and, oh bliss, her eyes found him—and she blushed. She blushed, ye heavens! He saw it clearly, and he sat thinking about it until, though the coach was not due to start for another five minutes and he might count on the guard summoning him, he was taken with fear lest some one should steal his seat. And he hurried out.

She was alone on the top of the coach, and a youthful waterman, one of the crowd of loiterers below, was making eyes at her to the delight of his companions. When Vaughan came forth, “I’d like to be him,” the wag said, winking with vulgar gusto. And the bystanders grinned at the good-looking young man who stood in the doorway buttoning up his box-coat. The position might soon have become embarrassing to her if not to him; but in the nick of time the eye of an inside passenger, who had followed him through the doorway, alighted on a huge placard which hung behind the coach.

“Take that down!” the stranger cried loudly and pompously. And in a moment all eyes were upon him. He prodded with his umbrella at the offending bill. “Do you hear me? Take it down, sir,” he repeated, turning to the guard. He was a portly man, reddish about the gills. “Take it down, sir, or I will! It is disgraceful! I shall report this conduct to your employers.”

The guard hesitated. “It don’t harm you, sir,” he pleaded, anxious, it was clear, to propitiate a man who would presently be good for half a crown.

“Don’t harm me?” the choleric gentleman retorted. “Don’t harm me? What’s that to do with it? What right—what right have you, man, to put party filth like that on a public vehicle in which I pay to ride? ‘The Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill!’ D—n the Bill, sir!” with violence. “Take it down! Take it down at once!” he repeated, as if his order closed the matter.

The guard frowned at the placard, which bore, largely printed, the legend which the gentleman found so little to his taste. He rubbed his head. “Well, I don’t know, sir,” he said. And then—the crowd about the coach was growing—he looked at the driver. “What do you say, Sammy?” he asked.

“Don’t touch it,” growled the driver, without deigning to turn his head.

“You see, sir, it is this way,” the guard ventured civilly. “Mr. Palmer has a Whig meeting at Reading to-day and the town will be full. And if we don’t want rotten eggs and broken windows—we’ll carry that!”

“I’ll not travel with it!” the stout gentleman answered positively. “Do you hear me, man? If you don’t take it down I will!”

“Best not!” cried a voice from the little crowd about the coach. And when the angry gentleman turned to see who spoke, “Best not!” cried another behind him. And he wheeled about again, so quickly that the crowd laughed. This raised his wrath to a white heat.

He grew purple. “I shall have it taken down!” he said. “Guard, remove it!”

“Don’t touch it,” growled the driver—one of a class noted in that day for independence and surly manners. “If the gent don’t choose to travel with it, let him stop here and be d—d!”

“Do you know,” the insulted passenger cried, “that I am a Member of Parliament?”

“I’m hanged if you are!” coachee retorted. “Nor won’t be again!”

The crowd roared at this repartee. The guard was in despair. “Anyway, we must go on, sir,” he said. And he seized his horn. “Take your seats, gents! Take your seats!” he cried. “All for Reading! I’m sorry, sir, but I’ve to think of the coach.”

“And the horses!” grumbled the driver. “Where’s the gent’s sense?”

They all scrambled to their seats except the ex-member. He stood, bursting with rage and chagrin. But at the last moment, when he saw that the coach would really go without him, he swallowed his pride, plucked open the coach-door, and amid the loud jeers of the crowd, climbed in. The driver, with a chuckle, bade the helpers let go, and the coach swung cheerily away through the streets of Maidenhead, the merry notes of the horn and the rattle of the pole-chains drowning the cries of the gutter-boys.

The little Frenchman turned round. “You vill have a refolution,” he said solemnly. “And the gentleman inside he vill lose his head.”

The coachman, who had hitherto looked askance at Froggy, as if he disdained his neighbourhood, now squinted at him as if he could not quite make him out. “Think so?” he said gruffly. “Why, Mounseer?”

“I have no doubt,” the Frenchman answered glibly. “The people vill have, and the nobles vill not give! Or they vill give a leetle—a leetle! And that is the worst of all. I have seen two refolutions!” he continued with energy. “The first when I was a child—it is forty years! My bonne held me up and I saw heads fall into the basket—heads as young and as lofly as the young Mees there! And why? Because the people would have, and the King, he give that which is the worst of all—a leetle! And the trouble began. And then the refolution of last year—it was worth to me all that I had! The people would have, and the Polignac, our Minister—who is the friend of your Vellington—he would not give at all! And the trouble began.”

The driver squinted at him anew. “D’you mean to say,” he asked, “that you’ve seen heads cut off?”

“I have seen the white necks, as white and as small as the Mees there; I have seen the blood spout from them; bah! like what you call pump! Ah, it was ogly, it was very ogly!”

The coachman turned his head slowly and with difficulty, until he commanded a full view of Vaughan’s pretty neighbour; at whom he gazed for some seconds as if fascinated. Then he turned to his horses and relieved his feelings by hitting one of the wheelers below the trace; while Vaughan, willing to hear what the Frenchman had to say, took up the talk.

“Perhaps here,” he said, “those who have will give, and give enough, and all will go well.”

“Nefer! Nefer!” the Frenchman answered positively. “By example, the Duke whose château we pass—what you call it—Jerusalem House?”

“Sion House,” Vaughan answered, smiling. “The Duke of Northumberland.”

“By example he return four members to your Commons House. Is it not so? And they do what he tell them. He have this for his nefew, and that for his niece, and the other thing for his maître d’hôtel! And it is he and the others like him who rule the country! Gives he up all that? To the bourgeoisie? Nefer! Nefer!” he continued with emphasis. “He will be the Polignac! They will all be the Polignacs! And you will have a refolution. And by-and-by, when the bourgeoisie is frightened of the canaille and tired of the blood-letting, your Vellington he will be the Emperor. It is as plain as the two eyes in the face! So plain for me, I shall not take off my clothes the nights!”

“Well, King Billy for me!” said the driver. “But if he’s willing, Mounseer, why shouldn’t the people manage their own affairs?”

“The people! The people! They cannot! Your horses, will they govern themselves? Will you throw down the reins and leave it to them, up hill, down hill? The people govern themselves Bah!” And to express his extreme disgust at the proposition, the Frenchman, who had lost his all with Polignac, bent over the side and spat into the road. “It is no government at all!”

The driver looked darkly at his horses as if he would like to see them try it on. “I am afraid,” said Vaughan, “that you think we are in trouble either way then, whether the Tories give or withhold?”

“Eizer way! Eizer way!” the Frenchman answered con amore. “It is fate! You are on the edge of the what you call it—chute! And you must go over! We have gone over. We have bumped once, twice! We shall bump once, twice more, et voilà—Anarchy! Now it is your turn, sir. The government has to be—shifted—from the one class to the other!”

“But it may be peacefully shifted?”

The little Frenchman shrugged his shoulders impatiently. “I have nefer seen the government shifted without all that that I have told you. There will be the guillotine, or the barricades. For me, I shall not take off my clothes the nights!”

He spoke with a sincerity so real and a persuasion so clear that even Vaughan was a little shaken, and wondered if those who watched the game from the outside saw more than the players. As for the coachman: