Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  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 résumé 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.
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br />   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 résumé 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?”