By that time, rid of the foreign prenomen, well allied by three good marriages, and since the American war of true blue Tory leanings, and thorough Church and King principles, the family was able to hold up its head among the best in the south of England. There might be some who still remembered that —
Saltash was a borough town
When Plymouth was a breezy down.
But the property was good, the borough safe, and any time these twenty years their owner might have franked his letters “Chippinge” had he willed it. As it was, he passed, almost as much as Mr. Western in the east or Sir Thomas Acland in the west, for the type of a country gentleman. The most powerful Minister gave him his whole hand; and at county meetings, at Salisbury or Devizes, no voice was held more powerful, nor any man’s hint more quickly taken than Sir Robert Vermuyden’s.
He was a tall and very thin man, of almost noble aspect, with a nose after the fashion of the Duke’s, and a slight stoop. In early days he had been something of a beau, though never of the Prince’s following, and he still dressed finely and with taste. With a smaller sense of personal dignity, or with wider sympathies, he might have been a happier man. But he had married too late — at forty-five; and the four years which followed, and their sequel, had darkened the rest of his life, drawn crow’s-feet about his eyes and peevish lines about his mouth. Henceforth he had lived alone, nursing his pride; and the solitude of this life — which was not without its dignity, since no word of scandal touched it — had left him narrow and vindictive, a man just but not over-generous, and pompous without complacency.
The neighbourhood knew that he and Lady Sybil — he had married the beautiful daughter of the last Earl of Portrush — had parted under circumstances which came near to justifying divorce. Some held that he had divorced her; but in those days an Act of Parliament was necessary, and no such Act stood on the Statute-book. Many thought that he ought to have divorced her. And while the people who knew that she still lived and still plagued him were numerous, few save Isaac White were aware that it was because his marriage had been made and marred at Bowood — and not purely out of principle — that Sir Robert opposed the very name of Lansdowne, and would have wasted a half of his fortune to wreck his great neighbour’s political power.
Not that his Tory principles were not strong. During five Parliaments he had filled one of his own seats, and had spoken from time to time after a dignified fashion, with formal gestures and a copious sprinkling of classical allusions. The Liberal Toryism of Canning had fallen below his ideal, but he had continued to sit until the betrayal of the party by Peel and the Duke — on the Catholic Claims — drove him from the House in disgust, and thenceforth Warren’s Hotel, his residence when in town, saw him but seldom. He had fancied then that nothing worse could happen; that the depths were plumbed, and that he and those who thought with him might punish the traitor and take no harm. With the Duke of Cumberland, the best hated man in England — which was never tired of ridiculing his moustachios — Eldon, Wetherell, and the ultra-Tories, he had not rested until he had seen the hated pair flung from office; nor was any man more surprised and confounded when the result of the work began to show itself. The Whigs, admitted to power by this factious movement, and after an exile so long that Byron could write of them —
Naught’s permanent among the human race
Except the Whigs not getting into place
— brought in no mild and harmless measure of reform, promising little and giving nothing, such as foe and friend had alike expected; but a measure of reform so radical that O’Connell blessed it, and Cobbett might have fathered it: a measure which, if it passed, would sweep away Sir Robert’s power and the power of his class, destroy his borough, and relegate him to the common order of country squires.
He was at first incredulous, then furious, then aghast. To him the Bill was not only the doom of his own influence but the knell of the Constitution. Behind it he saw red revolution and the crash of things. Lord Grey was to him Mirabeau, Lord John was Lafayette, Brougham was Danton; and of them and of their kind, when they had roused the many-headed, he was sure that the end would be as the end of the Gironde.
He was not the less furious, not the less aghast, when the moderates of his party pointed out that he had himself to thank for the catastrophe. From the refusal to grant the smallest reform, from the refusal to transfer the franchise of the rotten borough of Retford to the unrepresented city of Birmingham — a refusal which he had urged his members to support — the chain was complete; for in consequence of that refusal Mr. Huskisson had left the Duke’s Cabinet. The appointment of Mr. Fitzgerald to fill his seat had rendered the Clare election necessary. O’Connell’s victory at the Clare election had converted Peel and the Duke to the necessity of granting the Catholic Claims. That conversion had alienated the ultra-Tories, and among these Sir Robert. The opposition of the ultra-Tories had expelled Peel and the Duke from power — which had brought in the Whigs — who had brought in the Reform Bill.
Hinc illæ lacrimæ! For, in place of the transfer of the franchise of one rotten borough to one large city — a reform which now to the most bigoted seemed absurdly reasonable — here were sixty boroughs to be swept away, and nearly fifty more to be shorn of half their strength, a Constitution to be altered, an aristocracy to be dethroned!
And Calne, Lord Lansdowne’s pocket borough, was spared!
Sir Robert firmly believed that the limit had been fixed with an eye to Calne. They who framed the Bill, sitting in wicked, detestable confabulation, had fixed the limit of Schedule B so as to spare Calne and Tavistock — Arcades ambo, Whig boroughs both. Or why did they just escape? In the whole matter it was this, strangely enough, which troubled him most sorely. For the loss of his own borough — if the worst came to the worst — he could put up with it. He had no children, he had no one to come after him except Arthur Vaughan, the great-grandson of his grandmother. But the escape of Calne, this clear proof of the hypocrisy of the righteous Grey, the blatant Durham, the whey-faced Lord John, the demagogue Brougham — this injustice kept him in a state of continual irritation.
He was thinking of this as he paced slowly up and down the broad walk beside the Garden Pool, at Stapylton — a solitary figure dwarfed by the great elms. The placid surface of the pool, which mirrored the shaven lawns beyond it and the hoary church set amidst the lawns, the silence about him, broken only by the notes of song-birds or a faint yelp from the distant kennels, the view over the green undulations of park and covert — all vainly appealed to him to-day, though on summer evenings his heart took sad and frequent leave of them. For that which threatened him every day jostled aside for the present that which must happen one day. The home of his fathers might be his for some years yet, but shorn of its chief dignity, of its pride, its mastery; while Calne — Calne would survive, to lift still higher the fortunes of those who had sold their king and country, and betrayed their order.
Daily a man and horse awaited the mail-coach at Chippenham that he might have the latest news; and, seeing a footman hurrying towards him from the house, he supposed that the mail was in. But when the man, after crossing the long wooden bridge which spanned the pool, approached with no diminution of speed, he remembered that it was too early for the post; and hating to be disturbed in his solitary reveries, he awaited the servant impatiently.
“What it is?” he asked.
“If you please, Sir Robert, Lady Lansdowne’s carriage is at the door.”
Only Sir Robert’s darkening colour betrayed his astonishment. He had made his feelings so well known that none but the most formal civilities now passed between Stapylton and Bowood.
“Who is it?”
“Lady Lansdowne, Sir Robert. Her ladyship bade us say that she wishes to see you urgently, sir.” The man, as well as the master, knew that the visit was unusual.
The baronet was a proud man, and he bethought him that the drawing-rooms, seldom used and something neglected, were not in the state in which
he would wish his enemy’s wife to see them. “Where have you put her ladyship?” he asked.
“In the hall, Sir Robert.”
“Very good. I will come.”
The man hastened away over the bridge, and Sir Robert followed, more at leisure, but still quickly. When he had passed the angle of the church which stood in a line with the three blocks of building, connected by porticos, which formed the house, and which, placed on a gentle eminence, looked handsomely over the park, he saw that a carriage with four greys ridden by postillions and attended by two outriders stood before the main door. In the carriage, her face shaded by the large Tuscan hat of the period, sat a young lady reading. She heard Sir Robert’s footstep, and looked up, and in some embarrassment met his eyes.
He removed his hat. “It is Lady Louisa, is it not?” he said, looking gravely at her.
“Yes,” she said; and she smiled prettily at him.
“Will you not go into the house?”
“Thank you,” she replied, with a faint blush; “I think my mother wishes to see you alone, Sir Robert.”
“Very good.” And with a bow, cold but perfectly courteous, he turned and passed up the broad, shallow steps, which were of the same time-tinted lichen-covered stone as the rest of the building. Mapp, the butler, who had been looking out for him, opened the door, and he entered the hall.
In his heart, which was secretly perturbed, was room for the wish that he had been found in other than the high-buttoned gaiters and breeches of his country life. But he suffered no sign of that or of his more serious misgivings to appear, as he advanced to greet the still beautiful woman, who sat daintily warming one sandalled foot at the red embers on the hearth. She was far from being at ease herself. Warnings which her husband had addressed to her at parting recurred and disturbed her. But it is seldom that a woman of the world betrays her feelings, and her manner was perfect as he bent low over her hand.
“It is long,” she said gently, “much longer than I like to remember, Sir Robert, since we met.”
“It is a long time,” he answered gravely; and when she had reseated herself he sat down opposite her.
“It is an age,” she said slowly; and she looked round the hall, with its panelled walls, its deep window-seats, and its panoply of fox-masks and antlers, as if she recalled the past, “It is an age,” she repeated. “Politics are sad dividers of friends.”
“I fear,” he replied, in a tone as cold as courtesy permitted, “that they are about to be greater dividers.”
She looked at him quickly, with appeal in her eyes. “And yet,” she said, “we saw more of you once.”
“Yes.” He was wondering much, behind the mask of his civility, what had drawn her hither. He knew that it could be no light, no passing matter which had brought her over thirteen miles of Wiltshire roads to call upon a man with whom intercourse had been limited, for years past, to a few annual words, a formal invitation as formally declined, a measured salutation at race or ball. She must have a motive, and a strong one. It was only the day before that he had learned that Lord Lansdowne meant to drop his foolish opposition at Chippinge; was it possible that she was here to make a favour of this? And perhaps a bargain? If that were her errand, and my lord had sent her, thinking to make refusal less easy, Sir Robert felt that he would know how to answer. He waited.
VII
THE WINDS OF AUTUMN
Lady Lansdowne looked pensively at the tapering sandal which she held forward to catch the heat. “Time passes so very, very quickly,” she said with a sigh.
“With some,” Sir Robert answered. “With others,” he bowed, “it stands still.”
His gallantry did not deceive her. She knew it for the salute which duellists exchange before the fray, and she saw that if she would do anything she must place herself within his guard. She looked at him with sudden frankness. “I want you to bear with me for a few minutes, Sir Robert,” she said in a tone of appeal. “I want you to remember that we were once friends, and, for the sake of old days, to believe that I am here to play a friend’s part. You won’t answer me? Very well. I do not ask you to answer me.” She pointed to the space above the mantel. “The portrait which used to hang there?” she said. “Where is it? What have you done with it? But there, I said I would not ask, and I am asking!”
“And I will answer!” he replied. This was the last, the very last thing for which he had looked; but he would show her that he was not to be overridden. “I will tell you,” he repeated. “Lady Lansdowne, I have destroyed it.”
“I do not blame you,” she rejoined. “It was yours to do with as you would. But the original — no, Sir Robert,” she said, staying him intrepidly — she had taken the water now, and must swim— “you shall not frighten me! She was, she is your wife. But not yours, not your property to do with as you will, in the sense in which that picture — but there, I am blaming where I should entreat. I — —”
He stayed her by a peremptory gesture. “Are you here — from her?” he asked huskily.
“I am not.”
“She knows?”
“No, Sir Robert, she does not.”
“Then why,” — there was pain, real pain mingled with the indignation in his tone— “why, in God’s name, Madam, have you come?”
She looked at him with pitying eyes. “Because,” she said, “so many years have passed, and if I do not say a word now I shall never say it. And because — there is still time, but no more than time.”
He looked at her fixedly. “You have another reason,” he said. “What is it?”
“I saw her yesterday. I was in Chippenham when the Bristol coach passed, and I saw her face for an instant at the window.”
He breathed more quickly; it was evident that the news touched him home. But he would not blench nor lower his eyes. “Well?” he said.
“I saw her for a few seconds only, and she did not see me. And of course — I did not speak to her. But I knew her face, though she was changed.”
“And because” — his voice was harsh— “you saw her for a few minutes at a window, you come to me?”
“No, but because her face called up the old times. And because we are all growing older. And because she was — not guilty.”
He started. This was getting within his guard with a vengeance. “Not guilty?” he cried in a tone of extreme anger. And he rose. But as she did not move he sat down again.
“No,” she replied firmly. “She was not guilty.”
His face was deeply red. For a moment he looked at her as if he would not answer her, or, if he answered, would bid her leave his house. Then, “If she had been,” he said grimly, “guilty, Madam, in the sense in which you use the word, guilty of the worst, she had ceased to be my wife these fifteen years, she had ceased to bear my name, ceased to be the curse of my life!”
“Oh, no, no!”
“It is yes, yes!” And his face was dark. “But as it was, she was guilty enough! For years” — he spoke more rapidly as his passion grew— “she made her name a byword and dragged mine in the dirt. She made me a laughing-stock and herself a scandal. She disobeyed me — but what was her whole life with me, Lady Lansdowne, but one long disobedience? When she published that light, that foolish book, and dedicated it to — to that person — a book which no modest wife should have written, was not her main motive to harass and degrade me? Me, her husband? While we were together was not her conduct from the first one long defiance, one long harassment of me? Did a day pass in which she did not humiliate me by a hundred tricks, belittle me by a hundred slights, ape me before those whom she should not have stooped to know, invite in a thousand ways the applause of the fops she drew round her? And when” — he rose, and paced the room— “when, tried beyond patience by what I heard, I sent to her at Florence and bade her return to me, and cease to make herself a scandal with that person, or my house should no longer be her home, she disobeyed me flagrantly, wilfully, and at a price she knew! She went out of her way to follow him to Rome, she
flaunted herself in his company, ay, and flaunted herself in such guise as no Englishwoman had been known to wear before! And after that — after that — —”
He stopped, proud as he was, mastered by his feelings; she had got within his guard indeed. For a while he could not go on. And she, picturing the old days which his passionate words brought back, days when her children had been infants, saw, as it had been yesterday, the young bride, beautiful as a rosebud and wild and skittish as an Irish colt — and the husband staid, dignified, middle-aged, as little in sympathy with his captive’s random acts and flighty words as if he had spoken another tongue.
Thus yoked, and resisting the lightest rein, the young wife had shown herself capable of an infinity of folly. Egged on by the plaudits of a circle of admirers, she had now made her husband ridiculous by childish familiarities: and again, when he found fault with these, by airs of public offence, which covered him with derision. But beauty’s sins are soon forgiven; and fretting and fuming, and leading a wretched life, he had yet borne with her, until something which she chose to call a passion took possession of her. “The Giaour” and “The Corsair” were all the rage that year; and with the publicity with which she did everything she flung herself at the head of her soul’s affinity; a famous person, half poet, half dandy, who was staying at Bowood.
The world which knew her decided that the affair was more worthy of laughter than of censure, and laughed immoderately. But to the husband — the humour of husbands is undeveloped — it was terrible. She wrote verses to the gentleman, and he to her; and she published, with ingenuous pride, the one and the other. Possibly this or the laughter determined the admirer. He fled, playing the innocent Æneas; and her lamentations, crystallising in the shape of a silly romance which made shop-girls weep and great ladies laugh, caused a separation between the husband and wife. Before this had lasted many months the illness of their only child brought them together again; and when, a little later, the doctors advised a southern climate, Sir Robert reluctantly entrusted the girl to her. She went abroad with the child, and the parents never met again.
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 511