Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  “I must say, Mr. Vaughan,” he said, “that the — the circumstances in which you used the vote given to you by your cousin, and — and the way in which you turned against him after attending a dinner of his supporters — —”

  “Openly, fairly, and after warning, I turned against him,” Vaughan cried, enraged at the show of justice which the accusation wore. “And that, sir, in pursuance of opinions which I had publicly professed. More, I allowed myself to be elected only after I had once refused Lord Lansdowne’s offer of the seat! And after, only after, Sir Robert Vermuyden had so treated me that all ties were broken. Sergeant Wathen, I appeal to you again! Was that not so?”

  “I know nothing of that,” Wathen answered, sullenly.

  “Nothing? You know nothing of that?” Vaughan cried.

  “No,” the Sergeant answered, still more sullenly. “I know nothing of what passed between you and your cousin. I know only that you were present, as I have said, at a dinner of his supporters on the eve of the election, and that on a sudden, at that dinner, you declared yourself against him — with the result that you were elected by the other side!”

  For a moment Vaughan stood glowering at him, struck dumb by his denial and by the unexpected plausibility, nay, the unexpected strength of the case against him. He was sure that Wathen knew more, he was sure that if he would he could say more! He was sure that the man was dishonest. But he did not see how he could prove it, and ——

  The Irish Member laughed. “Well, sir,” he said, derisively, “is the explanation, now you’ve got it, to your mind?”

  The taunt stung Vaughan. He took a step forward. The next moment would have seen him commit himself to a foolish action, that could only have led him to Wimbledon Common or Primrose Hill. But in the nick of time a voice stayed him.

  “What’s this, eh?” it asked, its tone more lugubrious than usual. And Sir Charles Wetherell, who had just descended the stairs from the lobby, turned a dull eye from one disputant to the other. “Can’t you do enough damage with your tongues?” he rumbled. “Brawl upstairs as much as you like! That’s the way to the Woolsack! But you mustn’t brawl here!” And the heavy-visaged man, whose humour had again and again conciliated a House which his coarse invective had offended, once more turned from one to the other. “What is it?” he repeated. “Eh?”

  Vaughan hastened to appeal to him. “Sir Charles,” he said, “I will abide by your decision! Though I do not know, indeed, that I ought to take any man’s decision on a point which touches my honour!”

  “Oh!” Wetherell said in an inimitable tone. “Court of Honour, is it?” And he cast a queer look round the circle. “That’s it, is it? Well, I dare say I’m eligible. I dare swear I know as much about honour as Brougham about equity! Or the Sergeant there” — Wathen reddened angrily— “about law! Or Captain McShane here about his beloved country! Yes,” he continued, amid the unconcealed grins of those of the party whose weak points had escaped, “you may proceed, I think.”

  “You are a friend, Sir Charles,” Vaughan said, in a voice which quivered with anxiety, “you are a friend of Sir Robert Vermuyden’s?”

  “Well, I won’t deny him until I know more!” Wetherell answered quaintly. “What of it?”

  “You know what occurred at Chippinge before the election?”

  “None better. I was there.”

  “And what passed between Sir Robert Vermuyden and me?” Vaughan continued, eagerly.

  “I think I do,” Wetherell answered. “In the main I do.”

  “Thank you, Sir Charles. Then I appeal to you. You are opposed to me in politics, but you will do me justice. These gentlemen have thought fit to brand me here and now as a turncoat; and, worse, as one who was — who was elected” — he could scarcely speak for passion— “in opposition to Sir Robert’s, to my relative’s candidates, under circumstances dishonourable to me!”

  “Indeed? Indeed? That is serious.”

  “And I ask you, sir, is there a word of truth in that charge?”

  Wetherell had his eyes fixed gloomily on the pavement. He appeared to weigh the matter a moment or two. Then he shook his head.

  “Not a word,” he said, ponderously.

  “You — you bear me out, sir.”

  “Quite, quite,” the other answered slowly, as he took out his snuffbox. “To tell the truth, gentlemen,” he continued, in the same melancholy tone, “Mr. Vaughan was fool enough to quarrel with his bread and butter for the sake of the most worthless, damnable and mistaken convictions any man ever held! That’s the truth. He showed himself a very perfect fool, but an honourable and an honest fool — and that’s a rare thing. I see none here.”

  No one laughed at the gibe, and he turned to Vaughan, who stood, relieved indeed, but stiff and uncomfortable, uncertain what to do next. “I’ll take your arm,” he said. “I’ve saved you,” coolly, “from the ragged regiment on my side. Do you take me safe,” he continued, with a look towards the lower end of the Hall, “through your ragged regiment outside, my lad!”

  Vaughan understood only too well the generous motive which underlay the invitation. But for a moment he hung back.

  “I am your debtor, Sir Charles,” he said, deeply moved, “as long as I live. But I would like to know before I go,” and he raised his head, with a look worthy of Sir Robert, “whether these gentlemen are satisfied. If not — —”

  “Oh, perfectly,” the Sergeant cried, hurriedly. “Perfectly!” And he muttered something about being glad — hear explanation — satisfactory.

  But the Irish Member stepped up and held out his hand. “Faith,” he said, “there’s no man whose word I’d take before Sir Charles’s! There’s no hiatus in his honour, whatever may be said of his breeches! That’s one for you,” he added, addressing Wetherell. “I owed you one, my good sir!” And then he turned to Vaughan. “There’s my hand, sir! I apologise,” he said. “You’re a man of honour, and it’s mistaken we were!”

  “I am obliged to you for your candour,” Vaughan said, gratefully.

  Half a dozen others raised their hats to him, or shook hands with him frankly. The Sergeant did the same less frankly. But Vaughan saw that he was cowed. Wetherell was Sir Robert Vermuyden’s friend, and the Sergeant was Sir Robert’s nominee. So he pushed his triumph no farther. With a feeling of gratitude too deep for words, he offered his arm to Sir Charles, and went down the Hall in his company.

  By this time the crowd at the lower end had carried their joy and their horseplay elsewhere; and no attempt was made — Vaughan only wished an attempt had been made — to molest Wetherell. They walked across the yard to Parliament Street, as the first sunshine of the day fell on the bridge and the river. Flocks of gulls were swinging to and fro in the clear air above the water, and dumb barges were floating up with the tide. The hub-bub in that part was past and over; at that moment a score of coaches were speeding through the suburbs, bearing to market-town and busy city, ay, and to village greens, where the news was awaited eagerly, the tidings that the Bill had passed the Lower House.

  Sir Charles walked a short distance in silence. Then, “I thought some notion of the kind was abroad,” he said. “It’s as well this happened. What are you going to do about your seat if the Bill pass, young man?”

  “I am told that it is pre-empted,” Vaughan answered, in a tone between jest and earnest.

  “It is. But — —”

  “Yes, Sir Charles?”

  “You should see your own side about it,” Wetherell answered gruffly. “I can’t say more than that.”

  “I am obliged to you for that.”

  “You should be!” Wetherell retorted in a peculiar tone. And with an oath and a strange gesture he disengaged his arm. Halting and wheeling about, he pointed with a shaking hand to the towers of the Abbey, which rose against the blue, beatified by the morning sunshine. “If I said ‘batter down those walls, undig the dead, away with every hoary thing of time, the present and the future are enough, and we, the generation that burns
the mummies, which three thousand years have spared — we are wiser than all our forbears—’ what would you say? You would call me mad. Yet what are you doing? Ay, you, you among the rest! The building that our fathers built, patiently through many hundred years, adding a little here and strengthening there, the building that Hampden and Shrewsbury and Walpole, Chatham and his son, and Canning, and many others tended reverently, repairing here and there, as time required, you, you, who think you know more than all who have gone before you, hurry in ruin to the ground! That you may build your own building, built in a day, to suit the day, and to perish with the day! Oh, mad, mad, mad! Ay,

  “Hostis habet muros; ruit alta a culmine Troja.

  Sat patriæ Priamoque datum; si Pergama linquâ.

  Defendi possent, etiam, hoc defensa fuissent!”

  His voice quavered on the last accent, his chin sank on his breast. He turned wearily and resumed his course. When Vaughan, who did not venture to address him again, parted from him in silence at the door of his house, the fat man’s pendulous lip quivered, and a single tear ran down his cheek.

  XXVII

  WICKED SHIFTS

  It was with a lighter heart that Vaughan walked on to Bury Street. There were still, it seemed, faith and honour in the world, and some men who could be trusted. But if he expected much to come of this, if he expected to be received with an ovation on his next appearance at Westminster, he was doomed to disappointment. Wetherell’s defence convinced those who heard it; and in time, no doubt, passing from mouth to mouth, would improve the young Member’s relations, not only on the floor of the House, but in the lobbies and at Bellamy’s. But the English are not dramatic. They have no love for scenes. And no one of those whose silence or whose catcalls had wronged him thought fit to take his hand in cold blood and ask his pardon; nor did any Don Quixote cast down his glove in Westminster Hall and offer to do battle with his traducers. The manner of one man became a shade more cordial; another spoke where he would have nodded. And if Vaughan had risen at this time to speak on any question which he understood he would have been heard upon his merits.

  But the change, slow though genial, like the breaking up of an English frost, came too late to do him much service. With the transfer of the Bill to the House of Lords public interest deserted the Commons. They sat, indeed, through the month of September, to the horror of many a country gentleman, who saw in this the herald of evil days; and they debated after a fashion. But the attendance was sparse, and the thoughts and hopes of all men were in another place. Vaughan saw that for all the reputation he could now make the Dissolution might be come already. And with this, and the emptiness of his heart, from which he could no more put the craving for Mary Vermuyden than he could dismiss her image from the retina of his mind, he was very miserable. The void left by love, indeed, was rendered worse by the void left unsatisfied by ambition. Mary’s haunting face was with him at his rising, went with him to his pillow, her little hand was often on his sleeve, her eyes often pleaded to his. In his lonely rooms he would pace the floor feverishly, savagely, pestering himself with what might have been; kicking the furniture from his path and — and hating her! For the idea of marriage, once closely presented to man or woman, leaves neither unchanged, leaves neither as it found them, however quickly it be put aside.

  Still it was not possible for one who sprang from the governing classes, and was gifted with political instincts, to witness the excitement which moved the whole country during those weeks of September and the early days of October, without feeling his own blood stirred; without sharing to some extent the exhilaration with which the adventurous view the approach of adventures. What would the peers do? All England was asking that question. At Crockford’s, in the little supper-room, or at the French Hazard table itself, men turned to put it and to hear the answer. At White’s and Boodle’s, in the hall of the Athenæum, as they walked before Apsley House, or under the gas-lamps of Pall Mall, men asked that question again and again. It shared with Pasta and the slow-coming cholera — which none the less was coming — the chit-chat of drawing-rooms; and with the next prize fight or with ridicule of the New Police, the wrangling debates of every tavern and posthouse. Would the peers throw out the Bill? Would they — would those doting old Bishops in particular — dare to thwart the People’s will? Would they dare to withhold the franchise from Birmingham and Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield? On this husbands took one side, wives the other, families quarrelled. What Croker thought, what Lord Grey threatened, what the Duke had let drop, what Brougham had boasted, how Lady Lyndhurst had sneered, or her husband retorted, what the Queen wished — scraps such as these were tossed from mouth to mouth, greedily received, carried far into the country, and eventually, changed beyond recognition, were repeated in awestruck ears, in county ballrooms and at Sessions.

  One member of the Privy Council, who had left his party on the Bill, and whose vote, it was thought, had turned a division, shot himself. And many another, it was whispered, never recovered wholly from the strain of those days.

  For far more hung upon the Lords’ decision than the mere fate of the Bill. If they threw it out, what would the Ministry do? And — more momentous still, and looming larger in the minds of men — what would the country do? What would Birmingham and Sheffield, Manchester and Leeds do? What would they do?

  Lord Grey, strong in the King’s support, would persevere, said some. He would bring in the Bill again, and create peers in number sufficient to carry it. And Macaulay’s squib was flung from club to club, from meeting to meeting, until it reached the streets:

  What, though new opposed I be,

  Twenty peers shall carry me!

  If twenty won’t, thirty will,

  For I am his Majesty’s bouncing Bill.

  Ay, his Majesty’s Bill, God bless him! His Majesty’s own Bill! Hurrah for Lord Grey! Hurrah for Brougham! Hurrah for Lord John, and down with the Bishops! So the word flew from mouth to mouth, so errand boys yelled it under the windows of London House, in St. James’s Square, and wherever aproned legs might be supposed to meet under the mahogany.

  But others maintained that Lord Grey would simply resign, and let the consequences fall on the heads of those who opposed the People’s will. Those consequences, it was whispered everywhere — and not by the timid and the rich only — spelled Revolution! Revolution, red and anarchical, was coming, said many. Was not Scotland ready to rise? Was not the Political Union of Birmingham threatening to pay no taxes? Were not the Political Unions everywhere growling and lashing their sides? The winter was coming, and there would be fires by night and drillings by day, as there had been during the previous autumn. Through the long dark nights there would be fear and trembling, and barring of doors, and waiting for the judgment to come. And then some morning the crackling sound of musketry would awaken Pall Mall and Mayfair, the mob would seize the Tower and Newgate, the streets would run blood and the guillotine would rise in Leicester Square or Finsbury Fields.

  So widely were these fears spread — fostered as they were by both parties, by the Tories for the purpose of proving whither Reform was leading the country, by the Whigs to show to what the obstinacy of the borough-mongers was driving it — that few were proof against them. So few, that when the Bill was rejected in the early morning of Saturday, the 8th of October, the Tory peers, from Lord Eldon downwards, though they had not shrunk from doing their duty, could hardly be made to believe that they were at liberty to go to their homes unscathed.

  They did so, however. But the first mutterings of the storm soon made themselves heard. Within twenty-four hours the hearts of many failed them for fear. The Funds fell at once. The journals appeared in mourning borders. In many towns the bells were tolled and the shops were shut. The mob of Nottingham rose and burned the Castle and fired the house of an unpopular squire. The mob of Derby besieged the gaol and released the prisoners. At Darlington, Lord Tankerville narrowly escaped with his life; Lord Londonderry was left for dead; no Bishop dared to we
ar his apron in public. Everywhere rose the cry of “No Taxes!” Finally, the rabble rose in immense numbers, paraded the West End of London, broke the windows of many peers, assaulted others, and were only driven from Apsley House by the timely arrival of the Life Guards. The country, amazed and shaken from end to end, seemed to be already in the grip of rebellion; so that within the week the very Tories hastened to beg Lord Grey to retain office. Even the King, it was supposed, was shaken; and his famous distich — his one contribution to the poetry of the country,

  I consider Dissolution

  Tantamount to Revolution,

  found admirers for its truth, if not for its beauty.

  Such a ferment could not but occupy Vaughan’s mind and divert his thoughts from his own troubles, even from thoughts of Mary. Every day there was news: every day, in the opinion of many, the sky grew darker. But though the rejection of the Bill promised him a second short session, and many who sat for close boroughs chuckled privately over the respite, he was ill-content with a hand-to-mouth life. He saw that the Bill must pass eventually. He did not believe that there would be a revolution. It was clear that his only chance lay in following Wetherell’s advice, and laying his case before one of his chiefs.

  Some days after the division he happened on an opportunity. He was walking down Parliament Street when he came on a scene, much of a piece of the unrest of the time. A crowd was pouring out of Downing Street, and in the van of the rabble he espied the tall, ungainly figure of no less a man than Lord Brougham. Abreast of the Chancellor, but keeping himself to the wall as if he desired to dissociate himself from the demonstration, walked another tall figure, also in black, with shepherd’s plaid trousers. A second glance informed Vaughan that this was no other than Mr. Cornelius, who had been present at his interview with Brougham; and accepting the omen, he made up to the Chancellor just as the latter halted to rid himself of the ragged tail, which had, perhaps, been more pleasing to his vanity in the smaller streets.