Lord Henry slightly shrugged his shoulders, and said, "It is too late. I have begun my work and I cannot leave it."
"If a Parliamentary career could save this country," said Tancred, "I am sure you would be a public benefactor. I have observed what you and Mr. Con-ingsby and some of your friends have done and said, with great interest. But Parliament seems to me to be the very place which a man of action should avoid. A Parliamentary career, that old superst.i.tion of the eighteenth century, was important when there were no other sources of power and fame. An aristocracy at the head of a people whom they had plundered of their means of education, required some cultivated tribunal whose sympathy might stimulate their intelligence and satisfy their vanity. Parliament was never so great as when they debated with closed doors. The public opinion, of which they never dreamed, has superseded the rhetorical club of our great-grandfathers. They know this well enough, and try to maintain their unnecessary position by affecting the character of men of business, but amateur men of business are very costly conveniences. In this age it is not Parliament that does the real work. It does not govern Ireland, for example. If the manufacturers want to change a tariff, they form a commercial league, and they effect their purpose. It is the same with the abolition of slavery, and all our great revolutions. Parliament has become as really insignificant as for two centuries it has kept the monarch. O"Connell has taken a good share of its power; Cobden has taken another; and I am inclined to believe,"
said Tancred, "though I care little about it, that, if our order had any spirit or prescience, they would put themselves at the head of the people, and take the rest."
"Coningsby dines here to-day," said Sidonia, who, un.o.bserved, had watched Tancred as he spoke, with a searching glance.
"Notwithstanding what you say," said Lord Henry, smiling, "I wish I could induce you to remain and help us. You would be a great ally."
"I go to a land," said Tancred, "that has never been blessed by that fatal drollery called a representative government, though Omniscience once deigned to trace out the polity which should rule it."
At this moment the servant announced Lord and Lady Marney.
Political sympathy had created a close intimacy between Lord Marney and Coningsby. They were necessary to each other. They were both men entirely devoted to public affairs, and sitting in different Houses, both young, and both masters of fortunes of the first cla.s.s, they were indicated as individuals who hereafter might take a lead, and, far from clashing, would co-operate with each other. Through Coningsby the Marneys had become acquainted with Sidonia, who liked them both, particularly Sybil. Although received by society with open arms, especially by the high n.o.bility, who affected to look upon Sybil quite as one of themselves, Lady Marney, notwithstanding the homage that everywhere awaited her, had already shown a disposition to retire as much as possible within the precinct of a chosen circle.
This was her second season, and Sybil ventured to think that she had made, in the general gaieties of her first, a sufficient oblation to the genius of fashion, and the immediate requirements of her social position. Her life was faithful to its first impulse. Devoted to the improvement of the condition of the people, she was the moving spring of the charitable development of this great city. Her house, without any pedantic effort, had become the focus of a refined society, who, though obliged to show themselves for the moment in the great carnival, wear their masks, blow their trumpets, and pelt the mult.i.tude with sugarplums, were glad to find a place where they could at all times divest themselves of their mummery, and return to their accustomed garb of propriety and good taste.
Sybil, too, felt alone in the world. Without a relation, without an acquaintance of early and other days, she clung to her husband with a devotion which was peculiar as well as profound. Egremont was to her more than a husband and a lover; he was her only friend; it seemed to Sybil that he could be her only friend. The disposition of Lord Marney was not opposed to the habits of his wife. Men, when they are married, often shrink from the glare and bustle of those social mult.i.tudes which are entered by bachelors with the excitement of knights-errant in a fairy wilderness, because they are supposed to be rife with adventures, and, perhaps, fruitful of a heroine. The adventure sometimes turns out to be a catastrophe, and the heroine a copy instead of an original; but let that pa.s.s.
Lord Marney liked to be surrounded by those who sympathised with his pursuit; and his pursuit was politics, and politics on a great scale.
The commonplace career of official distinction was at his command. A great peer, with abilities and ambition, a good speaker, supposed to be a Conservative, he might soon have found his way into the cabinet, and, like the rest, have a.s.sisted in registering the decrees of one too powerful individual. But Lord Marney had been taught to think at a period of life when he little dreamed of the responsibility which fortune had in store for him.
The change in his position had not altered the conclusions at which he had previously arrived. He held that the state of England, notwithstanding the superficies of a material prosperity, was one of impending doom, unless it were timely arrested by those who were in high places. A man of fine mind rather than of brilliant talents, Lord Marney found, in the more vivid and impa.s.sioned intelligence of Coningsby, the directing sympathy which he required. Tadpole looked upon his lordship as little short of insane. "Do you see that man?" he would say as Lord Marney rode by. "He might be Privy Seal, and he throws it all away for the nonsense of Young England!"
Mrs. Coningsby entered the room almost on the footsteps of the Marneys.
"I am in despair about Harry," she said, as she gave a finger to Sidonia, "but he told me not to wait for him later than eight. I suppose he is kept at the House. Do you know anything of him, Lord Henry?"
"You may make yourself quite easy about him," said Lord Henry. "He promised Vavasour to support a motion which he has to-day, and perhaps speak on it. I ought to be there too, but Charles Buller told me there would certainly be no division and so I ventured to pair off with him."
"He will come with Vavasour," said Sidonia, "who makes up our party.
They will be here before we have seated ourselves."
The gentlemen had exchanged the usual inquiry, whether there was anything new to-day, without waiting for the answer. Sidonia introduced Tancred and Lord Marney.
"And what have you been doing to-day?" said Edith to Sybil, by whose side she had seated herself. "Lady Bardolf did nothing last night but gronder me, because you never go to her parties. In vain I said that you looked upon her as the most odious of her s.e.x, and her b.a.l.l.s the pest of society. She was not in the least satisfied. And how is Gerard?"
"Why, we really have been very uneasy about him," said Lady Marney, "but the last bulletin," she added, with a smile, "announces a tooth."
"Next year you must give him a pony, and let him ride with my Harry; I mean my little Harry, Harry of Monmouth I call him; he is so like a portrait Mr. Coningsby has of his grandfather, the same debauched look."
"Your dinner is served, sir!"
Sidonia offered his hand to Lady Marney; Edith was attended by Tancred.
A door at the end of the room opened into a marble corridor, which led to the dining-room, decorated in the same style as the library. It was a suite of apartments which Sidonia used for an intimate circle like the present.
CHAPTER XX.
_A Modern Troubadour_
THEY seated themselves at a round table, on which everything seemed brilliant and sparkling; nothing heavy, nothing oppressive. There was scarcely anything that Sidonia disliked so much as a small table, groaning, as it is aptly termed, with plate. He shrunk from great ma.s.ses of gold and silver; gigantic groups, colossal shields, and mobs of tankards and flagons; and never used them except on great occasions, when the banquet a.s.sumes an Egyptian character, and becomes too vast for refinement. At present, the dinner was served on Sevres porcelain of Rose du Barri, raised on airy golden stands of arabesque workmanship; a mule bore your panniers of salt, or a sea-nymph proffered it you on a sh.e.l.l just fresh from the ocean, or you found it in a bird"s nest; by every guest a different pattern. In the centre of the table, mounted on a pedestal, was a group of pages in Dresden china. Nothing could be more gay than their bright cloaks and flowing plumes, more elaborately exquisite than their laced shirts and rosettes, or more fantastically saucy than their pretty affected faces, as each, with extended arm, held a light to a guest. The room was otherwise illumined from the sides.
The guests had scarcely seated themselves when the two absent ones arrived.
"Well, you did not divide, Vavasour," said Lord Henry.
"Did I not?" said Vavasour; "and nearly beat the Government. You are a pretty fellow!"
"I was paired."
"With some one who could not stay. Your brother, Mrs. Coningsby, behaved like a man, sacrificed his dinner, and made a capital speech."
"Oh! Oswald, did he speak? Did you speak, Harry?"
"No; I voted. There was too much speaking as it was; if Vavasour had not replied, I believe we should have won."
"But then, my dear fellow, think of my points; think how they laid themselves open!"
"A majority is always the best repartee," said Coningsby.
"I have been talking with Montacute," whispered Lord Henry to Coningsby, who was seated next to him. "Wonderful fellow! You can conceive nothing richer! Very wild, but all the right ideas; exaggerated of course. You must get hold of him after dinner."
"But they say he is going to Jerusalem."
"But he will return."
"I do not know that; even Napoleon regretted that he had ever re-crossed the Mediterranean. The East is a career."
Mr. Vavasour was a social favourite; a poet and a real poet, and a troubadour, as well as a member of Parliament; travelled, sweet-tempered, and good-hearted; amusing and clever. With catholic sympathies and an eclectic turn of mind, Mr. Vavasour saw something good in everybody and everything, which is certainly amiable, and perhaps just, but disqualifies a man in some degree for the business of life, which requires for its conduct a certain degree of prejudice. Mr.
Vavasour"s breakfasts were renowned. Whatever your creed, cla.s.s, or country, one might almost add your character, you were a welcome guest at his matutinal meal, provided you were celebrated. That qualification, however, was rigidly enforced.
It not rarely happened that never were men more incongruously grouped.
Individuals met at his hospitable house who had never met before, but who for years had been cherishing in solitude mutual detestation, with all the irritable exaggeration of the literary character. Vavasour liked to be the Amphitryon of a cl.u.s.ter of personal enemies. He prided himself on figuring as the social medium by which rival reputations became acquainted, and paid each other in his presence the compliments which veiled their ineffable disgust. All this was very well at his rooms in the Albany, and only funny; but when he collected his menageries at his ancestral hall in a distant county, the sport sometimes became tragic.
A real philosopher, alike from his genial disposition and from the influence of his rich and various information, Vavasour moved amid the strife, sympathising with every one; and perhaps, after all, the philanthropy which was his boast was not untinged by a dash of humour, of which rare and charming quality he possessed no inconsiderable portion. Vavasour liked to know everybody who was known, and to see everything which ought to be seen. He also was of opinion that everybody who was known ought to know him; and that the spectacle, however splendid or exciting, was not quite perfect without his presence.
His life was a gyration of energetic curiosity; an insatiable whirl of social celebrity. There was not a congregation of sages and philosophers in any part of Europe which he did not attend as a brother. He was present at the camp of Kalisch in his yeomanry uniform, and a.s.sisted at the festivals of Barcelona in an Andalusian jacket. He was everywhere, and at everything; he had gone down in a diving-bell and gone up in a balloon. As for his acquaintances, he was welcomed in every land; his universal sympathies seemed omnipotent. Emperor and king, jacobin and carbonaro, alike cherished him. He was the steward of Polish b.a.l.l.s and the vindicator of Russian humanity; he dined with Louis Philippe, and gave dinners to Louis Blanc.
This was a dinner of which the guests came to partake. Though they delighted in each other"s society, their meetings were not so rare that they need sacrifice the elegant pleasures of a refined meal for the opportunity of conversation. They let that take its chance, and ate and drank without affectation. Nothing so rare as a female dinner where people eat, and few things more delightful. On the present occasion some time elapsed, while the admirable performances of Sidonia"s cook were discussed, with little interruption; a burst now and then from the ringing voice of Mrs. Coningsby crossing a lance with her habitual opponent, Mr. Vavasour, who, however, generally withdrew from the skirmish when a fresh dish was handed to him.
At length, the second course being served, Mrs. Coningsby said, "I think you have all eaten enough: I have a piece of information for you. There is going to be a costume ball at the Palace."
This announcement produced a number of simultaneous remarks and exclamations. "When was it to be? What was it to be? An age, or a country; or an olio of all ages and all countries?"
"An age is a masquerade," said Sidonia. "The more contracted the circle, the more perfect the illusion."