"Well," he said to himself, "I am turning quite practical and auld- warld. Those old Greeks were not so far wrong when they said that what made men citizens, patriots, heroes, was the love of wedded wife and child."
"Wedded wife and child!"--He shrank in from the daring of the delicious thought, as if he had intruded without invitation into a hidden sanctuary, and looked round for a book to drive away the dazzling picture. But even there his thoughts were haunted by Argemone"s face, and
"When his regard Was raised by intense pensiveness, two eyes, Two starry eyes, hung in the gloom of thought, And seemed, with their serene and azure smiles, To beckon him."
He took up, with a new interest "Chartism," which alone of all Mr.
Carlyle"s works he had hitherto disliked, because his own luxurious day-dreams had always flowed in such sad discord with the terrible warnings of the modern seer, and his dark vistas of starvation, crime, neglect, and discontent.
"Well," he said to himself, as he closed the book, "I suppose it is good for us easy-going ones now and then to face the possibility of a change. Gold has grown on my back as feathers do on geese, without my own will or deed; but considering that gold, like feathers, is equally useful to those who have and those who have not, why, it is worth while for the goose to remember that he may possibly one day be plucked. And what remains? "Io," as Medea says. . . . But Argemone?" . . . And Lancelot felt, for the moment, as conservative as the tutelary genius of all special constables.
As the last thought pa.s.sed through his brain, Bracebridge"s little mustang slouched past the window, ridden (without a saddle) by a horseman whom there was no mistaking for no one but the immaculate colonel, the chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, dared to go about the country "such a figure." A minute afterwards he walked in, in a student"s felt hat, a ragged heather-coloured coatee, and old white "regulation drills," shrunk half-way up his legs, a pair of embroidered Indian moca.s.sins, and an enormous meerschaum at his b.u.t.ton-hole.
"Where have you been this last week?"
"Over head and ears in Young England, till I fled to you for a week"s common sense. A gla.s.s of cider, for mercy"s sake, "to take the taste of it out of my mouth," as Bill Sykes has it."
"Where have you been staying?"
"With young Lord Vieuxbois, among high art and painted gla.s.s, spade farms, and model smell-traps, rubricalities and sanitary reforms, and all other inventions, possible and impossible, for "stretching the old formula to meet the new fact," as your favourite prophet says."
"Till the old formula cracks under the tension."
"And cracks its devotees, too, I think. Here comes the cider!"
"But, my dear fellow, you must not laugh at all this. Young England or Peelite, this is all right and n.o.ble. What a yet unspoken poetry there is in that very sanitary reform! It is the great fact of the age. We shall have men arise and write epics on it, when they have learnt that "to the pure all things are pure," and that science and usefulness contain a divine element, even in their lowest appliances."
"Write one yourself, and call it the Chadwickiad."
"Why not?
"Smells and the Man I sing.
There"s a beginning at once. Why don"t YOU rather, with your practical power, turn sanitary reformer--the only true soldier--and conquer those real devils and "natural enemies" of Englishmen, carbonic acid and sulphuretted hydrogen?"
"Ce n"est pas mon metier, my dear fellow. I am miserably behind the age. People are getting so cursedly in earnest now-a-days, that I shall have to bolt to the backwoods to amuse myself in peace; or else sham dumb as the monkeys do, lest folks should find out that I"m rational, and set me to work."
Lancelot laughed and sighed.
"But how on earth do you contrive to get on so well with men with whom you have not an idea in common!"
"Savoir faire, O infant Hercules! own daddy to savoir vivre. I am a good listener; and, therefore, the most perfect, because the most silent, of flatterers. When they talk Puginesquery, I stick my head on one side attentively, and "think the more," like the lady"s parrot. I have been all the morning looking over a set of drawings for my lord"s new chapel; and every soul in the party fancies me a great antiquary, just because I have been retailing to B as my own everything that A told me the moment before."
"I envy you your tact, at all events."
"Why the deuce should you? You may rise in time to something better than tact; to what the good book, I suppose, means by "wisdom."
Young geniuses like you, who have been green enough to sell your souls to "truth," must not meddle with tact, unless you wish to fare as the donkey did when he tried to play lap-dog."
"At all events, I would sooner remain cub till they run me down and eat me, than give up speaking my mind," said Lancelot. "Fool I may be, but the devil himself shan"t make me knave."
"Quite proper. On two thousand a year a man can afford to be honest. Kick out l.u.s.tily right and left!--After all, the world is like a spaniel; the more you beat it, the better it likes you--if you have money. Only don"t kick too hard; for, after all, it has a hundred million pair of shins to your one."
"Don"t fear that I shall run a-muck against society just now. I am too thoroughly out of my own good books. I have been for years laughing at Young England, and yet its little finger is thicker than my whole body, for it is trying to do something; and I, alas, am doing utterly nothing. I should be really glad to take a lesson of these men and their plans for social improvement."
"You will have a fine opportunity this evening. Don"t you dine at Minchampstead?"
"Yes. Do you?"
"Mr. Jingle dines everywhere, except at home. Will you take me over in your trap?"
"Done. But whom shall we meet there?"
"The Lavingtons, and Vieuxbois, and Vaurien, and a parson or two, I suppose. But between Saint Venus and Vieuxbois you may soon learn enough to make you a sadder man, if not a wiser one."
"Why not a wiser one? Sadder than now I cannot be; or less wise, G.o.d knows."
The colonel looked at Lancelot with one of those kindly thoughtful smiles, which came over him whenever his better child"s heart could bubble up through the thick crust of worldliness.
"My young friend, you have been a little too much on the stilts heretofore. Take care that, now you are off them, you don"t lie down and sleep, instead of walking honestly on your legs. Have faith in yourself; pick these men"s brains, and all men"s. You can do it. Say to yourself boldly, as the false prophet in India said to the missionary, "I have fire enough in my stomach to burn up" a dozen stucco and filigree reformers and "a.s.similate their ashes into the bargain, like one of Liebig"s cabbages.""
"How can I have faith in myself, when I am playing traitor to myself every hour in the day? And yet faith in something I must have: in woman, perhaps."
"Never!" said the colonel, energetically. "In anything but woman?
She must be led, not leader. If you love a woman, make her have faith in you. If you lean on her, you will ruin yourself, and her as well."
Lancelot shook his head. There was a pause.
"After all, colonel, I think there must be a meaning in those old words our mothers used to teach us about "having faith in G.o.d.""
The colonel shrugged his shoulders.
"Quien sabe? said the Spanish girl, when they asked her who was her child"s father. But here comes my kit on a clod"s back, and it is time to dress for dinner."
So to the dinner-party they went.
Lord Minchampstead was one of the few n.o.blemen Lancelot had ever met who had aroused in him a thorough feeling of respect. He was always and in all things a strong man. Naturally keen, ready, business- like, daring, he had carved out his own way through life, and opened his oyster--the world, neither with sword nor pen, but with steam and cotton. His father was Mr. Obadiah Newbroom, of the well-known manufacturing firm of Newbroom, Stag, and Playforall. A stanch Dissenter himself, he saw with a slight pang his son Thomas turn Churchman, as soon as the young man had worked his way up to be the real head of the firm. But this was the only sorrow which Thomas Newbroom, now Lord Minchampstead, had ever given his father. "I stood behind a loom myself, my boy, when I began life; and you must do with great means what I did with little ones. I have made a gentleman of you, you must make a n.o.bleman of yourself." Those were almost the last words of the stern, thrifty, old Puritan craftsman, and his son never forgot them. From a mill-owner he grew to coal- owner, shipowner, banker, railway director, money-lender to kings and princes; and last of all, as the summit of his own and his compeer"s ambition, to land-owner. He had half a dozen estates in as many different counties. He had added house to house, and field to field; and at last bought Minchampstead Park and ten thousand acres, for two-thirds its real value, from that enthusiastic sportsman Lord Peu de Cervelle, whose family had come in with the Conqueror, and gone out with George IV. So, at least, they always said; but it was remarkable that their name could never be traced farther back than the dissolution of the monasteries: and Calumnious Dryasdusts would sometimes insolently father their t.i.tle on James I. and one of his batches of bought peerages. But let the dead bury their dead. There was now a new lord in Minchampstead; and every country Caliban was finding, to his disgust, that he had "got a new master," and must perforce "be a new man." Oh! how the squires swore and the farmers chuckled, when the "Parvenu" sold the Minchampstead hounds, and celebrated his 1st of September by exterminating every hare and pheasant on the estate! How the farmers swore and the labourers chuckled when he took all the cottages into his own hands and rebuilt them, set up a first-rate industrial school, gave every man a pig and a garden, and broke up all the commons "to thin the labour-market." Oh, how the labourers swore and the farmers chuckled, when he put up steam-engines on all his farms, refused to give away a farthing in alms, and enforced the new Poor-law to the very letter. How the country tradesmen swore, when he called them "a pack of dilatory jobbers," and announced his intention of employing only London workmen for his improvements.
Oh! how they all swore together (behind his back, of course, for his dinners were worth eating), and the very ladies said naughty words, when the stern political economist proclaimed at his own table that "he had bought Minchampstead for merely commercial purposes, as a profitable investment of capital, and he would see that, whatever else it did, it should PAY."
But the new lord heard of all the hard words with a quiet self- possessed smile. He had formed his narrow theory of the universe, and he was methodically and conscientiously carrying it out. True, too often, like poor Keats"s merchant brothers,--
"Half-ignorant, he turned an easy wheel, Which set sharp racks at work to pinch and peel."
But of the harm which he did he was unconscious; in the good which he did he was consistent and indefatigable; infinitely superior, with all his defects, to the ignorant, extravagant do-nothing Squire Lavingtons around him. At heart, however, Mammoth-blinded, he was kindly and upright. A man of a stately presence; a broad, honest north-country face; a high square forehead, bland and unwrinkled. I sketch him here once for all, because I have no part for him after this scene in my corps de ballet.