Kitabı oku: «Chippinge Borough», sayfa 2

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?"

"I don't know," Mr. Cornelius answered gruffly.

"No?" the Chancellor said, not a whit put out. "He never knows anything!" And then, throwing one knee over the other, he regarded Vaughan with closer attention. "Mr. Vaughan," he said, "have you ever thought of entering Parliament?"

Vaughan's heart bounded, and his face betrayed his emotions. Good heavens, was the Chancellor about to offer him a Government seat? He scarcely knew what to expect or what to say. The prospect, suddenly opened, blinded him. He muttered that he had not as yet thought of it.

"You have no connection," Brougham continued, "who could help you to a seat? For if so, now is the time. Presently there will be a Reformed Parliament and a crowd of new men, and the road will be blocked by the throng of aspirants. You are not too young. Palmerston was not so old when Perceval offered him a seat in the Cabinet."

The words, the tone, the assumption that such things were for him-that he had but to hold out his hand and they would fall into it-dropped like balm into the young man's soul. Yet he was not sure that the other was serious, and he made a tremendous effort to hide the emotion he felt. "I am afraid," he said, with a forced smile, "that I, my lord, am not Lord Palmerston."

"No?" Brougham answered with a faint sneer. "But not much the worse for that, perhaps. So that if you have any connection who commands a seat, now is the time."

Vaughan shook his head. "I have none," he said, "except my cousin, Sir Robert Vermuyden."

"Vermuyden of Chippinge?" the Chancellor exclaimed, in a voice of surprise.

"The same, my lord."

"Good G-d!" Brougham cried. It was not a mealy-mouthed age. And he leant back and stared at the young man. "You don't mean to say that he is your cousin?"

"Yes."

The Chancellor laughed grimly. "Oh, dear, dear!" he said. "I am afraid that he won't help us much. I remember him in the House-an old high and dry Tory. I am afraid that, with your opinions, you've not much to expect of him. Still-Mr. Cornelius," to the gentleman at the table, "oblige me with Oldfield's 'House of Commons,' the Wiltshire volume, and the private Borough List. Thank you. Let me see-ah, here it is!"

He proceeded to read in a low tone, skipping from heading to heading: "Chippinge, in the county of Wilts, has returned two members since the twenty-third of Edward III. Right of election in the Alderman and the twelve capital burgesses, who hold their places for life. Number of voters, thirteen. Patron, Sir Robert Vermuyden, Bart., of Stapylton House.

"Umph, as I thought," he continued, laying down the book. "Now what does the list say?" And, taking it in turn from his knee, he read:

"In Schedule A for total disfranchisement, the population under 2000. Present members, Sergeant Wathen and Mr. Cooke, on nomination of Sir Robert Vermuyden; the former to oblige Lord Eldon, the latter by purchase. Both opponents of Bill; nothing to be hoped from them. The Bowood interest divides the corporation in the proportion of four to nine, but has not succeeded in returning a member since the election of 1741-on petition. The heir to the Vermuyden interest is-" He broke off sharply, but continued to study the page. Presently he looked over it.

"Are you the Mr. Vaughan who inherits?" he asked gravely.

"The greater part of the estates-yes."

Brougham laid down the book and rubbed his chin. "Under those circumstances," he said, after musing a while, "don't you think that your cousin could be persuaded to return you as an independent member?"

Vaughan shook his head with decision.

"The matter is important," the Chancellor continued slowly, and as if he weighed his words. "I cannot precisely make a promise, Mr. Vaughan; but if your cousin could see the question of the Bill in another light, I have little doubt that any object in reason could be secured for him. If, for instance, it should be necessary in passing the Bill through the Upper House to create new-eh?"

He paused, looking at Vaughan, who laughed outright. "Sir Robert would not cross the park to save my life, my lord," he said. "And I am sure he would rather hang outside the White Lion in Chippinge marketplace than resign his opinions or his borough!"

"He'll lose the latter, whether or no," Brougham answered, with a touch of irritation. "Was there not some trouble about his wife? I think I remember something."

"They were separated many years ago."

"She is alive, is she not?"

"Yes."

Brougham saw, perhaps, that the subject was not palatable, and he abandoned it. With an abrupt change of manner he flung the books from him with the recklessness of a boy, and raised his sombre figure to its height. "Well, well," he said, "I hoped for better things; but I fear, as Tommy Moore sings-

 
"He's pledged himself, though sore bereft
Of ways and means of ruling ill,
To make the most of what are left
And stick to all that's rotten still!
 

And by the Lord, I don't say that I don't respect him. I respect every man who votes honestly as he thinks." And grandly, with appropriate gestures, he spouted:

 
"Who spurns the expedient for the right
Scorns money's all-attractive charms,
And through mean crowds that clogged his flight
Has nobly cleared his conquering arms.
 

That's the Attorney-General's. He turns old Horace well, doesn't he?"

Vaughan coloured. Young and candid, he could not bear the thought of taking credit where he did not deserve it. "I fear," he said awkwardly, "that would bear rather hardly on me if we had a contest at Chippinge, my lord. Fortunately it is unlikely."

"How would it bear hardly on you?" Brougham asked, with interest.

"I have a vote."

"You are one of the twelve burgesses?" in a tone of surprise.

"Yes, by favour of Sir Robert."

The Chancellor, smiling gaily, shook his head. "No," he said, "no; I do not believe you. You do yourself an injustice. Leave that sort of thing to older men, to Lyndhurst, if you will, d-d Jacobin as he is, preening himself in Tory feathers, and determined whoever's in he'll not be out; or to Peel. Leave it! And believe me you'll not repent it. I," he continued loftily, "have seen fifty years of life, Mr. Vaughan, and lived every year of them and every day of them, and I tell you that the thing is too dearly bought at that price."

Vaughan felt himself rebuked; but he made a fight. "And yet," he said, "are there no circumstances, my lord, in which such a vote may be justified?"

"A vote against your conscience-to oblige someone?"

"Well, yes."

"A Jesuit might justify it. There is nothing which a Jesuit could not justify, I suppose. But though no man was stronger for the Catholic Claims than I was, I do not hold a Jesuit to be a man of honour. And that is where the difference lies. There! But," he continued, with an abrupt change from the lofty to the confidential, "let me tell you a fact, Mr. Vaughan. In '29-was it in April or May of '29, Mr. Cornelius?"

"I don't know to what you refer," Mr. Cornelius grunted.

"To be sure you don't," the Chancellor replied, without any loss of good-humour; "but in April or May of '29, Mr. Vaughan, the Duke offered me the Rolls, which is £7000 a year clear for life, and compatible with a seat in the Commons. It would have suited me better in every way than the Seals and the House of Lords. It was the prize, to be frank with you, at which I was aiming; and as at that time the Duke was making his right-about-face on the Catholic question, and was being supported by our side, I might have accepted it with an appearance of honour and consistency. But I did not accept it. I did not, though my refusal injured myself, and did no one any good. But there, I am chattering." He broke off, with a smile, and held out his hand. "However,

 
"Est et fideli tuta silentio
Merces!
 

You won't forget that, I am certain. And you may be sure I shall remember you. I am pleased to have made your acquaintance, Mr. Vaughan. Decide on the direction, politics or the law, in which you mean to push, and some day let me know. In the meantime follow the light! Light, more light! Don't let them lure you back into old Giant Despair's cave, or choke you with all the dead bones and rottenness and foulness they keep there, and that, by God's help, I'll sweep out of the world before it's a year older!"

And still talking, he saw Vaughan, who was murmuring his acknowledgments, to the door.

When that had closed on the young man Brougham came back, and, throwing wide his arms, yawned prodigiously. "Now," he said, "if Lansdowne doesn't effect something in that borough, I am mistaken."

"Why," Cornelius muttered curtly, "do you trouble about the borough? Why don't you leave those things to the managers?"

"Why? Why, first because the Duke did that last year, and you see the result-he's out and we're in. Secondly, Corny, because I am like the elephant's trunk, that can tear down a tree or pick up a pin."

"But in picking up a pin," the other grunted, "it picks up a deal of something else."

"Of what?"

"Dirt!"

"Old Pharisee!" the Chancellor cried.

Mr. Cornelius threw down his pen, and, turning in his seat, opened fire on his companion. "Dirt!" he reiterated sternly. "And for what? What will be the end of it when you have done all for them, clean and dirty? They'll not keep you. They use you now, but you're a new man. What, you-you think to deal on equal terms with the Devonshires and the Hollands, the Lansdownes and the Russells! Who used Burke, and when they had squeezed him tossed him aside? Who used Tierney till they wore him and his fortune out? Who would have used Canning, but he did not trust them, and so they worried him-though they were all dumb dogs before him-to his death. Ay, and presently, when you have served their turn, they will cast you aside."

"They will not dare!" Brougham cried.

"Pshaw! You are Samson, but you are shorn of your strength. They have been too clever for you. While you were in the Commons they did not dare. Harry Brougham was their master. So they lured you, poor fool, into the trap, into the Lords, where you may spout, and spout, and spout, and it will have as much effect as the beating of a bird's wings against the bars of its cage!"

"They will not dare!" Brougham reiterated.

"You will see. They will throw you aside."

Brougham walked up and down the room, his eyes glittering, his quaint, misshapen features working passionately.

"They will throw you aside," Mr. Cornelius repeated, watching him keenly. "You are a man of the people. You are in earnest. You are honestly in favour of retrenchment, of education, of reform. But to these Whigs-save and except to Althorp, who is that lusus naturæ, an honest man, and to Johnny Russell, who is a fanatic-these are but catchwords, stalking-horses, the means by which, after the dull old fashion of their fathers and their grandfathers and their great-grandfathers, they think to creep into power. Reform, if reform means the representation of the people by the people, the rule of the people by the people, or by any but the old landed families-why, the very thought would make them sick!"

Brougham stopped in his pacing to and fro. "You are right," he said sombrely.

"You acknowledge it?"

"I have known it-here!" And, drawing himself to his full height, he clapped his hand to his breast. "I have known it here for months. Ay, and though I have sworn to myself that they would not dare to treat me as they treated Burke, and Sheridan, and Tierney, and as they would have treated Canning, I knew it was a lie, my lad; I knew they would. My mother-ay, my old mother, sitting by the chimneyside, out of the world there, knew it, and warned me."

"Then why did you go into the Lords?" Cornelius asked. "Why be lured into the gilded cage, where you are helpless?"

"Because, mark you," Brougham replied sternly, "if I had not, they had not brought in this Bill. And we had waited, and the people had waited, another twenty years, maybe!"

"And so you went into the prison-house shorn of your strength?"

Brougham looked at him with a gleam of ferocity in his brilliant eyes. "Ay," he said, "I did. And by that act," he continued, stretching his long arms to their farthest extent, "mark you, mark you, never forget it, I avenged all-not only all I may suffer at their hands, but all that every slave who ever ground in their mill has suffered, the slights, the grudged meticulous office, the one finger lent to shake-all, all! I went into the prison-house, but when I did so I laid my hands upon the pillars. And their house falls, falls. I hear it-I hear it falling even now about their ears. They may throw me aside. But the house is falling, and the great Whig families-pouf! – they are not in the heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the water that is under the earth. You call Reform their stalking-horse? Ay, but it is into their own Troy that they have dragged it; and the clatter of strife which you hear is the death-knell of their power. They have let in the waves of the sea, and dream fondly that they can say where they shall stop and what they shall not touch. They may as well speak to the tide when it flows; they may as well command the North Sea in its rage; they may as well bid Hume be silent, or Wetherell be sane. You say I am spent, Cornelius; and so I am, it may be. I know not. But this I know. Never again will the families say 'Go!' and he goeth, and 'Do!' and he doeth, as in the old world that is passing-passing even at this minute, passing with the Bill. No," he continued, flinging out his arms with passion; "for when they thought to fool me, and to shut me dumb among dumb things behind the gilded wires, I knew-I knew that I was dragging down their house upon their heads."

Mr. Cornelius stared at him. "By G-d!" he said, "I believe you are right. I believe that you are a cleverer man than I thought you were."