Lancelot was now so far improved in health as to return to his
little cottage ornee. He gave himself up freely to his new passion.
With his comfortable fortune and good connections, the future seemed
bright and possible enough as to circumstances. He knew that
Argemone felt for him; how much it seemed presumptuous even to
speculate, and as yet no golden-visaged meteor had arisen portentous
in his amatory zodiac. No rich man had stepped in to snatch, in
spite of all his own flocks and herds, at the poor man's own ewe-
lamb, and set him barking at all the world, as many a poor lover has
to do in defence of his morsel of enjoyment, now turned into a mere
bone of contention and loadstone for all hungry kites and crows.
All that had to be done was to render himself worthy of her, and in
doing so, to win her. And now he began to feel more painfully his
ignorance of society, of practical life, and the outward present.
He blamed himself angrily for having, as he now thought, wasted his
time on ancient histories and foreign travels, while he neglected
the living wonderful present, which weltered daily round him, every
face embodying a living soul. For now he began to feel that those
faces did hide living souls; formerly he had half believed--he had
tried, but from laziness, to make himself wholly believe--that they
were all empty masks, phantasies, without interest or significance
for him. But, somehow, in the light of his new love for Argemone,
the whole human race seemed glorified, brought nearer, endeared to
him. So it must be. He had spoken of a law wider than he thought
in his fancy, that the angels might learn love for all by love for
an individual. Do we not all learn love so? Is it not the first
touch of the mother's bosom which awakens in the infant's heart that
spark of affection which is hereafter to spread itself out towards
every human being, and to lose none of its devotion for its first
object, as it expands itself to innumerable new ones? Is it not by
love, too--by looking into loving human eyes, by feeling the care of
loving hands,--that the infant first learns that there exist other
beings beside itself?--that every body which it sees expresses a
heart and will like its own? Be sure of it. Be sure that to have
found the key to one heart is to have found the key to all; that
truly to love is truly to know; and truly to love one, is the first
step towards truly loving all who bear the same flesh and blood with
the beloved. Like children, we must dress up even our unseen future
in stage properties borrowed from the tried and palpable present,
ere we can look at it without horror. We fear and hate the utterly
unknown, and it only. Even pain we hate only when we cannot KNOW
it; when we can only feel it, without explaining it, and making it
harmonise with our notions of our own deserts and destiny. And as
for human beings, there surely it stands true, wherever else it may
not, that all knowledge is love, and all love knowledge; that even
with the meanest, we cannot gain a glimpse into their inward trials
and struggles, without an increase of sympathy and affection.
Whether he reasoned thus or not, Lancelot found that his new
interest in the working classes was strangely quickened by his
passion. It seemed the shortest and clearest way toward a practical
knowledge of the present. 'Here,' he said to himself, 'in the
investigation of existing relations between poor and rich, I shall
gain more real acquaintance with English society, than by dawdling
centuries in exclusive drawing-rooms.'
The inquiry had not yet presented itself to him as a duty; perhaps
so much the better, that it might be the more thoroughly a free-will
offering of love. At least it opened a new field of amusement and
knowledge; it promised him new studies of human life; and as he lay
on his sofa and let his thoughts flow, Tregarva's dark revelations
began to mix themselves with dreams about the regeneration of the
Whitford poor, and those again with dreams about the heiress of
Whitford; and many a luscious scene and noble plan rose brightly
detailed in his exuberant imagination. For Lancelot, like all born
artists, could only think in a concrete form. He never worked out a
subject without embodying it in some set oration, dialogue, or
dramatic castle in the air.
But the more he dreamt, the more he felt that a material beauty of
flesh and blood required a material house, baths, and boudoirs,
conservatories, and carriages; a safe material purse, and fixed
material society; law and order, and the established frame-work of
society, gained an importance in his eyes which they had never had
before.
'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 passed 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 mocassins, and an enormous meerschaum at his
button-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 glass 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 glass, 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 noble. 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 lustily 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,
God 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 "assimilate 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 God."'
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 noblemen 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 nobleman 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 title
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.
Lord Minchampstead had many reasons for patronising Lancelot. In
the first place, he had a true eye for a strong man wherever he met
him; in the next place, Lancelot's uncle the banker, was a stanch
Whig ally of his in the House. 'In the rotten-borough times, Mr.
Smith,' he once said to Lancelot, 'we could have made a senator of
you at once; but, for the sake of finality, we were forced to
relinquish that organ of influence. The Tories had abused it,
really, a little too far; and now we can only make a commissioner of
you--which, after all, is a more useful post, and a more lucrative
one.' But Lancelot had not as yet 'Galliolised,' as the Irish
schoolmaster used to call it, and cared very little to play a
political ninth fiddle.
The first thing which caught his eyes as he entered the drawing-room
before dinner was Argemone listening in absorbed reverence to her
favourite vicar,--a stern, prim, close-shaven, dyspeptic man, with a
meek, cold smile, which might have become a cruel one. He watched
and watched in vain, hoping to catch her eye; but no--there she
stood, and talked and listened--
'Ah,' said Bracebridge, smiling, 'it is in vain, Smith! When did
you know a woman leave the Church for one of us poor laymen?'
'Good heavens!' said Lancelot, impatiently, 'why will they make such
fools of themselves with clergymen?'
'They are quite right. They always like the strong men--the
fighters and the workers. In Voltaire's time they all ran after the
philosophers. In the middle ages, books tell us, they worshipped
the knights errant. They are always on the winning side, the
cunning little beauties. In the war-time, when the soldiers had to
play the world's game, the ladies all caught the red-coat fever;
now, in these talking and thinking days (and be hanged to them for
bores), they have the black-coat fever for the same reason. The
parsons are the workers now-a-days--or rather, all the world expects
them to be so. They have the game in their own hands, if they did
but know how to play it.'
Lancelot stood still, sulking over many thoughts. The colonel
lounged across the room towards Lord Vieuxbois, a quiet, truly high-
bred young man, with a sweet open countenance, and an ample
forehead, whose size would have vouched for great talents, had not
the promise been contradicted by the weakness of the over-delicate
mouth and chin.
'Who is that with whom you came into the room, Bracebridge?' asked
Lord Vieuxbois. 'I am sure I know his face.'
'Lancelot Smith, the man who has taken the shooting-box at Lower
Whitford.'
'Oh, I remember him well enough at Cambridge! He was one of a set
who tried to look like blackguards, and really succeeded tolerably.
They used to eschew gloves, and drink nothing but beer, and smoke
disgusting short pipes; and when we established the Coverley Club in
Trinity, they set up an opposition, and called themselves the
Navvies. And they used to make piratical expeditions down to Lynn
in eight oars, to attack bargemen, and fen girls, and shoot ducks,
and sleep under turf-stacks, and come home when they had drank all
the public-house taps dry. I remember the man perfectly.'
'Navvy or none,' said the colonel, 'he has just the longest head and
the noblest heart of any man I ever met. If he does not distinguish
himself before he dies, I know nothing of human nature.'
'Ah yes, I believe he is clever enough!--took a good degree, a
better one than I did--but horribly eclectic; full of mesmerism, and
German metaphysics, and all that sort of thing. I heard of him one
night last spring, on which he had been seen, if you will believe
it, going successively into a Swedenborgian chapel, the Garrick's
Head, and one of Elliotson's magnetic soirees. What can you expect
after that?'
'A great deal,' said Bracebridge drily. 'With such a head as he
carries on his shoulders the man might be another Mirabeau, if he
held the right cards in the right rubber. And he really ought to
suit you, for he raves about the middle ages, and chivalry, and has
edited a book full of old ballads.'
'Oh, all the eclectics do that sort of thing; and small thanks to
them. However, I will speak to him after dinner, and see what there
is in him.'
And Lord Vieuxbois turned away, and, alas for Lancelot! sat next to
Argemone at dinner. Lancelot, who was cross with everybody for what
was nobody's fault, revenged himself all dinner-time by never
speaking a word to his next neighbour, Miss Newbroom, who was
longing with all her heart to talk sentiment to him about the
Exhibition; and when Argemone, in the midst of a brilliant word-
skirmish with Lord Vieuxbois, stole a glance at him, he chose to
fancy that they were both talking of him, and looked more cross than
ever.
After the ladies retired, Lancelot, in his sulky way, made up his
mind that the conversation was going to be ineffably stupid; and set
to to dream, sip claret, and count the minutes till he found himself
in the drawing-room with Argemone. But he soon discovered, as I
suppose we all have, that 'it never rains but it pours,' and that
one cannot fall in with a new fact or a new acquaintance but next
day twenty fresh things shall spring up as if by magic, throwing
unexpected light on one's new phenomenon. Lancelot's head was full
of the condition-of-the-poor question, and lo! everybody seemed
destined to talk about it.
'Well, Lord Vieuxbois,' said the host, casually, 'my girls are
raving about your new school. They say it is a perfect antiquarian
gem.'
'Yes, tolerable, I believe. But Wales has disappointed me a little.
That vile modernist naturalism is creeping back even into our
painted glass. I could have wished that the artist's designs for
the windows had been a little more Catholic.'
'How then?' asked the host, with a puzzled face.
'Oh, he means,' said Bracebridge, 'that the figures' wrists and
ankles were not sufficiently dislocated, and the patron saint did
not look quite like a starved rabbit with its neck wrung. Some of
the faces, I am sorry to say, were positively like good-looking men
and women.'
'Oh, I understand,' said Lord Minchampstead; 'Bracebridge's tongue
is privileged, you know, Lord Vieuxbois, so you must not be angry.'
'I don't see my way into all this,' said Squire Lavington (which was
very likely to be true, considering that he never looked for his
way). 'I don't see how all these painted windows, and crosses, and
chanting, and the deuce and the Pope only know what else, are to
make boys any better.'
'We have it on the highest authority,' said Vieuxbois, 'that
pictures and music are the books of the unlearned. I do not think
that we have any right in the nineteenth century to contest an
opinion which the fathers of the Church gave in the fourth.'
'At all events,' said Lancelot, 'it is by pictures and music, by art
and song, and symbolic representations, that all nations have been
educated in their adolescence! and as the youth of the individual is
exactly analogous to the youth of the collective race, we should
employ the same means of instruction with our children which
succeeded in the early ages with the whole world.'
Lancelot might as well have held his tongue--nobody understood him
but Vieuxbois, and he had been taught to scent German neology in
everything, as some folks are taught to scent Jesuitry, especially
when it involved an inductive law, and not a mere red-tape
precedent, and, therefore, could not see that Lancelot was arguing
for him. 'All very fine, Smith,' said the squire; 'it's a pity you
won't leave off puzzling your head with books, and stick to fox-
hunting. All you young gentlemen will do is to turn the heads of
the poor with your cursed education.' The national oath followed,
of course. 'Pictures and chanting! Why, when I was a boy, a good
honest labouring man wanted to see nothing better than a halfpenny
ballad, with a wood-cut at the top, and they worked very well then,
and wanted for nothing.'
'Oh, we shall give them the halfpenny ballads in time!' said
Vieuxbois, smiling.
'You will do a very good deed, then,' said mine host. 'But I am
sorry to say that, as far as I can find from my agents, when the
upper classes write cheap publications, the lower classes will not
read them.'
'Too true,' said Vieuxbois.
'Is not the cause,' asked Lancelot, 'just that the upper classes do
write them?'
'The writings of working men, certainly,' said Lord Minchampstead,
'have an enormous sale among their own class.'
'Just because they express the feelings of that class, of which I am
beginning to fear that we know very little. Look again, what a
noble literature of people's songs and hymns Germany has. Some of
Lord Vieuxbois's friends, I know, are busy translating many of
them.'
'As many of them, that is to say,' said Vieuxbois, 'as are
compatible with a real Church spirit.'
'Be it so; but who wrote them? Not the German aristocracy for the
people, but the German people for themselves. There is the secret
of their power. Why not educate the people up to such a standard
that they should be able to write their own literature?'
'What,' said Mr. Chalklands, of Chalklands, who sat opposite, 'would
you have working men turn ballad writers? There would be an end of
work, then, I think.'
'I have not heard,' said Lancelot, 'that the young women--LADIES, I
ought to say, if the word mean anything--who wrote the "Lowell
Offering," spun less or worse cotton than their neighbours.'
'On the contrary," said Lord Minchampstead, 'we have the most noble
accounts of heroic industry and self-sacrifice in girls whose
education, to judge by its fruits, might shame that of most English
young ladies.'
Mr. Chalklands expressed certain confused notions that, in America,
factory girls carried green silk parasols, put the legs of pianos
into trousers, and were too prudish to make a shirt, or to call it a
shirt after it was made, he did not quite remember which.
'It is a great pity,' said Lord Minchampstead, 'that our factory
girls are not in the same state of civilisation. But it is socially
impossible. America is in an abnormal state. In a young country
the laws of political economy do not make themselves fully felt.
Here, where we have no uncleared world to drain the labour-market,
we may pity and alleviate the condition of the working-classes, but
we can do nothing more. All the modern schemes for the amelioration
which ignore the laws of competition, must end either in
pauperisation'--(with a glance at Lord Vieuxbois),--'or in the
destruction of property.'
Lancelot said nothing, but thought the more. It did strike him at
the moment that the few might, possibly, be made for the many, and
not the many for the few; and that property was made for man, not
man for property. But he contented himself with asking,--
'You think, then, my lord, that in the present state of society, no
dead-lift can be given to the condition--in plain English, the
wages--of working men, without the destruction of property?'
Lord Minchampstead smiled, and parried the question.
'There may be other dead-lift ameliorations, my young friend,
besides a dead-lift of wages.'
So Lancelot thought, also; but Lord Minchampstead would have been a
little startled could he have seen Lancelot's notion of a dead-lift.
Lord Minchampstead was thinking of cheap bread and sugar. Do you
think that I will tell you of what Lancelot was thinking?
But here Vieuxbois spurred in to break a last lance. He had been
very much disgusted with the turn the conversation was taking, for
he considered nothing more heterodox than the notion that the poor
were to educate themselves. In his scheme, of course the clergy and
the gentry were to educate the poor, who were to take down
thankfully as much as it was thought proper to give them: and all
beyond was 'self-will' and 'private judgment,' the fathers of
Dissent and Chartism, Trades'-union strikes, and French Revolutions,
et si qua alia.
'And pray, Mr. Smith, may I ask what limit you would put to
education?'
'The capacities of each man,' said Lancelot. 'If man living in
civilised society has one right which he can demand it is this, that
the State which exists by his labour shall enable him to develop,
or, at least, not hinder his developing, his whole faculties to
their very utmost, however lofty that may be. While a man who might
be an author remains a spade-drudge, or a journeyman while he has
capacities for a master; while any man able to rise in life remains
by social circumstances lower than he is willing to place himself,
that man has a right to complain of the State's injustice and
neglect.'
'Really, I do not see,' said Vieuxbois, 'why people should wish to
rise in life. They had no such self-willed fancy in the good old
times. The whole notion is a product of these modern days--'
He would have said more, but he luckily remembered at whose table he
was sitting.
'I think, honestly,' said Lancelot, whose blood was up, 'that we
gentlemen all run into the same fallacy. We fancy ourselves the
fixed and necessary element in society, to which all others are to
accommodate themselves. "Given the rights of the few rich, to find
the condition of the many poor." It seems to me that other
postulate is quite as fair: "Given the rights of the many poor, to
find the condition of the few rich."'
Lord Minchampstead laughed.
'If you hit us so hard, Mr. Smith, I must really denounce you as a
Communist. Lord Vieuxbois, shall we join the ladies?'
In the drawing-room, poor Lancelot, after rejecting overtures of
fraternity from several young ladies, set himself steadily again
against the wall to sulk and watch Argemone. But this time she
spied in a few minutes his melancholy, moonstruck face, swam up to
him, and said something kind and commonplace. She spoke in the
simplicity of her heart, but he chose to think she was patronising
him--she had not talked commonplaces to the vicar. He tried to say
something smart and cutting,--stuttered, broke down, blushed, and
shrank back again to the wall, fancying that every eye in the room
was on him; and for one moment a flash of sheer hatred to Argemone
swept through him.
Was Argemone patronising him? Of course she was. True, she was but
three-and-twenty, and he was of the same age; but, spiritually and
socially, the girl develops ten years earlier than the boy. She was
flattered and worshipped by gray-headed men, and in her simplicity
she thought it a noble self-sacrifice to stoop to notice the poor
awkward youth. And yet if he could have seen the pure moonlight of
sisterly pity which filled all her heart as she retreated, with
something of a blush and something of a sigh, and her heart
fluttered and fell, would he have been content? Not he. It was her
love he wanted, and not her pity; it was to conquer her and possess
her, and inform himself with her image, and her with his own; though
as yet he did not know it; though the moment that she turned away he
cursed himself for selfish vanity, and moroseness and conceit.
'Who am I to demand her all to myself? Her, the glorious, the
saintly, the unfallen! Is not a look, a word, infinitely more than
I deserve? And yet I pretend to admire tales of chivalry! Old
knightly hearts would have fought and wandered for years to earn a
tithe of the favours which have been bestowed on me unasked.'--
Peace! poor Lancelot! Thy egg is by no means addle; but the chick
is breaking the shell in somewhat a cross-grained fashion.