The scene is at Lansmere Park,--a spacious pile, commenced in the reign
of Charles II.; enlarged and altered in the reign of Anne. Brilliant
interval in the History of our National Manners, when even the courtier
dreaded to be dull, and Sir Fopling raised himself on tiptoe to catch the
ear of a wit; when the names of Devonshire and Dorset, Halifax and
Carteret, Oxford and Bolingbroke, unite themselves, brotherlike, with
those of Hobbes and of Dryden, of Prior and Bentley, of Arbuthnot, Gay,
Pope, and Swift; and still, wherever we turn, to recognize some ideal of
great Lord or fine Gentleman, the Immortals of Literature stand by his
side.
The walls of the rooms at Lansmere were covered with the portraits of
those who illustrate that time which Europe calls the Age of Louis XIV.
A L'Estrange, who had lived through the reigns of four English princes
(and with no mean importance through all) had collected those likenesses
of noble contemporaries. As you passed through the chambers--opening one
on the other in that pomp of parade introduced with Charles II. from the
palaces of France, and retaining its mode till Versailles and the Trianon
passed, themselves, out of date--you felt you were in excellent company.
What saloons of our day, demeaned to tailed coats and white waistcoats,
have that charm of high breeding which speaks out from the canvas of
Kneller and Jervis, Vivien and Rigaud? And withal, notwithstanding lace
and brocade--the fripperies of artificial costume--still those who give
interest or charm to that day look from their portraits like men,--raking
or debonair, if you will, never mincing nor feminine. Can we say as much
of the portraits of Lawrence? Gaze there on fair Marlborough; what
delicate perfection of features, yet how easy in boldness, how serene in
the conviction of power! So fair and so tranquil he might have looked
through the cannon reek at Ramillies and Blenheim, suggesting to Addison
the image of an angel of war. Ah, there, Sir Charles Sedley, the
Lovelace of wits! Note that strong jaw and marked brow; do you not
recognize the courtier who scorned to ask one favour of the king with
whom he lived as an equal, and who stretched forth the right hand of man
to hurl from a throne the king who had made his daughter--a countess?
[Sedley was so tenacious of his independence that when his affairs
were most embarrassed, he refused all pecuniary aid from Charles II.
His bitter sarcasm, in vindication of the part he took in the
deposition of James II., who had corrupted his daughter, and made
her Countess of Dorchester, is well known. "As the king has made my
daughter a countess, the least I can do, in common gratitude, is to
assist in making his Majesty's daughter--a queen!"]
Perhaps, from his childhood thus surrounded by the haunting faces--that
spoke of their age as they looked from the walls--that age and those
portraits were not without influence on the character of Harley
L'Estrange. The whim and the daring, the passion for letters and
reverence for genius, the mixture of levity and strength, the polished
sauntering indolence, or the elastic readiness of energies once called
into action,--all might have found their prototypes in the lives which
those portraits rekindled. The deeper sentiment, the more earnest
nature, which in Harley L'Estrange were commingled with the attributes
common to a former age,--these, indeed, were of his own. Our age so
little comprehended, while it colours us from its atmosphere! so full of
mysterious and profound emotions, which our ancestors never knew!---will
those emotions be understood by our descendants?
In this stately house were now assembled, as Harley's guests, many of the
more important personages whom the slow length of this story has made
familiar to the reader. The two candidates for the borough in the True
Blue interest,--Audley Egerton and Randal Leslie; and Levy,--chief among
the barons to whom modern society grants a seignorie of pillage, which,
had a baron of old ever ventured to arrogate, burgess and citizen, socman
and bocman, villein and churl, would have burned him alive in his castle;
the Duke di Serrano, still fondly clinging to his title of Doctor and pet
name of Riccabocca; Jemima, not yet with the airs of a duchess, but robed
in very thick silks, as the chrysalis state of a duchess; Violante, too,
was there, sadly against her will, and shrinking as much as possible into
the retirement of her own chamber. The Countess of Lansmere had deserted
her lord, in order to receive the guests of her son; my lord himself,
ever bent on being of use in some part of his country, and striving hard
to distract his interest from his plague of a borough, had gone down into
Cornwall to inquire into the social condition of certain troglodytes who
worked in some mines which the earl had lately had the misfortune to
wring from the Court of Chancery, after a lawsuit commenced by his
grandfather; and a Blue Book, issued in the past session by order of
parliament, had especially quoted the troglodytes thus devolved on the
earl as bipeds who were in considerable ignorance of the sun, and had
never been known to wash their feet since the day when they came into the
world,--their world underground, chipped off from the Bottomless Pit!
With the countess came Helen Digby, of course; and Lady Lansmere, who had
hitherto been so civilly cold to the wife elect of her son, had, ever
since her interview with Harley at Knightsbridge, clung to Helen with
almost a caressing fondness. The stern countess was tamed by fear; she
felt that her own influence over Harley was gone; she trusted to the
influence of Helen--in case of what?--ay, what? It was because the
danger was not clear to her that her bold spirit trembled: superstitions,
like suspicions, are "as bats among birds, and fly by twilight." Harley
had ridiculed the idea of challenge and strife between Audley and
himself; but still Lady Lansmere dreaded the fiery emotions of the last,
and the high spirit and austere self-respect which were proverbial to the
first. Involuntarily she strengthened her intimacy with Helen. In case
her alarm should appear justified, what mediator could be so persuasive
in appeasing the angrier passions, as one whom courtship and betrothal
sanctified to the gentlest?
On arriving at Lansmere, the countess, however, felt somewhat relieved.
Harley had received her, if with a manner less cordial and tender than
had hitherto distinguished it, still with easy kindness and calm self-
possession. His bearing towards Audley Egerton still more reassured her:
it was not marked by an exaggeration of familiarity or friendship, which
would at once have excited her apprehensions of some sinister design,--
nor; on the other hand, did it betray, by covert sarcasms, an ill-
suppressed resentment. It was exactly what, under the circumstances,
would have been natural to a man who had received an injury from an
intimate friend, which, in generosity or discretion, he resolved to
overlook, but which those aware of it could just perceive had cooled or
alienated the former affection. Indefatigably occupying himself with all
the details of the election, Harley had fair pretext for absenting
himself from Audley, who, really looking very ill, and almost worn out,
pleaded indisposition as an excuse for dispensing with the fatigues of a
personal canvass, and, passing much of his time in his own apartments,
left all the preparations for contest to his more active friends.
It was not till he had actually arrived at Lansmere that Audley became
acquainted with the name of his principal opponent. Richard Avenel!
the brother of Nora! rising up from obscurity, thus to stand front to
front against him in a contest on which all his fates were cast. Egerton
quailed as before an appointed avenger. He would fain have retired from
the field; he spoke to Harley.
"How can you support all the painful remembrances which the very name of
my antagonist must conjure up?"
"Did you not tell me," answered Harley, "to strive against such
remembrances,--to look on them as sickly dreams? I am prepared to brave
them. Can you be more sensitive than I?"
Egerton durst not say more. He avoided all further reference to the
subject. The strife raged around him, and he shut himself out from it,
--shut himself up in solitude with his own heart. Strife enough there!
Once, late at night, he stole forth and repaired to Nora's grave. He
stood there, amidst the rank grass and under the frosty starlight, long,
and in profound silence. His whole past life seemed to rise before him;
and, when he regained his lonely room, and strove to survey the future,
still he could behold only that past and that grave.
In thus declining all active care for an election, to his prospects so
important, Audley Egerton was considered to have excuse, not only in the
state of his health, but in his sense of dignity. A statesman so
eminent, of opinions so well known, of public services so incontestable,
might well be spared the personal trouble that falls upon obscurer
candidates. And besides, according to current report, and the judgment
of the Blue Committee, the return of Mr. Egerton was secure. But though
Audley himself was thus indulgently treated, Harley and the Blue
Committee took care to inflict double work upon Randal. That active
young spirit found ample materials for all its restless energies. Randal
Leslie was kept on his legs from sunrise to starlight. There does not
exist in the Three Kingdoms a constituency more fatiguing to a candidate
than that borough of Lansmere. As soon as you leave the High Street,
wherein, according to immemorial usage, the Blue canvasser is first led,
in order to put him into spirits for the toils that await him
(delectable, propitious, constitutional High Street, in which at least
two-thirds of the electors, opulent tradesmen employed at the Park,
always vote for "my lord's man," and hospitably prepare wine and cakes in
their tidy back-parlours!)--as soon as you quit this stronghold of the
party, labyrinths of lanes and defiles stretch away into the farthest
horizon; level ground is found nowhere; it is all up hill and down hill,
--now rough, craggy pavements that blister the feet, and at the very
first tread upon which all latent corns shook prophetically; now deep,
muddy ruts, into which you sink ankle-deep, oozing slush creeping into
the pores, and moistening the way for catarrh, rheum, cough, sore throat,
bronchitis, and phthisis; black sewers and drains Acherontian, running
before the thresholds, and so filling the homes behind with effluvia,
that, while one hand clasps the grimy paw of the voter, the other
instinctively guards from typhus and cholera your abhorrent nose. Not in
those days had mankind ever heard of a sanitary reform! and, to judge of
the slow progress which that reform seems to make, sewer and drain would
have been much the same if they had. Scot-and-lot voters were the
independent electors of Lansmere, with the additional franchise of
Freemen. Universal suffrage could scarcely more efficiently swamp the
franchises of men who care a straw what becomes of Great Britain! With
all Randal Leslie's profound diplomacy, all his art in talking over,
deceiving, and (to borrow Dick Avenel's vernacular phrase) "humbugging"
educated men, his eloquence fell flat upon minds invulnerable to appeals,
whether to State or to Church, to Reform or to Freedom. To catch a Scot-
and-lot voter by such frivolous arguments--Randal Leslie might as well
have tried to bring down a rhinoceros by a pop-gun charged with split
peas! The young man who so firmly believed that "knowledge was power"
was greatly disgusted. It was here the ignorance that foiled him. When
he got hold of a man with some knowledge, Randal was pretty sure to trick
him out of a vote.
Nevertheless, Randal Leslie walked and talked on, with most creditable
perseverance. The Blue Committee allowed that he was an excellent
canvasser. They conceived a liking for him, mingled with pity. For,
though sure of Egerton's return, they regarded Randal's as out of the
question. He was merely there to keep split votes from going to the
opposite side; to serve his patron, the ex-minister; shake the paws, and
smell the smells which the ex-minister was too great a man to shake and
to smell. But, in point of fact, none of that Blue Committee knew
anything of the prospects of the election. Harley received all the
reports of each canvass-day. Harley kept the canvass-book locked up from
all eyes but his own, or it might be Baron Levy's, as Audley Egerton's
confidential, if not strictly professional adviser, Baron Levy, the
millionaire, had long since retired from all acknowledged professions.
Randal, however--close, observant, shrewd--perceived that he himself was
much stronger than the Blue Committee believed; and, to his infinite
surprise, he owed that strength to Lord L'Estrange's exertions on his
behalf. For though Harley, after the first day, on which he
ostentatiously showed himself in the High Street, did not openly canvass
with Randal, yet when the reports were brought in to him, and he saw the
names of the voters who gave one vote to Audley, and withheld the other
from Randal, he would say to Randal, dead beat as that young gentleman
was, "Slip out with me, the moment dinner is over, and before you go the
round of the public-houses; there are some voters we must get for you
to-night." And sure enough a few kindly words from the popular heir of
the Lansmere baronies usually gained over the electors, from whom, though
Randal had proved that all England depended on their votes in his favour,
Randal would never have extracted more than a "Wu'll, I shall waute gin
the Dauy coomes!" Nor was this all that Harley did for the younger
candidate. If it was quite clear that only one vote could be won for the
Blues, and the other was pledged to the Yellows, Harley would say, "Then
put it down to Mr. Leslie,"--a request the more readily conceded, since
Audley Egerton was considered so safe by the Blues, and alone worth a
fear by the Yellows.
Thus Randal, who kept a snug little canvass-book of his own, became more
and more convinced that he had a better chance than Egerton, even without
the furtive aid he expected from Avenel; and he could only account for
Harley's peculiar exertions in his favour by supposing that Harley,
unpractised in elections, and deceived by the Blue Committee, believed
Egerton to be perfectly safe, and sought, for the honour of the family
interest, to secure both the seats.
Randal's public cares thus deprived him of all opportunity of pressing
his courtship on Violante; and, indeed, if ever he did find a moment in
which he could steal to her reluctant side, Harley was sure to seize that
very moment to send him off to canvass an hesitating freeman, or harangue
in some public-house.
Leslie was too acute not to detect some motive hostile to his wooing,
however plausibly veiled in the guise of zeal for his election, in this
officiousness of Harley's. But Lord L'Estrange's manner to Violante was
so little like that of a jealous lover, and he was so well aware of her
engagement to Randal, that the latter abandoned the suspicion he had
before conceived, that Harley was his rival. And he was soon led to
believe that Lord L'Estrange had another, more disinterested, and less
formidable motive for thus stinting his opportunities to woo the heiress.
"Mr. Leslie," said Lord L'Estrange, one day, "the duke has confided to me
his regret at his daughter's reluctance to ratify his own promise; and
knowing the warm interest I take in her welfare, for his sake and her
own; believing, also, that some services to herself, as well as to the
father she so loves, give me a certain influence over her inexperienced
judgment, he has even requested me to speak a word to her in your
behalf!"
"Ah, if you would!" said Randal, surprised.
"You must give me the power to do so. You were obliging enough to
volunteer to me the same explanations which you gave to the duke, his
satisfaction with which induced him to renew or confirm the promise of
his daughter's hand. Should those explanations content me, as they did
him, I hold the duke bound to fulfil his engagement, and I am convinced
that his daughter would, in that case, not be inflexible to your suit.
But, till such explanations be given, my friendship for the father, and
my interest in the child, do not allow me to assist a cause which,
however, at present suffers little by delay."
"Pray, listen at once to those explanations."
"Nay, Mr. Leslie, I can now only think of the election. As soon as that
is over, rely on it you shall have the amplest opportunity to dispel any
doubts which your intimacy with Count di Peschiera and Madame di Negra
may have suggested.--/a propos/ of the election, here is a list of voters
you must see at once in Fish Lane. Don't lose a moment."
In the mean while, Richard Avenel and Leonard had taken up their quarters
in the hotel appropriated to the candidates for the Yellows; and the
canvass on that side was prosecuted with all the vigour which might be
expected from operations conducted by Richard Avenel, and backed by the
popular feeling.
The rival parties met from time to time in the streets and lanes, in all
the pomp of war,--banners streaming, fifes resounding (for bands and
colours were essential proofs of public spirit, and indispensable items
in a candidate's bills, in those good old days). When they thus
encountered, very distant bows were exchanged between the respective
chiefs; but Randal, contriving ever to pass close to Avenel, had ever the
satisfaction of perceiving that gentleman's countenance contracted into a
knowing wink, as much as to say, "All right, in spite of this tarnation
humbug."
But now that both parties were fairly in the field, to the private arts
of canvassing were added the public arts of oratory. The candidates had
to speak, at the close of each day's canvass, out from wooden boxes,
suspended from the windows of their respective hotels, and which looked
like dens for the exhibition of wild beasts. They had to speak at
meetings of Committees, meetings of electors, go the nightly round of
enthusiastic public-houses, and appeal to the sense of an enlightened
people through wreaths of smoke and odours of beer.
The alleged indisposition of Audley Egerton had spared him the excitement
of oratory, as well as the fatigue of canvassing. The practised debater
had limited the display of his talents to a concise, but clear and
masterly exposition of his own views on the leading public questions of
the day, and the state of parties, which, on the day after his arrival at
Lansmere, was delivered at a meeting of his general Committee, in the
great room of their hotel, and which was then printed and circulated
amongst the voters.
Randal, though he expressed himself with more fluency and self-possession
than are usually found in the first attempts of a public speaker, was not
effective in addressing an unlettered crowd; for a crowd of this kind is
all heart--and we know that Randal Leslie's heart was as small as heart
could be. If he attempted to speak at his own intellectual level, he was
so subtle and refining as to be incomprehensible; if he fell into the
fatal error--not uncommon to inexperienced orators--of trying to lower
himself to the intellectual level of his audience, he was only
elaborately stupid. No man can speak too well for a crowd,--as no man
can write too well for the stage; but in neither case should he be
rhetorical, or case in periods the dry bones of reasoning. It is to the
emotions or to the humours that the speaker of a crowd must address
himself; his eye must brighten with generous sentiment, or his lip must
expand in the play of animated fancy or genial wit. Randal's voice, too,
though pliant and persuasive in private conversation, was thin and poor
when strained to catch the ear of a numerous assembly. The falsehood of
his nature seemed to come out when he raised the tones which had been
drilled into deceit. Men like Randal Leslie may become sharp debaters,
admirable special pleaders; they can no more become orators than they can
become poets. Educated audiences are essential to them, and the smaller
the audience (that is, the more the brain supersedes the action of the
heart) the better they can speak.
Dick Avenel was generally very short and very pithy in his addresses. He
had two or three favourite topics, which always told. He was a fellow-
townsman,--a man who had made his own way in life; he wanted to free his
native place from aristocratic usurpation; it was the battle of the
electors, not his private cause, etc. He said little against Randal,--
"Pity a clever young man should pin his future to two yards of worn-out
red tape;" "He had better lay hold of the strong rope, which the People,
in compassion to his youth, were willing yet to throw out to save him
from sinking," etc. But as for Audley Egerton, "the gentleman who would
not show, who was afraid to meet the electors, who could only find his
voice in a hole-and-corner meeting, accustomed all his venal life to dark
and nefarious jobs"--Dick, upon that subject, delivered philippics truly
Demosthenian. Leonard, on the contrary, never attacked Harley's friend,
Mr. Egerton; but he was merciless against the youth who had filched
reputation from John Burley, and whom he knew that Harley despised as
heartily as himself. And Randal did not dare to retaliate (though
boiling over with indignant rage), for fear of offending Leonard's uncle.
Leonard was unquestionably the popular speaker of the three. Though his
temperament was a writer's, not an orator's; though he abhorred what he
considered the theatrical exhibition of self, which makes what is called
"delivery" more effective than ideas; though he had little interest at
any time in party politics; though at this time his heart was far away
from the Blues and Yellows of Lansmere, sad and forlorn,--yet, forced
into action, the eloquence that was natural to his conversation poured
itself forth. He had warm blood in his veins; and his dislike to Randal
gave poignancy to his wit, and barbed his arguments with impassioned
invective. In fact, Leonard could conceive no other motive for Lord
L'Estrange's request to take part in the election than that nobleman's
desire to defeat the man whom they both regarded as an impostor; and this
notion was confirmed by some inadvertent expressions which Avenel let
fall, and which made Leonard suspect that, if he were not in the field,
Avenel would have exerted all his interest to return Randal instead of
Egerton. With Dick's dislike to that statesman Leonard found it
impossible to reason; nor, on the other hand, could all Dick's scoldings
or coaxings induce Leonard to divert his siege on Randal to an assault
upon the man who, Harley had often said, was dear to him as a brother.
In the mean while, Dick kept the canvass-book of the Yellows as closely
as Harley kept that of the Blues; and in despite of many pouting fits and
gusts of displeasure, took precisely the same pains for Leonard as Harley
took for Randal. There remained, however, apparently unshaken by the
efforts on either side, a compact body of about a Hundred and Fifty
voters, chiefly freemen. Would they vote Yellow? Would they vote Blue?
No one could venture to decide; but they declared that they would all
vote the same way. Dick kept his secret "caucuses," as he called them,
constantly nibbling at this phalanx. A hundred and fifty voters!---they
had the election in their hands! Never were hands so cordially shaken,
so caressingly clung to, so fondly lingered upon! But the votes still
stuck as firm to the hands as if a part of the skin, or of the dirt,--
which was much the same thing!