Chippinge Borough. Weyman Stanley John
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."
III
TWO LETTERS
The Hall was empty when Vaughan came forth; and as the young man strode down its echoing length there was nothing save his own footsteps on the pavement to distract his mind from the scene in which he had taken part. He was excited and a little uplifted, as was natural. The promises made, if they were to be counted as promises, were of the vague and indefinite character which it is as easy to evade as to fulfil. But the Chancellor had spoken to him as to an equal and treated him as one who had but to choose a career to succeed in it, and to win the highest prizes which it could bestow. This was flattering; nor was it to a young man who had little experience of the world, less flattering to be deemed the owner of a stake in the country, and a person through whom offers of the most confidential and important character might be properly made.
He walked to his rooms in Bury Street with a pleasant warmth at his heart. And at the Academic that evening, where owing to the events of the day there was a fuller house than had ever been known, and a fiercer debate, he championed the Government and upheld the dissolution in a speech which not only excelled his previous efforts, but was a surprise to those who knew him best. Afterwards he recognised that his peroration had been only a paraphrase of Brougham's impassioned "Light! More Light!" and that the whole owed more than he cared to remember to the same source. But, after all, why not? It was not to be expected that he could at once rise to the heights of the greatest of living orators. And it was much that he had made a hit; that as he left the room he was followed by all eyes.
Nor did a qualm worthy of the name trouble him until the morning of the 27th, five days later-a Wednesday. Then he found beside his breakfast plate two letters bearing the postmark of Chippinge.
"What's afoot?" he muttered. But he had a prevision before he broke the seal of the first. And the contents bore out his fears. The letter ran thus:
"Dear Sir-I make no apology for troubling you in a matter in which your interest is second only to mine and which is also of a character to make apology beside the mark. It has not