Part 11 (1/2)

'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.'