Part 12 (1/2)

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 wors.h.i.+pped 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 n.o.blest 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 n.o.body'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 gla.s.s. 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 a.n.a.logous 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--n.o.body 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.'