Chippinge Borough

Now she was determined that she would blush and smile and be kind no more. She was grateful-God knew she was grateful, let him think what he would. But there were limits. Her weakness, as long as she believed that Chippenham must part them, had been pardonable. But if he had it in his mind to attend her to Bristol, to follow her or haunt her-as she had known foolish young cits at Clapham to haunt the more giddy of her flock-then her mistake was clear; and his conduct, now merely suspicious, would appear in its black reality. She hoped that he was innocent. She hoped that his change of plan at Chippenham had been no subterfuge; that he was not a roaring lion. But appearances were deceitful and her own course was plain.

It was the plainer, as she had not been blind to the respect with which all at the Angel had greeted her companion; even White, a man of substance, with a gold chain and seals hanging from his fob, had stood bareheaded while he talked to him. It was plain that he was a fine gentleman; one of those whom young persons in her rank of life must shun.

So he drew scarcely five words out of her in as many miles. At last, thrice rebuffed, "I am afraid you are tired," he said. Was it for this that he had chosen to go on to Bristol?

"Yes," she answered. "I am rather tired. If you please I would prefer not to talk."

He was a little huffed then, and let her be; nor did he guess, though he was full of conjectures about her, how she hated her seeming ingratitude. But there was nought else for it; better seem thankless now than be worse hereafter. For she was growing frightened. She was beginning to have more than an inkling of the road by which young things were led to be foolish. Her ear retained the sound of his voice though he was silent. The fashion in which he had stooped to her-though he was looking another way now-clung to her memory. His laugh, though he was grave now, rang for her, full of glee and good-fellowship. She could have burst into tears.

They stayed at Marshfield to take on the last team. And she tried to divert her mind by watching a woman in a veil who walked up and down beside the coach, and seemed to return her curiosity. But she tried to little purpose, for she felt strained and weary, and more than ever inclined to cry. Doubtless the peril through which she had passed had shaken her.

So that she was thankful when, after descending perilous Tog Hill, they saw from Kingswood heights the lights of Bristol shining through the dusk; and she knew that she was at her journey's end. To arrive in a strange place on the edge of night is trying to anyone. But to alight friendless and alone, amid the bustle of a city, and to know that new relations must be created and a new life built up-this may well raise in the most humble and contented bosom a feeling of loneliness and depression. And doubtless that was why Mary Smith, after evading Vaughan with a success beyond her hopes, felt as she followed her modest trunk through the streets that-but she bent her head to hide the unaccustomed tears.

VI

THE PATRON OF CHIPPINGE

Much about the time that the "Spectator" was painting in Sir Roger the most lovable picture of an old English squire which our gallery contains, Cornelius Vermuyden, of a younger branch of the Vermuydens who drained the fens, was making a fortune in the Jamaica trade. Having made it in a dark office at Bristol, and being, like all Dutchmen, of a sedentary turn, he proceeded to found a family, purchase a borough, and, by steady support of Whig principles and the Protestant succession, to earn a baronetcy in the neighbouring county of Wilts.

Doubtless the first Vermuyden had things to contend with, and at assize ball and sessions got but two fingers from the De Coverleys and their long-descended dames. But he went his way stolidly, married his son into a family of like origin-the Beckfords-and, having seen little George II. firmly on the throne, made way for his son.

This second Sir Cornelius rebuilt Stapylton, the house which his father had bought from the decayed family of that name, and after living for some ten years into the reign of Farmer George, vanished in his turn, leaving Cornelius Robert to succeed him, Cornelius George, the elder son, having died in his father's lifetime.

Sir Cornelius Robert was something after the pattern of the famous Mr. Onslow-

What can Tommy Onslow do?
He can drive a chaise and two.
What can Tommy Onslow more?
He can drive a chaise and four.

Yet he fitted the time, and, improving his father's pack of trencher-fed hounds by a strain of Mr. Warde's blood, he hunted the country so conscientiously that at his death a Dutch bottle might have been set upon his table without giving rise to the slightest reflection. He came to an end, much lamented, with the century, and Sir Robert, fourth and present baronet, took over the estates.

By that time, rid of the foreign prenomen, well allied by three good marriages, and since the American war of true blue Tory leanings, and thorough Church and King principles, the family was able to hold up its head among the best in the south of England. There might be some who still remembered that-

Saltash was a borough town
When Plymouth was a breezy down.

But the property was good, the borough safe, and any time these twenty years their owner might have franked his letters "Chippinge" had he willed it. As it was, he passed, almost as much as Mr. Western in the east or Sir Thomas Acland in the west, for the type of a country gentleman. The most powerful Minister gave him his whole hand; and at county meetings, at Salisbury or Devizes, no voice was held more powerful, nor any man's hint more quickly taken than Sir Robert Vermuyden's.

He was a tall and very thin man, of almost noble aspect, with a nose after the fashion of the Duke's, and a slight stoop. In early days he had been something of a beau, though never of the Prince's following, and he still dressed finely and with taste. With a smaller sense of personal dignity, or with wider sympathies, he might have been a happier man. But he had married too late-at forty-five; and the four years which followed, and their sequel, had darkened the rest of his life, drawn crow's-feet about his eyes and peevish lines about his mouth. Henceforth he had lived alone, nursing his pride; and the solitude of this life-which was not without its dignity, since no word of scandal touched it-had left him narrow and vindictive, a man just but not over-generous, and pompous without complacency.

The neighbourhood knew that he and Lady Sybil-he had married the beautiful daughter of the last Earl of Portrush-had parted under circumstances which came near to justifying divorce. Some held that he had divorced her; but in those days an Act of Parliament was necessary, and no such Act stood on the Statute-book. Many thought that he ought to have divorced her. And while the people who knew that she still lived and still plagued him were numerous, few save Isaac White were aware that it was because his marriage had been made and marred at Bowood-and not purely out of principle-that Sir Robert opposed the very name of Lansdowne, and would have wasted a half of his fortune to wreck his great neighbour's political power.

Not that his Tory principles were not strong. During five Parliaments he had filled one of his own seats, and had spoken from time to time after a dignified fashion, with formal gestures and a copious sprinkling of classical allusions. The Liberal Toryism of Canning had fallen below his ideal, but he had continued to sit until the betrayal of the party by Peel and the Duke-on the Catholic Claims-drove him from the House in disgust, and thenceforth Warren's Hotel, his residence when in town, saw him but seldom. He had fancied then that nothing worse could happen; that the depths were plumbed, and that he and those who thought with him might punish the traitor and take no harm. With the Duke of Cumberland, the best hated man in England-which was never tired of ridiculing his moustachios-Eldon, Wetherell, and the ultra-Tories, he had not rested until he had seen the hated pair flung from office; nor was any man more surprised and confounded when the result of the work began to show itself. The Whigs, admitted to power by this factious movement, and after an exile so long that Byron could write of them-

Naught's permanent among the human race
Except the Whigs not getting into place

-brought in no mild and harmless measure of reform, promising little and giving nothing, such as foe and friend had alike expected; but a measure of reform so radical that O'Connell blessed it, and Cobbett might have fathered it: a measure which, if it passed, would sweep away Sir Robert's power and the power of his class, destroy his borough, and relegate him to the common order of country squires.

He was at first incredulous, then furious, then aghast. To him the Bill was not only the doom of his own influence but the knell of the Constitution. Behind it he saw red revolution and the crash of things. Lord Grey was to him Mirabeau, Lord John was Lafayette, Brougham was Danton; and of them and of their kind, when they had roused the many-headed, he was sure that the end would be as the end of the Gironde.

He was not the less furious, not the less aghast, when the moderates of his party pointed out that he had himself to thank for the catastrophe. From the refusal to grant the smallest reform, from the refusal to transfer the franchise of the rotten borough of Retford to the unrepresented city of Birmingham-a refusal which he had urged his members to support-the chain was complete; for in consequence of that refusal Mr. Huskisson had left the Duke's Cabinet. The appointment of Mr. Fitzgerald to fill his seat had rendered the Clare election necessary. O'Connell's victory at the Clare election had converted Peel and the Duke to the necessity of granting the Catholic Claims. That conversion had alienated the ultra-Tories, and among these Sir Robert. The opposition of the ultra-Tories had expelled Peel and the Duke from power-which had brought in the Whigs-who had brought in the Reform Bill.

Hinc illæ lacrimæ! For, in place of the transfer of the franchise of one rotten borough to one large city-a reform which now to the most bigoted seemed absurdly reasonable-here were sixty boroughs to be swept away, and nearly fifty more to be shorn of half their strength, a Constitution to be altered, an aristocracy to be dethroned!

And Calne, Lord Lansdowne's pocket borough, was spared!

Sir Robert firmly believed that the limit had been fixed with an eye to Calne. They who framed the Bill, sitting in wicked, detestable confabulation, had fixed the limit of Schedule B so as to spare Calne and Tavistock-Arcades ambo, Whig boroughs both. Or why did they just escape? In the whole matter it was this, strangely enough, which troubled him most sorely. For the loss of his own borough-if the worst came to the worst-he could put up with it. He had no children, he had no one to come after him except Arthur Vaughan, the great-grandson of his grandmother. But the escape of Calne, this clear proof of the hypocrisy of the righteous Grey, the blatant Durham, the whey-faced Lord John, the demagogue Brougham-this injustice kept him in a state of continual irritation.

He was thinking of this as he paced slowly up and down the broad walk beside the Garden Pool, at Stapylton-a solitary figure dwarfed by the great elms. The placid surface of the pool, which mirrored the shaven lawns beyond it and the hoary church set amidst the lawns, the silence about him, broken only by the notes of song-birds or a faint yelp from the distant kennels, the view over the green undulations of park and covert-all vainly appealed to him to-day, though on summer evenings his heart took sad and frequent leave of them. For that which threatened him every day jostled aside for the present that which must happen one day. The home of his fathers might be his for some years yet, but shorn of its chief dignity, of its pride, its mastery; while Calne-Calne would survive, to lift still higher the fortunes of those who had sold their king and country, and betrayed their order.

Daily a man and horse awaited the mail-coach at Chippenham that he might have the latest news; and, seeing a footman hurrying towards him from the house, he supposed that the mail was in. But when the man, after crossing the long wooden bridge which spanned the pool, approached with no diminution of speed, he remembered that it was too early for the post; and hating to be disturbed in his solitary reveries, he awaited the servant impatiently.

"What it is?" he asked.

"If you please, Sir Robert, Lady Lansdowne's carriage is at the door."

Only Sir Robert's darkening colour betrayed his astonishment. He had made his feelings so well known that none but the most formal civilities now passed between Stapylton and Bowood.

"Who is it?"

"Lady Lansdowne, Sir Robert. Her ladyship bade us say that she wishes to see you urgently, sir." The man, as well as the master, knew that the visit was unusual.

The baronet was a proud man, and he bethought him that the drawing-rooms, seldom used and something neglected, were not in the state in which he would wish his enemy's wife to see them. "Where have you put her ladyship?" he asked.

"In the hall, Sir Robert."

"Very good. I will come."

The man hastened away over the bridge, and Sir Robert followed, more at leisure, but still quickly. When he had passed the angle of the church which stood in a line with the three blocks of building, connected by porticos, which formed the house, and which, placed on a gentle eminence, looked handsomely over the park, he saw that a carriage with four greys ridden by postillions and attended by two outriders stood before the main door. In the carriage, her face shaded by the large Tuscan hat of the period, sat a young lady reading. She heard Sir Robert's footstep, and looked up, and in some embarrassment met his eyes.

He removed his hat. "It is Lady Louisa, is it not?" he said, looking gravely at her.

"Yes," she said; and she smiled prettily at him.

"Will you not go into the house?"

"Thank you," she replied, with a faint blush; "I think my mother wishes to see you alone, Sir Robert."

"Very good." And with a bow, cold but perfectly courteous, he turned and passed up the broad, shallow steps, which were of the same time-tinted lichen-covered stone as the rest of the building. Mapp, the butler, who had been looking out for him, opened the door, and he entered the hall.

In his heart, which was secretly perturbed, was room for the wish that he had been found in other than the high-buttoned gaiters and breeches of his country life. But he suffered no sign of that or of his more serious misgivings to appear, as he advanced to greet the still beautiful woman, who sat daintily warming one sandalled foot at the red embers on the hearth. She was far from being at ease herself. Warnings which her husband had addressed to her at parting recurred and disturbed her. But it is seldom that a woman of the world betrays her feelings, and her manner was perfect as he bent low over her hand.

"It is long," she said gently, "much longer than I like to remember, Sir Robert, since we met."

"It is a long time," he answered gravely; and when she had reseated herself he sat down opposite her.

"It is an age," she said slowly; and she looked round the hall, with its panelled walls, its deep window-seats, and its panoply of fox-masks and antlers, as if she recalled the past, "It is an age," she repeated. "Politics are sad dividers of friends."