Chippinge Borough Page 6

  VI

  THE PATRON OF CHIPPINGE

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

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

  This second Sir Cornelius rebuilt Stapylton, the house which hisfather had bought from the decayed family of that name, and afterliving for some ten years into the reign of Farmer George, vanished inhis 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 oftrencher-fed hounds by a strain of Mr. Warde's blood, he hunted thecountry so conscientiously that at his death a Dutch bottle might havebeen set upon his table without giving rise to the slightestreflection. He came to an end, much lamented, with the century, andSir Robert, fourth and present baronet, took over the estates.

  By that time, rid of the foreign prenomen, well allied by three goodmarriages, and since the American war of true blue Tory leanings, andthorough Church and King principles, the family was able to hold upits head among the best in the south of England. There might be somewho 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 twentyyears their owner might have franked his letters "Chippinge" had hewilled it. As it was, he passed, almost as much as Mr. Western in theeast or Sir Thomas Acland in the west, for the type of a countrygentleman. The most powerful Minister gave him his whole hand; and atcounty meetings, at Salisbury or Devizes, no voice was held morepowerful, nor any man's hint more quickly taken than Sir RobertVermuyden's.

  He was a tall and very thin man, of almost noble aspect, with a noseafter the fashion of the Duke's, and a slight stoop. In early days hehad been something of a beau, though never of the Prince's following,and he still dressed finely and with taste. With a smaller sense ofpersonal dignity, or with wider sympathies, he might have been ahappier man. But he had married too late--at forty-five; and the fouryears which followed, and their sequel, had darkened the rest of hislife, drawn crow's-feet about his eyes and peevish lines about hismouth. Henceforth he had lived alone, nursing his pride; and thesolitude of this life--which was not without its dignity, since noword of scandal touched it--had left him narrow and vindictive, a manjust but not over-generous, and pompous without complacency.

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

  Not that his Tory principles were not strong. During five Parliamentshe had filled one of his own seats, and had spoken from time to timeafter a dignified fashion, with formal gestures and a copioussprinkling of classical allusions. The Liberal Toryism of Canning hadfallen below his ideal, but he had continued to sit until the betrayalof the party by Peel and the Duke--on the Catholic Claims--drove himfrom the House in disgust, and thenceforth Warren's Hotel, hisresidence when in town, saw him but seldom. He had fancied then thatnothing worse could happen; that the depths were plumbed, and that heand those who thought with him might punish the traitor and takeno harm. With the Duke of Cumberland, the best hated man inEngland--which was never tired of ridiculing his moustachios--Eldon,Wetherell, and the ultra-Tories, he had not rested until he had seenthe hated pair flung from office; nor was any man more surprised andconfounded when the result of the work began to show itself. TheWhigs, admitted to power by this factious movement, and after an exileso 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 littleand giving nothing, such as foe and friend had alike expected; but ameasure of reform so radical that O'Connell blessed it, and Cobbettmight have fathered it: a measure which, if it passed, would sweepaway Sir Robert's power and the power of his class, destroy hisborough, and relegate him to the common order of country squires.

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

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

  _Hinc illae lacrimae!_ For, in place of the transfer of the franchise ofone rotten borough to one large city--a reform which now to the mostbigoted seemed absurdly reasonable--here were sixty boroughs to beswept 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 eyeto Calne. They who framed the Bill, sitting in wicked, detestableconfabulation, had fixed the limit of Schedule B so as to spare Calneand Tavistock--_Arcades ambo_, Whig boroughs both. Or why did theyjust escape? In the whole matter it was this, strangely enough, whichtroubled him most sorely. For the loss of his own borough--if theworst came to the worst--he could put up with it. He had nochildren, he had no one to come after him except Arthur Vaughan, thegreat-grandson of his grandmother. But the escape of Calne, this clearproof of the hypocrisy of the righteous Grey, the blatant Durham, thewhey-faced Lord John, the demagogue Brougham--this injustice kept himin a state of continual irritation.

  He was thinking of this as he paced slowly up and down the broad walkbeside the Garden Pool, at Stapylton--a solitary figure dwarfed by thegreat elms. The placid surface of the pool, which mirrored the shav
enlawns beyond it and the hoary church set amidst the lawns, the silenceabout him, broken only by the notes of song-birds or a faint yelp fromthe distant kennels, the view over the green undulations of park andcovert--all vainly appealed to him to-day, though on summer eveningshis heart took sad and frequent leave of them. For that whichthreatened him every day jostled aside for the present that which musthappen one day. The home of his fathers might be his for some yearsyet, but shorn of its chief dignity, of its pride, its mastery; whileCalne--Calne would survive, to lift still higher the fortunes of thosewho had sold their king and country, and betrayed their order.

  Daily a man and horse awaited the mail-coach at Chippenham that hemight have the latest news; and, seeing a footman hurrying towards himfrom 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 tooearly for the post; and hating to be disturbed in his solitaryreveries, 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 hadmade his feelings so well known that none but the most formalcivilities now passed between Stapylton and Bowood.

  "Who is it?"

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

  The baronet was a proud man, and he bethought him that thedrawing-rooms, seldom used and something neglected, were not in thestate in which he would wish his enemy's wife to see them. "Where haveyou 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, moreat leisure, but still quickly. When he had passed the angle of thechurch which stood in a line with the three blocks of building,connected by porticos, which formed the house, and which, placed on agentle eminence, looked handsomely over the park, he saw that acarriage with four greys ridden by postillions and attended by twooutriders stood before the main door. In the carriage, her face shadedby the large Tuscan hat of the period, sat a young lady reading. Sheheard Sir Robert's footstep, and looked up, and in some embarrassmentmet his eyes.

  He removed his hat. "It is Lady Louisa, is it not?" he said, lookinggravely 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 motherwishes to see you alone, Sir Robert."

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

  In his heart, which was secretly perturbed, was room for the wish thathe had been found in other than the high-buttoned gaiters and breechesof his country life. But he suffered no sign of that or of his moreserious misgivings to appear, as he advanced to greet the stillbeautiful woman, who sat daintily warming one sandalled foot at thered embers on the hearth. She was far from being at ease herself.Warnings which her husband had addressed to her at parting recurredand disturbed her. But it is seldom that a woman of the world betraysher 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 reseatedherself he sat down opposite her.

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

  "I fear," he replied, in a tone as cold as courtesy permitted, "thatthey are about to be greater dividers."

  She looked at him quickly, with appeal in her eyes. "And yet," shesaid, "we saw more of you once."

  "Yes." He was wondering much, behind the mask of his civility, whathad drawn her hither. He knew that it could be no light, no passingmatter which had brought her over thirteen miles of Wiltshire roads tocall upon a man with whom intercourse had been limited, for yearspast, to a few annual words, a formal invitation as formally declined,a measured salutation at race or ball. She must have a motive, and astrong one. It was only the day before that he had learned that LordLansdowne meant to drop his foolish opposition at Chippinge; was itpossible that she was here to make a favour of this? And perhaps abargain? If that were her errand, and my lord had sent her, thinkingto make refusal less easy, Sir Robert felt that he would know how toanswer. He waited.