Yet it was these emotional, expressional women that Annabel Vyner naturally joined. She stood among them like a splendid incarnation of its spirit. She hoped vehemently that “Earl Grey and Lord John Russell would be beheaded as traitors;” she declared she would “go with delight to Tower Hill and see the axe fall.” She flashed into contempt, when she spoke of Mr. Brougham. “Botany Bay and hard labour might do for him; and as for the waiting crowds in the streets, the proper thing was to shoot them down, like rabid animals.” She wondered “the Duke of Wellington did not do so.” These sentiments were vivified by the passion that blazed in her black eyes and flushed her brown face crimson, and by the gown of bright yellow Chinese crape which she wore; for it fluttered and waved with her impetuous movements, and made a kind of luminous atmosphere around her.
“What a superb creature!” exclaimed Mr. Disraeli to the Hon. Mrs. Norton. And Mrs. Norton put up her glass and looked at Annabel critically.
“Superb indeed–to look at. Would you like to live with her?”
“It would be exciting.”
“More so than your ‘Vivian Grey,’ which I have just read. It is the book of the year.”
“No, that honour belongs to a little volume of poems by a young man called Tennyson. Get it; you will read every word it contains.”
“I am wedded to my idols,–Byron and Scott and Keble. I am much interested at present in those ‘Imaginary Conversations’ which that queer Mr. Landor has given us. They are worth reading, I assure you.”
“But why read them? Listen to the ‘Conversations’ around us! They are of Revolution, Civil War, Exile, and the Headsman. Could anything be more ‘Imaginary’?”
“Who can tell? Here comes Richmoor. He may be able to prognosticate. What a murmur of voices! What invisible movement! Can you divine the news from the messenger’s face?”
“He thinks that he brings good news. He may be fatally wrong.”