Harley heard, with a grim smile, and passing his hand within his vest, laid it upon Nora’s memoir.
“What could we do in parliament without you?” said the great proprietor, almost piteously.
“Rather what could I do without parliament? Public life is the only existence I own. Parliament is all in all to me. But we may cross now.”
Harley’s eye glittered cold as it followed the tall form of the statesman, towering high above all other passers-by. “Ay,” he muttered, “ay, rest as sure of my friendship as I was of thine! And be Lansmere our field of Philippi! There where thy first step was made in the only life that thou own’st as existence, shall the ladder itself rot from under thy footing. There, where thy softer victim slunk to death from the deceit of thy love, shall deceit like thine own dig a grave for thy frigid ambition. I borrow thy quiver of fraud; its still arrows shall strike thee; and thou too shalt say, when the barb pierces home, ‘This comes from the hand of a friend.’ Ay, at Lansmere, at Lansmere, shall the end crown the whole! Go, and dot on the canvas the lines for a lengthened perspective, where my eyes note already the vanishing point of the picture.”
Then through the dull fog and under the pale gas-lights Harley L’Estrange pursued his noiseless way, soon distinguished no more amongst the various, motley, quick-succeeding groups, with their infinite sub-divisions of thought, care, and passion; while, loud over all their low murmurs, or silent hearts, were heard the tramp of horses and din of wheels, and the vociferous discordant cry that had ceased to attract and interest in the ears it vexed, “Great News, Great News—Dissolution of Parliament—Great News!”
CHAPTER XIX.
The scene is at Lansmere Park,—a spacious pile, commenced in the reign of Charles II.; enlarged and altered in the reign of Anne. Brilliant interval in the History of our National Manners, when even the courtier dreaded to be dull, and Sir Fopling raised himself on tiptoe to catch the ear of a wit; when the names of Devonshire and Dorset, Halifax and Carteret, Oxford and Bolingbroke, unite themselves, brotherlike, with those of Hobbes and of Dryden, of Prior and Bentley, of Arbuthnot, Gay, Pope, and Swift; and still, wherever we turn, to recognize some ideal of great Lord or fine Gentleman, the Immortals of Literature stand by his side.
The walls of the rooms at Lansmere were covered with the portraits of those who illustrate that time which Europe calls the Age of Louis XIV. A L’Estrange, who had lived through the reigns of four English princes (and with no mean importance through all) had collected those likenesses of noble contemporaries. As you passed through the chambers—opening one on the other in that pomp of parade introduced with Charles II. from the palaces of France, and retaining its mode till Versailles and the Trianon passed, themselves, out of date—you felt you were in excellent company. What saloons of our day, demeaned to tailed coats and white waistcoats, have that charm of high breeding which speaks out from the canvas of Kneller and Jervis, Vivien and Rigaud? And withal, notwithstanding lace and brocade—the fripperies of artificial costume—still those who give interest or charm to that day look from their portraits like men,—raking or debonair, if you will, never mincing nor feminine. Can we say as much of the portraits of Lawrence? Gaze there on fair Marlborough; what delicate perfection of features, yet how easy in boldness, how serene in the conviction of power! So fair and so tranquil he might have looked through the cannon reek at Ramillies and Blenheim, suggesting to Addison the image of an angel of war. Ah, there, Sir Charles Sedley, the Lovelace of wits! Note that strong jaw and marked brow; do you not recognize the courtier who scorned to ask one favour of the king with whom he lived as an equal, and who stretched forth the right hand of man to hurl from a throne the king who had made his daughter—a countess?
[Sedley was so tenacious of his independence that when his affairs
were most embarrassed, he refused all pecuniary aid from Charles II.
His bitter sarcasm, in vindication of the part he took in the
deposition of James II., who had corrupted his daughter, and made
her Countess of Dorchester, is well known. “As the king has made my
daughter a countess, the least I can do, in common gratitude, is to
assist in making his Majesty’s daughter—a queen!”]