“I say, Charlie,” whispered the baronet to the aide-decamp, “but he's wide-awake, that Master Cashel; he's a very shrewd fellow, you'll see.”
“Do you mean to couch his eyes, Tom?” said Lord Charles, with his usual slow, lazy intonation; “what does he say about the races,—will he come?”
“Oh, he can't promise, old Kennyfeck has a hold upon him just now about law business.”
“You will impress upon him, my dear Mr. Kennyfeck,” said Mr. Meek, who held the lappet of the other's coat, “that there are positively—so to say—but two parties in the country,—the Gentleman and the Jacobin. Whig and Tory, orange and green, have had their day; and the question is now between those who have something to lose, and those who have everything to gain.”
“I really could wish that you, who are so far better qualified than I am to explain—”
“So I will; I intend, my dear sir. Now, when can you dine with me? You must come this week; next I shall be obliged to be in London. Shall we say Wednesday? Wednesday be it Above all, take care that he doesn't even meet any of that dangerous faction,—those Morgans. They are the very people to try a game of ascendancy over a young man of great prospects and large fortune. O'Growl wants a few men of standing to give an air of substance and respectability to the movement. Lord Witherton will be most kind to your young friend, but you must press upon him the necessity of being presented at once. We want to make him a D.L., and if he enters Parliament, to give him the lieutenancy of the county.”
While all these various criticisms were circulating, and amid an atmosphere, as it were, impregnated by plots and schemes of every kind, Cashel stood a very amused spectator of a scene wherein he never knew he was the chief actor. It would indeed have seemed incredible to him that he could, by any change of fortune, become an object of interested speculation to lords, ladies, members of the Government, Church dignitaries, and others. He was unaware that the man of fortune, with a hand to offer, a considerable share of the influence property always gives, livings to bestow, and money to lose, may be a very legitimate mark for the enterprising schemes of mammas and ministers, suggesting hopes alike to black-coats and blacklegs.
Perhaps, among the pleasant bits of credulity which we enjoy through life, there is none sweeter than that implicit faith we repose in the cordial expressions and flattering opinions bestowed upon us, when starting in the race, by many who merely, in the jockey phrase, “standing to win” upon us, have their own, and not our interest before them in the encouragement they bestow.
The discovery of the cheat is soon made, and we are too prone to revenge our own over-confidence by a general distrust, from which, again, experience, later on, rallies us. So that a young man's course is usually from over-simplicity to over-shrewdness, and then again to that negligent half-faith which either, according to the calibre of the wearer, conceals deep knowledge of life, or hides a mistaken notion of it. Let us return to Cashel, who now stood at the table, around which a considerable number of the party were grouped, examining a number of drawings, which Mr. Pepystell, the fashionable architect, had that day sent for Roland's inspection; houses, villas, castles, cottages, abbeys, shooting-boxes, gate-lodges, Tudor and Saxon, Norman and Saracenic,—everything that the morbid imagination of architecture run mad could devise and amalgamate between the chaste elegance of the Greek and the tinkling absurdity of the Chinese.
“I do so love a cottage ornée,” said Mrs. White, taking up a very beautiful representation of one, where rose-colored curtains, and a group on a grass-plot, with gay dresses and parasols, entered into the composite architecture. “To my fancy, that would be a very paradise.”