But the man whom they saluted as Vaughan still looked undisturbed. "Well, I don't think I ever was quite as much in love with Dizzy as you were; and as to the Premiership, we are not quite at the end yet, and Alors comme alors."
Philip Vaughan was a man just over fifty: tall, pale, distinguished-looking, with something in his figure and bearing that reminded one of the statue of Sidney Herbert, which in 1880 still stood before the War Office in Pall Mall. He looked both delicate and melancholy. His face was curiously devoid of animation; but his most marked characteristic was an habitual look of meditative abstraction from the things which immediately surrounded him. As he walked down the steps of the club towards a brougham which was waiting for him, the man who had tried in vain to interest him in the Midlothian Election turned to his nearest neighbour, and said: "Vaughan is really the most extraordinary fellow I know. There is nothing on earth that interests him in the faintest degree. Politics, books, sport, society, foreign affairs—he I never seems to care a rap about any of them; and yet he knows something about them all, and, if only you can get him to talk, he can talk extremely well. It is particularly curious about politics, for generally, if a man has once been in political life, he feels the fascination of it to the end." "But was Vaughan ever in political life?" "Oh yes I suppose you are too young to remember. He got into Parliament just after he left Oxford. He was put in by an old uncle for a Family Borough—Bilton—one of those snug little seats, not exactly 'Pocket Boroughs,' but very like them, which survived until the Reform Act of 1867." "How long did he sit?" "Only for one Parliament—from 1852 to 1857. No one ever knew why he gave up. He put it on health, but I believe it was just freakishness. He always was an odd chap, and of course he grows odder as he grows older." But just at that moment another exciting result came, trickling down the tape, and the hubbub was renewed.
Philip Vaughan was, as he put it in his languid way, "rather fond of clubs," so long as they were not political, and he spent a good deal of his time at the Travellers', the Athenæum, and the United Universities, and was a member of some more modern institutions. He had plenty of acquaintances, but no friends—at least of his own age. The Argus-eyed surveyors of club-life noticed that the only people to whom he seemed to talk freely and cheerfully were the youngest members; and he was notoriously good-natured in helping young fellows who wished to join his clubs, and did his utmost to stay the hand of the blackballer.
He had a very numerous cousinship, but did not much cultivate it. Sometimes, yielding to pressure, he would dine with cousins in London; or pay a flying visit to them in the country; but in order, as it was supposed to avoid these family entanglements, he lived at Wimbledon, where he enjoyed, in a quiet way, his garden and his library, and spent most of the day in solitary rides among the Surrey hills. When winter set in he generally vanished towards the South of Europe, but by Easter he was back again at Wimbledon, and was to be found pretty often at one or other of his clubs.
This was Philip Vaughan, as people knew him in 1880. Some liked him; some pitied him; some rather despised him; but no one took the trouble to understand him; and indeed, if anyone had thought it worth while to do so, the attempt would probably have been unsuccessful; for Vaughan never talked of the past, and to understand him in 1880 one must have known him as he had been thirty years before.
In 1850 two of the best known of the young men in society were Arthur Grey and Philip Vaughan. They were, and had been ever since their schooldays at Harrow, inseparable friends. The people to whom friendship is a sealed and hopeless mystery were puzzled by the alliance. "What have those two fellows in common?" was the constant question, "and yet you never see them apart." They shared lodgings in Mount Street, frequented the same clubs, and went, night after night, to the same diners and balls. They belonged, in short, to the same set: "went everywhere," as the phrase is, and both were extremely popular; but their pursuits and careers were different. Grey was essentially a sportsman and an athlete. He was one of those men to whom all bodily exercises come naturally, and who attain perfection in them with no apparent effort. From his earliest days he had set his heart on being a soldier, and by 1850 had obtained a commission in the Guards. Vaughan had neither gifts nor inclinations in the way of sport or games. At Harrow he lived the life of the intellect and the spirit, and was unpopular accordingly. He was constantly to be found "mooning," as his schoolfellows said, in the green lanes and meadow-paths which lie between Harrow and Uxbridge, or gazing, as Byron had loved to gaze, at the sunset from the Churchyard Terrace. It was even whispered that he wrote poetry.
Arthur Grey, with his good looks, his frank bearing, and his facile supremacy on the cricket-ground and in the racquet-court, was a popular hero; and of all his schoolfellows none paid him a more whole-hearted worship than the totally dissimilar Philip Vaughan. Their close and intimate affection was a standing puzzle to hard and dull and superficial natures; but a poet could interpret it.
"We trifled, toiled, and feasted, far apart
From churls, who, wondered what our friendship meant;
And in that coy retirement heart to heart
Drew closer, and our natures were content."[*]
[Footnote *: William Cory.]
Vaughan and Grey left Harrow, as they had entered it, on the same day, and in the following October both went up to Christ Church. Neither contemplated a long stay at Oxford, for each had his career cut out. Grey was to join the Guards at the earliest opportunity, and Vaughan was destined for Parliament. Bilton was a borough which the "Schedule A" of 1832 had spared. It numbered some 900 voters; and, even as the electors of Liskeard "were commonly of the same opinion as Mr. Eliot," so the electors of Bilton were commonly of the same opinion as Lord Liscombe.