"I love this dilapidation!" said Wharton, pausing for a moment with his back against the door he had just shut. "Only it makes me long to take off my coat and practise some honest trade or other—plastering, or carpentering, or painting. What useless drones we upper classes are! Neither you nor I could mend that ceiling or patch this floor—to save our lives."
They were in the disused library. It was now the last room westwards of the garden front, but in reality it was part of the older house, and had been only adapted and re-built by that eighteenth-century Marcella whose money had been so gracefully and vainly lavished on giving dignity to her English husband's birthplace. The roof had been raised and domed to match the "Chinese room," at the expense of some small rooms on the upper floor; and the windows and doors had been suited to eighteenth-century taste. But the old books in the old latticed shelves which the Puritan founder of the family had bought in the days of the Long Parliament were still there; so were the chairs in which that worthy had sat to read a tract of Milton's or of Baxter's, or the table at which he had penned his letters to Hampden or Fairfax, or to his old friend—on the wrong side—Edmund Verney the standard-bearer. Only the worm-eaten shelves were dropping from their supports, and the books lay in mouldy confusion; the roofs had great holes and gaps, whence the laths hung dismally down, and bats came flitting in the dusk; and there were rotten places in the carpetless floor.
"I have tried my best," said Marcella, dolefully, stooping to look at a hole in the floor. "I got a bit of board and some nails, and tried to mend some of these places myself. But I only broke the rotten wood away; and papa was angry, and said I did more harm than good. I did get a carpenter to mend some of the chairs; but one doesn't know where to begin. I have cleaned and mended some of the books, but—"
She looked sadly round the musty, forlorn place.
"But not so well, I am afraid, as any second-hand bookseller's apprentice could have done it," said Wharton, shaking his head. "It's maddening to think what duffers we gentlefolks are!"
"Why do you harp on that?" said Marcella, quickly. She had been taking him over the house, and was in twenty minds again as to whether and how much she liked him.
"Because I have been reading some Board of Trade reports before breakfast," said Wharton, "on one or two of the Birmingham industries in particular. Goodness! what an amount of knowledge and skill and resource these fellows have that I go about calling the 'lower orders.' I wonder how long they are going to let me rule over them!"
"I suppose brain-power and education count for something still?" said
Marcella, half scornfully.
"I am greatly obliged to the world for thinking so," said Wharton with emphasis, "and for thinking so about the particular kind of brain-power I happen to possess, which is the point. The processes by which a Birmingham jeweller makes the wonderful things which we attribute to 'French taste' when we see them in the shops of the Rue de la Paix are, of course, mere imbecility—compared to my performances in Responsions. Lucky for me, at any rate, that the world has decided it so. I get a good time of it—and the Birmingham jeweller calls me 'sir.'"
"Oh! the skilled labour! that can take care of itself, and won't go on calling you 'sir' much longer. But what about the unskilled—the people here for instance—the villagers? We talk of their governing themselves; we wish it, and work for it. But which of us really believes that they are fit for it, or that they are ever going to get along without our brain-power?"