Part III
"Love's eye is not so true as all men's: no,
How can it? O how can Love's eye be true
That is so vexed with watching and with tears?"
CHAPTER XV
London was in full season. But it was a cold May, and both the town and its inhabitants wore a gray and pinched aspect. Under the east wind an unsavory dust blew along Piccadilly; the ladies were still in furs; the trees were venturing out reluctantly, showing many a young leaf bitten by night frosts; the Park had but a scanty crowd; and the drapers, oppressed with summer goods, saw their muslins and gauzes in the windows give up their freshness for naught.
Nevertheless, the ferment of political and social life had seldom been greater. A Royal wedding in the near future was supposed to account for the vigor of London's social pulse; the streets, indeed, were already putting up poles and decorations. And a general election, expected in the autumn, if not before, accounted for the vivacity of the clubs, the heat of the newspapers, and the energy of the House of Commons, where all-night sittings were lightly risked by the Government and recklessly challenged by the Opposition. Everybody was playing to the gallery--i.e., the country. Old members were wooing their constituencies afresh; young candidates were spending feverish energies on new hazards, and anxiously inquiring at what particular date in the campaign tea-parties became unlawful. Great issues were at stake; for old parties were breaking up under the pressure of new interests and passions; within the Liberal party the bubbling of new faiths was at its crudest and hottest; and those who stood by the slow and safe ripening of Freedom, from "precedent to precedent," were in much anxiety as to what shape or shapes might ultimately emerge from a brew so strong and heady. Which only means that now, as always, Whigs and Radicals were at odds; and the "unauthorized programme" of the day was sending its fiery cross through the towns and the industrial districts of the north.
A debate of some importance was going on in the House of Commons. The Tory Government had brought in a Land Bill, intended, no doubt, rather as bait for electors than practical politics. It was timid and ill-drafted, and the Opposition, in days when there were still some chances in debate, joyously meant to kill it, either by frontal attack or by obstruction. But, in the opinion of the Left Wing of the party, the chief weapon of its killing should be the promise of a much larger and more revolutionary measure from the Liberal side. The powerful Right Wing, however, largely represented on the front bench, held that you could no more make farmers than saints by Act of Parliament, and that only by slow and indirect methods could the people be drawn back to the land. There was, in fact, little difference between them and the front bench opposite, except a difference in method; only the Whig brains were the keener; and in John Ferrier the Right Wing had a personality and an oratorical gift which the whole Tory party admired and envied.
There had been a party meeting on the subject of the Bill, and Ferrier and the front bench had, on the whole, carried the indorsement of their policy. But there was an active and discontented minority, full of rebellious projects for the general election.
On this particular afternoon Ferrier had been dealing with the Government Bill on the lines laid down by the meeting at Grenville House. His large pale face (the face of a student rather than a politician), with its small eyes and overhanging brows; the straight hair and massive head; the heavy figure closely buttoned in the familiar frock-coat; the gesture easy, animated, still young--on these well-known aspects a crowded House had bent its undivided attention. Then Ferrier sat down; a bore rose; and out flowed the escaping tide to the lobbies and the Terrace.
Marsham found himself on the Terrace, among a group of malcontents: Barton, grim and unkempt, prophet-eyes blazing, mouth contemptuous; the Scotchman McEwart, who had been one of the New Year's visitors to Tallyn, tall, wiry, red-haired, the embodiment of all things shrewd and efficient; and two or three more. A young London member was holding forth, masking what was really a passion of disgust in a slangy nonchalance.