I don't belong to St. Stephen's myself, thank Heaven. Very likely they would have returned me for the county when the governor departed this life had I tried them; but as I generally cut the county, from not being one of the grass countries, and as I couldn't put forward any patriotic claims like Mr. Harper Twelvetrees, (who, as he's such a slayer of vermin, thought, I suppose, that he'd try his hand at the dry-rot and the red tapeworms, which, according to cotton grumblers, are sapping the nation,) I haven't solicited its suffrages. The odds at Tattersall's interest me more than the figures of the ways and means; and Diophantus's and Kettledrum's legerdemain at Newmarket and Epsom is more to my taste than our brilliant rhetorician's with the surplus. I don't care a button about Lord Raynham and Sir C. Burrell's maids-of-all-work; they are not an attractive class, I should say, and, if they like to amuse their time tumbling out of windows, I can't see for the life of me why peers and gentlemen should rush to the rescue like Don Quixote to Dulcinea's. And as for that great question, Tea v. Paper, bohea delights the souls of old ladies and washerwomen—who destroy crumpets and character over its inebriating cups, and who will rush to crown Lord Derby's and Mr. Disraeli's brows with laurels if they ever go to the country with a teapot blazoned on their patriotic banners—more than it does mine, which prefers Bass and Burgundy, seltzer and Sillery; and, though I dare say Brown, Jones, and Robinson find the Divorce News exciting, and paper collars very showy and economical, as I myself am content with the Times and its compeers, and think, with poor Brummel, that life without daily clean linen were worthless, that subject doesn't absorb me as it does those gentlemen who find "the last tax of knowledge" so grandiloquent and useful a finishing period. So I have never stood for the county, nor essayed to stand for it, seeing that to one Bernal Osborne there are fifty prosers in St. Stephen's, and to be bored is, to a butterfly flutterer, as the young lady whose name heads this paper once obligingly called me, torture unparalleled by anything short of acid wine or the Chinese atrocities, though truly he who heads our Lower House with his vernal heart and his matchless brain were enough to make any man, coxcomb or hero, oppositionist or ministerialist, proud to sit in the same chamber with him. But there are nights now and then, of course, when I like to go to both Houses, to hear Lord Derby's rich, intricate oratory, or Gladstone's rhetoric, (which has so potent a spell even for his foes, and is yet charged so strangely against him as half a crime; possibly by the same spirit with which plain women reproach a pretty one for her beauty: what business has he to be more attractive than his compeers? of course it's a péché mortel in their eyes!) and when Mrs. Breloques, who is a charming little woman, to whom no man short of a Goth could possibly say "No" to any petition, gave me a little blow with her fan, and told me, as I valued her friendship, to get an order and take her and Gwen to hear the Lords' debate on Tuesday, when my cousin Viscount Earlscourt, one of the best orators in the Upper House, was certain to speak, of course I obliged her. Her sister Gwen, who was a girl of seventeen, barely out, and whom I wished at Jerico, (three is so odious a number, one of the triad must ever be de trop,) was wrathful with the Upper House; it in no wise realized her expectations; the peers should have worn their robes, she thought, (as if the horrors of a chamber filled with Thames odors in June wasn't enough without being bored with velvet and ermine) she would have been further impressed by coronets also; they had no business to lounge on their benches as if they were in a smoking-room; they should have declaimed like Kean, not spoken colloquially; and—in fact, they shouldn't have been ordinary men at all. I think a fine collection from Madame Tussaud's, with a touch of the Roman antique, would have been much more to Gwen's ideal, and she wasn't at all content till Earlscourt rose; he reconciled her a little, for he had a grand-seigneur air, she said, that made up for the incongruities of his dress. It was a measure that he had much at heart; he had exerted for it all his influence in the cabinet, and he was determined that the bill should pass the Lords, though the majority inclined to throw it out. As he stood now against the table, with his calm dignity of gesture, his unstrained flow of words, and his rich and ringing voice, which could give majesty to commonplace subjects, and sway even an apathetic audience as completely as Sheridan's Begum speech, every one in the House listened attentively, and each of his words fell with its due weight. I heard him with pride, often as I had done so before, though I noticed with pain that the lines in his forehead and his mouth were visibly deepened; that he seemed to speak with effort, for him, and looked altogether, as somebody had said to me at White's in the morning, as if he were wearing out, and would go down in his prime, like Canning and Pitt.
"Lord Earlscourt looks very ill—don't you think so?" said Lelia Breloques.
As I answered her, I heard a sharp-wrung sigh, and I looked for the first time at the lady next me. I saw a delicate profile, lips compressed and colorless, chestnut hair that I had last seen with his pearls gleaming above it: I saw, en deux mots, Beatrice Boville for the first time since that night eight months before, when she had stood before me in her passion and her pride. She never took her eyes off Earlscourt while he spoke, and I wondered if she regretted having lost him for a point of honor. Had she grown indifferent to him, that she had come to his own legislative chamber, or was her love so much stronger than her pride that she had sought to see him thus rather than not see him at all? When his speech was closed, and he had resumed his place on the benches, she leaned back, covering her eyes with her hand for a moment: and, as I said aloud (more for her benefit than Mrs. Breloques's) my regret that Earlscourt would wear himself out, I was afraid, in his devotion to public life, Beatrice started at the sound of my voice, turned her head hastily, and her face was colorless enough to tell me she had not gratified her pride without some cost. Of course I spoke to her; she had been a favorite of mine always, and I had often wished to come across her again; but beyond learning that she was with Lady Mechlin in Lowndes Square, and had been spending the winter at Pau for her aunt's health, I had no time to hear more, for Lelia, having only come for Earlscourt's speech, bade me take her to her carriage, while Beatrice and her party remained for the rest of the debate; but the rencontre struck me as so odd, that I believe it occupied my thoughts more than Mrs. Breloques liked, who got into her carriage in not the best of humors, and asked me if I was going in for public life that I'd grown so particularly unamusing. We're always unamusing to one woman if we're thinking at all about another.
"Do you know who was at the House to-night, Earlscourt, to hear your speech?" I asked him, as I met him, a couple of hours afterwards, in one of the passages, as he was leaving the House. He had altered much in eight months; he stooped a little from his waist; he looked worn, and his lips were pale. Men said his stamina was not equal to his brain; physicians, that he gave himself too much work and too little sleep. I knew he was more wrapped in public life than ever; that in his place in the government he worked unwearyingly, and that he found time in spare moments for intellectual recreation that would have sufficed for their life's study for most men. Still, I thought possibly there might be a weakness still clinging round his heart, though he never alluded to it; a passion which, though he appeared to have crushed it out, might be sapping his health more than all his work for the nation.
"Do you mean any one in particular? Persigny said he should attend, but I did not see him."
"No, I meant among the ladies. Beatrice Boville was in the seat next me." I had no earthly business to speak of her so abruptly, for when I had seen him for the first time after he left the Bad when Parliament met that February, he had forbidden me ever to mention her name to him, and no allusion to her had ever passed his lips. The worn, stern gravity, that had become his habitual expression, changed for a moment; bullet-proof he might be, but my arrow had shot in through the chain links of his armor; a look of unutterable pain, eagerness, anxiety, passion, passed over his face; but, whatever he felt, he subdued it, though his voice was broken as he answered me:—
"Once for all, I bade you never speak that name to me. Without being forbidden, I should have thought your own feeling, your own delicacy, might—"
"Have checked me? O, hang it, Earlscourt, listen one second without shutting a fellow up. I never broached the subject before, by your desire; but, now I have once broken the ice, I must ask you one question: Are you sure you judged the girl justly? are you sure you were not too quick to slan—"
He pressed his hand on his chest and breathed heavily as I spoke, but he wouldn't let me finish.
"That is enough. Would any man sacrifice what he held dearest wantonly and without proof? She is dear to me now. You are the only living being so thoughtless or so merciless as to force her name upon me, and rake up the one folly, the one madness, the one crowning sorrow of my life. See that you never dare bring forward her name again."