Our work was to be at Silverside; where Bill and his father already were in residence, having taken the front that looked over the porch, on the High Street side of the "Bull-and-Mouth Hotel." William Chumps, Esquire, had brought down "his lady, a lovely bride of some nineteen summers," as the Silverside Constitutional described her, though I could depose that she was four and twenty, being eleven months older than myself, and no bride of any summer at all, but married to Bill for three months of the winter. There was no taint of envy in my feelings. She certainly looked very handsome, and had spent a good lump of her £12,000 in apparel; and Bill, of course, was mightily proud of her. But to dream, for a moment, that I was pining, as her melancholy manner towards me conveyed,—I longed very often to bring my Laura; but a scene of that kind was not fitted for her! Patriotic sentiments repressed my private anger; and I worked very hard for Bill; and wrote him some good posters.
"Now, I am off for the Towers," I said to Sir Roland, only two days before the one fixed for the poll; "I can't stand any more of this, and Bill cannot want me any longer. I have had the very kindest letters from your mother; and if you prefer racket to home-life, I don't. I will meet you in London, any day you may appoint. But I must have a little quiet first. 'Tis as bad as a boat-race every day; and at Henley once I lost my nerve, from too much of it, and we got whacked."
"I see;" he replied, as he was fond of doing. "Another man's laurels, wreathed with orange-blossom, are hard to behold philosophically. Go, Tommy, go and recruit your roses. But remember our compact. You have won nothing yet."
He might say what he pleased, when he smiled like Laura; though his smile was strength, and hers was sweetness. That evening, I arrived where I was welcome; and the lovely blush, and soft whisper of a kiss, were worth a world of politics, and Parliament.
The privilege of changing their minds has always been handsomely yielded to fair ladies; so long as they do not change there with their precious hearts, and pure affections. I found my Laura in a vastly different political vein from her previous one. She had taken some peeps into the newspapers, not at all for the sake of the public, but for mine; and all the deep warmth of her nature was stirred, by the Radical outrage, to her country and her home.
"About the suffrage, and the Constitution, and the Abstinence-cause, I know nothing, or less than nothing—as gentlemen express it, though I don't see how there can be less than nothing;" she said to me, the very day after my arrival. "But about right and wrong, everybody has a right to some opinion. For poor landowners, what is it but robbery, downright robbery, to take away their land, and compel them to start afresh to earn more? But, oh, Tommy, Tommy, it takes all my breath away, to think of surrendering the English fleet to the bitterest enemies of England! Oh, come in here, that I may show you something it will strengthen all your principles to see."
There are few things more impressive to the model British mind—of which mine is, I am proud to say, a very tidy specimen—than a genuine series of ancestors in oil, proved (by internal and external evidence) extraneous to Wardour Street. Monuments perhaps have a still grander savour, especially recumbent figures of the Knight, and his Lady, on a slab together, with the little ones that failed to come to harm, sculpturally coming up, like frogs for the blessing. But these are very rarely to be found in any Chancel, or Chapel, by the dozen; while the pictures have an old family habit of keeping together. And to me it appeared that the Twentifold race were what our dear cousins, (who supply our slang, after stealing our standards) call "real grit," for never having driven me, or anybody else, into this caravan of dead Twentifolds. For my gallery of ancestors was restricted to a photograph of my dear father, and an ancient daguerreotype of Uncle Bill.
"Oh, Laura," I cried, when I saw them stretching, (like the windows of a Stop-at-all-Stations-train) for a furlong without any corner; "how can you look at all these great people, and come down from them, to a nobody like me?"