Poor Mary! The door was barely shut before her heart whispered that she had only to cross the hall and she would see him; that, on the other hand, if she did not cross the hall, she would never, never, never see him again! She would stay here for all time, bound hand and foot to the unchanging round of petty duties, a blind slave in the mill, no longer a woman—though her woman’s heart hungered for love—but a dull, formal, old maid, growing more stiff and angular with every year! No farther away than the other side of the hall were love and freedom. And she dared not, she dared not open the door!
And then she bethought her, that he was no weathercock, for he had come again! He had come! And it must be for something. For what?
She heard the door open on the parlour side of the hall, and she knew that he was going. And she stood listening, waiting with blanched cheeks.
The door opened and Miss Sibson came in, met her look—and started.
“Oh!” the schoolmistress exclaimed; and for a moment she stood, looking strangely at the girl, as if she did not know what to say to her. Then, “We were mistaken,” she said, with a serious face. “It is not the gentleman you were expecting, my dear. On the contrary, it’s a stranger who wishes to see you on business.”
Mary tried to gain command of herself. “I had rather not,” she said faintly. “I don’t think I can.”
“I fear—you must,” Miss Sibson rejoined, with unusual gravity. “Still, there is no hurry. He can wait a few minutes. He can await your leisure. Do you sit down and compose yourself. You have no reason to be disturbed. The gentleman”—she continued, with an odd inflection in her voice—“is old enough to be your father.”
XV
MR. PYBUS’S OFFER
“A note for you, sir.” Vaughan turned moodily to take it. It was the morning after the Vermuyden dinner, and he had slept ill, he had risen late, he was still sitting before his breakfast, toying with it rather than eating it. His first feeling on leaving the dining-room had been bitter chagrin at the ease with which Sir Robert had dealt with him. This had given place a little later to amusement; for he had a sense of humour. And he had laughed, though sorely, at the figure he had cut as he beat his retreat. Still later, as he lay, excited and wakeful, he had fallen a prey to doubt; that horrible three o’clock in the morning doubt, which defies reason, which sees all the cons in the strongest light and reduces the pros to shadows. However, one thing was certain. He had crossed the Rubicon. He had divorced himself by public act from the party to which his forbears—for the Vaughans as well as the Vermuydens had been Tories—had belonged. He had joined the Whigs; nay, he had joined the Reformers. But though he had done this deliberately and from conviction, though his reason approved the step, and his brain teemed with arguments in its favour, the chance that he might be wrong haunted him.
That governing class from which he was separating himself, from which his policy would snatch power, which in future would dub him traitor, what had it not done for England? With how firm a hand had it not guided the country through storm and stress, with what success shielded it not from foreign foes only, but from disruption and revolution? He scanned the last hundred and fifty years and saw the country, always under the steady rule of that class which had the greatest stake in its prosperity, advancing in strength and riches and comfort, ay, and, though slowly in these, in knowledge also and the humanities and decencies. And the question forced itself upon him, would that great middle class into whose hands the sway now fell, use it better? Would they produce statesmen more able than Walpole or Chatham, generals braver than Wolfe or Moore, a higher heart than Nelson’s? Nay, would the matter end there? Would not power slip into the hands of a wider and yet a wider circle? Would Orator Hunt’s dream of Manhood Suffrage, Annual Parliaments and the Ballot become a reality? Would government by the majority, government by tale of heads, as if three chawbacons must perforce be wiser than one squire, government by the ill-taught, untrained mass, with the least to lose and the most to gain—would that in the long run plunge the country in fatal misfortunes?