He did not understand and he sought refuge in compliments. “Permitted?” he said, with the gallant bow of an old beau. “All things are permitted to so much——”
“Hush!” she said. “But there! I will take you at your word. You know that the Bill—there is but one Bill now-a-days—is in Committee?”
He frowned, disliking the subject. “I don’t think,” he said, “that any good can come of discussing it, Lady Lansdowne.”
“I think it may,” she replied, with a confidence which she did not feel, “if you will hear me. It is whispered that there is a question in Committee of one of the doomed boroughs. One, I am told, Sir Robert, hangs between schedule A and schedule B; and that borough is Chippinge. Those who know whisper Lord Lansdowne that ultimately it will be plucked from the burning, and will be found in schedule B. Consequently it will retain one member.”
Sir Robert’s thin face turned a dull red. So the wicked Whigs, who had drawn the line of disfranchisement at such a point as to spare their pet preserves, their Calne and Bedford and the like, had not been able with all their craft to net every fish. One had evaded the mesh, and by Heavens, it was Chippinge! Chippinge, though shorn of its full glory, would still return one member. He had not hoped, he had not expected this. Now
Non omnis moriar, multaque pars mei
Vitabit Libitinam!
he thought with jubilation. And then another thought darted through his mind and changed his joy to chagrin. A seat had been left to Chippinge. But why? That Arthur Vaughan, that his renegade cousin, might continue to fill it, might continue to hold it, under his nose and to his daily, hourly, his constant mortification. By Heaven, it was too much! They had said well, who said that an enemy’s gift was to be dreaded. But he would fight the seat, at the next election and at every election, rather than suffer that miserable person, miserable on so many accounts, to fill it at his will. And after all the seat was saved; and no one could tell the future. The lasting gain might outlive the temporary vexation.
So, after frowning a moment, he tried to smooth his brow. “And your mission, Lady Lansdowne,” he said politely, “is to tell me this?”
“In part,” she said, with hesitation, for the course, of his feelings had been visible in his countenance. “But also——”
“But also—and in the main,” he answered with a smile, “to make a proposition, perhaps?”