“But surely you’re not! Man alive!”
“It is my business, I say!”
“Of course, of course, if it is as bad as that,” Flixton answered with a grin. “But—hope I don’t intrude, Vaughan, but ain’t you making a bit of a fool of yourself? What’ll old Vermuyden say, eh?”
“That’s my business too!” Vaughan answered haughtily.
“Just so, just so; and quite enough for me. All I say is—if you are not in earnest yourself, don’t play the dog in the manger!”
XI
DON GIOVANNI FLIXTON
In the political world the last week of April and the first week of May of that year were fraught with surprises. It is probable that they saw more astonished people than are to be found in England in an ordinary twelvemonth. The party which had monopolised power for half a century, and to that end and the advancement of themselves, their influence, their friends, and their dependants, had spent the public money, strained the law, and supported the mob, were incredibly, nay, were bitterly surprised when they saw all these engines turned against them; when they found dependants falling off and friends growing cold; above all, when they found that rabble, which they had so often directed, aiming its yells and brickbats against their windows.
But it is unlikely that any Tory of them all was more surprised by the change in the political aspect than Arthur Vaughan—when he came to think of it—by the position in which he had put himself. Certainly he had taken no step that was not revocable. He had said nothing positive; his honour was not engaged. But he had said a good deal. On the spur of the moment, moved by the strange attraction which the girl had for him, he had spoken after a fashion which only farther speech could justify. And then, not content with that, as if fortune were determined to make sport of his discretion, he had been led by another impulse—call it generosity, call it jealousy, call it what you will—to say more to Bob Flixton than he had said to her.
He had done this who had hitherto held himself a little above the common run of men. Who had chalked out his career and never doubted that he had the strength to follow it. Who had not been content to wait, idle and dissipated, for a dead man’s shoes, but in the pride of a mind which he believed to be the master of his passions had set his face towards the high prizes of the senate and the forum. He, who if he could not be Fox, would be Erskine. Who would be anything, in a word, except the empty-headed man of pleasure, or the plain dullard satisfied to sit in a corner with a little.
He, who had planned such a future, now found himself on the brink—ay, on the very point—of committing as foolish an act as the most thoughtless could commit. He was proposing to marry a girl below him in station, still farther below him in birth, whom he had only known three days, whom he had only seen three times! And all because she had beautiful eyes, and looked at him—Heavens, how she had looked at him!