“Ah, well, you can tell me another time what you expected. I have an engagement now and must be going,” the Honourable Bob said. “See you again!” And with a cool nod he turned on his heel, and assured that, whatever came of the affair, he had had the best of that bout, he strode off.
Vaughan was only too well aware of the same fact; and but that he held himself in habitual control, he would have followed and struck his rival. As it was, he stood a moment looking blackly after him. Then, sobered somewhat, though still bitterly chagrined, he took his way towards his hotel, carrying in his oblivious hand the letter which had been given him. Once he halted, half-minded to return to Miss Sibson’s and to see Mary and explain. He took, indeed, some steps in the backward direction. But he reflected that if he went he must speak, and plainly. And, angry as he was, furiously in love as he was, was he prepared to speak?
He was not prepared. And while he stood doubting between that eternal would, and would not, his eyes fell on the letter in his hand.
XII
A ROTTEN BOROUGH
Chippinge, Sir Robert Vermuyden’s borough, was in no worse case than two-thirds of the small boroughs of that day. Still, of its great men Cowley might have written:
Nothing they but dust can show,
Or bones that hasten to be so.
And of its greatness he might have said the same. The one and the other belonged to the past.
The town occupies a low, green hill, dividing two branches of the Avon which join their waters a furlong below. Built on the ridge and clinging to the slopes of this eminence the stone-tiled houses look pleasantly over the gentle undulations of the Wiltshire pastures—no pastures more green; and at a distance are pleasantly seen from them. But viewed more closely—at the date of which we write—the picturesque in the scene became mean or incongruous. Of the Mitred Abbey that crowned the hill and had once owned these fertile slopes there remained but the maimed hulk, patched and botched, and long degraded to the uses of that parish church its neighbour, of which nothing but the steeple survived. The crown-shaped market cross, once a dream of beauty in stone, still stood, but battered and defaced; while the Abbot’s gateway, under which sovereigns had walked, was sunk to a vile lock-up, the due corrective of the tavern which stood cheek by jowl with it.
Still, to these relics, grouped as they were upon an open triangular green, the hub of the town, there clung in spite of all some shadow of greatness. The stranger whose eye fell on the doorway of the Abbey Church, with its whorls of sculptured images, gazed and gazed again with a sense of wondering awe. But let him turn his back on these buildings, and his eye met, in cramped street and blind alley, a lower depth. Everywhere were things once fine, sunk to base uses; old stone mansions converted into tenements; the solid houses of mediæval burghers into crazy taverns; fretted cloisters into pigsties and hovels; a Gothic arch propped the sagging flank of a lath-and-plaster stable. Or if anything of the beauty of a building survived, it was masked by climbing penthouses; or, like the White Lion, the old inn which had been the Abbot’s guesthouse, it was altered out of all likeness to its former self. For the England of ’31, gross and matter-of-fact, was not awake to the value of those relics of a noble past which generations of intolerance had hurried to decay.
Doubtless in this mouldering, dusty shell was snug, warm living. Georgian comfort had outlived the wig and the laced coat, and though the influence of the Church was at its lowest ebb, and morals were not much higher, inns were plenty and flourished, and in the panelled parlours of the White Lion or the Heart and Hand was much good eating, followed by deep drinking. The London road no longer passed through the town; the great fair had fallen into disuse. But the cloth trade, by which Chippinge had once thriven, had been revived, and the town was not quite fallen. Still, of all its former glories, it retained but one intact. It returned two members to Parliament. That which Birmingham and Sheffield had not, this little borough of eighteen hundred souls enjoyed. Fallen in all other points, it retained, or rather its High Steward, Sir Robert Vermuyden, retained the right of returning, by the votes of its Alderman and twelve capital burgesses, two members to the Commons’ House.