At that very moment there was one of those unhappy breaks which make low voices loud; and Burrel was heard descanting upon the merits of Madeira after soup. "For Heaven's sake, never think of taking Sherry, my dear madam!" he exclaimed. "After soup or macaroni, Madeira is the only thing bearable."
Blanche Delaware looked up in Dr. Wilton's face with a smile full of playful meaning. "Do not judge him by that," replied the clergyman, speaking to the smile's purport--"do not judge him by that; I have known him from his boyhood. He was my pupil as a youth, and has been my friend as a man--and--"
"And that is evidence beyond rejection that he is all that is good and amiable?" said Miss Delaware, seriously.
"Ay, and though he can talk her own kind of nonsense to a worthy lady like that," replied Dr. Wilton, determined to revenge himself on Miss Delaware for her smile, "he can talk nonsense equally agreeable to younger and fairer ladies, my dear Blanche. So take care of your little heart, my pretty dame."
Miss Delaware laughed gayly, in the full, ignorant confidence of a heart that had known no wound; and the conversation dropped as far as it regarded Burrel. He himself prolonged the idle gossip with which he was amusing himself for some time; but finding, or fancying, that the elder lady who sat next to him possessed a mind that could appreciate better things, he gradually led the conversation to matters of more general interest than _pieds de cochons à la St. Menehould_, or the portraiture of gravel walks.
It is the most difficult manœuvre in the tactics of conversation, and shows greater skill, when executed neatly, than any other evolution whatever, to change at once from the flimsy and the foolish to the substantial and the good, without deviating into the heavy--to slide down the diapason from the high notes of common-place chatter, to the fine tenor of calm and sensible discourse, touching each semitone and enharmonic difference as one goes, till the change is scarcely felt, though the music may be richer. Burrel could do it when he liked; but now he overdid it. From French dishes he speedily got to France and the French people, and thence to the difference between the French and English character, with an easy facility that made the alteration of the subject seem nothing strange; but then he went a little beyond.
"The French," he said, in answer to a question from his neighbor, "have nothing of that sort of thing that we would call 'national modesty.' They would look upon it as _mauvaise honte_, and each Frenchman thinks himself fully justified in praising his own country to the skies. It is they who believe it, that are foolish. They, the French, call themselves the most civilized, well-informed people in the world; and yet go into the provinces, and you will find a peasantry more generally ignorant than perhaps any other country can show. I myself resided for many months in a part of one of the most cultivated departments of France, where the farmer on either hand of the house in which I dwelt during the hunting season--each renting many hundreds of acres of land--could neither read nor write. Where could such a thing be found in England?"
"Ay, sir," cried the wealthy country gentleman, opposite; "but their laws, sir, their laws--their wise and equitable courts of justice--their civil and political liberty, sir--a model for all nations; and which I hope some day to see fully adopted in this country."
"May God forbid!" cried Burrel. "As to their political liberty, we can not speak of it; for a thing that has never existed for ten years together, without deviating into anarchy on the one hand, or sinking into tyranny on the other, is something very like a nonentity. As to civil liberty they have no such thing; and may Heaven avert the day when an Englishman's house will be open to domiciliary visits at the caprice of any man or body of men, or when he can not ride twenty miles without being subjected to interruption, and a demand for his passport!"
He now found that his conversation was getting too heavy, and would fain have dropped it; but the other urged him somewhat warmly with, "Their laws, sir--their laws! their courts of justice!" and Burrel resolved that he should not rest even upon that.