"I consider that a very important part of your duties," said the young widow, promptly. "And I tell you this: when we come back from the Riviera, for the London season, I hope to be kept informed of everything that is going on—surely, with a husband in one House and a nephew in the other!"
"But what I want to know is," said Lord Musselburgh on this same occasion, "what Vin is going to do about the taxation of ground rents. I think that is about the hardest luck I ever heard of. Here is a young man, who no sooner gets into Parliament than he is challenged to say whether he will support the taxation of ground rents; and lo and behold! every penny of his own fortune is invested in ground rents! Isn't that hard? Other things don't touch him. Welsh Disestablishment will neither put a penny in his pocket nor take one out; while he can make promises by the dozen about the abolition of the tea duty, extension of Factory Acts, triennial Parliaments, and all the rest of it. Besides, it isn't only a question of money. He knows he has no more right to tax ground rents than to pillage a baker's shop; he knows he oughtn't to give the name of patriot to people who merely want to steal what doesn't belong to them; and I suppose he has his own ideas about contracts guaranteed by law, and the danger of introducing the legislation of plunder. But what is he going to do? What are you going to do, Marcus Curtius? Jump in, and sacrifice yourself, money and principles and all?"
"You are not one of my constituents," said Vincent, "and I decline to answer."
Day after day went by, and week after week; but no tidings came of the two fugitives. In such moments of interval as he could snatch from his various pursuits (for he was writing for an evening paper now, and that occupied a good deal of his time) his imagination would go wandering away over the surface of the globe, endeavouring to picture them here or there. He had remembered Maisrie's injunction; he could not forget that; but of what avail was it now? Busy as he was, he led a solitary kind of life; much thinking, especially during the long hours of the night, was eating into his spirit; in vain did Mrs. Ellison scheme and plan all kinds of little festivities and engagements in order to get him interested in Louie Drexel. But he was grateful to the girl, in a sort of way; when they had to go two and two (which Mrs. Ellison endeavoured to manage whenever there was a chance) she did all the talking; she did not seem to expect attention; she was light-hearted and amusing enough. He bought her music; sent her flowers; and so forth; and no doubt Mrs. Ellison thought that all was going well; but it is to be presumed that Miss Drexel herself was under no misapprehension, for she was an observant and shrewd-witted lass. Once, indeed, as they were walking up Regent-street, she ventured to hint, in a sisterly sort of fashion, that he might be a little more confidential with her; but he did not respond to this invitation; and she did not pursue the subject further.
Then the momentous wedding-day drew near; and it was with curious feelings that Vincent found himself on the way to Brighton again. But he was not alone. The two Drexel girls and Lord Musselburgh were with him, in this afternoon Pullman; and Miss Louie was chattering away like twenty magpies. Always, too, in an oddly personal way. You—the person she was addressing—you were responsible for everything that had happened to her, or might happen to her, in this country; you were responsible for the vagaries of the weather, for the condition of the cab that brought her, for the delay in getting tickets.
"Why," she said to Vincent, "you know perfectly well that all that your English poets have written about your English spring is a pure imposture. Who would go a-Maying when you can't be sure of the weather for ten minutes at a time? 'Hail, smiling morn!'—just you venture to say that, on the finest day you ever saw in an English spring; the chances are your prayer will be answered, and the chances are that the morn does begin to hail, like the very mischief. You know perfectly well that Herrick is a fraud. There never were such people as Corydon and Phyllis—with ribbons at their knees and in their caps. The farm-servants of Herrick's time were no better off than the farm-servants of this present time—stupid, ignorant louts, not thinking of poetry at all, but living the most dull and miserable of lives, with an occasional guzzle. But in this country, you believe anything that is told you. One of your great men says that machine-made things are bad; and so you go and print your books on hand-made paper—and worry yourselves to death before you can get the edges out. I call the man who multiplies either useful or pretty things by machinery a true philanthropist; he is working for the mass of the people; and it's about time they were being considered. In former days——"
"Don't you want to hire a hall, Louie?" said her sister Anna.
"Oh, I've no patience with sham talk of that kind!" continued Miss Drexel, not heeding the interruption. "As I say, in former days no one was supposed to have anything fine or beautiful in their house, except princes and nobles. The goldsmiths, and the lapidaries, and the portrait-painters—and the poor wretches who made Venetian lace—they all worked for the princes and nobles; and the common people were not supposed to have anything to do with art or ornament; they could herd like pigs. Well, I'm for machinery. I'm for chromolithography, when it can give the labourer a very fair imitation of a Landseer or a Millais to hang up in his cottage; I'm for the sewing-machine that can give the £150-a-year people a very good substitute for Syrian embroidery to put in their drawing-room. You've been so long used to princes and nobles having everything and the poor people nothing——"
"But we're learning the error of our ways," said Vincent, interposing. "My father is a Socialist."
"A Socialist," observed Lord Musselburgh, "who broke the moulds of a dessert-service lest anybody else should have plates of the same pattern!"