Demos Part 2

As soon as the vicar had taken his departure Alfred threw himself into a chair, thrust out his legs, and exploded in laughter.

'By Jove!' he shouted. 'If that man doesn't experience symptoms of disorder! Why, I should be prostrate for a week if I consumed a quarter of what he has put out of sight.'

'Alfred, you are shockingly rude,' reproved his mother, though herself laughing. 'Mr. Wyvern is absorbed in thought.'

'Well, he has taken the best means, I should say, to remind himself of actualities,' rejoined the youth. 'But what a man he is! How did he behave in church this morning?'

'You should have come to see,' said Mrs. Waltham, mildly censuring her son's disregard of the means of grace.

'I like Mr. Wyvern,' observed Adela, who was standing at the window looking out upon the dusking valley.

'Oh, you would like any man in parsonical livery,' scoffed her brother.

Alfred shortly betook himself to the garden, where, in spite of a decided freshness in the atmosphere, he walked for half-an-hour smoking a pipe. When he entered the house again, he met Adela at the foot of the stairs.

'Mrs. Mewling has just come in,' she whispered.

'All right, I'll come up with you,' was the reply. 'Heaven defend me from her small talk!'

They ascended to a very little room, which made a kind of boudoir for Adela. Alfred struck a match and lit a lamp, disclosing a nest of wonderful purity and neatness. On the table a drawing-board was slanted; it showed a text of Scripture in process of 'illumination.'

'Still at that kind of thing!' exclaimed Alfred. 'My good child, if you want to paint, why don't you paint in earnest? Really, Adela, I must enter a protest! Remember that you are eighteen years of age.'

'I don't forget it, Alfred.'

'At eight-and-twenty, at eight-and-thirty, you propose still to be at the same stage of development?'

'I don't think we'll talk of it,' said the girl quietly. 'We don't understand each other.'

'Of course not, but we might, if only you'd read sensible books that I could give you.'

Adela shook her head. The philosophical youth sank into his favourite att.i.tude--legs extended, hands in pockets, nose in air.

'So, I suppose,' he said presently, 'that fellow really has been ill?'

Adela was sitting in thought; she looked up with a shadow of annoyance on her face.

'That fellow?'

'Eldon, you know.'

'I want to ask you a question,' said his sister, interlocking her fingers and pressing them against her throat. 'Why do you always speak in a contemptuous way of Mr. Eldon?'

'You know I don't like the individual.'

'What cause has "the individual" given you?'

'He's a sn.o.b.'

'I'm not sure that I know what that means,' replied Adela, after thinking for a moment with downcast eyes.

'Because you never read anything. He's a fellow who raises a great edifice of pretence on rotten foundations.'

'What can you mean? Mr. Eldon is a gentleman. What pretence is he guilty of?'

'Gentleman!' uttered her brother with much scorn. 'Upon my word, that _is_ the vulgarest of denominations! Who doesn't call himself so nowadays! A man's a man, I take it, and what need is there to lengthen the name? Thank the powers, we don't live in feudal ages. Besides, he doesn't seem to me to be what you imply.'

Adela had taken a book; in turning over the pages, she said--

'No doubt you mean, Alfred, that, for some reason, you are determined to view him with prejudice.'

'The reason is obvious enough. The fellow's behaviour is detestable; he looks at you from head to foot as if you were applying for a place in his stable. Whenever I want an example of a contemptible aristocrat, there's Eldon ready-made. Contemptible, because he's such a sham; as if everybody didn't know his history and his circ.u.mstances!'

'Everybody doesn't regard them as you do. There is nothing whatever dishonourable in his position.'

'Not in sponging on a rich old plebeian, a man he despises, and living in idleness at his expense?'

'I don't believe Mr. Eldon does anything of the kind. Since his brother's death he has had a sufficient income of his own, so mother says.'

'Sufficient income of his own! Bah! Five or six hundred a year; likely he lives on that! Besides, haven't they soaped old Mutimer into leaving them all his property? The whole affair is the best ill.u.s.tration one could possibly have of what aristocrats are brought to in a democratic age. First of all, G.o.dfrey Eldon marries Mutimer's daughter; you are at liberty to believe, if you like, that he would have married her just the same if she hadn't had a penny. The old fellow is flattered. They see the hold they have, and stick to him like leeches. All for want of money, of course. Our aristocrats begin to see that they can't get on without money nowadays; they can't live on family records, and they find that people won't toady to them in the old way just on account of their name. Why, it began with Eldon's father--didn't he put his pride in his pocket, and try to make cash by speculation? Now I can respect him: he at all events faced the facts of the case honestly. The despicable thing in this Hubert Eldon is that, having got money once more, and in the dirtiest way, he puts on the top-sawyer just as if there was nothing to be ashamed of. If he and his mother were living in a small way on their few hundreds a year, he might haw-haw as much as he liked, and I should only laugh at him; he'd be a fool, but an honest one. But catch them doing that! Family pride's too insubstantial a thing, you see. Well, as I said, they ill.u.s.trate the natural course of things, the transition from the old age to the new. If Eldon has sons, they'll go in for commerce, and make themselves, if they can, millionaires; but by that time they'll dispense with airs and insolence--see if they don't.'

Adela kept her eyes on the pages before her, but she was listening intently. A sort of verisimilitude in the picture drawn by her Radical-minded brother could not escape her; her thought was troubled.

When she spoke it was without resentment, but gravely.

'I don't like this spirit in judging of people. You know quite well, Alfred, how easy it is to see the whole story in quite another way. You begin by a harsh and worldly judgment, and it leads you to misrepresent all that follows. I refuse to believe that G.o.dfrey Eldon married Mrs.

Mutimer's daughter for her money.'

Alfred laughed aloud.

'Of course you do, sister Adela! Women won't admit such things; that's _their_ aristocratic feeling!'

'And that is, too, worthless and a sham? Will that, too, be done away with in the new age?'

'Oh, depend upon it! When women are educated, they will take the world as it is, and decline to live on illusions.'

'Then how glad I am to have been left without education!'

In the meantime a conversation of a very lively kind was in progress between Mrs. Waltham and her visitor, Mrs. Mewling. The latter was a lady whose position much resembled Mrs. Waltham's: she inhabited a small house in the village street, and spent most of her time in going about to hear or to tell some new thing. She came in this evening with a look presageful of news indeed.

'I've been to Belwick to-day,' she began, sitting very close to Mrs.

Waltham, whose lap she kept touching as she spoke with excited fluency.

'I've seen Mrs. Yottle. My dear, what do you think she has told me?'

Mrs. Yottle was the wife of a legal gentleman who had been in Mr.

Mutimer's confidence. Mrs. Waltham at once divined intelligence affecting the Eldons.

'What?' she asked eagerly.