Part 17 (1/2)
”Us extravagant?” you reply.
Yes! your income is ten s.h.i.+llings a week; out of that you spend three s.h.i.+llings in drink; ay! you, the sober ones. You can't afford it, my boys. Find me a man whose income is a thousand a year; well, if he imitates you, and spends three hundred upon sensuality, I bet you the odd seven hundred he does not make both ends meet; the proportion is too great. And _two-thirds of the distress of the lower orders is owing to this--that they are more madly prodigal than the rich; in the worst, lowest and most dangerous item of all human prodigality!_
Lord Ipsden went to see Mrs. Harvey; it cost him much to go; she lived in the Old Town, and he hated disagreeable smells; he also knew from Saunders that she had two black eyes, and he hated women with black eyes of that sort. But this good creature did go; did relieve Mrs. Harvey; and, bare-headed, suffered himself to be bedewed ten minutes by her tearful twaddle.
For once Virtue was rewarded. Returning over the North Bridge, he met somebody whom but for his charity he would not have met.
He came in one bright moment plump upon--Lady Barbara Sinclair. She flushed, he trembled, and in two minutes he had forgotten every human event that had pa.s.sed since he was by her side.
She seemed pleased to see him, too; she ignored entirely his obnoxious proposal; he wisely took her cue, and so, on this secret understanding, they were friends. He made his arrangements, and dined with her family.
It was a family party. In the evening Lady Barbara allowed it to transpire that she had made inquiries about him.
(He was highly flattered.) And she had discovered he was lying hid somewhere in the neighborhood.
”Studying the guitar?” inquired she.
”No,” said he, ”studying a new cla.s.s of the community. Do you know any of what they call the 'lower cla.s.ses'?”
”Yes.”
”Monstrous agreeable people, are they not?”
”No, very stupid! I only know two old women--except the servants, who have no characters. They imitate us, I suspect, which does not say much for their taste.”
”But some of my friends are young women; that makes all the difference.”
”It does! and you ought to be ashamed. If you want a low order of mind, why desert our own circle?”
”My friends are only low in station; they have rather lofty minds, some of them.”
”Well, amuse yourself with these lofty minds. Amus.e.m.e.nt is the end of being, you know, and the aim of all the men of this day.”
”We imitate the ladies,” said he, slyly.
”You do,” answered she, very dryly; and so the dialogue went on, and Lord Ipsden found the pleasure of being with his cousin compensate him fully for the difference of their opinions; in fact, he found it simply amusing that so keen a wit as his cousins s could be entrapped into the humor of decrying the time one happens to live in, and admiring any epoch one knows next to nothing about, and entrapped by the notion of its originality, above all things; the idea being the stale commonplace of a.s.ses in every age, and the manner of conveying the idea being a mere imitation of the German writers, not the good ones, _bien entendu,_ but the quill-drivers, the sn.o.bs of the Teutonic pen.
But he was to learn that follies are not always laughable, that _eadem sentire_ is a bond, and that, when a clever and pretty woman chooses to be a fool, her lover, if he is wise, will be a greater--if he can.
The next time they met, Lord Ipsden found Lady Barbara occupied with a gentleman whose first sentence proclaimed him a pupil of Mr. Thomas Carlyle, and he had the mortification to find that she had neither an ear nor an eye for him.
Human opinion has so many shades that it is rare to find two people agree.
But two people may agree wonderfully, if they will but let a third think for them both.
Thus it was that these two ran so smoothly in couples.
Antiquity, they agreed, was the time when the world was old, its hair gray, its head wise. Every one that said, ”Lord, Lord!” two hundred years ago was a Christian. There were no earnest men now; Williams, the missionary, who lived and died for the Gospel, was not earnest in religion; but Cromwell, who packed a jury, and so murdered his prisoner--Cromwell, in whose mouth was heaven, and in his heart temporal sovereignty--was the pattern of earnest religion, or, at all events, second in sincerity to Mahomet alone, in the absence of details respecting Satan, of whom we know only that his mouth is a Scripture concordance, and his hands the hands of Mr. Carlyle's saints.
Then they went back a century or two, and were eloquent about the great antique heart, and the beauty of an age whose samples were Abbot Sampson and Joan of Arc.