Certainly Vaughan had, if man ever had, grounds for a quarrel with fate. He had left London heart-whole and happy, the heir to a large fortune. He returned a fortnight later, a member of the Commons House indeed, but heart-sick and soured, beggared of his expectations and tortured by the thought of what might have been—if his love had proved true as she was fair, and constant as she was sweet. Fond dreams of her beauty still tormented him. Visions of the modest home in which he would have found consolation in failure, and smiles in success, rose up before him and derided him. He hated Sir Robert. He hated, or tried to hate, the weakest and the most despicable of women. He saw all things and all men with a jaundiced eye, the sound of his voice and the look of his face were altered. Men who knew him and who passed him in the street, or who saw him eating his chop in solitary churlishness, nudged one another and said that he took his reverses ill; while others, wounded by his curtness or his ill-humour, added that he did not go the right way to make the most of what was left.
For a certainty he was become a man unpleasant to handle. But within, under the thorns, was a very human soul, wounded, sore, and miserable, seeking every way for an outlet from its pains, and finding hope of escape at one point only. Men were right, when they said that he did not go the way to make the most of his chances. For he laid himself out to please no one at this time; it was not in him. But he worked late and early, and with a furious energy to fit himself for a political career; believing that success in that career was all that was left to him, and that by the necessary labour he could best put the past behind him. Love and pleasure, and those sweets of home life of which he had dreamed, were gone from him. But the stern prizes of ambition, the crown of those who live laborious days, might still be his—if the Mirror of Parliament were never out of his hands, and if Mr. Hume himself were not more constant to his favourite pillar under the gallery than he to such chance seat as might fall to him on the same side of the House.
Alas, he had not taken the oaths an hour—with a sore heart, in a ruck of undistinguished new Members—before he saw that success was not so near or so clearly within reach, as hope, with her flattering tale, had argued. The times were propitious, certainly. The debates were close and fiery, and were scanned out of doors with an interest unknown before. The strife between Croker and Macaulay in the Commons, the duel between Brougham and Lyndhurst in the Lords, were followed in the country with as much attention as a battle between Belcher and Tom Cribb; and by the same classes. Everywhere men talked politics, talked of Reform, and of little else. The clubs, the ’Change, the taverns, nay, the drawing-rooms and the schools rang with the Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill; with Schedule A, cruel as Herod, and Schedule B, which spared one of twins. Before the window in the Haymarket which weekly displayed H.B.’s Political Caricatures, crowds stood gazing all day long, whatever the weather.