The goal was distant, but it was glorious. Nor had the eighteen months which he had given to the study of the law, to attendance at the Academic and at a less ambitious debating society, and to the output of some scientific feelers, shaken his faith in himself. He had not yet thought of a seat at St. Stephen’s; for no nomination had fallen to him, nor, save from one quarter, was likely to fall. And his income, some six hundred a year, though it was ample for a bachelor, would not stretch to the price of a seat at five thousand for the Parliament, or fifteen hundred for the Session—the quotations which had ruled of late. A seat some time, however, he must have; it was a necessary stepping-stone to the heights he would gain. And the subject in his mind as he paced Whitehall Place was the abolition of the close boroughs and the effect which the transfer of electoral power to the middle-class would have on his chances.
A small thing—no more than a quantity of straw laid thickly before one of the houses—brought his thoughts down to the present. By a natural impulse he raised his eyes to the house; by a coincidence, less natural, a hand, even as he looked, showed itself behind one of the panes of a window on the first floor, and drew down the blind. Vaughan stood after that, fascinated, and watched the lowering of blind after blind. And the solemn contrast between his busy thoughts and that which had even then happened in the house—between that which lay behind the darkened windows and the bright April sunshine about him, the twittering of the sparrows in the green, and the tumult of distant cheering—went home to him.
He thought of the lines, so old and so applicable:
_Omnes eodem cogimur, omnium_ _Versatur urna, serius, ocius_,
He was still rolling the words on his tongue with that love of the classical rhythm which was a mark of his day—and returns no more than the taste for the prize-ring which was coeval with it—when the door of the house opened and a man came clumsily and heavily out, closed the door behind him, and, with his head bent low and the ungainly movements of an automaton, made off down the street.
The man was very stout as well as tall, his dress slovenly and disordered. His hat was pulled awry over his eyes, and his hands were plunged deep in his breeches pockets. Vaughan saw so much. Then the door opened again, and a face, unmistakably that of a butler, looked out.