Alice, or the Mysteries — Book 03

								

peer, he had, on his accession to the title, exchanged that respectable
residence for a large mansion in Hamilton Place; and his sober dinners
were succeeded by splendid banquets.  Naturally, he had no taste for such
things; his mind was too nervous, and his temper too hard, to take
pleasure in luxury or ostentation.  But now, as ever he acted upon a
system.  Living in a country governed by the mightiest and wealthiest
aristocracy in the world, which, from the first class almost to the
lowest, ostentation pervades,--the very backbone and marrow of
society,--he felt that to fall far short of his rivals in display was to
give them an advantage which he could not compensate either by the power
of his connections or the surpassing loftiness of his character and
genius.  Playing for a great game, and with his eyes open to all the
consequences, he cared not for involving his private fortunes in a
lottery in which a great prize might be drawn.  To do Vargrave justice,
money with him had never been an object, but a means; he was grasping,
but not avaricious.  If men much richer than Lord Vargrave find State
distinctions very expensive, and often ruinous, it is not to be supposed
that his salary, joined to so moderate a private fortune, could support
the style in which he lived.  His income was already deeply mortgaged,
and debt accumulated upon debt.  Nor had this man, so eminent for the
management of public business, any of that talent which springs from
justice, and makes its possessor a skilful manager of his own affairs.
Perpetually absorbed in intrigues and schemes, he was too much engaged in
cheating others on a large scale to have time to prevent being himself
cheated on a small one.  He never looked into bills till he was compelled
to pay them; and he never calculated the amount of an expense that seemed
the least necessary to his purposes.  But still Lord Vargrave relied upon
his marriage with the wealthy Evelyn to relieve him from all his
embarrassments; and if a doubt of the realization of that vision ever
occurred to him, still public life had splendid prizes.  Nay, should he
fail with Miss Cameron, he even thought that, by good management, he
might ultimately make it worth while to his colleagues to purchase his
absence with the gorgeous bribe of the Governor-Generalship of India.
As oratory is an art in which practice and the dignity of station produce
marvellous improvement, so Lumley had of late made effects in the House
of Lords of which he had once been judged incapable.  It is true that no
practice and no station can give men qualities in which they are wholly
deficient; but these advantages can bring out in the best light all the
qualities they do possess.  The glow of a generous imagination, the
grasp of a profound statesmanship, the enthusiasm of a noble
nature,--these no practice could educe from the eloquence of Lumley Lord
Vargrave, for he had them not; but bold wit, fluent and vigorous