Surely it was impossible for any young legislator not quite worn out by a lifelong struggle with the time which was never meant to be set right—surely it was impossible for any fresh-hearted prosperous young Liberal to walk through those quiet streets without thinking of these things. Talbot Bulstrode thought very earnestly and very mournfully. To what end were his labours, after all? He was fighting for a handful of Cornish miners; doing battle with the rampant spirit of circumlocution for the sake of a few benighted wretches, buried in the darkness of a black abyss of ignorance a hundred times deeper and darker than the material obscurities in which they laboured. He was working his hardest and his best that these men might be taught, in some easy, unambitious manner, the simplest elements of Christian love and Christian duty. He was working for these poor faraway creatures, in their forgotten corner of the earth; and here, around and about him, was ignorance more terrible, because, hand-in-hand with ignorance of all good, there was the fatal experience of all evil. The simple Cornish miner who uses his pickaxe in the region of his friend’s skull, when he wishes to enforce an argument, does so because he knows no other species of emphasis. But in the London universities of crime, knavery and vice and violence and sin matriculate and graduate day by day; to take their degrees in the felon’s dock or on the scaffold. How could he be otherwise than sorrowful, thinking of these things? Were the Cities of the Plain worse than this city; in which there were yet so many good and earnest men labouring patiently day by day, and taking little rest? Was the great accumulation of evil so heavy that it rolled forever back upon the untiring Sisyphus? Or did they make some imperceptible advance towards the mountain-top, despite of all discouragement?
With this weary question debating itself in his brain, Mr. Bulstrode walked along Piccadilly towards the comfortable bachelor’s quarters, whose most commonplace attributes Lucy had turned to favour and to prettiness; but at the door of the Gloucester Coffeehouse Talbot paused to stare absently at a nervous-looking chestnut mare, who insisted upon going through several lively performances upon her hind-legs, very much to the annoyance of an unshaven ostler, and not particularly to the advantage of a smart little dogcart to which she was harnessed.
“You needn’t pull her mouth to pieces, my man,” cried a voice from the doorway of the hotel; “use her gently, and she’ll soon quiet herself. Steady, my girl; steady!” added the owner of this voice, walking to the dogcart as he spoke.
Talbot had good reason to stop short, for this gentleman was Mr. John Mellish, whose pale face, and loose, disordered hair betokened a sleepless night.
He was going to spring into the dogcart, when his old friend tapped him on the shoulder.
“This is rather a lucky accident, John; for you’re the very person I want to see,” said Mr. Bulstrode. “I’ve just telegraphed to you.”
John Mellish stared with a blank face.
“Don’t hinder me, please,” he said; “I’ll talk to you by-and-by. I’ll call upon you in a day or two. I’m just off to Felden. I’ve only been in town an hour and a half, and should have gone down before, if I had not been afraid of knocking up the family.”
He made another attempt to get into the vehicle, but Talbot caught him by the arm.
“You needn’t go to Felden,” he said; “your wife’s much nearer.”
“Eh?”
“She’s at my house. Come and have some breakfast.”
There was no shadow upon Talbot Bulstrode’s mind as his old schoolfellow caught him by the hand, and nearly dislocated his wrist in a paroxysm of joy and gratitude. It was impossible for him to look beyond that sudden burst of sunshine upon John’s face. If Mr. Mellish had been separated from his wife for ten years, and had just returned from the Antipodes for the sole purpose of seeing her again, he could scarcely have appeared more delighted at the prospect of a speedy meeting.
“Aurora here!” he said; “at your house? My dear old fellow, you can’t mean it! But of course I ought to have known she’d come to you. She couldn’t have done anything better or wiser, after having been so foolish as to doubt me.”
“She came to me for advice, John. She wanted me to advise her how to act for your happiness—yours, you great Yorkshireman, and not her own.”
“Bless her noble heart!” cried Mr. Mellish, huskily. “And you told her—”
“I told her nothing, my dear fellow; but I tell you to take your lawyer down to Doctor’s Commons with you tomorrow morning, get a new licence and marry your wife for the second time, in some quiet, little, out-of-the-way church in the City.”
Aurora had risen very early upon that peaceful Sunday morning. The few
