"I am for Reform!" he had said in the castle yard of York; and the people of England had answered: "So are we; and we will have it, or-"
The lacuna they had filled, not with words, but with facts stronger than words-with the flames of Kentish farmhouses and Wiltshire factories; with political unions counting their numbers by scores of thousands; with midnight drillings and vague and sullen murmurings; above all, with the mysterious terror of some great change which was to come-a terror that shook the most thoughtless and affected even the Duke, as men called the Duke of Wellington in that day. For was not every crown on the Continent toppling?
Vaughan did not suppose that, in view of the startling event of the day, he would be admitted. But the usher, who occupied a high stool outside the great man's door, no sooner read his card than he slid to the ground. "I think his lordship will see you, sir," he murmured blandly; and he disappeared.
He was back on the instant, and, beckoning to Vaughan to follow him, he proceeded some paces along a murky corridor, which the venerable form of Eldon seemed still to haunt. Opening a door, he stood aside.
The room which Vaughan saw before him was stately and spacious, and furnished with quiet richness. A deep silence, intensified by the fact that the room had no windows, but was lighted from above, reigned in it-and a smell of law-calf. Here and there on a bookcase or a pedestal stood a marble bust of Bacon, of Selden, of Blackstone. And for a moment Vaughan fancied that these were its only occupants. On advancing further, however, he discovered two persons, who were writing busily at separate side-tables; and one of them looked up and spoke.
"Your pardon, Mr. Vaughan!" he said. "One moment, if you please!"
He was almost as good as his word, for less than a minute later he threw down the pen, and rose-a gaunt figure in a black frockcoat, and with a black stock about his scraggy neck-and came to meet his visitor.
"I fear that I have come at an untimely moment, my lord," Vaughan said, a little awed in spite of himself by what he knew of the man.
But the other's frank address put him at once at his ease. "Politics pass, Mr. Vaughan," the Chancellor answered lightly, "but science remains." He did not explain, as he pointed to a seat, that he loved, above all things, to produce startling effects; to dazzle by the ease with which he flung off one part and assumed another.
Henry Brougham-so, for some time after his elevation to the peerage, he persisted in signing himself-was at this time at the zenith of his life, as of his fame. Tall, but lean and ungainly, with a long neck and sloping shoulders, he had one of the strangest faces which genius has ever worn. His clownish features, his high cheek-bones, and queer bulbous nose are familiar to us; for, something exaggerated by the caricaturist, they form week by week the trailing mask which mars the cover of "Punch." Yet was the face, with all its ugliness, singularly mobile; and the eyes, the windows of that restless and insatiable soul, shone, sparkled, laughed, wept, with incredible brilliance. That which he did not know, that which his mind could not perform-save sit still and be discreet-no man had ever discovered. And it was the knowledge of this, the sense of the strange and almost uncanny versatility of the man, which for a moment overpowered Vaughan.
The Chancellor seated himself opposite his visitor, and placed a hand on each of his wide-spread knees. He smiled.
"My friend," he said, "I envy you."
Vaughan coloured shyly. "Your lordship has little cause," he answered.
"Great cause," was the reply, "great cause! For as you are I was-and," he chuckled, as he rocked himself to and fro, "I have not found life very empty or very unpleasant. But it was not to tell you this that I asked you to wait on me, Mr. Vaughan, as you may suppose. Light! It is a singular thing that you at the outset of your career-even as I thirty years ago at the same point of mine-should take up such a parergon, and alight upon the same discovery."
"I do not think I understand."
"In your article on the possibility of the permanence of reflection-to which I referred in my letter, I think?"
"Yes, my lord, you did."
"You have restated a fact which I maintained for the first time more than thirty years ago! In my paper on colours, read before the Royal Society in-I think it was '96."
Vaughan stared. His colour rose slowly. "Indeed?" he said, in a tone from which he vainly strove to banish incredulity.
"You have perhaps read the paper?"
"Yes, I have."
The Chancellor chuckled. "And found nothing of the kind in it?" he said.
Vaughan coloured still more deeply. He felt that the position was unpleasant. "Frankly, my lord, if you ask me, no."
"And you think yourself," with a grin, "the first discoverer?"
"I did."
Brougham sprang like a boy to his feet, and whisked his long, lank body to a distant bookshelf. Thence he took down a much-rubbed manuscript book. As he returned he opened this at a place already marked, and, laying it on the table, beckoned to the young man to approach. "Read that," he said waggishly, "and confess, young sir, that there were chiefs before Agamemnon."
Vaughan stooped over the book, and having read looked up in perplexity. "But this passage," he said, "was not in the paper read before the Royal Society in '96?"
"In the paper read? No. Nor yet in the paper printed? There, too, you are right. And why? Because a sapient dunder-head who was in authority requested me to omit this passage. He did not believe that light passing through a small hole in the window-shutter of a darkened room impresses a view of external objects on white paper; nor that, as I suggested, the view might be made permanent if cast instead on ivory rubbed with nitrate of silver!"
Vaughan was dumbfounded, and perhaps a little chagrined. "It is most singular!" he said.
"Do you wonder now that I could not refrain from sending for you?"
"I do not, indeed."
The Chancellor patted him kindly on the shoulder, and by a gesture made him résumé his seat. "No, I could not refrain," he continued; "the coincidence was too remarkable. If you come to sit where I sit, the chance will be still more singular."
Vaughan coloured with pleasure. "Alas!" he said, smiling, "one swallow, my lord, does not made a summer."
"Ah, my friend," with a benevolent look. "But I know more of you than you think. You were in the service, I hear, and left it. Cedant arma togæ, eh?"
"Yes."
"Well, I, too, after a fashion. Thirty years ago I served a gun with Professor Playfair in the Volunteer Artillery of Edinburgh. God knows," he continued complacently, "if I had gone on with it, where I should have landed! Where the Duke is, perhaps! More surprising things have happened."
Vaughan did not know whether to take this, which was gravely and even sentimentally spoken, for jest or earnest. He did not speak. And Brougham, seated in his favourite posture, with a hand on either knee, his lean body upright, and the skirts of his black coat falling to the floor on either side of him, resumed. "I hear, too, that you have done well at the Academic," he said, "and on the right side, Mr. Vaughan. Light? Ay, always light, my friend, always light! Let that be our motto. For myself," he continued earnestly, "I have taken it in hand that this poor country shall never lack light again; and by God's help and Johnny Russell's Bill I'll bring it about! And not the phosphorescent light of rotten boroughs and corrupt corporations, Mr. Vaughan. No, nor the blaze of burning stacks, kindled by wretched, starving, ignorant-ay, above all, Mr. Vaughan, ignorant men! But the light of education, the light of a free Press, the light of good government and honest representation; so that, whatever they lack,