Hazeldeans suggested himself as the one on whom these broad lands should
devolve. Most young men brought into intimate contact with Audley
Egerton would have felt for that personage a certain loyal and admiring,
if not very affectionate, respect. For there was something grand in
Egerton,--something that commands and fascinates the young. His
determined courage, his energetic will, his almost regal liberality,
contrasting a simplicity in personal tastes and habits that was almost
austere, his rare and seemingly unconscious power of charming even the
women most wearied of homage, and persuading even the men most obdurate
to counsel,--all served to invest the practical man with those spells
which are usually confined to the ideal one. But, indeed, Audley Egerton
was an Ideal,--the ideal of the Practical. Not the mere vulgar,
plodding, red-tape machine of petty business, but the man of strong
sense, inspired by inflexible energy and guided to definite earthly
objects. In a dissolute and corrupt form of government, under a decrepit
monarchy or a vitiated republic, Audley Egerton might have been a most
dangerous citizen: for his ambition was so resolute, and his sight to its
ends was so clear. But there is something in public life in England
which compels the really ambitious man to honour, unless his eyes are
jaundiced and oblique, like Randal Leslie's. It is so necessary in
England to be a gentleman. And thus Egerton was emphatically considered
a gentleman. Without the least pride in other matters, with little
apparent sensitiveness, touch him on the point of gentleman, and no one
so sensitive and so proud. As Randal saw more of him, and watched his
moods with the lynx-eyes of the household spy, he could perceive that
this hard mechanical man was subject to fits of melancholy, even of
gloom; and though they did not last long, there was even in his habitual
coldness an evidence of something compressed, latent, painful, lying deep
within his memory. This would have interested the kindly feelings of a
grateful heart; but Randal detected and watched it only as a clew to some