The Palliser Novels (450 page)

“Certainly not.”

“Everett has an allowance, and this will be tantamount to an allowance to Emily. You have also had £3500. I hope it has been well expended; — except the £500 at that election, which has, of course, been thrown away.”

“The other was brought into the business.”

“I don’t know what the business is. But you and Emily must understand that the money has been given as her fortune.”

“Oh, quite so; — part of it, you mean.”

“I mean just what I say.”

“I call it part of it, because, as you observed just now, our living here will be the same as though you made Emily an allowance.”

“Ah; — well; you can look at it in that light if you please. John has the key of the cellar. He’s a man I can trust. As a rule I have port and sherry at table every day. If you like claret I will get some a little cheaper than what I use when friends are here.”

“What wine I have is quite indifferent to me.”

“I like it good, and I have it good. I always breakfast at 9.30. You can have yours earlier if you please. I don’t know that there’s anything else to be said. I hope we shall get into the way of understanding each other, and being mutually comfortable. Shall we go upstairs to Emily and Mrs. Roby?” And so it was determined that Emily was to come back to her old house about eight months after her marriage.

Mr. Wharton himself sat late into the night, all alone, thinking about it. What he had done, he had done in a morose way, and he was aware that it was so. He had not beamed with smiles, and opened his arms lovingly, and, bidding God bless his dearest children, told them that if they would only come and sit round his hearth he should be the happiest old man in London. He had said little or nothing of his own affection even for his daughter, but had spoken of the matter as one of which the pecuniary aspect alone was important. He had found out that the saving so effected would be material to Lopez, and had resolved that there should be no shirking of the truth in what he was prepared to do. He had been almost asked to take the young married couple in, and feed them, — so that they might live free of expense. He was willing to do it, — but was not willing that there should be any soft-worded, high-toned false pretension. He almost read Lopez to the bottom, — not, however, giving the man credit for dishonesty so deep or cleverness so great as he possessed. But as regarded Emily, he was also actuated by a personal desire to have her back again as an element of happiness to himself. He had pined for her since he had been left alone, hardly knowing what it was that he had wanted. And now as he thought of it all, he was angry with himself that he had not been more loving and softer in his manner to her. She at any rate was honest. No doubt of that crossed his mind. And now he had been bitter to her, — bitter in his manner, — simply because he had not wished to appear to have been taken in by her husband. Thinking of all this, he got up, and went to his desk, and wrote her a note, which she would receive on the following morning after her husband had left her. It was very short.
 

Dearest E
.

I am so overjoyed that you are coming back to me.

A. W.
 

He had judged her quite rightly. The manner in which the thing had been arranged had made her very wretched. There had been no love in it; — nothing apparently but assertions on one side that much was being given, and on the other acknowledgments that much was to be received. She was aware that in this her father had condemned her husband. She also had condemned him; — and felt, alas, that she also had been condemned. But this little letter took away that sting. She could read in her father’s note all the action of his mind. He had known that he was bound to acquit her, and he had done so with one of the old long-valued expressions of his love.

Sir Orlando Drought must have felt bitterly the quiescence with which he sank into obscurity on the second bench on the opposite side of the House. One great occasion he had on which it was his privilege to explain to four or five hundred gentlemen the insuperable reasons which caused him to break away from those right honourable friends to act with whom had been his comfort and his duty, his great joy and his unalloyed satisfaction. Then he occupied the best part of an hour in abusing those friends and all their measures. This no doubt had been a pleasure, as practice had made the manipulation of words easy to him, — and he was able to revel in that absence of responsibility which must be as a fresh perfumed bath to a minister just freed from the trammels of office. But the pleasure was surely followed by much suffering when Mr. Monk, — Mr. Monk who was to assume his place as Leader of the House, — only took five minutes to answer him, saying that he and his colleagues regretted much the loss of the Right Honourable Baronet’s services, but that it would hardly be necessary for him to defend the Ministry on all those points on which it had been attacked, as, were he to do so, he would have to repeat the arguments by which every measure brought forward by the present Ministry had been supported. Then Mr. Monk sat down, and the business of the House went on just as if Sir Orlando Drought had not moved his seat at all.

“What makes everybody and everything so dead?” said Sir Orlando to his old friend Mr. Boffin as they walked home together from the House that night. They had in former days been staunch friends, sitting night after night close together, united in opposition, and sometimes, for a few halcyon months, in the happier bonds of office. But when Sir Orlando had joined the Coalition, and when the sterner spirit of Mr. Boffin had preferred principles to place, — to use the language in which he was wont to speak to himself and to his wife and family of his own abnegation, — there had come a coolness between them. Mr. Boffin, who was not a rich man, nor by any means indifferent to the comforts of office, had felt keenly the injury done to him when he was left hopelessly in the cold by the desertion of his old friends. It had come to pass that there had been no salt left in the opposition. Mr. Boffin in all his parliamentary experience had known nothing like it. Mr. Boffin had been sure that British honour was going to the dogs and that British greatness was at an end. But the secession of Sir Orlando gave a little fillip to his life. At any rate he could walk home with his old friend and talk of the horrors of the present day.

“Well, Drought, if you ask me, you know, I can only speak as I feel. Everything must be dead when men holding different opinions on every subject under the sun come together in order that they may carry on a government as they would a trade business. The work may be done, but it must be done without spirit.”

“But it may be all important that the work should be done,” said the Baronet, apologising for his past misconduct.

“No doubt; — and I am very far from judging those who make the attempt. It has been made more than once before, and has, I think, always failed. I don’t believe in it myself, and I think that the death-like torpor of which you speak is one of its worst consequences.” After that Mr. Boffin admitted Sir Orlando back into his heart of hearts.

Then the end of the Session came, very quietly and very early. By the end of July there was nothing left to be done, and the world of London was allowed to go down into the country almost a fortnight before its usual time.

With many men, both in and out of Parliament, it became a question whether all this was for good or evil. The Boffinites had of course much to say for themselves. Everything was torpid. There was no interest in the newspapers, — except when Mr. Slide took the tomahawk into his hands. A member of Parliament this Session had not been by half so much bigger than another man as in times of hot political warfare. One of the most moving sources of our national excitement seemed to have vanished from life. We all know what happens to stagnant waters. So said the Boffinites, and so also now said Sir Orlando. But the Government was carried on and the country was prosperous. A few useful measures had been passed by unambitious men, and the Duke of St. Bungay declared that he had never known a Session of Parliament more thoroughly satisfactory to the ministers.

But the old Duke in so saying had spoken as it were his public opinion, — giving, truly enough, to a few of his colleagues, such as Lord Drummond, Sir Gregory Grogram and others, the results of his general experience; but in his own bosom and with a private friend he was compelled to confess that there was a cloud in the heavens. The Prime Minister had become so moody, so irritable, and so unhappy, that the old Duke was forced to doubt whether things could go on much longer as they were. He was wont to talk of these things to his friend Lord Cantrip, who was not a member of the Government, but who had been a colleague of both the Dukes, and whom the old Duke regarded with peculiar confidence. “I cannot explain it to you,” he said to Lord Cantrip. “There is nothing that ought to give him a moment’s uneasiness. Since he took office there hasn’t once been a majority against him in either House on any question that the Government has made its own. I don’t remember such a state of things, — so easy for the Prime Minister, — since the days of Lord Liverpool. He had one thorn in his side, our friend who was at the Admiralty, and that thorn like other thorns has worked itself out. Yet at this moment it is impossible to get him to consent to the nomination of a successor to Sir Orlando.” This was said a week before the Session had closed.

“I suppose it is his health,” said Lord Cantrip.

“He’s well enough as far as I can see; — though he will be ill unless he can relieve himself from the strain on his nerves.”

“Do you mean by resigning?”

“Not necessarily. The fault is that he takes things too seriously. If he could be got to believe that he might eat, and sleep, and go to bed, and amuse himself like other men, he might be a very good Prime Minister. He is over troubled by his conscience. I have seen a good many Prime Ministers, Cantrip, and I’ve taught myself to think that they are not very different from other men. One wants in a Prime Minister a good many things, but not very great things. He should be clever but need not be a genius; he should be conscientious but by no means strait-laced; he should be cautious but never timid, bold but never venturesome; he should have a good digestion, genial manners, and, above all, a thick skin. These are the gifts we want, but we can’t always get them, and have to do without them. For my own part, I find that though Smith be a very good Minister, the best perhaps to be had at the time, when he breaks down Jones does nearly as well.”

“There will be a Jones, then, if your Smith does break down?”

“No doubt. England wouldn’t come to an end because the Duke of Omnium shut himself up at Matching. But I love the man, and, with some few exceptions, am contented with the party. We can’t do better, and it cuts me to the heart when I see him suffering, knowing how much I did myself to make him undertake the work.”

“Is he going to Gatherum Castle?”

“No; — to Matching. There is some discomfort about that.”

“I suppose,” said Lord Cantrip, — speaking almost in a whisper, although they were closeted together, — “I suppose the Duchess is a little troublesome.”

“She’s the dearest woman in the world,” said the Duke of St. Bungay. “I love her almost as I do my own daughter. And she is most zealous to serve him.”

“I fancy she overdoes it.”

“No doubt.”

“And that he suffers from perceiving it,” said Lord Cantrip.

“But a man hasn’t a right to suppose that he shall have no annoyances. The best horse in the world has some fault. He pulls, or he shies, or is slow at his fences, or doesn’t like heavy ground. He has no right to expect that his wife shall know everything and do everything without a mistake. And then he has such faults of his own! His skin is so thin. Do you remember dear old Brock? By heavens; — there was a covering, a hide impervious to fire or steel! He wouldn’t have gone into tantrums because his wife asked too many people to the house. Nevertheless, I won’t give up all hope.”

“A man’s skin may be thickened, I suppose.”

“No doubt; — as a blacksmith’s arm.”

But the Duke of St. Bungay, though he declared that he wouldn’t give up hope, was very uneasy on the matter. “Why won’t you let me go?” the other Duke had said to him.

“What; — because such a man as Sir Orlando Drought throws up his office?”

But in truth the Duke of Omnium had not been instigated to ask the question by the resignation of Sir Orlando. At that very moment the “People’s Banner” had been put out of sight at the bottom of a heap of other newspapers behind the Prime Minister’s chair, and his present misery had been produced by Mr. Quintus Slide. To have a festering wound and to be able to show the wound to no surgeon, is wretchedness indeed! “It’s not Sir Orlando, but a sense of general failure,” said the Prime Minister. Then his old friend had made use of that argument of the ever-recurring majorities to prove that there had been no failure. “There seems to have come a lethargy upon the country,” said the poor victim. Then the Duke of St. Bungay knew that his friend had read that pernicious article in the “People’s Banner,” for the Duke had also read it and remembered that phrase of a “lethargy on the country,” and understood at once how the poison had rankled.

It was a week before he would consent to ask any man to fill the vacancy made by Sir Orlando. He would not allow suggestions to be made to him and yet would name no one himself. The old Duke, indeed, did make a suggestion, and anything coming from him was of course borne with patience. Barrington Erle, he thought, would do for the Admiralty. But the Prime Minister shook his head. “In the first place he would refuse, and that would be a great blow to me.”

“I could sound him,” said the old Duke. But the Prime Minister again shook his head and turned the subject. With all his timidity he was becoming autocratic and peevishly imperious. Then he went to Lord Cantrip, and when Lord Cantrip, with all the kindness which he could throw into his words, stated the reasons which induced him at present to decline office, he was again in despair. At last he asked Phineas Finn to move to the Admiralty, and, when our old friend somewhat reluctantly obeyed, of course he had the same difficulty in filling the office Finn had held. Other changes and other complications became necessary, and Mr. Quintus Slide, who hated Phineas Finn even worse than the poor Duke, found ample scope for his patriotic indignation.