THE PRIME MINISTER

by DAVID SKILTON

  ‘Mr Gresham has made his acceptance of office, – well, I will not say strictly conditional on your joining him. That would hardly be correct. But he has expressed himself quite willing to make the attempt with your aid, and doubtful whether he can succeed without it. He suggests that you should join him as President of the Council.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘If I were wanted at all I should take the Privy Seal.’

  ‘Certainly not, my friend. If there were any question of my return we would reverse the offices. But I think I may say that my mind is fixed. If you wish it I will see Mr Monk and do all that I can to get him to go with you. But, for myself, – I feel that it would be useless.’

  At last, at the Duke’s pressing request, he agreed to take twenty-four hours before he gave his final answer to the proposition.

  CHAPTER 77

  The Duchess in Manchester Square

  The Duke said not a word to his wife as to this new proposition, and when she asked him what tidings their old friend had brought as to the state of affairs, he almost told a fib in his anxiety to escape from her persecution. ‘He is in some doubt what he means to do himself,’ said the Duke. The Duchess asked many questions, but got no satisfactory reply to any of them. Nor did Mrs Finn learn anything from her husband, whom, however, she did not interrogate very closely. She would be contented to know when the proper time might come for ladies to be informed. The Duke, however, was determined to take his twenty-four hours all alone, – or at any rate not to be driven to his decision by feminine interference.

  In the meantime the Duchess went to Manchester Square intent on performing certain good offices on behalf of the poor widow. It may be doubted whether she had clearly made up her mind what it was that she could do, though she was clear that some debt was due by her to Mrs Lopez. And she knew too in what direction assistance might be serviceable, if only it could in this case be given. She had heard that the present member for Silverbridge had been the lady’s lover long before Mr Lopez had come upon the scene, and with those feminine wiles of which she was a perfect mistress she had extracted from him a confession that his mind was unaltered. She liked Arthur Fletcher, – as indeed she had for a time liked Ferdinand Lopez, – and felt that her conscience would be easier if she could assist in this good work. She built castles in the air as to the presence of the bride and bridegroom at Matching, thinking how she might thus repair the evil she had done. But her heart misgave her a little as she drew near to the house, and remembered how very slight was her acquaintance and how extremely delicate the mission on which she had come. But she was not the woman to turn back when she had once put her foot to any work; and she was driven up to the door in Manchester Square without any expressed hesitation on her own part. ‘Yes, – his mistress was at home,’ said the butler, still shrinking at the sound of the name which he hated. The Duchess was then shown upstairs, and was left alone for some minutes in the drawing-room. It was a large handsome apartment, hung round with valuable pictures, and having signs of considerable wealth. Since she had first invited Lopez to stand for Silverbridge she had heard much about him, and had wondered how he had gained possession of such a girl as Emily Wharton. And now, as she looked about, her wonder was increased. She knew enough of such people as the Whartons and the Fletchers to be aware that as a class they are more impregnable, more closely guarded by their feelings and prejudices against strangers than any other. None keep their daughters to themselves with greater care, or are less willing to see their rules of life changed or abolished. And yet this man, half foreigner half Jew, – and as it now appeared, – whole pauper, had stepped in and carried off a prize of which such a one as Arthur Fletcher was contending! The Duchess had never seen Emily but once, – so as to observe her well, – and had then thought her to be a very handsome woman. It had been at the garden party at Richmond, and Lopez had then insisted that his wife should be well dressed. It would perhaps have been impossible in the whole of that assembly to find a more beautiful woman than Mrs Lopez then was, – or one who carried herself with a finer air. Now when she entered the room in her deep mourning it would have been difficult to recognize her. Her face was much thinner, her eyes apparently larger, and her colour faded. And there had come a settled seriousness on her face which seemed to rob her of her youth. Arthur Fletcher had declared that as he saw her now she was more beautiful than ever. But Arthur Fletcher, in looking at her, saw more than her mere features. To his eyes there was a tenderness added by her sorrow which had its own attraction for him. And he was so well versed in every line of her countenance, that he could see there the old loveliness behind the sorrow; the loveliness which would come forth again, as bright as ever, if the sorrow could be removed. But the Duchess, though she remembered the woman’s beauty as she might that of any other lady, now saw nothing but a thing of woe wrapped in customary widow’s weeds. ‘I hope,’ she said, ‘I am not intruding in coming to you; but I have been anxious to renew our acquaintance for reasons which I am sure you will understand.’

  Emily at the moment hardly knew how to address her august visitor. Though her father had lived all his life in what is called good society, he had not consorted much with dukes and duchesses. She herself had indeed on one occasion been for an hour or two the guest of this grand lady, but on that occasion she had hardly been called upon to talk to her. Now she doubted how to name the Duchess, and with some show of hesitation decided at last upon not naming her at all. ‘It is very good of you to come,’ she said in a faltering voice.

  ‘I told you that I would when I wrote, you know. That is many months ago, but I have not forgotten it. You have been in the country since that, I think?’

  ‘Yes, in Herefordshire. Herefordshire is our county.’

  ‘I know all about it,’ said the Duchess, smiling. She generally did contrive to learn ‘all about’ the people whom she chose to take by the hand. ‘We have a Herefordshire gentleman sitting for, – I must not say our borough of Silverbridge.’ She was anxious to make some allusion to Arthur Fletcher; but it was difficult to travel on that Silverbridge ground, as Lopez had been her chosen candidate when she still wished to claim the borough as an appanage of the Palliser family. Emily, however, kept her countenance and did not show by any sign that her thoughts were running in that direction. ‘And though we don’t presume to regard Mr Fletcher,’ continued the Duchess, ‘as in any way connected with our local interests, he has always supported the Duke, and I hope has become a friend of ours. I think he is a neighbour of yours in the country.’

  ‘Oh yes. My cousin is married to his brother.’

  ‘I knew there was something of that kind. He told me that there was some close alliance.’ The Duchess as she looked at the woman to whom she wanted to be kind did not as yet dare to express a wish that there might at some not very distant time be a closer alliance. She had come there intending to do so; and had still some hope that she might do it before the interview was over. But at any rate she would not do it yet ‘Have I not heard,’ she said, ‘something of another marriage?’

  ‘My brother is going to marry his cousin, Sir Alured Wharton’s daughter.’

  ‘Ah; – I thought it had been one of the Fletchers. It was our member who told me, and he spoke as though they were all his very dear friends.’

  ‘They are dear friends, – very.’ Poor Emily still didn’t know whether to call her Duchess, my Lady, or Grace, – and yet felt the need of calling her by some special name.

  ‘Exactly. I supposed it was so. They tell me Mr Fletcher will become quite a favourite in the House. At this present moment nobody knows on which side anybody is going to sit to-morrow. It may be that Mr Fletcher will become the dire enemy of all the Duke’s friends.’

  ‘I hope not’

  ‘Of course I’m speaking of political enemies. Political enemies are often the best friends in the world; and I can assure you from my own experience that political friends are often the bitterest enemies. I never hated any people so
much as some of our supporters.’ The Duchess made a grimace, and Emily could not refrain from smiling. ‘Yes, indeed. There’s an old saying that misfortune makes strange bedfellows, but political friendship makes stranger alliances than misfortune. Perhaps you never met Sir Timothy Beeswax.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Well; – don’t. But, as I was saying, there is no knowing who may support whom now. If I were asked who would be Prime Minister tomorrow, I should take half-a-dozen names and shake them in a bag.’

  ‘Is it not settled then?’

  ‘Settled! No, indeed. Nothing is settled.’ At that moment indeed everything was settled, though the Duchess did not know it. ‘And so we none of us can tell how Mr Fletcher may stand with us when things are arranged. I suppose he calls himself a Conservative?’

  ‘Oh yes!’

  ‘All the Whartons, I suppose, are Conservatives, – and all the Fletchers.’

  ‘Very nearly. Papa calls himself a Tory.’

  ‘A very much better name, to my thinking. We are all Whigs, of course. A Palliser who was not a Whig would be held to have disgraced himself for ever. Are not politics odd? A few years ago I only barely knew what the word meant, and that not correctly. Lately I have been so eager about it, that there hardly seems to be anything else left worth living for. I suppose it’s wrong, but a state of pugnacity seems to me the greatest bliss which we can reach here on earth.’

  ‘I shouldn’t like to be always fighting.’

  ‘That’s because you haven’t known Sir Timothy Beeswax and two or three other gentlemen whom I could name. The day will come, I dare say, when you will care for politics.’

  Emily was about to answer, hardly knowing what to say, when the door was opened and Mrs Roby came into the room. The lady was not announced, and Emily had heard no knock at the door. She was forced to go through some ceremony of introduction. ‘This is my aunt, Mrs Roby,’ she said. ‘Aunt Harriet, the Duchess of Omnium.’ Mrs Roby was beside herself, – not all with joy. That feeling would come afterwards as she would boast to her friends of her new acquaintance. At present there was the embarrassment of not quite knowing how to behave herself. The Duchess bowed from her seat, and smiled sweetly, – as she had learned to smile since her husband had become Prime Minister. Mrs Roby curtsied, and then remembered that in these days only housemaids ought to curtsy.

  ‘Anything to our Mr Roby?’ said the Duchess, continuing her smile, – ‘ours as he was till yesterday at least.’ This she said in an absurd wail of mock sorrow.

  ‘My brother-in-law, your Grace,’ said Mrs Roby delighted.

  ‘Oh, indeed. And what does Mr Roby think about it, I wonder? But I dare say you have found, Mrs Roby, that when a crisis comes, – a real crisis, – the ladies are told nothing. I have.’

  ‘I don’t think, your Grace, that Mr Roby ever divulges political secrets.’

  ‘Doesn’t he indeed! What a dull man your brother-in-law must be to live with, – that is as a politician! Good-bye, Mrs Lopez. You must come and see me and let me come to you again. I hope, you know, – I hope the time may come when things may once more be bright with you.’ These last words she murmured almost in a whisper, as she held the hand of the woman she wished to befriend. Then she bowed to Mrs Roby, and left the room.

  ‘What was it she said to you?’ asked Mrs Roby.

  ‘Nothing in particular, Aunt Harriet’

  ‘She seems to be very friendly. What made her come?’

  ‘She wrote some time ago to say she would call.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I cannot tell you. I don’t know. Don’t ask me, aunt, about things that are passed. You cannot do it without wounding me.’

  ‘I don’t want to wound you, Emily, but I really think that that is nonsense. She is a very nice woman; – though I don’t think she ought to have said that Mr Roby is dull. Did Mr Wharton know that she was coming?’

  ‘He knew that she said she would come,’ replied Emily very sternly, so that Mrs Roby found herself compelled to pass on to some other subject Mrs Roby had heard the wish expressed that something ‘once more might be bright’, and when she got home told her husband that she was sure that Emily Lopez was going to marry Arthur Fletcher. ‘And why the d— shouldn’t she?’ said Dick. ‘And that poor man destroying himself not much more than twelve months ago! I couldn’t do it,’ said Mrs Roby. ‘I don’t mean to give you the chance,’ said Dick.

  The Duchess when she went away suffered under a sense of failure. She had intended to bring about some crisis of female tenderness in which she might have rushed into future hopes and joyous anticipations, and with the freedom which will come from ebullitions of feeling, have told the widow that the peculiar circumstances of her position would not only justify her in marrying this other man but absolutely called upon her to do it. Unfortunately she had failed in her attempt to bring the interview to a condition in which this would have been possible, and while she was still making the attempt that odious aunt had come in. ‘I have been on my mission,’ she said to Mrs Finn afterwards.

  ‘Have you done any good?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve done any harm. Women, you know, are so very different! There are some who would delight to have an opportunity of opening their hearts to a Duchess, and who might almost be talked into anything in an ecstasy.’

  ‘Hardly women of the best sort, Lady Glen.’

  ‘Not of the best sort. But then one doesn’t come across the very best, very often. But that kind of thing does have an effect; and as I only wanted to do good, I wish she had been one of the sort for the occasion.’

  ‘Was she – offended?’

  ‘Oh dear, no. You don’t suppose I attacked her with a husband at the first word. Indeed, I didn’t attack her at all. She didn’t give me an opportunity. Such a Niobe36 you never saw.’

  ‘Was she weeping?’

  ‘Not actual tears. But her gown, and her cap, and her strings were weeping. Her voice wept, and her hair, and her nose, and her mouth. Don’t you know that look of subdued mourning? And yet they say that that man is dying for love. How beautiful it is to see that there is such a thing as constancy left in the world.’

  When she got home she found that her husband had just returned from the old Duke’s house, where he had met Mr Monk, Mr Gresham, and Lord Cantrip. ‘It’s all settled at last,’ he said cheerfully.

  CHAPTER 78

  The New Ministry

  When the ex-Prime Minister was left by himself after the departure of his old friend his first feeling had been one of regret that he had been weak enough to doubt at all. He had long since made up his mind that after all that had passed he could not return to office as a subordinate. That feeling as to the impropriety of Caesar descending to serve under others which he had been foolish enough to express, had been strong with him from the very commencement of his Ministry. When first asked to take the place which he had filled the reason strong against it had been the conviction that it would probably exclude him from political work during the latter half of his life. The man who has written Q.C. after his name must abandon his practice behind the bar.37 As he then was, although he had already been driven by the unhappy circumstance of his peerage from the House of Commons which he loved so well, there was still open to him many fields of political work. But if he should once consent to stand on the top rung of the ladder, he could not, he thought, take a lower place without degradation. Till he should have been placed quite at the top no shifting his place from this higher to that lower office would injure him in his own estimation. The exigencies of the service and not defeat would produce such changes as that. But he could not go down from being Prime Minister and serve under some other chief without acknowledging himself to have been unfit for the place he had filled. Of all that he had quite assured himself. And yet he had allowed the old Duke to talk him into a doubt!

  As he sat considering the question he acknowledged that there might have been room for doubt, though in the present emergenc
y there certainly was none. He could imagine circumstances in which the experience of an individual in some special branch of his country’s service might be of such paramount importance to the country as to make it incumbent on a man to sacrifice all personal feeling. But it was not so with him. There was nothing now which he could do, which another might not do as well. That blessed task of introducing decimals into all the commercial relations of British life, which had once kept him aloft in the air, floating as upon eagle’s wings, had been denied him. If ever done it must be done from the House of Commons; and the people of the country had become deaf to the charms of that great reform. Othello’s occupation was, in truth, altogether gone, and there was no reason by which he could justify to himself the step down in the world which the old Duke had proposed to him.

  Early on the following morning he left Carlton Terrace on foot and walked as far as Mr Monk’s house, which was close to St James’s Street. Here at eleven o’clock he found his late Chancellor of the Exchequer in that state of tedious agitation in which a man is kept who does not yet know whether he is or is not to be one of the actors in the play just about to be performed. The Duke had never before been in Mr Monk’s very humble abode, and now caused some surprise. Mr Monk knew that he might probably be sent for, but had not expected that any of the ex-Prime Ministers of the day would come to him. People had said that not improbably he himself might be the man, – but he himself had indulged in no such dream. Office had had no great charms for him; – and if there was one man of the late Government who could lay it down without a personal regret, it was Mr Monk. ‘I wish you to come with me to the Duke’s house in St James’s Square,’ said the late Prime Minister. ‘I think we shall find him at home.’

  ‘Certainly. I will come this moment.’ Then there was not a word spoken till the two men were in the street together. ‘Of course I am a little anxious,’ said Mr Monk. ‘Have you anything to tell me before we get there?’