sent for to Windsor, and had on one occasion undertaken and on another had refused to undertake to form a Ministry. Mr. Daubeny had tried two or three combinations, and had been at his wits’ end. He was no doubt still in power,—could appoint bishops, and make peers, and give away ribbons. But he couldn’t pass a law, and certainly continued to hold his present uncomfortable position by no will of his own. But a Prime Minister cannot escape till he has succeeded in finding a successor; and though the successor be found and consents to make an attempt, the old unfortunate cannot be allowed to go free when that attempt is shown to be a failure. He has not absolutely given up the keys of his boxes, and no one will take them from him. Even a sovereign can abdicate; but the Prime Minister of a constitutional government is in bonds. The reader may therefore understand that the Duchess was asking her husband what place among the political rulers of the country had been offered to him by the last aspirant to the leadership of the Government.
But the reader should understand more than this, and may perhaps do so, if he has ever seen those former chronicles to which allusion has been made. The Duke, before he became a duke, had held very high office, having been Chancellor of the Exchequer. When he was transferred, perforce, to the House of Lords, he had,—as is not uncommon in such cases,—accepted a lower political station. This had displeased the Duchess, who was ambitious both on her own behalf and that of her lord,—and who thought that a Duke of Omnium should be nothing in the Government if not at any rate near the top. But after that, with the simple and single object of doing some special piece of work for the nation,—something which he fancied that nobody else would do if he didn’t do it,—his Grace, of his own motion, at his own solicitation, had encountered further official degradation, very much to the disgust of the Duchess. And it was not the way with her Grace to hide such sorrows in the depth of her bosom. When affronted she would speak out, whether to her husband, or to another,—using irony rather than argument to support her cause and to vindicate her ways. The shafts of ridicule hurled by her against her husband in regard to his voluntary abasement had been many and sharp. They stung him, but never for a moment influenced him. And though they stung him, they did not even anger him. It was her nature to say such things,—and he knew that they came rather from her uncontrolled spirit than from any malice. She was his wife too, and he had an idea that of little injuries of that sort there should be no end of bearing on the part of a husband. Sometimes he would endeavour to explain to her the motives which actuated him; but he had come to fear that they were and must ever be unintelligible to her. But he credited her with less than her real intelligence. She did understand the nature of his work and his reasons for doing it; and, after her own fashion, did what she conceived to be her own work in endeavouring to create within his bosom a desire for higher things. “Surely,” she said to herself, “if a man of his rank is to be a minister he should be a great minister;—at any rate as great as his circumstances will make him. A man never can save his country by degrading himself.” In this he would probably have agreed; but his idea of degradation and hers hardly tallied.
When therefore she asked him what they were going to make him, it was as though some sarcastic housekeeper in a great establishment should ask the butler,—some butler too prone to yield in such matters,—whether the master had appointed him lately to the cleaning of shoes or the carrying of coals. Since these knots had become so very tight, and since the journeys to Windsor had become so very frequent, her Grace had asked many such questions, and had received but very indifferent replies. The Duke had sometimes declared that the matter was not ripe enough to allow him to make any answer. “Of course,” said the Duchess, “you should keep the secret. The editors of the evening papers haven’t known it for above an hour.” At another time he told her that he had undertaken to give Mr. Gresham his assistance in any way in which it might be asked. “Joint Under-Secretary with Lord Fawn, I should say,” answered the Duchess. Then he told her that he believed an attempt would be made at a mixed ministry, but that he did not in the least know to whom the work of doing so would be confided. “You will be about the last man who will be told,” replied the Duchess. Now, at this moment, he had, as she knew, come direct from the house of Mr. Gresham, and she asked her question in her usual spirit. “And what are they going to make you now?”
But he did not answer the question in his usual manner. He would customarily smile gently at her badinage, and perhaps say a word intended to show that he was not in the least moved by her raillery. But in this instance he was very grave, and stood before her a moment making no answer at all, looking at her in a sad and almost solemn manner. “They have told you that they can do without you,” she said, breaking out almost into a passion. “I knew how it would be. Men are always valued by others as they value themselves.”
“I wish it were so,” he replied. “I should sleep easier tonight.”
“What is it, Plantagenet?” she exclaimed, jumping up from her chair.
“I never cared for your ridicule hitherto, Cora; but now I feel that I want your sympathy.”
“If you are going to do anything,—to do really anything, you shall have it. Oh, how you shall have it!”
“I have received her Majesty’s orders to go down to Windsor at once. I must start within half-an-hour.”
“You are going to be Prime Minister!” she exclaimed. As she spoke she threw her arms up, and then rushed into his embrace. Never since their first union had she been so demonstrative either of love or admiration. “Oh, Plantagenet,” she said, “if I can only do anything I will slave for you.” As he put his arm round her waist he already felt the pleasantness of her altered way to him. She had never worshipped him yet, and therefore her worship when it did come had all the delight to him which it ordinarily has to the newly married hero.
“Stop a moment, Cora. I do not know how it may be yet. But this I know, that if without cowardice I could avoid this task, I would certainly avoid it.”
“Oh no! And there would be cowardice; of course there would,” said the Duchess, not much caring what might be the bonds which bound him to the task so long as he should certainly feel himself to be bound.
“He has told me that he thinks it my duty to make the attempt.”
“Who is he?”
“Mr. Gresham. I do not know that I should have felt myself bound by him, but the Duke said so also.” This duke was our duke’s old friend, the Duke of St. Bungay.
“Was he there? And who else?”
“No one else. It is no case for exultation, Cora, for the chances are that I shall fail. The Duke has promised to help me, on condition that one or two he has named are included, and that one or two whom he has also named are not. In each case I should myself have done exactly as he proposes.”
“And Mr. Gresham?”
“He will retire. That is a matter of course. He will intend to support us; but all that is veiled in the obscurity which is always, I think, darker as to the future of politics than any other future. Clouds arise, one knows not why or whence, and create darkness when one expected light. But as yet, you must understand, nothing is settled. I cannot even say what answer I may make to her Majesty, till I know what commands her Majesty may lay upon me.”
“You must keep a hold of it now, Plantagenet,” said the Duchess, clenching her own fist.
“I will not even close a finger on it with any personal ambition,” said the Duke. “If I could be relieved from the burden this moment it would be an ease to my heart. I remember once,” he said,—and as he spoke he again put his arm around her waist, “when I was debarred from taking office by a domestic circumstance.”
“I remember that too,” she said, speaking very gently and looking up at him.
“It was a grief to me at the time, though it turned out so well,—because the office then suggested to me was one which I thought I could fill with credit to the country. I believed in myself then as far as that work went. But for this attempt I have no belief in myself. I doubt whether I have any gift for governing men.”
“It will come.”
“It