A LETTER-BAG
Lord Danesbury read Atlee’s letter with an enjoyment not unlike the feeling an old sportsman experiences in discovering that his cover hack—an animal not worth twenty pounds—was a capital fencer; that a beast only destined to the commonest of uses should actually have qualities that recalled the steeplechaser—that the scrubby little creature with the thin neck and the shabby quarters should have a turn of speed and a ‘big jump’ in him, was something scarcely credible, and highly interesting.
Now political life has its handicaps like the turf, and that old jockey of many Cabinets began seriously to think whether he might not lay a little money on that dark horse Joe Atlee, and make something out of him before he was better known in ‘the ring.’
He was smarting, besides, under the annoyances of that half-clever fellow Walpole, when Atlee’s letter reached him, and though the unlucky Cecil had taken ill and kept his room ever since his arrival, his Excellency had never forgiven him, nor by a word or sign showed any disposition to restore him to favour.
That he was himself overwhelmed by a correspondence, and left to deal with it almost alone, scarcely contributed to reconcile him to a youth who was not really ill, but smarting, as he deemed it, under a recent defeat; and he pointed to the mass of papers which now littered his breakfast-table, and querulously asked his niece if that brilliant young gentleman upstairs could be induced to postpone his sorrows and copy a despatch.
‘If it be not something very difficult or requiring very uncommon care, perhaps I could do it myself.’
‘So you could, Maude, but I want you too—I shall want you to copy out parts of Atlee’s last letter, which I wish to place before the Foreign Office Secretary. He ought to see what his protégé Brumsey is making of it. These are the idiots who get us into foreign wars, or those apologetic movements in diplomacy, which are as bad as lost battles. What a contrast to Atlee—a rare clever dog, Atlee—and so awake, not only to one, but to every contingency of a case. I like that fellow—I like a fellow that stops all the earths! Your half-clever ones never do that; they only do enough to prolong the race; they don’t win it. That bright relative of ours—Cecil—is one of those. Give Atlee Walpole’s chances, and where would he be?’
A very faint colour tinged her cheek as she listened, but did not speak.
‘That’s the real way to put it,’ continued he, more warmly. ‘Say to Atlee, “You shall enter public life without any pressing need to take office for a livelihood; you shall have friends able to push you with one party, and relations and connections with the Opposition, to save you from unnecessary cavil or question; you shall be well introduced socially, and have a seat in the House before—” What’s his age? five-and-twenty?’
‘I should say about three-and-twenty, my lord; but it is a mere guess.’
‘Three-and-twenty is he? I suspect you are right—he can’t be more. But what a deal the fellow has crammed for that time—plenty of rubbish, no doubt: old dramatists and such like; but he is well up in his treaties; and there’s not a speaker of eminence in the House that he cannot make contradict himself out of Hansard.’
‘Has he any fortune?’ sighed she, so lazily that it scarcely sounded as a question.
‘I suppose not.’
‘Nor any family?’
‘Brothers and sisters he may have—indeed, he is sure to have; but if you mean connections—belonging to persons of admitted station—of course he has not. The name alone might show it.’
Another little sigh, fainter than before, followed, and all was still.
‘Five years hence, if even so much, the plebeian name and the unknown stock will be in his favour; but we have to wade through a few dreary measures before that. I wish he was in the House—he ought to be in the House.’
‘Is there a vacancy?’ said she lazily.
‘Two. There is Cradford, and there is that Scotch place—the something-Burg, which, of course, one of their own people will insist on.’
‘Couldn’t he have Cradford?’ asked she, with a very slight animation.
‘He might—at least if Brand knew him, he’d see he was the man they wanted. I almost think I’ll write a line to Brand, and send him some extracts of the last letter. I will—here goes.’
‘If you’ll tell me—’
‘DEAR B.,—Read the inclosed, and say have you anybody better than the writer for your ancient borough of Cradford? The fellow can talk, and I am sure he can speak as well as he writes. He is well up in all Irish press iniquities. Better than all, he has neither prejudices nor principles, nor, as I believe, a five-pound note in the world. He is now in Greece, but I’ll have him over by telegraph if you give me encouragement.
‘Tell Tycross at F. O. to send Walpole to Guatemala, and order him to his post at once. G. will have told you that I shall not go back to Ireland. The blunder of my ever seeing it was the blackest in the life of yours, DANESBUBY.’
The first letter his lordship opened gave him very little time or inclination to bestow more thought on Atlee. It was from the head of the Cabinet, and in the coldest tone imaginable. The writer directed his attention to what had occurred in the House the night before, and how impossible it was for any Government to depend on colleagues whose administration had been so palpably blundering and unwise. ‘Conciliation can only succeed by the good faith it inspires. Once that it leaks out you are more eager to achieve a gain than confer a benefit, you cease to conciliate, and you only cajole. Now your lordship might have apprehended that, in this especial game, the Popish priest is your master and mine—not to add that he gives an undivided attention to a subject which we have to treat as one amongst many, and with the relations and bearings which attach it to other questions of state.
‘That you cannot, with advantage to the Crown, or, indeed, to your own dignity, continue to hold your present office, is clear enough; and the only question now is in what way, consistent with the safety of the Administration, and respect for your lordship’s high character, the relinquishment had best be made. The debate has been, on Gregory’s motion, adjourned. It will be continued on Tuesday, and my colleagues opine that if your resignation was in their hands before that day, certain leaders of the Opposition would consent to withdraw their motion. I am not wholly agreed with the other members of the Cabinet on this point; but, without embarrassing you by the reasons which sway my judgment, I will simply place the matter before you for your own consideration, perfectly assured, as I am, that your decision will be come to only on consideration of what you deem best for the interests of the country.
‘My colleague at the Foreign Office will write to-day or to-morrow with reference to your former post, and I only allude to it now to say the unmixed satisfaction it would give the Cabinet to find that the greatest interests of Eastern Europe were once more in the keeping of the ablest diplomatist of the age, and one of the most far-sighted of modern statesmen.
‘A motion for the abolition of the Irish viceroyalty is now on the notice paper, and it will be matter for consideration whether we may not make it an open question in the Cabinet. Perhaps your lordship would favour me with such opinions on the subject as your experiences suggest.
‘The extra session has wearied out every one, and we can with difficulty make a House.—Yours sincerely, G. ANNIVEY.’
The next he opened was briefer. It ran thus:—
‘DEAR DANESBURY,—You must go back at once to Turkey. That inscrutable idiot Brumsey has discovered another mare’s-nest, and we are lucky if Gortschakoff does not call upon us for public apology. Brunow is outrageous and demands B.‘s recall. I sent off the despatch while he was with me. Leflo Pasha is very ill, they say dying, so that you must haste back to your old friend (query: which is he?) Kulbash, if it be not too late, as Apponyi thinks.—Yours, G.
‘P.S.—Take none of your Irish suite with you to the East. The papers are sure to note the names and attack you if you should. They shall be cared for somehow, if there be any who interest you.
‘You have seen that the House was not over civil to you on Saturday night, though A. thinks you got off well.’
‘Resign!’ cried he aloud, as he dashed the letter on the table. ‘I think I would resign! If they asked what would tempt me to go back there, I should be sorely puzzled to name it. No; not the blue ribbon itself would induce me to face that chaos once more. As to the hint about my Irish staff, it was quite unnecessary. Not very likely, Maude, we should take Walpole to finish in the Bosporus what he has begun on the Liffey.’
He turned hastily to the Times, and threw his eyes over the summary of the debate. It was acrimonious and sneery. The Opposition leaders, with accustomed smoothness, had made it appear that the Viceroy’s Eastern experience had misled him, and that he thought ‘Tipperary was a Pashalick!’ Imbued with notions of wholesale measures of government, so applicable to Turkey, it was easy to see how the errors had affected his Irish policy. ‘There was,’ said the speaker, ‘somebody to be conciliated in Ireland, and some one to be hanged; and what more natural than that he should forget which, or that he should make the mistake of keeping all the flattery for the rebel and the rope for the priest.’ The neatness of the illustration took with the House, and the speaker was interrupted by ‘much laughter.’ And then he went on to say that, ‘as with those well-known ointments or medicines whose specific virtues lay in the enormous costliness of some of the constituents, so it must give unspeakable value to the efficacy of those healing measures for Ireland, to know that the whole British Constitution was boiled down to make one of them, and every right and liberty brayed in the mortar to furnish even one dose of this precious elixir.’ And then there was ‘laughter’ again.
‘He ought to be more merciful to charlatans. Dogs do not eat dogs,’ muttered his lordship to himself, and then asked his niece to send Walpole to him.
It was some time before Walpole appeared, and when he did, it was with such a wasted look and careworn aspect as might have pleaded in his favour.
‘Maude told me you wished to see me, my lord,’ said he, half diffidently.
‘Did I? eh? Did I say so? I forget all about it. What could it be? Let us see. Was it this stupid row they were making in the House? Have you read the debate?’
‘No, my lord; not looked at a paper.’
‘Of course not; you have been too ill, too weak. Have you seen a doctor?’
‘I don’t care to see a doctor; they all say the same thing. I only need rest and quiet.’
‘Only that! Why, they are the two things nobody can get. Power cannot have them, nor money buy them. The retired tradesman—I beg his pardon, the cheesemonger—he is always a cheesemonger now who represents vulgarity and bank-stock—he may have his rest and quiet; but a Minister must not dream of such a luxury, nor any one who serves a Minister. Where’s the quiet to come from, I ask you, after such a tirade of abuse as that?’ And he pointed to the Times. ‘There’s Punch, too, with a picture of me measuring out “Danesbury’s drops to cure loyalty.” That slim youth handing the spoon is meant for you, Walpole.’
‘Perhaps so, my lord,’ said he coldly.
‘They haven’t given you too much leg, Cecil,’ said the other, laughing; but Cecil scarcely relished the joke.
‘I say, Piccadilly is scarcely the place for a man after that: I mean, of course, for a while,’ continued he. ‘These things are not eternal; they have their day. They had me last week travelling in Ireland on a camel; and I was made to say, “That the air of the desert always did me good!” Poor fun, was it not?’
‘Very poor fun indeed!’
‘And you were the boy preparing my chibouque; and, I must say, devilish like.’
‘I did not see it, my lord.’
‘That’s the best way. Don’t look at the caricatures; don’t read the Saturday Review; never know there is anything wrong with you; nor, if you can, that anything disagrees with you.’
‘I should like the last delusion best of all,’ said he.
‘Who would not?’ cried the old lord. ‘The way I used to eat potted prawns at Eton, and peach jam after them, and iced guavas, and never felt better! And now everything gives acidity.’
‘Just because our fathers and grandfathers would have those potted prawns you spoke of.’
‘No, no; you are all wrong. It’s the new race—it’s the new generation. They don’t bear reverses. Whenever the world goes wrong with them, they talk as they feel, they lose appetite, and they fall down in a state like your—a—Walpole—like your own!’
‘Well, my lord, I don’t think I could be called captious for saying that the world has not gone over well with me.’
‘Ah—hum. You mean—no matter—I suppose the luckiest hand is not all trumps! The thing is to score the trick—that’s the point, Walpole, to score the trick!’
‘Up to this, I have not been so fortunate.’
‘Well, who knows what’s coming! I have just asked the Foreign Office people to give you Guatemala; not a bad thing, as times go.’
‘Why, my lord, it’s banishment and barbarism together. The pay is miserable! It is far away, and it is not Pall Mall or the Rue Rivoli.’
‘No, not that. There is twelve hundred for salary, and something for a house, and something more for a secretary that you don’t keep, and an office that you need not have. In fact, it makes more than two thousand; and for a single man in a place where he cannot be extravagant, it will suffice.’
‘Yes, my lord; but I was presumptuous enough to imagine a condition in which I should not be a single man, and I speculated on the possibility that another might venture to share even poverty as my companion.’
‘A woman wouldn’t go there—at least, she ought not. It’s all bush life, or something like it. Why should a woman bear that? or a man ask her to do so?’
‘You seem to forget, my lord, that affections may be engaged, and pledges interchanged.’
‘Get a bill of indemnity, therefore, to release you: better that than wait for yellow fever to do it.’ ‘I confess that your lordship’s words give me great discouragement, and if I could possibly believe that Lady Maude was of your mind—’
‘Maude! Maude! why, you never imagined that Lady Maude would leave comfort and civilisation for this bush life, with its rancheros and rattlesnakes. I confess,’ said he, with a bitter laugh, ‘I did not think either of you were bent on being Paul or Virginia.’
‘Have I your lordship’s permission to ask her own judgment in the matter: I mean with the assurance of its not being biassed by you?’
‘Freely, most freely do I give it. She is not the girl I believe her if she leaves you long in doubt. But I prejudge nothing, and I influence nothing.’
‘Am I to conclude, my lord, that I am sure of this appointment?’
‘I almost believe I can say you are. I have asked for a reply by telegraph, and I shall probably have one to-morrow.’
‘You seemed to have acted under the conviction that I should be glad to get this place.’
‘Yes, such was my conclusion. After that fiasco in Ireland you must go somewhere, for a time at least, out of the way. Now as a man cannot die for half-a-dozen years and come back to life when people have forgotten his unpopularity, the next best thing is South America. Bogota and the Argentine Republic have whitewashed many a reputation.’
‘I will remember your lordship’s wise words.’
‘Do so,’ said my lord curtly, for he felt offended at the flippant tone in which the other spoke. ‘I don’t mean to say that I’d send the writer of that letter yonder to Yucatan or Costa Rica.’
‘Who may the gifted writer be, my lord?’
‘Atlee, Joe Atlee; the fellow you sent over here.’
‘Indeed!’ was all that Walpole could utter.
‘Just take it to your room and read it over. You will be astonished at the thing. The fellow has got to know the bearings of a whole set of new questions, and how he understands the men he has got to deal with!’
‘With your leave I will do so,’ said he, as he took the letter and left the room.