“Oh yes! You must read it,” said Mrs Clinton. “Why, I’m going to read—well, some of it! I’ve promised!”
“So am I,” said little Muriel, while the Prince Consort rubbed his hands together with a sort of pride which was, on its other side, the profoundest humility. He was wondering, I think, that he should have been able to produce any book at all—even the worst of books—and admiring a talent which he had not considered himself to possess.
“I’m going to worry everybody who comes here to buy it—or to order it at Mudie’s, anyhow,” pursued Mrs Clinton. “What’s written in this house must be read.”
“I hope Vincents’ won’t lose a lot over it,” said the Prince Consort, shaking his head.
“Oh well, they’ve made a good deal out of me before now,” laughed his wife lightly.
I did not take the Prince Consort’s book away with me to the Continent. Whatever else it might be, it was certainly not holiday reading, and it would have needed a portmanteau to itself. But the reverberation of the extraordinary and almost unequalled “boom” which the book made reached me in the recesses of Switzerland. I came on The Times of three days before in my hotel, and it had three columns and a half on Mr Thompson Clinton’s work. The weekly Budget which my sister sent to me at Andermatt contained, besides a long review, a portrait of the Prince Consort (he must have sat to them on purpose) and a biographical sketch of him, quite accurate as to the remarkably few incidents which his previous life contained. It was this sketch which first caused me to begin to realise what was happening. For the sketch, after a series of eulogies (which to my prepossessed mind seemed absurdly extravagant) on the Prince Consort, reached its conclusion with the following remark:—“Mr Thompson Clinton’s wife is also a writer, and is known in the literary world as the author of more than one clever and amusing novel.” I laid down the Budget with a vague feeling that a revolution had occurred. It was now Mrs Clinton who “wrote too.”
I was right in my feeling, yet my feeling was inadequate to the reality with which I was faced on my return to England. The Prince Consort was the hero of the hour. I had written him a line of warm congratulation, and I settled at once to the book, not only in order to be able to talk about it, but also because I could not, without personal investigation, believe that he had done all they said. But he had. It was a wonderful book—full of learning and research, acute and profound in argument, and (greatest of all surprises) eminently lucid, polished, and even brilliant in style; irony, pathos, wit—the Prince Consort had them all. I laid the second volume down, wondering no longer that he had become an authority, that his name appeared in the lists of public banquets, that he was quoted now by one, now by the other, political party, and that translations into French and German were to be undertaken by distinguished savants.
And of course both The Quarterly and The Edinburgh had articles—“did him,” as his wife had phrased it. Upon which, being invited by Mrs Clinton to an evening party, I made a point of going.
There were a great many people there that night. A large group was on the hearthrug. I am tall, and looking over the heads of the assembly I saw the Prince Consort standing there. He was smiling, still rather nervously, and was talking in quick eager tones. Everyone listened in deferential silence, broken by murmurs of “Yes, yes,” or “How true!” or “I never thought of that!” And Muriel held the Prince Consort’s hand, and looked up at him with adoration in her young eyes. I rejoiced with the Prince Consort in his hour of deserved triumph, but I did not, somehow, find Muriel as “pretty a picture” as a lady told me later on that she was. Indeed, I thought that the child would have been as well—or better—in bed. I turned round and looked for Mrs Clinton. Ah, there she was, on her usual sofa. By her side sat Lady Troughton; nobody else was near. Mrs Clinton was talking very quickly and vivaciously to her companion, who rose as I approached, gave me her hand, and then passed on to join the group on the hearthrug. I sat down by Mrs Clinton, and began to congratulate her on her husband’s marvellous triumph.
“Yes,” said she, “do you see he’s in both the quarterlies?”