"What have we done?"
"Carried on the Queen's Government prosperously for three years. Is that nothing for a minister to do? I have never been a friend of great measures, knowing that when they come fast, one after another, more is broken in the rattle than is repaired by the reform. We have done what Parliament and the country expected us to do, and to my poor judgment we have done it well."
"I do not feel much self-satisfaction, Duke. Well;—we must see it out, and if it is as you anticipate, I shall be ready. Of course I have prepared myself for it. And if, of late, my mind has been less turned to retirement than it used to be, it has only been because I have become wedded to this measure, and have wished that it should be carried under our auspices." Then the old Duke took his leave, and the Prime Minister was left alone to consider the announcement that had been made to him.
He had said that he had prepared himself, but, in so saying, he had hardly known himself. Hitherto, though he had been troubled by many doubts, he had still hoped. The report made to him by Mr. Rattler, backed as it had been by Mr. Roby's assurances, had almost sufficed to give him confidence. But Mr. Rattler and Mr. Roby combined were as nothing to the Duke of St. Bungay. The Prime Minister knew now,—he felt that he knew, that his days were numbered. The resignation of that lingering old bishop was not completed, and the person in whom he believed would not have the see. He had meditated the making of a peer or two, having hitherto been very cautious in that respect, but he would do nothing of the kind if called upon by the House of Commons to resign with an uncompleted measure. But his thoughts soon ran away from the present to the future. What was now to come of himself? How should he use his future life,—he who as yet had not passed his forty-seventh year? He regretted much having made that apparently pretentious speech about Cæsar, though he knew his old friend well enough to be sure that it would never be used against him. Who was he that he should class himself among the big ones of the world? A man may indeed measure small things by great, but the measurer should be careful to declare his own littleness when he illustrates his position by that of the topping ones of the earth. But the thing said had been true. Let the Pompey be who he might, he, the little Cæsar of the day, could never now command another legion.
He had once told Phineas Finn that he regretted that he had abstained from the ordinary amusements of English gentlemen. But he had abstained also from their ordinary occupations,—except so far as politics is one of them. He cared nothing for oxen or for furrows. In regard to his own land he hardly knew whether the farms were large or small. He had been a scholar, and after a certain fitful fashion he had maintained his scholarship, but the literature to which he had been really attached had been that of blue-books and newspapers. What was he to do with himself when called upon to resign? And he understood,—or thought that he understood,—his position too well to expect that after a while, with the usual interval, he might return to power. He had been Prime Minister, not as the leading politician on either side, not as the king of a party, but,—so he told himself,—as a stop-gap. There could be nothing for him now till the insipidity of life should gradually fade away into the grave.
After a while he got up and went off to his wife's apartment, the room in which she used to prepare her triumphs and where now she contemplated her disappointments. "I have had the Duke with me," he said.
"What;—at last?"
"I do not know that he could have done any good by coming sooner."
"And what does his Grace say?"
"He thinks that our days are numbered."