"Yes, Brookes, I suppose things must take their course."
His lordship's remark showed that he accepted Mr. Brookes' point of view. The lawyer communicated the old man's decision to Lord Spunyarn, but the matter itself was never mentioned between Lord Pit Town and the executor of his late heir.
Young Lucius Haggard for the last few days had had plenty of food for reflection. The agony of mind which he had suffered when Lord Spunyarn had broken to him the strange story of his birth was more than counterbalanced by the disappearance of the proofs and the opportune illness of his father's widow. He found himself once more the heir apparent, and so temporary had been his degradation that it seemed but a fevered dream. Whether the story was true or false, probably no one would ever know. The more he thought of the matter, the more young Lucius Haggard congratulated himself on having controlled his feelings after his first natural burst of passionate indignation. He had not alienated Lord Spunyarn, he had not quarrelled with any one; his conduct, under the most trying circumstances, had been such as to merit the respect of all concerned. Though he had not yet won the rubber, he had decidedly scored the first game.
As time rolled on, Reginald Haggard's widow made no perceptible progress towards recovery. The speechlessness continued; she was still unable to articulate. At first she frequently attempted to speak, but gradually ceased her efforts, as she found that it was practically impossible to express herself. When she tried to write, although the fingers could grasp the pen, she was unable to produce written characters, but she appeared to hear and to understand perfectly. Her memory, too, seemed to have failed her, for she no longer attempted to express her grief at her husband's death. She had lost to a certain extent also the power of motion, and was confined to her couch. With this exception, her bodily health remained good, and there was no visible change in her appearance.
No intimation of the supposed discovery of a family mystery had been made to old Squire Warrender, not that there was any doubt as to his discretion, but simply because there was nothing to be gained by disturbing the old man's mind with so terrible a communication. Squire Warrender had hurried to the Castle to visit his daughter when he first heard of her seizure; but as the fears of an immediate fatal termination gradually wore off, the old squire had returned to King's Warren. But the two young men, as was natural, still remained at the Castle in close attendance upon their mother; George, from natural affection, while Lucius, though he longed to taste the sweets of his newly-acquired liberty, felt that it was to his interest to remain upon the spot in the unlikely contingency of Mrs. Haggard regaining her faculties.
While the minds of many of the inhabitants of Walls End Castle had been disturbed in the manner narrated, the quiet little parish of King's Warren had been shaken out of its ordinary state of somniferous torpidity. To use Mrs. Dodd's words, "the government of the country had at last become awakened to the important services rendered to the Church by my dear father." The fact is, that a bishopric had fallen in, and that the Prime Minister, a notorious talker and time-server, and a very old servant of Her Majesty, was extremely anxious to perpetrate a great and glorious job. But the Prime Minister was a wise man; he knew very well that in trying to please everybody he would satisfy no one, and so he meant to please himself, and to appoint to the vacant see an old college chum of his own, a learned but harmless enthusiast, now a Don, who had once in his life perpetrated a very abstruse work upon the Greek particle. The first thing that the Prime Minister did was to lend an apparently willing ear to the suggestions of the various busybodies who under such circumstances always favour unfortunates in his position with their disinterested ideas upon the subject. Deputations from the two rival missionary societies waited upon him, lords temporal and lords spiritual had private interviews with him, and the heads of his party expressed their opinions to him freely but confidentially; he promised to give their suggestions what he called his earnest consideration, and then he bowed them out. But the Prime Minister was a man who invariably killed two birds with one stone. "I will obtain some cheap popularity," he thought, "and several good rounds of universal applause, by a master-stroke. I will offer the bishopric to a simple parish clergyman." In the clerical world, to use a profane phrase, there were at least half-a-dozen favourites in the betting, and as many dark horses. When the Thunderer appeared with an inspired article upon the fitness of a successful parish clergyman for the more onerous position of a bishop, great was the humming and disturbance in the clerical hive. Profound was the disappointment in the minds of the drones and dignitaries. Men who were performing archidiaconal functions heaped dust and ashes on their heads, crying aloud that the interests of the Church were being sacrificed to obtain an ephemeral popularity. But the breasts of the working bees throbbed with excitement; the vicars of parishes who had been long in harness, and had never met with the expensive misfortune of being haled by their bishop, or the terrible aggrieved parishioner, under the Church Discipline Act, before that greatest of all clerical bogies, Lord Penzance, and who would never have thought of undergoing six months' imprisonment for conscience' sake; men who knew a good glass of wine when they saw it; men who were apostles of the Blue Ribbon Army, fathers of large families of sons and daughters blessed in having their quivers full of them, and Celibates wedded to the Church alone; all these men were racked by ambitious hopes. In the meanwhile the Prime Minister was occupied in putting salt on his sparrow's tail: that rare clerical bird so fast becoming extinct in the present day, rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno, who should be willing to reply to him nolo episcopari. The Prime Minister was looking round for a man of straw, and after some search he found him in the person of the Reverend John Dodd.
The Thunderer had said that "the little leaven that was needed in the hierarchy of the Church of England, that it might leaven the whole lump, was a parochial clergyman who had unostentatiously laboured in the clerical vineyard, a man who could rule his see as he had ruled his parish," and after a long diatribe, the article concluded with these pregnant words: "Such a man the noble lord at the head of affairs has found in the well-known vicar of King's Warren, the Reverend John Dodd." And then it compared the Reverend John Dodd to the "Man of Ross," in its usual graceful and pointed manner.
Verbal communications, like dead men, tell no tales.
The Prime Minister didn't write a letter to the Reverend John Dodd, he didn't even send him a halfpenny post-card, offering him the bishopric; but he did dispatch a trusted emissary. We must remember that the Minister had been credibly informed that the Reverend John Dodd was absolutely the only respectable clergyman in the Church of England, in the full possession of his mental faculties, who would be certain to decline the honours of consecration. Certain Roman emperors have earned our respect by refusing to accept divine honours, and the Prime Minister heard with delight that the Reverend John Dodd was a man of the same heroic kidney. We have met the emissary before, it was the same old clerical friend of the Reverend John's, who had on a previous occasion, as his archdeacon, warned him to set his house in order on the appointment of a new bishop, a king who knew not Joseph. He it was, who had recommended to his friend Dodd that eminently reliable clerical charwoman, the Reverend Barnes Puffin. The Reverend Barnes Puffin had done his work well, things had gone on smoothly ever since in the parish of King's Warren; and many a time and oft had the stout vicar, like the mask'd Arabian maid in the "Light of the Harem," exclaimed, "Oh, if there be an Elysium on earth, it is this, it is this." I don't believe that the vicar of King's Warren would have changed places with the Mikado of Japan. The two clergymen had their interview; at which Mrs. Dodd, to her great indignation, did not assist. Never before in his life had the Reverend John kept a secret so long from the knowledge of the wife of his bosom, the fair Cecilia; until the next morning at breakfast, he may be said to have continuously wrestled with her in the spirit. In vain did Mrs. Dodd alternately beg, command, and even entreat him with briny tears, to communicate to her what had taken place in that secret interview. All she could extract from him was, that she should know all about it at breakfast time. She even tried guessing, but each guess was more wildly improbable, and wider of the mark than the last; her final suggestion was a rather barbed arrow though.