“I almost think I might leave you to finish the discussion with my wife,” said his Lordship, laughing; “I half suspect it would be the best penalty on your temerity. Are you engaged for Sunday?—well, then, dine with us. And now, that bill being adjourned,” said he, with a weary sigh, “what next?”
“I am now coming to myself,—to my own case, my Lord,” said Dunn, with the very slightest tremor in his voice. “Need I say that I wish it were in the hands of any other advocacy? I am so far fortunate, however, that I address one fully conversant with my claims on his party. For five-and-twenty years I have been the careful guardian of their interests in a country where, except in mere name, they never possessed any real popularity. Your Lordship smiles a dissent; may I enter upon the question?”
“Heaven forbid!” broke in the Minister, smiling good-humoredly.
“Well, my Lord, were I to reduce my services to a mere monetary estimate, and furnish you with a bill of costs, for what a goodly sum should I stand in the estimates. I have mainly sustained the charge of seven county elections, hardly contested. I have paid the entire charges on twenty-two borough contests. I have subsidized the provincial press in your favor at a cost of several thousand pounds out of my own pocket I have compromised three grave actions about to be brought against the Government. Of the vast sums I have contributed to local charities, schools, nunneries, societies of various denominations, all in the interest of your party, I take no account I have spent in these and like objects a princely fortune, and yet these hundreds of thousands of pounds are as nothing—mere nothing to the actual personal services I have rendered to your party. In the great revolution effected by the sale of encumbered estates, I have so watchfully guarded your interests that I have replaced the old rampant Toryism of the land by a gentry at once manageable and practicable,—men intent less upon party than personal objects, consequently available to the Minister, always accessible by an offer of direct advantage. I have, with all this, so thrown a Whig light over the rising prosperity of the country, that it might seem the result of your wise rule that stimulated men to the higher civilization they have attained to, and that a more forbearing charity and a more liberal spirit went hand in hand with improved agriculture and higher farming. To identify a party with the great march of this prosperity, to make of your policy a cause of these noble results, was the grand conception which, for a quarter of a century, I have carried out. When Mr. O'Connell kept your predecessors in power, his price was the bit-by-bit surrender of what in your hearts you believed to be bulwarks of the constitution. In return for my support what have I got? Some patronage—be it so—for my own dependants and followers, no doubt! Show me one man of my name, one man of my convictions, holding place under the Crown. No, my Lord, my power to serve your party was based on this sure foundation, that I was open to no imputation; I was the distributor of your patronage to the men best worthy to receive it,—no more.”
“Four o'clock, Dunn; time's up,” said his Lordship. “I must go down to the House.”
“I am sorry to have detained your Lordship with so ungracious a theme.”
“Well, I do think you might have spared me some of it I know well my colleagues all know your invaluable services,—an admirable member of the party, active and able, but not quite neglected, either, eh, Dunn?—not entirely left in oblivion?”
While he spoke, he busied himself in the search for a paper amidst the heap of those before him, and could not, therefore, notice the mortification so palpably expressed on Dunn's face.
“I can't find it,” muttered he; “I should like, however, to show you the memorandum itself, in which your name stands recommended to her Majesty for a baronetcy.”
Dunn's sudden start made the speaker look up; and as he turned his eyes on him, there was no mistaking the look of determined anger on his features.