‘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.’