“I know it,—I know it; Lady Lendrick has intimated as much to me.”
“At all events, you can make no mistake in entertaining the project; and certainly the offer is not to be despised.”
“It is of him, and of him alone, I am thinking, Beattie. If he would let me see him, admit me once more on my old terms of affection, I would go anywhere, do anything that he counselled. Try, my dear friend, to bring this about; do your best for me, and remember I will subscribe to any terms, submit to anything, if he will only be reconciled to me.”
“It will be hard if we cannot manage this somehow,” said Beattie; “but now let us to bed. It is past two o'clock. Good-night, Tom; sleep well, and don't dream of the Cape or the Caffres.”
CHAPTER VII. THE FOUNTAIN OF HONOR
That ancient and incongruous pile which goes by the name of the Castle in Dublin, and to which Irishmen very generally look as the well from which all honors and places flow, is not remarkable for either the splendor or space it affords to the inmates beneath its roof. Upheld by a great prestige perhaps, as in the case of certain distinguished people, who affect a humble exterior and very simple belongings, it may deem that its own transcendent importance has no need of accessories. Certainly the ugliness of its outside is in noway unbalanced by the meanness within; and even the very highest of those who claim its hospitality are lodged in no-princely fashion.
In a corner of the old red brick quadrangle, to the right of the state entrance, in a small room whose two narrow windows looked into a lane, sat a very well-dressed young-gentleman at a writing-table. Short, and disposed to roundness in face as well as figure, Mr. Cholmondely Balfour scarcely responded in appearance to his imposing name. Nature had not been as bountiful, perhaps, as Fortune; for while he was rich, well born, and considerably gifted in abilities, his features were unmistakably common and vulgar, and all the aids of dress could not atone for the meanness in his general look. Had he simply accepted his image as a thing to be quietly borne and submitted to, the case might not have been so very bad; but he took it as something to be corrected, changed, and ameliorated, and the result was a perpetual struggle to make the most ordinary traits and commonplace features appear the impress of one on whom Nature had written gentleman. It would have been no easy task to have imposed on him in a question of his duty. He was the private secretary of the Viceroy, who was his maternal uncle. It would have been a tough task to have misled or deceived him in any matter open to his intelligence to examine; but upon this theme there was not the inventor of a hair-wash, a skin-paste, a whisker-dye, or a pearl-powder that might not have led him captive. A bishop might have found difficulty in getting audience of him,—a barber might have entered unannounced; and while the lieutenant of a county sat waiting in the antechamber, the tailor, with a new waistcoat pattern, walked boldly into the august presence. Entering life by that petite porte of politics, an Irish office, he had conceived a very humble estimate of the people amongst whom he was placed. Regarding his extradition from Whitehall and its precincts as a sort of probationary banishment, he felt, however, its necessity; and as naval men are accredited with two years of service for every one year on the coast of Africa, Mr. Balfour was aware that a grateful Government could equally recognize the devotion of him who gave some of the years of his youth to the Fernando Po of statecraft.
This impression, being rarely personal in its consequences, was not of much moment; but it was conjoined with a more serious error, which was to imagine that all rule and governance in Ireland should be carried on with a Machiavellian subtlety. The people, he had heard, were quick-witted; he must therefore out-manoeuvre them. Jobbery had been, he was told, the ruin of Ireland; he would show its inefficiency by the superior skill with which he could wield its weapon. To be sure his office was a very minor one, its influence very restricted, but Mr. Balfour was ambitious; he was a Viceroy's nephew; he had sat for months in the House, from which he had been turned out on a petition. He had therefore social advantages to build on, abilities to display, and wrongs to avenge; and as a man too late for the train speculates during the day how far on his road he might have been by this time or by that, so did Mr. Balfour continually keep reminding himself how, but for that confounded petition, he might now have been a Treasury this or a Board of Trade that,—a corporal, in fact, in that great army whose commissioned officers are amongst the highest in Europe.
Let us now present him to our reader, as he lay back in his chair, and by a hand-bell summoned his messenger.