“So, then,” said Culduff, after listening to a somewhat lengthy explanation from Bramleigh of why and how it was that there was nothing to be done financially at the moment,—“so, then, I am to gather the plan of a company to work the mines is out of the question?”
“I would rather call it deferred than abandoned,” was the cautious reply.
“In my career what we postpone we generally prohibit. And what other course is open to us?”
“We can wait, my Lord, we can wait. Coal is not like indigo or tobacco; it is not a question of hours—whether the crop be saved or ruined. We can wait.”
“Very true, sir; but I cannot wait. There are some urgent calls upon me just now, the men who are pressing which will not be so complaisant as to wait either.”
“I was always under the impression, my Lord, that your position as a peer, and the nature of the services that you were engaged in, were sufficient to relieve you from all the embarrassments that attach to humbler men in difficulties?”
“They don't arrest, but they dun us, sir; and they dun with an insistence and an amount of menace, too, that middle-class people can form no conception of. They besiege the departments we serve under with their vulgar complaints, and if the rumor gets abroad that one of us is about to be advanced to a governorship or an embassy, they assemble in Downing Street like a Reform demonstration. I declare to you I had to make my way through a lane of creditors from the Privy Council Office to the private entrance to F. O., my hands full of their confounded accounts—one fellow, a boot-maker, actually having pinned his bill to the skirt of my coat as I went. And the worst of these impertinences is, that they give a Minister who is indisposed towards you a handle for refusing your just claims. I have just come through such an ordeal: I have been told that my debts are to be a bar to my promotion.”
The almost tremulous horror which he gave to this last expression—as of an outrage unknown to mankind—warned Bramleigh to be silent.
“I perceive that you do not find it easy to believe this, but I pledge my word to you it is true. It is not forty-eight hours since a Secretary of State assumed to make my personal liabilities—the things which, if any things are a man's own, are certainly so—to make these an objection to my taking a mission of importance. I believe he was sorry for his indiscretion; I have reason to suppose that it was a blunder he will not readily repeat.”
“And you obtained your appointment?” asked Bramleigh.