“But to discern that camomile,” the Chancellor continued gaily, “though bitter to-day makes us better tomorrow, is a different thing from——”
“Administering a dose!” Vaughan laughed, falling into the great man’s humour.
“To be sure. But enough of that. Now I think of it, Mr. Vaughan,” he continued, looking at his companion, “I have not had the pleasure of seeing you since—but I need not remind you of the occasion. You’ve had good cause to remember it! Yes, yes,” he went on with voluble complacency—he was walking as well as talking very fast—“I seldom speak without meaning, or interfere without result. I knew well what would come of it. It was not for nothing, Mr. Vaughan, that I got down our Borough List and asked you if you had no thought of entering the House. The spark—and tinder! For there you are in the House!”
“Yes,” Vaughan replied, astonished at the coolness with which the other unveiled, and even took credit for, the petty intrigue of six months back. “But——”
“But,” Brougham said, taking him up with a quick, laughing glance, “you are not yet on the Treasury Bench? That’s it?”
“No, not yet,” Vaughan answered, good-humouredly.
“Ah, well, time and patience and Bellamy’s chops, Mr. Vaughan, will carry you far, I am sure.”
“It is on that subject—the subject of time—I venture to trouble your lordship.”
The Chancellor’s lumpish but singularly mobile features underwent a change. Caught in a complacent, vain humour, he had forgotten a thing which, with Vaughan’s last words, recurred to him. “Yes?” he said, “yes, Mr. Vaughan?” But the timbre of that marvellously flexible voice with which he boasted that he could whisper so as to be heard to the very door of the House of Commons, was changed. “Yes, what is it, pray?”
“It is time I require,” Vaughan answered. “And, in fine, I have done some service, yeoman service, my lord, and I think that I ought not to be cast aside by the party in whose interest I was returned, and with whose objects I am in sympathy.”