Not that Stubbs said this at Riddsley, or anything like it. He smiled and kept silence, as became a man who knew much and was set above common rumor. The landlord of the Audley Arms, the corndealer, the brewer, the saddler went away from him with their fears allayed merely by the way in which he shrugged his shoulders. At the farmers’ ordinary he had never been more cheerful. He gave the toast of “Horn and Corn, gentlemen! And when potatoes take their place you may come and tell me!” And he gave it so heartily that the farmers went home, market-peart and rejoicing, laughed at their doubting neighbors, and quoted a hundred things that Lawyer Stubbs had not said.
But a day or two later the lawyer sustained an unpleasant shock. He had been little moved by Lord John’s manifesto—the declaration in which the little Whig Leader, seeing that the Government hesitated, had plumped for total repeal. That was in the common course of things. It had heartened him, if anything. It was natural. It would bring the Tories into line and put an end to trimming. But this—this which confronted him one morning when he opened his London paper was different. He read it, he held his breath, he stood aghast a long minute, he swore. After a few minutes he took his hat and the newspaper, and went round to the house in which Lord Audley lived when he was at Riddsley.
It was a handsome Georgian house, built of brick with stone facings, and partly covered with ivy. A wide smooth lawn divided it from the road. The occupant was a curate’s widow who lived there with her two sisters and eked out their joint means by letting the first floor to her landlord. For “The Butterflies” was Audley property, and the clergyman’s widow was held to derogate in no way by an arrangement which differed widely from a common letting of lodgings. Mrs. Jenkinson was stout, short, and fussy, her sisters were thin, short, and precise, but all three overflowed with words as kindly as their deeds. Good Mrs. Jenkinson, in fact, who never spoke of his lordship behind his back but with distant respect, sometimes forgot in his presence that he was anything but a “dear young man,” and when he had a cold, would prescribe a posset or a warming-pan with an insistence which at times amused and more often bored him.
Stubbs found his lordship just risen from a late lunch, and in his excitement, the lawyer forgot his manners. “By G—d, my lord!” he cried, “he’s resigned.”
Audley looked at him with displeasure. “Who’s resigned?” he asked coldly.
“Peel!”
Against that news the young man was not proof. He caught the infection. “Impossible!” he said, rising to his feet.
“It’s true! It’s in the Morning Post, my lord! He saw the Queen yesterday. She’s sending for Lord John. It’s black treachery! It’s the blackest of treachery! With a majority in the House, with the peers in his pocket, the country quiet, trade improving, everything in his favor, he’s sold us—sold us to Cobden on some d—d pretext of famine in Ireland!”
Audley did not answer at once. He stood deep in thought, his eyes on the floor, his hands in his pockets. At length, “I don’t follow it,” he said. “How is Russell, who is in a minority, to carry repeal?”
“Peel’s promised his support!” Stubbs cried. Like most honest men, he was nothing if not thorough. “You may depend upon it, my lord, he has! He won’t deceive me again. I know him through and through, now. He’ll take with him Graham and Gladstone and Herbert, his old tail, Radicals at heart every man of them, and he’s the biggest!”