Naturally he buried his private mishap—and my lord’s—in silence. But his mien was changed. He was an altered, a shaken man. When he passed through the streets, he walked with his chin on his breast, his shoulders bowed. He shunned men’s eyes. Then one day Basset entered his office and for a long time was closeted with him.
When he left Stubbs left also, and his bearing was so subtly changed as to impress all who met him; while Farthingale, stepping out in his absence, drank his way through three brown brandies in a silence which grew more portentous with every glass. At The Butterflies, whither the lawyer hastened, Audley met him with moody and repellent eyes, and in the first flush of the news which the lawyer brought refused to believe it. It was not only that the tidings seemed too good to be true, the relief from the nightmare which weighed upon him too great to be readily accepted. But the thing that Mary had done was so far out of his ken and so much beyond his understanding that he could not rise to it, or credit it. Even when he at last took in the truth of the story he put upon it the interpretation that was natural to him.
“It was a forgery!” he cried with an oath. “You may depend upon it, it was a forgery and they discovered it.”
But Stubbs would not agree to that. Stubbs was very stout about it, and giving details of his conversation with Basset gradually persuaded his patron. In one way, indeed, the news coming through him wrought a benefit which neither Mary nor Basset had foreseen. It once more commended him to Audley, and by and by healed the breach which had threatened to sever the long connection between the lawyer and Beaudelays. If Stubbs’s opinion of my lord could never again be wholly what it had been, if Audley still had hours of soreness when the other’s negligence recurred to his mind, at least they were again at one as to the future. They were once more free to look forward to a time when a marriage with Lady Adela, or her like, would rebuild the fortunes of the Great House. Of Audley, whose punishment if short had been severe, one thing at least may be ventured with safety—and beyond this we need not inquire; that to the end his first, last, greatest thought would be—himself!
Late in June, the Corn Laws were repealed. On the same day Sir Robert Peel, in the eyes of some the first, in the eyes of others the last of men, was forced to resign. Thwarted by old friends and abandoned by new ones, he fell by a manœuvre which even his enemies could not defend. Whether he was more to be blamed for blindness than he was to be praised for rectitude, are questions on which party spirit has much to say, nor has history as yet pronounced a final decision. But if his hand gave the victory to the class from which he sprang, he was at least free from the selfishness of that class. He had ideals, he was a man,
He nothing common did nor mean,
Upon that memorable scene,
But bowed his comely head,
Down as upon a bed.
Nor is it possible, even for those who do not agree with him, to think of his dramatic fall without sympathy.
In the same week Basset and Mary were married. They spent their honeymoon after a fashion of their own, for they travelled through the north of England, and beginning with the improvements which Lord Francis Egerton was making along the Manchester Canal, they continued their quiet journey along the inland waterways which formed in the ’forties a link, now forgotten, between the great cities. In this way—somewhat to the disgust of Mary’s new maid, whose name was Joséphine—they visited strange things; the famous land-warping upon the Humber, the Doncaster drainage system in Yorkshire, the Horsfall dairies. They brought back to the old gabled house at Blore some ideas which were new even to old Hayward—though the “Duke” would never have admitted this.
“Now that we are not protected, we must bestir ourselves,” Basset said on the last evening before their return. “I’ll inquire about a seat, if you like,” he added reluctantly.