“You must make excuses for her, Duchess.”
“Of course. I know. After all she is a most fortunate woman. And as for you—I regard you as a hero among lovers.”
“I’m getting used to it,” she said one day to Mrs. Finn.
“Of course you’ll get used to it. We get used to anything that chance sends us in a marvellously short time.”
“What I mean is that I can go to bed, and sleep, and get up and eat my meals without missing the sound of the trumpets so much as I did at first. I remember hearing of people who lived in a mill, and couldn’t sleep when the mill stopped. It was like that with me when our mill stopped at first. I had got myself so used to the excitement of it, that I could hardly live without it.”
“You might have all the excitement still, if you pleased. You need not be dead to politics because your husband is not Prime Minister.”
“No; never again—unless he should come back. If anyone had told me ten years ago that I should have taken an interest in this or that man being in the Government, I should have laughed him to scorn. It did not seem possible to me then that I should care what became of such men as Sir Timothy Beeswax and Mr. Roby. But I did get to be anxious about it when Plantagenet was shifted from one office to another.”
“Of course you did. Do you think I am not anxious about Phineas?”
“But when he became Prime Minister, I gave myself up to it altogether. I shall never forget what I felt when he came to me and told me that perhaps it might be so;—but told me also that he would escape from it if it were possible. I was the Lady Macbeth of the occasion all over;—whereas he was so scrupulous, so burdened with conscience! As for me, I would have taken it by any means. Then it was that the old Duke played the part of the three witches to a nicety. Well, there hasn’t been any absolute murder, and I haven’t quite gone mad.”
“Nor need you be afraid, though all the woods of Gatherum should come to Matching.”
“God forbid! I will never see anything of Gatherum again. What annoys me most is, and always was, that he wouldn’t understand what I felt about it;—how proud I was that he should be Prime Minister, how anxious that he should be great and noble in his office;—how I worked for him, and not at all for any pleasure of my own.”
“I think he did feel it.”
“No;—not as I did. At last he liked the power—or rather feared the disgrace of losing it. But he had no idea of the personal grandeur of the place. He never understood that to be Prime Minister in England is as much as to be an Emperor in France, and much more than being President in America. Oh, how I did labour for him—and how he did scold me for it with those quiet little stinging words of his! I was vulgar!”
“Is that a quiet word?”
“Yes;—as he used it;—and indiscreet, and ignorant, and stupid. I bore it all, though sometimes I was dying with vexation. Now it’s all over, and here we are as humdrum as anyone else. And the Beeswaxes, and the Robys, and the Droughts, and the Pountneys, and the Lopezes, have all passed over the scene! Do you remember that Pountney affair, and how he turned the poor man out of the house?”
“It served him right.”
“It would have served them all right to be turned out—only they were there for a purpose. I did like it in a way, and it makes me sad to think that the feeling can never come again. Even if they should have him back again, it would be a very lame affair to me then. I can never again rouse myself to the effort of preparing food and lodging for half the Parliament and their wives. I shall never again think that I can help to rule England by coaxing unpleasant men. It is done and gone, and can never come back again.”
Not long after this the Duke took Mr. Monk, who had come down to Matching for a few days, out to the very spot on which he had sat when he indulged himself in lecturing Phineas Finn on Conservatism and Liberalism generally, and then asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer what he thought of the present state of public affairs. He himself had supported Mr. Gresham’s government, and did not belong to it because he could not at present reconcile himself to filling any office. Mr. Monk did not scruple to say that in his opinion the present legitimate division of parties was preferable to the Coalition which had existed for three years. “In such an arrangement,” said Mr. Monk, “there must always be a certain amount of distrust, and such a feeling is fatal to any great work.”
“I think I distrusted no one till separation came—and when it did come it was not caused by me.”
“I am not blaming anyone now,” said the other; “but men who have been brought up with opinions altogether different, even with different instincts as to politics, who from their mother’s milk have been nourished on codes of thought altogether opposed to each other, cannot work together with confidence even though they may desire the same thing. The very ideas which are sweet as honey to the one are bitter as gall to the other.”
“You think, then, that we made a great mistake?”
“I will not say that,” said Mr. Monk. “There was a difficulty at the time, and that difficulty was overcome. The Government was carried on, and was on the whole
