ANOTHER fortnight glided away, and he was still at the Castle, still the constant and almost sole companion of May Dacre. It is breakfast; the servant is delivering the letter-bag to Mr. Dacre. Interesting moment! when you extend your hand for the billet of a mistress, and receive your tailor’s bill! How provokingly slow are most domestic chieftains in this anxious operation! They turn the letters over and over, and upside and down; arrange, confuse, mistake, assort; pretend, like Champollion, to decipher illegible franks, and deliver with a slight remark, which is intended as a friendly admonition, the documents of the unlucky wight who encourages unprivileged correspondents.
A letter was delivered to Miss Dacre. She started, exclaimed, blushed, and tore it open.
‘Only you, only you,’ she said, extending her hand to the young Duke, ‘only you were capable of this!’
It was a letter from Arundel Dacre, not only written but franked by him.
It explained everything that the Duke of St. James might have told them before; but he preferred hearing all himself, from the delighted and delightful lips of Miss Dacre, who read to her father her cousin’s letter.
The Duke of St. James had returned him for one of his Cornish boroughs. It appeared that Lord St. Maurice was the previous member, who had accepted the Chiltern Hundreds in his favour.
‘You were determined to surprise, as well as delight us,’ said Mr. Dacre.
‘I am no admirer of mysteries,’ said the Duke; ‘but the fact is, in the present case, it was not in my power to give you any positive information, and I had no desire to provide you, after your late disappointment, with new sources of anxiety. The only person I could take the liberty with, at so short a notice, was St. Maurice. He, you know, is a Liberal; but he cannot forget that he is the son of a Tory, and has no great ambition to take any active part in affairs at present. I anticipated less difficulty with him than with his father. St. Maurice can command me again when it suits him; but, I confess to you, I have been surprised at my uncle’s kindness in this affair. I really have not done justice to his character before, and regret it. He has behaved in the most kind-hearted and the most liberal manner, and put me under obligations which I never shall forget. He seems as desirous of serving my friend as myself; and I assure you, sir, it would give you pleasure to know in what terms of respect he speaks of your family, and particularly of Arundel.’
‘Arundel says he shall take his seat the morning of the debate. How very near! how admirably managed! Oh! I never shall recover my surprise and delight! How good you are!’
‘He takes his seat, then, tomorrow,’ said Mr. Dacre, in a musing tone. ‘My letters give a rather nervous account of affairs. We are to win it, they hope, but by two only. As for the Lords, the majority against us will, it is said, be somewhat smaller than usual. We shall never triumph, George, till May is M.P. for the county. Cannot you return her for Pen Bronnock too?’
They talked, as you may suppose, of nothing else. At last Mr. Dacre remembered an appointment with his bailiff, and proposed to the Duke to join him, who acceded.
‘And I to be left alone this morning, then!’ said Miss Dacre. ‘I am sure, as they say of children, I can set to nothing.’
‘Come and ride with us, then!’
‘An excellent idea! Let us canter over to Hauteville! I am just in the humour for a gallop up the avenue, and feel half emancipated already with a Dacre in the House! Oh! tomorrow, how nervous I shall be!’
‘I will despatch Barrington, then,’ said Mr. Dacre, ‘and join you in ten minutes.’
‘How good you are!’ said Miss Dacre to the Duke. ‘How can we thank you enough? What can we do for you?’
‘You have thanked me enough. What have I done after all? My opportunity to serve my friends is brief. Is it wonderful that I seize the opportunity?’
‘Brief! brief! Why do you always say so? Why do you talk so of leaving us?’
‘My visit to you has been already too long. It must soon end, and I remain not in England when it ceases.’
‘Come and live at Hauteville, and be near us?’
He faintly smiled as he said, ‘No, no; my doom is fixed. Hauteville is the last place that I should choose for my residence, even if I remained in England. But I hear the horses.’
The important night at length arrived, or rather the important messenger, who brought down, express, a report of its proceedings to Castle Dacre.
Nothing is more singular than the various success of men in the House of Commons. Fellows who have been the oracles of coteries from their birth; who have gone through the regular process of gold medals, senior wranglerships, and double firsts, who have nightly sat down amid tumultuous cheering in debating societies, and can harangue with unruffled foreheads and unfaltering voice, from one end of a dinner-table to the other, who, on all occasions, have something to say, and can speak with fluency on what they know nothing about, no sooner rise in the House than their spells desert them. All their effrontery vanishes. Commonplace ideas are rendered even more uninteresting by monotonous delivery; and keenly alive as even boobies are in those sacred walls to the ridiculous, no one appears more thoroughly aware of his unexpected and astounding deficiencies than the orator himself. He regains his seat hot and hard, sultry and stiff, with a burning cheek and an icy hand, repressing his breath lest it should give evidence of an existence of which he is ashamed, and clenching his fist, that the pressure may secretly convince him that he has not as completely annihilated his stupid body as his false reputation.
On the other hand, persons whom the women have long deplored, and the men long pitied, as having ‘no manner,’ who blush when you speak to them, and blunder when they speak to you, suddenly jump up in the House with a self-confidence, which is only equalled by their consummate ability. And so it was with Arundel Dacre. He rose the first night that he took his seat (a great disadvantage, of which no one was more sensible than himself), and for an hour and a half he addressed the fullest House that had long been assembled, with the self-possession of an habitual debater. His clenching argument, and his luminous detail, might have been expected from one who had the reputation of having been a student. What was more surprising was, the withering sarcasm that blasted like the simoom, the brilliant sallies of wit that flashed like a sabre, the gushing eddies of humour that drowned all opposition and overwhelmed those ponderous and unwieldy arguments which the producers announced as rocks, but which he proved to be porpoises. Never was there such a triumphant début; and a peroration of genuine eloquence, because of genuine feeling, concluded amid the long and renewed cheers of all parties.
The t............