Читать книгу Patronage - Maria Edgeworth - Страница 14

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Little versed in the ways of courts or courtiers, Godfrey had been easily deceived by the apparent candour of Cunningham Falconer. The fact was, that Cunningham, not directly from himself, but by means of persons of whom Lord Oldborough could have no suspicion, had insinuated to his lordship that Godfrey Percy was the secret cause of the aversion Miss Hauton showed to the proposed match with the Marquis of Twickenham. This idea once suggested was easily confirmed by the account of the young lady’s behaviour at the opera, which was reported to Lord Oldborough with proper exaggerations, and with a total misrepresentation of Godfrey’s conduct. The fainting at the ball was also recollected, and many other little circumstances combined to bring conviction to Lord Oldborough’s mind. He was now persuaded that Major Gascoigne’s business was merely a pretence for Godfrey’s coming to town: apprehension of being disappointed in completing an alliance essential to his ambitious views, pique at the idea of being deceived, and nearly duped by a boy and girl, a rooted hatred and utter contempt for love and love affairs, altogether produced that change in Lord Oldborough’s manner towards Captain Percy which had appeared so extraordinary.—Had Captain Percy delayed to leave town, he would next day have received orders from his commanding officer to join his regiment. As to Major Gascoigne’s business, it had made so little impression upon Lord Oldborough, that he had totally forgotten the poor major’s name till Godfrey repeated it to him. Indeed, Godfrey himself could scarcely have blamed his lordship for this, had he known how much business, how many cares pressed at this time upon the mind of the unhappy statesman.—Besides a load of public business, and all the open and violent attacks of opposition, which he had usually to sustain, he was now under great and increasing anxiety from the discovery of that plot against him, among his immediate associates in office, which the Tourville papers, deciphered by Commissioner Falconer and Cunningham, had but partially revealed. Lord Oldborough was in the condition of a person apprised that he is standing upon ground that is undermined, but who does not know exactly by what hand or at what moment the train that may destroy him is to be set on fire. One word frequently recurred in the Tourville papers, which puzzled Commissioner Falconer extremely, and of which he was never able to make out the meaning; the word was Gassoc. It was used thus: “We are sorry to find that the Gassoc has not agreed to our proposal.”—“No answer has been given to question No. 2 by the Gassoc.”—“With regard to the subsidy, of which 35,000l. have not been sent or received, the Gassoc has never explained; in consequence, great discontents here.”—“If the Gassoc be finally determined against the Eagle, means must be taken to accomplish the purposes alluded to in paragraph 4, in green (of the 7th ult.), also those in No. B. in lemon juice (of September last).”—“The Gassoc will take notes of the mining tools forgotten—also bullets too large, and no flints (as per No. 9, in sympathetic ink)—also the sea charts, sent instead of maps—consequent delay in march of troops—loss of fortress—to be attributed to the Eagle.”

The Eagle, which at first had been taken for granted to be the Austrian eagle, was discovered to be Lord Oldborough. An eagle was his lordship’s crest, and the sea-charts, and the mining-tools, brought the sense home to him conclusively. It was plain that the Gassoc stood for some person who was inimical to Lord Oldborough, but who it could be was the question. Commissioner Falconer suggested, that for Gassoc, you should read Gosshawk; then, said he, “by finding what nobleman or gentleman has a gosshawk in his arms, you have the family name, and the individual is afterwards easily ascertained.” To the Heralds’-office the commissioner went a gosshawking, but after spending a whole day with the assistance of Garter king at arms, he could make nothing of his gosshawks, and he gave them up.

He next presumed that there might be a mistake of one letter in the foreign spelling of the word, and that Gassoc should be Cassock, and might then mean a certain bishop, who was known to be a particular enemy of Lord Oldborough. But still there were things ascribed to the Gassoc, which could not come within the jurisdiction or cognizance of the Cassock—and the commissioner was reluctantly obliged to give up the church. He next suggested, that not only one letter, but every letter in the word might be mistaken in the foreign spelling, and that Gassoc might be the French or German written imitation of the oral sound of some English proper name. The commissioner supported this opinion very plausibly by citing many instances of the barbarous spelling of English names by foreigners: Bassompierre writes Jorchaux for York-house, Innimthort for Kensington; even in the polite memoirs of le Comte de Grammont, we have Soutkask for Southesk, and Warméstre for some English name not yet deciphered. Upon this hint the commissioner and Cunningham made anagrams of half the noble names in England, but in vain.

Afterwards, recollecting that it was the fashion at one time even to pun in the coats of arms of the nobility, and in the choice of their mottos, he went to work again at the Heralds’-office, and tried a course of puns, but to no purpose: the commissioner was mortified to find all his ingenuity at fault.

Cunningham took care not to suggest anything, therefore he could never be convicted of mistake. Nor was he in the least vexed by his father’s or his own fruitless labour, because he thought it might tend to his future advancement.

Lord Oldborough had thrown out a hint that it would soon be necessary to recall the present and send a new envoy or resident to the German court in question; Cunningham nourished a hope of being chosen for this purpose, as the Tourville papers were already known to him, and he could, under private instructions, negotiate with M. de Tourville, and draw from him an explanation. He did not, however, trust even his father with the hope he had conceived, but relied on his own address, and continually strove, by oblique hints, to magnify the danger of leaving any part of the plot unravelled.

What effect these suggestions produced, or whether they produced any, Cunningham was unable to judge from the minister’s impenetrable countenance. Lord Oldborough lost not a moment in repairing the mistake about sea-charts, and the omission of mining tools, which he had discovered from a paragraph in the Tourville papers; he stayed not to inquire whether the error had been wilful or unintentional—that he left for future investigation. His next object was the subsidy. This day the Duke of Greenwich gave a cabinet dinner. After dinner, when the servants had retired, and when none of the company were prepared for such a stroke, Lord Oldborough, in his decided, but very calm manner, began with, “My lords, I must call your attention to an affair of some importance—the subsidy from the secret service to our German ally.”

All who had within them sins unwhipped of justice trembled.

“I have learned, no matter how,” continued Lord Oldborough, “that, by some strange mistake, 35,000l of that subsidy were not remitted at the time appointed by us, and that discontents, likely to be prejudicial to his majesty’s service, have arisen in consequence of this delay.”

His lordship paused, and appeared to take no notice of the faces of feigned astonishment and real consciousness by which he was surrounded. Each looked at the other to inquire by what means this secret was divulged, and to discover, if possible, how much more was known. Lord Skreene began at the same moment with the Duke of Greenwich to suggest that some clerk or agent must certainly be much to blame. Lord Oldborough, in his decided tone, replied that it was indifferent to him what clerk, agent, or principal was to blame in the business; but that if the money were not bonâ fide remitted, and acknowledged by the court to which it was promised, and before any disagreeable consequences should ensue, he must be under the necessity of stating the affair to his majesty—of resigning his office, and bringing the whole before parliament.

The terror of his voice, and lightning of his eye, the dread of his determined spirit, operated powerfully. The subsidy was remitted the next day, though at the expense of a service of plate which Lord Skreene had bespoken for his mistress, and though Secretary Cope was compelled to sell at some disadvantage a few of the very few remaining acres of his paternal estate, to make good what had been borrowed from the secret service money.

At the cabinet dinner, the keen eye of Lord Oldborough had discerned some displeasure lurking in the mind of the Duke of Greenwich—a man of considerable political consequence from his rank and connexions, and from the number of voices he could command or influence. Lord Oldborough knew that, if he could regain the duke, he could keep in awe his other enemies. His grace was a puzzle-headed, pompous fool, whom Heaven had cursed with the desire to be a statesman. He had not more than four ideas; but to those four, which he conceived to be his own, he was exclusively attached.—Yet a person of address and cunning could put things into his head, which after a time he would find there, believe to be his own, and which he would then propose as new with great solemnity, and support with much zeal. Lord Oldborough, however, was neither able nor willing to manage his grace in this manner; he was too imperious; his pride of character was at continual variance with the duke’s pride of rank. The duke’s was a sort of pride which Lord Oldborough did not always understand, and which, when he did, he despised—it was a species of pride that was perpetually taking offence at trifling failures in etiquette, of which Lord Oldborough, intent upon great objects, was sometimes guilty. There is a class of politicians who err by looking for causes in too high a sphere, and by attributing the changes which perplex states and monarchs to great passions and large motives. Lord Oldborough was one of this class, and with all his talents would have failed in every attempt to comprehend and conciliate the Duke of Greenwich, had he not been assisted by the inferior genius of Commissioner Falconer. While his lordship was thus searching far and wide among the reasonable and probable causes for the duke’s coldness, examining and re-examining the bearings of every political measure, as it could affect his grace’s interest immediately or remotely, Commissioner Falconer sought for the cause, and found it in the lowest scale of trifles—he made the discovery by means which Lord Oldborough could not have devised, and would not have used. The duke had a favourite under-clerk, who, for a valuable consideration, disclosed the secret to the commissioner. Lord Oldborough had sent his grace a note, written in his own hand, sealed with a wafer. The clerk, who was present when the note was received, said that the duke’s face flushed violently, and that he flung the note immediately to his secretary, exclaiming, “Open that, if you please, sir—I wonder how any man can have the impertinence to send me his spittle!”

This nice offence, which bore so coarse a comment, had alienated the mind of the Duke of Greenwich. When Commissioner Falconer had thus sagaciously discovered the cause of the noble duke’s displeasure, he with great address applied a remedy. Without ever hinting that he knew of the offensive circumstance, having some business to transact with the duke, he contrived, as if undesignedly, to turn the conversation upon his friend Lord Oldborough’s strange and unaccountable negligence of common forms and etiquette; as a proof of which he told the duke in confidence, and in a very low voice, an anecdote, which he heard from his son Cunningham, from Lord Oldborough’s own secretary, or the commissioner protested that he would not, he could not have believed it—his lordship had been once actually upon the point of sealing a note with a wafer to one of the royal dukes!—had the wafer absolutely on his lips, when Cunningham felt it his duty to take the liberty of remonstrating. Upon which, Lord Oldborough, as Commissioner Falconer said, looked with the utmost surprise, and replied, “I have sealed with a wafer to the Duke of Greenwich, and he was not offended.”

This anecdote, the truth of which it fortunately never occurred to the duke to doubt, had an immediate and powerful effect upon his mind, as the commissioner saw by the complacent smile that played on his countenance, and still further by the condescending pity with which his grace observed, that “Great geniuses never understand common things—but do every thing awkwardly, whether they cut open a book, or seal a note.”

Mr. Falconer having thus brought the duke into fine temper, left him in the best dispositions possible towards Lord Oldborough, went to his lordship to report progress, and to boast of his success; but he told only as much of what had passed as he thought would suit the statesman’s character, and ensure his approbation.—The Duke of Greenwich was as much pleased by this reconciliation as Lord Oldborough; for, though in a fit of offended pride he had been so rash as to join his lordship’s enemies, yet he had always dreaded coming to open war with such an adversary. His grace felt infinitely more safe and comfortable when he was leaning upon Lord Oldborough than when he stood opposed to him, even in secret. There were points in politics in which he and Lord Oldborough coincided, though they had arrived at these by far different roads. They agreed in an overweening love of aristocracy, and in an inclination towards arbitrary power; they agreed in a hatred of innovation; they agreed in the principle that free discussion should be discouraged, and that the country should be governed with a high and strong hand. On these principles Lord Oldborough always acted, but seldom spoke, and the Duke of Greenwich continually talked, but seldom acted: in fact, his grace, “though he roared so loud, and looked so wondrous grim,” was, in action, afraid of every shadow. Right glad was he to have his political vaunts made good by a coadjutor of commanding talents, resource, and civil courage. Yet, as Lord Oldborough observed, with a man of such wayward pride and weak understanding, there was no security from day to day for the permanence of his attachment. It was then that Commissioner Falconer, ever ready at expedients, suggested that an alliance between his grace’s family and his lordship’s would be the best possible security; and that the alliance might be easily effected, since it was evident of late that the Marquis of Twickenham was much disposed to admire the charms of his lordship’s niece, Miss Hauton. Lord Oldborough had not remarked that the marquis admired any thing but good wine; his lordship’s attention was not turned to these things, nor had he, in general, much faith in friendships founded on family alliances; but he observed that the duke was peculiarly tenacious of connexions and relationships, and, therefore, this might be the best method of holding him.

From the moment Lord Oldborough decided in favour of this scheme, Mr. and Mrs. Falconer had done all in their power, with the utmost zeal and address, to forward it, by contriving continual dancing-parties and musical meetings, at their house, for the young people. Lady Oldborough, who was sickly, whose manners were not popular, and who could not bear to be put out of her way, was quite unsuited to this sort of business, and rejoiced that the Falconers took it off her hands. Things were just in this state, and Lord Oldborough had fixed his mind upon the match, when Godfrey Percy’s arrival in town had threatened disappointment. In consequence of this fear, Lord Oldborough not only despatched Godfrey directly to his regiment, but, to put an end to the danger at once, to banish the idea of seeing him again completely out of the young lady’s head, the cruel uncle and decided politician had Godfrey’s regiment ordered immediately to the West Indies.