And yet he was so wrong! The trial had been no failure.The thing had been done and well done, and had succeeded.Was failure to be presumed because one impertinent puppy had found his way into the house? And then to abandon the system at once, whether it had failed or whether it had succeeded, would be to call the attention of all the world to an acknowledged failure,--to a failure so disreputable that its acknowledgement must lead to the loss of everything! It was known now,--so argued the Duchess to herself,--that she had devoted herself to the work of cementing and consolidating the Coalition by the graceful hospitality which the wealth of herself and her husband enabled her to dispense.She had made herself a Prime Ministress by the manner in which she opened her saloons, her banqueting halls, and her gardens.It had never been done before, and now it had been well done.There had been no failure.And yet everything was to be broken down because his nerves had received a shock!
'Let it die out,' Mrs Finn had said.'The people will come here and will go away, and then, when you are up in London, you will soon fall into your old ways.' But this did not suit the new ambition of the Duchess.She had so fed her mind with daring hopes that she could not bear that it 'should die out'.She had arranged a course of things in her own mind by which she should come to be known as the great Prime Minister's wife, and she had, perhaps unconsciously, applied the epithet more to herself than to her husband.She, too, wished to be written of in memoirs, and to make a niche for herself in history.And now she was told that she was to let it 'die out'.
'I suppose he is a little bilious,' Barrington Erle had said.
'Don't you think he'll forget about it when he gets up to London?' The Duchess was sure that her husband would not forget anything.He never did forget anything.'I want him to be told,' said the Duchess, 'that everybody thinks he is doing very well.I don't mean about politics exactly, but as to keeping the party together.Don't you think that we have succeeded?'
Barrington Erle thought upon the whole they had succeeded; but suggested at the same time that there were seeds of weakness.
'Sir Orlando and Sir Timothy Beeswax are not sound, you know,'
said Barrington Erle.'He can't make them sounder by shutting himself up like a hermit,' said the Duchess.Barrington Erle, who had peculiar privileges of his own, promised that if he could by any means make an occasion, he would let the Duke know that their side of the Coalition was more than contented with the way in which he did his work.
'You don't think we've made a mess of it?' said the Duchess to Phineas, asking him a question.'I don't think that the Duke has made a mess of it,--or you,' said Phineas, who had come to love the Duchess because his wife loved her.'But it won't go on for ever, Duchess.' 'You know what I have done,' said the Duchess, who took it for granted that Mr Finn knew all that his wife knew.
