The Bramleighs of Bishop's Folly Part 20

Though a man of several clubs, his Lords.h.i.+p's favorite haunt was a small unimposing-looking house close to St. James's Square, called the "Plenipo." Its members were all diplomatists, nothing below the head of a mission being eligible for ballot. A Masonic mystery pervaded all the doings of that austere temple, whose dinners were reported to be exquisite, and whose cellar had such a fame that "Plenipo Lafitte" had a European reputation.

Now, veteran asylums have many things recommendatory about them, but from Greenwich and the Invalides downwards there is one especial vice that clings to them--they are haunts of everlasting complaint. The men who frequent them all belong to the past, their sympathies, their a.s.sociations, their triumphs and successes, all pertain to the bygone.

Harping eternally over the frivolity, the emptiness, and sometimes the vulgarity of the present, they urge each other on to most exaggerated notions of the time when they were young, and a deprecatory estimate of the world then around them.

It is not alone that the days of good dinners and good conversation have pa.s.sed away, but even good manners have gone, and more strangely too, good looks. "I protest you don't see such women now"--one of these bewigged and rouged old debauchees would say, as he gazed at the slow procession moving on to a drawing-room, and his compeers would concur with him, and wonderingly declare that the thing was inexplicable.

In the sombre-looking breakfast-room of this austere temple, Lord Culduff sat reading the "Times." A mild, soft rain was falling without; the water dripping tepid and dirty through the heavy canopy of a London fog; and a large coal fire blazed within--that fierce furnace which seems so congenial to English taste; not impossibly because it recalls the factory and the smelting-house--the "sacred fire" that seems to inspire patriotism by the suggestion of industry.

Two or three others sat at tables through the room, all so wonderfully alike in dress, feature, and general appearance, that they almost seemed reproductions of the same figure by a series of mirrors; but they were priests of the same "caste," whose forms of thought and expression were precisely the same; and thus as they dropped their scant remarks on the topics of the day, there was not an observation or a phrase of one that might not have fallen from any of the others.

"So," cried one, "they 're going to send the Grand Cross to the Duke of Hochmaringen. That will be a special mission. I wonder who 'll get it?"

"Cloudesley, I'd say," observed another; "he's always on the watch for anything that comes into the 'extraordinaries.'"

"It will not be Cloudesley," said a third. "He stayed away a year and eight months when they sent him to Tripoli, and there was a rare jaw about it for the estimates."

"Hochmaringen is near Baden, and not a bad place for the summer," said Culduff. "The d.u.c.h.ess, I think, was daughter of the margravine."

"Niece, not daughter," said a stern-looking man, who never turned his eyes from his newspaper.

"Niece or daughter, it matters little which," said Culduff, irritated at correction on such a point.

"I protest I 'd rather take a turn in South Africa," cried another, "than accept one of those missions to Central Germany."

"You 're right, Upton," said a voice from the end of the room; "the cookery is insufferable."

"And the hours. You retire to bed at ten."

"And the ceremonial. Blounte never threw off the lumbago he got from bowing at the court of Bratensdorf."

"They 're ign.o.ble sort of things, at the best, and should never be imposed on diplomatic men. These invest.i.tures should always be entrusted to court functionaries," said Culduff, haughtily. "If I were at the head of F. O., I'd refuse to charge one of the 'line' with such a mission."

And now something that almost verged on an animated discussion ensued as to what was and what was not the real province of diplomacy; a majority inclining to the opinion that it was derogatory to the high dignity of the calling to meddle with what, at best, was the function of the mere courtier.

"Is that Culduff driving away in that cab?" cried one, as he stood at the window.

"He has carried away my hat, I see, by mistake," said another. "What is he up to at this hour of the morning?"

"I think I can guess," said the grim individual who had corrected him in the matter of genealogy; "he's off to F. O. to ask for the special mission he has just declared that none of us should stoop to accept."

"You 've hit it, Grindesley," cried another. "I 'll wager a pony you 're right."

"It's so like him."

"After all, it's the sort of thing he's best up to. La Ferronaye told me he was the best master of the ceremonies in Europe."

"Why come amongst us at all, then? Why not get himself made a gold-stick, and follow the instincts of his genius?"

"Well, I believe he wants it badly," said one who affected a tone of half kindliness. "They tell me he has not eight hundred a year left him."

"Not four. I doubt if he could lay claim to three."

"He never had in his best day above four or five thousand, though he tells you of his twenty-seven or twenty-eight."

"He had originally about six; but he always lived at the rate of twelve or fifteen, and in mere ostentation too."

"So I 've always heard." And then there followed a number of little anecdotes of Culduff's selfishness, his avarice, his meanness, and such like, told with such exact.i.tude as to show that every act of these men's lives was scrupulously watched, and when occasion offered mercilessly recorded.

While they thus sat in judgment over him, Lord Culduff himself was seated at a fire in a dingy old room in Downing Street, the Chief Secretary for Foreign Affairs opposite him. They were talking in a tone of easy familiarity, as men might who occupied the same social station, a certain air of superiority, however, being always apparent in the manner of the Minister towards the subordinate.

"I don't think you can ask for this, Culduff," said the great man, as he puffed his cigar tranquilly in front of him. "You've had three of these special missions already."

"And for the simple reason that I was the one man in England who knew how to do them."

"We don't dispute the way you did them; we only say all the prizes in the wheel should not fall to the same man."

"You have had my proxy for the last five years."

"And we have acknowledged the support--acknowledged it by more than professions."

"I can only say this, that if I had been with the other side, I 'd have met somewhat different treatment."

"Don't believe it, Culduff. Every party that is in power inherits its share of obligations. We have never disowned those we owe to you."

"And why am I refused this, then?"

"If you wanted other reasons than those I have given you, I might be able to adduce them--not willingly indeed--but under pressure, and especially in strict confidence." "Reasons against my having the mission?"

"Reasons against your having the mission."

"You amaze me, my Lord. I almost doubt that I have heard you aright I must, however, insist on your explaining yourself. Am I to understand that there are personal grounds of unfitness?"

The other bowed in a.s.sent.

"Have the kindness to let me know them."

"First of all, Culduff, this is to be a family mission--the d.u.c.h.ess is a connection of our own royal house--and a certain degree of display and consequent expense will be required. Your fortune does not admit of this."

"Push on to the more cogent reason, my Lord," said Culduff, stiffly.

"Here, then, is the more cogent reason. The court has not forgotten--what possibly the world may have forgotten--some of those pa.s.sages in your life for which you, perhaps, have no other remorse than that they are not likely to recur; and as you have given no hostages for good behavior, in the shape of a wife, the court, I say, is sure to veto your appointment. You see it all as clearly as I do."

"So far as I do see," said Culduff, slowly: "the first objection is my want of fortune, the second, my want of a wife?"

"Exactly so."

"Well, my Lord, I am able to meet each of these obstacles; my agent has just discovered coal on one of my Irish estates, and I am now in town to make arrangements on a large scale to develop the source of wealth.

As to the second disability, I shall pledge myself to present the Viscountess Culduff at the next drawing-room."