The Nabob [135]
I am sure that my torture makes half the pleasure of his life now. Every morning he comes forth from his wretched lodging with his dog, his folding- stool, his frightful music, and says to himself, 'Come, let us go and worry the Duc de Mora.' Not a day does he miss, the wretch! Why, see, if I were but to open the window a trifle, you would hear his deluge of little sharp notes above the noise of the water and the traffic. Well, this journalist of the /Messenger/, he is your clarinet; if you allow him to see that his music wearies you, he will never finish. And with this, my dear deputy, I will remind you that you have a meeting at three o'clock at the office, and I must send you back to the Chamber."
Then turning to Jenkins:
"You know what I asked of you, doctor--pearls for the day after to-morrow; and let them be extra strong!"
Jenkins started, shook himself as at the sudden awakening from a dream:
"Certainly, my dear duke. You shall be given some stamina--oh, yes; stamina, breath enough to win the great Derby stakes."
He bowed, and left the room laughing, the veritable laugh of a wolf showing its gleaming white teeth. The Nabob took leave in his turn, his heart filled with gratitude, but not daring to let anything of it appear in the presence of this sceptic in whom all demonstrativeness aroused distrust. And the Minister of State, left alone, rolled up in his wraps before the crackling and blazing fire, sheltered in the padded warmth of his luxury, doubled that day by the feverish caress of the May sunshine, began to shiver with cold again, to shiver so violently that Felicia's letter which he had reopened and was reading rapturously shook in his hands.
A deputy is in a very singular situation during the period which follows his election and precedes--as they say in parliamentary jargon --the verification of its validity. It is a little like the position of the newly married man during the twenty-four hours separating the civil marriage from its consecration by the Church. Rights of which he cannot avail himself, a half-happiness, a semi-authority, the embarrassment of keeping the balance a little on this side or on that, the lack of a defined footing. One is married and yet not married, a deputy and yet not perfectly sure of being it; only, for the deputy, this uncertainty is prolonged over days and weeks, and since the longer it lasts the more problematical does the validation become, it is like torture for the unfortunate representative on probation to be obliged to attend the Chamber, to occupy a place which he will perhaps not keep, to listen to discussions of which it is possible that he will never hear the end, to fix in his eyes and ears the delicious memory of parliamentary sittings with their sea of bald or apoplectic foreheads, their confused noise of rustling papers, the cries of attendants, wooden knives beating a tattoo on the tables, private conversations from amid which the voice of the orator issues, a thundering or timid solo with a continuous accompaniment.
This situation, at best so trying to the nerves, was complicated in the Nabob's case by these calumnies, at first whispered, now printed, circulated in thousands of copies by the newspapers, with the consequence that he found himself tacitly put in quarantine by his colleagues.
The first days he went and came in the corridors, the library, the dining-room, the lecture-hall, like the rest, delighted to roam through all the corners of that majestic labyrinth; but he was unknown to most of his associates, unacknowledged by a few members of the Rue Royale Club, who avoided him, detested by all the clerical party of which Le Merquier was the head. The financial set was hostile to this multi-millionaire, powerful in both "bull" and "bear" market, like those vessels of heavy tonnage which displace the water of a harbour, and thus his isolation only became the more marked by the change in his circumstances and the same enmity followed him everywhere.
His gestures, his manner, showed trace of it in a certain constraint, a sort of
Then turning to Jenkins:
"You know what I asked of you, doctor--pearls for the day after to-morrow; and let them be extra strong!"
Jenkins started, shook himself as at the sudden awakening from a dream:
"Certainly, my dear duke. You shall be given some stamina--oh, yes; stamina, breath enough to win the great Derby stakes."
He bowed, and left the room laughing, the veritable laugh of a wolf showing its gleaming white teeth. The Nabob took leave in his turn, his heart filled with gratitude, but not daring to let anything of it appear in the presence of this sceptic in whom all demonstrativeness aroused distrust. And the Minister of State, left alone, rolled up in his wraps before the crackling and blazing fire, sheltered in the padded warmth of his luxury, doubled that day by the feverish caress of the May sunshine, began to shiver with cold again, to shiver so violently that Felicia's letter which he had reopened and was reading rapturously shook in his hands.
A deputy is in a very singular situation during the period which follows his election and precedes--as they say in parliamentary jargon --the verification of its validity. It is a little like the position of the newly married man during the twenty-four hours separating the civil marriage from its consecration by the Church. Rights of which he cannot avail himself, a half-happiness, a semi-authority, the embarrassment of keeping the balance a little on this side or on that, the lack of a defined footing. One is married and yet not married, a deputy and yet not perfectly sure of being it; only, for the deputy, this uncertainty is prolonged over days and weeks, and since the longer it lasts the more problematical does the validation become, it is like torture for the unfortunate representative on probation to be obliged to attend the Chamber, to occupy a place which he will perhaps not keep, to listen to discussions of which it is possible that he will never hear the end, to fix in his eyes and ears the delicious memory of parliamentary sittings with their sea of bald or apoplectic foreheads, their confused noise of rustling papers, the cries of attendants, wooden knives beating a tattoo on the tables, private conversations from amid which the voice of the orator issues, a thundering or timid solo with a continuous accompaniment.
This situation, at best so trying to the nerves, was complicated in the Nabob's case by these calumnies, at first whispered, now printed, circulated in thousands of copies by the newspapers, with the consequence that he found himself tacitly put in quarantine by his colleagues.
The first days he went and came in the corridors, the library, the dining-room, the lecture-hall, like the rest, delighted to roam through all the corners of that majestic labyrinth; but he was unknown to most of his associates, unacknowledged by a few members of the Rue Royale Club, who avoided him, detested by all the clerical party of which Le Merquier was the head. The financial set was hostile to this multi-millionaire, powerful in both "bull" and "bear" market, like those vessels of heavy tonnage which displace the water of a harbour, and thus his isolation only became the more marked by the change in his circumstances and the same enmity followed him everywhere.
His gestures, his manner, showed trace of it in a certain constraint, a sort of