第26章 MADAME NOVIKOFF(5)

"MISS O. Well, certainly I did my best; but I fear I have ruined the political reputation of my English partizans, for in order to make them 'beloved of the Slave,' I of course had to make them, poor souls! go against their own country; and their country, stupid as it is, has now I fear found them out.

"G.TANT PIS POUR EUX!ENTRE NOUS, if I had beenGladstone, I should have preferred the love of my own country to the love of these - Slaves of yours. But, tell me, how did you get hold of Gladstone?

"MISS O. RIEN DE PLUS SIMPLE! Four or five years ago I asked what was his weak point, and was told that he had two, 'Effervescence,' and 'Theology.' With that knowledge I found it all child's play to manage him. I just sent him to Munich, and there boiled him up in a weak decoction of 'Filioque,' then kept him ready for use, and impatiently awaited the moment when our plans for getting up the 'Bulgarian atrocities' should be mature. I say 'impatiently,' for, Heavens, how slow you all were! at least so it strikes a woman.The arrangement of the 'atrocities' was begun by our people in 1871, and yet till 1876, though I had Gladstone ready in 1875, nothing really was done! I assure you, Prince, it is a trying thing to a woman to be kept waiting for promised atrocities such an unconscionable time.

"G. That brother-in-law of yours was partly the cause of our slowness. He was always wanting to have the orders for fire and blood in neat formal despatches, signed by me, and copied by clerks. However, I hope you are satisfied now, with the butcheries and the flames, and the - ?

"MISS O.POUR LE MOMENT!"

She is absent during the sudden dissolution of Parliament in 1874. "London woke yesterday morning and found that your friend Gladstone had made a COUP-D'ETAT. He has dissolved Parliament at a moment when no human being expected it, and my impression is that he has made a good hit, and that the renovated Parliament will give him a great majority." The impression was wildly wrong; and he found a cause for the Conservative majority in Gladstone's tame foreign policy, andespecially in the pusillanimity his government showed when insulted by Gortschakoff. He always does justice to her influence with Gladstone; his great majority at the polls in 1880 is HER victory and HER triumph; but his Turkophobia is no less her creation: "England is stricken with incapacity because you have stirred up the seething caldron that boils under Gladstone's skull, putting in diabolical charms and poisons of theology to overturn the structure of English polity:" she will be able, he thinks, to tell her government that Gladstone is doing his best to break up the British Empire.

He quotes with approbation the newspaper comparison of her to the Princess Lieven. She disparages the famous ambassadress; he sets her right. Let her read the "Correspondence," by his friend Mr. Guy Le Strange, and she will see how large a part the Princess played in keeping England quiet during the war of 1828-29. She did not convert her austere admirer, Lord Grey, to approval of the Russian designs, nor overcome the uneasiness with which the Duke of Wellington regarded her intrigues; but the Foreign Minister, Lord Aberdeen, was apparently a fool in her hands; and, whoever had the merit, the neutrality of England continued. That was, he repeats more than once, a most critical time for Russia; it was an object almost of life and death to the Czar to keep England dawdling in a state of actual though not avowed neutrality. It is, he argued, a matter of fact, that precisely this result was attained, and "I shall be slow to believe that Madame de Lieven did not deserve a great share of the glory (as you would think it) of making England act weakly under such circumstances; more especially since we know that the Duke did not like the great lady, and may be supposed to have distinctly traced his painful embarrassment to her power." So the letters go, interspersed with news, with criticisms of notable persons, with comments enlightening or cynical on passing political events: with personal matters only now and then; as when he notes the loss of his two sisters; dwells with unwonted feeling on the death of his eldest nephew by consumption; condoles with her on her husband's illness; gives council, wise or playful, as to the education of her son. "I am glad to hear that he is good at Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, for that shows hiscleverness; glad also to hear that he is occasionally naughty, for that shows his force. I advise you to claim and exercise as much control as possible, because I am certain that a woman - especially so gifted a one as you - knows more, or rather feels more, about the right way of bringing up a boy than any mere man."Unbrokenly the correspondence continues: the intimacy added charm, interest, fragrance to his life, brought out in him all that was genial, playful, humorous. He fights the admonitions of coming weakness; goes to Sidmouth with a sore throat, but takes his papers and his books. It is, he says, a deserted little sea-coast place. "Mrs. Grundy has a small house there, but she does not know me by sight. If Madame Novikoff were to come, the astonished little town, dazzled first by her, would find itself invaded by theologians, bishops, ambassadors of deceased emperors, and an ex- Prime-Minister." But as time goes on he speaks more often of hissuffering throat; of gout, increasing deafness, only half a voice: his last letter is written in July, 1890, to condole with his friend upon her husband's death. In October his nurse takes the pen; Madame Novikoff comes back hurriedly from Scotland to find him in his last illness. "It is very nice," he told his nurse, "to see dear Madame Novikoff again, but I am going down hill fast, and cannot hope to be well enough to see much of her." This is in November, 1890; on New Year's Eve came the inexorable, "Terminator of delights and Separator of friends."