The Child to Come

The Great Western came into New York on the Friday morning, fourteen days from Bristol, with the London papers to the fourth of June; and by Saturday breakfast they were on the table at Mrs Arguelles’s, among the coffee-cups, still smelling of the railway.

It had rained in the night, hard, the third night running, and stopped at dawn; and the heat had come up out of the wet ground as it did in New Westminster in June, so that by eight o’clock the whole city lay in a warm steam like a laundry, and the shutters were closed on the street side, and the six of them sat in the brown half-light of the dining room in their shirt-sleeves, with the flies. Stanly read the news. He read it standing at the window, where a crack of the shutter let in enough light to read by, holding the paper up to it; and the others ate, and listened, and Clay took snuff and watched their faces, which was his way of reading a newspaper.

There was a great deal about the Chartists, and a great deal about China. There was a new ship of a hundred and twenty guns to be launched at Woolwich, the largest in the navy, and Crabb of Alabama, who liked a large thing, made Stanly read that twice. There was the trial of the Swiss valet who had cut his master’s throat in his bed, which was to come on in June; and there was a piece of plate that the Queen and the Prince had given to Lord Melbourne, a centre for his dinner table, with an inscription that Stanly read out in his best voice: Presented to Viscount Melbourne, as a token of regard, by Victoria R. and Albert.

“And Albert,” said Crabb. “Like a man signing for his wife at the bank.”

Then Stanly read them the Prince at Exeter Hall.

He had taken the chair, on the first of June, at a great meeting for the extinction of the slave trade, and made a speech; the paper gave it, with the cheering marked in its places, as the London papers did. Stanly read it straight through, in a voice that he made, without quite intending to, a little foreign. I deeply regret that the exertions which have heretofore been made by civilized Europe to abolish the dreadful traffic in human beings have failed of success. Loud cheers. I therefore trust that this great country will not relax its efforts until it shall have put an end, finally and forever, to this trade, which is so repugnant to the spirit of Christianity and to the best feelings of our nature. Loud cheers. Let us then hope that Divine Providence will prosper our holy cause, and that under the auspices of our queen (tremendous cheering) and parliament, we shall, at no distant period, be enabled to accomplish this great object for which we have this day met.

His royal highness delivered this address with a slight foreign accent, and in a manner remarkably simple and unaffected.

There was a short silence round the table. Somebody’s knife scraped a plate.

“Exeter Hall,” said a member from Georgia at the end of the table, who was new that session, and still said what he thought. “The Queen’s husband, in Exeter Hall, with the Quakers and the Clapham men. I call that a very pretty thing to read at breakfast.”

“Read it again,” said Clay.

Stanly looked at him, and read it again; and Clay sat back with his snuffbox open in his hand and listened to it a second time, as he would have listened to a speech in the House by a man whose vote he did not yet know, for what was not in it.

It was not long. It said civilized Europe, and this great country. It said the slave trade, and the traffic, and the trade, and never once the other word. It did not say America. It did not say the West Indies either, though the Queen had freed her slaves there two summers ago and might have been forgiven for mentioning it; nor Cuba, nor Brazil, nor the Spanish flag, nor anybody’s flag at all; and it did not say a single thing that a member of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of America could stand up and quote against the Queen’s husband in a debate. Clay, who had written a good many speeches in his time for men who had to stand before a meeting and say nothing dangerous at length, recognised the work, and admired it, and wondered whose it was.

“He has been well advised,” he said. “Or he has a head on him. Either way, I would not quarrel with it. He said the trade, my friend. Not one word more. There is not a sentence in it we could not stand up and cheer ourselves, and very likely we should.”

“We put down the trade in ‘seven,” Stanly said.

“So we did. So we did. Read us something cheerful.”

---

What Stanly read them next was a paragraph from a London weekly, copied into the Liverpool paper, about the necessity of passing a regency bill before the end of the session; and he read it slowly, because it was written in the London manner, which went round a thing three times before it lay down.

The country may look shortly for the announcement of this measure, which will probably be the first official communication of another very interesting event. That was the Queen’s condition, and the table understood it, and Crabb grinned. The necessity of providing for all possible contingencies where queens are concerned is one of the unpleasant distinctions rendered indispensable by their position. We wish to anticipate nothing but what is most cheerful and gratifying in Her Majesty’s present prospects; but it is possible that the country might be left with an infant heir to the crown, deprived of its natural protectress at the moment of its birth.

“They are making ready for her dying,” said Crabb.

“They are making ready for the child,” said Clay. “It is the same act, and a good deal more cheerful, put that way. When a queen is brought to bed, Crabb, there are always two lives in the room, and Parliament must think of both, and it would be very odd if it did not. She will be brought to bed in the winter, and be delivered, and get up again, and they will have passed their bill for nothing, as Parliaments generally do, and nobody will ever look at it again.”

“And if they pass one,” said Crabb, who never let a thing go once he had his teeth in it, “must we?”

The table looked at Clay.

It was a fair question, and he had known since the second paragraph that somebody would ask it, and had been considering, while Stanly read, how to put it away. The Charter said nothing about a regency, because the men who wrote it in Philadelphia had been too busy with everything else to think of it, and too delicate, perhaps, to think of a king’s death on paper while they were still making terms with the king. There was one Regency Act on the books of the Union, and Clay could have told them its date without looking, because it had been passed in the year he was first made Speaker: the Act of 1811, made in a hurry for poor old King George when he lost his wits for the last time, alongside the British one. It said a great deal about a King who could not govern, and nothing whatever about a baby.

“We have a Regency Act already,” he said, “which was made for a mad old man and says nothing of infants, and it has done very well for thirty years by not being needed. If the London Parliament passes a bill for the Prince, I dare say somebody will tell this House that it ought to pass one too, and I dare say he will be right, and I dare say he will tell us in December.” He shut the snuffbox. “I do not propose to make the Prince a regent of America in the last three weeks of a session, Crabb, for a child that is not yet born, of a Queen who is twenty-one and in excellent health and has, so far as I know, no intention of dying. Let the child be born first. Then we will see what it needs.”

“And if it doesn’t come to that,” said Crabb, “we never need see at all.”

“That is very often the case,” said Clay, “with the things this House is asked to see. Stanly, what else?”

Stanly found the place, and read them the Derby.

---

It was the last three weeks of the session, and the heat lay on the city like a hand.

It was not the dry heat of Kentucky, which Clay could bear, but the wet heat of the Potomac, which came up out of the marshes at the foot of the Axis and the canal and the low ground by the old port town, and lay in the streets at night and would not lift; and the members bore it as members did every summer, badly, and longed to be gone. They had been sitting since the first week in December. They were tired, and short-tempered, and homesick, and frightened of the fevers that came in August, and every one of them had something he wanted passed before the House rose and something he wanted stopped; and it was in these weeks, Clay had always found, that the real business of a session was done, because men who wanted to go home would agree to almost anything that let them.

He did it at the breakfast tables. He did it at dinner, and over the whist, and on the steps of Parliament House in the evening, and walking down the Axis in the dusk with a member on either arm. He had a bank bill that had come back from the Lords with its best clause taken out, and he wanted it put back, and knew that it would not be; so he set about finding out what the Lords would take instead, and letting it be known in the Commons that this was what he had wanted all along. He had a tariff schedule that the members from the cotton country could not stomach and the members from the iron country could not do without, and he spent three evenings at three different boarding houses finding a sentence that both could read as a victory. He had a deficit at the Exchequer that the Chancellor would have to own to before the end of the session, and that the Popular Democrats would make a great deal of when he did, and he spent an evening in the Chancellor’s house next to Charter House arranging how the owning was to be done, and on which day, and in what words, so that there should be as little as possible for them to make anything of.

It was the work he was best at in the world. He had once heard himself described in the House, by a Popular Democrat who meant it unkindly, as a man who could read the Commons as a river pilot reads the water; and he had taken it as the only compliment that member had ever paid anybody, and had thanked him for it, which had annoyed him very much.

In the evenings, when the House rose, they played whist at Mrs Arguelles’s with the windows open on the garden and the Madeira on the side table, Clay and Stanly against Crabb and the Georgian, for a pound the rubber, because Clay would not play for less and the Georgian could not afford more. Clay played well and talked through it, which the Georgian thought unfair and the others had stopped noticing. Charles brought the candles at nine. The moths came in at the window to them, and the mocking-birds sang in the dark in the yard of the house behind, and the frogs answered from the canal, and somewhere down the hill towards the river a fiddle was playing, as it played every night, the same three tunes.

The member from the Western Reserve had had his day after Easter, as Clay had promised him in March, for his motion against the slave trade in the District; and the House had heard him out with perfect courtesy and rejected his motion by eighty-one votes, as Clay had known it would, and the market under the windows of Parliament House had gone on exactly as before, as Clay had also known. The member had come to Clay afterwards in the lobby, and thanked him for keeping his word, which had made Clay more uncomfortable than anything else that had happened that session. He did not care to be thanked for things of that kind. He had kept his word because he always kept it; it was the only capital a man in his position had. What the member had got for it was a day, and a division, and his name in the Votes, and the market went on.

There had been, too, a note from Government House.

It had come up from the Executive Quarter the week before last, sent on from his own office, where it had been lying for some days among the things that could wait: three lines in the Governor-General’s daughter-in-law’s hand, signed in the old man’s own with his left, in letters an inch high. The Governor-General was not aware of any rule, and could not discover any precedent, that settled whether the Imaum of Muscat’s presents, now lodged at Columbia Palace, belonged to the Queen as a lady’s presents belonged to her, or to the Crown, or to the Union; and he would be obliged if Her Majesty’s ministers would advise him upon it before the House disposed of anything.

Clay had read it twice, and smiled, and put it back on the pile.

It was exactly like Adams. Five men in the Union might have seen that the House’s little resolution about the pearls was a question about the Crown, and four of them would have said nothing, because it was June. Adams had seen it, and written it down, and sent it up the hill to be answered; and the answer, as Clay perfectly understood, was that the ministry had better have one before the Commons gave the Queen’s pearls to two orphan asylums by a majority of eleven on a Thursday afternoon. Clay had no answer. He did not want one. A question that had lain unasked for fifty years would lie for six months more without spoiling, and in six months it would be December, and the Imaum would have forgotten he had sent them.

He had written back, in his own hand, very civilly, that Her Majesty’s ministers would give the point their most careful consideration; and he had sent word to the chairman of the committee that the ministry would be glad to see the resolution stay with the committee until the House rose. Whether it would stay there was another matter. Committees in the last three weeks of a session did very much as they pleased.

---

The Virginia members gave him a dinner on the Saturday, the twenty-seventh, at the hotel on the Avenue below the Hill.

It was Wise of Accomack’s notion. Wise was thirty-three, and thin, and quick, and loud, and loved Clay this summer with the whole of his heart, as he generally loved somebody, and had decided that the Prime Minister ought to be dined by the members of the province where he was born before the House rose; and since nobody could think of a reason against it except the heat, which was not a reason anybody in Virginia had ever let stand in the way of a dinner, it was done. There were sixty of them at three long tables in the long room upstairs, with the windows open on the Avenue and the lamps lit and every man in a black coat and a white waistcoat and wet through by the soup. There was turtle, and a saddle of mutton, and Smithfield ham, and the canvas-backs were out of season, and Wise apologised for them in his speech as if he had personally failed to shoot them.

There were the toasts, as there always were. There were seventeen of them. They drank the Union, and the Charter, and the Commons, and the memory of Washington; they drank the Province of Virginia, and the city of Richmond, and the Prime Minister’s health, standing, with three times three, and Wise’s voice cracking on the third; and they drank the County of Hanover, which was where Clay had been born, in a house on the edge of the Slashes, in the war, to a Baptist preacher who had died when he was four.

He got up to answer it. He had not meant to say very much. He found, when he was on his feet, with the lamps hot over the tables and the sixty faces turned up to him, wet and red and fond, that he wanted to say something true, which he did not often find at dinners; and he said, in the low voice that he kept for the end of a speech and used now at the beginning, that he had not been back to the county of his birth for a great many years, and that he did not know when he would go back now, or whether; but that he could still see, if he shut his eyes, the streams in which he had bathed as a boy, and the springs at which he had drunk, and the piney fields, and the old mill on the creek where he had been sent with the corn; and that a man who had spent his life in public places, among people who wanted things of him, was glad to be reminded, once in a long while, of a place that wanted nothing of him at all.

They cheered him till the glasses rang. Wise wept. Clay sat down, and took snuff, and was very much moved, and despised himself a little for it, and ate a strawberry.

Then Wise got up again, with his glass, and called for silence, and gave them the Queen.

They rose for it, all of them, with a great scraping of chairs on the boards, and stood with their glasses up, sixty Virginians in black coats in the lamplight; and Clay, who was standing at Wise’s right hand, with the heat on his face and the noise of the Avenue coming up through the open windows, thought how odd it was, and how ordinary, that sixty men from the oldest province in America, who had fought her grandfather for four years in their grandfathers’ time, and beaten him, and made a Charter out of the beating, should stand up in a hotel in New Westminster on a June night to drink the health of a girl in London whom not one of them had ever seen. They did it every year. They did it at every dinner in the Union. They had done it for her uncles, and for the old mad King, her grandfather, before them, and it meant something, though Clay could not have told any of them what, and would not have tried; and he drank, with the rest, and was glad of it.

He did not sit down. He put up his hand, as they were sitting, and they stopped, and looked at him, and the room went quiet again.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I will add something to that, by the chairman’s leave, if he will not think it a liberty. The London papers by the last steamer have been telling us, in the very proper language which the London papers keep for these things, that the Queen is in what they call an interesting situation; and I think we may take it, now, as settled. I give you the Queen again, gentlemen. And the child to come.”

They liked that. They roared, and drank it, standing; and somebody at the far table called out the Duke of Virginia!, and somebody else or the Princess!, and there was laughing, and the toast went round again in pieces, the child!, the child to come!, until Wise beat on the table with a spoon. Clay sat down, and Crabb, two places off, leant across the Georgian and said in his ear, under the noise, “And one more life between us and Cumberland,” and Clay said, “Hush,” and then, because it was true, “Yes.”

They drank eleven more toasts after that. The last was to the ladies, whose health was drunk with great feeling by sixty men not one of whom had his wife within two hundred miles; and at a quarter to one they went down into the Avenue in a body, singing, and broke up there, under the trees, in the dark, with the heat still coming up off the stones.

---

He walked home with Stanly and Crabb, slowly, up the long slope towards Charter Hill, with Parliament House pale on its hill over the roofs ahead of them and a few lamps still burning in the boarding houses. The others went in. Clay stood for a while on the step, in the warm dark, with the fireflies going on and off in Mrs Arguelles’s garden, and his own heart going rather fast from the wine and the stairs, as it did now, at sixty-three, when he let it; and then he went up, and found Charles asleep in the chair outside his door, and woke him, and sent him to bed, and lit his own candle, and sat down in his shirt-sleeves to write to his wife.

My dear Lucretia,

We rise on the twenty-first, God willing, and I shall be with you by the middle of August, if the Lords and the roads allow. The heat here is very great, and the whole House is sick of itself, and I do not blame it.

The Virginians gave me a dinner tonight, sixty of them, very handsome, with Wise in the chair and in tears, and I made them a speech about Hanover County which I believe was the best I have made this year, because I meant it. I spoke of the mill. You will say I am getting old. I am.

The London papers say the Queen is with child and will be brought to bed in the winter, and the whole city has drunk her health and that of the child to come, and I with them. I thought of our own, which I do not often let myself do at dinners. Kiss Julia’s little ones for their grandfather, and tell them I am bringing each of them something from the city; and tell Henry I have his letter and will answer it from home.

Your affectionate husband,

H. Clay.

He read it over, and sealed it, and put out the candle, and lay on his bed in the dark without undressing, with the window open, listening to the frogs; and he thought, as he lay there, about the Queen, which he did not often do, because there was seldom any reason to. Twenty-one, and four months married, and with child, and the whole of her life and her reign in front of her, and the old man in Hanover sixty-nine and in nobody’s way. He thought that it was the best news the Union had had from London in a long time, and very likely the best it would have this year; and that whatever else happened in the next three weeks, he had at least done one thing at that dinner that nobody would ever be able to use against him; and he turned on his side, in the heat, and slept.