Читать книгу Dr. Wainwright's Patient. A Novel онлайн

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And the prayer of these great creatures was, to a large extent, answered. Most of the men in the Stannaries Office were pleasant, agreeable, sufficiently educated, well-dressed, and gentlemanly-mannered. Within the previous few years there had been a Scotch and an Irish Lord Commissioner, and each of them had left traces of his patronage in the office: the first in the importation of two or three grave men, who, not finding work enough to do, filled up their leisure by reading statistics, or working out mathematical problems; the last, by the appointment of half-a-dozen roistering blades, who did very little of the work there was to do, and required the help of a Maunders' "Treasury of Knowledge," subscribed for amongst them, to enable them to do what they did; but who were such good riders and such first-rate convivialists that they were found in mounts and supper-parties for two-thirds of the year. The Irish element was, however, decidedly unpopular with Mr. Branwhite, the secretary, a cold-blooded, fish-like man, dry and tasteless, like a human captain's biscuit, who had no animal spirits himself, and consequently hated them in others. He was a long, thin, melancholy-looking fiddle-faced sort of a man, who tried to hide his want of manner under an assumed brusquerie and bluntness of speech. He had been originally brought up as a barrister, and owed his present appointment to the fact of his having a very pretty wife, who attracted the senile attentions and won the flagging heart of the Earl of Lechmere, who happened to be Lord Commissioner of the Stannaries when Sir Francis Pongo died, after forty years' tenure of the secretaryship. Lord Lechmere having, when he called at Mrs. Branwhite's pretty villa in the Old Brompton lanes, been frequently embarrassed by the presence of Mr. Branwhite, that gentleman's barristerial practice being not sufficient to take him often to the single chamber which he rented in Quality Court, Chancery Lane, thought this a favourable opportunity to improve the Branwhite finances, in this instance at least without cost to himself, and of assuring himself of Mr. Branwhite's necessitated absence from the Old Brompton villa during certain periods of the day. Hence Mr. Branwhite's appointment as secretary to H.M. Stannaries. There was a row about it, of course. Why did not the promotion "go in the office"? That is what the Stannaries men wanted to know, and what they threatened to get several members of Parliament to inquire of the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, who replied on Stannaries matters in the Lower House. The Official Chronicle, that erudite and uncompromising advocate of the Government service, came out with a series of letters signed "Eraser," "Half-margin," and "Nunquam Dormio;" and a leader in which Lord Lechmere was compared to King David, and Mr. Branwhite to Uriah the Hittite, the parallel in the latter case being heightened by the writer's suggestion that each had been selected "for a very warm berth." But the authorities cared neither for official remonstrances nor press sarcasms. They had their answer to the question why the promotion did not go in the office. Who was the next in rotation? Mr. Bult, the chief-clerk. Was Mr. Bult competent in any way for the secretaryship? Would the gentlemen of the Stannaries Office like to see their department represented by Mr. Bult? Certainly not. Very well, then, as it was impossible, after Mr. Bult's lengthened service, during which his character had been stainless, to pass him by, and place any of his juniors over his head, the only course was to seek for Sir Francis's successor in some gentleman unconnected with the place. This was the way in which Mr. Branwhite obtained his appointment. Lord Lechmere's party went out of office soon after, and Lord Lechmere himself has been dead for years; but Mr. Branwhite held on through the régimes of the Duke of M'Tavish and Viscount Ballyscran, and was all-powerful as ever now while Lord Polhill of Pollington was Lord Commissioner. What was thought of him, and, indeed, what was thought and said pretty plainly about most official persons and topics, we shall learn by looking into a large room on the ground-floor of the office known as the Principal Registrar's Room.