He lowered his eyes. The commission which was the subject of this discussion lay there on the table before him, the space which the name of Randal Holles was intended to occupy still standing blank. He was defeated, and he had best, for the sake of Holles as much as for his own, accept the situation without further argument.
He took up a pen, dipped it, and drew the document to him.
“Since you have His Majesty’s authority, there can be, of course, no further question.”
Rapidly, his quill scratching and spluttering across the sheet, he filled in the name of Sir Harry Stanhope, bitterly considering that he might as profitably have filled in Nell Gwynn’s. He dusted the thick writing with pounce, and proffered it without another word. But his looks were heavy.
Buckingham rose, smiling, and Sir Harry bounced up with him, smiling also. For the first and last time in the course of that short interview Sir Harry spoke.
“Your grace’s devoted servant,” he professed himself, bowing and smirking. “I shall study to discharge my office creditably, and to allay any qualms my youth may leave in your grace’s mind.”
“And youth,” said Buckingham, smiling, to reassure Albemarle, “is a fault that time invariably corrects.”
Albemarle rose slowly to his feet, and the others bowed themselves out of his presence.
Then he sat down again heavily, took his head in his hands, and softly loosed an oath.
Holles came an hour later, radiant with expectation, a gay, youthful-looking, commanding figure in his splendid red coat, to be crushed by the news that proved him Fortune’s fool again, as ever.
But he bore it well on the face of him, however deeply the iron was thrust into his soul. It was Albemarle who for once showed excitement, Albemarle who inveighed in most unmeasured terms against the corrupt influence of the Court and the havoc it was working.
“It needed a man for this office and they have constrained me to give it to a fribble, a dolly in breeches, a painted dawcock.”
Holles remembered Tucker’s denunciations of the present government and began to realize at last how right he was and how justified he and his associates might be of their conviction that the people were ready to rise and sweep this Augean stable clean.