Page:Knight's Quarterly Magazine series 1 volume 3 (August–November 1824).djvu/156

 “But what for?” they both repeated, re-entering at another door.

Without vouchsafing any answer, however, the Commissioner went on:—“and let the tailor, the shoemaker, the milliner, the”

“The fiddlestick end, Mr. Pig. I insist upon knowing what all this is about.”

“No matter what, my darling. Sic volo, sic jubeo; stat pro ratione voluntas.”

“Hark you, Mr. Commissioner. Matters are at length come to a crisis. You have the audacity to pretend to keep a secret from your lawful wife. Hear then my fixed determination. At this moment there is a haunch of venison roasting for dinner. The cook is so ignorant that, without my directions, this haunch will be scorched to a cinder. Now I swear that, unless you instantly reveal to me this secret without any reservation whatever, I will resign the venison to its fate. I will, by all that is sacred.”

The venison could not be exposed to a more fiery trial than was Mr. Commissioner Pig; the venison, when alive and hunted, could not have perspired more profusely, nor trembled in more anguish. But there was no alternative. His “morals” gave way before “his passions:” and after binding his wife and daughter by the general oath of secrecy, he communicated the state mystery. By the same or similar methods so many other wives assailed the virtue of their husbands, that in a few hours the limited scheme of secrecy adopted by the council was realized on the most extensive scale: for before night-fall, not merely a few members of the council, but every man, woman, and child, in the place, had been solemnly bound over to inviolable secrecy.

Meantime some members of the council, who had an unhappy leaning to infidelity, began to suggest doubts on the authenticity of the Commissioner’s news. Of old time he had been celebrated for the prodigious quantity of secret intelligence which his letters communicated, but not equally for its quality. Too often it stood in unhappy contradiction to the official news of the public journals. But then, on such occasions, the Commissioner would exclaim, What then? Who would believe what newspapers say? No man of sense believes a word the newspapers say. Agreeably to which hypothesis, upon various cases of obstinate discord between his letters and the gazettes of Europe, some of which went the length of point-blank contradiction, unceremoniously giving the lie to each other, he persisted in siding with the former: peremptorily refusing to be talked into a belief of certain events