Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 1.djvu/89

Rh ardour in the fray, the general personal sympathy of the party and the attention excited by the fresh cleverness of his speeches, tinted with young idealism and yet sticking sufficiently to the question (the burning question, it has since burnt out), had rendered almost brilliant. There had been leaders in the newspapers about it, half in compliment to her husband, who was known to be failing so prematurely (he was almost as young to die, and to die famous—Lady Agnes regarded it as famous—as his son had been to stand), which the boy's mother religiously preserved, cut out and tied together with a ribbon, in the innermost drawer of a favourite cabinet. But it had been a barren, or almost a barren triumph, for in the order of importance in Nick's history another incident had run it, as the phrase is, very close: nothing less than the quick dissolution of the Parliament in which he was so manifestly destined to give symptoms of a future. He had not recovered his seat at the general election, for the second contest was even sharper than the first, and the Tories had put forward a loud, vulgar, rattling, almost bullying man. It was to a certain extent a comfort that poor Sir Nicholas, who had been witness of the bright hour, passed away before the darkness. He died, with all his hopes on his second son's head, unconscious of near disaster, handing on the torch and the tradition, after a long, supreme interview with Nick, at which Lady Agnes had not been present but which she knew to have been a sort of paternal dedication, a solemn communication of ideas on the highest national questions (she had reason to believe he had touched on those of external as well as of domestic and of colonial policy), leaving on the boy's