III

But she was reserved for a very different fate.  The outburst of republicanism had been in fact the last flicker of an expiring cause.  The liberal tide, which had been flowing steadily ever since the Reform Bill, reached its height with Mr. Gladstone’s first administration; and towards the end of that administration the inevitable ebb began.  The reaction, when it came, was sudden and complete.  The General Election of 1874 changed the whole face of politics.  Mr. Gladstone and the Liberals were routed; and the Tory party, for the first time for over forty years, attained an unquestioned supremacy in England.  It was obvious that their surprising triumph was pre-eminently due to the skill and vigour of Disraeli.  He returned to office, no longer the dubious commander of an insufficient host, but with drums beating and flags flying, a conquering hero.  And as a conquering hero Victoria welcomed her new Prime Minister.

Then there followed six years of excitement, of enchantment, of felicity, of glory, of romance.  The amazing being, who now at last, at the age of seventy, after a lifetime of extraordinary struggles, had turned into reality the absurdest of his boyhood’s dreams, knew well enough how to make his own, with absolute completeness, the heart of the Sovereign Lady whose servant, and whose master, he had so miraculously become.  In women’s hearts he had always read as in an open book.  His whole career had turned upon those curious entities; and the more curious they were, the more intimately at home with them he seemed to be.  But Lady Beaconsfield, with her cracked idolatry, and Mrs. Brydges-Williams, with her clogs, her corpulence, and her legacy, were gone:  an even more remarkable phenomenon stood in their place.  He surveyed what was before him with the eye of a past-master; and he was not for a moment at a loss.  He realised everything—­the interacting complexities of circumstance and character, the pride of place mingled so inextricably with personal arrogance, the superabundant emotionalism, the ingenuousness of outlook, the solid, the laborious respectability, shot through so incongruously by temperamental cravings for the coloured and the strange, the singular intellectual limitations, and the mysteriously essential female elements impregnating every particle of the whole.  A smile hovered over his impassive features, and he dubbed Victoria “the Faery.”  The name delighted him, for, with that epigrammatic ambiguity so dear to his heart, it precisely expressed his vision of the Queen.  The Spenserian allusion was very pleasant—­the elegant evocations of Gloriana; but there was more in it than that:  there was the suggestion of a diminutive creature, endowed with magical—­and mythical—­properties, and a portentousness almost ridiculously out of keeping with the rest of her make-up.  The Faery, he determined, should henceforward wave her wand for him alone.