73
durance merged in exasperation: and that the boundary line was reached, the day Mr Norton met me in the County Court; the day that, to evade a just claim, he unburied all the falsehoods of the past; endeavoured to disgrace me (in 1853, as he had done in 1836) for the sake of money; and in cold blood re-published, to the grieving of my grown up sons, the slanders which had blighted my youth in their infancy. But for that day in the County Courts Mr Norton might have gone to his grave in seeming respectability; our history known only to a few friends. Struggle and warfare were over with me. Much of the bitterness I had felt, had faded with time; much had vanished when I recovered my sons. While that bitterness was yet fresh, and circumstances, from time to time, roused me to desire a more public justification,—Lord Melbourne himself was the first to preach lessons of patience. He spoke to me of the "nine days' wonder" my story would be; of the perfect conviction of the real circumstances of my case, entertained by those whose opinion I valued; of my youth, and the likelihood that in a few years I would have "lived down" all temporary scandal; of the embarrassment it would be to him,—as the minister of a young unmarried Sovereign,—to have such a history re-opened;—of the disloyal selfishness he conceived such a struggle on my part would evince; of the awkwardness, in particular, of any attempt to prove interference on the part of those Personages who had denied it to him; of the certainty that when the Queen was married, and the Court more established, I would find, in the earnest support of those whose faithful minister he had been, an upholding that would make me forget the disgrace I had endured in his name. He was my friend, though not my lover; and the resolves of many an angry day and hour subsided under his influence. In later years there had been no need for such arguments for silence. I had long relinquished the idea of warfare with Mr Norton; and was quietly making the best of a bad destiny. All last winter
