THREE:Low banks favored them.
THREE:Scarcely was the Prince married, when he began to complain of his limited income. His father, as Prince of Wales, had been allowed one hundred thousand pounds from the Civil List, which then was only seven hundred thousand pounds, but he now received only fifty thousand pounds from a Civil List of eight hundred thousand pounds. Bolingbroke, two years before, on leaving England, told the prince, as his parting advice, to apply to Parliament, without any regard to the king, for a permanent income of one hundred thousand pounds a year. Under these circumstances, Walpole persuaded the king to send a message to the prince, offering to settle a large jointure on the princess, and to make the prince's own income independent of his father. Here the prince ought to have yielded; if he had been either politic or well-disposed, he would have done so. The king was at this time very ill, and his physicians declared that if he did not alter soon, he could not live a twelvemonth. This circumstance of itself would have touched any young man of the least natural feeling, to say nothing of policy; for, if the king died, there was an end of the questionthe prince would be king himself. But he was now in such a temper that he would not listen to the royal proposal; and the next day, the 22nd of February, 1737, Pulteney made his motion in the House of Commons for an address beseeching the king to settle upon the prince a hundred thousand pounds a year, and promising that the House would enable him effectually to do so. What was still stranger, it was seconded by Sir John Barnard. The[68] Commons were not willing to run counter to a prince apparently on the point of ascending the throne, and Walpole would have found himself in a minority had Wyndham, as he hoped, brought the Tories to vote for the prince. But forty-five Jacobites, who could not bring themselves to vote for an heir of the House of Hanover, though they would by that have done a serious mischief to the Hanoverian usurper, as they styled him, rose in a body and quitted the House. On the division, the Ministerial party amounted to two hundred and thirty-four, the Opposition to only two hundred and fourbeing a majority for Ministers of exactly thirty. The next day the same motion was made in the Lords by Carteret, but was rejected by a large majorityone hundred and three to forty.
THREE:Climb they did, until the sea dropped down to a gray-green, flat expanse and only the powerful binoculars Larry was using could pick out the cruising hydroplane slowly verging away from the shore in an apparently aimless voyage.
TWO:Pending her arrival, Landor brought himself to look[Pg 16] upon it as his plain duty and only course to marry her. It would save her, and any man who might otherwise happen to love her, from learning what she was. That she might refuse to look at it in that way, did not much enter into his calculations. It required a strong effort for him to decide it so, but it was his way to pick out the roughest possible path before him, to settle within himself that it was that of duty, and to follow it without fagging or complaint. He dreaded any taint of Apache blood as he dreaded the venom of a rattler. He had seen its manifestations for twenty odd years, had seen the hostile savage and the civilized one, and shrank most from the latter. But he had promised Cabot to do his best by the waif, and the best he could see was to marry her. There was always before him, to urge him on to the sacrifice, the stalwart figure of his boyhood's friend, standing forsaken in the stretch of desert with the buzzards hovering over him in the burning sky. He permitted himself to hope, however, that she was not too obviously a squaw.