“She has only been a widow, you know, four months,” said Archie, pleading for delay. “It won’t be delicate, will it?”
“Delicate!” said Sir Hugh. “I don’t know whether there is much of delicacy in it at all.”
“I don’t see why she isn’t to be treated like any other woman. If you were to die, you’d think it very odd if any fellow came up to Hermy before the season was over.”
“Archie, you are a fool,” said Sir Hugh; and Archie could see by his brother’s brow that Hugh was angry. “You say things that for folly and absurdity are beyond belief. If you can’t see the peculiarities of Julia’s position, I am not going to point them out to you.”
“She is peculiar, of course—having so much money, and that place near Guildford, all her own for her life. Of course it’s peculiar. But four months, Hugh!”
“If it had been four days it need have made no difference. A home, with someone to support her, is everything to her. If you wait till lots of fellows are buzzing round her you won’t have a chance. You’ll find that by this time next year she’ll be the top of the fashion; and if not engaged to you, she will be to someone else. I shouldn’t be surprised if Harry were after her again.”
“He’s engaged to that girl we saw down at Clavering.”
“What matters that? Engagements can be broken as well as made. You have this great advantage over everyone, except him, that you can go to her at once without doing anything out of the way. That girl that Harry has in tow may perhaps keep him away for some time.”
“I tell you what, Hugh, you might as well call with me the first time.”
“So that I may quarrel with her, which I certainly should do—or, rather, she with me. No, Archie; if you’re afraid to go alone, you’d better give it up.”
“Afraid! I’m not afraid!”
“She can’t eat you. Remember that with her you needn’t stand on your p’s and q’s, as you would with another woman. She knows what she is about, and will understand what she has to get as well as what she is expected to give. All I can say is, that if she accepts you, Hermy will consent that she shall go to Clavering as much as she pleases till the marriage takes place. It couldn’t be done, I suppose, till after a year; and in that case she shall be married at Clavering.”
Here was a prospect for Julia Brabazon;—to be led to the same altar, at which she had married Lord Ongar, by Archie Clavering, twelve months after her first husband’s death, and little more than two years after her first wedding! The peculiarity of the position did not quite make itself apparent either to Hugh or to Archie; but there was one point which did suggest itself to the younger brother at that moment.
“I don’t suppose there was anything really wrong, eh?”
“Can’t say, I’m sure,” said Sir Hugh.
“Because I shouldn’t like—”
“If I were you I wouldn’t trouble myself about that. Judge not, that you be not judged.”
“Yes, that’s true, to be sure,” said Archie; and on that point he went forth satisfied.
But the job before him was a peculiar job, and that Archie well knew. In some inexplicable manner he put himself into the scales and weighed himself, and discovered his own weight with fair accuracy. And he put her into the scales, and he found that she was much the heavier of the two. How he did this—how such men as Archie Clavering do do it—I cannot say; but they do weigh themselves, and know their own weight, and shove themselves aside as being too light for any real service in the world. This they do, though they may fluster with their voices, and walk about with their noses in the air, and swing their canes, and try to look as large as they may. They do not look large, and they know it; and consequently they ring the bells, and look after the horses, and shove themselves on one side, so that the heavier weights may come forth and do the work. Archie Clavering, who had duly weighed himself, could hardly bring himself to believe that Lady Ongar would be fool enough to marry him! Seven thousand a year, with a park and farm in Surrey, and give it all to him—him, Archie Clavering, who had, so to say, no weight at all! Archie Clavering, for one, could not bring himself to believe it.
But yet Hermy, her sister, thought it possible; and though Hermy was, as Archie had found out by his invisible scales, lighter than Julia, still she must know something of her sister’s nature. And Hugh, who was by no means light—who was a man of weight, with money and position and firm ground beneath his feet—he also thought that it might be so. “Faint heart never won a fair lady,” said Archie to himself a dozen times, as he walked down to the Rag. The Rag was his club, and there was a friend there whom he could consult confidentially. No; faint heart never won a fair lady; but they who repeat to themselves that adage, trying thereby to get courage, always have faint hearts for such work. Harry Clavering never thought of the proverb when he went a-wooing.
But Captain Boodle of the Rag—for Captain Boodle always lived at the Rag when he was not at Newmarket, or at other racecourses, or in the neighbourhood of Market Harborough—Captain Boodle knew a thing or two, and Captain Boodle was his fast friend. He would go to Boodle and arrange the campaign with him. Boodle had none of that hectoring, domineering way which Hugh never quite threw off in his intercourse with his brother. And Archie,
