“I knew there was something of that kind. He told me that there was some close alliance.” The Duchess as she looked at the woman to whom she wanted to be kind did not as yet dare to express a wish that there might at some not very distant time be a closer alliance. She had come there intending to do so; and had still some hope that she might do it before the interview was over. But at any rate she would not do it yet. “Have I not heard,” she said, “something of another marriage?”
“My brother is going to marry his cousin, Sir Alured Wharton’s daughter.”
“Ah;—I thought it had been one of the Fletchers. It was our member who told me, and he spoke as though they were all his very dear friends.”
“They are dear friends—very.” Poor Emily still didn’t know whether to call her Duchess, my Lady, or your Grace—and yet felt the need of calling her by some special name.
“Exactly. I supposed it was so. They tell me Mr. Fletcher will become quite a favourite in the House. At this present moment nobody knows on which side anybody is going to sit tomorrow. It may be that Mr. Fletcher will become the dire enemy of all the Duke’s friends.”
“I hope not.”
“Of course I’m speaking of political enemies. Political enemies are often the best friends in the world; and I can assure you from my own experience that political friends are often the bitterest enemies. I never hated any people so much as some of our supporters.” The Duchess made a grimace, and Emily could not refrain from smiling. “Yes, indeed. There’s an old saying that misfortune makes strange bedfellows, but political friendship makes stranger alliances than misfortune. Perhaps you never met Sir Timothy Beeswax.”
“Never.”
“Well;—don’t. But, as I was saying, there is no knowing who may support whom now. If I were asked who would be Prime Minister tomorrow, I should take half-a-dozen names and shake them in a bag.”
“It is not settled then?”
“Settled! No, indeed. Nothing is settled.” At that moment indeed everything was settled, though the Duchess did not know it. “And so we none of us can tell how Mr. Fletcher may stand with us when things are arranged. I suppose he calls himself a Conservative?”
“Oh, yes!”
“All the Whartons, I suppose, are Conservatives—and all the Fletchers.”
“Very nearly. Papa calls himself a Tory.”
“A very much better name, to my thinking. We are all Whigs, of course. A Palliser who was not a Whig would be held to have disgraced himself forever. Are not politics odd? A few years ago I only barely knew what the word meant, and that not correctly. Lately I have been so eager about it, that there hardly seems to be anything else left worth living for. I suppose it’s wrong, but a state of pugnacity seems to me the greatest bliss which we can reach here on earth.”
“I shouldn’t like to be always fighting.”
“That’s because you haven’t known Sir Timothy Beeswax and two or three other gentlemen whom I could name. The day will come, I dare say, when you will care for politics.”
Emily was about to answer, hardly knowing what to say, when the door was opened and Mrs. Roby came into the room. The lady was not announced, and Emily had heard no knock at the door. She was forced to go through some ceremony of introduction. “This is my aunt, Mrs. Roby,” she said. “Aunt Harriet, the Duchess of Omnium.” Mrs. Roby was beside herself—not all with joy. That feeling would come afterwards as she would boast to her friends of her new acquaintance. At present there was the embarrassment of not quite knowing how to behave herself. The Duchess bowed from her seat, and smiled sweetly—as she had learned to smile since her husband had become Prime Minister. Mrs. Roby curtsied, and then remembered that in these days only housemaids ought to curtsey.
“Anything to our Mr. Roby?” said the Duchess, continuing her smile—“ours as he was till yesterday at least.” This she said in an absurd wail of mock sorrow.
“My brother-in-law, your Grace,” said Mrs. Roby, delighted.
“Oh indeed. And what does Mr. Roby think about it, I wonder? But I dare say you have found, Mrs. Roby, that when a crisis comes—a real crisis—the ladies are told nothing. I have.”
“I don’t think, your Grace, that Mr. Roby ever divulges political secrets.”
“Doesn’t he indeed! What a dull man your brother-in-law must be to live with—that is as a politician! Goodbye, Mrs. Lopez. You must come and see me and let me come to you again. I hope, you know—I hope the time may come when things may once more be bright with you.” These last words she murmured almost in a whisper, as she held the hand of the woman she wished to befriend. Then she bowed to Mrs. Roby, and left the room.
“What was it she said to you?” asked Mrs. Roby.
“Nothing in particular, Aunt Harriet.”
“She seems to be very friendly. What made her come?”
“She wrote some time ago to say she would call.”
“But why?”
“I cannot tell you. I don’t know. Don’t ask me, aunt, about things that are passed. You cannot do it without wounding me.”
“I don’t want to wound you, Emily, but I really think that that is nonsense. She is a very nice woman;—though I don’t think she ought to have said that Mr. Roby is dull. Did Mr. Wharton know that she was coming?”
“He knew that she said she would come,” replied Emily very sternly, so that Mrs. Roby found herself compelled to pass on to some other subject. Mrs. Roby had heard the wish expressed that something “once more might be bright,” and when she got home told her husband that she was sure that Emily Lopez was going to marry Arthur Fletcher. “And why the d⸺ shouldn’t she?” said Dick. “And that poor man destroying himself not much more than twelve months ago!
