“Then why don’t you try it?”
“Because I’ve got into another groove. I’ve become essentially a city man—one of those who take up the trade of making money generally.”
“And does that content you?”
“No, Duchess;—certainly not. Instead of contenting me it disgusts me. Not but that I like the money—only it is so insufficient a use of one’s life. I suppose I shall try to get into Parliament some day. Seats in Parliament don’t grow like blackberries on bushes.”
“Pretty nearly,” said the Duchess.
“Not in my part of the country. These good things seem to be appointed to fall in the way of some men, and not of others. If there were a general election going on tomorrow, I should not know how to look for a seat.”
“They are to be found sometimes even without a general election,” said the Duchess.
“Are you alluding to anything now?”
“Well;—yes, I am. But I’m very discreet, and do not like to do more than allude. I fancy that Mr. Grey, the member for Silverbridge, is going to Persia. Mr. Grey is a Member of Parliament. Members of Parliament ought to be in London and not in Persia. It is generally supposed that no man in England is more prone to do what he ought to do than Mr. Grey. Therefore, Mr. Grey will cease to be Member for Silverbridge. That’s logic; isn’t it?”
“Has your Grace any logic equally strong to prove that I can follow him in the borough?”
“No;—or if I have, the logic that I should use in that matter must for the present be kept to myself.” She certainly had a little syllogism in her head as to the Duke ruling the borough, the Duke’s wife ruling the Duke, and therefore the Duke’s wife ruling the borough; but she did not think it prudent to utter this on the present occasion. “I think it much better that men in Parliament should be unmarried,” said the Duchess.
“But I am going to be married,” said he.
“Going to be married, are you?”
“I have no right to say so, because the lady’s father has rejected me.” Then he told her the whole story, and so told it as to secure her entire sympathy. In telling it he never said that he was a rich man, he never boasted that that search after wealth of which he had spoken, had been successful; but he gave her to understand that there was no objection to him at all on the score of money. “You may have heard of the family,” he said.
“I have heard of the Whartons of course, and know that there is a baronet—but I know nothing more of them. He is not a man of large property, I think.”
“My Miss Wharton—the one I would fain call mine—is the daughter of a London barrister. He, I believe, is rich.”
“Then she will be an heiress.”
“I suppose so;—but that consideration has had no weight with me. I have always regarded myself as the architect of my own fortune, and have no wish to owe my material comfort to a wife.”
“Sheer love!” suggested the Duchess.
“Yes, I think so. It’s very ridiculous; is it not?”
“And why does the rich barrister object?”
“The rich barrister, Duchess, is an out and out old Tory, who thinks that his daughter ought to marry no one but an English Tory. I am not exactly that.”
“A man does not hamper his daughter in these days by politics, when she is falling in love.”
“There are other cognate reasons. He does not like a foreigner. Now I am an Englishman, but I have a foreign name. He does not think that a name so grandly Saxon as Wharton should be changed to one so meanly Latin as Lopez.”
“The lady does not object to the Latinity?”
“I fancy not.”
“Or to the bearer of it?”
“Ah;—there I must not boast. But in simple truth there is only the father’s ill-will between us.”
“With plenty of money on both sides?” asked the Duchess. Lopez shrugged his shoulders. A shrug at such a time may mean anything, but the Duchess took this shrug as signifying that the question was so surely settled as to admit of no difficulty. “Then,” said the Duchess, “the old gentleman may as well give way at once. Of course his daughter will be too many for him.” In this way the Duchess of Omnium became the fast friend of Ferdinand Lopez.
XXII
St. James’s Park
Towards the end of September Everett Wharton and Ferdinand Lopez were in town together, and as no one else was in town—so at least they both professed to say—they saw a good deal of each other. Lopez, as we know, had spent a portion of the preceding month at Gatherum Castle, and had made good use of his time, but Everett Wharton had been less fortunate. He had been a little cross with his father, and perhaps a little cross with all the Whartons generally, who did not, he thought, make quite enough of him. In the event of “anything happening” to that ne’er-do-well nephew, he himself would be the heir; and he reflected not unfrequently that something very probably might happen to the nephew. He did not often see this particular cousin, but he always heard of him as being drunk, overwhelmed with debt and difficulty, and altogether in that position of life in which it is probable that something will “happen.” There was always of course the danger that the young man might marry and have a child;—but in the meantime surely he, Everett Wharton, should have been as much thought of on the banks of the Wye as Arthur Fletcher. He had been asked down to Wharton Hall—but he had been asked in a way which he had not thought to be flattering and had declined to
