“Lord Chiltern thinks it’s the shooting.”
“But where is a person to shoot if he mayn’t shoot in his own woods? Not that the Duke cares about the shooting for himself. He could not hit a pheasant sitting on a haystack, and wouldn’t know one if he saw it. And he’d rather that there wasn’t such a thing as a pheasant in the world. He cares for nothing but farthings. But what is a man to do? Or, rather, what is a woman to do?—for he tells me that I must settle it.”
“Lord Chiltern says that Mr. Fothergill has the foxes destroyed. I suppose Mr. Fothergill may do as he pleases if the Duke gives him permission.”
“I hate Mr. Fothergill, if that’ll do any good,” said the Duchess; “and we wish we could get rid of him altogether. But that, you know, is impossible. When one has an old man on one’s shoulders one never can get rid of him. He is my incubus; and then you see Trumpeton Wood is such a long way from us at Matching that I can’t say I want the shooting for myself. And I never go to Gatherum if I can help it. Suppose we made out that the Duke wanted to let the shooting?”
“Lord Chiltern would take it at once.”
“But the Duke wouldn’t really let it, you know. I’ll lay awake at night and think about it. And now tell me about Adelaide Palliser. Is she to be married?”
“I hope so—sooner or later.”
“There’s a quarrel or something;—isn’t there? She’s the Duke’s first cousin, and we should be so sorry that things shouldn’t go pleasantly with her. And she’s a very good-looking girl, too. Would she like to come down to Matching?”
“She has some idea of going back to Italy.”
“And leaving her lover behind her! Oh, dear, that will be very bad. She’d much better come to Matching, and then I’d ask the man to come too. Mr. Maud, isn’t he?”
“Gerard Maule.”
“Ah, yes; Maule. If it’s the kind of thing that ought to be, I’d manage it in a week. If you get a young man down into a country house, and there has been anything at all between them, I don’t see how he is to escape. Isn’t there some trouble about money?”
“They wouldn’t be very rich, Duchess.”
“What a blessing for them! But then, perhaps, they’d be very poor.”
“They would be rather poor.”
“Which is not a blessing. Isn’t there some proverb about going safely in the middle? I’m sure it’s true about money—only perhaps you ought to be put a little beyond the middle. I don’t know why Plantagenet shouldn’t do something for her.”
As to this conversation Lady Chiltern said very little to Adelaide, but she did mention the proposed visit to Matching.
“The Duchess said nothing to me,” replied Adelaide, proudly.
“No; I don’t suppose she had time. And then she is so very odd; sometimes taking no notice of one, and at others so very loving.”
“I hate that.”
“But with her it is neither impudence nor affectation. She says exactly what she thinks at the time, and she is always as good as her word. There are worse women than the Duchess.”
“I am sure I wouldn’t like going to Matching,” said Adelaide.
Lady Chiltern was right in saying that the Duchess of Omnium was always as good as her word. On the next day, after that interview with Lord Chiltern about Mr. Fothergill and the foxes—as to which no present further allusion need be made here—she went to work and did learn a good deal about Gerard Maule and Miss Palliser. Something she learned from Lord Chiltern—without any consciousness on his lordship’s part, something from Madame Goesler, and something from the Baldock people. Before she went to bed on the second night she knew all about the quarrel, and all about the money. “Plantagenet,” she said the next morning, “what are you going to do about the Duke’s legacy to Marie Goesler?”
“I can do nothing. She must take the things, of course.”
“She won’t.”
“Then the jewels must remain packed up. I suppose they’ll be sold at last for the legacy duty, and, when that’s paid, the balance will belong to her.”
“But what about the money?”
“Of course it belongs to her.”
“Couldn’t you give it to that girl who was here last night?”
“Give it to a girl!”
“Yes;—to your cousin. She’s as poor as Job, and can’t get married because she hasn’t got any money. It’s quite true; and I must say that if the Duke had looked after his own relations instead of leaving money to people who don’t want it and won’t have it, it would have been much better. Why shouldn’t Adelaide Palliser have it?”
“How on earth should I give Adelaide Palliser what doesn’t belong to me? If you choose to make her a present, you can, but such a sum as that would, I should say, be out of the question.”
The Duchess had achieved quite as much as she had anticipated. She knew her husband well, and was aware that she couldn’t carry her point at once. To her mind it was “all nonsense” his saying that the money was not his. If Madame Goesler wouldn’t take it, it must be his; and nobody could make a woman take money if she did not choose. Adelaide Palliser was the Duke’s first cousin, and it was intolerable that the Duke’s first cousin should be unable to marry because she would have nothing to live upon. It became, at least, intolerable as soon as the Duchess had taken it into her head to like the first cousin. No doubt there were other first cousins as badly off, or perhaps worse, as to whom the Duchess would care nothing whether they were rich or poor—married or single; but then they were first cousins who had not
