“I have just come up from my mother’s,” said Lord Fawn, twiddling his hat. Then Lizzie, with a pretty eagerness, asked after Lady Fawn and the girls, and her dear little friend Lucy Morris. Lizzie could be very prettily eager when she pleased. She leaned forward her face as she asked her questions, and threw back her loose lustrous lock of hair, with her long lithe fingers covered with diamonds—the diamonds, these, which Sir Florian had really given her, or which she had procured from Mr. Benjamin in the clever manner described in the opening chapter. “They are, all quite well, thank you,” said Lord Fawn. “I believe Miss Morris is quite well, though she was a little out of sorts last night.”
“She is not ill, I hope,” said Lizzie, bringing the lustrous lock forward again.
“In her temper, I mean,” said Lord Fawn.
“Indeed! I hope Miss Lucy is not forgetting herself. That would be very sad, after the great kindness she has received.” Lord Fawn said that it would be very sad, and then put his hat down upon the floor. It came upon Lizzie at that moment, as by a flash of lightning—by an electric message delivered to her intellect by that movement of the hat—that she might be sure of Lord Fawn if she chose to take him. On Friday she might have been sure of Frank—only that Lady Linlithgow came in the way. But now she did not feel at all sure of Frank. Lord Fawn was at any rate a peer. She had heard that he was a poor peer—but a peer, she thought, can’t be altogether poor. And though he was a stupid owl—she did not hesitate to acknowledge to herself that he was as stupid as an owl—he had a position. He was one of the Government, and his wife would, no doubt, be able to go anywhere. It was becoming essential to her that she should marry. Even though her husband should give up the diamonds, she would not in such case incur the disgrace of surrendering them herself. She would have kept them till she had ceased to be a Eustace. Frank had certainly meant it on that Thursday afternoon;—but surely he would have been in Mount Street before this if he had not changed his mind. We all know that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. “I have been at Fawn Court once or twice,” said Lizzie, with her sweetest grace, “and I always think it a model of real family happiness.”
“I hope you may be there very often,” said Lord Fawn.
“Ah, I have no right to intrude myself often on your mother, Lord Fawn.”
There could hardly be a better opening than this for him had he chosen to accept it. But it was not thus that he had arranged it—for he had made his arrangements. “There would be no feeling of that kind, I am sure,” he said. And then he was silent. How was he to deploy himself on the ground before him so as to make the strategy which he had prepared answer the occasion of the day? “Lady Eustace,” he said, “I don’t know what your views of life may be.”
“I have a child, you know, to bring up.”
“Ah, yes;—that gives a great interest, of course.”
“He will inherit a very large fortune, Lord Fawn;—too large, I fear, to be of service to a youth of one-and-twenty; and I must endeavour to fit him for the possession of it. That is—and always must be, the chief object of my existence.” Then she felt that she had said too much. He was just the man who would be fool enough to believe her. “Not but what it is hard to do it. A mother can of course devote herself to her child;—but when a portion of the devotion must be given to the preservation of material interests there is less of tenderness in it. Don’t you think so?”
“No doubt,” said Lord Fawn;—“no doubt.” But he had not followed her, and was still thinking of his own strategy. “It’s a comfort, of course, to know that one’s child is provided for.”
“Oh, yes;—but they tell me the poor little dear will have forty thousand a year when he’s of age; and when I look at him in his little bed, and press him in my arms, and think of all that money, I almost wish that his father had been a poor plain gentleman.” Then the handkerchief was put to her eyes, and Lord Fawn had a moment in which to collect himself.
“Ah!—I myself am a poor man;—for my rank I mean.”
“A man with your position, Lord Fawn, and your talents and genius for business, can never be poor.”
“My father’s property was all Irish, you know.”
“Was it indeed?”
“And he was an Irish peer, till Lord Melbourne gave him an English peerage.”
“An Irish peer, was he?” Lizzie understood nothing of this, but presumed that an Irish peer was a peer who had not sufficient money to live upon. Lord Fawn, however, was endeavouring to describe his own history in as few words as possible.
“He was then made Lord Fawn of Richmond, in the peerage of the United Kingdom. Fawn Court, you know, belonged to my mother’s father before my mother’s marriage. The property in Ireland is still mine, but there’s no place on it.”
“Indeed!”
“There was a house, but my father allowed it to tumble down. It’s in Tipperary;—not at all a desirable country to live in.”
“Oh, dear, no! Don’t they murder the people?”
“It’s about five thousand a year, and out of that my mother has half for her life.”
“What an excellent family arrangement,” said Lizzie. There was so long a pause made between each statement that she was forced to make
