“Certainly in peace, and with much admiration—and a great deal of love and affection, and all that kind of thing, if you will only accept it.”
“I shall be too proud, Lady Glencora;—for the Duke’s sake, if for no other reason.”
“And I have to make my apology.”
“It was made as soon as your carriage stopped at my door with friendly wheels. Of course I understand. I can know how terrible it all was to you—even though the dear little Plantagenet might not have been in much danger. Fancy what it would be to disturb the career of a Plantagenet! I am far too well read in history, I can assure you.”
“I said a word for which I am sorry, and which I should not have said.”
“Never mind the word. After all, it was a true word. I do not hesitate to say so now myself, though I will allow no other woman to say it—and no man either. I should have degraded him—and disgraced him.” Madame Goesler now had dropped the bantering tone which she had assumed, and was speaking in sober earnest. “I, for myself, have nothing about me of which I am ashamed. I have no history to hide, no story to be brought to light to my discredit. But I have not been so born, or so placed by circumstances, as make me fit to be the wife of the Duke of Omnium. I should not have been happy, you know.”
“You want nothing, dear Madame Goesler. You have all that society can give you.”
“I do not know about that. I have much given to me by society, but there are many things that I want;—a bright-faced little boy, for instance, to go about with me in my carriage. Why did you not bring him, Lady Glencora?”
“I came out in my penitential sheet, and when one goes in that guise, one goes alone. I had half a mind to walk.”
“You will bring him soon?”
“Oh, yes. He was very anxious to know the other day who was the beautiful lady with the black hair.”
“You did not tell him that the beautiful lady with the black hair was a possible aunt, was a possible—? But we will not think any more of things so horrible.”
“I told him nothing of my fears, you may be sure.”
“Some day, when I am a very old woman, and when his father is quite an old duke, and when he has a dozen little boys and girls of his own, you will tell him the story. Then he will reflect what a madman his great-uncle must have been, to have thought of making a duchess out of such a wizened old woman as that.”
They parted the best of friends, but Lady Glencora was still of opinion that if the lady and the Duke were to be brought together at Matching, or elsewhere, there might still be danger.
LXIII
Showing How the Duke Stood His Ground
Mr. Low the barrister, who had given so many lectures to our friend Phineas Finn, lectures that ought to have been useful, was now himself in the House of Commons, having reached it in the legitimate course of his profession. At a certain point of his career, supposing his career to have been sufficiently prosperous, it becomes natural to a barrister to stand for some constituency, and natural for him also to form his politics at that period of his life with a view to his further advancement, looking, as he does so, carefully at the age and standing of the various candidates for high legal office. When a man has worked as Mr. Low had worked, he begins to regard the bench wistfully, and to calculate the profits of a two years’ run in the Attorney-Generalship. It is the way of the profession, and thus a proper and sufficient number of real barristers finds its way into the House. Mr. Low had been angry with Phineas because he, being a barrister, had climbed into it after another fashion, having taken up politics, not in the proper way as an assistance to his great profession, but as a profession in itself. Mr. Low had been quite sure that his pupil had been wrong in this, and that the error would at last show itself, to his pupil’s cost. And Mrs. Low had been more sure than Mr. Low, having not unnaturally been jealous that a young whippersnapper of a pupil—as she had once called Phineas—should become a Parliament man before her husband, who had worked his way up gallantly, in the usual course. She would not give way a jot even now—not even when she heard that Phineas was going to marry this and that heiress. For at this period of his life such rumours were afloat about him, originating probably in his hopes as to Violet Effingham and his intimacy with Madame Goesler. “Oh, heiresses!” said Mrs. Low. “I don’t believe in heiresses’ money till I see it. Three or four hundred a year is a great fortune for a woman, but it don’t go far in keeping a house in London. And when a woman has got a little money she generally knows how to spend it. He has begun at the wrong end, and they who do that never get themselves right at the last.”
At this time Phineas had become somewhat of a fine gentleman, which made Mrs. Low the more angry with him. He showed himself willing enough to go to Mrs. Low’s house, but when there he seemed to her to give himself airs. I think that she was unjust to him, and that it was natural that he should not bear himself beneath her remarks
