The Young Duke Part 12

Then there were country neighbours in great store, with wives that were treasures, and daughters fresh as flowers. Among them we would particularise two gentlemen. They were great proprietors, and Catholics and Baronets, and consoled themselves by their active maintenance of the game-laws for their inability to regulate their neighbours by any other.

One was Sir Chetwode Chetwode of Chetwode; the other was Sir Tichborne Tichborne of Tichborne. It was not easy to see two men less calculated to be the slaves of a foreign and despotic power, which we all know Catholics are. Tall, and robust, and rosy, with hearts even stouter than their ma.s.sy frames, they were just the characters to a.s.semble in Runnymede, and probably, even at the present day, might have imitated their ancestors, even in their signatures. In disposition they were much the same, though they were friends. In person there were some differences, but they were slight. Sir Chetwode's hair was straight and white; Sir Tichborne's brown and curly. Sir Chetwode's eyes were blue; Sir Tichborne's grey.

Sir Chetwode's nose was perhaps a snub; Sir Tichborne's was certainly a bottle. Sir Chetwode was somewhat garrulous, and was often like a man at a play, in the wrong box! Sir Tichborne was somewhat taciturn; but when he spoke, it was always to the purpose, and made an impression, even if it were not new. Both were kind hearts; but Sir Chetwode was jovial, Sir Tichborne rather stern. Sir Chetwode often broke into a joke; Sir Tichborne sometimes backed into a sneer. .

A few of these characters were made known by Mr. Dacre to his young friend, but not many, and in an easy way; those that stood nearest.

Introduction is a formality and a bore, and is never resorted to by your well-bred host, save in a casual way. When proper people meet at proper houses, they give each other credit for propriety, and slide into an acquaintance by degrees. The first day they catch a name; the next, they ask you whether you are the son of General----. 'No; he was my uncle.'

'Ah! I knew him well. A worthy soul!' And then the thing is settled. You ride together, shoot, or fence, or hunt. A game of billiards will do no great harm; and when you part, you part with a hope that you may meet again.

Lord Mildmay was glad to meet with the son of an old friend. He knew the late Duke well, and loved him better. It is pleasant to hear our fathers praised. We, too, may inherit their virtues with their lands, or cash, or bonds; and, scapegraces as we are, it is agreeable to find a precedent for the blood turning out well. And, after all, there is no feeling more thoroughly delightful than to be conscious that the kind being from whose loins we spring, and to whom we cling with an innate and overpowering love, is viewed by others with regard, with reverence, or with admiration. There is no pride like the pride of ancestry, for it is a blending of all emotions. How immeasurably superior to the herd is the man whose father only is famous! Imagine, then, the feelings of one who can trace his line through a thousand years of heroes and of princes!

'Tis dinner! hour that I have loved as loves the bard the twilight; but no more those visions rise that once were wont to spring in my quick fancy. The dream is past, the spell is broken, and even the lore on which I pondered in my first youth is strange as figures in Egyptian tombs.

No more, no more, oh! never more to me, that hour shall bring its rapture and its bliss! No more, no more, oh! never more for me, shall Flavour sit upon her thousand thrones, and, like a syren with a sunny smile, win to renewed excesses, each more sweet! My feasting days are over: me no more the charms of fish, or flesh, still less of fowl, can make the fool of that they made before. The fricandeau is like a dream of early love; the frica.s.see, with which I have so often flirted, is like the tattle of the last quadrille; and no longer are my dreams haunted with the dark pa.s.sion of the rich ragout. Ye soups! o'er whose creation I have watched, like mothers o'er their sleeping child! Ye sauces! to which I have even lent a name, where are ye now? Tickling, perchance, the palate of some easy friend, who quite forgets the boon companion whose presence once lent l.u.s.tre even to his ruby wine and added perfume to his perfumed hock!

Our Duke, however, had not reached the age of retrospection. He pecked as prettily as any bird. Seated on the right hand of his delightful hostess, n.o.body could be better pleased; supervised by his jager, who stood behind his chair, no one could be better attended. He smiled, with the calm, amiable complacency of a man who feels the world is quite right.

CHAPTER IX.

_The Chatelaine of Castle Dacre_

HOW is your Grace's horse, Sans-pareil?' asked Sir Chetwode Chetwode of Chetwode of the Duke of St. James, shooting at the same time a sly glance at his opposite neighbour, Sir Tichborne Tichborne of Tichborne.

'Quite well, sir,' said the Duke in his quietest tone, but with an air which, he flattered himself, might repress further inquiry.

'Has he got over his fatigue?' pursued the dogged Baronet, with a short, gritty laugh, that sounded like a loose drag-chain dangling against the stones. 'We all thought the Yorks.h.i.+re air would not agree with him.'

'Yet, Sir Chetwode, that could hardly be your opinion of Sanspareil,'

said Miss Dacre, 'for I think, if I remember right, I had the pleasure of making you encourage our glove manufactory.'

Sir Chetwode looked a little confused. The Duke of St. James, inspirited by his fair ally, rallied, and hoped Sir Chetwode did not back his steed to a fatal extent. 'If,' continued he, 'I had had the slightest idea that any friend of Miss Dacre was indulging in such an indiscretion, I certainly would have interfered, and have let him known that the horse was not to win.'

'Is that a fact?' asked Sir Tichborne Tichborne of Tichborne, with a st.u.r.dy voice.

'Can a Yorks.h.i.+reman doubt it?' rejoined the Duke. 'Was it possible for anyone but a mere Newmarket dandy to have entertained for a moment the supposition that anyone but May Dacre should be the Queen of the St.

Leger?'

'I have heard something of this before,' said Sir Tichborne, 'but I did not believe it. A young friend of mine consulted me upon the subject.

"Would you advise me," said he, "to settle?" "Why," said I, "if you can prove any bubble, my opinion is, don't; but if you cannot prove anything, my opinion is, do."'

'Very just! very true!' were murmured by many in the neighbourhood of the oracle; by no one with more personal sincerity than Lady Tichborne herself.

'I will write to my young friend,' continued the Baronet.

'Oh, no!' said Miss Dacre. 'His Grace's candour must not be abused. I have no idea of being robbed of my well-earned honours. Sir Tichborne, private conversation must be respected, and the sanct.i.ty of domestic life must not be profaned. If the tactics of Doncaster are no longer to be fair war, why, half the families in the Riding will be ruined!'

'Still,'--said Sir Tichborne.

But Mr. Dacre, like a deity in a Trojan battle, interposed, and asked his opinion of a keeper.

'I hope you are a sportsman,' said Miss Dacre to the Duke, 'for this is the palace of Nimrod!'

'I have hunted; it was not very disagreeable. I sometimes shoot; it is not very stupid.'

'Then, in fact, I perceive that you are a heretic. Lord Faulconcourt, his Grace is moralising on the barbarity of the chase.'

'Then he has never had the pleasure of hunting in company with Miss Dacre.'

'Do you indeed follow the hounds?' asked the Duke.

'Sometimes do worse, ride over them; but Lord Faulconcourt is fast emanc.i.p.ating me from the trammels of my frippery foreign education, and I have no doubt that, in another season, I shall fling off quite in style.'

'You remember Mr. Annesley?' asked the Duke.

'It is difficult to forget him. He always seemed to me to think that the world was made on purpose for him to have the pleasure of "cutting" it.'

'Yet he was your admirer!'

'Yes, and once paid me a compliment. He told me it was the only one that he had ever uttered.'

'Oh, Charley, Charley! this is excellent. We shall have a tale when we meet. What was the compliment?'

'It would be affectation in me to pretend that I have forgotten it.

Nevertheless, you must excuse me.'

'Pray, pray let me have it!'

'Perhaps you will not like it?'

'Now, I must hear it.'

'Well then, he said that talking to me was the only thing that consoled him for having to dine with you and to dance with Lady Shrops.h.i.+re.'

'Charles is jealous,' drawled the Duke.

'Of her Grace?' asked Miss Dacre, with much anxiety.

'No; but Charles is aged, and once, when he dined with me, was taken for my uncle.'

The ladies retired, and the gentlemen sat barbarously long. Sir Chetwode Chetwode of Chetwode and Sir Tichborne Tichborne of Tichborne were two men who drank wine independent of fas.h.i.+on, and exacted, to the last gla.s.s, the identical quant.i.ty which their fathers had drunk half a century before, and to which they had been used almost from their cradle. The only subject of conversation was sporting. Terrible shots, more terrible runs, neat barrels, and pretty fencers. The Duke of St.

James was not sufficiently acquainted with the geography of the mansion to make a premature retreat, an operation which is looked upon with an evil eye, and which, to be successful, must be prompt and decisive, and executed with supercilious nonchalance. So he consoled himself by a little chat with Lord Mildmay, who sat smiling, handsome, and mustachioed, with an empty gla.s.s, and who was as much out of water as he was out of wine. The Duke was not very learned in Parisian society; but still, with the aid of the d.u.c.h.ess de Berri and the d.u.c.h.ess de Duras, Leontine Fay, and Lady Stuart de Rothesay, they got on, and made out the time until Purgatory ceased and Paradise opened.

For Paradise it was, although there were there a.s.sembled some thirty or forty persons not less dull than the majority of our dull race, and in those little tactics that make society less burdensome perhaps even less accomplished. But a sunbeam will make even the cloudiest day break into smiles; a bounding fawn will banish monotony even from a wilderness; and a gla.s.s of claret, or perchance some stronger grape, will convert even the plat.i.tude of a goblet of water into a pleasing beverage, and so May Dacre moved among her guests, shedding light, life, and pleasure.

She was not one who, shrouded in herself, leaves it to chance or fate to amuse the beings whom she has herself a.s.sembled within her halls.

Nonchalance is the _metier_ of your modern hostess; and so long as the house be not on fire, or the furniture not kicked, you may be even ignorant who is the priestess of the hospitable fane in which you wors.h.i.+p.