The Young Duke, Benjamin Disraeli [early reader books TXT] 📗

peer and a French colonel. Methinks such an incident might have been a better reason for a late measure than an Irishman being returned a member of our Imperial Parliament. There was our friend Lord St. Jerome; of course his stepmother, yet young, and some sisters, pretty as nuns. There were some cousins from the farthest north, Northumbria's bleakest bound, who came down upon Yorkshire like the Goths upon Italy, and were revelling in what they considered a southern clime.

There was an M.P. in whom the Catholics had hopes. He had made a great speech; not only a great speech, but a great impression. His matter certainly was not new, but well arranged, and his images not singularly original, but appositely introduced; in short, a bore, who, speaking on a subject in which a new hand is indulged, and connected with the families whose cause he was pleading, was for once courteously listened to by the very men who determined to avenge themselves for their complaisance by a cough on the first opportunity. But the orator was prudent; he reserved himself, and the session closed with his fame yet full-blown.

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 massy frames, they were just the characters to assemble 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 fricassee, 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 passion 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 lustre 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, nobody could be better pleased; supervised by his jaeger, 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 Yorkshire 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 sturdy voice.

'Can a Yorkshireman 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 sanctity 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 emancipating 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 Shropshire.'

'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 fashion, and exacted, to the last glass, the identical quantity 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 glass, 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 Duchess de Berri and the Duchess de Duras, Leontine Fay, and Lady Stuart de Rothesay, they got on, and made out the time until Purgatory ceased