第76章

'Are you alluding to anything now?'

'Well;--yes, I am.But I'm very discreet, and do not like to do more than allude.I fancy that Mr Grey, the member for Silverbridge, is going to Persia.Mr Grey is a Member of Parliament.Members of Parliament ought to be in London and not in Persia.It is generally supposed that no man in England is more prone to do what he ought to do than Mr Grey.Therefore, Mr Grey will cease to be Member for Silverbridge.That's logic, isn't it?'

'Has your Grace any logic equally strong to prove that I can follow him in the borough?'

'No;--or if I have, the logic that I should use in that matter must for the present be kept to myself.' She certainly had a little syllogism in her head as to the Duke ruling the borough, the Duke's wife ruling the Duke, and therefore the Duke's wife ruling the borough; but she did not think it prudent to utter this on the present occasion.'I think it much better that men in Parliament should be unmarried,' said the Duchess.

'But I am going to be married,' said he.

'Going to be married, are you?'

'I have no right to say so, because the lady's father has rejected me.' Then he told her the whole story, and so told it as to secure her entire sympathy.In telling it he never said that he was a rich man, he never boasted that that search after wealth of which he had spoken, had been successful; but he gave her to understand that there was no objection to him at all on the score of money.'You may have heard of the family,' he said.

'I have heard of the Whartons of course, and know that there is a baronet,--but I know nothing more of them.He is not a man of large property, I think.'

'My Miss Wharton, the one I would fain call mine,--is the daughter of a London barrister.He, I believe, is rich.'

'Then she will be an heiress.'

'I suppose so;--but that consideration has had no weight with me.I have always regarded myself as the architect of my own fortune, and have no wish to owe my material comfort to a wife.'

'Sheer love!' suggested the Duchess.

'Yes, I think so.It's very ridiculous, is it not?'

'And why does the rich barrister object?'

'The rich barrister, Duchess, is an out and out old Tory, who thinks that his daughter ought to marry no one but an English Tory.I am not exactly that.'

'A man does not hamper his daughter in these days by politics, when she is falling in love.'

'There are other cognate reasons.He does not like a foreigner.

Now I am an Englishman, but I have a foreign name.He does not think a name so grandly Saxon as Wharton should be changed to one so meanly Latin as Lopez.'

'The lady does not object to the Latinity?'

'I fancy not.'

'Or to the bearer of it.'

'Ah;--there I must not boast.But in simple truth there is only the father's ill-will between us.'

'With plenty of money on both sides?' asked the Duchess.Lopez shrugged his shoulders.A shrug at such a time may mean anything, but the Duchess took this shrug as signifying that that question was so surely settled as to admit of no difficulty.

'Then,' said the Duchess, 'the old gentleman may as well give way at once.Of course his daughter will be too many for him.' In this way the Duchess of Omnium became the best friend of Ferdinand Lopez.