MRS. FORBES and her daughter had been in London two weeks. The engagement had been announced by the Duke a week previously, and was the sensation of the hour. The American newspapers were agog, but, as Mr. Forbes refused to be interviewed, were obliged to content themselves with daily bulletins from London. Mr. Forbes’ opposition was suspected, but could not be verified. When congratulated, he replied diplomatically that he was not a warm advocate of international marriages. He hedged with a sense of bitter abasement, but he could not fling his dignity into the public maw.
Mrs. Van Rhuys informed people that, personally, her brother liked the Duke of Bosworth, but had hoped that Augusta would marry an American. She could not name the exact amount of the dowry; several millions, probably. The Duke seemed singularly indifferent. He wished the marriage to take place at once and in England, that his mother, who idolized him, might be present. Wherefore the sudden move, as the trousseau was of far more importance than the breaking of a dozen social engagements. Mr. Forbes would go over for the wedding, of course—unless this dreadful financial muddle prevented. She and her brother-in-law, Schuyler Van Rhuys, who was nursing the wound inflicted by that unintelligible Californian, Helena Belmont, should go, in any case. No; the Duke had not jilted Mabel Creighton. On the contrary, Mabel might be said to have made the match. She and the Duke had known each other for a long while, and were the best of friends, nothing more.
All the folk in London of the Duke’s set had called on Mrs. Forbes and the impending Duchess. As Parliament was sitting, there was a goodly number of them. The United States Ambassador gave a banquet in honour of the engagement, and it was the first of many attentions.
But the Duke was a man in whom few beyond his intimate circle took personal interest: he was cold, repellent, unpicturesque. The heiress had neither beauty nor the thistle-down attraction of the average American girl. It was Virginia Forbes who introduced a singular variation into this important but hackneyed transaction, and atoned for the paucities of the principal figures: she absorbed something more than two-thirds of the public attention. Her beauty, her distinction, her lively wit, her exquisite taste in dress, her jewels, above all her girlish appearance, commanded the reluctant admiration or the subtle envy of the women, the enthusiasm of the men, and the unflagging attentions of the weekly press. Her ancestry was suddenly discovered, and was a mine of glittering and illimited strata. Her photograph was printed in every paper which aimed to amuse a great and weary people, and was on sale in the shops. In short, she was the “news” of the hour; and the twentieth of his line and the lady who would save the entail were the mere mechanism selected by Circumstance to steer a charming woman to her regalities.
“You certainly ought to be in a state of unleavened bliss,” remarked her daughter with some sarcasm one evening as they sat together after tea, alone for the hour. “You simply laid your plans, sailed over, and down went London. I never knew anything quite so neat in my life. But it is in some people’s lines to get everything they want, and I suppose you will to the end of the chapter.”
Mrs. Forbes was gazing into the fire through the sticks of a fan. Her face was without its usual colour and her lips were contracted.
“Not a line from your father, and it is three weeks,” she said abruptly.
“You did not expect him—father!—to come round in a whirl, I suppose. But why do you worry so? You know that it can end in one way only. We are all he has, and he adores us, and cannot live without us. It isn’t as if he were fast, like so many New York men. I have not worried—not for a moment.”
“How can you be so cold-blooded? I wish you knew the wretch I feel. If he does adore us, cannot you comprehend what we are making him suffer? Sometimes I think I can never make it up to him, not with all the devotion I am capable of, after this miserable business is over.”
“Mother! You are not weakening? You will not retreat now that you have gone so far?”
“I have no intention of retreating. But I wish that I had stayed in New York and fought it out there. It was a shocking and heartless thing to run away and leave him like that, a brutal and insulting thing; but when he told me that he should pull Mr. Creighton through, and speak to the Duke, this move seemed the only one that could save the game.”
“And a very wise one it was. Father would have beaten you in the end—surely; he can do anything with you. I think it is humiliating to be part and parcel of a man like that.”
“You know nothing of love. You are fascinated by a man who has the magnetism of indifference; that is all.”
“I am quite sure that I love Bertie,” said Miss Forbes with decision. “I have analyzed myself thoroughly, and I feel convinced that it is love—although I thank my stars that I could never in any circumstances be so besottedly in love with a man as you are with dear papa. I do not pretend to deny that I am pleased, very pleased, at the idea of being a Duchess. All we American girls of the best families have good blue English blood in our veins, and it seems to me that in accepting the best that the mother country can offer us, we should feel no more flattered or excited than any English-born girl in the same circumstances. For the nouveau riche—the fungi—of course it is ridiculous, and also lamentable: they muddy a pure stream, and they are chromos in a jewelled frame. But there are many of us that should feel a certain gratitude to Providence that we are permitted to save from ruin the grand old families whose ancestors and ours played together, perhaps, as children. To me it is a sacred duty as well as a very great pleasure. Papa’s English ancestors may not have been as smart as yours, but he has seven generations of education and refinement, position and wealth behind him in the United States; he is the chief figure in the aristocracy of the United States; and in time he must see things as we do.”
To this edifying homily Mrs. Forbes gave scant attention. She was tormented with conjectures of her husband’s scorn and displeasure, picturing his loneliness. Sometimes she awoke suddenly in the night, lost the drift for the moment of conversation in company, saw a blank wall instead of the mise en scène of the play, her brain flaring with the enigma: “Will life ever be quite the same again?” She had had a second object in leaving New York abruptly: she believed that her husband could not stand the test of her absence and anger. But in the excitement and rush of those two days she had not looked into her deeper knowledge of him. She had known him very well. It was a dangerous experiment to wound a great nature, to shatter the delicate partition between illusion and an analytical mind.
“What a dreadful sigh!” expostulated Miss Forbes. “It is bad for the heart to sigh like that. I don’t think you are very well. I don’t think, lovely as you look, that you have been quite up to mark since we left New York.”
“I suppose it is because I was ill crossing; I never was before, you know. And then it is the first time in my life that I have been away from both your father and mammy. I am so used to being taken care of that I feel as if I were doing the wrong thing all the time, and Marie is merely a toilette automaton. This morning the clothes were half off the bed when I woke up, and the window was open; and yesterday Marie gave me the wrong wrap, and I was cold all the afternoon.”
“Good heavens, mother!” cried Miss Forbes. “Fancy being thirty-nine and such a baby. I feel years older than you.”
“And immeasurably superior. I suppose the petting and care I have had all my life would bore you. Well, your cold independent nature often makes me wonder what are its demands upon happiness. Does Bertie ever kiss you?”
“Occasionally; but I don’t care much about kissing. We discuss the questions of the day.”
“Poor man!”
“I am sure that he likes it, and we shall get along admirably. I am the stronger nature, and I feel reasonably certain that I shall acquire great influence over him, and make an exemplary man of him.”
“Great heavens!” thought Mrs. Forbes. “A plain passionless pseudo-intellectual girl reforming an English profligate! What a sight for the gods!”
“I hope papa will come round before the wedding, because I wish only the interest of my dowry settled on us, and it takes a man to hold out on that point. That would give me the upper hand in a way. You have not written to him since we left, have you?”
“No.”
“Don’t you think it is time?”
“I intend to write by to-morrow’s steamer.”
“Do make him really understand that he is forcing you to sacrifice the houses and jewels to which you are so much attached.”
“I shall make it as strong as I can.”
“I’ll write to Aunt Harriet, and tell her to talk to him. Poor dear papa, I am afraid he is lonesome. I wish he would come over so that we could all be together again. Give him my love and a kiss.”
“You certainly have a magnificent sense of humour.”