Lord Alistair's Rebellion

by Allen Upward

In saying this he was thinking of the history of his own father and mother, of which he had learned more than his mother suspected. He had sometimes felt surprised, as well as mortified, that he should have had such a parent as Lord Alexander. Never having seen his father since early childhood, and being free from any tendency to romantic idealism, the Duke was able to judge the dead man quite impartially, and to think of him as if he had been some remote ancestor, whose virtues and vices were merely matter of curiosity for his descendants.

“I wonder my mother’s own experience has not taught her the folly of thinking that a worthless man can be redeemed by a good wife,” he reflected impatiently. “Alistair takes after his father; no doubt that is why she has always loved him better than me. Her whole soul is absorbed in trying to save him from the consequences of his own follies, and I am merely a pawn in the game. Now she wants to enlist Hero Vanbrugh in the same task, as if a girl like that were fit for nothing better than to be the keeper of a drunken prodigal.”

The Duchess observed the frown on her eldest son’s brow with wondering dismay. It did not occur to her that he could be moved by any other feeling than fraternal jealousy. Old-fashioned in her ideas on this subject, as on most others, she had never contemplated it as possible that the Duke of Trent and Colonsay could marry out of his own class. And the class in which, with perfectly unconscious pride, she placed her young friend was that middle one which appeared to have been created to supply doctors and lawyers and men of business for the service of the aristocracy. In her eyes the girl’s father, Sir Bernard Vanbrugh, was simply a successful medical man. The scientific achievements which had made him a European personage, greater than any Secretary of State, were outside her ken.

If she had come to entertain the project of marrying Hero Vanbrugh to her prodigal son as a last means of averting the terrible catastrophe of Molly Finucane, she did so honestly, considering that she offered a privilege to Hero, corresponding with the greatness of the interest at stake. It was in the perfect simplicity of this conviction that she had so candidly revealed her design. In the same spirit she had been ready to take Alistair’s brother into her confidence without any apprehension that she might be applying the spur of rivalry to a slumbering admiration.

She was familiar with the Duke’s expressed views on matrimony, which she respected, although they struck a little cold on her own more emotional nature. She knew that he had made up his mind from an early age to two things—that he was one of the best matches in Great Britain, and that marriage was the most important card he had to play in the game of life. It had long been understood between them that Trent was in no hurry; that what he required in a wife was a great fortune, accompanied by those social graces which count for so much in politics; and that when he found a possessor of both these gifts who pleased him she would become his Duchess. The mother lived in the mild expectation of hearing some day that her young sultan had thrown the handkerchief to a fitting aspirant, whom it would be her part to welcome with what tenderness was permitted, and in whose favour she would cheerfully resign her place in Colonsay House.

Thus it lay altogether outside her calculations that her eldest son could take any interest in Hero Vanbrugh warmer than a passing friendship. The prudent young statesman was the last person in the world whom anyone acquainted with him would have believed capable of a romantic passion. And the last person in the world to believe it would have been the young Minister himself.

A man who has lived to the age of thirty without ever losing his head in the company of a woman naturally regards himself as love-proof, and perhaps insensibly relaxes his self-defence. But Hero Vanbrugh enjoyed one great advantage over almost every unmarried girl whom Trent had ever met, inasmuch as she had not come before him as a candidate for the orange-blossoms.

If he had met her in one of those crowded ballrooms where her sisters are paraded nightly in the London season for the allurement of intending purchasers, Trent would have carefully guarded himself from giving her a second thought. He had met her for the first time at his own table, lunching in outdoor costume with his mother, who introduced her as a helper in her charitable work. The Duke, presuming that Miss Vanbrugh came from some humble clerical circle, unbent from his ordinary reserve in the desire to put her at her ease. He was rewarded for this kindly effort by the discovery that she was beautiful and charming.

It was not until afterwards that he learned from his mother, who rallied him playfully on his fascination, that he had been entertaining the daughter of the great Vanbrugh. It was chance, therefore—one of those chances that every now and then take over the control of our lives and change them for us—that had caused Trent to meet Hero Vanbrugh on this easy footing instead of in the cankered atmosphere of fashion. But the ice, once broken, could not be re-formed, and the relations between Hero and her host at Colonsay House had developed into intimacy.

Up to this time the Duke’s mental attitude had been that of a man who views a tempting object in a shop-window, and stands hesitating, purse in hand, wishful to buy, but unable to make up his mind to give the price. Now he suddenly became aware that another possible purchaser was coming up, and that if he wanted to make sure of the bargain, he must lose no more time.