It is difficult at all times for a man with a strong sense of his own dignity to make love, and for a man animated by the calm and temperate regard of the Duke of Trent to try to make love according to the accepted English convention struck even his imagination as dangerously foolish.
He condemned in his own mind the national custom which requires the man to do his own love-making.
“Now, in France,” he reflected, “there would be no trouble about the matter. I should tell my mother to send for Sir Bernard Vanbrugh, and they would settle it between them.”
Sir Bernard’s name suggested an alternative which recommended itself the more the longer he considered it. He would carry his proposal to Hero’s father, and leave it to him to break the ice with Hero herself.
His acquaintance with the great scientist and physician was of the slightest, but he could hardly distrust the reception such a son-in-law as himself was likely to receive, and he might count on the father’s influence with his daughter to overcome any possible hesitation on her part.
Desirous to give every possible distinction to his overture, the Home Secretary drew towards him a sheet of the official notepaper, and wrote a few lines requesting the physician to name an hour at which he would receive him on a private matter. The note folded and sealed, he handed it to his private secretary, with injunctions to send it by a messenger, and bring back the reply.
Sir Bernard Vanbrugh’s answer, which arrived within half an hour, was even more formal than the Duke’s request, simply stating that the physician would be at liberty that day at five o’clock.
The Duke ordered his carriage, and alighted at Sir Bernard’s door in Stratford Place punctually at the hour named. Rather to his surprise, but even more to his relief, he was taken, not into the drawing-room, but into the physician’s consulting-room, and offered the patient’s chair.
The man whose grey powerful eyes, under their square wall of forehead, were turned on him with something of the penetrative power of a searchlight, across a fragile-looking desk in some decorative wood, was a man with a remarkable history.
There are some men of whom their friends are accustomed to say that they should like them better if they were not so clever. Vanbrugh had started in life with this handicap. He was an intellectual monster, a brain-giant whose understanding was to the understandings of those about him what the magnesium light is to a tallow candle.