“When you are married, you take the rank and title of your husband,—a duchess, if he be a duke.”
“A duchess be it, then,” said she, in that light, volatile tone she was ever best pleased to employ, while, with a rattling gayety, she went on: “How I should love to be one of those great people you have described to me,—soaring away in all that ideal splendor which would come of a life of boundless cost, the actual and the present being only suggestive of a thousand fancied enjoyments! What glorious visions might one conjure up out of the sportiveness of an untrammelled will! Yes, Mr. Beecher, I have made up my mind,—I 'll be a duchess!”
“But you might have all these as a marchioness, a countess—”
“No, I 'll be a duchess; you sha'n't cheat me out of my just claims.”
“Will your Grace please to give orders about packing up, for we must be away soon after one o'clock,” said he, laughing.
“If I were not humility itself, I'd say the train should await my convenience,” said she, as she left the room with a proud and graceful dignity that would have become a queen.
For a few moments Beecher sat silent and thoughtful in his chair, and then burst out into a fit of immoderate laughing,—he laughed till his eyes ran over and his sides ached. “If this ain't going the pace, I 'd like to know what speed is!” cried he, aloud. “I wonder what old Grog would say if he heard her; and the best of the joke is, she is serious all the while. She is in the most perfect good faith about it all. And this comes of the absurdity of educating her out of her class. What a strange blunder for so clever a head to make! You might have guessed, Master Grog, that she never could be a 'plater.' Let her only enter for a grand match, and she 'll be 'scratched' from one end of England to the other. Ay, Davis, my boy, you fancy pedigrees are only cared for on the turf; but there is a Racing Calendar, edited by a certain Debrett, that you never heard of.”
Again, he thought of Davis as a peer,—“Viscount Davis!” Baron Grog, as he muttered it, came across him, and he burst out once more into laughter; then suddenly checking himself, he said, “I must take right good care, though, that he never hears of this same conversation; he's just the fellow to say I led her on to laugh at and ridicule him; he 'd suspect in a moment that I took her that pleasant gallop,—and if he did—” A long, wailing whistle finished the sentence for him.
Other and not very agreeable reflections succeeded these. It was this very morning that he himself had determined on “levanting,” and there he was, more securely moored than ever. He looked at his watch, and muttered, “Eleven o'clock; by this time I should have been at Verviers, and on the Rhine before midnight. In four days more, I 'd have had the Alps between us, and now here I am without the chance of escape; for if I bolted and left his daughter here, he'd follow me through the world to shoot me!”
He sat silent for some minutes, and then, suddenly springing up from his chair, he cried out,—