The Duke then inquired whether he were one of the Worcestershire Pinners, and Charles said he didn’t know.
The Duke then rambled off among his capacious memories, and presently brought back a Pinner who had been at Christchurch with him, and who had married, he said, one of the Dartmoors, an extremely handsome woman, fair too, who was probably the girl’s grandmother.
Charles merely bowed his head.
The Duke then asked who the Lukes, apart from this boy-husband at Ananias, were; for, he said, except the fellow in the Bible, he couldn’t recollect ever having heard of a Luke before.
Charles said all he knew was that they lived at South Winch.
‘What?’ cried the Duke. ‘Has she married beneath her?’—and was so really upset that for a time he blinked at Charles in silence. Because he felt that if only this dear son of his had secured the beautiful young creature he could have died content; and it seemed to him a double catastrophe that not only should his boy have missed her, but that she should have been caught into a misalliance with some obscure family in a suburb.
‘Upon my word, Charles,’ he said, after a dismayed silence, ‘that’s a pity. A very great pity.’
And rambling off into his memories again, he said it was a good thing that poor Jack Pinner was dead, for no man had a keener family feeling than he, and it would have broken his heart to think his grand-daughter had made a mistake of that kind.
He couldn’t get over it. He had never, in the whole of his long life, seen anyone to touch this girl for beauty, and that she should, at the very outset of what ought to have been a career of unparalleled splendour and success, have dropped out of her proper sphere and become entangled in a suburb really shocked him. Kings at her feet, all Europe echoing with her name—this seemed to the Duke such beauty’s proper accompaniment.
‘Tut, tut,’ he said, his hands, clasped on the top of his stick, shaking more than usual, ‘tut, tut, tut. What was her mother thinking of?’