Worcester inquired what that meant.
"Simply, les droits du mari, for the first night."
Worcester, having by this time discovered that I was only laughing at him, appeared deeply wounded and offended with me.
"My love, what is to be done?" I asked. "I, as your friend, your real friend, wish you to be comfortably reconciled to your parents, and, by making me your wife you lose them for ever, without doing me any material good; for I have no ambition nor hankering after rank, and, I confess, my conscience does not reproach me with any particular crime, attached to my present, quiet mode of life, since I have no children; else I should for their sake judge differently. Let us hope the best, enjoy the present, and be merry, pray, or I might as well have remained in town."
By degrees Worcester recovered his spirits, and, perhaps, there never was an hour during our whole acquaintance in which he was so devoted to me, so madly, passionately fond of me, as during my visit to the Crown Inn, which proves how the passion of love is ever increased by difficulties, till it, at last, acquires such a degree of enthusiastic ardour, as persons in the full, easy possession of what they desire can form not the least conception of.
Alas! how fleeting are our moments of happiness! Poor Worcester was obliged to leave me by nine in the morning, after handing me into a hack-chaise; because he could not bear the idea of my being again addressed by any low man who might happen to be fellow traveller, when my dress would induce them to mistake me for a servant.
Just as I had got about a mile from Oxford, one of Worcester's uncles passed my chaise: if I recollect right it was Lord Edward. He stared at me in my old costume as though I had been the ninth wonder of the world. However, I hoped, since I had never in my life spoken to his lordship and merely guessed him to be a Somerset, that he would have remained at least in some little doubt as to my identity.
The next morning's post convinced me of my mistake. Worcester, in a very long, dismal letter, acquainted me that I had been seen, in a very odd, unladylike kind of dress close to Oxford. Worcester assured his father that it was quite impossible, as I certainly should not have gone to Oxford without acquainting him of the circumstance. The duke and duchess condescended to laugh at him as a weak silly dupe to a vile and profligate woman, asked him what good he fancied I could be doing by travelling about in disguise; and why, if it had been good, I looked so confused, and appeared so anxious to hide my face from his uncle, as to have actually covered it with both my hands? His uncle further declared that I was both deformed and ugly, which rendered his infatuation the more absurd.
Worcester, in reply, declared his aunt so very ugly that the man who had chosen her for his wife must for ever give up all pretensions to taste; and then he asked them why they imagined two of the handsomest men of this, and perhaps of any age, Lord Ponsonby and the Duke of Argyll—my readers must excuse my placing Lord Ponsonby first—should have been so much in love with deformity? And, if they were, it was of course a proof that my mind must have been of that superior cast as made ample amends for the defects of my person.
There were two young men at that time on a visit with Her Grace of Beaufort, who is known to have always encouraged a very motherly kindness of feeling towards young men, particularly when they were well looking. Perhaps she wanted them for her daughters; and yet, that beauty soon fades is the cry of most moral mammas. However that may be (and I have not in the least presumed to entertain a doubt of Her Grace's virtue, according to the English acceptation of that word), the two young men I have just now mentioned, and who so vehemently joined the hue and cry against me, were Montagu, the eldest son of a lady in Portman Square, who used to give charitable dinners to the poor chimney-sweepers once a year, and Mr. Meyler, a young Hampshire gentleman, in the possession of very large West India property, of at least five and twenty thousand a year.