‘You may trust them for that, but I want to keep out of their clutches. In case of a second marriage all this business will have to be gone into; but marry I will, if it is only to spite the presumptive heir, a man whom I always hated as a sneaking boy, and I don’t love the man now he fancies he is going to step into my shoes, or, if not, who feels that his family will. I am bound to marry, if only out of spite.’
‘The best thing you can do, Sir Watkin, and I wish you well through it. I am not a marrying man myself. I never was. I am getting too old for it, and I could not afford it if I wished. When we are young we have dreams of love in a cottage, and try to persuade ourselves that what is enough for one is enough for two; that there is nothing half so sweet as love’s young dream. But, oh, the terrible awakening, when the dream is over, and the grim-reality of poverty stalks in at the door, and the husband has endless toil, and the wife endless sorrow, and even then the wolf is not kept from the door; and things are worse when the happy couple come to their senses and feel what fools they have been. There is little room for love then. I believe matrimony is the sin of the age. No one can pretend now that to increase and multiply is the whole duty of man. The world is over-peopled, half of the people of England cannot get a decent living as it is. Why am I to drag a respectable woman down into the depths of poverty? Why, I ask, is she to drag me down? I have my comforts, my clubs, my amusements, my occupations, my position in society. Were I married I should lose them all, unless I married a Miss Kilmansegg with her golden leg. But your case is different, Sir Watkin. You are bound to marry. It is a duty you to owe to your ancestors, who have given you title and fortune, to continue the family.’
It may be that some may not approve of this style of talk. They may question the need of great hereditary families. They may go so far as to insinuate that the happiness of such few individuals is often inconsistent with the welfare of the many; that the system which keeps up such is an artificial one; that the true aim of legislation should be the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Respectability in wonder may well ask what next? But in the coming era respectability will have a good deal to wonder about.
CHAPTER XXI.
AN UNPLEASANT RENCONTRE.
Left alone with himself, Sir Watkin revolved many things. He was not sorry after all, he tried to persuade himself, that he was not in Parliament. He was no eager politician, and he had none of that fatal fluency when on his legs, so common in our day among the ambitious clerks and traders who join Parliamentary societies, and figure in them with the hope at some time or other of calling themselves M.P.’s. It was time, he thought, that he should again try his luck in the matrimonial market, and, indeed, he had almost made up his mind to secure a prize which had been temptingly displayed.
He had been staying at Brighton, at a grand hotel, and there he had made the acquaintance of a wealthy merchant, an old widower, with an only daughter, for whose hand and heart he had already commenced angling. The father was chatty and cheerful in the smoking-room, of one of the Brighton clubs, and the girl, if she had not the birth of a lady, had all the accomplishments of one. She was not romantic, few girls nowadays are. She was not a philosopher in petticoats, as so many of them try to be. She read novels, could quote Tennyson, had the usual accomplishments, never failed to put in an appearance at a fashionable church on a Sunday, and had once or twice figured at a stall at a charity bazaar. Her figure looked well on horseback, and did not disgrace a Belgravian ball-room. It was to her credit that she had not attempted authorship. She was not a bad hand at a charade, and was a proficient in lawn tennis, where one weak curate after another had succumbed to her charms. Poor fellows, they singed their wings in vain at that candle. Neither father nor daughter was ecclesiastically inclined. In addition, she had had the measles and been vaccinated and confirmed, and was ambitious of worldly success.
‘Just a woman to make a lady of,’ said the Baronet to himself, as he watched her receding figure one morning as she was on her way to Brill’s Baths for a swimming lesson. ‘They tell me the old man has no end of tin, and this is his only child.’
He met the Baronet half way. When Sir William Holles, the son of that Sir William Holles, Lord Mayor of London, and Alderman of Candlewick Ward, and knighted by Henry VIII., was recommended by his friends to marry his daughter to the Earl of Cumberland, he replied:
‘Sake of God’ (his usual mode of expression), ‘I do not like to stand with my cap in hand to my son-in-law. I will see her married to an honest gentleman with whom I may have friendship and conversation.’
Sir Watkin relieved the London merchant of any apprehension on that score, when, one day, he managed to dine in his company. It was wonderful how well they got on together. Sir Watkin talked of stocks and shares, of foreign loans and the rate of exchange, of hostile tariffs, of the fall of this house and the rise of another, of aldermen and lord mayors, as if he had been a City man himself. It is true this talk is rather dull, but Sir Watkin was not brilliant by any means.