“Susanna has never yet seen the Duke of Halcyon—her cousin, and the husband for whom you destine her. When she does see him—I think I may be pardoned for saying——”
“She’ll raise Cain,” agreed Lady Beaumaris. “Girls think such heaps of good looks; I was like that myself, before I married your father, Gus.”
“My dear mother, granted that Halcyon’s gifts, both physical and mental, are not”—the Earl coughed—“not of the kind best calculated to impress and win upon a romantic, willful girl!... He is, to speak plainly——”
“A hideous little Troglodyte,” nodded the Dowager, over her interminable Shetland-wool knitting.
“Odd, considering that his mother, when Lady Flora MacCodrum, was, with the sole exception of myself, the handsomest young woman presented in the Spring of 1845.”
“Mother,” said Lord Beaumaris, “delightful as your reminiscences invariably are, Alaric is waiting to resume.”
“I had merely intended to suggest,” said Alaric, twirling his eyeglass by its black ribbon and turning his demure drab-colored countenance and balefully glittering left eye upon the Earl and the Dowager in turn, “that the Duke of Halcyon, like the rhubarb of Susanna’s infancy, should be rendered tolerable, agreeable, and even desirable to our dear girl’s palate, by being forbidden and withheld. Ask him here in September for the partridge shooting—as I understand you think of doing—but let him appear, not in his own character as a young English Peer of immense wealth and irreproachable reputation, but as one of those literary and artistic Ineligibles, who are encouraged by Society to take every liberty with it—short of marrying its cousins, sisters, or daughters. Let him encourage his hair to grow—wear a velvet coat, a flamboyant necktie, and silk stockings in combination with tweed knickerbockers. Let him pay attention to Susanna—as marked as he chooses. And do you, for your part”—he fixed Lord Beaumaris with his gleaming left eye—“discourage those attentions, and lose no opportunity of impressing upon your daughter that she is to discourage them too. Given this tempting opportunity of manifesting her independent spirit, you will find—or I know nothing of Susanna—that it will be pull baker, pull devil. And I know which will pull the hardest!”
Lord Beaumaris rose to his feet in superb indignation. He struck the attitude in which he had posed for his portrait, by Millais, which hung at the upper end of the library, representing him in the act of delivering his maiden speech in Parliament—an address advocating the introduction of footwarmers into the Upper House, and opened upon Alaric:
“Your proposal—I do not hesitate to say it—is audacious. You deliberately expect that I—I, Gustavus Templebar Bloundle-Abbott Bloundle, ninth Earl of Beaumaris, and head of this ancient family—should stoop to carry out a deception—and upon my only child. That I should take advantage of her willful youth, her undisciplined temper, to——”
“To bring about a match that will set every mother’s mouth watering, and secure your daughter’s son a dukedom, and a hundred and thirty thousand a year.... That’s so, and I guess,” said Lady Beaumaris, “you’ll do it, Gus! You’re a representative English peer, it’s true, but on my side you’ve Yankee blood in you, and the grandson of Elijah K. Van Powler isn’t going to back out of a little bluff that’s going to pay. No, sir!” The Dowager ran her knitting-needles through her wool ball, and rolled up her work briskly. “He’ll do it, Alaric,” she said with conviction.