"And he has a right to be presented to the Court, and know the Queen; and maybe now and then she asks a duke or two to dine with her, and advise her what to do about Parliament and Radicals and foreign possessions, and so on?"
"I believe so, aunt dear."
"It is wonderful to think of it! Wonderful to think of it! To think that the young man we knew in this humble little house as Charlie will be sitting down to gold services with the Queen, and that we shall see his name in The Court Circular--'The Duke of Shropshire visited the Queen yesterday, and afterwards enjoyed the honour of dining with Her Majesty.' Wonderful!"
From the lids of the girl's eyes the tears now began to fall. The old Duke had been drowned, the present Duke was dying, and her Charlie, her own, her only darling Charlie, was to be the new Duke. And they should read all those dreadful things in The Court Circular and elsewhere; and she should scarcely be able to take up any kind of a paper in which she should not find his name; but it was plain to her she had lost himself. She, the sweetheart, the wife of a great duke!--she blushed crimson with shame at the bare thought, and she wept for sorrow that a dukedom should rob her of her dear lover.
The elder woman's thoughts went on in quite a different way.
She had, of course, often seen lords and ladies in the Park and the theatres and other places of public assembly, but she had never spoken to one. Her father had, of course, spoken to many, and had been presented at Court; but then her father was to her a god apart, quite as much apart as the members of the peerage. She had, as far as she could now recollect, never seen a duke, except the Duke of Wellington. But then he wasn't a great duke to her mind. He was a great captain, a great soldier, but the ducal quality in him was too new to be interesting. It was overborne by the splendour of his achievements and the glory of his renown. The dukedom was no more in him than the scarf he had put on that morning. But a duke proper, from her point of view, she had never seen; one of whose house there had been dukes three hundred years ago had never come within her ken, and of such dukes she stood in awe, not knowing what manner of men they might be. She had heard of the Dukeries as of some mysterious region, upon which nothing earthly could compel her to enter. She had, of course, seen royal dukes; but these she looked upon as only princes of the blood masquerading.
She had never in all her life spoken to a lord or a lady; and beyond what she read of them in books, which she believed to be mostly lies, she had no means of forming any notion of how they spoke. She knew that judges on the bench were not as other men, and did not speak as other men; but judges were only common men, had been only common barristers at one time. Had a lord spoken to her she should not have known what to say. She should in all likelihood have said Yes or No without any discrimination, and retired. She would not say Yes or No, my lord, for all the world; for to say so would have been to admit she knew the honour which had been thrust upon her; and the burden of such an admission she could not bear. She had a notion that members of the peerage were as much removed from sympathy with common mortals as birds or fishes; and when, once a year or so, in looking idly down the columns of The Times, she could not help seeing that a noble lord had said something about turnips or calves, she hastened on, shocked and affrighted as much as though a clergyman, in whom she had always trusted, had one Sunday, in the pulpit, advised his congregation to come no more to church, but to spend the day in playing whist and billiards, and dancing and singing, and eating and drinking.
But now what had arisen? A man whom she had known for years, who had crossed her threshold hundreds of times, who had sat on every chair in that little drawing-dining-room, who had eaten her beef and broken her eggs at his tea, who had rolled her chair from one room into the other, who had made the salad for tea and praised the condition of her beer, who had kissed her niece in her presence over and over again, and had promised to be a good husband to that young girl, whom she now loved more than all else on earth--this man was now about to be lifted into the front rank of the peerage! He was to be a duke--the ducal son of she knew not how many fathers! It was prodigious! unbelievable!
And what would come of it all? Would he remember them? Plainly: for had he not sent the important papers to Marion? And there was the girl, wretched and dispirited. Why? Ah well, she might guess. Charles Augustus Cheyne with a few hundreds a year from his pen, and Charles Augustus Cheyne, Duke of Shropshire and master of how much wealth she knew not, were widely different persons. But, after all, who could tell? She had met Mr. Cheyne, and liked him. She had never met a duke--how could she tell what would be her feelings towards a duke if she met one? And then the fact of Cheyne and a duke being one! She should let matters take their course, and see how they would turn out.
"Marion dear," she said at the end of these cogitations, "what is it you are to do with those papers Charles sent you?"