Putting two and two together, as the saying is, it was not difficult for me to guess who the expected Marquis was—and, indeed, the King’s College youth set that question at once to rest, by wagging his head at me, and winking his eye, and saying, “We expect Farintosh.”
“Why, my dearest children,” Matronly Virtue exclaimed, “this anxiety to behold the young Marquis of Farintosh, whom we expect at our modest table, Mrs. Pendennis, to-day? Twice you have been at the window in your eagerness to look for him. Louisa, you silly child, do you imagine that his lordship will appear in his robes and coronet? Rodolf, you absurd boy, do you think that a Marquis is other than a man? I have never admired aught but intellect, Mrs. Pendennis; that, let us be thankful, is the only true title to distinction in our country nowadays.”
“Begad, sir,” whispers the old Major to me, “intellect may be a doosid fine thing, but in my opinion, a Marquisate and eighteen or twenty thousand a year—I should say the Farintosh property, with the Glenlivat estate and the Roy property in England, must be worth nineteen thousand a year at the very lowest figure and I remember when this young man’s father was only Tom Roy, of the 42nd, with no hope of succeeding to the title, and doosidly out at elbows too—I say what does the bankeress mean by chattering about intellect? Hang me, a Marquis is a Marquis; and Mrs. Newcome knows it as well as I do.” My good Major was growing old, and was not unnaturally a little testy at the manner in which his hostess received him. Truth to tell, she hardly took any notice of him and cut down a couple of the old gentleman’s stories before he had been five minutes in the room.
To our party presently comes the host in a flurried countenance, with a white waistcoat, holding in his hand an open letter, towards which his wife looks with some alarm. “How dy’ doo, Lady Clara, how dy’ doo, Ethel?” he says, saluting those ladies, whom the second carriage had brought to us. “Sir Barnes is not coming, that’s one place vacant; that, Lady Clara, you won’t mind, you see him at home: but here’s a disappointment for you, Miss Newcome, Lord Farintosh can’t come.”
At this, two of the children cry out “Oh! oh!” with such a melancholy accent that Miss Newcome and Lady Clara burst out laughing.
“Got a dreadful toothache,” said Mr. Hobson; “here’s his letter.”
“Hang it, what a bore!” cries artless young King’s College.
“Why a bore, Samuel? A bore, as you call it, for Lord Farintosh, I grant; but do you suppose that the high in station are exempt from the ills of mortality? I know nothing more painful than a toothache,” exclaims a virtuous matron, using the words of philosophy, but showing the countenance of anger.
“Hang it, why didn’t he have it out?” says Samuel.
Miss Ethel laughed. “Lord Farintosh would not have that tooth out for the world, Samuel,” she cried, gaily. “He keeps it in on purpose, and it always aches when he does not want to go out to dinner.”