The Duke spent the rest of the day alone, and was not happy in his solitude. All that Silverbridge had told him was sad to him. He had taught himself to think that he could love Lady Mabel as an affectionate father wishes to love his son's wife. He had set himself to wish to like her, and had been successful. Being most anxious that his son should marry he had prepared himself to be more than ordinarily liberal,--to be in every way gracious. His children were now everything to him, and among his children his son and heir was the chief. From the moment in which he had heard from Silverbridge that Lady Mabel was chosen he had given himself up to considering how he might best promote their interests,--how he might best enable them to live, with that dignity and splendour which he himself had unwisely despised. That the son who was to come after him should be worthy of the place assigned to his name had been, of personal objects, the nearest to his heart. There had been failures, but still there had been left room for hope. The boy had been immature at Eton;--but how many unfortunate boys had become great men! He had disgraced himself by his folly at college,--but although some lads will be men at twenty, others are then little more than children. The fruit that ripens the soonest is seldom the best. Then had come Tifto and the racing mania.
Nothing could be worse than Tifto and racehorses. But from that evil Silverbridge had seemed to be made free by the very disgust which the vileness of the circumstance had produced. Perhaps Tifto driving a nail into his horse's foot had on the whole been serviceable. That apostasy from the political creed of the Pallisers had been a blow,--much more felt than the loss of the seventy thousand pounds;--but even under that blow he had consoled himself by thinking that a conservative patriotic nobleman may serve his country,--even as a Conservative. In the midst of this he had felt that the surest resource for his son against evil would be in an early marriage. If he would marry becomingly, then might everything still be made pleasant. If his son should marry becomingly nothing which a father could do should be wanting to add splendour and dignity to his son's life.
In thinking of all this he had by no means regarded his own mode of life with favour. He knew how jejune his life had been,--now devoid of other interests than that of the public service to which he had devoted himself. He was thinking of this when he told his son that he had neither ploughed and sowed or been the owner of sheep or oxen. He often thought of this, when he heard those round him talking of the sports, which, though he condemned them as the employment of a life, he now regarded wistfully, hopelessly as far as he himself was concerned, as proper recreations for a man of wealth. Silverbridge should have it all, if he could arrange it.
The one thing necessary was a fitting wife,--and the fitting wife had been absolutely chosen by Silverbridge himself.
It may be conceived, therefore, that he was again unhappy. He had already been driven to acknowledge that these children of his,--thoughtless, restless, though they seemed to be,--still had a will of their own. In all which how like they were to their mother!
With her, however, his word, though it might be resisted, had never lost its authority. When he had declared that a thing should not be done, she had never persisted in saying that she would do it. But with his children it was otherwise. What power he had over Silverbridge,--or for the matter of that, even his daughter? They had only to be firm and he knew that he must be conquered.
'I thought that you liked her,' Silverbridge had said to him. How utterly unconscious, thought the Duke, must the young man have been of all that his position required of him when he used such an argument! Liked her. He did like her. She was clever, accomplished, beautiful, well-mannered,--as far as he knew endowed with all good qualities! Would not many an old Roman have said as much for some favourite Greek slave,--for some freedmen whom he would admit to his very heart? But what old Roman ever dreamed of giving his daughter to the son of a Greek bondsman! Had he done so, what would have become of the name of a Roman citizen? And was it not his duty to fortify and maintain that higher, smaller, more precious pinnacle of rank on which Fortune had placed him and his children?
Like her! Yes! he liked her certainly. He had by no means always found that he best liked the companionship of his own order. He had liked to feel around him the free battle of the House of Commons. He liked the power of attack and defence in carrying on which an English politician cares nothing for rank. He liked to remember that the son of any tradesman might, by his own merits, become a peer of Parliament. He would have liked to think that his son should share all these tastes with him. Yes;--he liked Isabel Boncassen. But how different was that liking from a desire that she should be bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh!
