第57章

'I was thinking of--myself.'

'You are certainly one of the impossibles.'

'Why, Lady Mab?'

'For twenty reasons. You are too young, and you are bound to oblige your father, and you are to be wedded to Parliament,--at any rate for the next ten years. And altogether it wouldn't do,--for a great many reasons.'

'I suppose you don't like me well enough?'

'What a question to ask! No, my Lord I do not. There, that's what you may call an answer. Don't you pretend to look offended, because if you do, I shall laugh at you. If you may have your joke surely I may have mine.'

'I don't see any joke in it.'

'But I do. Suppose I were to say the other thing. Oh, Lord Silverbridge, you do me so much honour! And now I come to think about it, there is no one in the world I am so fond of as you.

Would that suit you?'

'Exactly.'

'But it wouldn't suit me. There's papa. Don't run away.'

'It's ever so much past five,' said the legislator, 'and I had intended to be in the House more than an hour ago. Good-bye. Give my love to Miss Cassewary.'

'Certainly. Miss Cassewary is your most devoted friend. Won't you bring your sister to see me some day?'

'When she is in town I will.'

'I should like to know her. Good-bye.'

As he hurried down to the House in a hansom, he thought over it all, and told himself that he feared it would not do. She might perhaps accept him, but if so, she would do it simply in order that she might become Duchess of Omnium. She might, he thought, have accepted him then, had she chosen. He had spoken plainly enough. But she had laughed at him. He felt that if she loved him, there ought to have been something of that feminine tremor, of that doubting, hesitating half-avowal of which he had perhaps read in novels, and which his own instincts taught him to desire. But there had been no tremor nor hesitating. 'No; my Lord, I do not,' she had said when he asked her to her face whether she liked him well enough to be his wife. 'No; my Lord I do not.' It was not the refusal conveyed in these words which annoyed him. He did believe that if he were to press his suit with the usual forms she would accept him. But it was that there should be such a total absence of trepidation in her words and manner. Before her he blushed and hesitated and felt that he did not know how to express himself. If she would only have done the same, then there would have been an equality. Then he could have seized her in his arms and sworn that never, never, never would he care for any one but her.

In truth he saw everything as it was only too truly. Though she might choose to marry him if he pressed his request, she would never subject herself to him as he would have the girl do whom he loved. She was his superior, and in every word uttered between them showed that it was so. But yet how beautiful she was;--how much more beautiful than any other thing he had ever seen!

He sat on one of the high seats behind Sir Timothy Beeswax and Sir Orlando Drought, listening, or pretending to listen, to the speeches of three or four gentlemen respecting sugar, thinking of all this till half-past seven;--and then he went to dine with the proud consciousness of having done his duty. The forms and methods of the House were, he flattered himself, soaking into him gradually,--as his father had desired. The theory of legislation was sinking into his mind. The welfare of the nation depended chiefly on sugar. But he thought that, after all, his own welfare must depend on the possession of Mab Grex.