‘What a perfect family,’ exclaimed Hugo Bohun, as he extracted a couple of fat little birds from their bed of aspic jelly; ‘everything they do in such perfect taste. How safe you were here to have ortolans for supper!’
All the little round tables, though their number was infinite, were full. Male groups hung about; some in attendance on fair dames, some foraging for themselves, some thoughtful and more patient and awaiting a satisfactory future. Never was such an elegant clatter.
‘I wonder where Carisbrooke is,’ said Hugo Bohun. ‘They say he is wonderfully taken with the beauteous daughter of the house.’
‘I will back the Duke of Brecon against him,’ said one of his companions. ‘He raved about her at White’s yesterday.’
‘The end is not so near as all that,’ said a third wassailer.
‘I do not know that,’ said Hugo Bohun. ‘It is a family that marries off quickly. If a fellow is obliged to marry, he always likes to marry one of them.’
‘What of this new star?’ said his friend, and he mentioned Lothair.
‘Oh! he is too young; not launched. Besides he is going to turn Catholic, and I doubt whether that would do in that quarter.’
‘But he has a greater fortune than any of them.’
‘Immense! A man I know, who knows another man——’ and then he began a long statistical story about Lothair’s resources.
‘Have you got any room here, Hugo?’ drawled out Lord St. Aldegonde.
‘On no account; half of it and some soup will satisfy me.’
‘I should have thought you would have been with the swells,’ said Hugo Bohun.
‘That does not exactly suit me,’ said St. Aldegonde. ‘I was ticketed to the Duchess of Salop, but I got a first-rate substitute with the charm of novelty for her Grace, and sent her in with Lothair.’
St. Aldegonde was the heir apparent of the wealthiest, if not the most ancient, dukedom in the United Kingdom. He was spoiled, but he knew it. Had he been an ordinary being, he would have merely subsided into selfishness and caprice, but having good abilities and a good disposition, he was eccentric, adventurous, and sentimental. Notwithstanding the apathy which had been engendered by premature experience, St. Aldegonde held extreme opinions, especially on political affairs, being a republican of the reddest dye. He was opposed to all privilege, and indeed to all orders of men, except dukes, who were a necessity. He was also strongly in favour of the equal division of all property, except land. Liberty depended on land, and the greater the landowners, the greater the liberty of a country. He would hold forth on this topic even with energy, amazed at anyone differing from him; ‘as if a fellow could have too much land,’ he would urge with a voice and glance which defied contradiction. St. Aldegonde had married for love, and he loved his wife, but he was strongly in favour of woman’s rights and their extremest consequences. It was thought that he had originally adopted these latter views with the amiable intention of piquing Lady St. Aldegonde; but if so, he had not succeeded. Beaming with brightness, with the voice and airiness of a bird, and a cloudless temper, Albertha St. Aldegonde had, from the first hour of her marriage, concentrated her intelligence, which was not mean, on one object; and that was never to cross her husband on any conceivable topic. They had been married several years, and she treated him as a darling spoiled child. When he cried for the moon, it was promised him immediately; however irrational his proposition, she always assented to it, though generally by tact and vigilance she guided him in the right direction. Nevertheless, St. Aldegonde was sometimes in scrapes; but then he always went and told his best friend, whose greatest delight was to extricate him from his perplexities and embarrassments.