The Eustace Diamonds (85 page)

‘God forbid that you should be hurt. Heaven forbid that even the winds of heaven should blow too harshly on my beloved. But my beloved is subject to the malice of the world. My beloved is a flower all beautiful within and without, but one whose stalk is weak, whose petals are too delicate, whose soft bloom is evanescent. Let me be the strong staff against which my beloved may blow in safety.'

A vague idea came across Lizzie's mind that this glowing language had a taste of the Bible
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about it, and that, therefore, it was in some degree impersonal, and intended to be pious. She did not relish piety at such a crisis as this, and was, therefore, for a moment inclined to be cold. But she liked being called a flower, and was not quite sure whether she remembered her Bible rightly. The words which struck her ear as familiar might have come from Juan and Haidee,
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and if so, nothing could be more opportune. ‘Do you expect me to give you answer now, Mr Emilius?'

‘Yes – now' And he stood before her in calm dignity, with his arms crossed upon his breast.

She did give him his answer then and there, but first she turned her face to the wall – or rather to the back of the sofa, and burst into a flood of tears. It was a delicious moment to her, that in which she was weeping. She sobbed forth something about her child, something about her sorrows, something as to the wretchedness
of her lot in life, something of her widowed heart – something also of that duty to others which would compel her to keep her income in her own hands; and then she yielded herself to his entreaties.

‘she is married today, duke, down in Scotland' – said Lady Glencora, sitting close to the duke's ear, for the duke was a little deaf. They were in the duke's small morning sitting-room, and no one else was present excepting Madame Max Goesler.

‘Married tomorrow – down in Scotland. Dear, dear! what is he?' The profession to which Mr Emilius belonged had been mentioned to the duke more than once before.

‘He's some sort of a clergyman, duke. You went and heard him preach, Madame Max. You can tell us what he's like.'

‘Oh, yes; he's a clergyman of our church,' said Madame Goesler.

‘A clergyman of our church; – dear, dear. And married in Scotland! That makes it stranger. I wonder what made a clergyman marry her?'

‘Money, duke,' said Lady Glencora, speaking very loud.

‘Oh, ah, yes; money. So he'd got money; had he?'

‘Not a penny, duke; but she had.'

‘Oh, ah, yes. I forgot. She was very well left; wasn't she? And so she has married a clergyman without a penny. Dear, dear! Did not you say she was very beautiful?'

‘Lovely!'

‘Let me see – you went and saw her, didn't you?'

‘I went to her twice – and got quite scolded about it. Plan-tagenet said that if I wanted horrors I'd better go to Madame Tussaud.
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Didn't he, Madame Max?' Madame Max smiled and nodded her head.

‘And what's the clergyman like?' asked the duke.

‘Now, my dear, you must take up the running,' said Lady Glencora, dropping her voice. ‘I ran after the lady, but it was you who ran after the gentleman.' Then she raised her voice. ‘Madame Max will tell you all about it, duke. She knows him very well.'

‘You know him very well; do you? Dear, dear, dear!'

‘I don't know him at all, duke, but I once went to hear him preach. He's one of those men who string words together, and do a good deal of work with a cambric pocket-handkerchief.'

‘A gentleman?' asked the duke.

‘About as like a gentleman as you're like an archbishop,' said Lady Glencora.

This tickled the duke amazingly. ‘He, he, he; – I don't see why I shouldn't be like an archbishop. If I hadn't happened to be a duke, I should have liked to be an archbishop. Both the archbishops take rank of me. I never quite understood why that was, but they do. And these things never can be altered when they're once settled. It's quite absurd, now-a-days, since they've cut the archbishops down so terribly. They were princes once,
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I suppose, and had great power. But it's quite absurd now. and so they must feel it. I have often thought about that a good deal, Glencora.'

‘And I think about poor Mrs Arch, who hasn't got any rank at all.'

‘A great prelate having a wife does seem to be an absurdity,' said Madame Max, who had passed some years of her life in a Catholic country.

‘And the man is a cad; – is he?' asked the duke.

‘A Bohemian Jew, duke – an impostor who has come over here to make a fortune. We hear that he has a wife in Pranue, and probably two or three elsewhere. But he has got poor little Lizzie
Eustace and all her money into his grasp, and they who know him say that he's likely to keep it.'

‘Dear, dear, dear!'

‘Barrington says that the best spec he knows out, for a younger son, would be to go to Prague for the former wife, and bring her back with evidence of the marriage. The poor little woman could not fail of being grateful to the hero who would liberate her.'

‘Dear, dear, dear!' said the duke. ‘And the diamonds never turned up after all. I think that was a pity, because I knew the late man's father very well. We used to be together a good deal at one time. He had a fine property, and we used to live; – but I can't just tell you how we used to live. He, he, he!'

‘You had better tell us nothing about it, duke,' said Madame Max.

The affairs of our heroine were again discussed that evening in another part of the Priory. They were in the billiard-room in the evening, and Mr Bonteen was inveighing against the inadequacy of the law as it had been brought to bear against the sinners who, between them, had succeeded in making away with the Eustace diamonds. ‘It was a most unworthy conclusion to such a plot,' he said. ‘It always happens that they catch the small fry, and let the large fish escape.'

‘Whom did you specially want to catch?' asked Lady Glencora.

‘Lady Eustace, and Lord George de Bruce Carruthers – as he calls himself.'

‘I quite agree with you, Mr Bonteen, that it would be very nice to send the brother of a marquis to Botany Bay, or wherever they go now;
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and that it would do a deal of good to have the widow of a baronet locked up in the Penitentiary; but you see, if they didn't happen to be guilty, it would be almost a shame to punish them for the sake of the example.'

‘They ought to have been guilty,' said Barrington Erie.

‘They were quality,' protested Mr Bonteen.

Mr Palliser was enjoying ten minutes of recreation before he went back to his letters. ‘I can't say that I attended to the case very closely,' he observed, ‘and perhaps, therefore, I am not entitled to speak about it.'

‘If people only spoke about what they attended to, how very little there would be to say – eh, Mr Bonteen?' This observation came, of course, from Lady Glencora.

‘But as far as I could hear' continued Mr Palliser, ‘Lord George Carruthers cannot possibly have had anything to do with it. It was a stupid mistake on the part of the police.'

‘I'm not quite so sure, Mr Palliser,' said Bonteen.

‘I know Coldfoot told me so.' Now Sir Harry Coldfoot was at this time Secretary of State for the Home Affairs, and in a matter of such importance of course had an opinion of his own.

‘We all know that he had money dealings with Benjamin, the Jew,' said Mrs Bonteen.

‘Why didn't he come forward as a witness when he was summoned?' asked Mr Bonteen triumphantly. ‘And as for the woman, does anybody mean to say that she should not have been indicted for perjury?'

‘The woman, as you are pleased to call her, is my particular friend,' said Lady Glencora. When Lady Glencora made any such statement as this – and she often did make such statements, no one dared to answer her. It was understood that Lady Glencora was not to be snubbed, though she was very much given to snubbing others. She had attained this position for herself by a mixture of beauty, rank, wealth, and courage; – but the courage had, of the four, been her greatest mainstay.

Then Lord Chiltern, who was playing billiards with Barrington Erle, rapt his cue down on the floor, and made a speech. ‘I never was so sick of anything in my life as I am of Lady Eustace. People have talked about her now for the last six months.'

‘Only three months, Lord Chiltern,' said Lady Glencora, in a tone of rebuke.

‘And all that I can hear of her is, that she has told a lot of lies and lost a necklace.'

‘When Lady Chiltern loses a necklace worth ten thousand pounds there will be talk of her,' said Lady Glencora.

At that moment Madame Max Goesler entered the room and whispered a word to the hostess. She had just come from the
duke, who could not bear the racket of the billiard-room. ‘Wants to go to bed, does he? Very well. I'll go to him.'

‘He seems to be quite fatigued with his fascination about Lady Eustace.'

‘I call that woman a perfect God-send. What should we have done without her?' This Lady Glencora said almost to herself as she prepared to join the duke. The duke had only one more observation to make before he retired for the night. ‘I'm afraid, you know, that your friend hasn't what I call a good time before her, Glencora.'

In this opinion of the Duke of Omnium's the readers of this story will perhaps agree.