plain she suffered both in her heart and her pride.
Her voice was under fair command-more than mine was.
She counselled me to go to London, at once. ’I
would be off to London if I were you, Harry,’—for
the purpose of checking my father’s extravagances,—would
have been the further wording, which she spared me;
and I thanked her, wishing, at the same time, that
she would get the habit of using choicer phrases whenever
there might, by chance, be a stress of emotion between
us. Her trembling, and her ’I’d be
off,’ came into unpleasant collision in the recollection.
I acknowledge to myself that she was a true and hearty
friend. She listened with interest to my discourse
on the necessity of my being in Parliament before
I could venture to propose formally for the hand of
the princess, and undertook to bear the burden of
all consequent negotiations with my grandfather.
If she would but have allowed me to speak of Temple,
instead of saying, ‘Don’t, Harry, I like
him so much!’ at the very mention of his name,
I should have sincerely felt my indebtedness to her,
and some admiration of her fine spirit and figure besides.
I could not even agree with my aunt Dorothy that Janet
was handsome. When I had to grant her a pardon
I appreciated her better.
The squire again did honour to Janet’s eulogy
and good management of him.
‘And where,’ said she, ’would you
find a Radical to behave so generously, Harry, when
it touches him so?’
He accorded me his permission to select my side in
politics, merely insisting that I was never to change
it, and this he requested me to swear to, for (he
called the ghost of old Sewis to witness) he abhorred
a turncoat.
’If you’re to be a Whig, or a sneaking
half-and-half, I can’t help you much,’
he remarked. ’I can pop a young Tory in
for my borough, maybe; but I can’t insult a
number of independent Englishmen by asking them to
vote for the opposite crew; that’s reasonable,
eh? And I can’t promise you plumpers for
the county neither. You can date your Address
from Riversley. You’ll have your house
in town. Tell me this princess of yours is ready
with her hand, and,’ he threw in roughly, ’is
a respectable young woman, I’ll commence building.
You’ll have a house fit for a prince in town
and country, both.’
Temple had produced an effect on him by informing
him that ’this princess of mine’ was entitled
to be considered a fit and proper person, in rank
and blood, for an alliance with the proudest royal
Houses of Europe, and my grandfather was not quite
destitute of consolation in the prospect I presented
to him. He was a curious study to me, of the Tory
mind, in its attachment to solidity, fixity, certainty,
its unmatched generosity within a limit, its devotion
to the family, and its family eye for the country.
An immediate introduction to Ottilia would have won
him to enjoy the idea of his grandson’s marriage;
but not having seen her, he could not realize her
dignity, nor even the womanliness of a ‘foreign
woman.’
