With a rhapsody upon her beauty, he informs her of
his rank, for a flourish to the proposal of honourable
and immediate marriage. He cannot wait.
This is the fatal condition of his love: apparently
a characteristic of amorous dukes. We read them
in the signs extended to us. The minds of these
august and solitary men have not yet been sounded;
they are too distant. Standing upon their lofty
pinnacles, they are as legible to the rabble below
as a line of cuneiform writing in a page of old copybook
roundhand. By their deeds we know them, as heathendom
knows of its gods; and it is repeatedly on record that
the moment they have taken fire they must wed, though
the lady’s finger be circled with nothing closer
fitting than a ring of the bed-curtain. Vainly,
as becomes a candid country lass, blue-eyed Susan tells
him that she is but a poor dairymaid. He has
been a student of women at Courts, in which furnace
the sex becomes a transparency, so he recounts to her
the catalogue of material advantages he has to offer.
Finally, after his assurances that she is to be married
by the parson, really by the parson, and a real parson—
Sweet
Susie is off for her parents’ consent,
And
long must the old folk debate what it meant.
She
left them the eve of that happy May morn,
To
shine like the blossom that hangs from the thorn!
Apart from its historical value, the ballad is an
example to poets of our day, who fly to mythological
Greece, or a fanciful and morbid mediaevalism, or—save
the mark!—abstract ideas, for themes of
song, of what may be done to make our English life
poetically interesting, if they would but pluck the
treasures presented them by the wayside; and Nature
being now as then the passport to popularity, they
have themselves to thank for their little hold on
the heart of the people. A living native duke
is worth fifty Phoebus Apollos to Englishmen, and a
buxom young lass of the fields mounting from a pair
of pails to the estate of duchess, a more romantic
object than troops of your visionary Yseults and Guineveres.
CHAPTER II
A certain time after the marriage, his Grace alighted
at the Wells, and did himself the honour to call on
Mr. Beamish. Addressing that gentleman, to whom
he was no stranger, he communicated the purport of
his visit.
‘Sir, and my very good friend,’ he said,
’first let me beg you to abate the severity
of your countenance, for if I am here in breach of
your prohibition, I shall presently depart in compliance
with it. I could indeed deplore the loss of
the passion for play of which you effectually cured
me. I was then armed against a crueller, that
allows of no interval for a man to make his vow to
recover!’
‘The disease which is all crisis, I apprehend,’
Mr. Beamish remarked.
’Which, sir, when it takes hold of dry wood,
burns to the last splinter. It is now’—the
duke fetched a tender groan—’three
years ago that I had a caprice to marry a grandchild!’
Copyrights
The Tale of Chloe from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
