The Duke's Children

by Anthony Trollope

  ‘Those are two Christian names I suppose, but what do they call you at home?’

  ‘Frank,’ whispered Mary, who was with them.

  ‘Then I will call you Frank, if you will allow me. The use of Christian names is, I think, pleasant and hardly common enough among us. I almost forget my own boy's name because the practice has grown up of calling him by a title.’

  ‘I am going to call him Abraham,’ said Isabel.

  ‘Abraham is a good name, only I do not think he got it from his godfathers and godmothers.’

  ‘Who can call a man Plantagenet? I should as soon think of calling my father-in-law Coeur de Lion.’

  ‘So he is,’ said Mary. Whereupon the Duke kissed the two girls and went his way, – showing that by this time he had adopted the one and the proposed husband of the other into his heart.

  The day before the Duke started for London to be present at the grand marriage he sent for Frank. ‘I suppose,’ said he, ‘that you would wish that some time should be fixed for your own marriage.’ To this the accepted suitor of course assented. ‘But before we can do that something must be settled about – money.’ Tregear when he heard this became hot all over, and felt that he could not restrain his blushes. Such must be the feeling of a man when he finds himself compelled to own to a girl's father that he intends to live upon her money and not upon his own. ‘I do not like to be troublesome,’ continued the Duke, ‘or to ask questions which might seem to be impertinent.’

  ‘Oh no! Of course I feel my position. I can only say that it was not because your daughter might probably have money that I first sought her love.’

  ‘It shall be so received. And now – But perhaps it will be best that you should arrange all this with my man of business. Mr Morton shall be instructed. Mr Morton lives near my place in Barsetshire, but is now in London. If you will call on him he shall tell you what I would suggest. I hope you will find that your affairs will be comfortable. And now as to the time.’

  Isabel's wedding was declared by the newspapers to have been one of the most brilliant remembered in the metropolis. There were six bridesmaids, of whom of course Mary was one, – and of whom poor Lady Mabel Grex was equally of course not another. Poor Lady Mabel was at this time with Miss Cassewary at Grex, paying what she believed would be a last visit to the old family home. Among the others were two American girls, brought into that august society for the sake of courtesy rather than of personal love. And there were two other Palliser girls and a Scotch McCloskie cousin. The breakfast was of course given by Mr Boncassen at his house in Brook Street, where the bridal presents were displayed. And not only were they displayed; but a list of them, with an approximating statement as to their value, appeared in one or two of the next day's newspapers; – as to which terrible sin against good taste neither was Mr or Mrs Boncassen guilty. But in these days, in which such splendid things were done on so very splendid a scale, a young lady cannot herself lay out her friends' gifts so as to be properly seen by her friends. Some well-skilled, well-paid hand is needed even for that, and hence comes this public information on affairs which should surely be private. In our grandmothers’ time the happy bride's happy mother herself compounded the cake; – or at any rate the trusted housekeeper. But we all know that terrible tower of silver which now stands niddle-noddling with its appendages of flags and spears on the modern wedding breakfast-table. It will come to pass with some of us soon that we must deny ourselves the pleasure of having young friends, because their marriage presents are so costly.

  Poor Mrs Boncassen had not perhaps a happy time with her august guests on that morning; but when she retired to give Isabel her last kiss in privacy she did feel proud to think that her daughter would some day be an English Duchess.

  CHAPTER 80

  The Second Wedding

  November is not altogether an hymeneal month, but it was not till November that Lady Mary Palliser became the wife of Frank Tregear. It was postponed a little perhaps, in order that the Silverbridges, – as they were now called, – might be present. The Silverbridges, who were now quite Darby and Joan, had gone to the States when the Session had been brought to a close early in August, and had remained there nearly three months. Isabel had taken infinite pleasure in showing her English husband to her American friends, and the American friends had no doubt taken a pride in seeing so glorious a British husband in the hands of an American wife. Everything was new to Silverbridge, and he was happy in his new possession. She too enjoyed it infinitely, and so it happened that they had been unwilling to curtail their sojourn. But in November they had to return, because Mary had declared that her marriage should be postponed till it could be graced by the presence of her elder brother.

  The marriage of Silverbridge had been august. There had been a manifest intention that it should be so. Nobody knew with whom this originated. Mrs Boncassen had probably been told that it ought to be so, and Mr Boncassen had been willing to pay the bill. External forces had perhaps operated. The Duke had simply been passive and obedient. There had however been a general feeling that the bride of the heir of the house of Omnium should be produced to the world amidst a blaze of trumpets and a glare of torches. So it had been. But both the Duke and Mary were determined that this wedding should be different. It was to take place at Matching, and none would be present but they who were staying in the house, or who lived around, – such as tenants and dependants. Four clergymen united their forces to tie Isabel to her husband, one of whom was a bishop, one a canon, and the two others royal chaplains; but there was only to be the Vicar of the parish at Matching. And indeed there were no guests in the house except the two bridesmaids and Mr and Mrs Finn. As to Mrs Finn Mary had made a request, and then the Duke had suggested that the husband should be asked to accompany his wife.

  It was very pretty. The church itself is pretty, standing in the park, close to the old Priory, not above three hundred yards from the house. And they all walked, taking the broad path through the ruins, going under that figure of Sir Guy which Silverbridge had pointed out to Isabel when they had been whispering there together. The Duke led the way with his girl upon his arm. The two bridesmaids followed. Then Silverbridge and his wife, with Phineas and his wife. Gerald and the bridegroom accompanied them, belonging as it were to the same party! It was very rustic; – almost improper! ‘This is altogether wrong, you know,’ said Gerald. ‘You should appear coming from some other part of the world, as if you were almost unexpected. You ought not to have been in the house at all, and certainly should have gone under disguise.’

  There had been rich presents too on this occasion, but they were shown to none except to Mrs Finn and the bridesmaids, – and perhaps to the favoured servants of the house. At any rate there was nothing said of them in the newspapers. One present there was, – given not to the bride but to the bridegroom, – which he showed to no one except to her. This came to him only on the morning of his marriage, and the envelope containing it bore the postmark of Sedbergh. He knew the handwriting well before he opened the parcel. It contained a small signet-ring with his crest, and with it there were but a few words written on a scrap of paper. ‘I pray that you may be happy. This was to have been given to you long ago, but I kept it back because of that decision.’ He showed the ring to Lady Mary and told her it had come from Lady Mabel; – but the scrap of paper no one saw but himself.

  Perhaps the matter most remarkable in the wedding was the hilarity of the Duke. One who did not know him well might have said that he was a man with very few cares, and who now took special joy in the happiness of his children, – who was thoroughly contented to see them marry after their own hearts. And yet, as he stood there on the altar-steps giving his daughter to that new son and looking first at his girl, and then at his married son, he was reminding himself of all he had suffered.

  After the breakfast, – which was by no means a grand repast and at which the cake did not look so like an ill-soldered silver castle as that other construction had done, – the
happy couple were sent away in a modest chariot to the railway station, and not above half-a-dozen slippers were thrown after them. There were enough for luck, – or perhaps there might have been luck even without them, for the wife thoroughly respected her husband, as did the husband his wife. Mrs Finn, when she was alone with Phineas, said a word or two about Tregear. ‘When she first told me of her engagement I did not think it possible that she should marry him. But after he had been with me I felt sure that he would succeed.’

  ‘Well, sir,’ said Silverbridge to the Duke when they were out together in the park that afternoon, ‘what do you think about him?’

  ‘I think he is a manly young man.’

  ‘He certainly is that. And then he knows things and understands them. It was never a surprise to me that Mary should have been so fond of him.’

  ‘I do not know that one ought to be surprised at anything. Perhaps what surprised me most was that he should have looked so high. There seemed to be so little to justify it. But now I will accept that as courage which I before regarded as arrogance.’

  A NOTE ON THE MANUSCRIPT

  The manuscript of The Duke's Children is in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. About one-fifth of the original manuscript was cut before publication. This was mostly achieved by the regularly spaced excision of words, phrases and sentences not strictly necessary to the action of the novel. No significant character or episode was removed entirely. In its cut version, The Duke's Children moves rather more briskly than the spacious and reflective narrative Trollope had first intended to publish, but tells much the same story.

  Occasionally, however, Trollope deletes substantial passages, and changes the balance of the novel. He had evidently planned a part for Mrs Grey, the heroine (as Alice Vavasor) of Can You Forgive Her? (1864), and a paragraph introducing the ‘real friendship’ between the Duke and Mrs Grey into the story is cut from Chapter 1. The pathos of the Duke's friendless situation in the published version of the novel's opening chapter is thus accentuated, and a deleted phrase from Chapter 1 speaks of his ‘morbid self-debasement’ after his wife's death.

  Tregear was originally more harshly presented. A deleted passage from Chapter 3 speaks of his reluctance to enter the legal profession, apparently the only gentlemanly trade open to him:

  It was already too late with him for diplomacy, – which he told his friends he would have liked; at any rate for that regular entrance into the lower ranks by which alone, we are given to understand, though not always made to believe, can the good things of the Civil Service be reached. For the Army and the Navy he was also too old, and, as he himself thought, by far too well educated. But to the bar he made many objections. He did not, he said, like the duplicity. He did not, in truth, like the labour. He liked to be a gentleman at large, having certain vague ideas as to a further career in Parliament; and he tried, very much in vain, to satisfy himself by thinking that he could be content to live among gentlemen as a poor man.

  Trollope removed other passages which present Tregear in an unflattering light. In Chapter 4, Tregear resents Mrs Finn's firmness: ‘With the Duchess he had generally found that he could have his own way, over Lady Mary his dominion had of course been supreme. And in his intercourse with Silver-bridge his influence had always been the more powerful of the two.’ Trollope also cut a passage describing the note Tregear writes to Mrs Finn in Chapter 4: ‘He began the note by presenting his compliments, and did his best to make it stiff and almost uncivil. “Silly boy!” she said to herself as she read the effusion. “Even if he had money he would not be fit to marry her.”’

  Major Tifto, on the other hand, was rather more sympathetically treated in the original version. His introduction in Chapter 6 included these sentences: ‘And it must be added to the above good things that he had a way of making himself pleasant with young men. He could be authoritative about horses, as is required from a man who is a Master of Fox Hounds and a pundit on race-courses, and at the same time could be short of speech, flattering in manner, and not dictatorial.’ His ultimate fate, bleak in the published novel, was sketched a little more cheerfully in a deleted sentence which was to have concluded Chapter 75: ‘In process of time Tifto married a publican's daughter under the name of Henry Walker, and, having inherited his father-in-law's business, lived to be able to tell his noble patron that the pension was no longer needed.’

  Politics played a rather larger part in the novel as first conceived, and the Conservatives were presented in a more negative light. Chapter 7 dwells on their vindictive pleasure in Silverbridge's defection: ‘No doubt the Conservative party would like it, and in order to seduce from his allegiance the heir of the house of Omnium would take care that arrangements should be made so that the family borough of Silverbridge should help him in his apostasy.’ In Chapter 11, Trollope cut a passage revealing the Duke's bitterness at his son's political disloyalty: ‘The fact that you are my son and that being so you call yourself a Conservative ought, together, to debar you from securing a single vote. But of course I shall not interfere.’ A larger part was planned for Phineas Finn, a central figure in the earlier political novels. A deleted passage from Chapter 45 describes Phineas's crucial role in Silverbridge's eventual defection from the Conservative cause: ‘Phineas Finn demolished one after another the juvenile arguments of the young deserter. “He'll come back to us, Duke, before long,” said Phineas one morning.’

  Mrs Finn, too, originally occupied more space in the novel. Trollope dwelt on the Duke's initial suspicion of her as an outsider in Chapter 13:

  No doubt there returned at this time to the Duke's mind something of the feeling towards this woman which had been strong with him when first his wife had proposed her to him as a friend. He too had thought, – he as well as Lady Cantrip and others, – that she had been in some degree mysterious and, in the same degree, objectionable. At any rate she was not one of his class. She had then been a widow and even up to this day he had heard nothing of her first husband except that he had died leaving her a rich woman. She had no doubt behaved well in peculiar circumstances. She might herself have been at this very moment a Duchess of Omnium, the old Duke having asked her to marry him. She had refused, – no doubt very wisely in reference to her own happiness; but there had seemed to be something noble in the refusal.

  The Duke's gradual and reluctant recognition of the worth of this ‘mysterious widow of an unheard of old husband’ was originally intended to make a more significant contribution to the moral education he undergoes after his wife's death.

  Mrs Spooner's part in the published novel was also curtailed. Trollope had planned to open Chapter 63 with an expression of Lord Silverbridge's admiration: ‘If Miss Boncassen had cause to be jealous of any other woman, that woman, after the occurrence recorded in the last chapter, was Mrs Spooner. “Upon my word,” he said to Lady Chiltern that evening, “I don't think I ever came across such a thorough brick in all my life.”’ Other deleted passages pursue the theme. Silverbridge goes to stay at Spooner Hall, where his entertainment includes a ‘grand dinner party’. But Lady Chiltern warns him of the limitations of his hostess (‘I don't know whether Mrs Spooner doesn't shine most on horseback’), and Silverbridge at last comes to share her opinion: ‘“You were quite right about her shining,” Silverbridge said afterwards. “When she is showing a lead after the hounds she is bright. She doesn't quite know what she is about so well when she's at home.”’ Trollope believed that it was in her home that a woman most needed to know what she was about, as he asserts in an excised passage from Chapter 72, where Isabel is introduced to her new home in Carlton Terrace: ‘The man is more than the house, – or ought to be; as heaven is, or ought to be, more than earth. But among earthly things, of all these material comforts, the house to the woman must stand first. It is to be the scene of her joy, her labour, and her troubles. To a man his house is, comparatively, like a kennel to a dog. It is a convenience and he likes to have it well arranged. But to a woma
n it is a temple sacred to the Gods; her own temple sacred to her own Gods.’

  One of the titles Trollope had originally considered for the novel was ‘Lord Silverbridge’, and the young lord's development, central to the finished novel, was still more so in the uncut manuscript. A passage removed from Chapter 74 shows Silverbridge to be more explicitly aware of what has happened to Mabel, and therefore more ruthless in the pursuit of his own interests, than he seems to be in the published text:

  That her plight should be so wretched. That she whom he had so nearly loved, whom he did regard with so dear a friendship should be exempt from all their content, should be as it were left out from their futurities, took away much from the thoroughness of his satisfaction. He and his friend Tregear were the heroes of the day, and it was through him and his friend Tregear that she had fallen to the ground. He had been wont to tell himself that he had committed no offence against her. But he could no longer comfort himself with that assurance. The very fact that she had found out that he and his father had at one time all but settled that she should be his wife seemed to cut that ground from under his feet. Poor Mabel Grex! It was, however, a great comfort to him that Isabel should have intervened just in time. Lady Mabel had many charms – but there could be only one chief, one best, one loveliest of her sex!

  The novel as Trollope published it ends abruptly, with the Duke's reflections on Tregear's persistence. Trollope had originally intended a rather more open ending, with the hint of a possible sequel, as the Duke speculates on what Tregear's future might hold:

  ‘Who knows. He may yet live to be a much greater man than his father-in-law. I am certainly very glad that he has a seat in Parliament.’

  ‘It will be my turn next,’ said Gerald, as he was smoking with his brother that evening. ‘After what you and Mary have done, I think he must let me have my own way whatever it be.’