THE PRIME MINISTER (8 page)

There was a great deal that could be done ‘in his way’ as father, – but how was it to be
introduced and the case made clear? Lopez did not know whether the old man had as yet ever suspected such a feeling as that which he now intended to declare. He had been intimate at the house in Manchester Square, and had certainly ingratiated himself very closely with a certain Mrs Roby, who had
been Mrs Wharton’s sister and constant companion, who lived in Berkeley Street, close round the corner
from Manchester Square, and spent very much of her time with Emily Wharton. They were together daily, as though Mrs Roby had assumed the part of a second mother, and Lopez was well aware that Mrs Roby knew of his love. If there was real confidence between Mrs Roby and the old lawyer, the old lawyer must know it also; – but as to that Lopez felt that he was in the dark.

The task of speaking to
an old father is not unpleasant when the lover knows that he has been smiled upon, and, in fact, approved for the last six months. He is going to be patted on the back, and made much of, and received into the family. He is to be told that his Mary or his Augusta has been the best daughter in the world, and will therefore certainly be the best wife, and he himself will probably on that special occasion
be spoken of with unqualified praise, – and all will be pleasant But the subject is one very difficult to broach when no previous light has been thrown on it Ferdinand Lopez, however, was not the man to stand shivering on the brink when a plunge was necessary, – and therefore he made his plunge. ‘Mr Wharton, I have taken the liberty to call upon you here, because I want to speak to you about
your daughter.’

‘About my daughter!’ The old man’s surprise was quite genuine. Of course, when he had given himself a moment to think, he knew what must be the nature of his visitor’s communication. But up to that moment he had never mixed his daughter and Ferdinand Lopez in his thoughts together. And now, the idea having come upon him, he looked at the aspirant with severe and unpleasant eyes.
It was manifest to the aspirant that the first flash of the thing was painful to the father.

‘Yes, sir. I know how great is my presumption. But, yet, having ventured, I will hardly say to entertain a hope, but to have come to such a state that I can only be happy by hoping, I have thought it best to come to you at once.’

‘Does she know anything of this?’

‘Of my visit to you? Nothing.’

‘Of
your intentions; – of your suit generally? Am I to understand that this has any sanction from her?’

‘None at all.’

‘Have you told her anything of it?’

‘Not a word. I come to ask you for your permission to address her.’

‘You mean that she has no knowledge whatever of your, – your preference for her.’

‘I cannot say that. It is hardly possible that I should have learned to love her as I do without
some consciousness on her part that it is so.’

‘What I mean is, without any beating about the bush, – have you been making love to her?’

‘Who is to say in what making love consists, Mr Wharton?’

‘D— it, sir, a gentleman knows. A gentleman knows whether he has been playing on a girl’s feelings, and a gentleman, when he is asked as I have asked you, will at any rate tell the truth. I don’t want
any definitions. Have you been making love to her?’

‘I think, Mr Wharton, that I have behaved like a gentleman; and that you will acknowledge at least so much when you come to know exactly what I have done and what I have not done. I have endeavoured to commend myself to your daughter, but I have never spoken a word of love to her.’

‘Does Everett know of all this?’

‘Yes.’

‘And has he encouraged
it?’

‘He knows of it, because he is my most intimate friend. Whoever the lady might have been, I should have told him. He is attached to me, and would not I think, on his own account, object to call me his brother. I spoke to him yesterday on the matter very plainly, and he told me that I ought certainly to see you first. I quite agreed with him, and therefore I am here. There has certainly been
nothing in his conduct to make you angry, and I do not think that there has been anything in mine.’

There was a dignity of demeanour and a quiet assured courage which had its effect upon the old lawyer. He felt that he could not storm and talk in ambiguous language of what a ‘gentleman’ would or would not do. He might disapprove of this man altogether as a son-in-law, – and at the present moment
he thought that he did, – but still the man was entitled to a civil answer. How were lovers to approach the ladies of their love in any manner more respectful than
this? ‘Mr Lopez,’ he said, ‘you must forgive me if I say that you are comparatively a stranger to us.’

‘That is an accident which would be easily cured if your will in that direction were as good as mine.’

‘But, perhaps, it isn’t
One has to be explicit in these matters. A daughter’s happiness is a very serious consideration; – and some people, among whom I confess that I am one, consider that like should marry like. I should wish to see my daughter marry, – not only in my own sphere, neither higher nor lower, – but with someone of my own class.’

‘I hardly know, Mr Wharton, whether that is intended to exclude me.’

‘Well,
– to tell you the truth I know nothing about you. I don’t know who your father was, – whether he was an Englishman, whether he was a Christian, whether he was a Protestant, – not even whether he was a gentleman. These are questions which I should not dream of asking under any other circumstances; – would be matters with which I should have no possible concern, if you were simply an acquaintance.
But when you talk to a man about his daughter –!’

‘I acknowledge freely your right of inquiry.’

‘And I know nothing of your means; – nothing whatever. I understand that you live as a man of fortune, but I presume that you earn your bread. I know nothing of the way in which you earn it, nothing of the certainty or amount of your means.’

‘Those things are of course matters for inquiry; but may
I presume that you have no objection which satisfactory answers to such questions may not remove?’

‘I shall never willingly give my daughter to anyone who is not the son of an English gentleman. It may be a prejudice, but that is my feeling.’

‘My father was certainly not an English gentleman. He was a Portuguese.’ In admitting this, and in thus subjecting himself at once to one clearly-stated
ground of objection, – the objection being one which, though admitted, carried with itself neither fault nor disgrace, – Lopez felt that he had got a certain advantage. He could not get over the fact that he was the son of a Portuguese parent, but by admitting that openly he thought he might avoid present discussion on matters which might, perhaps, be more disagreeable, but to which
he need not
allude if the accident of his birth were to be taken by the father as settling the question.

‘My mother was an English lady,’ he added, ‘but my father certainly was not an Englishman. I never had the common happiness of knowing either of them. I was an orphan before I understood what it was to have a parent.’

This was said with a pathos which for the moment stopped the expression of any further
harsh criticism from the lawyer. Mr Wharton could not instantly repeat his objection to a parentage which was matter for such melancholy reflections; but he felt at the same time that as he had luckily landed himself on a positive and undeniable ground of objection to a match which was distasteful to him, it would be unwise for him to go to other matters in which he might be less successful. By
doing so, he would seem to abandon the ground which he had already made good. He thought it probable that the man might have an adequate income, and yet he did not wish to welcome him as a son-in-law. He thought it possible that the Portuguese father might be a Portuguese nobleman, and therefore one whom he would be driven to admit to have been in some sort a gentleman; – but yet this man who was
now in his presence and whom he continued to scan with the closest observation, was not what he called a gentleman. The foreign blood was proved, and that would suffice. As he looked at Lopez, he thought that he detected Jewish signs, but he was afraid to make any allusion to religion, lest Lopez should declare that his ancestors had been noted as Christians since St James first preached in the
Peninsula.

‘I was educated altogether in England,’ continued Lopez, ‘till I was sent to a German university in the idea that the languages of the Continent are not generally well learned in this country; – I can never be sufficiently thankful to my guardian for doing so.’

‘I dare say; – I dare say. French and German are very useful. I have a prejudice of my own in favour of Greek and Latin.’

‘But I rather fancy I picked up more Greek and Latin at Bohn than I should have got here, had I stuck to nothing else.’

‘I dare say; – I dare say. You may be an Admirable Crichton for what I know.’

‘I have not intended to make any boast, sir, but simply to vindicate those who had the care of my education. If you have no objection except that founded on my birth, which is an accident –’

‘When
one man is a peer and another a ploughman, that is an accident. One doesn’t find fault with the ploughman, but one doesn’t ask him to dinner.’

‘But my accident,’ said Lopez smiling, ‘is one which you would hardly discover unless you were told. Had I called myself Talbot you would not know but that I was as good an Englishman as yourself.’

‘A man of course may be taken in by falsehoods,’ said
the lawyer.

‘If you have no other objection than that raised, I hope you will allow me to visit in Manchester Square.’

‘There may be ten thousand other objections, Mr Lopez, but I really think that the one is enough. Of course I know nothing of my daughter’s feelings. I should imagine that the matter is as strange to her as it is to me. But I cannot give you anything like encouragement. If I
am ever to have a son-in-law, I should wish to have an English son-in-law. I do not even know what your profession is.’

‘I am engaged in foreign loans.’

‘Very precarious I should think. A sort of gambling, isn’t it?’

‘It is the business by which many of the greatest mercantile houses in the city have been made.’

‘I dare say; – I dare say; – and by which they come to ruin. I have the greatest
respect in the world for mercantile enterprise, and have had as much to do as most men with mercantile questions. But I ain’t sure that I wish to marry my daughter in the City. Of course it’s all prejudice. I won’t deny that on general subjects I can give as much latitude as any man; but when one’s own hearth is attacked –’

‘Surely such a position as mine, Mr Wharton, is no attack!’

‘In my sense
it is. When a man proposes to assault and invade the very kernel of another man’s heart, to share with him, and indeed to take from him, the very dearest of his possessions, to become part and parcel with him either for infinite good or infinite evil, then a man has a right to guard even his prejudices as precious bulwarks.’ Mr Wharton as he said this was walking about the room with his hands
in his trousers pockets. ‘I have always been for absolute toleration in matters of religion, – have always advocated admission of Roman Catholics and Jews into Parliament, and even to the Bench. In ordinary life I never question a man’s religion. It is nothing to me whether he belives in Mahomet, or has no belief at all. But when a man comes to me for my daughter –’

‘I have always belonged to
the Church of England,’ said Ferdinand Lopez.

‘Lopez is at any rate a bad name to go to a Protestant church with, and I don’t want my daughter to bear it. I am very frank with you, as in such a matter men ought to understand each other. Personally I have liked you well enough, and have been glad to see you at my house. Everett and you have seemed to be friends, and I have had no objection to
make. But marrying into a family is a very serious thing indeed.’

‘No man feels that more strongly than I do, Mr Wharton.’

‘There had better be an end of it’

‘Even though I should be happy enough to obtain her favour?’

‘I can’t think that she cares about you. I don’t think it for a moment. You say you haven’t spoken to her, and I am sure she’s not a girl to throw herself at a man’s head. I
don’t approve it, and I think it had better fall to the ground. It must fall to the ground.’

‘I wish you would give me a reason.’

‘Because you are not English.’

‘But I am English. My father was a foreigner.’

‘It doesn’t suit my ideas. I suppose I may have my own ideas about my own family, Mr Lopez? I feel perfectly certain that my child will do nothing to displease me, and this would displease
me. If we were to talk for an hour I could say nothing further.’

‘I hope that I may be able to present things to you in an aspect so altered,’ said Lopez as he prepared to take his leave, ‘as to make you change your mind.’

‘Possibly; – possibly,’ said Wharton; ‘but I do not think it probable. Good morning to you, sir. If I have said anything that has seemed to be unkind, put it down to my anxiety
as a father and not to my conduct as a man.’ Then the door was closed behind his visitor, and Mr Wharton was left walking up and down his room alone. He was by no means satisfied with himself He felt that he had been rude and at the same time not decisive. He had not explained to the man as he would wish to have done, that it was monstrous and out of the question that a daughter of the Whartons,
one of the oldest families in England, should be given to a friendless Portuguese, – a probable Jew, – about whom nobody knew anything. Then he remembered that sooner or later his girl would have at least £60,000, a fact of
which no human being but himself was aware. Would it not be well that somebody should be made aware of it, so that his girl might have the chance of suitors preferable to this
swarthy son of Judah? He began to be afraid, as he thought of it, that he was not managing his matters well. How would it be with him if he should find that the girl was really in love with this swarthy son of Judah? He had never inquired about his girl’s heart, though there was one to whom he hoped that his girl’s heart might some day be given. He almost made up his mind to go home at once, so
anxious was he. But the prospect of having to spend an entire afternoon in Manchester Square was too much for him, and he remained in his chamber till the usual hour.