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It might be necessary for him, as a married man, to give up such acquaintances as the de Courcys, but he should like, if possible, to maintain a friendship with Lady Alexandrina. What a friend Lady Alexandrina would be for Lily, if any such friendship were only possible!
"My dear, the English are an aristocratic people. They do not forgive mysterious blood and ungentle origins. While we have our Howards, our Talbots, and our Poulets to say nothing of the De Courcys and Cliftons it would surely seem excessively absurd to endure the intrusion of French émigrés into our midst."
Edgar himself, however, experienced something of the same feeling when he took his last farewell from the De Courcys before starting for Dover.
It has been told in the last chapter how Lady de Courcy gave a great party in London in the latter days of April, and it may therefore be thought that things were going well with the de Courcys; but I fear the inference would be untrue.
His father had been member for Barsetshire all his life, and he looked forward to similar prosperity as though it were part of his inheritance; but he failed to take any of the steps which had secured his father's seat. In the autumn of 1834 the dissolution came, and Frank Gresham, with his honourable lady wife and all the de Courcys at his back, found that he had mortally offended the county.
But the squire of Greshamsbury was a great man at Greshamsbury; and it behoved him to maintain the greatness of his squirehood when discussing his affairs with the village doctor. So much he had at any rate learnt from his contact with the de Courcys. And the doctor proud, arrogant, contradictory, headstrong as he was why did he bear to be thus snubbed?
"Are you going to Courcy, mamma?" "Oh, certainly; yes, I must see my sister-in-law now. You don't seem to realise the importance, my dear, of Frank's marriage. He will be in a great hurry about it, and, indeed, I cannot blame him. I expect that they will all come here." "Who, mamma? the de Courcys?" "Yes, of course. I shall be very much surprised if the earl does not come now.
Since his marriage with a daughter of the De Courcys, by which marriage he had intended to climb to the highest pinnacle of social eating and drinking, he had gradually found himself to be falling in the scale of such matters, and could bring himself to dine with a Dobbs Broughton without any violent pain.
He could get no one to slur over his sin for him, as though it were no sin, only an unfortunate mistake; no one but the de Courcys, who had, as it were, taken, possession of him and swallowed him alive. "It can't be helped now," said Crosbie. "But as for that fellow who made such a brutal attack on me the other morning, he knows that he is safe behind her petticoats.
In his marriage with the noble daughter of the De Courcys he had allowed the framers of the De Courcy settlement to tie him up in such a way that now, even when chance had done so much for him in freeing him from his wife, he was still bound to the De Courcy faction.
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