as her name. He had seen her
walking across a field, not many months after the interment of his
second Duchess, Maria, that great and gifted lady. I know not whether it
was that her bonny mien fanned in him some embers of his youth, or that
he was loth to be outdone in gracious eccentricity by his crony the Duke
of Dewlap, who himself had just taken a bride from a dairy. (You have
read Meredith's account of that affair? No? You should.) Whether it was
veritable love or mere modishness that formed my ancestor's resolve,
presently the bells were ringing out, and the oldest elm in the park was
being felled, in Meg Speedwell's honour, and the children were strewing
daisies on which Meg Speedwell trod, a proud young hoyden of a bride,
with her head in the air and her heart in the seventh heaven. The Duke
had given her already a horde of fine gifts; but these, he had said,
were nothing--trash in comparison with the gift that was to ensure for
her a perdurable felicity. After the wedding-breakfast, when all the
squires had ridden away on their cobs, and all the squires' ladies in
their coaches, the Duke led his bride forth from the hall, leaning on
her arm, till they came to a little edifice of new white stone, very
spick and span, with two lattice-windows and a bright green door
between. This he bade her enter. A-flutter with excitement, she
turned the handle. In a moment she flounced back, red with shame and
anger--flounced forth from the fairest, whitest, dapperest dairy,
wherein was all of the best that the keenest dairy-maid might need. The
Duke bade her dry her eyes, for that it ill befitted a great lady to be
weeping on her wedding-day. 'As for gratitude,' he chuckled, 'zounds!
that is a wine all the better for the keeping.' Duchess Meg soon forgot
this unworthy wedding-gift, such was her rapture in the other, the so
august, appurtenances of her new life. What with her fine silk gowns
and farthingales, and her powder-closet, and the canopied bed she slept
in--a bed bigger far than the room she had slept in with her sisters,
and standing in a room far bigger than her father's cottage; and
what with Betty, her maid, who had pinched and teased her at the
village-school, but now waited on her so meekly and trembled so
fearfully at a scolding; and what with the fine hot dishes that were set
before her every day, and the gallant speeches and glances of the fine
young gentlemen whom the Duke invited from London, Duchess Meg was