CHAPTER 3

Francis Oliphant Tregear

Mr Francis Oliphant Tregear was a young man who might not improbably make a figure in the world, should circumstances be kind to him, but as to whom it might be doubted whether circumstances would be sufficiently kind to enable him to use serviceably his unquestionable talents and great personal gifts.  He had taught himself to regard himself as a young English gentleman of the first water, qualified by his birth and position to live with all that was most noble and most elegant, and he could have lived in that sphere naturally and gracefully were it not that part of the ‘sphere’ which he specially affected requires wealth as well as birth and intellect.  Wealth he had not, and yet he did not abandon the sphere.  As a consequence of all this, it was possible that the predictions of his friends as to that figure which he was to make in the world might be disappointed.

He had been educated at Eton, from whence he had been sent to Christ Church; and both at school and at college had been the most intimate friend of the son and heir of a great and wealthy duke.  He and Lord Silverbridge had been always together, and they who were interested in the career of young noblemen had generally thought he had chosen his friend well.  Tregear had gone out in honours, having been a second-class man.  His friend Silverbridge, we know, had been allowed to take no degree at all; but the terrible practical joke by which the whole front of the Dean’s house had been coloured scarlet in the middle of the night, had been carried on without any assistance from Tregear.  The two young men had then been separated for a year; but immediately after taking his degree, Tregear, at the invitation of Lord Silverbridge, had gone to Italy, and had there completely made good his footing with the Duchess,—­with what effect on another member of the Palliser family the reader already knows.

The young man was certainly clever.  When the Duchess found that he cold talk without any shyness, that he could speak French fluently, and that after a month in Italy could chatter Italian, at any rate without reticence or shame, when she perceived that all the women liked the lad’s society and impudence, and that all the young men were anxious to know him, she was glad to find that Silverbridge had chosen so valuable a friend.  And then he was beautiful to look at,—­putting her almost in mind of another man on whom her eyes had once loved to dwell.  He was dark, with hair that was almost black, but yet was not black; with clear brown eyes, a nose as regular as Apollo’s, and a mouth in which was ever to be found that expression of manliness, which of all characteristics is the one which women love the best.  He was five feet ten in height.  He was always well dressed, and yet always so dressed as to seem to show that his outside garniture had not been matter of trouble to him.  Before the Duchess had dreamed what might take place between the young man and her daughter she had been urgent in her congratulations to her son as to the possession of such a friend.