Wintonstayed in London until September, with a certain sense of satisfaction in this self-martyrdom. It was totally unnecessary and could advantage nobody—but the thought of going into the country and pretending to enjoy himself while everything was so doubtful as to his future prospects, was disagreeable to him. He neglected his friends, he declined his invitations, he took pleasure in making himself miserable, and in pouring out his loneliness and wretchedness on sheet after sheet of note-paper, and addressing the budget to Billings Court;from whence, very soon indeed after this practice began, the Duchess, alarmed, sent him an energetic protestation. “Such a hot correspondence will soon awaken suspicions,” she wrote; “for Jane’s sake I implore you to be a little more patient.” “Patient! much she knows about it!” Winton said, when, pouncing upon this letter with the hope of finding, perhaps—who could tell?—the Duke’s consent in it and final sanction, he encountered this disappointing check. What could she know about it indeed, with Jane by her side, and all that she cared for? Perhaps in other circumstances the young man might have had a glimmering perception that the Duchess was well acquainted with the exercise of patience, even though Jane was her daughter; but at present his own affairs entirely occupied his mind. He spent a good deal of his time inWardour Street and other cognate regions, and attended a great many sales, in which there was some degree of soothing to be obtained; for to “pick up” something which might hereafter grace her sitting-room, gave a glory tobric-a-brac, and thus he seemed to be doing something for her, even when most entirely separated from her. Jane herself wrote to him the most soothing of letters. “So long as we know each other as we do, and trust each other, what does a little delay matter?” she said. Poor Winton cried out, “Much she knows about it!” again, as he kissed yet almost tore, in loving fury, her tender little epistle. This was very unreasonable, for of course she knew quite as much about it as he did. When a pair of lovers are parted, it is not the lady that is supposed to feel it the least.
And yet he was more or less justifiedin that despairing exclamation, for Jane’s perfect faith was such as is rarely possible to a man who has been in the world. He did not feel at all sure that she might not be capable out of pure sweetness and self-sacrifice—that pernicious doctrine in which, he said to himself angrily, women are nourished—of giving him up. Even the Duchess sometimes thought so, deceived by the serene aspect of her child, who did not pine or sigh, but pursued her gentle career with a more than ordinary sweetness and pleasure in it. Lady Jane had the advantage over both these doubting souls. Doubt was not in her; and she was aware, as they were not, of the persistency of her own steadfast nature, which, in the absence of all experience to the contrary, she held to be a universal characteristic. It did not occur to her as possible that having made up his mind on an important subject—far less given his heart, to use the sentimental language which she blushed yet was pleased in the depths of her seclusion to employ—any man—or woman either—could be persuaded or forced to change it. Many things were possible—but not that. She had no excitement on the subject, because it was outside of all her consciousness, a thing impossible. Change! give up! The only result of such a suggestion upon Lady Jane was a faintly humorous and perfectly serene smile. But Winton had not this admirable serenity. Perhaps he was not himself so absolutely true as the stainless creature whom he loved. He worked himself up into little fits of passion sometimes, asking himself how could he tell what agencies might be brought to bear upon her, what necessities might be urged upon her? It was very well known that the Duke was poor; and if it sohappened that in the depths of his embarrassment somebody stepped forward with one of those fabulous fortunes which are occasionally to be met with, ready to free the father at the cost of the daughter, as occurs sometimes even out of novels, would Jane be able to resist all the inducements that would be brought to bear upon her? Winton sprang from his feet more than once with a wild intention of rushing to his lawyers and instructing them to stop his Grace’s mouth with a bundle of bank-notes, lest he might lend an ear to that imaginary millionaire. And on coming to his senses, it must be said that the Duke’s overweening pride, which was working his own harm, was the point of consolation to which the lover clung, and not any conviction of the firmness of Lady Jane in such circumstances. Itwasa comfort that his Grace was far too haughty in his dukedom to suffer the approach of mere millionaires.
In September, Lady Germaine returning from that six weeks at Homburg with which it was the fashion in those days for worn-out fine ladies to recruit themselves after the labours of the season, and pausing in London two days in a furiousaccèsof shopping before she went to the country, saw Winton pass the door at which her carriage was standing, and pounced upon him with all the eagerness of an explorer in a savage country. “You here!” she said; “for goodness’ sake come and help me with my shopping. I have not spoken two words together for a week—not even on the journey! There was nobody: I can’t think where the people have gone to: one used to be sure of picking up some one on the way, but there was nobody. Well! and how arethings going?” she added, making a distinct pause after her first little personal outburst was over.
“Very badly,” Winton said, with a sigh.
“Papa will not pay any attention?” said Lady Germaine. “I warned you of that: don’t say you were taken unawares. I told you he was the most impracticable of men, and you, in your holy innocence——”
“Don’t,” said Winton. “I remember all you said; you called me names: you confessed that you felt guilty——”
“Be just. I did not say I felt guilty, but only that his Grace would think me so, which are very different things. And so he will not have you? poor boy! but I knew that from the beginning. There is one fine thing in him, that he has no eye to his own advantage. Most people would think you a very good match for Jane.”
“Don’t speak blasphemy,” said Winton. “I agree with the Duke, he is as right as a man can be. There is nobody good enough for her——”
“Except——”
“Except no one that I am acquainted with. I don’t deserve that she should let me tie her shoes. Oh, don’t suppose I have changed my opinion about that.”
“I am glad to find you are in such a proper frame of mind—then there will be no trouble at all, none of the expedients adopted in such cases? Poor Lady Jane! but since that is the case, there is nothing more to be said. And what, may I ask, you good humble-minded young man, are you doing in town in September? You ought to be shooting somewhere, or making yourself agreeable.”
“I am knocking about at all the sales,” said Winton, “trying to pick up a littlething here and there for her rooms at Winton. What are the expedients you were thinking of, dear Lady Germaine? It is always good to know.”
Lady Germaine laughed. “Then you have not given in?” she said. “I did not suppose you were the sort of person to give in. What did he say? was it final? did he show you to the door? You will think it hard-hearted of me to laugh, but I should like to have been in hiding somewhere to have seen his Grace’s face when you ventured to tell him.”
“He has not received that shock yet,” said Winton, not very well pleased.
“He has not——! Do you mean you have never asked the Duke? Are things just as they were, then, and no advance made?” said Lady Germaine, in a tone of wonder that was not quite free of contempt.
“They will not let me speak,” said Winton, in a voice from which he could not keep a certain querulous accent. “It is not my way of managing affairs; but what can I do? Her mother says——”
“Then you have got the Duchess on your side?”
“I suppose so,” said the young man. “I sometimes doubt whether it is for good or evil. She will not let me speak. She says she will let me know the right moment. In the meantime life is insupportable, you know. I shall take my courageà deux mains, and when I go down there——”
“You are going down there—to Billings?” cried Lady Germaine with a gasp of astonishment.
“On the 10th,” said Winton with a sigh, “but whether anything will come of it or not——”
“When the Duchess is taking the business into her own hands! Reginald Winton, I have told you before you were a goose,” said Lady Germaine, solemnly. “And what is the use of mooning about here and asking me what are the expedients? Of course she has thought of all the expedients. Whateverhemay be, the Duchess is a woman of sense. Are you furnishing Winton? Have you all your arrangements made? I should have everything ready—down to the footstools and door-mats—and servants engaged, and your carriages seen to. You can’t marry a duke’s daughter without taking a little trouble about the place you are going to put her in.”
“Trouble—there shall be no sparing of trouble!” he cried; but then shook his head. “We are a long way off that,” he added, in a dolorous tone.
“This is the confident lover,” said LadyGermaine, “who scoffed at dukes and thought himself good enough for anybody’s daughter. Don’t you see that if it comes to nothing, something must come of it directly? Things of this sort can’t hang on—they go quicker than the legitimate drama. If I were you, I would have the steeds saddled in their stalls, and the knights in their armour, like Walter Scott, you know.”
“Do you think so?” said Winton, his eyes lighting up. “If I could imagine that anything so good as this was on the cards——”
“On the cards! Oh, the obtuseness of man! Do you think the Duchess will let herself be beaten? Oh yes, her husband has been too many for her again and again. I know she has had to give in and let him take his own way: but now that Jane is concerned, and she has pledged herself to you——”
“She has been very kind. I had not the least right to expect such kindness as she has shown me: but she has given no pledge,” said Winton with a recurrence of his despondency.
Lady Germaine, who had stopped herself in the full career of her shopping to hold this conversation with him in a luxurious corner of the great shop, where all was still at this dead moment of the year, and only velvet-footed assistants passed now and then noiselessly—gave him at this moment a look of disdain, and rose up from her chair. “I did not think you had been such a noodle,” she said, and, before he could answer a word, went forward to the nearest counter, where an elegant youth had been waiting all the time with bales of silks and stuffs half unfolded for her ladyship’s inspection—and plunged into business. That elegant youth had not in any way betrayedhis weariness. He had stood by his wares as if it were the most natural thing in the world to wait for half an hour, so to speak, between the cup and the lip: but he had not been without his thoughts, and these thoughts were not very favourable to Lady Germaine. Most likely this was the origin of a paragraph which crept into one of the Society papers in the deadness of the season and puzzled all the tantalised circles in country houses, and even bewildered the clubs. Who could the “Lady G.” be who had awakened the echoes of the back shop at Allen and Lewisby’s? Here is the advantage of an immaculate reputation. Neither the clubs nor the country houses ever associated Lady Germaine with such a possibility; but this, of course was what that elegant young person did not know.
“Why am I a noodle?” said Winton, going after her, and too much absorbedin the subject to think of the attendant at all.
“If you can think of a stronger word put that instead,” said Lady Germaine. “I can’t call names here, don’t you see, though I shouldsolike to. No pledge! Oh, you—— What should you like in that way? Something on parchment, with seals hanging to it like a Pope’s bull? as if every word she said and every suggestion she made was not a pledge, and the strongest of pledges? Go away, and let me choose the children’s new frocks in peace. It is easier to do that than to make people understand.”
But Winton did not go away. He leaned over her chair, making certainty more certain to the spectator behind the counter. “Look here,” he said; “do you really mean what you say—that I ought to have everything ready?”
“Don’t you think these two shades go nicely together?” said Lady Germaine, putting the silk and the merino side by side with skilful hands, and with an air of the profoundest deliberation. “The girls have not a thing to wear. I should have the steeds in the stables and the knights in the hall, if I were you, and William of Deloraine ready to ride by night or by day.”
Perhaps this advice was not the clearest in the world, but, such as it was, it was all the lady would give; and it sent Winton along the half-lighted half-empty streets, in the twilight of the soft September evening, with an alert pace and a heart beating as it had not beat since London had suddenly become empty to him by the departure of one family from it. He went over every room of his house that evening, calculating and considering. It was a charming house, andhe had regarded it with no small satisfaction when, only a year or two before, its decorations had been completed. But now, with the idea in his mind that at any moment (was not that what she said?) he might have to be ready for the princess, the wife—that his happiness might come upon him suddenly, and his life be transformed, and his house turned intoherhouse—in this view it was astonishing how many things he found that were incomplete. Nay, everything was incomplete. It was dingy—it was small; it was commonplace. The drawing-rooms had become old-fashioned, though yesterday he had been under the impression that there was an antique grace about them—a flavour of the old world which gave them character. The dining-room was heavy and elaborate; the library too dark; the morning-room—good heavens! there was no morning-room in which alady could establish herself, but only a half-furnished place uninhabited, cold, with no character at all. It brought a cold dew all over him when he opened the door of that empty chamber. He could scarcely sleep for thinking of it. What if she might be ready before her house was! The idea was intolerable: and everything was petty, mean, without beauty, unworthy of her. He had not thought so when he walked through those over-gilded drawing-rooms in Grosvenor Square, and said to himself that not amid such tawdry fineries as these should his wife be housed. Everything had changed since that brief moment of confidence. He was dissatisfied with everything. Next morning he had no sooner awoke from a sleep troubled by dreams of chaotic upholstery, than he went to work. Perhaps, after all, things were not so bad. With the aid of a fewexperts, and a great deal of money, much, if not everything, can be done in a very short space of time. He ran down into the country as soon as he had set things going in Kensington, and arrived at his old manor-house without warning, to the great consternation of the housekeeper. Winton had still more need of the experts and thebric-a-brac. It wanted many things besides, which were not to be had in a moment, and his life for the next week was as laborious as that of the busiest workman. The excitement among the servants and hangers-on at both places was indescribable. He said nothing of his approaching marriage, and yet nothing but an approaching marriage could account for it; or else that he was going clean out of his senses, which was another hypothesis produced.
This fit of active and hopeful exertion got over these remaining days with thespeed of a dream. The hours galloped along with him as lightly at least, if not as merrily, as though they were indeed carrying him to his wedding-day. But when all was done that he could do, and the moment approached for his visit to Billings, a cold shade fell over him. Lady Germaine’s clever little speeches began to look like nonsense as he thought them over; “quicker than the legitimate drama;” what did she mean by that? Could he imagine for a moment to himself that Jane, the princess of her own race as well as of his affections, the serene and perfect lady of his thoughts, would be the heroine of any vulgar romance? That he could have entertained such a thought for a moment horrified him when he paused in his feverish exertion and began to think what it all meant. But this was only on the way to Billings, when every pulse in his body began tothrob high with the thought of being once more in her presence, under the same roof with her, and about to put his fortune to the test to gain everything or—no, not to lose her. He said to himself with a sudden passion that he would not lose Jane. Such a calamity was not possible. Father and mother and all the powers might do what they would or could, but she was his, and give her up he would not. Thus the anxious lover went round the compass and came back to the point from which he started. He found Lady Germaine as wise and clever as he had always thought her, when he came thus far. There were expedients—and the Duchess was pledged to the employment of them as certainly as if he had her word for it engrossed on parchments sealed and signed and delivered. One way or another, his visit to Billings would be decisive. Hewent like a soldier to the field of battle, with a thrill of excitement over him, as well as with all the softening enthusiasm of a lover. Happen how it might, he could not leave that unknown fortress, that Castle Dangerous, as he came.
Itwas not, however, at all like a conquering hero that Winton made his appearance at Billings. A number of other people arrived by the same train, and were conveyed in various carriages both before and after him to the great house. It was a long drive, and he had time to think about it and to go over the approaching meeting, rehearsing it again and again. Winton knew as well as any one what it is to arrive at a country house,—the confusion of the arrival, the little pause when no one knows what to do, thehesitation of the people who have never been there before, the well-bred attempts of the people who have, not to seem too much at home, the anxiety of the hosts to distribute their attentions equally and leave no one out—were all familiar to him. But somehow his special position now gave him much of the feeling of surprise and disappointment and involuntary half-offence which a new-comer, unused to society, and expecting perhaps to be received with all the warm individual welcome of more intimate hospitality, feels when he finds himself only one of the least considerable of a large party. All the other members of the group were of greater consequence than Winton, and almost all werehabituésof the place, accustomed to come year after year—persons whom the Duke could receive as sufficiently near his own level to be worthy the honour of his friendship.Such a party is always diversified by some one or two people who are altogether nobodies, and afford either a sort of background like supernumeraries in a play, or are elevated to the most important position by dint of dexterity and adulation. Winton felt himself to belong to the background as he stood about in the hall when all the greetings were going on, waiting for his. It had been like a sudden downfall from heaven to earth to perceive, as he cast his first rapid glance round on entering, that Jane was not there. Afterwards he said to himself that he could not have endured her to be there, but for the moment her absence struck him like a blow. And what could the Duchess do more than shake hands with him as she did with all her other guests? He thought she gave him a glance of warning, a little smile—but no doubt every man there supposedthat for himself individually her Grace had a kind regard. He stood talking for a short time after the ladies had been swept away to their rooms. He knew several of the more important of the guests, and he knew one of the nobodies who was a very prominent figure. But it was with an indignant sense that his reception ought to have been a very different one that he found himself following a servant up the grand staircase into those distant regions allotted to bachelors, where his non-importance was to be still more forcibly brought home to him. He who ought to have been received as the son of the house—he to whom its brightest member had linked her fate—that he should come in on the same footing as Mr Rosencrantz the German librarian, or that stale hanger-on of the clubs who made a sort of trade of country houses, was verybitter to Winton. He was not accustomed to be asuper, and he did not like the post. To tell the truth, in the first half-hour in Billings Castle Winton felt his own hopes and dreams come back upon him with a bitterness and sense of ridicule which drove him almost out of himself. Had he not been a fool to entertain any hopes at all? Was not Lady Germaine ludicrously mistaken when she talked of the Duchess’s pledge? The Duchess, was she not far too great a lady to care what happened to a simple gentleman? He began to think he had been a fool to come, a fool ever to permit himself to shipwreck his heart and life in this way, and doubly a fool, a ridiculous idiot, to go drivelling into decorations and pieces of furniture, as if his little manor-house could ever vie with—All these thoughts were put to flight ina moment by the sudden opening of a closed door which flooded a dark passage to his right with the glory of the sunset sweeping through it. Some one came out and stood for a moment in the midst of that glory: then Winton heard himself called. The servant disappeared by magic, and he suddenly found himself in a small sitting-room with a broad window flooded by the evening light. The Duchess held out both her hands to him, but he scarcely saw them, for behind her, coming in through another door, a little flush upon her soft cheeks, and that liquid golden illumination in her eyes—— it was as if some one had said to him out of the glowing west, “O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?”
This meeting, however, was of the briefest—for the house was very full and the dinner-hour approaching. “Youmust go away directly,” the Duchess said; “but I could not trust you to meet for the first time down-stairs before so many eyes.”
“So it was policy?” Winton cried.
“Entirely policy—is not every step I take more or less of that description?—but Jane could not have borne it,” she said, “and neither could you, I think. I did not bring you here to ruin you. We must all be on our p’s and q’s.”
“P’s and q’s!” cried Winton, “become insupportable. Dear Duchess, you will not be too hard upon me. Now at least I must have it out, and know my fate. How can I bear to hang on—to have everything pushed off in indefinite space?”
Lady Jane touched his arm lightly with her hand, stroking it, with a pretty movement of mingled soothing and sympathy. “Pazienza!” she said softly; butshe liked the impatience. It pleased her delicate sense of what was best.
“Would you prefer, Mr Winton, to know the worst?—would you rather have a definite No than an indefinite suspense?”
“Don’t call him Mr Winton,” said Lady Jane in her under tone.
Winton looked from one lady to another keenly, with an inquiry which the Duchess met without flinching, and Lady Jane without being at all aware what it meant. Her Grace gave him an almost imperceptible nod, always looking him full in the face. Her eyes seemed to promise everything. “In that case,” he said—“in that case—better the refusal: then we shall see what there remains to do.”
The Duchess sighed. “I believe it is the wisest way,” she said, “after all: but you cannot suppose it is very pleasantto me. Now, go; you must go, and leave us to dress. You may come here to-morrow after breakfast, or when we come in, in the afternoon—but you must not be always coming. And in the meantime prudence, prudence! you cannot be too prudent. If you betray yourself I cannot answer for the consequences. You must remember that for Jane’s sake.”
Then they put him out of the room, out of the shining of the sunset in which he thought she stood transfigured, the soft glory caressing her, the level golden radiance getting into her eyes and flooding them—and closed the door upon him, leaving him in the darkness of the passage, which looked all black to his dazzled eyes. Fortunately his guide appeared a moment afterwards and he was led up to his chamber, in the wilds so to speak of the great house, where he came back to himself as wellas he could. Winton was only a man like the rest of his kind. He wondered if the women enjoyed, with a native feminine malice such as everybody has commented upon from the beginning of time, the position in which they had placed him. Ah, notthey; not Jane, who was a world above all jesting—but perhaps the Duchess, who, he could imagine, did not mind making him pay a little in his dignity, in his self-regard, for the promotion he had got through her daughter’s love. She would do anything for him because Jane loved him, but perhaps she had a mischievous satisfaction in the little drama which she was arranging round him—the external slights, the sudden bliss, the dismissal back again to humility and the second floor. Was this so? He concluded it was, with a half-amused irritation, a sense of being played with.She was kind: but was it in mortal to suffer without a pang, without an attempt at reprisals, the loss of Jane? And then, perhaps the Duchess too had a little feeling that he was not one of her own caste, her daughter’s equal—not enough to make her resist that daughter’s choice, but yet enough to prompt in passing a little prick as with a needle at the too fortunate. As a matter of fact, had Winton been cool enough to notice it, the Duchess had meant him no prick at all. He had been received in the usual way, lodged according to the general rule. She had thought it wisest not to do anything to distinguish him beyond his neighbours, but that was all.
The evening was full of tantalised and suppressed expectation, yet of a moment’s pleasure now and then. Except the German librarian and the man from the clubs, and a young author who had beenthe fashion and was theprotégéof one of the great families visiting at Billings, the company was all much more splendid than Winton. Names that were known to history buzzed about him as he sat down to dinner, with Lady Adela Grandmaison beside him, who was exceedingly relieved to fall to his lot and not to one of the elderly noblemen who illustrated the table. Lady Adela wore asacquelike a dainty lady of the eighteenth century, but was apt to throw herself into attitudes which were suggestive of the fourteenth. She did not feel at all disposed to be disdainful of Winton. Instead of this she took him into her confidence. “Did you ever see such a party of swells?” she said, notwithstanding her medieval attitudes. “Don’t they frighten you to death, Mr Winton? I am so glad to have somebody I dare talk to. The Duke is toofunny for anything, don’t you think so? like an old monarch in the pantomime. It is all exactly like the theatre. He says ‘My lord’—listen! exactly as they do on the stage.”
“I suppose they did that sort of thing when his Grace was young,” said Winton, looking up the great table to where that majestic presence showed beyond the ranks of his guests. A little tremor ran over him when he realised the splendour of the personage to whom he was going so soon to carry his suit. “Perhaps we are a little too free-and-easy nowadays,” he said.
“Don’t desert your generation,” cried Lady Adela; and then she added significantly, “there is Jane looking our way. Jane is so sweet—don’t you think so, Mr Winton?”
Winton met the soft eyes of his love and the keen ones of this young observerat the same moment; and this, though he was a man of the world, brought a sudden flush to his face. All the fine company, and the gorgeous table, heavy with plate and brilliant with flowers, grew like a mist to him, and nothing seemed real except that softly tinted, tender-shining countenance, turning upon him the light of her eyes. They were so placed that though they never spoke they could see each other across the table, through a little thicket of feathery ferns and flowers. Lady Jane was too courteous, too self-forgetting to neglect her special companion or to abandon the duty of entertaining her parent’s guests. But now and then she would lift her eyes and empty out her heart in one look across the table through that flowery veil. He was not nearly so entertaining in consequence as Lady Adela had hoped.
Next morning there were some momentsthat were full of excitement and happiness in the midst of a day which was just like other days. Lady Jane agreed fully with Winton, that to be there under her father’s roof without informing him of the object of his visit was a thing unworthy of her lover; and she was, like him, entirely convinced that, whatever might come of it, the explanation must be made. The Duchess did not contest this high decision of principle—but she shook her head. “I have nothing to say against you. I suppose you are right. It must be done sooner or later,” she said. “There is only one thing—put it off till the last day of your visit; for this I am sure of, that you will not be able to spend another night at Billings.”
“Mamma!” Lady Jane cried, with a fervour which brought the tears to her eyes, “my father will say nothing that one gentleman may not say to another.”
The Duchess once more shook her head. “When one gentleman asks another for his daughter and is refused—though the one should be the most courteous in the world, and the other the most patient, yet it is generally considered most convenient that they should not continue in the same house.”
“I will take your mother’s advice, my dearest,” said Winton; but it was hardly possible for mortal man to have it put before him so plainly without a little feeling of offence. It had been settled that he was to stay a week, and notwithstanding the happiness which the Duchess had secured to him by giving him the entry to this sacred little sitting-room into which no stranger ever intruded, and by affording him as many opportunities as were possible of seeing Lady Jane, he spent the rest of the time with a certain feeling of hostility inhis mind towards her, which was thoroughly unreasonable. He began to doubt whether she wished him to succeed, whether she was indeed so truly his friend as she represented herself to be. A man must be magnanimous indeed who can entirely free his mind from the prevalent notions about the love of women for “managing,” and their inclination towards intrigue and mystery. A conviction that his own manly statement of his case would tell more effectually with the Duke, who was a gentleman though he might be pompous and haughty, than any semi-deceitful feminine process, began to grow in his mind. And this conviction, in which there was a partially indignant revulsion of feeling—rank ingratitude and unkindness, but of that he was not conscious—from his allegiance to the Duchess, gave him a natural inclination to propitiate the head of the house and see him in hisbest light, which was not without a certain influence even on the Duke himself, who more and more felt this modest young commoner, though he was nobody in particular, to be a person of discrimination, and one who was capable of appreciating himself and understanding his views.
Thus with new hopefulness on one side, and mistrust on the other, Winton counted the days as they went by towards the moment which was to decide his fate. He impressed his own hopefulness upon Lady Jane, who was indeed very willing to believe that nothing but what was noble and honourable could come from her father. They discussed the subject anxiously, yet with less and less alarm. To her it seemed, as she heard all the wise and modest speeches her lover intended to make as to his own lesser importance, but great love—it seemed to her that no heart could hold out againsthim. That tenderest humility, which was the natural characteristic of her mind underneath the instincts of rank which were so strong in her, and the sense of lofty position which was part of her religion—was touched with the most exquisite wonder and happiness at the thought that all this noble and pure passion was hers, and hers only. “It is impossible,” she said, “if you speak to him as you do to me, Reginald—oh, it is impossible that he can resist.” “It is impossible, my darling,” said the young man, “when he hears that you love me.” Thus they encouraged each other, and on the eve of the great day wrought themselves to an enthusiasm of faith and certainty. The Duchess’s limitation of his visits had of course come to very little purpose, and every moment that Winton could manage to escape from the bonds of society below stairs he spent with LadyJane above, discoursing upon their hopes, and the manner in which best to get them wrought into fulfilment. They talked of everything, in those stolen hours of sweetness: of what was to happen in the future, of all they were to be to each other, coming back again and again to the moment which was to decide all, always with a stronger and stronger sense that the Duke’s consent must come, and that to be balked by this initial difficulty was impossible. But it cannot be denied that Winton had certain difficulties even about that future in his communings with his bride. He could not get her to understand that very little self-sacrifice would be necessary on her part, and that the house to which he proposed to transplant her was little less luxurious than her own. Lady Jane smiled upon him when he said this with one of those little heavenly stupidities which belong to suchwomen. She did not wish it be so, and so far as this went put no faith in him. It was a settled question in her own mind. Arabella’s famous elucidation had fortified her on that point beyond all assault. It pleased her to look forward to the little manor-house, and the changed world which would surround the Squire’s wife. If he had carried her direct to a palace more splendid than Billings, she would have felt a visionary but active disappointment. She drew him gently to other subjects when he entered upon this, especially to the one unfailing subject, the Duke, and what he might say. They both grew very confident as they talked it over: and yet when Winton came to tell her, on the evening preceding that momentous day, that he had asked for an interview and it had been granted to him, Lady Jane lost her pretty colour, which was always so evanescent, and herbreath, and almost her self-possession. “No,” she said, “oh, not afraid! if you saythatto him, Reginald, he cannot resist—but only a little nervous; one is always nervous when there is any doubt. And then to think that this is the last evening!”
“If things go right it will not be the last evening,” he cried. “The Duchess said a man could not stay who had been refused; but even she would allow that a man who hasnotbeen refused may remain and be happy. Ah, Jane! imagine the happiness of being allowed to belong to each other! no more secret meetings, no further alarms or discovery.”
She gave a sigh of happiness and relief, yet blushed almost painfully. The idea of doing anything which she did not wish to be found out hurt her still, notwithstanding that in the stress of the crisis she had yielded to do it. Winton’s conscience was not so delicate, and his excitement made him wildly confident. It is a woman’s part to fear in such a case as it is her part to encourage in the midst of doubt. “Provided,” she said, with a little sigh of suspense, “provided it all goes as we wish.”
He took her hands in his and held them fast and stood bending over her looking into her eyes. “Supposing,” he said slowly, “supposing,”—he was so excited and sure of what was going to happen that he could afford to be theatrical,—“supposing all should not go as we wish, Jane—what then?”
Lady Jane did not make any reply. She returned his look, with her hands clasping his, standing steadfast without a shadow of wavering. She felt as she had done in her youth when she had imagined herself facing the guillotine. She was ready to suffer whatever mightbe inflicted upon her, but to yield, she would not. It would have been easier by far to die.
All this time the Duchess let them have their way. They were ungrateful, they were even unkind, but she endured it with a patience and toleration to which long experience had trained her. If it was with a little pang that she kissed her daughter, wondering at that universal law which makes a woman, still more than a man, forsake father and mother, and cleave to her husband, she said nothing about it: she left them to themselves and their hopes. She said to herself that they would find out too soon what a broken reed they were trusting to, and her heart ached for the failure of those anticipations which gave Lady Jane so beautiful a colour, and an air of such serene happiness. Better that she should have a happy evening, that sheshould sleep softly and wake hopefully once more.
The morning of the great day dawned in a weeping mist, the heavens leaden, the earth sodden, and streams of blinding rain falling by intervals. Lady Jane, as she opened her eyes upon the misty daylight, and thought, as soon as her faculties were awake, of what was going to be done, clasped her soft hands, and said a prayer forhim, and for herself, and still more warmly for her father, who was, so to speak, on his trial. He had never been less than a noble father in Lady Jane’s eyes. She had not found him out, being scarcely of her generation in this respect, and accepting unaffectedly what was presented to her as the real state of things; but she could not help feeling that the Duke was on his trial. He might deny her lover’s suit and break her own heart, and yet keep his child’s respect.But a vague fear lest he should not do this had got into her soul she did not know how. She waited with a tremor which she could not subdue for the moment. How fortunate it was that it rained, and that it was impossible to go out! For once in her life Lady Jane failed in her duty. She escaped from little Lady Adela, who was so anxious to be taken into her confidence, and from the other guests, who, seeing the hopelessness of the weather, were yawning together in the great bow-window of the morning-room, gazing out upon the sodden grass and dreary avenue, dripping from every tree, and wondering how they were to kill the time till luncheon. Lady Jane, instead of helping to solve that problem, as she ought to have done, fled from them and escaped to the seclusion of her mother’s drawing-room, where she sat with the door ajar, listening for every footstep. TheDuchess, though she had felt her desertion, and knew that the foolish pair of lovers were in a sort of secession from her, following their own way, yet was very magnanimous to their wrong-headedness. She said no word and looked no look of reproach, but gave up her writing and her business, and went down herself among the unoccupied ladies, and did her best to amuse them. This was perhaps of all the sacrifices she made for them the one that cost her most.
It was about eleven o’clock when Winton presented himself at the door of the Duke’s room; which was a handsome room, full of books, with a large window looking out upon the park, and some of the finest of the family pictures upon the walls. Over the mantelpiece hung a full-length portrait, looking gigantic, of the Duchess, with Lady Jane, a little girl of eight or nine, holding her hand. Itseemed to Winton, as his eye caught this on entering, that there was a reproachful look in the eyes, and that Jane’s little face, serene and sweet as it had always been, had a startled air of curiosity, and watched him from behind her mother. The large window was full of blank and colourless daylight, and an atmosphere of damp and rain. The Duke rose as he came in with much graciousness, and pointed to a chair. He came from his writing-table, which was at some distance, and placed himself in front of the fireplace, as an Englishman loves to do, even when there is no fire. “I hope,” the Duke said, “that you are going to tell me of something in which I can serve you, Mr Winton.” There arose in Winton’s mind a momentary thrill of indignation and derision. Serve him! as if he were not better off and more fit to serve himself than half-a-dozen bankrupt dukes! ButWinton remembered that this was Jane’s father, and restrained himself: and indeed the excitement and suspense in his breast left him at no leisure for more than a momentary rebellion. He replied—“It is true, I do appear before your Grace as a suitor——” but here his voice failed him and his courage.
“You must not hesitate to speak plainly,” said the Duke, always more and more graciously. “Alas! I am in opposition, and my influence does not tell for much. Still, if there is any way in which I can be of use to you—there is no one for whom I should more willingly stretch a point.”
“You are very kind,” said Winton. “It is not in that way that I should trouble you. I am not in want of patronage—in that way. I may say that I am rich—not,” he hastened to add, “as you are, but, for my position in life, very well off—almost more than well off.”
“I am delighted to hear it, Mr Winton; but that is all the more reason why you should serve your country. We want men who are indifferent to pecuniary advantage. I shall be most happy to mention your name to Lord Coningsby or to——”
“If you will permit me,” said Winton, “it is your Grace only whose favour I desire to gain.”
Here the Duke began to laugh in a somewhat imbecile way, shaking his head with an air of complacency which would have been too ludicrous for mortal powers of gravity, had not Winton’s mind been so much otherwise occupied. “Ah,” he said, “I see! you are thinking of that old story about the Foreign Office. You must know that was mere talk. I do not expect that anything could come of it. But if,” his Grace added with another little run of laughter, “when we return topower—be assured, Mr Winton, that nothing could give me greater pleasure——”
What was he to say? Winton knew very well that he himself was as likely, if not more so—for he was a young man, with the world before him—to be Foreign Minister than the Duke: and what with the confusion of the mistake and the ludicrous character of the patronage offered, he was more embarrassed than tongue could tell. “You are very kind,” he faltered, scarcely knowing what he said; then, taking his courage with both hands, “Duke,” he said, boldly, “it was on a much more presumptuous errand I ventured to intrude upon you. What you will say to me I dare not venture to think. I come not to ask for patronage or place, but for something a great deal more precious. I come——” Here he paused, so bewildered by the dignified unconsciousness and serene superiority of thepotentate in whose presence he stood that words failed him, and he stood and gazed at that immovable countenance with a sort of appalled wonder to think that anything should be so great yet so small, so capable of making himself ridiculous, and yet with power to spoil two lives at his pleasure. The Duke shifted his position a little, put his right hand within his waistcoat in an attitude in which he had once stood for his portrait, and regarded his suppliant with benignity. “Go on,” he said, waving his other hand, “go on.”
Ah, how right the Duchess was! Oh, what a miserable mistake the lover had made! But there was no drawing back now. “I am not worthy, no one is worthy of her,” he said with agitation. “I am only a commoner, which I know is a disadvantage in your eyes. The only thing, and that is nothing, is, that at least I could make ample provision and secure every comfort for my wife.”
“Your wife!” said the Duke, with a surprise which was ineffable. If any gleam of suspicion came over him he quenched it in the sublime patronage of a superior. “This is very interesting,” he said, “and shows a great faith in my friendship to take me into your confidence on such a delicate subject. I am happy to hear you are in such favourable circumstances; but really,” he added with a laugh, “when you think how very unlikely it is that I can have any knowledge of the future Mrs Winton——”
The young man grew red and hot with a mixture of embarrassment and resentful excitement, stung by the look and the tone. “It is your daughter,” he said, “who has given me permission to come to you. It is of Lady Jane I want to speak. You cannot think meless worthy of her than I think myself.”
“Lady Jane!” The Duke grew pale; he took his hand out of his waistcoat, and stared at the audacious suitor with dismay. Then he recovered himself with an effort, and snatched at a smile as if it had been something that hung on the wall, and put it on tremulously. “Ah! ah! I see,” he added. “You think she might render you assistance. Speak a good word for you?—eh?” The attempt to be jocular, which was entirely out of his habits, convulsed his countenance. “Yes, yes, I see! that is what you mean,” he said.
There was a pause, and the two men looked each other in the face. A monarch confronted by the whole embodied force of revolution—scorning it, hating it—yet with an insidious suggestion of alarm underneath all—on one hand; and onthe other the revolution embodied—pale with lofty anger and a sense of its own rights, yet not without a regret, a sympathetic pang for the old king about to be discrowned. The mutual contemplation lasted not more than a few moments, though it seemed so long. Then the Duke turned on his heel with a grimace which in his agitation he intended for a laugh. “I prefer,” he said, “on the whole, that Lady Jane should not be appealed to. My disposition to serve you was personal. The ladies of my family are not less amicably inclined, I am sure; but I do not wish them to be mixed up—in short you will understand that, wishing you well in every way, I must advise you to trust to your own attractions in a matrimonial point of view. I cannot permit my daughter to interfere.”
He had moved about while he wasspeaking, but at the end returned to his place and fixed Winton with the commanding look, straight in the eyes, of a man determined to intimidate an applicant. It was the least successful way in which he could have attempted to influence the present suitor. Winton’s excitement rose to such a pitch that he recovered his calm and self-possession as if by magic.
“I feel that I have explained myself badly,” he said, “and this is not a matter on which there can be any misunderstanding between us. I must ask you to listen to me calmly for a moment.”
“Calmly, my good sir! your matrimonial affairs, however important to you, can scarcely be expected to excite me,” cried his Grace sharply, with irritation in every tone.
“There can be nothing in the world so exciting—to both of us,” said Winton.“My Lord Duke, I come from your daughter, from Jane.”
“Sir!” cried the Duke. But no capitals are capable of expressing the force, the fury, of this outburst, which struck Winton like a projectile, full in the face so to speak. He made a step backward in momentary dismay.
“I must finish,” he said, somewhat wildly. “Jane sends me to your Grace. I love her and she me. She has promised to be my wife. It is no intercession, it is herself I ask. Jane—Duke! on her account I have a right to be heard—a right—to have an answer at least.”
The Duke was beyond the power of speech. He was purple with rage and astonishment, and at the same time moved by a kind of furious panic. He caught at his shirt-collar like a man stifled. He had no voice to reply, but waved his hand imperiously towards the door. AndWinton, too, was in a degree panic-struck. He had never seen such a blind and helpless fit of passion before. Such things had been heard of as that a man should die of rage. That indeed would be a separation from Jane beyond any power to amend. He drew back a little with an anxiety he could not conceal.
“I have taken you by surprise,” he said. “I ask your pardon. Whatever I can do to soften the shock—to meet your wishes—I will do.”
“Go, sir!—go, sir!” the Duke stormed in his fury. “That is all you can do—go! there is the door.” He waved his hand towards it with a threatening gesture. He was transported out of himself. He followed Winton step by step with a sort of moral compulsion, forcing him to retire. The young man’s blood, it is needless to say, was in an uproar; his heart thumping against his breast, everypulse going like a hammer. But he made a stand again midway to that door which seemed the only reply he was to have. “You will remember,” he said, “that I have no answer—you give me no answer; I will leave the room and the house as your Grace bids, but that is not a reply——”
“Go, sir!” the Duke cried. He stamped his foot like an enraged fishwife. He had the sense to hold himself in, not to allow the torrent of abuse which was on his lips to pour forth; but how long he would have been able to endure, to keep in this vigorous and fiery tide, could not have been predicted. He flung open the door with a force which made the walls quiver, and the action seemed more or less to bring him to himself. He recovered his voice at last. “I ought,” he panted, with a snarl, “to thank you for the honour you have done my poor house;” and thus withan explosion of labouring breath drove the astonished suitor out, as if by a blast of wind. Winton found himself in the corridor, while the crash of the great door swung behind him echoed through the house, with an amazement which words cannot describe. It had all passed like a scene in a dream. He paused a moment to recover himself. He, too, was breathless, his whole physical being agitated, his head hot and throbbing, his heart choking him. He could not speak to the Duchess, whom he met a moment after coming along the corridor with a packet of papers in her hand. “It is all over,” he said incoherently, waving his hand as he passed her. The only idea in his mind for the moment was of indignity and wrong.
TheDuchess’s little sitting-room had not for years enclosed so melancholy a group. She herself, in old days when she first began to realise all the circumstances of the life which she had come into, had wept many an unnoticed tear in it; but in after-years she had acquired the philosophy of maturity, and had too much to do holding her own amid all the adverse circumstances about her, to be able to indulge in personal lamentations. But Lady Jane had never known any of those burdens which had madeher mother’s career so full of care. When Winton rushed in, in all the excitement of the scene which he had just gone through in the Duke’s library, too much disturbed even to tell her what had passed, it was almost her first experience of the darker side of existence. For the first moment he had not been able to keep some resentment and sense of the indignity to which he had been exposed from getting to light. He told her with a pale smile and fiery eyes that he had scarcely time to speak to her, that he must go instantly, that her father had turned him out. But as Winton came to himself, and began to perceive the pain which he was inflicting upon her, he did his best to smooth away the first unguarded outburst. Lady Jane’s pallor, the tears which she could not restrain, the serenity of her countenance turned into anguish, all made apparentto him the fact which he had forgotten, that there were to her two sides to the question. He tried to draw in his words, to smooth away what he had said in the first outburst of his resentment. “After all, we must remember it was a great shock to him. I am nobody, only a simple gentleman, not fit to place myself on a level with the Duke’s daughter,” he said, though still with that smile of wounded pride and bitterness about his lips. Lady Jane was too heart-broken to say much; she listened like a martyr at the stake, standing silent while spears and arrows were thrust into her. Her father! he had been tried and he had not borne the trial. What she understood by rank was the highest courtesy, the noblest humbleness. A man who would turn another to the door, who would suffer his guest to perceive, under any circumstances, that he was not as a princein his host’s eyes—Lady Jane did not understand such a being. It hurt her so deeply that she did not even at first realise the fact that it was her lover who was turned away. She tried to ask a few faltering questions, to make out the circumstances to be less terrible; but failing in this, fell into silence, into such shame and consternation and deep humiliated pain as even Winton scarcely comprehended. No other hand, no other proceeding could have struck such a blow at all the traditions of her life. She sat with her hand indeed in her lover’s, but in a kind of miserable separation even from him, feeling her life fall away from her, unable to think or realise what was to happen now; until Winton, recovering from his excitement only to fall into a deeper panic, took renewed fright from her silence. “Jane,” he said, “Jane! you don’t mean to give me up because yourfather has turned me away?” Lady Jane turned her head towards him, gave him a miserable smile, and pressed his hand faintly, then fell, as perhaps had never happened in her life before, into a passion of tears. He drew her into his arms, as was natural, and she wept on his shoulder, as one refusing to be comforted. It was but vaguely that Winton could even guess the entire upheaval of all her foundations, the ruin into which her earth had fallen. He thought it was the tragedy of his own love that was the cause, and that with this heart-breaking convulsion she was making up her mind to see it come to an end.
This was the attitude in which the Duchess found them. She, too, was pale, her eyes bright, her nostrils dilated, as if she had been in the wars. She found her daughter in this speechless passion of weeping, with Winton’s pale countenance very despairing and tragical, yet touched with a livelier alarm, a frightened incomprehension, bending over her. He gave her a look of appeal as she came in; was it true that all was over, as he had said? The Duchess went to her child’s side and took the hand that lay on her lap and caressed it. “My darling,” she said, “this is not a moment to give in: and you are not one to fail in a great crisis, Jane. We have only a very little time to decide what we are to do before Reginald goes away.”
She had not called him Reginald before, and there was a faint smile in her eyes as they met his—a smile of forgiveness and motherly kindness, though he had asked no pardon. The sound of her mother’s voice broke the spell of Lady Jane’s self-abandonment, and it went to Winton’s heart with a forlorn sense of happiness in the midst of allthe misery, that even her mother exercised a constraint upon her which when alone with him she did not feel. Was it not that she was herself, and that with him nature had free course unabashed? But the scene grew brighter and more hopeful when the Duchess came into it. She was not surprised nor overthrown by what had happened. She put back the soft hair from her child’s forehead, and gave her a kiss of consolation. “My dearest,” she said, “the crisis has come which I knew would come. Reginald must go as soon as it is possible for him to go. It is for you now to say what is to be done. You are of age; you have a right to judge for yourself. When you told me first, I warned you what was before you. You have never taken the burden of your life upon you hitherto. Now the moment has come. I will not interfere. I will say nothing;neither will Reginald, if I understand him rightly. You must judge for yourself what you will do.”
Winton obeyed her Grace’s lead, though with reluctance and a troubled mind. He only partially comprehended what she meant. He would have liked for his own part, to hold his love fast—to cry out to her once more, “You will not give me up because your father sends me away?” But he yielded to the Duchess’s look, though with a grudge, feeling that this was moral compulsion almost as absolute as that with which her husband had turned him out. He rose from the sofa on which he had been sitting with Jane, and stood before her, feeling in his hand still the mould of hers which had lain there so long, and which left his, he thought, with reluctance. This proceeding brought her altogether to herself. She looked around her withan almost pitiful surprise. “Am I to be left alone,” she said, with a quiver in her lip, “when I need support most?” and then there was a pause. To Jane and to Winton it seemed as if the very wheels of existence were arrested and the world stood still. No one spoke. He was not capable of it; the Duchess would not. Lady Jane between, with wet eyelashes, and cheeks still pale with tears, and mouth quivering, her hands clasped in her lap as if clinging to each other since there was nothing else to hold by, sat perfectly still for a moment which seemed an hour. When she spoke at last there was a catch in her voice, and the words came with difficulty, and with little pauses between.
“What is it I am to decide?” she said. “All was decided—when we foundout—in town—— We cannot separate, he and I—— That—can never come into question now. Is it not so?—— I may read it wrong—— It appears—I have already read something wrong——” And then a spasm came over her face once more: but she got it under control. “What you mean is—about details?” said Lady Jane.
Winton, who had been in so extreme a state of excitement and suspense that he could bear no more, dropped down upon his knees at the side of the sofa on which she sat, and, clasping them, put down his face upon her hands. Lady Jane freed one to put it lightly upon his bowed head, with something of that soft maternal smile of indulgence of which love has the privilege. “Did he think I was a child?” she said to her mother, with a gentle wonder in her eyes. “Or not honest?” She herself was calm again; steadfast, while the others still trembled, seeing the complications somuch less clearly than the fair and open way. She was a little surprised by Winton’s broken ecstasies, by her mother’s tremulous kiss of approval. “Is there anything left for me to decide?” she said.
Nobody knew very well what was said or done in the agitated half-hour that remained. It was agreed between them that “the details,” of which Lady Jane had spoken with a blush, should be arranged afterwards, when all were more cool and masters of themselves—a state to which no one of the little group attained until Winton was hurrying along the country roads towards the station, and Lady Jane and her mother were seated in forlorn quiet alone in that little room which for the last week had been the scene of so many excitements. The Duchess rose with a start when the little French clock on the mantelpiece chimed one. “My dearest,” she said, “we have many things to do which look like falsehood, we women. You and I must appear at luncheon as if nothing had happened. There must be no red eyes, my love, no abstraction. It will be all over the world in no time, if we do not take care. For myself, alas! I am used to it; but you, Jane——”
Lady Jane did not immediately reply. She said, “There is one thing, mamma, to which I have made up my mind——”
The Duchess was examining herself in the glass to see if she was pale or red, or anything different from her ordinary aspect. She turned round to hear what this new determination was.
“I will speak to my father myself,” Lady Jane said.
If a cannon had been discharged into the peaceful little boudoir the effect couldscarcely have been greater. “You will speak to your father, Jane? There are some things I know better than you. It will wound you, my darling—for no good.”
“But I think it is right. There should be no means neglected to make him give his consent. With his consent all would be better. I think I ought to do it. It will be no shock to him now—he knows. To think of him likethatis the thing that gave me most pain.”
“But if you should see him likethat”—the Duchess said; then added hastily, “I know you are right. But you must set your face like a flint; you must not allow yourself to be made unhappy. Jane, your father does not think as I think in many ways. I have tried to keep you from all opposition; but he is old and you are young; you judge differently. You must not think because his pointof view is different that he is wrong, even in this case—altogether.”
Lady Jane lifted her mild eyes, which were almost stern in their unwavering sense of right. “I sometimes feel that you think nothing is wrong—altogether,” she said.
“Perhaps not,” the Duchess replied, with a smile and a sigh.
“It seems noble to me that you should think so, but I cannot. My father will not be likethatto me,” she added, with a little sadness. “Do not be afraid, and I will take a little time—not to-day, unless he speaks to me.”
“He will not speak to you,” said the Duchess, eagerly. She thought that she had at least secured that.
And then they went to luncheon. A little look of exhaustion about Lady Jane’s face, a clear shining in her eyes like the sky after rain, betrayed to somekeen-sighted spectators that there had been agitation in the atmosphere. But for a novice unaccustomed to trouble, she bore herself very well. And as for the Duchess, she was perfect. Her unruffled mind, her easy grace of greatness, were visible in every movement. What could so great a lady have to trouble her? She was gracious to everybody, and full of suggestions as to what should be done, as the afternoon promised to clear up, proposing expeditions to one place and another. “Mr Winton would have been an addition to your riding-party, but unfortunately he left us this morning,” she said in a voice of the most perfect composure. “So that there was nothing in it, after all,” little Lady Adela whispered to her mother. But Lady Grandmaison, who was a woman of experience, shook her head.
And next morning Lady Jane, pale, but courageous, with a heart that fluttered, but a purpose as steadfast as her nature, went softly down-stairs in her turn and knocked at the Duke’s door.