ACTING FOR HERSELF.
The Duchess’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 made her 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 apparent to 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 prince in 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 your father 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 all the 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 with an 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 found
out--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 so much 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 could scarcely 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 like
_that_ is the thing that gave me most pain.”
“But if you should see him like _that_”--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 point of 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 like _that_ to 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 some keen-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.