CHAPTER V.
THE ANTICIPATIONS OF LADY JANE.
LADY JANE, it will easily be understood, did not look upon the matter at all from the same point of view. A girl, however much she may be in love, is seldom anxious for a peremptory marriage such as—when there is no great sacrifice involved—suits the bolder sex. She loves to play with her happiness, to prolong the sweet time when, without any violent breach of other habits, even any change of name, she can enjoy the added glory of this crown of life. She accompanied Winton through the great silent rooms, with a sense of perfect, quiet happiness which was exactly in accordance with the summer morning—the fresh soft air in which there was no sunshine, but a flood of subdued light, and in which every sound had a tone of enchantment, though not music. It suited her gentle nature to dwell in such an atmosphere of delicate delight, which had no fact to vulgarise it, but only an ecstasy of feeling. She was disappointed to find that he was less satisfied, less happy. And he would have been angry to see that she was so happy. Such are the differences between those most near to each other. He kissed the rosebud and her hands as, with a sense of daring beyond words, she put it into his coat; but he wanted something more. Yes, he could have been angry with her; he felt a desire to say something brutal. “How can you be satisfied to deceive your father?” he asked. “It will be clandestine——” He had the cruelty to say this, though next moment he was horrified, and begged her pardon, metaphorically on his knees.
“Clandestine!” she said, with a little surprise—she made allowance for a man’s rough way of speaking—“oh no; my father has never entered into all the circumstances. So long as my mother approves——”
“But,” Winton cried, in his ferocity, “suppose he refuses his consent at last, as the Duchess thinks, will you venture to oppose him then, or will you send me away?”
“Ah, never that!” said Lady Jane, looking at him with her soft eyes. They were not brilliant eyes, but when she looked at him there came over them a certain liquid light, a melting radiance such as no words could describe. The light was love, and may be seen glorifying many an unremarkable orb. It made hers so exquisite that they dazzled the beholder, especially the happy beholder who knew this was for him. But he was not satisfied even with that.
“Suppose,” he went on, “that the Duke were to open that door and walk in now—as he has a good right to do, into his own drawing-room—what would come of it? Would you take your hand out of mine, and bid me good-bye like a stranger?”
Her hand indeed slid out of his at the suggestion, and a little tremor ran through her frame; but the next moment she raised her head and put her hand lightly within his arm. “If you think I am without courage!” she said—then added with a smile, “when it is necessary; but at present it is not necessary.”
“Then you will not, whatever happens, give me up?—not even if the foundations of the earth are shaken, not even if the Duke says ‘No’?” he cried, partly furious, partly satirical, catching at the hand which was on his arm.
His violence gave her a little shock, and the savage satire of the tone in which he named her father distressed Lady Jane. “You must not speak so,” she said, with her soft dignity: “the Duke is my father. But you do not know me if you think that anything will change me.” Then indeed Winton felt a little ashamed of himself, and began to realise that he did not yet know all of this gentle creature who was going to be his wife. She parted with him at the door of the ante-room, and went back through her mother’s boudoir to her own retirement. Next to being with the objet aimé, being alone is the purest happiness at this stage. She kissed her mother, who was busy at her writing-table, in passing. The Duchess was deep in calculation, not how she should make her ends meet, which was impossible, but how near she could draw them together, so that the gap might be small. It is a sad and harassing business. She paused only a moment to pat her child on her soft cheek, and reflect within herself how beautifying was this love which in youth is full of enchantment and illusion, and then returned to her figures. When the ends will meet, what pleasure there is even in the pain of drawing them together! but when no miracle will do this, when there must always remain a horrible chasm between! Fifty remained thus at work in the finance department, while Twenty-eight went lightly away to think over her happiness. It must be allowed that Lady Jane was not quite young enough—she ought to have been but twenty, by rights; but her maturity only added to the exceeding fulness of her enjoyment. There is something sweet in being awakened late; it prolongs the morning, it keeps the “vision splendid” a little longer in one’s eyes. The unfulfilled even has a glory of its own, which people who are bigoted in belief of the ordinary canons of romance are slow to perceive. This preserved to Lady Jane, at an age when girlhood is over, its most perfect fragrance and charm.
Presently, however, the sweet vagueness of her anticipations began to open into other thoughts. She had been so preserved by her stately upbringing and the traditions which she had felt to centre in her, from knowledge of fact and the world, that she knew little at all about money, or the power it has to bridge over social differences. When she allowed her heart to go out to Reginald Winton, she did so with the most absolute conviction that it involved a great descent in rank and abandonment of luxury. She would have to put off the coronet from her head, she believed, the princess royal’s myrtle crown. She would have to learn a great many things, both to do and to do without. She had heard of Winton House, which was a small place; and probably she had heard of the house in town. But the latter had altogether dropped out of her mind, and she knew very well that a squire’s little manor would be very different from Billings, and would require from its mistress an existence of a kind unknown to all her previous experiences. She would have to superintend her own household; if not to make her maids spin, according to the usage of old times, at least to direct the housemaids, and know how things ought to be done. Though her father was in reality much less rich than the man whom she had chosen for her husband, she was entirely in the dark on this point, and her mind awoke to a sense of a hundred requirements of which she knew nothing. She had been like a star, and dwelt apart (if it is not profane to apply such words to a young lady of the nineteenth century) as much as any poet. But now love and duty bade her come down from these heights, and learn how people walk along the common ways. She addressed herself to this task without a grudge, with glad alacrity and readiness; but she was a little puzzled, it must be admitted, to know how to begin. The first person to whom she addressed herself (for naturally Lady Jane was shy of betraying her motive, or letting it be known that the inquiries she made were for her own benefit) was her maid, who was as superior a young person and as much like a waiting gentlewoman as it was possible to find. Lady Jane was aware, of course, that Arabella’s family (for this was the distinguished name she bore) were not in the same position as Mr Winton. But in that sad deficiency of perspective which we have already noted as one of the drawbacks of rank, she felt it possible that Arabella’s knowledge of how life was conducted at her end of the social circle would be more useful than her own to Reginald Winton’s wife. She opened the subject in, it must be avowed, a very uncompromising and artless way one evening, while Arabella stood behind her, partially visible in the large mirror before which she sat, brushing out her long and abundant hair. It was very fine and silky, and made very little appearance when smoothly wound round the back of her head; but when it was being brushed out it was like a veil, soft and dreamy and illimitable, spreading out almost as far as the operator chose in a cloud of soft darkness—“like twilight, too, her dusky hair.” A lady’s-maid is very much wanting in the spirit of her profession if she is indifferent to the fact that her mistress has fine hair. Generally it is the thing of which she is most proud. And Arabella held this sentiment in the warmest way. Her scorn of chignons and of frizzing was indescribable. “You should just see my lady’s hair when it is down,” she would say, almost crying over the fact which she could not ignore, that the hair of many other ladies, when it was up, greatly exceeded in appearance and volume the soft locks of Lady Jane. It was while Arabella was employed in this way that her mistress, looking at her in the glass, said suddenly, “If you were going to be married, Arabella, what should you do to prepare for it? I want very much to know.”
“My lady!” cried the girl, with a violent start. She let the brush fall from her hand with the fright it gave her, and then without any warning she began to cry. “Indeed, indeed, I never could make up my mind to leave your ladyship—not in a hurry like he wants me to—never! never! at least till you were suited,” Arabella said.
“Oh!” cried Lady Jane, turning round, “then you really were thinking! I did not know of that, I assure you; I never thought of it. Are you really going to be married, Arabella?”
“It is none of my doing,” the girl said; “indeed I told him I couldn’t make up my mind to leave; but he says—you know, my lady, men find always a deal to say——”
“Do they?” said Lady Jane, with a soft laugh of sympathy. Yes, it was true—they had a deal to say: and then sometimes when they were silent, that said still more. She paused upon this recollection, with a soft wave of pleasure going over her; and then—perhaps not so anxious to understand Arabella as to follow out her own thoughts—“Tell me,” she said, “when you go away from me, Arabella—out of Billings and out of Grosvenor Square—into a little small house, how does it feel to you? Do you dislike it very much? Is it very wretched? I should like to know how you feel about it. One day here in these large rooms—and the next in a tiny little place, without servants, without any conveniences. It is only lately that I have thought about this, but I want to know. Nobody can tell me so well as you.”
“Oh, my lady,” cried Arabella, “don’t you know without telling? Why, it’s home! That makes all the difference; though it’s a little place, yet it’s your own.”
Lady Jane’s eyes still remained unsatisfied, though she said “To be sure” vaguely. “To be sure,” she repeated; “but then here you have everything done for you, and everything is nice. You cannot have the same at home.”
“No, my lady; but it’s so nice and fresh there: no carpets or things to catch the dust—except in the parlour, but that is only for Sundays. The floors all so white and fresh; the plates and the dishes shining; the fire so cheerful. I can’t deny,” said Arabella, her tone of delight sinking to one of candid avowal, “that the parlour is—well, my lady, it is a dreadful little place; and poor mother is so proud of it!—it is not so nice as the room the under-housemaids have their tea in. I feel just as if I were one of the inferior servants when I sit there. But the kitchen: if your ladyship took a fancy to playing at being poor—like the French queen did, you know, my lady—it would be quite nice enough even for you.”
“You should not say ‘like the French queen did’; that is bad grammar,” said Lady Jane, softly. “I shan’t play at being poor, Arabella, but perhaps some day—— All this you have been saying is about your home, but that was not what I asked. If you were going to be married, what would you do? You could not keep any servants; you would have to do all sorts of things yourself. Do you think it will be a dreadful sacrifice to make?”
Arabella gave her lady’s hair a few tugs, perhaps unconsciously to hide a little emotion, perhaps with a little gentle indignation at her mistress’s humble estimate of her prospects. “It is not so low as you think, my lady,” she said. “He is a careful young man that has saved a little, and can give me a nice home and keep me a servant. I’ll have no dirty work to do nor need to soil my fingers. He thinks, like your ladyship, that it will be a great sacrifice; but what can a girl have better, mother says, than a good steady husband and a nice home? and I think so too.”
Lady Jane smiled with gentle sympathy. “And so do I, Arabella. Still that is not the question I was asking. It will be a small house, I suppose, and one little maid? And I suppose you will have many things to do, and to live with——” Here she paused, blushing for her own want of perception. “You are accustomed to things very much the same as mine,” she continued softly, “and it must be different. How will you put up with it—or shall you not mind? Only a few little rooms, perhaps, to live in.”
“Oh, my lady,” said Arabella, “a few! We shall have a little parlour, where I can sit in the afternoons. What could any one wish for more? Your ladyship yourself, or even the Duchess, though you have all the castle to choose from, you can’t sit in more than one room at a time. And it has often surprised me, my lady, to see how, with all those beautiful drawing-rooms and all their grand furniture, your ladyship and the Duchess will prefer quite a little bit of a place to sit in. Look at the morning-room at the castle!—and her Grace’s boudoir here is quite small in comparison. I can’t see that it will make much difference to me.”
“That is a very just observation, Arabella,” said Lady Jane; “I wonder I never thought of it before. Nobody can sit in more than one room at a time, it is quite true; that is all one really needs. I am very much obliged to you for putting it so clearly.”
“Yes, my lady,” said Arabella, with a little curtsey of acknowledgment. She was pleased, but not so much surprised as might have been expected. She was fond of her mistress, and had a great reverence for her in her way, but she was aware that in practical matters she herself was far more likely to be right than Lady Jane. And then she proceeded on her own account to give many particulars which were very satisfactory to herself, and inspired her mistress with great interest, but threw no further light upon the point which occupied her mind. She smiled to herself afterwards, with a mixture of sympathy and amusement, to think that Arabella was going to be married too. But in the meantime this new view as to the number of rooms which were indispensable, did her a great deal of good, and threw much light upon the chief subject of her thoughts.
Her next inquiries were addressed to a very different kind of counsellor. It was well for Lady Jane that she was not on womanly confidential terms with her sister-in-law, or it would have been very difficult to keep the secret of her love from that acute observer; as it was, the curiosity of Susan was much awakened by some of her questions. She asked her, “What do girls in the other classes do when they are preparing for their marriage?” Lady Jane would not say the lower classes, partly lest she might offend Lady Hungerford, partly because of a delicate sense she had that deficiency of any kind should not be made a mark for those who suffered under it. Lady Jane’s politeness was such that among blind people she would have thought it right to assume that blindness was the common rule of life, and to suppress in her talk any invidious distinction of herself as a person who saw.
“What do they do when they are preparing for their marriage? Why, dear, they generally spend most of their time, and far too much of their thoughts, in buying their wedding clothes.”
“That is so in all classes,” said Lady Jane; “but still that cannot be everything. Some must be bent upon doing their best in their new life. Those, for instance, who have not much money.”
“I am afraid I cannot tell you,” said Susan, “for I never was in that predicament. My people, you know, were vulgar, and it was a great rise in the world for me, of course, to marry Hungerford.”
“I do not think you have ever thought it that,” said Lady Jane.
“Haven’t I? I ought to have, then. It was a great rise; but my people were never poor. A good girl who is going to marry a clerk, or that sort of thing, buys a cookery-book, I believe, and has her husband’s slippers warmed for him when he comes home. She finds out all the cheap shops, and puts down her expenses every day in a book. That is all I know.”
“I was not thinking of a clerk’s wife. I was thinking rather of a gentleman—in the country, for instance—not great people, but perfectly nice, and as—as good as ourselves, you know. If a girl wanted very much to do her duty, I wonder what she would do?”
“It would depend very much upon her husband’s requirements, I should say. If he was a fox-hunter, she would probably ride a great deal, and find out all about horses and dogs; if he was studious, she would pay a little attention to books. All that wears off after a little time,” said Lady Hungerford. “But at the beginning, when a girl is not used to it, and is making experiments, she takes up all her husband’s fads, and attempts to humour him. By-and-by, of course, everything finds its level, and she lets him alone and follows her own way.”
“You think, then, that it does not make much difference what one does,” said Lady Jane.
“What one does! You do not mean yourself, I suppose? Crown princesses are above all that sort of thing; they are too magnificent for human nature’s daily food. You will be married by proxy, no doubt, when the time comes, in Westminster Abbey.”
“Which means I shall never be married at all,” said Lady Jane, with subdued pleasure and a delightful sense of her own superior knowledge. She smiled with such a tender softness that her lively sister-in-law, who, if not formed in a very delicate mould, was yet capable of kind impulse, and clever enough to understand the superiority of the spotless creature beside her, had a moment of shame and self-reproach.
“If you are not, it will be all the worse for somebody,” she said. “When I was married I used to watch Hungerford to find out what he wanted me to do; but I soon tired of that, for he never wanted me to do anything. Most men like you to strike out your own line, and never mind them. That is why I say everything finds its level. The most dreadful thing in the world is a woman who is always studying to do her duty, and watching her husband to anticipate his wishes. They don’t like to have their wishes anticipated. They like to state them honestly, and have the satisfaction of getting what they want. They are strange creatures, men. The best thing is to strike out your own line, and never interfere with theirs. It is always most satisfactory in the end.”
Lady Jane made no answer to this, except by a little sigh, in which Lady Hungerford, to her great astonishment, noticed an impatient sound. “What is it you want to know?” she said. “Why are you asking me such questions?” But Lady Jane made no reply. She had got a little enlightenment from Arabella, but none from this woman of the world. How to manage her husband was not a question which disturbed her. The clerk’s wife studying the cookery-book pleased her more than the lady who first tried to humour her husband’s fads, and then struck out her own line. In such a person the sweet and true but not too lively intelligence of Lady Jane had little interest. She dwelt on the other with a tender sympathy. After all, it was not entirely in the light of the husband that she regarded this new life. She wanted to put herself in tone with it, to understand its requirements for herself as well as for him. She retired into her own chamber and thought it out in the quiet which, even in London, is possible in a great house. It would not be possible, perhaps, to have every room cushioned and every noise stopped before it reached her, as here. Lady Jane imagined herself stepping down into a world of noise and bustle, and duties quite unknown to her. It would be her business to bring harmony out of that; not to confront the guillotine, as she once thought, but perhaps to do something even harder, to overcome the petty and small, even the sordid perhaps, and show what her order was capable of, and what a thing it was to be a woman. A soft enthusiasm filled her for those unknown, humble duties. As for giving up, what was there to give up? Arabella’s philosophy gave her a shield against every suggestion of loss. You can’t sit in more than one room at a time, if you have a hundred to choose from. To think that a girl like that should find the true solution of the parable without knowing anything about it, which the wisest shook their heads over! Lady Jane, with that enlightenment, did not feel the least fear. Next time she was out without supervision, she drove to a bookseller’s and bought all the books she could find upon household economy. ‘How to Live on Three Hundred a-Year’ was one of these volumes. With this she did not quite sympathise, feeling it too fine and elaborate. Her instinct told her that domestic economy, to be beautiful, must be more spontaneous and not so laboured, and that some things were tawdry, and some sordid, in the arrangements laid down. She thought over the problems in these books with great conscientiousness. She thought a French cook would be much the best to start with, for they were so economical. She thought plate would be the cheapest thing to use, since it never breaks. But with a few mistakes of this kind, which were inevitable, and which experience would set right in three months, Lady Jane made herself out a beautiful programme for her behaviour as a poor man’s wife. It gave her a sense of elation to feel that at the least she could do something, and qualify herself for fulfilling a heroic destiny. She was quite unconscious of either downfall or humiliation.