CHAPTER VIII.
THE DECISIVE MOMENT.
IT was 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, the hesitation 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 were habitués of 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 supposed that 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 very bitter to Winton. He was not accustomed to be a super, 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 in a 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. “You must 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; but she 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 pleasant to 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 well as 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, not they; 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 been the fashion and was the protégé of 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 a sacque like 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 too funny 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 observer at 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 moments that 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 in his 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 his best 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 against him. 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 Lady Jane 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 such women. 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 her breath, and almost her self-possession. “No,” she said, “oh, not afraid! if you say that to 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 has not been 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 might be 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 she should 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 for him, 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. The Duchess, 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. It seemed 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! But Winton 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 to power—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 the potentate 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 me less 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 on the 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 was speaking, 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. And Winton, 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