The Duke's Daughter and The Fugitives vol. 1/3 by Mrs. Oliphant - HTML preview

CHAPTER X.
 A MOMENTOUS INTERVIEW.

THE Duke, like his wife, was too highbred to allow any sign of disturbance to be seen in him; but nevertheless he was very greatly disturbed. Such a thing had never happened to him in all his life before. He had come in contact indeed with many men of lower social pretensions than Winton. But a person who is absolutely nobody is always easier to deal with than one who, without reaching at all to the level on which you can regard him as an equal, is still, by the unfortunate and levelling privileges of English society, supposed to be as good even as a duke; whereas nobody but a duke can be, in reality, as good as a duke, though a peer of old creation may approach him near enough for most social purposes. But a Mr Winton! His was precisely the kind of position which is most perplexing and disagreeable to the great man who is nevertheless obliged to allow, in deference to the folly of society, that there can be nothing higher than an English gentleman, and that princes themselves must consider their right to that title as their highest qualification. There are commoners, indeed, with whom even a duke might make an alliance and find himself no loser. We have already pointed out that Mr Roundell, of Bishop’s Roundell, had been seriously thought of as a suitor for Lady Jane. But a little squire with a little manor-house somewhere in the Midland counties—a man whom only a chance inheritance had raised above the necessity of working for his living, whose ancestors had been no better than little squires before him, who was nobody, of a race unheard of out of their parish, that he should take it upon him to walk quietly up to the Duke on his own hearth and ask from him the hand of Lady Jane! He did not venture to permit himself to dwell upon the thought. When it came back to his mind it set his blood boiling as at first—his head grew hot, his veins too full, his respiration difficult. To allow himself to be driven into a fit by such canaille would be unworthy of him; and therefore the Duke put force upon himself, and when the recollection came back took the wise step of flying from it. He would not risk himself on such an ignoble occasion. To allow a Mr Winton to bring on an illness would be almost as bad as accepting him for Lady Jane. Therefore he sent for his steward, or had an interview with his head groom, or seized upon some other external aid to save himself from the thought. He was unusually stately during the evening and snubbed the man of the clubs, who had gained some favour before by his adroitness and the interest he took in the house of Billings. The Duke turned his back upon this candidate for favour in the midst of an account he was giving of some discoveries he had made—discoveries for which the entire race of the Altamonts ought, he believed, to have been his debtors—as if the House of Altamont could have been advantaged by any discovery made by a man who was nobody, or indeed wanted any new glorification. The Duke turned round in the very midst of the tale, turned his shoulder to the discoverer and began to talk to the next of his noble visitors. This snub direct made everybody stare, and quenched the victim for the evening. It gave his Grace a little satisfaction to mortify somebody; but after all it did not do much for his own wounds. And after a disturbed night, when malicious recollection presented him with the souvenir of Winton almost before he was free of his disturbed dreams, it may be supposed that the Duke’s uprising was not a pleasant one. Heaven and earth! a little squire! a nobody! He got up precipitately—if the Duke could be supposed to do anything precipitately—and hurried his dressing, and plunged himself into business. To allow himself to be drawn even into a bilious attack by an assailant so contemptible would have been beneath him. His Grace was very busy checking the steward’s accounts, and just had started what he thought was an error in the balance-sheet, and was about with much enjoyment to hunt it back to its origin—for he loved to think that he was cheated, and to find out the managers of the estate in an inaccurate sixpence was a great gratification to him—when there suddenly came a low and somewhat tremulous knock at his door. He knew in a moment that it was some new annoyance and connected with the Winton affair, though it did not occur to him who the applicant could be who made this gentle demand for admittance. His first thought was so little wise that it prompted him to make as though he had not heard. But he heard very well, and through every fibre of him. Then as he waited, keeping very quiet, with perhaps a hope that the interruption might thus be diverted, the knock was repeated a little louder. The Duke rose in great impatience. He knew as well as if he had been in all their counsels what it was, but he did not know who it was. When it was repeated for the third time he made a stride across the room, and with his own hand flung the door open. “WELL!” he said in a voice of thunder, then fell back appalled. For there, in her white morning dress, and whiter than her dress, save when she was crimson, her soft countenance inspired with something which her father had never seen there before, her eyes meeting his steadfastly, a slight tremor in her, which rather added to than detracted from her firmness—stood Lady Jane.

The Duke was so much excited that for one moment he failed in politeness towards the princess royal. “YOU!” he cried, with something of that intonation of supreme surprise and horror, with which he had said SIR to her lover. But he paused, and a better inspiration returned to him. A spasmodic sort of smile came over his face. “Ah, Jane!” he said, and put out his hand. “You want to speak to me? This is an unusual visit—and perhaps it is rather an unfortunate moment, if you have much to say.”

“Not very much, papa,” Jane answered, with an agitated smile. She took his hand, though he had not meant this, and held it, as she closed the door behind her. He would not have allowed her to do as much as this herself, had he noted what she meant, but he was agitated too in spite of himself. He recovered, however, and shut the door, then led his daughter to a chair and placed her in it. It was—but he noticed that only after it was beyond mending—the very chair in which her presumptuous suitor had placed himself yesterday. The Duke stood up before her in front of the fireplace exactly as he had done with Winton. The coincidence alarmed him, but now he could not help it. “Well, my love?” he said. He put on an air which was jaunty and light-hearted, the false gaiety with which a frightened man faces unknown danger. “Well, my love! I have just found Whitaker out in some serious miscalculations. I am robbed on all hands by my servants. It is one of the penalties of our position. But I warn you I have my head full of this and will be a poor listener. Whitaker, you see——”

“What I have to say will not take much time, papa. But it is very important to me.”

“Ah, ah!” said the Duke, with a laugh. “Chiffons, eh? Money wanted? You must talk that over with your mother. I am not rich, but whatever my Jane may require, were it to the half of my kingdom——”

He made her a bow full of that deference and almost reverential respect with which it was one of the Duke’s best points to have surrounded his only daughter—with a smile in which there was more tenderness than his Grace was capable of showing to any other creature. He loved his daughter, and he venerated her as a sort of flower of humanity and of the Altamonts, who were the best that humanity could produce.

“I will not ask so much as that,” said Lady Jane, tremulous, yet firm; “and yet I have come to ask you for something, father. I am older than girls are usually when they—marry.”

“Older, nonsense! Who has told you that?” cried the Duke, his veins beginning to swell, and his heart to thump with rising excitement. “You are in the bloom of your youth. I have never seen a girl look sweeter, or fairer, or younger, for that matter, than my child has been looking. Who has put such folly into your head?”

“It is not folly, it is true; and no matter—that is nothing; but only to show you that I am serious. I am no longer a girl, papa. Ah! do not interrupt; I shall always be a girl to you. I am a woman. I have had a great many thoughts before I came to speak—for myself. That is the last thing one wishes to do. To have others do it is so much the easier. But one must at last. I have come to speak to you for myself.”

“Jane, you had better pause and think,” said the Duke, with threatening looks.

“What can you have to say about yourself? Don’t bring down my respect for my daughter. We are driven out of our respect for women in most cases early in our career; but most men have a prejudice in favour of their daughters. Don’t force me to think that you are just like all the rest.”

She looked at him wondering, but with eyes that did not falter. “My mother, I am sure, can have forfeited no one’s respect,” she said softly; “neither shall I, I hope; but perhaps more than she. I must speak to you, father, about my own life. Oh!” she cried, clasping her hands, with a vivid colour coming to her pale cheeks, “speak you for me! do not let me have to do it. There are things that can only be said when the case is desperate, and surely—surely it cannot be desperate between you and me. Speak for me, father, to your own heart.”

“So far as I can see, this is melodrama,” said the Duke, with a feeble smile of agitation that looked like a sneer, for his lips were dry. “What am I to say? Come, must we be brutal? That Lady Jane Altamont, like any poor milliner, is beginning to be afraid——”

Her eyes opened a little wider with a scared look, but she said nothing, only gazed more fixedly on her father, her whole soul bent on what he was next to say.

“Afraid,” he said, with a little forced giggle of a laugh, “because she is twenty-eight, and her cheek is hollow—afraid that she is growing an old maid, and will never get a husband? There is nothing more natural than that,” he cried, bursting out into a mocking laugh.

Lady Jane rose from her chair. She coloured high, then became white as a ghost. Astonishment, consternation, pain—pain indescribable, a kind of horror and dismay were in her eyes. She opened her lips, but only to give forth a gasp of sound which was inarticulate. She did not take her eyes from him; but gradually there grew in them, besides the pitiful suffering of a creature outraged and insulted, a gleam of indignation, a flash of contempt. When a man, even a duke, has taken that fatal step between resentment and fury, between what is permissible and what is unpermissible, the other steps are easy enough. Her father forgot that she was Lady Jane, and the first of womankind. He let his passion go. The more he had loved and elevated her, the more did he trample all her superiority under his feet.

“Ah! you thought I should say something prettier, something more pleasant,” he cried. “Poetical! but I am not poetical, and that is the short and long of it. Afraid to lose your chance altogether, and determined to have a husband, that is the meaning of it! I know now why the man was brought here. I never could make out what we wanted with him at Billings. A last chance for Jane! Ah, I see it all now!”

Lady Jane stood and received all this as if the words had been stones. She put her hands upon her breast to ward them off. She shrank backwards now and then with a faint moan, as one after another was discharged at her. Her eyes grew larger, and more and more pitiful, wet, appealing as if to earth and heaven; but she never withdrew them from her father’s face. And now that he had let himself loose, he raved on, expending upon her all his wrath, putting himself more and more fatally in the wrong with every word, showing, alas! that nothing, not a coal-heaver, could be more vulgar than a duke when he is put to it. Lady Jane stood still before him and never said a word. This was worse than the guillotine. She had dreamt of facing the insults of the mob, but never the insults of her father. As she stood there, to all appearance so full and painfully occupied in sustaining the storm of words thus poured upon her, a hundred reflections were passing through her mind. She almost smiled to herself to think how small had been the terrible scenes presented to her by her imagination, in face of the reality. The Constitution might have gone to pieces, the guillotine might have been raised without shaking her confidence in her class, or disturbing her lofty unconscious superiority to all the rabble could do,—but her father—this was what she had not thought of. Ah! it is not any rabble that can shake the foundations of the earth: but when your father, when those who are most dear to you, lay hands upon the pillars of the house—she stood so still, and looked at him with such a steadfast gaze, that the Duke was driven out of himself. He said—who can doubt?—a thousand things he never meant to say. He turned himself outside in before her, displaying weaknesses which even his wife did not know. But at last his wrath exhausted itself. He began to stammer and hesitate, then stopped short suddenly, with all the consciousness of his self-betrayal on him. There was a moment’s silence, during which they looked at each other without a word said—and then he made a step forward closer to her, and asked, “What have you got to say?”

“Nothing,” said Lady Jane. Her eyes were wet, and shining all the more for the moisture in them, but she had not cried nor felt any impulse to cry. “Oh, nothing—nothing now.”

“You are convinced then?” he said hurriedly, trying to assume his usual aspect. “Come, come, that is well. And perhaps I have been hasty. But you know what is the point upon which I feel most strongly. There must be no descent out of your rank. I have trained you in the sentiment of your rank, above all things. What have we else?” cried the Duke, “everything fails us—the masses pour in everywhere—they have ruined the kingdom, they are ruining the Church: but,” he said slowly, “they shall never ruin the House of Altamont: that shall be kept sacred whatever goes. Pardon me, my love, if I have failed in respect to the last daughter of the house. I know my Jane will not fail.”

But still Lady Jane did not make any reply. She stood as if she had been struck dumb, regarding him with a kind of serious wonder which confused him more than he could say. The desire to explain herself, to ask him for his consent, to get his sympathy, seemed to have died in her. Was she stunned only, or convinced, or what was it he had done? The Duke grew alarmed at last. He waited a moment longer, and then he added, “I have been hasty. After all, my dear, whatever it is, it would be better that you should say what you meant to say.”

She shook her head, still looking at him. “No—no—there would be no advantage in it now.”

“What do you mean by now?—perhaps I might have been mistaken. Come, let me hear what it was,” the Duke cried, with an air of sudden amiability, ignoring all that had gone before.

“Father,” said Lady Jane with a certain solemnity, “there was a great deal to say—but not now. Certain things were uppermost in my mind. I thought my father would listen, and perhaps feel for me, though he might not approve. But I do not wish it now. There is nothing—it is over——”

She put her hand upon her heart, pressing it as if to keep down a sigh. Her eyes so wet, but not weeping, were strangely pathetic, with a resignation in them which it was not wonderful perhaps that he should interpret in his own way. He put out his hand and laid it caressingly upon her arm.

“My good child! if that is so, you may be sure it is for the best. I knew there was that in my Jane that would respond to what I said. And I thank you, my love, not only for myself, but in the name of the race.”

She looked at him again with a penetrating gaze. “The race is everything to you then,” she said.

“Everything, my love! everything. I have no other thought.”

“To keep it honourable and true—above all unworthy thoughts, above dishonesty and untruth,” she said slowly, telling over the words like beads.

“That is what I desire,” said the Duke. Then he added his gloss. “To retain our old nobility unbroken, to sully the name with no mésalliances. Your brother has disregarded my wishes; but though I would never have sanctioned it, he has secured another kind of advantage, and perhaps I have no right to complain. But you, my Jane, nothing must touch you: you must remain the pride of your family. And,” he added soothingly, “do not lose heart, my love. Lady Jane Altamont will not want for opportunities. Do not think from what I said that you are considered passée by any one, or that a good marriage is less likely than before. We are not come the length of putting up with an inferior, trust me, my dear.”

Lady Jane’s pallor changed into an overwhelming blush. She turned away from him, almost shaking his hand from her shoulder. “In that case,” she said, with a muffled voice full of some emotion which he did not quite understand, nor yet feel comfortable about—“in that case there is certainly no more to say.”

And without any little civility, such as, though not indispensable, it is pretty to keep up between the nearest relations, no little bow or smile, or glance of pleasant understanding, she turned from him and went out of the room, suddenly and noiselessly. The Duke did not like it: he felt there was something in it which he had not fathomed. He stood in the place where she had left him, his hand still stretched out where she had shaken it off, his mouth and his eyes open, a bewildered alarm in his mind. What did she mean? Was there more meaning than one in those simple-seeming words? Was this real submission as he hoped, or a something else? He could not tell. But a cold chill got into his veins; he did not know what to make of it. After a while, however, he reasoned with himself, and recovered his comfort. Jane, who had always been so docile, so ready to accept his views, why should she turn against him and all his traditions now?

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.