THE scenes that followed were at times not only so exciting, but so tranquil, that we shrink from attempting to depict them. If there had been anything wanted to confirm the determination of the Duke to hold to the position he had taken up, it would have been the arrival of the Duchess, and the prodigious step he took in refusing her admittance to her daughter. After that there was nothing too much for him. He had burnt his ships. When Lord and Lady Germaine arrived next morning to bring away the bride, with some trembling on the part of the lady, but a contemptuous certainty on that of the gentleman, that “the old duffer,” though he had let his temper out, was not such a fool as all that—they were refused admittance peremptorily. After they had parleyed for some time with the man at the door,—a personage whom the Duke, roused into energy by the position in which he found himself, had engaged on the previous day, and who was invulnerable to all assaults and persuasions,—the Duchess herself came to them, extremely pale, and with difficulty preserving her composure. She had remained all night notwithstanding the misery of the circumstances altogether, and though she did not admit it in words, her quick-witted visitors easily perceived that she herself had not been permitted to see her daughter. “You will think it is medieval,” she said with a faint smile. “The Duke is very determined when he thinks it worth while.”
“I suppose,” said Lady Germaine, touched by the aspect of the suffering woman, “that one does not have the blood of Merlin in one’s veins for nothing.”
“Merlin,” said Lord Germaine, who was very slangy, “was the old swell who was seducted by Miss Vivien. I don’t think it would have been hard work to get over him.”
The Duchess stood in the doorway pale, supporting with difficulty any levity on the subject, yet ready to put as brave a face upon it as possible. “Give Reginald my love, and tell him it is impossible this can last for ever,” she said. “I am sorry for him to the bottom of my heart, and sorry for my child, but at present I cannot help even her.”
Lady Germaine stepped within the guarded door to take the Duchess’s hand and kiss her. “And we are so sorry for you, so indignant——”
“Hush!” the Duchess said. “It is my fault; I should have had the courage of my convictions. I should have gone with my child myself; the error was mine.”
Lady Germaine was half disposed to reply, “Oh, if you think we neglected any precaution——” But she had not the heart to be offended.
The pair drove away after a while considerably discomfited. “I did not think the old duffer had so much spirit,” Lord Germaine said with secret admiration. “I say, Nell, if you tried to marry Dolly against my will, I wonder if I should be up to that?”
“If there was any chance of it I should lock you up first,” said his dutiful wife.
“And on the edge of a smash, the greatest smash that has been since—— Billings will have to be sold up, and all that is in it,” Lord Germaine said thoughtfully.
Lady Germaine showed neither surprise nor pain at this piece of news. “What a chance for Reginald!” she said. “He can buy in all their best things and do up Jane’s rooms at Winton like her old ones at home.” And then she laughed and added, “He wouldn’t have those old things in his house. Taste had not been invented when their Graces were married.”
It was in this mood of partial hilarity that they reached their own door, where poor Winton was waiting. However sympathetic friends may be, the way in which they take our troubles is very different from the way in which we ourselves take them. The Germaines, though they threw themselves so warmly into his affairs, and had given themselves so much trouble, had to change their aspect suddenly, to put up shutters and draw down blinds metaphorically, as they approached the actual sufferer. But into his misery and rage it is unnecessary to enter. He said, as was natural, a great many things that it would have been better not to say, and for some time after he besieged the house. He went in person, he wrote, he communicated by means of his solicitors with the solicitors of the Duke, whose mouths watered over the settlements he had made, which the authorities on his own side thought ridiculous, and professed their eagerness to do their best, but would not flatter him with any hopes of success. “No man in his senses would reject a son-in-law like you, Mr Winton, especially in the circumstances,” the senior partner said; “but the Duke is the Duke, and there is nothing more to be said. We have found him very impracticable, extremely impracticable in his own affairs; things are looking bad for the family altogether. There is Lord Hungerford now has some sense. He made a capital marriage himself—you should get him on your side.”
Winton found no great difficulty in getting Hungerford on his side. That young nobleman was so much excited on the subject, that he even took it upon him to speak to his father and show him how ridiculous it was.
“You can’t make a house in Grosvenor Square like a castle in the Apennines,” Hungerford cried; “for heaven’s sake, sir, don’t make us ridiculous!” Lady Hungerford on her side enjoyed the whole affair immensely. “I never realised before that I had really married into a great house,” she said. “It’s like the ‘Family Herald.’ It’s like the sort of nobility we understand among the lower classes, don’t you know? not your easygoing, like-other-people kind.” And she offered to take lessons of a locksmith so that she might be able to break open Jane’s prison.
To tell the truth, even suggestions of this kind, which were partially comic and wholly theatrical, came to be entertained by Winton before his trial was over. One of his friends seriously advised him to get an Italian servant, used to conspiracies, smuggled into the house, in order to deliver the captive. Another thought that rope-ladders and a midnight descent from the window might be practicable; but a rope-ladder from a second-floor window in Grosvenor Square would not be easy to manage, and a wag intervened and suggested a fire-escape, which turned the whole into ridicule. This was one of the aspects of the case, indeed, which aggravated everything else. The whole situation, being so serious and painful to two or three people, was, to the rest of the world, irresistible from the comic side. People drove through Grosvenor Square on purpose to look up at the second-floor windows: and as the instruments began to tune up, and the feast to be set in order for the first arrivals of society, the importance of the strange event grew greater and greater. A new Home Secretary, and all the consequent changes in the Cabinet, faded into nothing in comparison. “Have you heard that Jane Altamont was half-married to Regy Winton some time in the winter, and that odious old Duke dragged her from the very altar, and has kept her ever since under lock and key?” Very likely it was Lady Germaine who first put the story about, but it was taken up by everybody with all the interest and excitement which such a tale warranted. Further details were given that were almost incredible; to wit, that the Duchess herself, though living in the same house, was not allowed to see her daughter, and that Lady Jane for two months had only breathed the fresh air through her window, and had never left the suite of rooms in which she was confined; worse than if she had been in jail, everybody said. But not even this was the point which most roused the popular indignation (if we may call the indignation of the drawing-rooms popular). Half-married! that was the terrible thought.
The Duke paid one or two visits before the opening of Parliament. It may be supposed that to none but very great houses indeed would his Grace pay such an honour: and though he was not very quick to observe in general matters, yet his sense of his own importance was so keen that it answered for intelligence, so far as he himself was concerned. He saw that the ladies regarded him with a sort of alarm, that even the gentlemen after dinner showed a curiosity which was not certainly the awed and respectful interest which he thought it natural he should excite. And it was not long before his hostess, who was, he could not deny, his equal, of his own rank, and of unexceptionable antecedents, made the matter clear to him. “Duke,” she said, “of course you know I wouldn’t for the world meddle in any one’s private affairs. But there is such a strange story going about—— Dear Jane! We had hoped to see her with you as well as Margaret” (Margaret was the Duchess, and a very intimate friend of this other great, great lady); “and now neither of them has come. But it is not possible—don’t think for a moment that I believe it!—that this story can be true.”
“If your Grace will kindly explain what the story is?” Our Duke, liking due respect himself, always gave their titles to other people, according to the golden rule.
“I don’t like even to put it into words; that you stopped her marriage—at the altar itself; that the dear girl is neither married nor single; that—— But I give you pain.”
“The statement is calculated to give me pain; but the facts, as of course your Grace knows very well, are true. I arrived in time to prevent my daughter from making a marriage which I disapproved.”
“Oh, we are all liable to that,” said the great lady, letting her eyes dwell regretfully, yet with maternal pride, upon a daughter who had been so abandoned as to marry a clergyman, but who had produced a baby, for whose sake the parents had forgiven its father. “Who can guard against such a misfortune? But Beatrice, poor thing, is very happy,” she added with a sigh.
The Duke made her a little bow. It said a great deal. It said, if you are so lost to every sense of what is becoming as to take it in that way—but I should never have allowed it! He to utter sentences of this kind, who had made himself the talk of society! “But, Duke,” she said with spirit, taking up Nurse Mordaunt’s argument, “if the altar is not held sacred, what will become of us? They say you stopped her when she was saying the very words——”
“The subject is not a very agreeable one,” said the Duke; “I cannot take it upon me to recollect at what point they were in the service—— but at all events, your Grace may be assured it was not too late.”
“Oh, but it must have been too late,” cried the indignant matron. “I heard he had said ‘I will.’ I heard he had put the ring on her finger. I could not have believed it was true had not you said so. But you cannot let it rest like that. Half-married! it’s wicked, you know,” her Grace cried.
And the other Duke, the gracious host, permitted himself, in a moment of expansion, to say something of the same sort. “I wouldn’t interfere with your affairs for the world,” he said; “but I hope, Billingsgate, you don’t mean to let that sweet girl of yours lie under such a stigma——”
“A stigma! My daughter! There is no stigma,” cried the head of the Altamonts, growing scarlet.
“Well, I don’t want to be a meddler: but the women say so. They are all in a fuss about it; one hears of nothing else wherever one goes. You will have to give in sooner or later,” said the other Duke.
“Never!” said his Grace of Billingsgate, and he hastened his departure from his friend’s abode. But the next house he went to the same result was produced. There was a putting together of feminine heads, a whispering, a direction of glances towards him, from eyes which once had looked upon him only with awe; and after a little hesitation and beating about the bush, the same outburst of remark. Half-married! The most important lady in the company took him to task very seriously. “What is to become of her? you should think of that. At present she has you to protect her reputation. But suppose anything were to happen to you? We are all mortal; and think of dear Jane with such a scandal against her. People will say it is the man who has drawn back: they will say all sorts of things; for it is inconceivable that a girl’s father, her own father, should play with her reputation like that.”
“Her reputation!” the Duke cried, almost with a shriek of indignation. “My child’s reputation! Who would dare——”
“Oh, nobody would dare,” said his assailant—“but everybody would understand. People would make sure that there were reasons. Half-married! There is not one of us that doesn’t feel it. Such a thing was never heard of. Oh, you must not think you will escape it by going away. Wherever you go you will hear the same thing. The news has gone everywhere. Didn’t you see it in the ‘Universe’ at full length? Of course nobody could mistake the Duke of B—— G——. Oh, I hope you will think it over seriously, before it is too late.”
The Duke, more angry than ever, went back to Grosvenor Square. He was determined to face it out. Country houses are proverbially glad of a piece of gossip to give their dull life an interest. He began to go out into society, as much as there was at that early season, and present a bold front to the world. His home was dull enough, with Lady Jane locked into her room and watched, lest by craft or force she should make her escape; her mother obstinately refusing to go out, or accompany him anywhere; his very servants looking at him reproachfully. The butler, who had been with him for about thirty years, and whose knowledge of wine and of the cellars at Billings was inexhaustible, threw up his situation; and so did the housekeeper, who was Jarvis’s wife. “I don’t hold with no such goings-on,” Mrs Jarvis said. And when he dined with the leader of his party (which was in opposition) Mrs Coningsby did not wait till the conclusion of the dinner, but cried, “Duke, it cannot be true about Lady Jane!” before he had eaten his soup. This lady treated the subject lightly, which was more odious to him than the other way. “Oh no, it can’t be true,” she said; “we all know that they say you dragged her from church by the hair of her head, and snatched her hand away when the bridegroom was putting on the ring. Mr Coningsby was in a dreadful way about it. He said it would be such a cry at the elections; but I told him, Nonsense! the Duke is far too fine a gentleman, I said.” This was more difficult to answer than the other mode of assault. The Duke became all manner of colours as he listened. “And the elections are so near,” the lady said. “Of course the Government will not care how false it is; they will placard it on all the walls, with a picture as large as life. They will turn all the clergy against us. Of course, dear Duke, of course, to people who know you so well as I do—you need not tell me that it is not true.” The Duke sat grim, and heard all this, and did not say a word. There was a flutter in the drawing-room as he came in: everybody looked at him as if he had been a wild beast. “Dragged her out by the hair of her head!” he heard whispered on every side of him, and though Mrs Coningsby still affected not to believe, the bishop’s wife contemplated him with terrible gravity. “Oh, I hope you will talk it over with the bishop,” she said. “He is so anxious about it. Lady Jane was always such a favourite. I do hope you will take the bishop’s advice. After a certain part of the service, I have always understood it was a sin to interfere.” Later in the evening he was mobbed by half-a-dozen ladies—there is no other word for it—mobbed and overwhelmed with one universal cry. Half-married! Poor Lady Jane! Dear Lady Jane! They pressed round him, each with her protestation, a soft, yet urgent babel of voices. The poor Duke escaped at last, not knowing how he got away. It seemed to his Grace that he had escaped out of a mob, and that his coat must be torn and his linen frayed with the conflict. He was astonished beyond all description; but he was likewise appalled by the discovery that even he was not above the reach of public opinion. It affected him against his will. He felt ashamed, uneasy, confused even on the points where he was most sure.
And when he came home, he went to his wife’s boudoir, where she sat alone, to bid her good-night, which was a form he always observed, though this event had separated them entirely. She was permitted now to see Jane once a-day; but as she would give no promise that she would not help her daughter to leave the house, this was the utmost that he had granted her. She was seated alone, reading, pale and weary. She scarcely raised her eyes when he came in, though she put down her book. The fire was low, and there was no light in the room except the reading-lamp. The Duke could not help feeling the difference from former times. A temptation came upon him to throw himself upon her sympathy, and tell her how he had been persecuted. He would have done so had it been on any other subject, but he remembered in time that on this he had no sympathy to expect from his wife. So he stood for a minute or two before the fire, feeling chilled, silenced, an injured man. “No, I have not had a pleasant evening,” he said shortly; “how should my evening be pleasant when every one remarks your absence? I am asked if you are ill; I am asked——”
“Other questions, I imagine, that are still more difficult to answer.”
“And whose fault is it?” he cried, with vehemence. “If you had taken the steps you ought to have taken, and supported my authority, as was your duty, there would have been no such questions to ask.”
The Duchess turned away with some impatience; she made no reply: the question had been often enough discussed in all its bearings. If she had now thrown herself at his feet and begged his pardon and forbearance, what a relief it would have been to him! He would have yielded and saved his position, and recovered the pose of a magnanimous superior. But the Duchess had no intention of the kind. After a while, during which they did not look at each other, she seated gazing into the fire, he standing staring into the vacant air, he took up his candlestick with an air of impatience. “Good night, then,” he said, with in his turn an air of impatience.