Read Ebook: The Duke's Daughter; and The Fugitives; vol. 2/3 by Oliphant Mrs Margaret

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"Father," said Lady Jane very low, "it is you who are forgetting our dignity. I will go home, if Reginald takes me; but not with you. I suppose no one doubts our honour. It is not the time for delay now, after you have done all this. Reginald will take me home."

What the Duke said further it is scarcely necessary to record. He had to stand by at last, half stupefied, and watch them walk down the aisle arm in arm, bride and bridegroom, to the evidence of everybody's senses. He followed himself as in a dream, and got in, cowed, but vowing vengeance, into the cab, which was all his Grace could find to reach St Alban's in from the railway,--and in that followed the brougham which conveyed his daughter and her--not husband, and yet not lover--to Grosvenor Square. But when he had once got her there!

The Rector and his wife stood open-mouthed to see the pageant thus melt away. The Duke, to whom they had done so great a favour, took no more notice of them than of the two poor women, who vaguely felt themselves in fault somehow, and still kept crying, looking after the bride. Not a word to the poor clergyman, who had almost done wrong for his sake--not a look even, not the faintest acknowledgment, any more than if he had nothing to do with it! Simms and his wife stood gaping, too, at the church door, looking after the party which had been far too much preoccupied to think of half-crowns. "This is how people are treated after they have done their best. I always told you not to meddle," Mrs Marston said, which was very ungenerous, as well as untrue. But the Rector said nothing. He was mortified to the bottom of his heart. But when the excitement had a little died away, he said to himself with vindictive pleasure that he hoped they were having a pleasant day, those fine people in Grosvenor Square.

THE WEDDING-DAY.

It was not a pleasant day in Grosvenor Square. When the Duke arrived in his cab the door was opened to him by the humble person who had care of the house while the family were out of town,--an old servant, to whom this charge was a sort of pensioning off. She was very much fluttered, and informed him in an undertone that Lady Jane had arrived a few minutes before "with a gentleman." "Her ladyship is in the library, your Grace, and the gentleman with her," the old woman said, curtseying and trembling--for though Lady Jane's garb was very simple for a bride, still it was a white dress, and in the middle of winter it is well known that ladies do not go about their ordinary business in such garments. The Duke considered a moment and then decided that he would not see his daughter till her companion was gone. He was tremulous with rage and discomfiture, yet with the sense that vengeance was in his hands. This feeling made him conclude that it was more wise not to see Winton, not to run the risk of losing his temper or betraying his intentions, but to remain on the watch till he withdrew, and in the meantime to arrange his own plans. He told the old housekeeper to let him know when the gentleman was gone, and in the meantime hurried up-stairs to his daughter's room, and examined it carefully. Lady Jane had two rooms appropriated to her use, with a third communicating with them in which her maid slept. This was a large area to put under lock and key, which was her father's determination: but in the ferment of his excited mind and temper he felt no derogation in the half-stealthy examination he made of the shut-up rooms, their windows and means of communication, the locks on the door, and all the arrangements that would be necessary to shut them off entirely from the rest of the house. With his own hands he removed the keys, locking all the doors but one, and leaving the key on the outside of that to shut off all entrance to the prison.

While he was thus occupied the pair so strangely severed stood together in the library waiting for his appearance, and getting a certain bitter sweetness out of the last hour they were to spend together. They were not aware that it was, in any serious sense of the words, their last hour. "Till to-morrow" was the limit they gave themselves. To-morrow no further interruption would be possible, the incomplete service would be resumed, and all would be well. Even the Duke, unreasonable as he might be, would not think it practicable, when in his sober senses, to endeavour to sunder those who had been almost put together in the presence of God. They believed, notwithstanding the tantalising misery of this interruption, that it could not be but for a few hours; and though Winton's impatience and indignation were at first almost frenzy, Lady Jane recovered her courage before they reached the house, and did her best to soothe him. She drew good even out of the evil. To-morrow all would be completed in her father's presence. When once convinced that matters had gone too far to be arrested, how could he refuse to lend his sanction to what must be, whether with his sanction or not? She pleased herself with this solution of all their difficulties. "My mother will come, I am sure," she said, "as soon as the train can bring her. I shall have her with me, which will be far, far better than Lady Germaine, and there will be no further need of concealment, which is odious, is it not, Reginald? There is a soul of goodness in things evil," she said. As for Winton, he was past speaking: the disappointment, and those passions that rage in the male bosom, were too much for him--fury and indignation, and pride in arms, and the sense of defeat, which was intolerable. But he permitted himself to be subdued, to yield to her who had put so much force upon herself, and conquered so many natural repugnances and womanly traditions for him. Lady Jane would not even let it appear that she felt the shame of being thus dragged back to her father's house. "To-morrow," she said, "to-morrow," with a thousand tender smiles. When it became apparent that the Duke did not mean to make an appearance, she turned that to their advantage with soothing sophistry. "He has nothing to say now," she cried, "don't you see, Reginald? You cannot expect him to come and offer us his consent; if he withdraws his opposition, that is all we can desire. Had he meant to persevere, he would have come to us at once, and ordered you away, and made another struggle. That is what I have been fearing. And now in return for his forbearance you must go. Oh, do you think I wish you to go? but it is best, it will be most honourable. What could be done in the circumstances but that you should bring me home? Yes, till your house is mine this is still home--till to-morrow," she cried, smiling upon him. Winton paced up and down the gloomy closed-up room in an agony of uncertainty, bewilderment, and dismay.

"There is our honour," said Lady Jane. "I pledged it to my father. And if I went with you, it would only be to separate again. Surely I am better at home than at Lady Germaine's:--till to-morrow--till to-morrow," she repeated softly. The library was next the door, it was close to the open street, the free air out-of-doors. The temptation, though she rejected it, was great upon Lady Jane too. There was a moment in which, though she did not allow it, she wavered. The next moment, with more fortitude than ever, she recovered the mastery of herself. It was she at last who, tenderly persuading and beseeching, induced him to go away. She went to the door with him and almost put him out with loving force. "You will come back for me to-morrow--to-morrow! it is not long till to-morrow," she said, waving her hand to her distracted bridegroom as he hurried away. It was well that there was nobody in town--nobody in Grosvenor Square--except a passing milk-boy, to see the Duke's daughter standing in the doorway like the simplest maiden, in her white dress, a wonderful vision for a murky London day, taking farewell of her love. She closed the door after him with her own hand, while poor old Mrs Brown, in such a flutter as she had never before experienced in her life, came bobbing out from the corner in which she had been keeping watch. "Oh, my lady! my lady!" the old woman said. She had scarcely been high enough up in the hierarchy of service below-stairs to have come to speech of Lady Jane at all, and now to think that she was all the attendance possible for that princess royal! Lady Jane, it may be supposed, was in no light-hearted mood, but she stopped with a smile to reassure the old servant.

"Nurse Mordaunt is with me," she said; "she will, no doubt, be here directly, Mrs Brown. You must not vex yourself about me. It will only be till to-morrow. If you will have a fire lighted in my room, I will go there.

"Yes, my lady; oh, my lady! but I'm afraid there's some sad trouble," said the old housekeeper.

Thus with tired and lingering steps, and despondency taking possession of her soul, Lady Jane went softly up-stairs, longing to divest herself of her wedding-gown and hide her humiliation, looking vainly for her father, whose appearance in this wilderness, even if it were only to upbraid and denounce her, would still have had a certain consolation in it. The Duke, unseen, watched her progress with a vindictive pleasure in the downcast air and slow, languid step. He watched her to her very door with an eagerness not to be described. At the last moment she might turn round, she might still leave the house, she might escape. In no case could he have used violence to his daughter. To level thunderbolts of speech was one thing, to use force was quite another. To lift his hand was impossible. If she turned round and fled down the stairs and out at the door, she must do so: there was no way in which he could stop her: if any third person were present, even Mrs Brown, he would be obliged to keep a watch upon himself, to demand no more obedience than she would give, to treat her as a reasonable being. All this the Duke felt, spying upon her steps as she went slowly up, following her, his footsteps falling noiselessly on the thick carpets. He heard her sigh, but this made no difference. To any one else this sigh of the widowed bride, alone in this dismal empty house on the day that was to have been, that almost was, her wedding-day, would have contained something touching. But it did not touch the Duke. He followed at a distance, keeping out of sight, determined to give her no opportunity to appeal to him. When he heard her door close, a certain glow of satisfaction came over his face. He went forward quickly, and turned the key in the lock and put it in his pocket. He heard her moving about in the room, and he could hear that she stopped short at the noise and stood listening to know what it was. But all was quiet again, and Lady Jane suspected nothing. She had begun to look in her wardrobe for something to put on instead of her white dress. She thought it was some jar of one of the doors as she opened them. And he stole down-stairs again, unnoticed and unobserved. Who was there to notice him? no one in the house, except his daughter locked into the room, and Mrs Brown with her little niece down-stairs. The Duke withdrew into the library, where he had sat and pondered for many a day, but never as now. The old housekeeper had bestirred herself and had lighted a fire and set out a table with two places for luncheon. She at least could do her duty if no one else did. Mrs Brown, indeed, felt as a neglected general has often done when the moment arrived in which he could distinguish himself. She had never had this opportunity. Now, at last, in the end of her life it had come to her. His Grace, who was so particular, should for once in his life know what it was to eat a chop, an English chop, in its perfection. She had sent out her handmaiden to fetch them, and lit the fire herself in her devotion. This is an extent of enthusiasm to which few people would go. And Lady Jane, sweet creature, who was evidently in trouble somehow with her papa, who had sent that nice young gentleman off as fast as ever she could, that the Duke and he might not meet, poor thing! what would be so good for her as a chop? The old housekeeper betook herself to her work with the warmest sense at once of benevolence and of power--power to ameliorate and soften the hardness of destiny, and to win fame and honour to herself. What enterprise could have a finer motive? Of the three people in the house, she was the happy one, as happens not unfrequently among all the twists and entanglements of fate.

Before, however, Mrs Brown had begun to cook her chops, Nurse Mordaunt, Lady Jane's devoted attendant since her childhood, arrived in much anxiety and distress. Nurse had been detained by various matters, by Lady Germaine, and by the delay in getting her ladyship's things, which had been left that morning at Lady Germaine's house. With a heavy heart nurse had effaced the direction of Lady Jane Winton from the box. She had never herself approved of such a marriage any more than the Duke did. It injured her pride sadly to think of "My Lady" marrying a commoner at all, and marrying him secretly at a poky little church in the city! But that she should be married and not married, half a wife, "dragged from the altar," was something which no one could contemplate with calmness. Nurse was more shamed, distracted, broken-hearted than any of the party. "Oh, don't ask me," she answered, shaking her head, when Mrs Brown humbly, with every respect, begged to know what had happened. "It is as bad as a revolution--it's worse than the Chartists; even Radicals respect the marriage vow," nurse cried in her dismay. "I don't approve of it, and never did, and never will. Up to the church door I'd have done anything to stop it. But bless us! if you don't keep the altar sacred, what have you got to trust to?" She caused the boxes to be brought into the hall with their erased addresses. There was nobody to carry them anywhere,--none of the attendance about to which Mrs Mordaunt was accustomed. "Fetch one of the men," she had said at first, but then she remembered there was no man in Grosvenor Square at this time of the year. "Drat it! as if things were not bad enough already; no servants, no comfort, nobody but Mrs Brown to look to everything!" Mrs Mordaunt was too much broken down to go to her young lady at once. She condescended to go into the kitchen, where it was at least warm, to eat one of the chops and to rest a little before she went up-stairs. And her arrival was scarcely over before it was followed by another more urgent and important. The old housekeeper almost fainted when, opening the door in answer to the impatient summons of another arrival, she saw the Duchess herself get out of a hackney-cab. "Bless us!" the old woman cried; if the Queen had come next she could not have been more surprised.

The Duchess, it need not be said, was in the secret of all those arrangements which were to make Lady Jane into Reginald Winton's wife. She had a cold that day, partly real, partly no doubt emotional, but enough to make her keep her room in the morning, leaving her guests to the care of her sister, who was at Billings on a visit. She got up, as may be supposed, with a great deal of agitation from her broken rest, thinking of her Jane, how she would be preparing for her marriage, with nobody but Lady Germaine to comfort and support her. Lady Germaine was very kind: she had taken charge of the whole business; she and her husband had gone to town on purpose to facilitate everything; but still it was dreadful to the Duchess to think that her child should have no one but Lady Germaine to lean upon at such a moment of her life. In her own room, in the stillness of the morning, the thoughts of the mother were bent upon this subject, which she went over and over, thinking of everything. She figured to herself how her child would wake, and realise what a fateful morning it was, and wish for her mother. How she would say her prayers with all the fervour of such a crisis, and linger upon the contemplation of the past, and the sweet but awful thought of the future. Though her husband and his reign were so near, Jane would think of her home, of the parents who loved her, and shed some tears to think that the most momentous act of her life was taking place away from them, in opposition to one of them. The Duchess, who was very much overcome, at once by what she knew and what she did not know, by imagination and by fact, shed more tears herself at this point, and she had to dry them hastily to look up with an unconcerned face when her maid came into the room bringing a piece of news which in a moment startled her into activity and alarm. The Duke had gone suddenly off to town by the early train. After he had read his letters he had seemed agitated, but said nothing to Bowles except that business called him to town. And he had been gone an hour when the news was brought to his wife. The reader may suppose how short a time elapsed before the anxious mother followed him. She went out quietly in a close carriage, nobody knowing, and got the next train, arriving in London two hours later than that by which her husband had travelled. He was sitting down with a little shrug of his shoulders, but not without appetite, to Mrs Brown's chops, when she drove up to the door, and suddenly came in upon him, pale and full of anguish. Her eye ran round the room questioning before she said a word:--then she loosened her cloak and sat down upon the nearest seat with a sigh of relief.

He looked at her still more keenly. "I have Jane with me," he said.

"Jane!" It was all her mother could do not to break down altogether, and show her anguish and disappointment in passionate tears; but her heart was leaping in her throat, and she could not speak.

"That is to say," he added slowly, with unspeakable enjoyment in the sense of having got the better of the women altogether, and holding them in his hand, "she is in the house. I arrived in time to save her from becoming the victim--of a villain. I shall keep her safe now I have got her," the Duke said, with an ineffable flourish of his hand.

"The victim--of a villain? What do you mean by such words? They sound as if you had got them out of a novel," the Duchess said; but her heart was beating so that she could scarcely hear herself speak.

"Then you knew nothing about it?" said her husband calmly.

The Duchess got up from her seat. She was too much agitated to be able to keep still. "I knew, if that is what you mean, that she was to marry--the man she loved--to-day. What have you done? Have you parted your own child from her happiness and her life?"

He rose too. He had kept up his calm demeanour as long as he could. Now his rage got the better of him. "So you were in the plot!" he cried, "you! I felt it, and yet I could not believe it. You who ought to have been the first to carry out my will and respect my decision."

"Augustus," said his wife, very pale, standing up before him, her hand upon the back of a tall chair, her head erect, "this must not go too far. Jane has not one but two parents, and she has always had her mother's sanction. You are aware of that."

"It may be so in law," said the Duchess, recovering her composure, "but it is certainly not so in nature; nor have I ever considered myself your agent, in respect to my child. I have yielded to you in a hundred ways--and so much the worse for you that I have done so; but, as regards Jane, I have never thought it my duty to yield--and never will; such a suggestion is intolerable," she said, with a touch of feminine passion. "My right and my authority are the same as yours--neither of them absolute--for she is old enough to judge for herself."

"Ah, poor girl!" he said, with a knowledge that it was the most irritating thing he could say, and at the same time a coarse sort of pleasure in insulting the women, though they were so near to him; "that is at the bottom of everything. You made her believe it was her last chance. She was determined anyhow to have a husband."

The Duchess grew scarlet, but she was sufficiently enlightened by experience to restrain the angry reply that almost forced its way from her lips. She looked at him with a silent indignation not unmingled with pity, then turned her head away. Poor Mrs Brown! Her chops, that had been so good, so hot, stood neglected on the table. Her opportunity was over. It was no fault of hers that she had not distinguished herself. So many another disappointed genius has done its best, and some accident has stepped in and balked its highest effort. Had the Duchess delayed but half an hour, his Grace, after so much French cookery, would have experienced the wholesome pleasure of at least one British chop, and probably in consequence would have promoted Mrs Brown to a post near his person. But it was not to be. There was no luncheon eaten that day in Grosvenor Square. The discussion was prolonged for some time, and then the Duchess was heard to go hastily up-stairs. She went to her daughter's room with tears of hot passion in her eyes and an intolerable pang in her heart, and knocking softly, called to Jane with a voice which she could scarcely keep from breaking. "My darling!" she cried, "my sweet, my own girl!" with something heartrending in her accents. All had been still before; but now there was a stir in reply.

"Oh, mother dear, come in, come in! How I have longed for you!" Lady Jane cried; and then there was a little pause of expectation, breathless with a strange suspicion on one side, and such miserable humiliation and anguish on the other, as can scarcely be put into words.

Lady Jane, fully roused, hurried to it and turned the handle vainly, and shook the heavy door. "I cannot open it," she cried wildly. "Mother, mother! what does this mean? Cannot you come in? What can take you away from me when I want you--the people in the house? Oh, mother, I want you, I want you!" she cried as she had never done in her life before. And then there was such a scene as might be put into a comedy and made very ridiculous, and which yet was very heartrending as it happened, and overpowered these two women with a consternation, a sense of helplessness, a bitter perception of the small account they were of, which paralysed their very souls--not only that he had the power to do it, but also the heart: he with whom they had lived in the closest ties, whom they had loved and served, for whom they had been ready to do all that he pleased, one for the greater part of her life, the other since ever she had been born. What did it matter, any one would have said, the power such a man had over his wife and his daughter? He would never use it to make them unhappy. But there are capabilities of human misery in families which no one can fathom, which may seem to make it doubtful by moments how far the family relation is so blessed as it is thought to be. The Duke felt that now, for the first time, he had these women under his thumb, so to speak. He had them so bound that they could not resist, could not move, could not even call for help from any one without betraying the secrets of the family. He kept possession of his library, and, with the key in his pocket, had a moment of triumph. They had united against him; but now they should feel his power.

IN PRISON.

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."

"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."

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.

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 . Half-married! that was the terrible thought.

"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.

"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.

"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.

"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."

"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.

"Good night," she said.

DELIVERANCE.

Lady Jane had been for two months the solitary inhabitant of those two rooms on the second floor. Yet not altogether solitary--Nurse Mordaunt had been allowed to join her, and had been the faithful companion of her captivity. She was a better companion than a younger maid would have been, for she had been a kind of second mother to Lady Jane, and knew all her life and everything that concerned her, besides being a person of great and varied experience, who had anecdotes and tales to illustrate every vicissitude of life. Nurse Mordaunt was acquainted even with parallel instances to place beside Lady Jane's own position. She knew every kind of thing that had ever happened "in families," by which familiar expression she meant great families like those to which she had been accustomed all her life. Little families without histories she knew nothing of. The profound astonishment which overwhelmed Lady Jane when she found herself a prisoner it would be impossible to describe. She felt once more as she had felt when her father insulted her womanly delicacy and sent the blood of shame tingling to her cheeks, shame not so much for herself as for him. Was it possible that her father, the head of so great a house, the descendant of so many noble ancestors, and again her father, the man to whom she had looked up with undoubting confidence and admiration all her life--that at the end he was no true gentleman at all, but only a sham gentleman, the shadow without any substance, the symbol, with all meaning gone out of it? Do not suppose that Lady Jane put this deliberately into words. Ah, no! the thoughts we put into words do not sting us like those that glance into our souls like an arrow, darting, wounding before we have time to put up any shield or defence to keep them out. Deeper even than her separation at such a moment from her lover, more bitter than her thoughts of his disappointment, of his rage and misery, was this empoisoned thought: her father, a great peer, a noble gentleman--yet thus suddenly showing himself not noble at all, not true, a tyrant, without any understanding even of the creatures whom he could oppress. Lady Jane was sad enough on her own account and on Winton's, it may well be believed: but of this last wound she felt that she never could be healed. Imagine those traditions of her rank in which she had been brought up, her proud yet so earnest and humble sense of its obligations, the martyrdom which in her youth she had been so ready to accept--all come down to this, that she was a prisoner in her father's house, locked up like a naughty child,--she who had been trained to be the princess royal, the representative of an ideal race! Ah, if it had but been a revolution, a rebellion, democracy rampant, such an imprisonment as she had once been taught to think likely! but to sink down from the grandeur of that conception to the pettiness and bathos of this! She tried to smile to herself sometimes, in the long days which passed so slowly, at her own ludicrous anticipations, and at the entire futility, after all, of this suffering to which she was being exposed. But she had not a lively sense of humour, and could not laugh at those young dreams, which, after all, were the highest of her life. And somehow the sense that the present troubles could produce no possible result of the kind intended, made her almost more impatient of them than if they had been more dangerous. That her father could think to subdue her by such means, that he could expect to convince her by so miserable an argument, that he could suppose it possible that she would change for this, abandon what she had resolved upon at the expense of all her prejudices and so many of her better feelings, because of being shut up in two rooms for two months, or two years, or any time he might choose to keep her there! If she had not thought her filial duty a sufficient reason, would she be convinced by a lock and key? Lady Jane smiled with high and silent disdain at so extraordinary a mistake. But it was unworthy, it was lowering to her moral dignity to be exposed to so vexatious and petty an ordeal. At a State prison, with the block at the end, she had been prepared to smile serenely, carrying her high faith and constancy through even the death ordeal. But confinement in her own room was laughable, not heroic; it made her blush that she should be exercised in so miserable a way--in a way so impossible to bring about any result.

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