“But,” Winton cried, in his ferocity, “suppose he refuses his consent at last, as the Duchess thinks, will you venture to oppose him then, or will you send me away?”
“Ah, never that!” said Lady Jane, looking at him with her soft eyes. They were not brilliant eyes, but when she looked at him there came over them a certain liquid light, a melting radiance such as no words could describe. The light was love, and may be seen glorifying many an unremarkable orb. It made hers so exquisite that they dazzled the beholder, especially the happy beholder who knew this was for him. But he was not satisfied even with that.
“Suppose,” he went on, “that the Duke were to open that door and walk in now—as he has a good right to do, into his own drawing-room—what would come of it? Would you take your hand out of mine, and bid me good-bye like a stranger?”
Her hand indeed slid out of his at the suggestion, and a little tremor ran through her frame; but the next moment she raised her head and put her hand lightly within his arm. “If you think I am without courage!” she said—then added with a smile, “when it is necessary; but at present it is not necessary.”
“Then you will not, whatever happens, give me up?—not even if the foundations of the earth are shaken, not even if the Duke says ‘No’?” he cried, partly furious, partly satirical, catching at the hand which was on his arm.
His violence gave her a little shock, and the savage satire of the tone in which he named her father distressed Lady Jane. “You must not speak so,” she said, with her soft dignity: “the Duke is my father. But you do not know me if you think that anything will change me.” Then indeed Winton felt a little ashamed of himself, and began to realise that he did not yet know all of this gentle creature who was going to be his wife. She parted with him at the door of the ante-room, and went back through her mother’s boudoir to her own retirement. Next to being with the objet aimé, being alone is the purest happiness at this stage. She kissed her mother, who was busy at her writing-table, in passing. The Duchess was deep in calculation, not how she should make her ends meet, which was impossible, but how near she could draw them together, so that the gap might be small. It is a sad and harassing business. She paused only a moment to pat her child on her soft cheek, and reflect within herself how beautifying was this love which in youth is full of enchantment and illusion, and then returned to her figures. When the ends will meet, what pleasure there is even in the pain of drawing them together! but when no miracle will do this, when there must always remain a horrible chasm between! Fifty remained thus at work in the finance department, while Twenty-eight went lightly away to think over her happiness. It must be allowed that Lady Jane was not quite young enough—she ought to have been but twenty, by rights; but her maturity only added to the exceeding fulness of her enjoyment. There is something sweet in being awakened late; it prolongs the morning, it keeps the “vision splendid” a little longer in one’s eyes. The unfulfilled even has a glory of its own, which people who are bigoted in belief of the ordinary canons of romance are slow to perceive. This preserved to Lady Jane, at an age when girlhood is over, its most perfect fragrance and charm.
Presently, however, the sweet vagueness of her anticipations began to open into other thoughts. She had been so preserved by her stately upbringing and the traditions which she had felt to centre in her, from knowledge of fact and the world, that she knew little at all about money, or the power it has to bridge over social differences. When she allowed her heart to go out to Reginald Winton, she did so with the most absolute conviction that it involved a great descent in rank and abandonment of luxury. She would have to put off the coronet from her head, she believed, the princess royal’s myrtle crown. She would have to learn a great many things, both to do and to do without. She had heard of Winton House, which was a small place; and probably she had heard of the house in town. But the latter had altogether dropped out of her mind, and she knew very well that a squire’s little manor would be very different from Billings, and would require from its mistress an existence of a kind unknown to all her previous experiences. She would have to superintend her own household; if not to make her maids spin, according to the usage of old times, at least to direct the housemaids, and know how things ought to be done. Though her father was in reality much less rich than the man whom she had chosen for her husband, she was entirely in the dark on this point, and her mind awoke to a sense of a hundred requirements of which she knew nothing. She had been like a star, and dwelt apart (if it is not profane to apply such words to a young lady of the nineteenth century) as much as any poet. But now love and duty bade her come down from these heights, and learn how people walk along the common ways. She addressed herself to this task without a grudge, with glad alacrity and readiness; but she was a little puzzled, it must be admitted, to know how to begin. The first person to whom she addressed herself (for naturally Lady Jane was shy of betraying her motive, or letting it be known that the inquiries she made were for her own benefit) was her maid, who was as superior a young person and as much like a waiting gentlewoman as it was possible to find. Lady Jane was aware, of course, that Arabella’s family (for this was the distinguished name she bore) were not in the same position as Mr Winton. But in that sad deficiency of perspective which we have already noted as one of the drawbacks of rank, she felt it possible that Arabella’s knowledge of how life was conducted at her end of the social circle would be more useful than her own to Reginald Winton’s wife. She opened the subject in, it must be avowed, a very uncompromising and artless way one evening, while Arabella stood behind her, partially visible in the large mirror before which she sat, brushing out her long and abundant hair. It was very fine and silky, and made very little appearance when smoothly wound round the back of her head; but when it was being brushed out it was like a veil, soft and dreamy and illimitable, spreading out almost as far as the operator chose in a cloud of soft darkness—“like twilight, too, her dusky hair.” A lady’s-maid is very much wanting in the spirit of her profession if she is indifferent to the fact that her mistress has fine hair. Generally it is the thing of which she is most proud. And Arabella held this sentiment in the warmest way. Her scorn of chignons and of frizzing was indescribable. “You should just see my lady’s hair when it is down,” she would say, almost crying over the fact which she could not ignore, that the hair of many other ladies, when it was up, greatly exceeded in appearance and volume the soft locks of Lady Jane. It was while Arabella was employed in this way that her mistress, looking at her in the glass, said suddenly, “If you were going to be married, Arabella, what should you do to prepare for it? I want very much to know.”
“My lady!” cried the girl, with a violent start. She let the brush fall from her hand with the fright it gave her, and then without any warning she began to cry. “Indeed, indeed, I never could make up my mind to leave your ladyship—not in a hurry like he wants me to—never! never! at least till you were suited,” Arabella said.
“Oh!” cried Lady Jane, turning round, “then you really were thinking! I did not know of that, I assure you; I never thought of it. Are you really going to be married, Arabella?”
“It is none of my doing,” the girl said; “indeed I told him I couldn’t make up my mind to leave; but he says—you know, my lady, men find always a deal to say——”