“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 he could not conceal.
“I have taken you by surprise,” he said. “I ask your pardon. Whatever I can do to soften the shock—to meet your wishes—I will do.”
“Go, sir!—go, sir!” the Duke stormed in his fury. “That is all you can do—go! there is the door.” He waved his hand towards it with a threatening gesture. He was transported out of himself. He followed Winton step by step with a sort of moral compulsion, forcing him to retire. The young man’s blood, it is needless to say, was in an uproar; his heart thumping against his breast, every pulse going like a hammer. But he made a stand again midway to that door which seemed the only reply he was to have. “You will remember,” he said, “that I have no answer—you give me no answer; I will leave the room and the house as your Grace bids, but that is not a reply——”
“Go, sir!” the Duke cried. He stamped his foot like an enraged fishwife. He had the sense to hold himself in, not to allow the torrent of abuse which was on his lips to pour forth; but how long he would have been able to endure, to keep in this vigorous and fiery tide, could not have been predicted. He flung open the door with a force which made the walls quiver, and the action seemed more or less to bring him to himself. He recovered his voice at last. “I ought,” he panted, with a snarl, “to thank you for the honour you have done my poor house;” and thus with an explosion of labouring breath drove the astonished suitor out, as if by a blast of wind. Winton found himself in the corridor, while the crash of the great door swung behind him echoed through the house, with an amazement which words cannot describe. It had all passed like a scene in a dream. He paused a moment to recover himself. He, too, was breathless, his whole physical being agitated, his head hot and throbbing, his heart choking him. He could not speak to the Duchess, whom he met a moment after coming along the corridor with a packet of papers in her hand. “It is all over,” he said incoherently, waving his hand as he passed her. The only idea in his mind for the moment was of indignity and wrong.
CHAPTER IX.
ACTING FOR HERSELF.
The Duchess’s little sitting-room had not for years enclosed so melancholy a group. She herself, in old days when she first began to realise all the circumstances of the life which she had come into, had wept many an unnoticed tear in it; but in after-years she had acquired the philosophy of maturity, and had too much to do holding her own amid all the adverse circumstances about her, to be able to indulge in personal lamentations. But Lady Jane had never known any of those burdens which had made her mother’s career so full of care. When Winton rushed in, in all the excitement of the scene which he had just gone through in the Duke’s library, too much disturbed even to tell her what had passed, it was almost her first experience of the darker side of existence. For the first moment he had not been able to keep some resentment and sense of the indignity to which he had been exposed from getting to light. He told her with a pale smile and fiery eyes that he had scarcely time to speak to her, that he must go instantly, that her father had turned him out. But as Winton came to himself, and began to perceive the pain which he was inflicting upon her, he did his best to smooth away the first unguarded outburst. Lady Jane’s pallor, the tears which she could not restrain, the serenity of her countenance turned into anguish, all made apparent to him the fact which he had forgotten, that there were to her two sides to the question. He tried to draw in his words, to smooth away what he had said in the first outburst of his resentment. “After all, we must remember it was a great shock to him. I am nobody, only a simple gentleman, not fit to place myself on a level with the Duke’s daughter,” he said, though still with that smile of wounded pride and bitterness about his lips. Lady Jane was too heart-broken to say much; she listened like a martyr at the stake, standing silent while spears and arrows were thrust into her. Her father! he had been tried and he had not borne the trial. What she understood by rank was the highest courtesy, the noblest humbleness. A man who would turn another to the door, who would suffer his guest to perceive, under any circumstances, that he was not as a prince in his host’s eyes—Lady Jane did not understand such a being. It hurt her so deeply that she did not even at first realise the fact that it was her lover who was turned away. She tried to ask a few faltering questions, to make out the circumstances to be less terrible; but failing in this, fell into silence, into such shame and consternation and deep humiliated pain as even Winton scarcely comprehended. No other hand, no other proceeding could have struck such a blow at all the traditions of her life. She sat with her hand indeed in her lover’s, but in a kind of miserable separation even from him, feeling her life fall away from her, unable to think or realise what was to happen now; until Winton, recovering from his excitement only to fall into a deeper panic, took renewed fright from her silence. “Jane,” he said, “Jane! you don’t mean to give me up because your father has turned me away?” Lady Jane turned her head towards him, gave him a miserable smile, and pressed his hand faintly, then fell, as perhaps had never happened in her life before, into a passion of tears. He drew her into his arms, as was natural, and she wept on his shoulder, as one refusing to be comforted. It was but vaguely that Winton could even guess the entire upheaval of all her foundations, the ruin into which her earth had fallen. He thought it was the tragedy of his own love that was the cause, and that with this heart-breaking convulsion she was making up her mind to see it come to an end.