This was the attitude in which the Duchess found them. She, too, was pale, her eyes bright, her nostrils dilated, as if she had been in the wars. She found her daughter in this speechless passion of weeping, with Winton’s pale countenance very despairing and tragical, yet touched with a livelier alarm, a frightened incomprehension, bending over her. He gave her a look of appeal as she came in; was it true that all was over, as he had said? The Duchess went to her child’s side and took the hand that lay on her lap and caressed it. “My darling,” she said, “this is not a moment to give in: and you are not one to fail in a great crisis, Jane. We have only a very little time to decide what we are to do before Reginald goes away.”
She had not called him Reginald before, and there was a faint smile in her eyes as they met his—a smile of forgiveness and motherly kindness, though he had asked no pardon. The sound of her mother’s voice broke the spell of Lady Jane’s self-abandonment, and it went to Winton’s heart with a forlorn sense of happiness in the midst of all the misery, that even her mother exercised a constraint upon her which when alone with him she did not feel. Was it not that she was herself, and that with him nature had free course unabashed? But the scene grew brighter and more hopeful when the Duchess came into it. She was not surprised nor overthrown by what had happened. She put back the soft hair from her child’s forehead, and gave her a kiss of consolation. “My dearest,” she said, “the crisis has come which I knew would come. Reginald must go as soon as it is possible for him to go. It is for you now to say what is to be done. You are of age; you have a right to judge for yourself. When you told me first, I warned you what was before you. You have never taken the burden of your life upon you hitherto. Now the moment has come. I will not interfere. I will say nothing; neither will Reginald, if I understand him rightly. You must judge for yourself what you will do.”
Winton obeyed her Grace’s lead, though with reluctance and a troubled mind. He only partially comprehended what she meant. He would have liked for his own part, to hold his love fast—to cry out to her once more, “You will not give me up because your father sends me away?” But he yielded to the Duchess’s look, though with a grudge, feeling that this was moral compulsion almost as absolute as that with which her husband had turned him out. He rose from the sofa on which he had been sitting with Jane, and stood before her, feeling in his hand still the mould of hers which had lain there so long, and which left his, he thought, with reluctance. This proceeding brought her altogether to herself. She looked around her with an almost pitiful surprise. “Am I to be left alone,” she said, with a quiver in her lip, “when I need support most?” and then there was a pause. To Jane and to Winton it seemed as if the very wheels of existence were arrested and the world stood still. No one spoke. He was not capable of it; the Duchess would not. Lady Jane between, with wet eyelashes, and cheeks still pale with tears, and mouth quivering, her hands clasped in her lap as if clinging to each other since there was nothing else to hold by, sat perfectly still for a moment which seemed an hour. When she spoke at last there was a catch in her voice, and the words came with difficulty, and with little pauses between.
“What is it I am to decide?” she said. “All was decided—when we found out—in town—— We cannot separate, he and I—— That—can never come into question now. Is it not so?—— I may read it wrong—— It appears—I have already read something wrong——” And then a spasm came over her face once more: but she got it under control. “What you mean is—about details?” said Lady Jane.
Winton, who had been in so extreme a state of excitement and suspense that he could bear no more, dropped down upon his knees at the side of the sofa on which she sat, and, clasping them, put down his face upon her hands. Lady Jane freed one to put it lightly upon his bowed head, with something of that soft maternal smile of indulgence of which love has the privilege. “Did he think I was a child?” she said to her mother, with a gentle wonder in her eyes. “Or not honest?” She herself was calm again; steadfast, while the others still trembled, seeing the complications so much less clearly than the fair and open way. She was a little surprised by Winton’s broken ecstasies, by her mother’s tremulous kiss of approval. “Is there anything left for me to decide?” she said.
Nobody knew very well what was said or done in the agitated half-hour that remained. It was agreed between them that “the details,” of which Lady Jane had spoken with a blush, should be arranged afterwards, when all were more cool and masters of themselves—a state to which no one of the little group attained until Winton was hurrying along the country roads towards the station, and Lady Jane and her mother were seated in forlorn quiet alone in that little room which for the last week had been the scene of so many excitements. The Duchess rose with a start when the little French clock on the mantelpiece chimed one. “My dearest,” she said, “we have many things to do which look like falsehood, we women. You and I must appear at luncheon as if nothing had happened. There must be no red eyes, my love, no abstraction. It will be all over the world in no time, if we do not take care. For myself, alas! I am used to it; but you, Jane——”
Lady Jane did not immediately reply. She said, “There is one thing, mamma, to which I have made up my mind——”
The Duchess was examining herself in the glass to see if she was pale or red, or anything different from her ordinary aspect. She turned round to hear what this new determination was.
“I will speak to my father myself,” Lady Jane said.
If a cannon had been discharged into the peaceful little boudoir the effect could scarcely have been greater. “You will speak to your father, Jane? There are some things I know better than you. It will wound you, my darling—for no good.”