She looked at him wondering, but with eyes that did not falter. “My mother, I am sure, can have forfeited no one’s respect,” she said softly; “neither shall I, I hope; but perhaps more than she. I must speak to you, father, about my own life. Oh!” she cried, clasping her hands, with a vivid colour coming to her pale cheeks, “speak you for me! do not let me have to do it. There are things that can only be said when the case is desperate, and surely—surely it cannot be desperate between you and me. Speak for me, father, to your own heart.”
“So far as I can see, this is melodrama,” said the Duke, with a feeble smile of agitation that looked like a sneer, for his lips were dry. “What am I to say? Come, must we be brutal? That Lady Jane Altamont, like any poor milliner, is beginning to be afraid——”
Her eyes opened a little wider with a scared look, but she said nothing, only gazed more fixedly on her father, her whole soul bent on what he was next to say.
“Afraid,” he said, with a little forced giggle of a laugh, “because she is twenty-eight, and her cheek is hollow—afraid that she is growing an old maid, and will never get a husband? There is nothing more natural than that,” he cried, bursting out into a mocking laugh.
Lady Jane rose from her chair. She coloured high, then became white as a ghost. Astonishment, consternation, pain—pain indescribable, a kind of horror and dismay were in her eyes. She opened her lips, but only to give forth a gasp of sound which was inarticulate. She did not take her eyes from him; but gradually there grew in them, besides the pitiful suffering of a creature outraged and insulted, a gleam of indignation, a flash of contempt. When a man, even a duke, has taken that fatal step between resentment and fury, between what is permissible and what is unpermissible, the other steps are easy enough. Her father forgot that she was Lady Jane, and the first of womankind. He let his passion go. The more he had loved and elevated her, the more did he trample all her superiority under his feet.
“Ah! you thought I should say something prettier, something more pleasant,” he cried. “Poetical! but I am not poetical, and that is the short and long of it. Afraid to lose your chance altogether, and determined to have a husband, that is the meaning of it! I know now why the man was brought here. I never could make out what we wanted with him at Billings. A last chance for Jane! Ah, I see it all now!”
Lady Jane stood and received all this as if the words had been stones. She put her hands upon her breast to ward them off. She shrank backwards now and then with a faint moan, as one after another was discharged at her. Her eyes grew larger, and more and more pitiful, wet, appealing as if to earth and heaven; but she never withdrew them from her father’s face. And now that he had let himself loose, he raved on, expending upon her all his wrath, putting himself more and more fatally in the wrong with every word, showing, alas! that nothing, not a coal-heaver, could be more vulgar than a duke when he is put to it. Lady Jane stood still before him and never said a word. This was worse than the guillotine. She had dreamt of facing the insults of the mob, but never the insults of her father. As she stood there, to all appearance so full and painfully occupied in sustaining the storm of words thus poured upon her, a hundred reflections were passing through her mind. She almost smiled to herself to think how small had been the terrible scenes presented to her by her imagination, in face of the reality. The Constitution might have gone to pieces, the guillotine might have been raised without shaking her confidence in her class, or disturbing her lofty unconscious superiority to all the rabble could do,—but her father—this was what she had not thought of. Ah! it is not any rabble that can shake the foundations of the earth: but when your father, when those who are most dear to you, lay hands upon the pillars of the house—she stood so still, and looked at him with such a steadfast gaze, that the Duke was driven out of himself. He said—who can doubt?—a thousand things he never meant to say. He turned himself outside in before her, displaying weaknesses which even his wife did not know. But at last his wrath exhausted itself. He began to stammer and hesitate, then stopped short suddenly, with all the consciousness of his self-betrayal on him. There was a moment’s silence, during which they looked at each other without a word said—and then he made a step forward closer to her, and asked, “What have you got to say?”
“Nothing,” said Lady Jane. Her eyes were wet, and shining all the more for the moisture in them, but she had not cried nor felt any impulse to cry. “Oh, nothing—nothing now.”
“You are convinced then?” he said hurriedly, trying to assume his usual aspect. “Come, come, that is well. And perhaps I have been hasty. But you know what is the point upon which I feel most strongly. There must be no descent out of your rank. I have trained you in the sentiment of your rank, above all things. What have we else?” cried the Duke, “everything fails us—the masses pour in everywhere—they have ruined the kingdom, they are ruining the Church: but,” he said slowly, “they shall never ruin the House of Altamont: that shall be kept sacred whatever goes. Pardon me, my love, if I have failed in respect to the last daughter of the house. I know my Jane will not fail.”
But still Lady Jane did not make any reply. She stood as if she had been struck dumb, regarding him with a kind of serious wonder which confused him more than he could say. The desire to explain herself, to ask him for his consent, to get his sympathy, seemed to have died in her. Was she stunned only, or convinced, or what was it he had done? The Duke grew alarmed at last. He waited a moment longer, and then he added, “I have been hasty. After all, my dear, whatever it is, it would be better that you should say what you meant to say.”