“And on the edge of a smash, the greatest smash that has been since—— Billings will have to be sold up, and all that is in it,” Lord Germaine said thoughtfully.
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 (if we may call the indignation of the drawing-rooms popular). Half-married! that was the terrible thought.
The Duke paid one or two visits before the opening of Parliament. It may be supposed that to none but very great houses indeed would his Grace pay such an honour: and though he was not very quick to observe in general matters, yet his sense of his own importance was so keen that it answered for intelligence, so far as he himself was concerned. He saw that the ladies regarded him with a sort of alarm, that even the gentlemen after dinner showed a curiosity which was not certainly the awed and respectful interest which he thought it natural he should excite. And it was not long before his hostess, who was, he could not deny, his equal, of his own rank, and of unexceptionable antecedents, made the matter clear to him. “Duke,” she said, “of course you know I wouldn’t for the world meddle in any one’s private affairs. But there is such a strange story going about—— Dear Jane! We had hoped to see her with you as well as Margaret” (Margaret was the Duchess, and a very intimate friend of this other great, great lady); “and now neither of them has come. But it is not possible—don’t think for a moment that I believe it!—that this story can be true.”
“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.
“I don’t like even to put it into words; that you stopped her marriage—at the altar itself; that the dear girl is neither married nor single; that—— But I give you pain.”
“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.”