The Duke, more angry than ever, went back to Grosvenor Square. He was determined to face it out. Country houses are proverbially glad of a piece of gossip to give their dull life an interest. He began to go out into society, as much as there was at that early season, and present a bold front to the world. His home was dull enough, with Lady Jane locked into her room and watched, lest by craft or force she should make her escape; her mother obstinately refusing to go out, or accompany him anywhere; his very servants looking at him reproachfully. The butler, who had been with him for about thirty years, and whose knowledge of wine and of the cellars at Billings was inexhaustible, threw up his situation; and so did the housekeeper, who was Jarvis’s wife. “I don’t hold with no such goings-on,” Mrs Jarvis said. And when he dined with the leader of his party (which was in opposition) Mrs Coningsby did not wait till the conclusion of the dinner, but cried, “Duke, it cannot be true about Lady Jane!” before he had eaten his soup. This lady treated the subject lightly, which was more odious to him than the other way. “Oh no, it can’t be true,” she said; “we all know that they say you dragged her from church by the hair of her head, and snatched her hand away when the bridegroom was putting on the ring. Mr Coningsby was in a dreadful way about it. He said it would be such a cry at the elections; but I told him, Nonsense! the Duke is far too fine a gentleman, I said.” This was more difficult to answer than the other mode of assault. The Duke became all manner of colours as he listened. “And the elections are so near,” the lady said. “Of course the Government will not care how false it is; they will placard it on all the walls, with a picture as large as life. They will turn all the clergy against us. Of course, dear Duke, of course, to people who know you so well as I do—you need not tell me that it is not true.” The Duke sat grim, and heard all this, and did not say a word. There was a flutter in the drawing-room as he came in: everybody looked at him as if he had been a wild beast. “Dragged her out by the hair of her head!” he heard whispered on every side of him, and though Mrs Coningsby still affected not to believe, the bishop’s wife contemplated him with terrible gravity. “Oh, I hope you will talk it over with the bishop,” she said. “He is so anxious about it. Lady Jane was always such a favourite. I do hope you will take the bishop’s advice. After a certain part of the service, I have always understood it was a sin to interfere.” Later in the evening he was mobbed by half-a-dozen ladies—there is no other word for it—mobbed and overwhelmed with one universal cry. Half-married! Poor Lady Jane! Dear Lady Jane! They pressed round him, each with her protestation, a soft, yet urgent babel of voices. The poor Duke escaped at last, not knowing how he got away. It seemed to his Grace that he had escaped out of a mob, and that his coat must be torn and his linen frayed with the conflict. He was astonished beyond all description; but he was likewise appalled by the discovery that even he was not above the reach of public opinion. It affected him against his will. He felt ashamed, uneasy, confused even on the points where he was most sure.
And when he came home, he went to his wife’s boudoir, where she sat alone, to bid her good-night, which was a form he always observed, though this event had separated them entirely. She was permitted now to see Jane once a-day; but as she would give no promise that she would not help her daughter to leave the house, this was the utmost that he had granted her. She was seated alone, reading, pale and weary. She scarcely raised her eyes when he came in, though she put down her book. The fire was low, and there was no light in the room except the reading-lamp. The Duke could not help feeling the difference from former times. A temptation came upon him to throw himself upon her sympathy, and tell her how he had been persecuted. He would have done so had it been on any other subject, but he remembered in time that on this he had no sympathy to expect from his wife. So he stood for a minute or two before the fire, feeling chilled, silenced, an injured man. “No, I have not had a pleasant evening,” he said shortly; “how should my evening be pleasant when every one remarks your absence? I am asked if you are ill; I am asked——”
“Other questions, I imagine, that are still more difficult to answer.”
“And whose fault is it?” he cried, with vehemence. “If you had taken the steps you ought to have taken, and supported my authority, as was your duty, there would have been no such questions to ask.”
The Duchess turned away with some impatience; she made no reply: the question had been often enough discussed in all its bearings. If she had now thrown herself at his feet and begged his pardon and forbearance, what a relief it would have been to him! He would have yielded and saved his position, and recovered the pose of a magnanimous superior. But the Duchess had no intention of the kind. After a while, during which they did not look at each other, she seated gazing into the fire, he standing staring into the vacant air, he took up his candlestick with an air of impatience. “Good night, then,” he said, with in his turn an air of impatience.
CHAPTER XV.
DELIVERANCE.
Lady Jane had been for two months the solitary inhabitant of those two rooms on the second floor. Yet not altogether solitary—Nurse Mordaunt had been allowed to join her, and had been the faithful companion of her captivity. She was a better companion than a younger maid would have been, for she had been a kind of second mother to Lady Jane, and knew all her life and everything that concerned her, besides being a person of great and varied experience, who had anecdotes and tales to illustrate every vicissitude of life. Nurse Mordaunt was acquainted even with parallel instances to place beside Lady Jane’s own position. She knew every kind of thing that had ever happened “in families,” by which familiar expression she meant great families like those to which she had been accustomed all her life. Little families without histories she knew nothing of. The profound astonishment which overwhelmed Lady Jane when she found herself a prisoner it would be impossible to describe. She felt once more as she had felt when her father insulted her womanly delicacy and sent the blood of shame tingling to her cheeks, shame not so much for herself as for him. Was it possible that her father, the head of so great a house, the descendant of so many noble ancestors, and again her father, the man to whom she had looked up with undoubting confidence and admiration all her life—that at the end he was no true gentleman at all, but only a sham gentleman, the shadow without any substance, the symbol, with all meaning gone out of it? Do not suppose that Lady Jane put this deliberately into words. Ah, no! the thoughts we put into words do not sting us like those that glance into our souls like an arrow, darting, wounding before we have time to put up any shield or defence to keep them out. Deeper even than her separation at such a moment from her lover, more bitter than her thoughts of his disappointment, of his rage and misery, was this empoisoned thought: her father, a great peer, a noble gentleman—yet thus suddenly showing himself not noble at all, not true, a tyrant, without any understanding even of the creatures whom he could oppress. Lady Jane was sad enough on her own account and on Winton’s, it may well be believed: but of this last wound she felt that she never could be healed. Imagine those traditions of her rank in which she had been brought up, her proud yet so earnest and humble sense of its obligations, the martyrdom which in her youth she had been so ready to accept—all come down to this, that she was a prisoner in her father’s house, locked up like a naughty child,—she who had been trained to be the princess royal, the representative of an ideal race! Ah, if it had but been a revolution, a rebellion, democracy rampant, such an imprisonment as she had once been taught to think likely! but to sink down from the grandeur of that conception to the pettiness and bathos of this! She tried to smile to herself sometimes, in the long days which passed so slowly, at her own ludicrous anticipations, and at the entire futility, after all, of this suffering to which she was being exposed. But she had not a lively sense of humour, and could not laugh at those young dreams, which, after all, were the highest of her life. And somehow the sense that the present troubles could produce no possible result of the kind intended, made her almost more impatient of them than if they had been more dangerous. That her father could think to subdue her by such means, that he could expect to convince her by so miserable an argument, that he could suppose it possible that she would change for this, abandon what she had resolved upon at the expense of all her prejudices and so many of her better feelings, because of being shut up in two rooms for two months, or two years, or any time he might choose to keep her there! If she had not thought her filial duty a sufficient reason, would she be convinced by a lock and key? Lady Jane smiled with high and silent disdain at so extraordinary a mistake. But it was unworthy, it was lowering to her moral dignity to be exposed to so vexatious and petty an ordeal. At a State prison, with the block at the end, she had been prepared to smile serenely, carrying her high faith and constancy through even the death ordeal. But confinement in her own room was laughable, not heroic; it made her blush that she should be exercised in so miserable a way—in a way so impossible to bring about any result.
Nurse Mordaunt was an excellent companion, but after a while she began to droop and pine. She wanted the fresh air; she wanted to see her grandchildren; she wanted, oh, imperiously beyond description! a talk, a gossip, a little human intercourse with some one of her own kind. Lady Jane was a darling—the sweetest of ladies; but it was a different thing talking to that angel and chatting familiarly over things in general with Mrs Jarvis. Nurse no more than other mortals could be kept continuously on the higher level. She longed to unbend, to be at her ease, to feel herself, as the French say, chez elle, in which expression there is almost a more intimate well-being than in that of being at home, which we English think so much superior. Her health suffered, which Lady Jane would not allow that hers did; and at last, Nurse Mordaunt made such strenuous representations on the subject to the new servant, whose business it was to watch over the prisoners, that she was allowed to go out. She was allowed to go out and the Duchess to come in, two proceedings altogether contradictory of the spirit of the confinement, and which were, indeed, a confession of failure, though the Duke himself was unaware of it. This made a great change to the prisoner, whose cheeks, though still pale, got a little tinge of colour and hope in consequence. It did more for her than merely to bring her her mother’s society, though that was much. It brought her also other news of the outer world—news of Winton more definite than the distant sight of him riding or walking through the Square, which he did constantly. Now, at last, she received the budget of letters, of which her mother’s hands were full. Lady Jane smiled and cried a little at the entreaties her lover addressed to her to be steadfast—not to give him up. “I wonder what they all think,” she said; “is this an argument likely to convince one’s reason, mother, or to persuade one for love’s sake?” She looked round upon her prison—her pretty chamber furnished with every luxury—and laughed a little. “Is it my head or my heart that is appealed to?” she said. This, perhaps, was too clear-sighted for the angelic point of view from which the world in general expected Lady Jane to view most matters. But, in fact, though she had more poetry in her than her mother, Lady Jane had come into possession of part of her mother’s fortune, so to speak, her sense; and that is a quality which will assert itself. Now the Duchess, in the excitement of standing by helpless while her daughter suffered, had come to regard the matter more melodramatically than Lady Jane did, to suffer her feelings to get the mastery, and to imagine a hundred sinkings of the heart and depressions of the spirit to which the captive must be liable. She recognised the change instinctively, for it was one which had taken place long ago in herself. She, too, had been brought to see the paltriness of many things that looked imposing, the futility of les grands moyens. Lady Jane’s development had been slow. At twenty-eight she had been less experienced than many a girl of eighteen. But now her eyes were opened. Even her lover, who thought it possible that she might yield under such persuasion, was subject to almost a passing shade of that high but gentle disdain with which she contemplated the vulgar force to which she was subjected; for it was vulgar, alas! though a duke was the originator: and unspeakably weak though it was—what the French call brutal—everything, in short, that a mode of action destined to affect a sensitive, proud, and clear-seeing soul ought not to be.
The new régime had continued but a short time when Nurse Mordaunt returned one day from her walk with heightened colour and great suppressed excitement. Something, it was evident, was in her mind quite beyond the circle of her usual thoughts; but she talked less, not more, than usual, and left her lady free to read over and over the last letters, and to refresh her heart with all the raptures of her lover’s delight in having again found the means of communicating with her after the misery of six weeks of silence and complete separation. Something he said of a speedy end of all difficulties, which Lady Jane took but little thought of, being far more interested in the reunion with himself, which his letters brought about. A speedy end: no doubt an end would come some time; but at present the prisoner was not so sanguine as those outside. She did not know the gallant stand which the ladies were making, or the social state of siege which had been instituted in respect to the Duke; and she sighed, but smiled, at Winton’s hope. All went on as usual during the long, long evening. It was long, though it was provided with everything calculated to make it bearable—books and the means of writing, writing to him—which was far more amusing and absorbing than any other kind of composition. Her fire was bright, her room full of luxurious comfort—a piano in it, and materials for a dozen of those amateur works with which time can be cheated out of its length. But she sighed and wearied, as was natural, notwithstanding the happiness of having her lover’s letters, and of having talked with her mother, and of knowing as she did that some time or other this must come to an end. “After all, nurse,” she said with a little laugh, as she prepared for bed, “to be in prison is not desirable. I should like to have a run in the woods at Billings, or even a walk in Rotten Row.”