Thus with tired and lingering steps, and despondency taking possession of her soul, Lady Jane went softly up-stairs, longing to divest herself of her wedding-gown and hide her humiliation, looking vainly for her father, whose appearance in this wilderness, even if it were only to upbraid and denounce her, would still have had a certain consolation in it. The Duke, unseen, watched her progress with a vindictive pleasure in the downcast air and slow, languid step. He watched her to her very door with an eagerness not to be described. At the last moment she might turn round, she might still leave the house, she might escape. In no case could he have used violence to his daughter. To level thunderbolts of speech was one thing, to use force was quite another. To lift his hand was impossible. If she turned round and fled down the stairs and out at the door, she must do so: there was no way in which he could stop her: if any third person were present, even Mrs Brown, he would be obliged to keep a watch upon himself, to demand no more obedience than she would give, to treat her as a reasonable being. All this the Duke felt, spying upon her steps as she went slowly up, following her, his footsteps falling noiselessly on the thick carpets. He heard her sigh, but this made no difference. To any one else this sigh of the widowed bride, alone in this dismal empty house on the day that was to have been, that almost was, her wedding-day, would have contained something touching. But it did not touch the Duke. He followed at a distance, keeping out of sight, determined to give her no opportunity to appeal to him. When he heard her door close, a certain glow of satisfaction came over his face. He went forward quickly, and turned the key in the lock and put it in his pocket. He heard her moving about in the room, and he could hear that she stopped short at the noise and stood listening to know what it was. But all was quiet again, and Lady Jane suspected nothing. She had begun to look in her wardrobe for something to put on instead of her white dress. She thought it was some jar of one of the doors as she opened them. And he stole down-stairs again, unnoticed and unobserved. Who was there to notice him? no one in the house, except his daughter locked into the room, and Mrs Brown with her little niece down-stairs. The Duke withdrew into the library, where he had sat and pondered for many a day, but never as now. The old housekeeper had bestirred herself and had lighted a fire and set out a table with two places for luncheon. She at least could do her duty if no one else did. Mrs Brown, indeed, felt as a neglected general has often done when the moment arrived in which he could distinguish himself. She had never had this opportunity. Now, at last, in the end of her life it had come to her. His Grace, who was so particular, should for once in his life know what it was to eat a chop, an English chop, in its perfection. She had sent out her handmaiden to fetch them, and lit the fire herself in her devotion. This is an extent of enthusiasm to which few people would go. And Lady Jane, sweet creature, who was evidently in trouble somehow with her papa, who had sent that nice young gentleman off as fast as ever she could, that the Duke and he might not meet, poor thing! what would be so good for her as a chop? The old housekeeper betook herself to her work with the warmest sense at once of benevolence and of power—power to ameliorate and soften the hardness of destiny, and to win fame and honour to herself. What enterprise could have a finer motive? Of the three people in the house, she was the happy one, as happens not unfrequently among all the twists and entanglements of fate.
Before, however, Mrs Brown had begun to cook her chops, Nurse Mordaunt, Lady Jane’s devoted attendant since her childhood, arrived in much anxiety and distress. Nurse had been detained by various matters, by Lady Germaine, and by the delay in getting her ladyship’s things, which had been left that morning at Lady Germaine’s house. With a heavy heart nurse had effaced the direction of Lady Jane Winton from the box. She had never herself approved of such a marriage any more than the Duke did. It injured her pride sadly to think of “My Lady” marrying a commoner at all, and marrying him secretly at a poky little church in the city! But that she should be married and not married, half a wife, “dragged from the altar,” was something which no one could contemplate with calmness. Nurse was more shamed, distracted, broken-hearted than any of the party. “Oh, don’t ask me,” she answered, shaking her head, when Mrs Brown humbly, with every respect, begged to know what had happened. “It is as bad as a revolution—it’s worse than the Chartists; even Radicals respect the marriage vow,” nurse cried in her dismay. “I don’t approve of it, and never did, and never will. Up to the church door I’d have done anything to stop it. But bless us! if you don’t keep the altar sacred, what have you got to trust to?” She caused the boxes to be brought into the hall with their erased addresses. There was nobody to carry them anywhere,—none of the attendance about to which Mrs Mordaunt was accustomed. “Fetch one of the men,” she had said at first, but then she remembered there was no man in Grosvenor Square at this time of the year. “Drat it! as if things were not bad enough already; no servants, no comfort, nobody but Mrs Brown to look to everything!” Mrs Mordaunt was too much broken down to go to her young lady at once. She condescended to go into the kitchen, where it was at least warm, to eat one of the chops and to rest a little before she went up-stairs. And her arrival was scarcely over before it was followed by another more urgent and important. The old housekeeper almost fainted when, opening the door in answer to the impatient summons of another arrival, she saw the Duchess herself get out of a hackney-cab. “Bless us!” the old woman cried; if the Queen had come next she could not have been more surprised.
The Duchess, it need not be said, was in the secret of all those arrangements which were to make Lady Jane into Reginald Winton’s wife. She had a cold that day, partly real, partly no doubt emotional, but enough to make her keep her room in the morning, leaving her guests to the care of her sister, who was at Billings on a visit. She got up, as may be supposed, with a great deal of agitation from her broken rest, thinking of her Jane, how she would be preparing for her marriage, with nobody but Lady Germaine to comfort and support her. Lady Germaine was very kind: she had taken charge of the whole business; she and her husband had gone to town on purpose to facilitate everything; but still it was dreadful to the Duchess to think that her child should have no one but Lady Germaine to lean upon at such a moment of her life. In her own room, in the stillness of the morning, the thoughts of the mother were bent upon this subject, which she went over and over, thinking of everything. She figured to herself how her child would wake, and realise what a fateful morning it was, and wish for her mother. How she would say her prayers with all the fervour of such a crisis, and linger upon the contemplation of the past, and the sweet but awful thought of the future. Though her husband and his reign were so near, Jane would think of her home, of the parents who loved her, and shed some tears to think that the most momentous act of her life was taking place away from them, in opposition to one of them. The Duchess, who was very much overcome, at once by what she knew and what she did not know, by imagination and by fact, shed more tears herself at this point, and she had to dry them hastily to look up with an unconcerned face when her maid came into the room bringing a piece of news which in a moment startled her into activity and alarm. The Duke had gone suddenly off to town by the early train. After he had read his letters he had seemed agitated, but said nothing to Bowles (who was his Grace’s valet) except that business called him to town. And he had been gone an hour when the news was brought to his wife. The reader may suppose how short a time elapsed before the anxious mother followed him. She went out quietly in a close carriage, nobody knowing, and got the next train, arriving in London two hours later than that by which her husband had travelled. He was sitting down with a little shrug of his shoulders, but not without appetite, to Mrs Brown’s chops, when she drove up to the door, and suddenly came in upon him, pale and full of anguish. Her eye ran round the room questioning before she said a word:—then she loosened her cloak and sat down upon the nearest seat with a sigh of relief.
“What have you done with Jane?” she was about to say: but then it appeared to her that Jane must have escaped, that everything was accomplished. She could have wept or laughed in the extreme blessedness of this relief, but she dared not do either. She looked at him instead, as he sat looking suspiciously at her. “It made me very anxious to hear of your going,” she said. “I feared something might be wrong. I am going back directly, and nobody knows I am out of my room: but I felt that I must hear——”
“What?” he asked with watchful suspicion; it was a terrible ordeal to go through. The Duchess did all a woman could to take the meaning out of her own face and put upon it an aspect of affectionate concern alone. “I did not know what to think,” she said; “I was very anxious: but it cannot be anything very bad, I hope, since I find you——” How hard it is to say what is not the truth! While she uttered these commonplace words her eyes were watching him, keenly questioning everything about him. At last her heart seemed to stand still. She perceived the two covers laid on the table. “You have some one with you,” she said, with a catching of her breath.
He looked at her still more keenly. “I have Jane with me,” he said.
“Jane!” It was all her mother could do not to break down altogether, and show her anguish and disappointment in passionate tears; but her heart was leaping in her throat, and she could not speak.
“That is to say,” he added slowly, with unspeakable enjoyment in the sense of having got the better of the women altogether, and holding them in his hand, “she is in the house. I arrived in time to save her from becoming the victim—of a villain. I shall keep her safe now I have got her,” the Duke said, with an ineffable flourish of his hand.
“The victim—of a villain? What do you mean by such words? They sound as if you had got them out of a novel,” the Duchess said; but her heart was beating so that she could scarcely hear herself speak.
“Then you knew nothing about it?” said her husband calmly.