LORD OAKBURN’S DAUGHTERS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF "EAST LYNNE."
CHAPTER XV.THE FACE AGAIN.
A conflict was going on in the mind of Laura Chesney. Two passions, bad and good, were at work there, each striving for the mastery.
Should it be obedience or dieobedience? Should she bear on in the straight line of duty, and be obedient to her father, to all the notions of right in which she had been reared; or should she quit her home in defiance, quit it clandestinely, to become the wife of Mr. Carlton? Reader! It has indeed come to this, grievous as it is to have to write it, st the present day, of a well-trained gentlewoman.
On the day that Mr. Carlton had asked for Laura, Captain Chesney commanded her before him. He did not spare her; every reproach that the case seemed to demand was lavished upon her by the indignant captain; and he finally forbade her ever to give another thought to Mr. Carlton. The abuse he heaped upon the unconscious surgeon would have been something grand if spoken upon the boards of a theatre; it simply made Laura rebellious. He told her that, except in his professional capacity, he disliked Mr. Carlton, and that nothing in the world would ever induce him to admit the man to his family. And this he confirmed with sundry unnecessary words.
Laura retired, apparently acquiescent. Not to him did she dare show disobedience, and the captain concluded that the affair was settled and over. Whether Laura’s rebellious feelings would have subsided afterwards into duty had she been let alone, it is impossible to say; but Mr. Carlton took every possible occasion of fostering them.
He did not want for opportunity. Laura-careless, wilful, reprehensible Laura—had yielded to his persuasions of meeting him in secret. Evening after evening, at the dusk hour, unless unavoidably kept away by the exigencies of patients, was Mr. Carlton in the dark grove of trees that skirted Captain Chesney’s house; and Laura found no difficulty in joining him. The captain and Miss Chesney would as soon have suspected her of stealing out to meet a charged cannon as a gentleman, and Laura’s movements were free.
But it was not possible that this state of things could continue. Laura had not been reared to deceit, and she did feel ashamed of herself. She felt also something else—a fear of detection. Each evening as she glided, trembling, into that grove, he protested with tears to Mr. Carlton that it must be the last; that she dared not come again. And suppose she made it the last, he answered, what then? were they to bid each other adieu for ever?
Ah, poor Laura Chesney’s heart was only too much inclined to open to the specious argument he breathed into it—that there was but one way of ending satisfactorily the present unhappy state of things: that of flying with him. It took but a few days to accomplish—the convincing her that it would be best for them in every way, and inducing her to promise to consent. So long as she was Miss Laura Chesney, Captain Chesney’s obstinacy would continue, he argued; but when once they were married, he would be easily brought to forgive. Mr. Carlton believed this when he said it. He believed that these loud, hot-tempered men, who were so fond of raging out, never bore malice long. Perhaps as a rule he was right, but in all rules there are exceptional cases. With many tears, with many sighs, with many qualms of self-reproach, Laura yielded her consent, and Mr. Carlton laid his plans, and communicated them to her. But for his having been forbidden the house, Laura might never have ventured on the step; but to continue to steal out in fear and trembling to see him, she dared not; and to live without seeing him would have been the bitterest fate of all.
In the few days that had elapsed since the rupture between her father and her lover, Laura Chesney seemed to have lived years. In her after life, when she glanced back at this time, she asked herself whether it was indeed possible that but those few days, a fortnight at most, had passed over her head, during which she was making up her mind to leave her home with Mr. Carlton. Only a few days! to deliberate upon a step that must fix the destiny of her whole life!
But we must hasten on.
It was about a month subsequent to the death of Mrs. Crane, and the moon’s rays were again gladdening the earth. The rays were weak and watery. Dark clouds passed frequently over the face of the sky, and sprinkling showers, threatening heavier rain, fell at intervals.
Gliding out of her father’s door, by the servant’ entrance, came Laura Chesney. She wore a black silk dress, the mourning for Lady Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/556 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/557 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/558 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/559 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/560 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/561 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/562 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/563 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/564
LORD OAKBURN’S DAUGHTERS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF "EAST LYNNE."
CHAPTER XVII.DISAPPEARANCE.
Jane Chesney sat in the darkening twilight of the evening, gazing at the outsides of the two letters which had caused so much speculation. The conviction was gradually forcing itself upon her, that the view taken of the case by Mr. John Grey was the only one that offered any reasonable solution; for if the young Earl of Oakburn was lying ill of fever at Chesney Oaks, it was out of the range of probability to suppose that letters would be sent to him to Captain Cheney’s house at South Wennock.
Lucy’s voice broke the stillness of the long pause that had followed on Mr. Grey’s departure. The little girl, gifted with much sensitive feeling, had not liked to speak before, and even now her tones were timid and low.
“Do you think it can be true, Jane—that papa is Earl of Oakburn?”
“I—I think it must be, Lucy. I cannot see anything else that the coming of these letters here can mean.”
Lucy rose from her low seat by the fire, and was running to the door. “I’ll go and tell Laura,” she said; but Jane drew her book.
“Not yet, Lucy. Let us be sure that it is true first. Somehow I do not like to speculate upon it. It is so sad, it is so grievously sad for the young earl to have died like this—if he has died.”
Lucy sat down again, disappointed. She had all a child’s love of imparting marvellous news. But Laura would be coming down-stairs directly, she supposed, and then Jane would no doubt tell her.
Jane sat in silence. She was possessed of extreme right feeling, she had no selfishness, was just in her regard for others, and she did not like to dwell upon the probability of this being true—or, as she had phrased it, to speculate upon it. 1f Lord Oakhurn was dead, had been cut off thus early, none would feel more genuine regret for him than Jane. And yet, in spite of this, in spite of herself, certain thoughts intruded themselves and would not be driven back. No more privations, no more pinching, no more care; no more dread of that horrible prison for one whom she so loved, which had been ever present in her mind, a shadow and a dread. Strive as she would, she could not wholly drive these thoughts away from her brain; she could not do it; and yet she almost hated and despised herself for their being there.
By-and-by, just as Pompey brought in the lamp, the step of Captain Chesney was heard on the wet gravel, The rain ever since morning had been incessant, drenching; but it had cleared up now.
“I can’t get any news of Oakburn,” said the captain, when he came in. “The omnibus brought no passengers at all to-night. What’s that, Jane? Another letter for him? Well, it’s strange that he should not be here to meet them.”
“Papa,” said Jane, her pulses beating at what she had to any, “I fear we may have been under a mistake in expecting him at all. Mr. Grey has been here since you went out, and he says Lord Oakburn was lying at Chesney Oaks two days ago, dangerously ill of typhus fever; it was found then that he had not many hours to live. Mr. Grey thinks it certain that these two letters are for you.”
“For me!” repeated the puzzled captain, not having discerned the drift of the argument.
“Yes, papa,” replied Jane, bending her head and speaking in a very low tone. “For you, as Earl of Oakburn.”
Captain Chesney stared at Jane, and then made her repeat exactly what Mr. Grey had said. It subdued him greatly. He was as unselfish as Jane, and he thought of the young earl’s fate, not of his own advancement.
“I’ll risk it, Jane, and open one of the letters,” he said. “If—if it should be all right, why the poor fellow will forgive me; he was always good-natured. I’ll just tell him how it happened, and why I did it. Give me the one that came this morning.”
Jane selected the morning’s letter, and Captain Chesney opened it. He ran his eyes over its contents, standing by the lamp to do so, and then he sat down in a very humble fashion and in deep silence.
“It’s true, Jane,” he presently said, with something very like a sob. “The poor lad is gone, and I am Earl of Oakburn.”
The letter was from the steward at Chesney Oaks. He wrote to acquaint the new earl of his young master’s death, and to request his immediate presence at Chesney Oaks. The earl (as we must henceforth call Captain Chesney) flung it on the table in a momentary access of his customary choler. Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/584 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/585 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/586 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/587 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/588 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/589 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/590 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/591
LORD OAKBURN’S DAUGHTERS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF "EAST LYNNE."
CHAPTER XIX.NEW HONOURS.
Jane Chesney’s position was a trying one. In the midst of the grief, it may be said the horror, she felt at the step taken by her sister Laura that eventful night, there was also the perplexity as to what her own course ought to be. She was powerless to prevent it now; in fact everybody else was powerless; Mr. Carlton and Laura had gained some hours’ start, and could not be brought back again. Had Jane known of the detention at the station at Lichford, still she could have done nothing; the fleetest horse, ready saddled and bridled at her door, would scarcely have conveyed her, galloping like a second Lady Godiva, along that dark and muddy cross-country road, in time to catch them before the arrival of the midnight train for which they waited, for it was well past eleven ere Jane heard of it from Judith.
No; stop the flight she could not. That them was abandoned as hopeless; and it must be remembered that Jane did not know they were gone to Lichford; she had no clue whatever to the line of route taken. Her chief perplexity lay in the doubt of how best to convey the tidings to her father, so as to pain him least. To save him pain in any shape or form, whether mentally or bodily, Jane would have sacrificed her own life. Now and then faint hopes would come over her that their fears were groundless, that they were wholly mistaken, that they were judging Laura wrongfully; and a hundred suppositions as to where Laura could be, arose to her heated fancy: certainly the fact that Mr. Carlton had left the town for a few days, as reported to Judith by his servants, was not sufficient proof of Laura’s having left it. But, even while these delusive arguments arose, the conviction of the worst lay all the deeper upon her mind.
Perhaps Jane Chesney was nearly the last in the town to hear the positive news of the truth by word of mouth. With morning light there arrived at Mr. Carlton’s house the man whom he had charged to look after the missing horse: which had been found with little trouble, standing still with his nose over a field gateway. Securing him for the night, the man started before dawn to convey him to the address at South Wennock, as given him by Mr. Carlton; he had to be back to his own work betimes, at the farmer’s where he was a day labourer. When rung up, just as Judith had rung them up the night before, the servants could scarcely believe their own eyes, to see the horse arrive home in that fashion, led by a halter and covered with splashes of mud. The man explained, so far as he was cognizant of it, what had happened on the previous night; told his orders as to bringing home the horse, provided he could find him, spoke of where the carriage was lying, and said it had better be looked after.
Whether it was from this circumstance, or whether the report arose in that mysterious manner in which reports do arise, nobody knows how or where; certain it was, that when South Wennock sat down to its breakfast-tables on that same morning, half its inhabitants were talking of the elopement of the surgeon with Miss Laura Chesney. Mr. John Grey was the one to convey its certain tidings to Jane.
He was at the house very early—soon after eight o’clock. Called to a distance that day, his only chance of seeing Lucy Chesney'e hands was to pay them a visit before his departure; in fact he had promised to do so on the previous night.
Jane was ready for him; Jane alone: glad of an excuse to keep the little girl in bed in that house of perplexity and trouble, Jane had bade her not rise to breakfast. Mr. Grey was pained at the look of care on the face of Miss Chesney—let us call her so for a short while yet!—at the too evident marks of the sleepless and miserable night she had spent.
“Do not suffer this untoward event to affect your health!” he involuntarily exclaimed; and his low tone was full of tender concern, of considerate sympathy. “How ill you look!”
Jane was startled. Was it known already? But there was that in Mr. Grey’s earnest face that caused her heart to leap out to him them and then no it might to a friend of long-tried years.
“Is it known?” she asked, her life-pulses seeming to stand still.
“It is,” he answered, with a grave face. “The town is ringing with it.”
Jane, standing before him with her quiet bearing, gave no mark of pain, save that she raised her hand and laid it for a few moments on her temples.
“I have been hoping—against hope, it is true, but still hoping—that it might not be; that my sister might have taken refuge somewhere from the storm, and would return home Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/612 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/613 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/614 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/615 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/616 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/617 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/618 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/619
LORD OAKBURN’S DAUGHTERS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “EAST LYNNE.”
CHAPTER XXI.
In the very heart of South Wennock, standing a little back from the street, nearly opposite the Red Lion Inn, was the old church of St. Mark; and on the morning after the return home of Mr. Carlton and his bride, this church was invaded by more people than could conveniently get into it, for a rumour had gone forth to the town that Mr. Carlton and Lady Laura were to be re-married.
It was even so. Possibly in deference to Laura’s scruples; possibly that he himself was not willing to trust to the impromptu ceremony in Scotland, which had been of the slightest, and that he would constitute her his own beyond the power of any future quibbles of law to dispute, Mr. Carlton had returned home provided with a license in all due form. The clergyman was apprised, and nine o’clock saw Mr. Carlton and Laura at the church.
If, by fixing that early hour, their motive was to avoid gaping spectators, the precaution had utterly failed. How the news got about was a puzzle to Mr. Carlton as long as he lived. He accused the incumbent of St. Mark’s, the reverend Mr. Jones, of spreading it; he accused the curate, Mr. Lycett, to whom was deputed the duty of marrying them; he accused the clerk, who was charged to have the church open. But these functionaries, one and all, protested it had not got about through them. However it might have been, when Mr. Carlton and Laura arrived at the door in a close carriage, precisely one minute before nine, they were horror-struck to find themselves in the midst of a dense crowd, extending from the street up to the very altar-rails, and through which they had to pick their way.
“Rather a strong expression that,” sneers some genial critic. “Horror-struck!” But it really did appear to apply to Mr. Carlton. Laura wore the handsome cashmere shawl which he had given her, the light silk dress sent by Jane, and a white bonnet and veil bought somewhere on her travels. She stood at the altar with downcast eyes and blushing cheeks, just as a young bride under the circumstance might be supposed to stand, never once looking at the throng, and apparently unheedful of them. Not so Mr. Carlton. He stood with a ghastly face, into which the colour would not come by any effort of will, glancing over his shoulder perpetually, not at the offending crowd, whom Mr. Carlton regarded simply with anger and would have liked to duck wholesale in the nearest pond, but as if impelled by some imaginary fear. Did he dread the intrusion of his wife’s father, Lord Oakburn? that he would, even at that useless and tardy hour, appear and forbid the ceremony? South Wennock, who prided itself upon its discernment, said so.
The superfluities of a groomsman and a bridesmaid had not been provided by Mr. Carlton. The clerk performed the office of the one, and Laura dispensed with that of the other, The wedding ring was firmly placed upon her finger, and they turned from the altar as securely married as though them had been no previous runaway escapade. The licence had described her as Laura Chesney, otherwise Carlton, and it was so that the signed the book.
But there occurred an unlucky contretemps. The carriage waited at the church door, and Laura and Mr. Carlton had taken their seats in it on the conclusion of the ceremony, when, just as it was moving off amidst the dense mob of the gaping spectators, an open fly came from the opposite direction. It contained Lord Oakburn and his stick. The earl was on his way back to Chesney Oaks, was now being conveyed to Great Wennock to catch one of the morning trains, Pompey on the box beside the driver, and a great portmanteau between Pompey’s knees.
Perhaps nearly the only household in South Wennock to which the report of the morning’s intended ceremony had not penetrated, was that of Cedar Lodge. Even such newsmongers as milkwomen and baker’s boys were chary of telling aught there that concerned its runaway daughter. When Lord Oakburn saw the crowd round the church, therefore, he looked out at it in surprise, wondering what was agate, and then he caught sight of the inmates of the close carriage about to be driven away from its doors. His daughter’s terrified gaze met his.
Lord Oakburn’s brow flushed red with passion. In his hot temper he raised his stick with a menacing gesture, as if he would have beaten one of them, bride or bridegroom, had he been near enough; or as if he meant to throw it at the carriage, as he sometimes threw it at Pompey. It did not go, however. He let it drop on the fly seat again, with a word that was certainly not a blessing; and the fly went on, and the meeting was over.
There was no fear on Mr. Carlton’s Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/640 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/641 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/642 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/643 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/644 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/645 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/646 not like him. They returned last night, and were remarried here this morning, I understand,” she added, dropping her voice. “I fear—I do fear, that Laura will live to regret it.”
“It’s to be hoped she will,” said the countess, in just the same tone that Lord Oak burn might have wished it. “I saw my young lady just now.”
“You saw her, aunt?”
“I did,” said Lady Oakburn, nodding her head, “and she saw me. She was at the window of a house as I passed it: Mr. Carlton’s, I suppose. Mark me, Jane! she will live to repent it; these runaway matches don’t bring luck with them. Where’s Clarice?”
The concluding question was put quite as abruptly as the one had been regarding Laura. Jane lifted her eyes, and the flush of excitement stole into her cheek.
“She is where she was, I conclude, Aunt Oakburn.”
“And where’s that? You may tell me all you know of her proceedings since she left home.”
It was certainly condescending of the dowager to allow this, considering that since the departure of Clarice from her home, she had never permitted Jane to mention her in any one of her letters.
“The all is not much, aunt,” said Jane. “You know that she sent us word she had entered on a situation in the neighbourhood of Hyde Park”
“And that she had assumed a false name,” interrupted the countess, with acrimony.
“Yes, I know so much. Go on.”
“That she had changed her name,” said Jane, wincing at the plain statement of the case. “But she desired her letters to be addressed Miss Chesney; therefore I cannot see how she can have wholly dropped it.”
“Who would write to her, pray?”
“I did,” said Jane. “I thought it well that we should not all abandon her”
“Abandon her!” again interposed the countess. “I think it was she who abandoned us.”
“Well—yes, of course it was—but you know what I mean, aunt. I wrote to her occasionally, and I had a few letters from her. Papa never forbade that.”
“And what did she say in her letters?”
“Not much: they were generally short ones. I expect they were written just to tell me that she was well and safe. She gave scarcely any particulars of the family she was with, but she said she was as comfortable there on the whole, she supposed, as she could expect to be. But I have not heard from her since the beginning of the year, and I am getting uneasy about it. My two last letters have brought forth no reply: and they were letters that required one.”
“She’s coming home,” said the countess. “You’ll see.”
“I wish I could think so,” returned Jane. “But when I remember her proud spirit, a conviction comes over me that she will not make the first move. She will expect papa to do it.”
“Then she should expect, for me, were I her father,” tartly returned the dowager, as she rose and put on her bonnet. “If she has no more sense of what is due to the Earl of Oakburn, and to herself as Lady Clarice Chesney, than to be out teaching children, I’d let her stop until her senses came to her.”
Almost the same words as those used by the earl not many hours before. And the old Countess of Oakburn reiterated them again, as she said adieu to her grandnieces, and departed as abruptly as she had arrived.
(To be continued.)
THE THREE HUNTERS.
(FROM THE GERMAN OF UHLAND.)
I.
Three hunters a-hunting merrily start:
They go out a-hunting the milk-white hart.
II.
They lay them down under a tall fir-tree,
And each of the hunters a dream doth see.
III.
FIRST DREAM.
“I dreamt the while I was beating the bush,
Thereout in a moment the hart did rush.”
IV.
SECOND DREAM.
“The hounds they yelped, and away he hied,
But I wounded him in his milk-white side.”
V.
THIRD DREAM.
“And when I saw him lie dead on the ground,
A joyous blast on my bugle I wound.”
VI.
The while the three hunters thus dreaming lie,
The milk-white hart runs swiftly by.
VII.
Before the three hunters have opened their eyes,
Away far out of their reach he flies.
Blomfield Jackson.
LORD OAKBURN’S DAUGHTERS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “EAST LYNNE.”
CHAPTER XXIII.MISS LETHWAIT.
In a magnificent reception-room of Portland Place sat the Earl of Oakburn and Lady Jane Chesney. It was the middle of June, and the London season was at its height. The whole of May Lord Oakburn and his daughters had stayed at Chesney Oaks; he had now taken this house, furnished, for three months. Chesney Oaks was in the market to let: to let to anybody who would take it and pay rent for it; and the countess dowager had worked herself into a fume and a fret when she first saw the advertisement, and had come down upon the earl in a burst of indignation, demanding to know what he meant by disgracing the family. The earl answered her; he was quite capable of doing it; and a hot war of words waged for some minutes between them, and neither would give way. The earl had reason on his side, though; if his means were not sufficient to keep up Chesney Oaks, better that he should let it than allow it to go to ruin through unoccupation.
So Chesney Oaks was in the hire market, and old Lady Oakburn told her sailor nephew that he deserved to have his ears boxed, that she should never forgive him, and then she withdrew in dudgeon to her house in Kensington Gardens, and the earl devoutly wished she might never come out of it to torment him again.
Indeed there was scarcely a poorer peer on Great Britain’s roll than the new Earl of Oakburn, but to him and to Jane this poverty was as very riches. His net revenue would be little if any more than three thousand per annum; as to the rent he expected to get from the letting of Chesney Oaks, it would nearly if not all go in keeping the place in proper repair. Chesney Oaks had no broad lands attaching to it; the house was good, and the ornamental gardens were good; but these are not the things that yield huge revenues. The furniture of Chesney Oaks was the private property of the late earl, it reverted to his grandmother, the old countess. Had the present earl pleased her—that is, had he not offended her by advertising the place—she would very probably have made him a present of it, for she was capable of being generous when it suited her; but when she found the house was irrevocably to be let, she, in a fit of temper, game orders for it to be taken out, and it was now in, the course of removal. “I’ll not. leave a stick or a stone in the place,” she had said to Lord Oakburn in the stormy interview alluded to above. ”I’d not use them if you did,” retorted the exasperated earl, “and the sooner the things are out, the better.” For one thing, the house was in admirable repair; the young earl having had it put in complete ornamental order twelve months before, on the occasion of his marriage. So the furniture passed out of Lord Oakburn’s hands, when perhaps by a little diplomacy, which he was entirely incapable of exercising, it might have remained his, and the dowager was distributing it amidst her married daughters—who were too well off to care for it.
For a fortnight or more after Chesney Oaks was advertised no applicant had applied for it. Then one came forward. It was Sir James Marden, a gentleman who was returning to Europe after a long sojourn in the East, and who had commissioned his brother, Colonel Marden, to engage for him a suitable residence. It was natural that the colonel should wish to secure one in the vicinity of his own; he lived at Pembury, and Chesney Oaks appeared to be the very thing, of all others; and the negotiations were proceeding satisfactorily.
The earl was talking to Jane about it now. He was no hard bargain dealer. Generous by nature, he could not higgle and haggle, and stand out for pence and shillings and pounds, as so many do. All he did, any transaction he might engage in, was set about in the most simple, straightforward manner imaginable. It would have occurred to most people to employ an agent to conduct this business of the letting; it did not occur to the earl. He wrote the advertisements out with his own hand, and he added to them his own name and address in full, as to where applications might be made. One or two interviews had taken place between him and Colonel Marden, who was staying with his family in town; and on the previous day to this morning on which the earl and his daughter were sitting together, Mrs. Marden had made her first call on Indy Jane, and they had grown in that short call quite intimate. Jane was now telling her father that she had promised to accompany Mrs. Marden to a morning concert that very day.
Jane was attired in mourning; a handsome black dress of a thin gauzy texture, ample and flowing. She was quiet and unpretending as ever, but there was a look of rest in her face Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/668 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/669 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/670 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/671 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/672 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/673 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/674 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/675
LORD OAKBURN’S DAUGHTERS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “EAST LYNNE.”
CHAPTER XXIX. AN IRON ENTERING INTO THE SOUL.
The Earl of Oakburn was in a bustle. The earl was one of those people who always are in a bustle when starting upon a journey, be it ever so short a one. He was going on a visit to Sir James Marden at Chesney Oaks, and he was putting himself in a commotion over it.
To Jane’s surprise he had announced an intention not to take Pompey. Jane wondered how he would get on without that faithful and brow-beaten follower, if only in the light of an object to roar at; and when she asked the earl the reason for not taking him, he had civilly replied that it was no business of hers. Jane felt sorry for the decision, for she believed Pompey to be essential to her father’s comforts; and she knew the earl, with all his temper, liked the old servant, and was glad to have him about him; but otherwise Jane attached no importance to the matter. So the earl was driven to the Paddington station, and Pompey, after seeing his master and his carpet-bag safely in an express train, returned with the carriage to Portland Place.
Jane Chesney was a little busy on her own score just now, for she was seeking a governess to replace Miss Lethwait; one who should prove to be a more desirable inmate than that lady had been. Jane blamed herself greatly for not having inquired more minutely into Miss Lethwait’s antecedents; she had been, as she thought now, too much prepossessed in her favour at first sight, had taken her too entirely upon trust. That Jane would not err again on that score, her present occupation was proving—that of searching out the smallest details in connection with the lady now recommended to her, a Miss Snow. Not many days yet had Miss Lethwait quitted the house, but Jane had forcibly put her out of remembrance. Never, willingly, would she think again upon one, whose conduct in that one particular, the episode to which Jane had been a witness the night of the party, had been so entirely obnoxious.
Lord Oakburn was whirled along that desirable line for travellers, the Great Western. In the opposite corner of the comfortable carriage there happened to be another old naval commander sitting, and the terms that the two got upon were so good, that his lordship could not believe his eyes when he saw the well-known station at Pembury, or believe that they had already reached it.
He had, however, to part with his new acquaintance, for Pembury station was his alighting point. He found Sir James Marden’s carriage waiting for him, a sort of mail phaeton, Sir James himself, a little man with a yellow face, seated in the box seat. The earl and his carpet-bag were duly installed in it, and Sir James drove out of the station.
As they were proceeding up the street to take the avenue for Chesney Oaks,—the pleasant avenue, less green now than it had been in spring, which wound through the park to the house,—a small carriage, drawn by a pair of beautiful ponies, came rapidly down upon them. Not more beautiful in their way, those ponies, than were the ladies seated in the carriage. Two gay, lovely ladies, laughing and talking with each other, their veils and their streamers and their other furbelows, flying behind them in the wind. The one, driving, was Colonel Marden’s wife, and she was about to rein in and greet Sir James, when her companion, with a half-smothered cry and a sudden paleness displacing the rich bloom on her cheeks, seized the reins and sent the ponies onward at a gallop. It was Lady Laura Carlton.
“Holloa!” exclaimed Sir James, “what was that for?”
Lord Oakburn, in his surprise, had started up in the phaeton. About the last person he had been thinking of was Laura, and Pembury was about the last place he would have expected to see her in. The fact was, Laura had recently met Mrs. Marden at a friend’s house near Great Wennock; the two ladies had struck up a sudden friendship, and Laura had come back with her for a few days’ visit.
“She was evidently scared at the sight of one of us, and I’m sure I never met her before to my knowledge,” cried Sir James, alluding to the lady seated with Mrs. Marden. “Do you know her, Lord Oakburn?”
“Know her!” repeated the earl, rather explosively. “I’m sorry to say I do know her, sir. She is an ungrateful daughter of mine, who ran away from her home to be married to a fellow, and never asked my leave.”
“It must be Lady Laura Carlton!” quickly exclaimed Sir James Marden.
“It is,” said the earl. “And I assure you I’d give a great deal out of my pocket if she were Lady Laura Anybody-else.”
“You’ll have to forgive her, I suppose. What a handsome girl she is!”
“No, I shan’t have to forgive her,” returned the earl, much offended at the suggestion. “I don’t intend to forgive her.”
Brave words, no doubt. But who knows what might have come of the interview had that pony carriage been allowed to stop? It might have been a turning point in Laura’s life, might have led to a reconciliation—for Lord Oakburn’s bark was worse than his bite, and he did love his children. But Laura Carlton, in her startled fear at seeing him so close to her, had herself given the check and the impetus, and the opportunity was gone by for ever.
“What brings her at Pembury?” growled the earl, as they drove through the park.
“I can’t tell,” replied Sir James. “I conclude she must be visiting at my brother’s.”
“I didn’t know she knew them,” was the comment of the earl. “Forgive a clandestine marriage! No, never!”
Brave words again of the Earl of Oakburn’s. Clandestine marriages are not good in themselves, and they often work incalculable ill, entailing embarrassing consequences on more than one generation, But the condemnation would have come with better grace from another than Lord Oakburn, seeing that he was contemplating something of the sort on his own account.
He slept one night at Chesney Oaks, and then he concluded his visit. Sir James Warden was surprised and vexed at the abrupt termination. He set it down to the unwelcome presence of the earl’s rebellious daughter at Pembury, and he pressed Lord Oakburn’s hand at parting, and begged him to come again shortly, at a more convenient period.
But most likely Lord Oakburn had never intended a longer stay. The probabilities were—it’s hard, you know, to have to write it of a middle-aged earl, a member of the sedate and honourable Upper House—that he had only taken Chesney Oaks as a blind to his daughters on his way to Miss Lethwait. For his real visit was to her.
Chesney Oaks was situated in quite an opposite part of the kingdom to Twifford vicarage, but by taking advantage of cross rails, Lord Oakburn contrived to reach Twifford late that same night. He did not intrude on them until the following morning. The house, a low one, covered with ivy, was small and unpretending, but exceedingly picturesque; its garden was beautiful, and the birds made their nests and sang in the clustering trees that surrounded the lawn and flowers.
In features they were very much alike, but in figure no two could be much more dissimilar than the father and daughter. The vicar was a little shruken man, particularly timid in manner; his daughter magnificent as a queen. If she had looked queenly in the handsomely proportioned rooms of the earl’s town house, how much more so did she look in the miniature little parlour of the vicarage.
Lord Oakburn entered upon his business in his usual blunt fashion. He had come down, he said, to make acquaintance with Mr. Lethwait, and to know when the wedding was to be.
The vicar replied by stating that Eliza had told him all. And he, the father, was deeply sensible of the honour done her by the Earl of Oakburn, and that he himself should be proud and pleased to see her his wife; but that he felt a scruple upon the point, as did Eliza. He felt that her entrance into the family might be very objectionable to the earl’s daughters.
And, knowing what you do know of the earl, you may be sure that that speech was the signal for an outburst. He poured forth a torrent of angry eloquence in his peculiar manner, so completely annihilating every argument but his own, that the timid clergyman never dared to utter another word of objection. The earl must have it his own way: as it had been pretty sure from the first he would have it.
“Eliza has been a good and dutiful daughter, my lord,” said the vicar, who in his retired life, his humble home, had hardly ever been brought into contact with one of the earl’s social degree. “My living has been very small, and my expenses have been inevitably large—that is, large for one in my position. The last years of my wife’s life were years of illness; she suffered from a complaint that required constant medical attendance and expensive nourishment, and Eliza was to us throughout almost as a guardian angel. Every penny she could spare from her own absolute expenses, she sent to us. She has put up with undesirable places where the discomforts were great, the insults hard to be borne, and would not throw herself out, lest we might suffer. She has been a good daughter,” he emphatically added; “she will, I hesitate not to say it, make a good wife. And if only your lordship’s daughters will”
Another interrupting burst from his lordship: his daughters had nothing to do with it, and he did not intend that they should have. And the vicar was finally silenced.
The earl did things like nobody else. He had spent the best part of his life at sea, and shore ideas and proprieties were still almost to him as a closed book. In discussing the arrangements of the marriage with Miss Lethwait—for he compelled her to discuss them, and he did it in a perfectly matter-of-fact manner, just as he might have discussed a debate in the Lords—she found herself obliged to hint, as he did not, that a tour, long or short, inland or foreign, as might be convenient, was usually deemed eligible on that auspicious occasion. The earl could not be brought to see it; did not understand it. What on earth was the matter with his house at home that they could not proceed direct to it on their wedding day? he demanded. Were there a brig convenient they might enjoy a month’s cruize in her, and he’d say something to it, or even a well-built yacht; but he hated land travelling, and was not going to encounter it.
Miss Lethwait thought of the horrors of sea-sickness, and left the brig and the yacht to drop into abeyance. Neither dared she, in the timidity of her new position, urge the tour further upon him; but she did shrink from being taken home to the midst of his daughters on the marriage day.
On the following day the earl went back to town, Miss Lethwait having succeeded in postponing the period of the marriage until October.
September was a busy month with Jane Chesney. The term for which they had engaged their present furnished residence was expiring, and Lord Oakburn took on lease one of the neighbouring houses in Portland Place.
Jane was in her element. Choosing furniture and planning out arrangements for their new home was welcome work, all being done with one primary object—the comfort of her father. The best rooms were appropriated to him, the best things were placed in them. Jane thought how happy they should be together, she and her father, in this settled homestead. They did not intend to go out of town that year: why should they? they had but a few months entered it. Custom? Fashion? The earl did not understand custom, and fashion was as a foreign ship to him. Jane only cared for what he cared.
They moved into the house the last week in September, Jane anxious with loving cares still. But for the mysterious and prolonged absence of Clarice, she would have been thoroughly and completely happy. Miss Snow was proving an efficient governess for Lucy, and Jane had leisure on her hands. The unpleasant episode in the reign of the last governess, Eliza Lethwait, had nearly faded from Jane Chesney’s memory, and she no more dreamt of connecting that condemned lady with certain occasional short absences of the earl in the country, than she dreamt of attributing them to visits paid to the Great Mogul.
The first week in October came in, and the evenings were getting wintry. Lord Oakburn had been away from home three days, and Jane, who had just got the house into nice condition, and was resting from her labours, had leisure to feel ill. Not actually ill, perhaps; but anything but well. She had felt so all day, a sick shivery feeling that she could not account for, a low-spirited sensation, as of some approaching evil. Do coming events thus cast their shadows before? There are those who tell us that they do. Not in that way, however, was Jane Chesney superstitious, or did she think of attributing her sensations to any such mystical cause. She “felt out of sorts” she said to Lucy’s governess, and supposed she had caught cold.
Causing a fire to be lighted in her dressing-room, a little snuggery on the second floor adjoining her bed-room, she resolved to make herself comfortable there for the evening. She ordered the tea-tray to be brought up, and sent a message for Miss Snow and Lucy.
Miss Snow, a little, lively, warm-mannered woman, the very reverse of the dignified Miss Lethwait, was full of trifling cares for Lady Jane. She threw a warm shawl on her shoulders, she insisted on wrapping her feet in flannel as they rested on the footstool before the fire, and she asked permission to make and pour out the tea.
Judith was at that moment bringing in the tea-tray. Judith—I’m sure I forget whether this has been mentioned before—had taken the place of own maid to Jane and Lucy when the change occurred in their fortunes. Jane valued her greatly, and the girl was deserving of it.
“A gentleman has called to inquire when the earl will be at home, my lady,” she said, as she put down the tray. “He wishes very particularly to see him.”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Jane, rather listlessly. “Who is it?”
“It is that same gentleman who has been here occasionally on Sir James Marden’s business,” replied Judith. “I heard him say to Wilson as I came through the hall that he had had a communication from Chesney Oaks which he wished the earl to see as soon as possible. Wilson asked me if I’d bring the message to your ladyship.”
Jane turned her head in some slight surprise. “A communication from Chesney Oaks?” she repeated. “But papa is at Chesney Oaks. You can tell the gentleman so, Judith.”
“No, Jane, papa’s not at Chesney Oaks,” interposed Lacy, who was dancing about the room with her usual restlessness. “If he had been going to Chesney Oaks he would have gone from the Paddington Station, wouldn’t he?”
“Well?” said Jane.
“Well, he went to the King’s Cross Station.”
“How do you know?” asked Jane.
Lucy gave a deprecatory glance at Miss Snow ere she entered on her confession. She had run out to her papa after he was in the carriage for a last last kiss, and heard Pompey give the order to the coachman, “The King’s Cross Station.”
Jane shook her head. “You must have been mistaken, Lucy,” she said. “I asked papa whether he was going to Chesney Oaks, and he—he—” Jane stopped a moment in recollection—“he nodded his head in the affirmative. It must have meant the affirmative,” she added, slowly, as if debating the point with herself. “I am sure he is at Chesney Oaks.”
“Shall I inquire of the coachman, my lady?” asked Judith. “He is down stairs.”
“Yes, do,” replied Jane. “And you can tell the gentleman, Sir James Marden’s agent, that I shall expect Lord Oakburn home daily until I see him. He seldom remains away above three days.”
Judith went down on her errand, and came up again. Lucy was right. The coachman had driven his master to the King’s Cross Station: the coachman further said that it was to the King’s Cross Station that he had driven his master on his recent absences. Jane wondered. She was not aware that Lord Oakburn knew any one on that line. This time he had taken Pompey with him.
Miss Snow busied herself with the tea; Lucy talked; Jane sat in listless idleness. And thus the time went on until a loud knock and ring resounded through the house. Jane lifted her eyes to the clock on the mantelpiece, and saw that it wanted ten minutes to nine.
“Visitors to-night!” she exclaimed, with vexation.
“Don’t admit them, Lady Jane,” spoke up Miss Snow impulsively, in her sympathy for Lady Jane. “You are not well enough.”
Lucy had escaped from the room, and Miss Snow caught her at the dignified pastime of listening. Stretched over the balustrades as far as she could stretch, her ears and eyes were riveted to what was going on in the hall below. The governess administered a sharp reprimand and ordered her to come away. But Lucy was absorbed, and altogether ignored both Miss Snow and the mandate.
“Do you hear me speak to you, Lady Lucy? Must I come for you, then?”
Lucy drew away now, but not, as it appeared, in obedience to the governess. Her face wore a puzzled look of surprise, and she went back to the room on tiptoe.
“Jane,” said she, scarcely above her breath, “Jane what do you think? It is papa and Miss Lethwait!”
Jane turned round on her chair. “What nonsense, Lucy! Miss Lethwait!”
“It is indeed, Jane. It looks just as though papa had brought her on a visit, and there’s some luggage coming into the hall. Miss Lethwait”
“It cannot be Miss Lethwait,” sharply interrupted Lady Jane, her tone betraying annoyance at the very mistake.
“Yes it is Miss Lethwait,” persisted Lucy. “She is dressed so well!—in a rich damask dress and a white bonnet, and an Indian shawl with a gold border. It is just like that Indian shawl of mamma’s that you never remove from the drawer and never wear, because you say it puts you too much in mind of her.”
“Lucy, you must certainly be dreaming!” reiterated Jane. “Miss Lethwait would never dare to step inside our house again. If”
Jane stopped. Wilson the footman had come up the stairs, and his face wore a blank look.
“I beg your pardon, my lady; the earl has arrived.”
“Well?” said Jane.
“He ordered me to come up to you, my lady, and ask whether there was nobody to receive him and—and—Lady Oakburn.”
“Bade you ask what?” demanded Jane, bending her haughty eyelids on the servant.
“My lady,” returned the man, thinking he would give the words as they were given to him, and then perhaps he should escape anger, “what his lordship said was this: ‘Go up and see where they are, and ask what’s the reason that nobody is about, to receive Lady Oakburn.’ They were the exact words, my lady.”
“Is it my aunt, the Dowager Lady Oakburn?” asked Jane in her wonder.
“It is Miss Lethwait, my lady. That is to say, she as was Miss Lethwait when she lived here.”
Lucy was right, then! A ghastly hue overspread the face of Jane Chesney. Not at the unhappy fact—which as yet, strange to say, had not dawned on her mind—but at the insult offered to her by this re-entrance of the governess into their house. Who was she, this Eliza Lethwait, that she should come again, and beard her in her home? Had he, her father, brought her—brought her on a visit, as surmised by Lucy?
The footman had already gone down stairs again. Jane flung aside Miss Snow’s wrapperings and prepared to descend. The governess had stood in a state of puzzled amazement, wondering what it all meant. On the stairs Jane encountered Judith. The girl was paler than usual, and very grave.
“My lady,” she whispered, arresting Jane’s progress, “do you know what has occurred?”
“I know that that person whom I turned from my house has dared to intrude into it again,” answered Lady Jane in her wrath, speaking far more openly than it was her custom to speak before a servant. “But she shall not stop in it; no, not for an hour. Let me pass, Judith.”
“Oh, my lady, hear the worst before you go in; before you enter upon a contest with her that perhaps she’d gain,” implored Judith, in her eager sympathy for her mistress. “My lord has married her, and has brought her home.”
Jane fell against the wall and looked at Judith, a pitiable expression of helplessness on her face. The girl resumed.
“Pompey says they were married yesterday morning; were married by Miss Lethwait’s father in his own church. He says, my lady, he finds it is to Miss Lethwait’s the earl has gone lately when he has been absent from town; not to Chesney Oaks.”
“Support me, Judith,” was the feeble prayer of the unhappy daughter.
Utterly sick and faint was she, and but for Judith’s help she would have fallen. She sunk down on the friendly stairs, and let her head rest on them until the faintness had passed. Then she rose, staggering, and went on with what feeble strength was left her.
“I must know the worst,” she moaned. “I must know the worst.”
Lucy, wondering and timid, stole into the drawing-room after her. Standing by its fire, her face turned to the door in expectation, was she who had quitted the house as Miss Lethwait, only six or seven weeks before. Jane’s eyes fell on her dress, as mentioned by Lucy, the rich sweeping silk, the pretty white bonnet, and the costly shawl—their own mother’s shawl! taken by the earl from its resting place to bestow on his new bride. Woman’s mind is a strange compound of strength and littleness; and to see that shawl on her shoulders brought to Jane’s heart perhaps the keenest pang of all. The earl was striding the room; his stick, suspiciously restless, coming down loudly with each step. He confronted his two daughters.
“So! here you are at last! And nothing ready, that I see, in the shape of welcome. Not so much as the tea laid! What’s the reason, Lady Jane?”
“We did not expect you,” replied Jane in a low tone, her back turned on the ex-governess.
“You got my letter. Wasn’t it plain enough?”
“I have not received any letter.”
“Not received any letter! By Jove! I’ll prosecute the post-office! Girls,” with a flourish of his hand towards his wife—“here’s your new mother, Lady Oakburn. You don’t want a letter to welcome her.”
It seemed that Jane, at any rate, wanted something, if not a letter. She persistently ignored the presence of the lady, keeping her face turned to her father. But when she tried to address him, no sound issued from her white and quivering lips. The new countess came forward, and humbly, deprecatingly, held out her hand to Jane.
“Lady Jane, I implore you, let there be peace between us. Suffer me to sue for it. It has pleased Lord Oakburn to make me his wife; but indeed I have not come here to interfere with his daughters’ privileges or to sow dissension in their home. Try and like me, Lady Jane! It will not be difficult to me to love you.”
Jane wheeled round, her white lips trembling, her face ablaze with scorn.
“Like you!” she repeated, her voice, in her terrible emotion, rising to a hiss. “Like you! Can we like the serpent that entwines its deadly coils around its victim? You have brought your arts to bear on my unsuspicious father, and torn him from his children. As you have dealt with us, Eliza Lethwait, may you so be dealt with when your turn shall come!”
The countess drew back in agitation. She laid her hand on Lucy.
“You at least will let me love you, Lucy! I loved you when I was with you, and I will endeavour to be to you a second mother. This entrance into your home is as embarrassing and painful to me as to you.”
Lucy burst into tears as she received the kiss pressed upon her lips. She had liked Miss Lethwait very much, but she did not like her to bring upon them this discomfort.
The earl and his stick, neither of them quite so brave as usual, went off to take refuge in the small room that they had made the library; glad perhaps, if the truth could be known, that he had a refuge just then to hide himself in.
“It’s new lines to them yet, Eliza,” he called out as he went, for the benefit of his rebellious daughters. “To Jane especially. They haven’t got their sea-legs on at present; but it will be all right in a day or two. Or you shall ask them the reason why.”
An exceedingly smart lady’s maid brushed past the earl, brushed past Jane, and addressed her mistress, with whom she had arrived.
“Your chamber is in order now, my lady, and what you’ll want to-night unpacked. I thought your ladyship might like a fire, so I have had one lighted.”
The countess passed out of the room, glad as the earl, perhaps, to make her escape. Jane grasped a chair in her heart-sickness.
Oh, reader! surely you can feel for her! She was hurled without warning from the post of authority in her father’s home, in which she had been mistress for years; she was hurled from the chief place in her father’s heart. One whom she regarded as in every way beneath her, whom she disliked and despised, over whom she had held control, was exalted into her place; raised over her. She might have borne that bitterness: not patiently, but still she might have borne it: but what she could not bear was that another should become more to her father than she was. He whom she had so revered and loved, he in whom her very life had been bound up, had now taken to himself an idol—and Jane henceforth was nothing.
She dragged her aching limbs back to her dressing-room and cowered down before the fire with a low moan. Judith found her there. The girl had a letter in her hand.
“My lady, Pompey’s nearly out of his mind with alarm. He says he’d rather run away back to Africa than that his fault should become known to his master. My lord gave him a letter to post for you yesterday, and he forgot it, and has just found it in his pocket.”
Jane mechanically stretched out her hand for the letter; mechanically opened it. It was short and pithy.
“Dear Jane:—I married Miss Lethwait this morning, and we shall be home to tea to-morrow: have things ship-shape. You behaved ill to her when she was with us, and she felt it keenly, but you’ll take care to steer clear of that quicksand for the future; for remember she’s my wife now, and will be the mistress of my home.
“Your affectionate father,
“Oakburn.”
Jane crushed the letter in her hand and let her head fall, a convulsive sob that arose in her throat from time to time alone betraying her anguish. If ever the iron entered into the soul of woman, it had surely entered into that of Jane Chesney.
CHAPTER XXX.BACK AT THE OLD HOME.
They stood together in the library—the earl and his daughter Jane. The morning sun streamed in at the window, playing on the fair smooth hair of Jane, showing all too conspicuously the paleness of her cheek, the utter misery of her countenance. The earl, looking bluff and uncomfortable, paced the carpet restlessly, his stick, for a wonder, lying unheeded in a corner.
It was their first meeting since the of his return the previous night. Ah, what a night it had been for Jane! Never for an instant had she closed her eyes. As she went to bed, so she rose; not having once lost consciousness of the blow that had been dealt out to her.
She had heard the earl go into the library, after his breakfast. He had taken it with the countess and Lucy. And Jane, drinking at a gulp the cup of tea brought to her, and which had stood neglected until it was cold, went down stairs and followed him in.
Not to reproach him; not to cast a word of indignation on the usurping countess; simply to speak of herself, and what her future course must be.
“This is no longer a home for me, papa,” she quietly began, striving to subdue all outward token of emotion, of the bitter pain that was struggling within her. “I think you must see that it is not. Will you help me to another?”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Jane,” said the earl, testily, wishing he was breasting the waves in a hurricane off the Cape, rather than in this dilemma. “It will all smooth down in a few days, if you’ll only let it.”
Jane lifted her eyes to him, a whole world of anguish in their depths. “I could not stop here,” she said, in a low tone, quite painful from its earnestness. “Papa, it would kill me.”
And it seemed as if it really would kill her. Lord Oakburn grunted something unintelligible, and looked uncommonly ill-at-ease.
“You must let me go away, papa. Perhaps you will help me to another home?”
“What home? Where d’ye want to go?” he crossly asked.
“I have been thinking that I could go to South Wennock,” she said. “I cannot remain in London. The house at South Wennock has not let since we left it; it is lying useless there, with its furniture; and, now that the winter is approaching, it will not be likely to let. Suffer me to go back there.”
Lord Oakburn took a few strides up and down without reply. Jane stood, as before, near the table, one hand leaning on it, as if for support.
“It’s the most rubbishing folly in the world, Jane! You’d be as comfortable at home as ever you were, if you’d only bring your mind to it. Do you suppose she has come into the house to make things unpleasant for us? You don’t know her, if you think that. But there!—have it your own way! If you’d like to go back to South Wennock for the winter, you can.”
“Thank you,” answered Jane, with a suppressed sob. “You will allow me sufficient to live upon, papa?”
“I’ll see about that,” said the earl, testily. “Let me know what you want, and I’ll do what I can.”
“I should like to continue in it, papa: to make it my home for life.”
“Stuff, Jane! Before you have been there six months you’ll be right glad to come back to us.”
“You will let me take Lucy, papa?”
“No; I’ll be shot if I do!” returned the earl, raising his voice in choler. “I don’t approve of your decamping off at all, though I give in to it; but I will never permit Lucy to share in such rebellion. You needn’t say more, Jane. If my other daughters leave me, I will keep her.”
Jane sighed as she gave up the thought of Lucy. She moved from the table and held out her hand.
“Good-by, papa. I shall go to-day.”
“Short work, my young lady,” was the answer. “You’ll come to see the folly of your whim speedily, I hope.”
He shook hands. But, in his vexation and annoyance, he did not offer to kiss her, and he did not say “Good-by.” Perhaps he felt vexed at himself as much as at Jane.
She went up to her room. Judith was busy at the dressing-table, and a maid was making the bed. Jane motioned to the latter to quit the chamber.
“I am going back to South Wennock, Judith, to live at the old house on the Rise. I leave for it to-day. Would you like to go, and remain with me?”
Judith looked too surprised to speak. She had a glass toilette-bottle in her hand, dusting it, and she laid it down in wonder. Jane continued.
“If you do not wish to go with me, I suppose you can remain here with Lady Lucy. They will want a maid for her, unless Lady Oakburn’s is to attend on her. That can be ascertained.”
“I will go with you, my lady,” said Judith.
“I shall be glad if you will. But mine will be a very quiet household. Only you and another, at the most.”
“I would prefer to go with you, my lady.”
“Then, Judith, let us make haste with the preparations. We must be away from this house to-day.”
Scarcely had she spoken when Lucy came dancing in, her cheeks and her eyes glowing.
“O Jane! I hope we shall all be happy together!” she exclaimed. “I think we can be. Lady Oakburn is so kind. She means to get Miss Snow a nice situation, and to teach me herself. She says she will not entrust my education to anybody else.”
“I am going away, Lucy,” said Jane, drawing the little gild to her. “I wish—I wish I could have had you with me? But papa will not”
“Going away!” repeated Lucy. “Where?”
“I am going back to South Wennock to live.”
“Oh Jane! And to leave papa! What will he do without you?”
A spasm passed over Jane Chesney’s face. “He has some one else now, Lucy.”
Lucy burst into tears. “And I, Jane! What shall I do? You have never been away from me in all my life!”
A struggle with herself, and then Jane’s tears burst forth. For the first time since the descending of the blow. She laid her face on Lucy’s neck and sobbed aloud.
Only for a few moments did she suffer herself to indulge the grief. “I cannot afford this, child,” she said; “I have neither time nor emotion to spare to-day. You must leave me, or I shall not be ready.”
Lucy went down, her face wet. Lady Oakburn, who seemed to be taking to her new home and its duties quite naturally, was sorting some of Lucy’s music in the drawing-room. She looked just as she had used to look as Miss Lethwait; but she wore this morning a beautiful dress of lama, shot with blue and gold, and a lace cap of guipure. Lucy’s noisy entrance and noisy grief caused her to turn abruptly.
“My dear child, what is the matter?”
“Jane is going away,” was the sobbing answer.
“Going away!” echoed the countess, not understanding.
“Yes, she is going back to live at South Wennock, she says. She and Judith are packing up to go to-day.”
Lady Oakburn was as one struck dumb. For a minute she could neither stir nor speak. Self-reproach was taking possession of her.
“Does your papa know of this, Lucy?”
“Oh yes, I think so,” sobbed Lucy. “Jane said she had asked papa to let me go with her, and he would not.”
Lady Oakburn quitted the room and went in search of the earl. He was in the library still, pacing it with his stick now—the stick having just menaced poor Pompey’s head, who had come in with a message.
“Lucy tells me that Lady Jane is about to leave,” began the countess. “Oh, Lord Oakburn, it is what I feared! I would almost rather have died than come here to sow dissension in your house. Can nothing be done?”
“No, it can’t,” said the earl. “When Jane’s determined upon a thing, she is determined. It’s the fault of the family, my lady; as you’ll find when you have been longer in it.”
“But, Lord Oakburn”
“My dear, look here. All the talking in the world won’t alter it, and I’d rather hear no more upon the subject. Jane will go to South Wennock; but I daresay she’ll come to her senses before she has lived there many months.”
Did a recollection cross the earl’s mind of another of his daughters, of whom he had used the self-same words? Clarice! She would come to her senses, he said, if let alone. But it seemed she had not come to them yet.
Lady Oakburn, more grieved, more desolate than can well be imagined, for she was feeling herself to be a wretched interloper, in her lively conscientiousness, went upstairs to Jane’s room and knocked at it. Jane was alone then. She was standing before a chest of drawers, taking out their contents. The countess was agitated, even to tears.
“Oh, Lady Jane, do not inflict this unhappiness upon me! I wish I had never entered the house, if the consequences are to involve your leaving it.”
Jane stood, calm, impassive, scarcely deigning to raise her haughty eyelids.
“You should have thought of consequences before, madam.”
“If you could know how very far from my thoughts it would be to presume in any way upon my position!” continued the countess imploringly. “If you would consent to be still the mistress of the house, Lady Jane”
“I beg your pardon,” interrupted Jane, in a haughty tone of reproof, as if she would recall her to common sense. “My time is very short,” she continued: “may I request to be left alone?”
Lady Oakburn saw there was no help for it, no remedy; and she turned to quit the room with a gesture of grief and pain. “I can only pray that the time may come when you will know me better, Lady Jane. Believe me, I would rather have died, than been the means of turning you from your home.”
Taking leave of none but Lucy and Miss Snow, Lady Jane quitted the house with Judith in the course of the afternoon. Lord Oakburn had gone out: his wife, Jane would not see. And in that impromptu fashion Lady Jane returned to South Wennock, and took up her abode again in the old house, startling the woman who had charge of it.
The next day Jane wrote to her father. Her intention was to live as quietly as possible, she told him, keeping only two maids—Judith, to attend upon her personally, and a general servant—and a very modest sum indeed Jane named as an estimation of what it would cost her to live upon. But Lord Oakburn was more liberal, and exactly doubled it: in his answer he told her, her allowance would be at the rate of five hundred a year.
But the past trouble reacted upon Jane, and she became really ill. Mr. John Grey was called in to her. He found the sickness more of the mind than the body, and knew that time alone could work a cure.
“My dear lady, if I were to undertake you as a patient I should but be robbing you,” he said to her, at his second interview. “Tonics? Well, you shall have some if you wish; but the best tonic will be time.”
She saw that he divined how cruel had been the blow of the earl’s marriage, the news of which had caused quite a commotion in South Wennock. Even this remote allusion to it Jane would have resented in some; but there was that about Mr. Grey that seemed to draw her to him as a friend. She sat at the table in the little square drawing-room—little, as compared to some of the rooms to which she had lately been accustomed—and leaned her cheek upon her hand. Mr. Grey was seated on the other side the hearth, opposite to her. It was getting towards the dusk of evening, and the red blaze of the fire played on Jane’s pale face.
“Yes,” she acknowledged, “it is time alone that can do much for me, I believe. I feel—I feel that I shall never be blithe again. But I should like some tonic medicine, Mr. Grey.”
“You shall have it, Lady Jane. I fancy you are naturally not very strong.”
“Not very strong, perhaps. But I have hitherto enjoyed good health. Are there any changes at South Wennock?” she continued, not sorry to quit the subject of self for some other.
“No, I think not,” he answered; “nothing in particular, that would interest you. A few people have died; a few have married: as is the case in all places.”
“Does Mr. Carlton get much practice?” she asked, overcoming her repugnance to speak of that gentleman, in her wish for some information as to how he and Laura were progressing.
“He gets a great deal,” said Mr. Grey. “The fact is, quite a tide has set in against my brother, and Mr. Carlton reaps the benefit.”
“I do not understand,” said Jane.
“People seem to have taken a dislike to my brother, on account of that unhappy affair in Palace Street,” he explained. “Or rather, I should say, to distrust him. In short, people won’t have Mr. Stephen Grey to attend them any longer: if I can’t go, they run for Mr. Carlton, and thus he has now a great many of our former patients. South Wennock is a terrible place for gossip; everybody must interfere with his neighbour’s affairs. Just now,” added Mr. John Grey, with a genial smile, “the town is commenting on Lady Jane Chesney’s having called in me, instead of Mr. Carlton, her sister’s husband.”
Jane shook her head. “I dislike Mr. Carlton personally very much,” she said. “Had he never entered our family to sow dissension in it, I should still have disliked him. But this must be a great trouble to Mr. Stephen Grey.”
“It is a great annoyance. I wonder sometimes that Stephen puts up with it so patiently. ‘It will come round with time,’ is all he says.”
“Has any clue been obtained to the unfortunate lady who died?” asked Jane.
“Not the slightest. She lies, poor thing, in the corner of St. Mark’s Churchyard, unclaimed and unknown.”
“But, has her husband never come forward to inquire after her?” exclaimed Lady Jane, in wonder. “It was said at the time, I remember, that he was travelling. Surely he must have returned?”
“No one whatever has come forward,” was Mr. Grey’s reply. “Neither he nor anybody else. In short, Lady Jane, but for that humble grave and the obloquy that has become the property of my brother Stephen, the whole affair might well seem a myth; a something that had only happened in a dream.”
“Does it not strike you as being altogether very singular?” said Lady Jane, after a pause of thought. “The affair itself, I mean.”
“Very much so indeed. It so impressed me at the time of the occurrence; far more than it did my brother.”
“It would almost seem as though—as though the poor young lady had had no husband,” concluded Lady Jane. “If it be not uncharitable to the dead to say so.”
“That is the opinion I incline to,” avowed Mr. John Grey. “My brother, on the contrary, will not entertain it; he feels certain, he says, that in that respect things were as straight as they ought to be. But for one thing, I should adopt my opinion indubitably, and go on, as a natural sequence, to the belief that she herself introduced the fatal drops into the draught.”
“And that one thing—what is it?” asked Jane, interested in spite of her own cares. But indeed the tragedy from the first had borne much interest for her—as it had for everybody else in South Wennock.
“The face that was seen on the stairs by Mr. Carlton.”
“But I thought Mr. Carlton maintained afterwards that he had not seen any face there—that it was a misapprehension of his own?”
“Rely upon it, Mr. Carlton did see a face there, Lady Jane. The impression conveyed to his mind at the moment was, that a face—let us say a man—was there; and I believe it to have been a right one. The doubt arose to him afterwards with the improbability: and, for one thing, he may wish to believe that there was nobody, and to impress that belief upon others.”
“But why should he wish to do that?” asked Jane.
“Because he must be aware that it was very careless of him not to have put the matter beyond doubt at the time. To see a man hovering in that stealthy manner near a sick lady’s room would be the signal for unearthing him to most medical attendants. It ought to have been so to Mr. Carlton; and he is no doubt secretly taking blame to himself for not having done it.”
“I thought he did search.”
“Yes, superficially. He carried out a candle and looked around. But he should have remained on the landing, and called to those below to bring lights, so as not to allow a chance of escape. Of course, he had no thought of evil.”
“And you connect that man with the evil?”
“I do,” said Mr. Grey, as he rose to leave. “There’s not a shadow of doubt on my mind that that man was the author of Mrs. Crane’s death.”
(To be continued.)
HEFFIE’S TROUBLE.
I remember how late we all sat round the fire that night, Aunt Rachel, Cousin Lucy, and I. It was such a cold wild night, and such a tumult was going on out of doors, as made the pleasant cheerful warmth within seem doubly pleasant and cheerful.
My aunt had been left a widow some years since, with two children, a son and a daughter; my cousin Lucy, and Arthur, who was now in a government office in London. I had lived my childish years away, knowing no other home than my aunt’s pretty cottage at Ashwood, no mother’s face but hers. I had been given to her when my parents left England for India, when I was little more than four years old; it was there my mother died soon after their arrival, leaving my poor father desolate in a strange land. And now, after twelve years of Indian service, he had come back to live in the old Hall at Riverbank, a lovely spot, which had belonged to our family for many generations past.
To that sweet home, one golden June day, he had brought my gentle mother, a pretty bride of seventeen; and there, about a year after, I, their only child, was born. Being so young when I left it, I had of course little or no recollection of the place, nor do I remember having any desire to see it again. You call this strange and unnatural; perhaps it was, but then our home at Ashwood was very retired indeed, a sunny nook in a quiet comer of this busy moving world. Beyond the rector and his wife, we had very few neighbours. Lucy and I had only each other to play with while Arthur was away at school; and when he returned for the holidays, we were happy indeed.
So quietly and peacefully the narrow, waveless stream of our life flowed on, and we were happy and content; not knowing any other, we cared not to have it widened. I do not think this circumscribed life of ours did any real harm to Lucy; with me it was otherwise. I suffered, where she escaped untouched; for we were very different, very unlike each other.
Hers was a frank, sympathetic, trusting nature, that easily attached itself. You could not help loving her if you tried. She would creep into your heart like a little bird, and there make a green little nest for herself, even before you were aware. My disposition, on the contrary, was shy, reserved, and cold; or, rather, my affections were not easily stirred into warmth. I was slow to open my heart, and I opened it only to a few; but for them I had a kind of passionate worship, that would have considered no sacrifice too great, no self-renunciation too impossible. But, ah! at Ashwood my love had never been put to a severer test than the little daily efforts to please my gentle aunt and cousins. Beyond them I wanted no one else; I never cared to make friends. Even my father’s name, that name which above all others, should have had a sacred shrine in my heart (I say it now in all the anguish of a sorrowful shame burning at my breast), had little power to kindle any emotion there. And so, when one day the news had come to us that he was going to marry again (a widow lady, with an only daughter a little older than myself) it did not please or trouble me. I received it calmly and quietly, as something I had little concern in. But when, a little later, a letter came telling of their arrival in England, and that now he had returned home he wished to have his child again, I felt as if a heavy blow had fallen upon my heart, and only yielded as to a cruel necessity. Dreadful to me was the thought of leaving my aunt and cousins, of changing my calm, unruffled life at Ashwood for a new existence among strangers, for they were all more or less strangers to me.
And so, as I said before, we three sat round the fire very late that night. We heard the clock in the hall strike the hour of midnight, and still we never moved. I think each of us in her secret heart dreaded to be the first to break up that last home conference. Lucy, with an expression of touching sadness in her sweet face, sat looking into the fire far more gently and submissively than I into my future life; whilst dear, kind, Aunt Rachel would now and then try to cheer us by some pleasant, hope-assuring word, though I could see that her own eyes were growing dim while she spoke. And so at last we said good night, once more and for the last time; and once more Cousin Lucy and I lay down to sleep, side by side, in the two little French beds with rosebud curtains, in that same dear room we had called the nursery long ago. Before the sun went down again we were many long miles apart. The old life was gone; and Aunt Rachel’s fond, earnest blessing, and Lucy’s tearful embrace, were all that remained to me of the happy home days that would never come back.
Well, I arrived at the old house at Riverbank, that house which had been my mother’s home for nearly all her married life; yet my heart refused to recognise it as my own. My father met me in the hall and said, “Heffie, you are quite a woman; I am glad, very glad, to have my child again.” And my stepmother greeted me kindly, affectionately; and Agnes took my hand and said (with her eyes looking kindly into mine), “shall we be sisters?”
And so they took me in among them; and day by day they strove, with tender words and loving deeds, to win my wayward, sullen heart, that still remained shut up within itself, closely as ever door was locked and barred.
Day by day they strove with me, constantly, patiently, but in vain; because I would not strive with myself. The old life was gone—the old life around and within me; and instead of trying to read calmly the new leaf that lay open before me, I only stained it with my tears, and kept ever in my memory, turning again and again the pages I had for ever finished. I lived and moved in a kind of dream, seeing and hearing, yet taking no heed of what I saw or heard. I spent hours in my own room, reading over and over again the books Lucy had given to me the night before I left them. Most of them we had read together, she and I; and now I must read alone; and often, as the short winter afternoon was growing dark and cold, a sick, dreary feeling would creep over my heart—of miserable loneliness, that seemed consuming me in its very intensity. Ah! had I not brought all my trouble upon myself? No; I was not pretty, like Agnes. I knew that, and my father knew it also; and he was proud of her, I could see; but not proud of his poor, pale little Heffie. It was always Agnes who went out to ride with him, who was ready to walk wherever he liked, who read to him in the evening when he was tired. Why was it that I was seldom with him, that I never read or sang to him for hours as she did? Because I had a false feeling in my foolish heart that he could not love me, could not care for me. How should he, when I was so little to him, and she so much? So days grew into weeks, weeks into months, and summer came once more, once more to gladden men and women and children’s hearts, with long days of golden sunshine, and soft cool dewy nights. Yes, summer came once more, and with it came a change in my life, my self-inflicted, lonely life. One morning I received a letter from my Cousin Arthur, saying that his mother and Lucy were going to spend the next three months with some friends in Scotland; and that if his uncle and Mrs. Leigh would kindly receive him for a little while, he would so very much like to come and spend his summer holiday at Riverbank. He longed to see me again; it would be like a coming back of the old days.
“Yes, Heffie, certainly,” said my father, when I gave him Arthur’s message, “let him come by all means. We shall be delighted to see him; it will make a pleasant change, a very pleasant change for us all.”
As I rose to leave the room I saw his wife’s gentle eyes turned on me with a kind, half-pitying look I had often seen there of late, and heard her say (when she thought I was out of hearing), “Poor child, I am glad she will have this pleasure. I long to see a little colour in that pale face; it is too young to look so sad.” And my father answered, “Yes, it is too young; life should not be difficult at seventeen. Oh, Margaret! I have a great fear haunting me sometimes.” And here he lowered his voice to almost a whisper, so that I heard no more; and I hastened up-stairs to write my letter. What was this great fear that haunted my father? I could not tell. I had often remarked lately (as I said before) my stepmother’s eyes watching me with an anxious, half-pitying expression; and once or twice I had seen them fill with tears when she thought I was not noticing her. Did this great fear haunt her, too ? Three days passed by, and Arthur came—pleasant, cheerful, kind, Cousin Arthur. How my heart bounded at the sight of him, at the sound of his fine manly voice, that seemed to me like an echo from the old life,—the old life that was gone. All was changed during the few weeks he stayed at Riverbank. It was as if some kind fairy had come with her magic wand and touched the hours, and turned them into gold. I felt almost quite happy. Something of my old self seemed to have come back. It was a season of strange, wonderful gladness—a short, happy dreaming, that went too quickly by—and I awoke crying, to find it over, gone.
I knew he and Agnes liked each other from the beginning; nothing was more natural. Many of their tastes and pursuits were the same. And so it happened that day by day there grew up between them a sure, yet silent sympathy, so sure and silent that for a long time neither was conscious how much the other was helping to make the sunny June of life more bright and sunny still. Week after week went by, till we counted six, and then Arthur’s leave had expired, and he must return to London. The last evening came (how far away it seems, now as I look back). I was sitting alone in my own room, not reading or writing, or hardly thinking; but listening listlessly to the dull patter of the rain against the window, for it had been pouring all day.
Presently I heard a knock at my door, and Arthur entered, saying he wanted to talk with me. He had hardly seen me since the morning. “Dear Heffie,” he said, “I want to tell you something, something that I want you to feel glad for. Can you guess?”
“No. How should I?”
“Well, then, Agnes has promised to-day to be my wife. Say you are glad, Heffie, won’t you? You used to be glad years ago when I brought home a new prize from school; but now you do not speak.”
“Arthur, I am very glad.” I said it with my lips, but a voice in my heart answered, “No, Heffie, you are not glad; you know you are not.”
“Why not?”
Because that moment had revealed to my heart a secret it had been keeping from itself, a secret it had not dared to discover; but now it had stolen out from the dark, silent corner where it had hidden itself away, and, standing out like a giant fierce and strong in the broad open daylight, it stared me in the face mockingly, cruelly; and I saw that it was an idol I had been bowing down to, a pillar I had been leaning on for strength; and the idol was crumbling, the pillar was falling, and I, who had leaned too long on that one support, was weak (oh! how weak) now it was gone.
Arthur stayed with me for a long while that evening, talking of many things,—of Agnes most of all. He asked me to be kind to her when he was gone, to show her love and sympathy for his sake.
He knew not he was asking me to do a hard thing. The next day he was gone, and Agnes moved about the house quiet and subdued, as if a little shadow had come to dim her sky for a moment; while I, who had no right to grieve, yet grieved more hopelessly. Now, at the distance of nearly twenty years, I can look back calmly on that time, as on the recollection of a troubled dream, from which the awakening was tranquil as the clear shining after rain. But then there was no shining, no rest, no comfort. The next few months that passed before the winter came (that was when the wedding was to be) were very dreary ones to me. There was a little brief while indeed, in which Aunt Rachel and Lucy paid us a visit on their way home from Scotland; but when that was over I felt even more lonely than ever. My heart was more than ever closed to Agnes. I felt towards her as if she had done me a cruel wrong; as if she had stolen from me something that might have been mine; that I would have valued, oh how pricelessly!
One afternoon, near the end of November, as I was sitting in the library with my father, he looked up from his newspaper suddenly, and said, “Heffie, my child, I wish I could see you happy, really happy. I cannot bear to see that pale face of yours day after day without a smile upon it. Can you not borrow a little sunshine from Agnes?”
I did not answer for a few moments. Then a desperate resolve seemed suddenly to shape itself into words on my lips, and I said, “Let me go away, father; let me leave Riverbank. I can never be happy while I stay here. Let me go.”
“Let you go away, Heffie! What can you mean? Where do you want to go?”
“Anywhere, father; anywhere! I will be a governess, or a companion. I will do anything; only let me go away.”
“Why, Heffie, you do not know what you are saying. Are you in your senses, child? What makes you so unhappy? Tell me.”
“I cannot, father; I cannot tell any one. But, oh! I want to go away! I want to go away!” And in the passion of my entreaty I sobbed bitterly.
“Heffie,” my father exclaimed half frightened, “what is the matter? Are you ill?”
Just then the door opened, and Mrs. Leigh entered the room. She tried to speak to me: but I rushed wildly past her into the hall and up-stairs, never pausing till I reached my own room, and there, sinking on the floor beside the sofa, I pressed my head against the pillows and wept as I had not wept for a long while.
Presently I heard a step in the passage. Some one knocked at my door. I did not answer, or even raise my head; I dreaded that they should see my tears. Again the knock was repeated; but I never moved. At length the door opened, and I knew, without looking back, that it was my stepmother who stood near me. She laid her hand gently on my shoulder, saying, “Heffie, my poor child, what is the matter? Are you ill, or in trouble, or has any one been unkind to you? Do tell me.”
But still I did not move, but kept my face buried in the sofa pillow.
“Heffie,” she said again, and this time there was even a little sternness in her voice, “Heffie, listen to me. I must speak to you; I must know what all this means.”
Her manner quieted me in an instant. I let her raise me from the floor, and, seating herself on the sofa, made me sit beside her, put her arm round me, and drew my head to rest on her bosom. She did not try to stop my tears altogether: they were flowing more quietly now; but I was cold and trembling, though my head was burning; and, taking one of my hands, she gently chafed it in her own without speaking a word for some time. At last, as I grew calmer still, she spoke again.
“Heffie, dearest love, why will you not tell me what is troubling this poor little heart so much?”
“Because, because I cannot tell any one. I must not; indeed I must not. Nobody could help me if I did.”
“Is it so very bad, dear,—so incurable? Oh, Heffie! I would be to you in your dear mother’s place if you would let me,—if you would open your heart to me, and trust me as you would have trusted her. You are too young to bear all this grief alone. Will you not trust me with part of it, at least?”
What right had I to all this tenderness from her, those words of sympathy,—I who, for nearly a whole year, had coldly cast away the love she would have given me? Did I deserve it now? I knew 1 did not; but that last appeal—so tenderly, so earnestly made—seemed to touch somewhere in my heart a chord that had never thrilled before. My proud, wayward heart was bowed in a moment, powerless to close itself any longer; for she had found the right key, and used it skilfully. Yes, after a year’s hard striving (cold and resisting on my side, patient and gentle on hers), I was conquered at last; and, subdued and humbled as a penitent child, I lay weeping in her arms, depending on her love. And there, in the shadow of the dark November twilight, I told her all my trouble: no, not all, only a part; but she (with the quick insight of her woman’s sympathy) guessed the rest. She did not say many words to comfort me. She only said, “My poor child!” But I could feel her silent sympathy far more than words. I felt it in the closer pressure of her arms round me, in the touch of her hand on my hair as she tenderly stroked it from my forehead, and pressed an earnest kiss upon it.
“You are very young, dear,” she said at length, “for such a hard battle; but you will gain the victory if you will ask for strength.”
I knew not how long we remained together that evening. I can dimly remember trying to raise my head to ask her forgiveness for the past, and being hardly able to speak for the burning pain in it. And I remember how kindly she helped me to bed, and sat by my side for a long while, till she thought I had fallen asleep; but the next few days I can very faintly recall: they are almost a blank in my memory. I knew that I was very ill, and at one time in danger of dying. I lay in a half-sleeping, half-waking state, having no part in the life that was going on around me. My dreams were restless and distressed; always haunted by that one image—the pillar I had leaned on too long for strength. Once I thought my cousin Arthur and I were walking on the side of a precipice: it was dark and foggy, and every step I was afraid of falling. At last I felt the arm I leaned on growing weak; but I thought it was still strong enough to support me. By degrees, however, it seemed to give way; my foot slipped, for the mist was in my eyes, and I felt myself falling. I cried out in my agony of fear, “Oh, Arthur, save me! do not leave me!” And then in my distress I awoke, to see Agnes bending over me, while she bathed my burning forehead.
“What is the matter?” I said. “Have I been ill? Where am I?”
“In your own room, Heffie dear. You have been ill; but you are better now,” she answered.
“Oh, yes, I am better now. Have you been near me long?”
“Mamma and I have both been with you. We want to make you well and strong again.”
“Do you? I thought you could not love me. Why do you stay with me?”
“Stay with you, Heffie! Why should I leave you? You would not send me away, would you?”
“I thought you would hate me. I was unkind, cruel to you.”
“Hush, Heffie, that is all over now. Let us try to forget it, shall we? But here is Dr. White coming to see you.” And at that moment the door opened, and my stepmother and the doctor came in.
I will not dwell on those days of weakness, and weeks of slow recovery, that were ended at last. I have said that that time, as I see it now, was a troubled evil dream, from which the awaking was calm and tranquil as the clear shining after rain. Yes, the shining came at last; the battle was won, because the strength that won it was not my own. Well, the day arrived—the wedding day—his and hers. I saw them kneeling side by side, and heard the words, “I, Arthur, take thee, Agnes, to be my wedded wife.” And in my heart I blessed them, him and her. And so they went away to London, and I tried to fill her place at home; tried to be to them what she had been; and they were very kind and patient with me, and would not let me see how sadly they missed her.
Nearly twenty years have come and gone since then, and many things are changed. My father and stepmother are sleeping side by side in the quiet village churchyard at Riverbank. The old Hall has been sold; but, as the new owner is now abroad, it has a melancholy, deserted look.
Arthur and Agnes have a sunny little home in Devonshire. They are very happy in each other; very happy in their one child, whom they have named Heffie. She is now a fair girl of eighteen, with the image of her mother’s youth upon her. And as I gaze into the blue depths of those true, earnest eyes, I think, half-mournfully, half-thankfully, of the old days at Riverbank.
Aunt Rachel has left her pretty cottage at Ashwood, for the new rector and his wife have begged her to make her home with them, the rector’s wife being Cousin Lucy.
And I, reader? my home is a small lodging in a quiet street in London—London, “that gathering-place of souls,” as Mrs. Browning has I have only two rooms; but they are snug and pleasant enough. And here I live, and write books, and make verses, very thankful if now and then I am allowed to add my little drop of help or comfort to the sea of human charity around me. And I am happy; for though my cup may never be full to the very brim, still I know it is fuller (how much fuller!) than I deserve.
LORD OAKBURN’S DAUGHTERS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “EAST LYNNE.”
CHAPTER XXIX. AN IRON ENTERING INTO THE SOUL.
The Earl of Oakburn was in a bustle. The earl was one of those people who always are in a bustle when starting upon a journey, be it ever so short a one. He was going on a visit to Sir James Marden at Chesney Oaks, and he was putting himself in a commotion over it.
To Jane’s surprise he had announced an intention not to take Pompey. Jane wondered how he would get on without that faithful and brow-beaten follower, if only in the light of an object to roar at; and when she asked the earl the reason for not taking him, he had civilly replied that it was no business of hers. Jane felt sorry for the decision, for she believed Pompey to be essential to her father’s comforts; and she knew the earl, with all his temper, liked the old servant, and was glad to have him about him; but otherwise Jane attached no importance to the matter. So the earl was driven to the Paddington station, and Pompey, after seeing his master and his carpet-bag safely in an express train, returned with the carriage to Portland Place.
Jane Chesney was a little busy on her own score just now, for she was seeking a governess to replace Miss Lethwait; one who should prove to be a more desirable inmate than that lady had been. Jane blamed herself greatly for not having inquired more minutely into Miss Lethwait’s antecedents; she had been, as she thought now, too much prepossessed in her favour at first sight, had taken her too entirely upon trust. That Jane would not err again on that score, her present occupation was proving—that of searching out the smallest details in connection with the lady now recommended to her, a Miss Snow. Not many days yet had Miss Lethwait quitted the house, but Jane had forcibly put her out of remembrance. Never, willingly, would she think again upon one, whose conduct in that one particular, the episode to which Jane had been a witness the night of the party, had been so entirely obnoxious.
Lord Oakburn was whirled along that desirable line for travellers, the Great Western. In the opposite corner of the comfortable carriage there happened to be another old naval commander sitting, and the terms that the two got upon were so good, that his lordship could not believe his eyes when he saw the well-known station at Pembury, or believe that they had already reached it.
He had, however, to part with his new acquaintance, for Pembury station was his alighting point. He found Sir James Marden’s carriage waiting for him, a sort of mail phaeton, Sir James himself, a little man with a yellow face, seated in the box seat. The earl and his carpet-bag were duly installed in it, and Sir James drove out of the station.
As they were proceeding up the street to take the avenue for Chesney Oaks,—the pleasant avenue, less green now than it had been in spring, which wound through the park to the house,—a small carriage, drawn by a pair of beautiful ponies, came rapidly down upon them. Not more beautiful in their way, those ponies, than were the ladies seated in the carriage. Two gay, lovely ladies, laughing and talking with each other, their veils and their streamers and their other furbelows, flying behind them in the wind. The one, driving, was Colonel Marden’s wife, and she was about to rein in and greet Sir James, when her companion, with a half-smothered cry and a sudden paleness displacing the rich bloom on her cheeks, seized the reins and sent the ponies onward at a gallop. It was Lady Laura Carlton.
“Holloa!” exclaimed Sir James, “what was that for?”
Lord Oakburn, in his surprise, had started up in the phaeton. About the last person he had been thinking of was Laura, and Pembury was about the last place he would have expected to see her in. The fact was, Laura had recently met Mrs. Marden at a friend’s house near Great Wennock; the two ladies had struck up a sudden friendship, and Laura had come back with her for a few days’ visit.
“She was evidently scared at the sight of one of us, and I’m sure I never met her before to my knowledge,” cried Sir James, alluding to the lady seated with Mrs. Marden. “Do you know her, Lord Oakburn?”
“Know her!” repeated the earl, rather explosively. “I’m sorry to say I do know her, sir. She is an ungrateful daughter of mine, who ran away from her home to be married to a fellow, and never asked my leave.”
“It must be Lady Laura Carlton!” quickly exclaimed Sir James Marden.
“It is,” said the earl. “And I assure you I’d give a great deal out of my pocket if she were Lady Laura Anybody-else.”
“You’ll have to forgive her, I suppose. What a handsome girl she is!”
“No, I shan’t have to forgive her,” returned the earl, much offended at the suggestion. “I don’t intend to forgive her.”
Brave words, no doubt. But who knows what might have come of the interview had that pony carriage been allowed to stop? It might have been a turning point in Laura’s life, might have led to a reconciliation—for Lord Oakburn’s bark was worse than his bite, and he did love his children. But Laura Carlton, in her startled fear at seeing him so close to her, had herself given the check and the impetus, and the opportunity was gone by for ever.
“What brings her at Pembury?” growled the earl, as they drove through the park.
“I can’t tell,” replied Sir James. “I conclude she must be visiting at my brother’s.”
“I didn’t know she knew them,” was the comment of the earl. “Forgive a clandestine marriage! No, never!”
Brave words again of the Earl of Oakburn’s. Clandestine marriages are not good in themselves, and they often work incalculable ill, entailing embarrassing consequences on more than one generation, But the condemnation would have come with better grace from another than Lord Oakburn, seeing that he was contemplating something of the sort on his own account.
He slept one night at Chesney Oaks, and then he concluded his visit. Sir James Warden was surprised and vexed at the abrupt termination. He set it down to the unwelcome presence of the earl’s rebellious daughter at Pembury, and he pressed Lord Oakburn’s hand at parting, and begged him to come again shortly, at a more convenient period.
But most likely Lord Oakburn had never intended a longer stay. The probabilities were—it’s hard, you know, to have to write it of a middle-aged earl, a member of the sedate and honourable Upper House—that he had only taken Chesney Oaks as a blind to his daughters on his way to Miss Lethwait. For his real visit was to her.
Chesney Oaks was situated in quite an opposite part of the kingdom to Twifford vicarage, but by taking advantage of cross rails, Lord Oakburn contrived to reach Twifford late that same night. He did not intrude on them until the following morning. The house, a low one, covered with ivy, was small and unpretending, but exceedingly picturesque; its garden was beautiful, and the birds made their nests and sang in the clustering trees that surrounded the lawn and flowers.
In features they were very much alike, but in figure no two could be much more dissimilar than the father and daughter. The vicar was a little shruken man, particularly timid in manner; his daughter magnificent as a queen. If she had looked queenly in the handsomely proportioned rooms of the earl’s town house, how much more so did she look in the miniature little parlour of the vicarage.
Lord Oakburn entered upon his business in his usual blunt fashion. He had come down, he said, to make acquaintance with Mr. Lethwait, and to know when the wedding was to be.
The vicar replied by stating that Eliza had told him all. And he, the father, was deeply sensible of the honour done her by the Earl of Oakburn, and that he himself should be proud and pleased to see her his wife; but that he felt a scruple upon the point, as did Eliza. He felt that her entrance into the family might be very objectionable to the earl’s daughters.
And, knowing what you do know of the earl, you may be sure that that speech was the signal for an outburst. He poured forth a torrent of angry eloquence in his peculiar manner, so completely annihilating every argument but his own, that the timid clergyman never dared to utter another word of objection. The earl must have it his own way: as it had been pretty sure from the first he would have it.
“Eliza has been a good and dutiful daughter, my lord,” said the vicar, who in his retired life, his humble home, had hardly ever been brought into contact with one of the earl’s social degree. “My living has been very small, and my expenses have been inevitably large—that is, large for one in my position. The last years of my wife’s life were years of illness; she suffered from a complaint that required constant medical attendance and expensive nourishment, and Eliza was to us throughout almost as a guardian angel. Every penny she could spare from her own absolute expenses, she sent to us. She has put up with undesirable places where the discomforts were great, the insults hard to be borne, and would not throw herself out, lest we might suffer. She has been a good daughter,” he emphatically added; “she will, I hesitate not to say it, make a good wife. And if only your lordship’s daughters will”
Another interrupting burst from his lordship: his daughters had nothing to do with it, and he did not intend that they should have. And the vicar was finally silenced.
The earl did things like nobody else. He had spent the best part of his life at sea, and shore ideas and proprieties were still almost to him as a closed book. In discussing the arrangements of the marriage with Miss Lethwait—for he compelled her to discuss them, and he did it in a perfectly matter-of-fact manner, just as he might have discussed a debate in the Lords—she found herself obliged to hint, as he did not, that a tour, long or short, inland or foreign, as might be convenient, was usually deemed eligible on that auspicious occasion. The earl could not be brought to see it; did not understand it. What on earth was the matter with his house at home that they could not proceed direct to it on their wedding day? he demanded. Were there a brig convenient they might enjoy a month’s cruize in her, and he’d say something to it, or even a well-built yacht; but he hated land travelling, and was not going to encounter it.
Miss Lethwait thought of the horrors of sea-sickness, and left the brig and the yacht to drop into abeyance. Neither dared she, in the timidity of her new position, urge the tour further upon him; but she did shrink from being taken home to the midst of his daughters on the marriage day.
On the following day the earl went back to town, Miss Lethwait having succeeded in postponing the period of the marriage until October.
September was a busy month with Jane Chesney. The term for which they had engaged their present furnished residence was expiring, and Lord Oakburn took on lease one of the neighbouring houses in Portland Place.
Jane was in her element. Choosing furniture and planning out arrangements for their new home was welcome work, all being done with one primary object—the comfort of her father. The best rooms were appropriated to him, the best things were placed in them. Jane thought how happy they should be together, she and her father, in this settled homestead. They did not intend to go out of town that year: why should they? they had but a few months entered it. Custom? Fashion? The earl did not understand custom, and fashion was as a foreign ship to him. Jane only cared for what he cared.
They moved into the house the last week in September, Jane anxious with loving cares still. But for the mysterious and prolonged absence of Clarice, she would have been thoroughly and completely happy. Miss Snow was proving an efficient governess for Lucy, and Jane had leisure on her hands. The unpleasant episode in the reign of the last governess, Eliza Lethwait, had nearly faded from Jane Chesney’s memory, and she no more dreamt of connecting that condemned lady with certain occasional short absences of the earl in the country, than she dreamt of attributing them to visits paid to the Great Mogul.
The first week in October came in, and the evenings were getting wintry. Lord Oakburn had been away from home three days, and Jane, who had just got the house into nice condition, and was resting from her labours, had leisure to feel ill. Not actually ill, perhaps; but anything but well. She had felt so all day, a sick shivery feeling that she could not account for, a low-spirited sensation, as of some approaching evil. Do coming events thus cast their shadows before? There are those who tell us that they do. Not in that way, however, was Jane Chesney superstitious, or did she think of attributing her sensations to any such mystical cause. She “felt out of sorts” she said to Lucy’s governess, and supposed she had caught cold.
Causing a fire to be lighted in her dressing-room, a little snuggery on the second floor adjoining her bed-room, she resolved to make herself comfortable there for the evening. She ordered the tea-tray to be brought up, and sent a message for Miss Snow and Lucy.
Miss Snow, a little, lively, warm-mannered woman, the very reverse of the dignified Miss Lethwait, was full of trifling cares for Lady Jane. She threw a warm shawl on her shoulders, she insisted on wrapping her feet in flannel as they rested on the footstool before the fire, and she asked permission to make and pour out the tea.
Judith was at that moment bringing in the tea-tray. Judith—I’m sure I forget whether this has been mentioned before—had taken the place of own maid to Jane and Lucy when the change occurred in their fortunes. Jane valued her greatly, and the girl was deserving of it.
“A gentleman has called to inquire when the earl will be at home, my lady,” she said, as she put down the tray. “He wishes very particularly to see him.”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Jane, rather listlessly. “Who is it?”
“It is that same gentleman who has been here occasionally on Sir James Marden’s business,” replied Judith. “I heard him say to Wilson as I came through the hall that he had had a communication from Chesney Oaks which he wished the earl to see as soon as possible. Wilson asked me if I’d bring the message to your ladyship.”
Jane turned her head in some slight surprise. “A communication from Chesney Oaks?” she repeated. “But papa is at Chesney Oaks. You can tell the gentleman so, Judith.”
“No, Jane, papa’s not at Chesney Oaks,” interposed Lacy, who was dancing about the room with her usual restlessness. “If he had been going to Chesney Oaks he would have gone from the Paddington Station, wouldn’t he?”
“Well?” said Jane.
“Well, he went to the King’s Cross Station.”
“How do you know?” asked Jane.
Lucy gave a deprecatory glance at Miss Snow ere she entered on her confession. She had run out to her papa after he was in the carriage for a last last kiss, and heard Pompey give the order to the coachman, “The King’s Cross Station.”
Jane shook her head. “You must have been mistaken, Lucy,” she said. “I asked papa whether he was going to Chesney Oaks, and he—he—” Jane stopped a moment in recollection—“he nodded his head in the affirmative. It must have meant the affirmative,” she added, slowly, as if debating the point with herself. “I am sure he is at Chesney Oaks.”
“Shall I inquire of the coachman, my lady?” asked Judith. “He is down stairs.”
“Yes, do,” replied Jane. “And you can tell the gentleman, Sir James Marden’s agent, that I shall expect Lord Oakburn home daily until I see him. He seldom remains away above three days.”
Judith went down on her errand, and came up again. Lucy was right. The coachman had driven his master to the King’s Cross Station: the coachman further said that it was to the King’s Cross Station that he had driven his master on his recent absences. Jane wondered. She was not aware that Lord Oakburn knew any one on that line. This time he had taken Pompey with him.
Miss Snow busied herself with the tea; Lucy talked; Jane sat in listless idleness. And thus the time went on until a loud knock and ring resounded through the house. Jane lifted her eyes to the clock on the mantelpiece, and saw that it wanted ten minutes to nine.
“Visitors to-night!” she exclaimed, with vexation.
“Don’t admit them, Lady Jane,” spoke up Miss Snow impulsively, in her sympathy for Lady Jane. “You are not well enough.”
Lucy had escaped from the room, and Miss Snow caught her at the dignified pastime of listening. Stretched over the balustrades as far as she could stretch, her ears and eyes were riveted to what was going on in the hall below. The governess administered a sharp reprimand and ordered her to come away. But Lucy was absorbed, and altogether ignored both Miss Snow and the mandate.
“Do you hear me speak to you, Lady Lucy? Must I come for you, then?”
Lucy drew away now, but not, as it appeared, in obedience to the governess. Her face wore a puzzled look of surprise, and she went back to the room on tiptoe.
“Jane,” said she, scarcely above her breath, “Jane what do you think? It is papa and Miss Lethwait!”
Jane turned round on her chair. “What nonsense, Lucy! Miss Lethwait!”
“It is indeed, Jane. It looks just as though papa had brought her on a visit, and there’s some luggage coming into the hall. Miss Lethwait”
“It cannot be Miss Lethwait,” sharply interrupted Lady Jane, her tone betraying annoyance at the very mistake.
“Yes it is Miss Lethwait,” persisted Lucy. “She is dressed so well!—in a rich damask dress and a white bonnet, and an Indian shawl with a gold border. It is just like that Indian shawl of mamma’s that you never remove from the drawer and never wear, because you say it puts you too much in mind of her.”
“Lucy, you must certainly be dreaming!” reiterated Jane. “Miss Lethwait would never dare to step inside our house again. If”
Jane stopped. Wilson the footman had come up the stairs, and his face wore a blank look.
“I beg your pardon, my lady; the earl has arrived.”
“Well?” said Jane.
“He ordered me to come up to you, my lady, and ask whether there was nobody to receive him and—and—Lady Oakburn.”
“Bade you ask what?” demanded Jane, bending her haughty eyelids on the servant.
“My lady,” returned the man, thinking he would give the words as they were given to him, and then perhaps he should escape anger, “what his lordship said was this: ‘Go up and see where they are, and ask what’s the reason that nobody is about, to receive Lady Oakburn.’ They were the exact words, my lady.”
“Is it my aunt, the Dowager Lady Oakburn?” asked Jane in her wonder.
“It is Miss Lethwait, my lady. That is to say, she as was Miss Lethwait when she lived here.”
Lucy was right, then! A ghastly hue overspread the face of Jane Chesney. Not at the unhappy fact—which as yet, strange to say, had not dawned on her mind—but at the insult offered to her by this re-entrance of the governess into their house. Who was she, this Eliza Lethwait, that she should come again, and beard her in her home? Had he, her father, brought her—brought her on a visit, as surmised by Lucy?
The footman had already gone down stairs again. Jane flung aside Miss Snow’s wrapperings and prepared to descend. The governess had stood in a state of puzzled amazement, wondering what it all meant. On the stairs Jane encountered Judith. The girl was paler than usual, and very grave.
“My lady,” she whispered, arresting Jane’s progress, “do you know what has occurred?”
“I know that that person whom I turned from my house has dared to intrude into it again,” answered Lady Jane in her wrath, speaking far more openly than it was her custom to speak before a servant. “But she shall not stop in it; no, not for an hour. Let me pass, Judith.”
“Oh, my lady, hear the worst before you go in; before you enter upon a contest with her that perhaps she’d gain,” implored Judith, in her eager sympathy for her mistress. “My lord has married her, and has brought her home.”
Jane fell against the wall and looked at Judith, a pitiable expression of helplessness on her face. The girl resumed.
“Pompey says they were married yesterday morning; were married by Miss Lethwait’s father in his own church. He says, my lady, he finds it is to Miss Lethwait’s the earl has gone lately when he has been absent from town; not to Chesney Oaks.”
“Support me, Judith,” was the feeble prayer of the unhappy daughter.
Utterly sick and faint was she, and but for Judith’s help she would have fallen. She sunk down on the friendly stairs, and let her head rest on them until the faintness had passed. Then she rose, staggering, and went on with what feeble strength was left her.
“I must know the worst,” she moaned. “I must know the worst.”
Lucy, wondering and timid, stole into the drawing-room after her. Standing by its fire, her face turned to the door in expectation, was she who had quitted the house as Miss Lethwait, only six or seven weeks before. Jane’s eyes fell on her dress, as mentioned by Lucy, the rich sweeping silk, the pretty white bonnet, and the costly shawl—their own mother’s shawl! taken by the earl from its resting place to bestow on his new bride. Woman’s mind is a strange compound of strength and littleness; and to see that shawl on her shoulders brought to Jane’s heart perhaps the keenest pang of all. The earl was striding the room; his stick, suspiciously restless, coming down loudly with each step. He confronted his two daughters.
“So! here you are at last! And nothing ready, that I see, in the shape of welcome. Not so much as the tea laid! What’s the reason, Lady Jane?”
“We did not expect you,” replied Jane in a low tone, her back turned on the ex-governess.
“You got my letter. Wasn’t it plain enough?”
“I have not received any letter.”
“Not received any letter! By Jove! I’ll prosecute the post-office! Girls,” with a flourish of his hand towards his wife—“here’s your new mother, Lady Oakburn. You don’t want a letter to welcome her.”
It seemed that Jane, at any rate, wanted something, if not a letter. She persistently ignored the presence of the lady, keeping her face turned to her father. But when she tried to address him, no sound issued from her white and quivering lips. The new countess came forward, and humbly, deprecatingly, held out her hand to Jane.
“Lady Jane, I implore you, let there be peace between us. Suffer me to sue for it. It has pleased Lord Oakburn to make me his wife; but indeed I have not come here to interfere with his daughters’ privileges or to sow dissension in their home. Try and like me, Lady Jane! It will not be difficult to me to love you.”
Jane wheeled round, her white lips trembling, her face ablaze with scorn.
“Like you!” she repeated, her voice, in her terrible emotion, rising to a hiss. “Like you! Can we like the serpent that entwines its deadly coils around its victim? You have brought your arts to bear on my unsuspicious father, and torn him from his children. As you have dealt with us, Eliza Lethwait, may you so be dealt with when your turn shall come!”
The countess drew back in agitation. She laid her hand on Lucy.
“You at least will let me love you, Lucy! I loved you when I was with you, and I will endeavour to be to you a second mother. This entrance into your home is as embarrassing and painful to me as to you.”
Lucy burst into tears as she received the kiss pressed upon her lips. She had liked Miss Lethwait very much, but she did not like her to bring upon them this discomfort.
The earl and his stick, neither of them quite so brave as usual, went off to take refuge in the small room that they had made the library; glad perhaps, if the truth could be known, that he had a refuge just then to hide himself in.
“It’s new lines to them yet, Eliza,” he called out as he went, for the benefit of his rebellious daughters. “To Jane especially. They haven’t got their sea-legs on at present; but it will be all right in a day or two. Or you shall ask them the reason why.”
An exceedingly smart lady’s maid brushed past the earl, brushed past Jane, and addressed her mistress, with whom she had arrived.
“Your chamber is in order now, my lady, and what you’ll want to-night unpacked. I thought your ladyship might like a fire, so I have had one lighted.”
The countess passed out of the room, glad as the earl, perhaps, to make her escape. Jane grasped a chair in her heart-sickness.
Oh, reader! surely you can feel for her! She was hurled without warning from the post of authority in her father’s home, in which she had been mistress for years; she was hurled from the chief place in her father’s heart. One whom she regarded as in every way beneath her, whom she disliked and despised, over whom she had held control, was exalted into her place; raised over her. She might have borne that bitterness: not patiently, but still she might have borne it: but what she could not bear was that another should become more to her father than she was. He whom she had so revered and loved, he in whom her very life had been bound up, had now taken to himself an idol—and Jane henceforth was nothing.
She dragged her aching limbs back to her dressing-room and cowered down before the fire with a low moan. Judith found her there. The girl had a letter in her hand.
“My lady, Pompey’s nearly out of his mind with alarm. He says he’d rather run away back to Africa than that his fault should become known to his master. My lord gave him a letter to post for you yesterday, and he forgot it, and has just found it in his pocket.”
Jane mechanically stretched out her hand for the letter; mechanically opened it. It was short and pithy.
“Dear Jane:—I married Miss Lethwait this morning, and we shall be home to tea to-morrow: have things ship-shape. You behaved ill to her when she was with us, and she felt it keenly, but you’ll take care to steer clear of that quicksand for the future; for remember she’s my wife now, and will be the mistress of my home.
“Your affectionate father,
“Oakburn.”
Jane crushed the letter in her hand and let her head fall, a convulsive sob that arose in her throat from time to time alone betraying her anguish. If ever the iron entered into the soul of woman, it had surely entered into that of Jane Chesney.
CHAPTER XXX.BACK AT THE OLD HOME.
They stood together in the library—the earl and his daughter Jane. The morning sun streamed in at the window, playing on the fair smooth hair of Jane, showing all too conspicuously the paleness of her cheek, the utter misery of her countenance. The earl, looking bluff and uncomfortable, paced the carpet restlessly, his stick, for a wonder, lying unheeded in a corner.
It was their first meeting since the of his return the previous night. Ah, what a night it had been for Jane! Never for an instant had she closed her eyes. As she went to bed, so she rose; not having once lost consciousness of the blow that had been dealt out to her.
She had heard the earl go into the library, after his breakfast. He had taken it with the countess and Lucy. And Jane, drinking at a gulp the cup of tea brought to her, and which had stood neglected until it was cold, went down stairs and followed him in.
Not to reproach him; not to cast a word of indignation on the usurping countess; simply to speak of herself, and what her future course must be.
“This is no longer a home for me, papa,” she quietly began, striving to subdue all outward token of emotion, of the bitter pain that was struggling within her. “I think you must see that it is not. Will you help me to another?”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Jane,” said the earl, testily, wishing he was breasting the waves in a hurricane off the Cape, rather than in this dilemma. “It will all smooth down in a few days, if you’ll only let it.”
Jane lifted her eyes to him, a whole world of anguish in their depths. “I could not stop here,” she said, in a low tone, quite painful from its earnestness. “Papa, it would kill me.”
And it seemed as if it really would kill her. Lord Oakburn grunted something unintelligible, and looked uncommonly ill-at-ease.
“You must let me go away, papa. Perhaps you will help me to another home?”
“What home? Where d’ye want to go?” he crossly asked.
“I have been thinking that I could go to South Wennock,” she said. “I cannot remain in London. The house at South Wennock has not let since we left it; it is lying useless there, with its furniture; and, now that the winter is approaching, it will not be likely to let. Suffer me to go back there.”
Lord Oakburn took a few strides up and down without reply. Jane stood, as before, near the table, one hand leaning on it, as if for support.
“It’s the most rubbishing folly in the world, Jane! You’d be as comfortable at home as ever you were, if you’d only bring your mind to it. Do you suppose she has come into the house to make things unpleasant for us? You don’t know her, if you think that. But there!—have it your own way! If you’d like to go back to South Wennock for the winter, you can.”
“Thank you,” answered Jane, with a suppressed sob. “You will allow me sufficient to live upon, papa?”
“I’ll see about that,” said the earl, testily. “Let me know what you want, and I’ll do what I can.”
“I should like to continue in it, papa: to make it my home for life.”
“Stuff, Jane! Before you have been there six months you’ll be right glad to come back to us.”
“You will let me take Lucy, papa?”
“No; I’ll be shot if I do!” returned the earl, raising his voice in choler. “I don’t approve of your decamping off at all, though I give in to it; but I will never permit Lucy to share in such rebellion. You needn’t say more, Jane. If my other daughters leave me, I will keep her.”
Jane sighed as she gave up the thought of Lucy. She moved from the table and held out her hand.
“Good-by, papa. I shall go to-day.”
“Short work, my young lady,” was the answer. “You’ll come to see the folly of your whim speedily, I hope.”
He shook hands. But, in his vexation and annoyance, he did not offer to kiss her, and he did not say “Good-by.” Perhaps he felt vexed at himself as much as at Jane.
She went up to her room. Judith was busy at the dressing-table, and a maid was making the bed. Jane motioned to the latter to quit the chamber.
“I am going back to South Wennock, Judith, to live at the old house on the Rise. I leave for it to-day. Would you like to go, and remain with me?”
Judith looked too surprised to speak. She had a glass toilette-bottle in her hand, dusting it, and she laid it down in wonder. Jane continued.
“If you do not wish to go with me, I suppose you can remain here with Lady Lucy. They will want a maid for her, unless Lady Oakburn’s is to attend on her. That can be ascertained.”
“I will go with you, my lady,” said Judith.
“I shall be glad if you will. But mine will be a very quiet household. Only you and another, at the most.”
“I would prefer to go with you, my lady.”
“Then, Judith, let us make haste with the preparations. We must be away from this house to-day.”
Scarcely had she spoken when Lucy came dancing in, her cheeks and her eyes glowing.
“O Jane! I hope we shall all be happy together!” she exclaimed. “I think we can be. Lady Oakburn is so kind. She means to get Miss Snow a nice situation, and to teach me herself. She says she will not entrust my education to anybody else.”
“I am going away, Lucy,” said Jane, drawing the little gild to her. “I wish—I wish I could have had you with me? But papa will not”
“Going away!” repeated Lucy. “Where?”
“I am going back to South Wennock to live.”
“Oh Jane! And to leave papa! What will he do without you?”
A spasm passed over Jane Chesney’s face. “He has some one else now, Lucy.”
Lucy burst into tears. “And I, Jane! What shall I do? You have never been away from me in all my life!”
A struggle with herself, and then Jane’s tears burst forth. For the first time since the descending of the blow. She laid her face on Lucy’s neck and sobbed aloud.
Only for a few moments did she suffer herself to indulge the grief. “I cannot afford this, child,” she said; “I have neither time nor emotion to spare to-day. You must leave me, or I shall not be ready.”
Lucy went down, her face wet. Lady Oakburn, who seemed to be taking to her new home and its duties quite naturally, was sorting some of Lucy’s music in the drawing-room. She looked just as she had used to look as Miss Lethwait; but she wore this morning a beautiful dress of lama, shot with blue and gold, and a lace cap of guipure. Lucy’s noisy entrance and noisy grief caused her to turn abruptly.
“My dear child, what is the matter?”
“Jane is going away,” was the sobbing answer.
“Going away!” echoed the countess, not understanding.
“Yes, she is going back to live at South Wennock, she says. She and Judith are packing up to go to-day.”
Lady Oakburn was as one struck dumb. For a minute she could neither stir nor speak. Self-reproach was taking possession of her.
“Does your papa know of this, Lucy?”
“Oh yes, I think so,” sobbed Lucy. “Jane said she had asked papa to let me go with her, and he would not.”
Lady Oakburn quitted the room and went in search of the earl. He was in the library still, pacing it with his stick now—the stick having just menaced poor Pompey’s head, who had come in with a message.
“Lucy tells me that Lady Jane is about to leave,” began the countess. “Oh, Lord Oakburn, it is what I feared! I would almost rather have died than come here to sow dissension in your house. Can nothing be done?”
“No, it can’t,” said the earl. “When Jane’s determined upon a thing, she is determined. It’s the fault of the family, my lady; as you’ll find when you have been longer in it.”
“But, Lord Oakburn”
“My dear, look here. All the talking in the world won’t alter it, and I’d rather hear no more upon the subject. Jane will go to South Wennock; but I daresay she’ll come to her senses before she has lived there many months.”
Did a recollection cross the earl’s mind of another of his daughters, of whom he had used the self-same words? Clarice! She would come to her senses, he said, if let alone. But it seemed she had not come to them yet.
Lady Oakburn, more grieved, more desolate than can well be imagined, for she was feeling herself to be a wretched interloper, in her lively conscientiousness, went upstairs to Jane’s room and knocked at it. Jane was alone then. She was standing before a chest of drawers, taking out their contents. The countess was agitated, even to tears.
“Oh, Lady Jane, do not inflict this unhappiness upon me! I wish I had never entered the house, if the consequences are to involve your leaving it.”
Jane stood, calm, impassive, scarcely deigning to raise her haughty eyelids.
“You should have thought of consequences before, madam.”
“If you could know how very far from my thoughts it would be to presume in any way upon my position!” continued the countess imploringly. “If you would consent to be still the mistress of the house, Lady Jane”
“I beg your pardon,” interrupted Jane, in a haughty tone of reproof, as if she would recall her to common sense. “My time is very short,” she continued: “may I request to be left alone?”
Lady Oakburn saw there was no help for it, no remedy; and she turned to quit the room with a gesture of grief and pain. “I can only pray that the time may come when you will know me better, Lady Jane. Believe me, I would rather have died, than been the means of turning you from your home.”
Taking leave of none but Lucy and Miss Snow, Lady Jane quitted the house with Judith in the course of the afternoon. Lord Oakburn had gone out: his wife, Jane would not see. And in that impromptu fashion Lady Jane returned to South Wennock, and took up her abode again in the old house, startling the woman who had charge of it.
The next day Jane wrote to her father. Her intention was to live as quietly as possible, she told him, keeping only two maids—Judith, to attend upon her personally, and a general servant—and a very modest sum indeed Jane named as an estimation of what it would cost her to live upon. But Lord Oakburn was more liberal, and exactly doubled it: in his answer he told her, her allowance would be at the rate of five hundred a year.
But the past trouble reacted upon Jane, and she became really ill. Mr. John Grey was called in to her. He found the sickness more of the mind than the body, and knew that time alone could work a cure.
“My dear lady, if I were to undertake you as a patient I should but be robbing you,” he said to her, at his second interview. “Tonics? Well, you shall have some if you wish; but the best tonic will be time.”
She saw that he divined how cruel had been the blow of the earl’s marriage, the news of which had caused quite a commotion in South Wennock. Even this remote allusion to it Jane would have resented in some; but there was that about Mr. Grey that seemed to draw her to him as a friend. She sat at the table in the little square drawing-room—little, as compared to some of the rooms to which she had lately been accustomed—and leaned her cheek upon her hand. Mr. Grey was seated on the other side the hearth, opposite to her. It was getting towards the dusk of evening, and the red blaze of the fire played on Jane’s pale face.
“Yes,” she acknowledged, “it is time alone that can do much for me, I believe. I feel—I feel that I shall never be blithe again. But I should like some tonic medicine, Mr. Grey.”
“You shall have it, Lady Jane. I fancy you are naturally not very strong.”
“Not very strong, perhaps. But I have hitherto enjoyed good health. Are there any changes at South Wennock?” she continued, not sorry to quit the subject of self for some other.
“No, I think not,” he answered; “nothing in particular, that would interest you. A few people have died; a few have married: as is the case in all places.”
“Does Mr. Carlton get much practice?” she asked, overcoming her repugnance to speak of that gentleman, in her wish for some information as to how he and Laura were progressing.
“He gets a great deal,” said Mr. Grey. “The fact is, quite a tide has set in against my brother, and Mr. Carlton reaps the benefit.”
“I do not understand,” said Jane.
“People seem to have taken a dislike to my brother, on account of that unhappy affair in Palace Street,” he explained. “Or rather, I should say, to distrust him. In short, people won’t have Mr. Stephen Grey to attend them any longer: if I can’t go, they run for Mr. Carlton, and thus he has now a great many of our former patients. South Wennock is a terrible place for gossip; everybody must interfere with his neighbour’s affairs. Just now,” added Mr. John Grey, with a genial smile, “the town is commenting on Lady Jane Chesney’s having called in me, instead of Mr. Carlton, her sister’s husband.”
Jane shook her head. “I dislike Mr. Carlton personally very much,” she said. “Had he never entered our family to sow dissension in it, I should still have disliked him. But this must be a great trouble to Mr. Stephen Grey.”
“It is a great annoyance. I wonder sometimes that Stephen puts up with it so patiently. ‘It will come round with time,’ is all he says.”
“Has any clue been obtained to the unfortunate lady who died?” asked Jane.
“Not the slightest. She lies, poor thing, in the corner of St. Mark’s Churchyard, unclaimed and unknown.”
“But, has her husband never come forward to inquire after her?” exclaimed Lady Jane, in wonder. “It was said at the time, I remember, that he was travelling. Surely he must have returned?”
“No one whatever has come forward,” was Mr. Grey’s reply. “Neither he nor anybody else. In short, Lady Jane, but for that humble grave and the obloquy that has become the property of my brother Stephen, the whole affair might well seem a myth; a something that had only happened in a dream.”
“Does it not strike you as being altogether very singular?” said Lady Jane, after a pause of thought. “The affair itself, I mean.”
“Very much so indeed. It so impressed me at the time of the occurrence; far more than it did my brother.”
“It would almost seem as though—as though the poor young lady had had no husband,” concluded Lady Jane. “If it be not uncharitable to the dead to say so.”
“That is the opinion I incline to,” avowed Mr. John Grey. “My brother, on the contrary, will not entertain it; he feels certain, he says, that in that respect things were as straight as they ought to be. But for one thing, I should adopt my opinion indubitably, and go on, as a natural sequence, to the belief that she herself introduced the fatal drops into the draught.”
“And that one thing—what is it?” asked Jane, interested in spite of her own cares. But indeed the tragedy from the first had borne much interest for her—as it had for everybody else in South Wennock.
“The face that was seen on the stairs by Mr. Carlton.”
“But I thought Mr. Carlton maintained afterwards that he had not seen any face there—that it was a misapprehension of his own?”
“Rely upon it, Mr. Carlton did see a face there, Lady Jane. The impression conveyed to his mind at the moment was, that a face—let us say a man—was there; and I believe it to have been a right one. The doubt arose to him afterwards with the improbability: and, for one thing, he may wish to believe that there was nobody, and to impress that belief upon others.”
“But why should he wish to do that?” asked Jane.
“Because he must be aware that it was very careless of him not to have put the matter beyond doubt at the time. To see a man hovering in that stealthy manner near a sick lady’s room would be the signal for unearthing him to most medical attendants. It ought to have been so to Mr. Carlton; and he is no doubt secretly taking blame to himself for not having done it.”
“I thought he did search.”
“Yes, superficially. He carried out a candle and looked around. But he should have remained on the landing, and called to those below to bring lights, so as not to allow a chance of escape. Of course, he had no thought of evil.”
“And you connect that man with the evil?”
“I do,” said Mr. Grey, as he rose to leave. “There’s not a shadow of doubt on my mind that that man was the author of Mrs. Crane’s death.”
(To be continued.)
| This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Metasyntactic variable, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. |