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