Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/643

 hand with a menacing gesture; just as the Earl of Oakburn had lifted his, in the encounter earlier in the morning before St. Mark’s Church.

Earl of Oakburn’s sojourn at Cedar Lodge had been a short one. He had but gone home for a day or two to discuss future plans with Jane; or, rather, to inform Jane of his future plans, for he was one who discussed them only with his own will.

It would be necessary for him to let Chesney Oaks. He had succeeded to the British peerage, it is true; but he had not succeeded to the broad lauds, the proud rent-roll of an ordinary peer. A certain income he came into with the title as a matter of course; an income which, in comparison with the straitened one of later days, appeared like a mine of incalculable wealth, and which would no doubt prove as such to him and Jane, with their simple and inexpensive habits. The earl just dead had had a large private fortune, which did not go with the title; even with that, he had been reckoned a poor man for his rank. Yes, there would be nothing for it but to let Chesney Oaks, he observed to Jane. To keep up such a place as it ought to be kept up would absorb the whole of his income, for it could not be done under three or four thousand a year. He should therefore let Chesney Oaks, and reside in London.

Jane’s heart acquiesced in everything. But for the blow just dealt out by Laura, she would have felt supremely happy. There had existed a dark spot in their domestic history for some little time past, but she had every hope that this change in their fortunes would remove it, and bring things straight again. It could not—she argued with herself—it could not be otherwise.

One word from Lord Oakburn would remove the cloud, would bring the wanderer home from an exile, voluntary at first, enforced now. And yet, Jane hesitated to beg that that word should be spoken. The subject had been a very bitter one; it had thrown the shadow of a constraint between Jane and her father, where until then all had been so open; and he had long ago interdicted all mention of the subject on Jane’s part; but this rise in their fortunes rendered it necessary, as her plain good sense told her, that the interdict should no longer exist—that the matter should be opened again.

Not in that hour’s visit to Chesney Oaks would Jane allude to it; when she went to impart to him the ill doings of one daughter, it was scarcely the time to beg grace for another. But when Lord Oakburn came home on the Tuesday, the day following the funeral of the late peer, then Jane resolved to speak to him. How she shrank from it, none save herself could tell. His bitterness against Laura was so demonstrative that Jane was willing to let a day or two go on ere she entered upon the other bitter subject, “I will leave it until tomorrow,” she thought; but when the morrow came (Wednesday), it brought Laura’s letter about her clothes, and the earl went into so great an access of wrath, that Jane did not dare to speak. Still she could not let him go away again without speaking; and on the Thursday morning she took courage, as they were alone after breakfast, and the earl was giving her hurried orders about this and that for the fly was already at the door to carry him away—she took courage and spoke quietly and pleadingly, though her heart was beating.

“Papa, forgive my speaking upon a forbidden subject. You will let me see after Clarice now?”

“What?” thundered the earl.

The tone was so stern, the countenance bent on Jane so dark in its anger, that all Jane’s forced courage left her. Her manner grew hesitating; timid; imparting a notion of which she was painfully conscious—that she was asking something it was not right to ask.

“Clarice,” she faltered. “May we not send to her?”

“No,” emphatically spoke the earl. “Hold your tongue, Jane! Send to her! Let Clarice come to her senses.”

And that was all it brought forth. Lord Oakburn stepped into the fly, attended by Pompey, to be driven to Great Wennock railway station, and on his way to it enjoyed the pleasure of that encounter with his rebellious daughter and her husband as they quitted St. Mark’s Church after their second marriage.

To make things clear to you, my reader, it may be necessary to revert for an instant to the past. Captain Chesney—we will speak of him by his old name, as it relates to the time he bore it—had four daughters, although you have only heard of three. He never had a son. Jane, Laura, Clarice, and Lucy were the names, Clarice being next to Laura. They were the two who seemed to stand together. Jane was considerably older, Lucy considerably younger, but Laura and Clarice were nearly of an age, there being only a year between them. When they were growing up, promising both of them to be of unusual beauty, though they were not much alike, the dowager Countess of Oakburn, who, in her patronising, domineering way, took a good deal of interest in her nephew Captain Chesney’s family, came forward with