LORD OAKBURN’S DAUGHTERS.
BY THE AUTHOR OF "EAST LYNNE."
CHAPTER XXXV.LAURA’S IMPROMPTU VISIT.
It was a somewhat singular coincidence that the Dowager Countess of Oakburn should die the day subsequent to the earl. Such was the fact. She had been ill for several weeks; no immediate danger was apprehended, but in the very hour that she heard news of the earl’s death—the tidings of which were conveyed to her in the morning—she was taken suddenly worse, and expired at three o’clock in the afternoon. Lady Jane went to her house at Kensington and was in time to see her alive, but she had then lost consciousness, and was speechless. One of the old countess’s grand daughters said—it was a dreadfully irreverent thing to say—that they must have gone together to plague each other on the journey, just as they had plagued each other in life.
It was decided that the two funerals should take place at the same time and spot in one of the great London cemeteries. The burial place of the Earls of Oakburn was Chesney Oaks; but he, the old sailor just gone, had expressly desired that no parade or any unnecessary expense should be wasted upon him. The conveying him to Chesney Oaks would involve a considerable outlay; his poor worthless body would not rest any the better for it, he quaintly said; let it be put into the ground in the simplest manner possible, and in the nearest burial-place. The executors of the countess dowager thought it well to observe the same private simplicity with regard to her, and it was arranged that they should be interred together.
Jane and Laura remained in town until the funeral should be over. They would not quit the house while their father lay dead in it; and in the new reconciliation with his widow, there was no necessity for their hurrying away. Laura, impetuous in all her doings, took a violent fancy to the countess, protesting secretly to Jane that she was a far superior woman to what she had imagined; and it would be a convenient house to stay at, she candidly added, when she chose to visit London. Jane was not swayed by any motives so interested; but she could not help acknowledging to herself that the countess won upon her regard day by day.
“She has done her duty by Lucy,” Miss Snow remarked to Lady Jane confidentially. “Ah, never a mother was more anxious for a child’s welfare than Lady Oakburn is for Lucy’s. I made my mind up at first not to stop; but when I found how good she was, how she tried to do her utmost for us all in loving-kindness, I thought I should be foolish to leave. She would not have kept me, though, but for the earl; she told me she should wish to take the child’s education entirely into her own hands, but he would not suffer it. I daresay she will take it now.”
They were busy getting their mourning. Jane ordered hers neat and good, entirely befitting a lady, but plain; Laura chose hers for its magnificence. Jane ventured to give her a caution against the expense, and Laura tossed her head in answer.
“Papa is sure to have remembered me,” she said, “and surely I may spend what is my own.” And she actually appealed to the countess—was it not certain that the earl had left her her share of money?
It was a curious question to put, and perhaps the very fact of asking it proved that Laura was not quite so sure upon the point as she wished to be. Lady Oakburn, however, could tell her nothing. She did not know how the earl had left his affairs. That he had made a recent will, she believed; for in the prospect of a little child’s being born, he had remarked to her that he must settle his affairs in accordance with the prospect, and she thought he had done so; but she did not know any details, for the earl had not mentioned them to her.
“Oh, it was sure to be all right,” Laura remarked with customary unconcern; and she bought every pretty black dress that attracted her eye.
“You will be godmother to the little baby, Lady Jane, when the time comes for christening him?” supplicated the countess with sensible hesitation. “He shall belong as much to you as to me.”
“Yes, willingly,” replied Jane. She did not hesitate; that little frail being in its sheltering cradle seemed to be the one link to life left by her father.
“And—if I may express a wish—will you not call him Francis?”
“Francis, certainly; Francis always. The Earls of Oakburn have mostly been John—but I don’t know that it need be a rule for us. We can name him Francis John; but he must be called Francis.”
On one of the days that intervened between