and whether things are ill or well done, it is not I who am responsible. I would have saved my father's life with my own, had it been possible so to save it.”
“You have been here with him?”
“Since this afternoon.”
“And yet you have excluded me!” returned Lady Oakburn, her voice trembling with its suppressed emotion. “You think it right to exclude a wife from her husband's death bed?”
“I think it very wrong,” said Lady Jane: “I think nothing can justify it, save peril to her own life. The first caution I had breathed into my ear upon entering this house, was, that the truth of my father's state, his danger, must be kept from you. I ventured to remonstrate; yes I did: once to Dr. James alone, again to the medical men in concert; and I was told that it was essential you should be kept in ignorance; that the tidings, if imparted, might have the worst effect upon you. I should have been the first to tell you, had I dared.”
Lady Oakburn turned her condemning eyes on the nurse. “It was Dr. James,” spoke up the woman; “he gave his orders throughout the household, and we could but obey him. He was afraid of such a thing as this, that has now happened; and who's to know, my lady, that you may not die for it?”
“I beg your pardon,” murmured the countess to Jane. “Oh, Lady Jane, let us be friends in this awful moment!” she implored, an irresistible impulse prompting her to speak. “He was your father; my husband; and he is lying dead before us; he has entered into the world where strife must cease; forgive me for the injury you think I did you, for the estrangement that I unhappily caused; let us at least be friends in the present hour, though the future should bring coolness again!”
Jane Chesney put her hand into her step mother's. “It was not my fault that you were not with him; had it rested with me, you should have been. He charged me to give you his love, and to say how he wished he could have seen you, but that the doctors forbid it. His death has been very peaceful; full of hope of a better world; a little while, he said, and we should all be joining him there.”
Lady Oakburn, Jane's hand still in hers, had laid her face upon the pillow by the dead, when a storm of suffocating sobs was heard behind them. Lucy, likewise aroused by Laura's cry on the stairs, had stolen in, in her night dress.
“You kept it from me too, Lucy!” exclaimed Lady Oakburn in a tone of sad reproach. “And I trusted to you!”
“It was kept from her,” spoke up the nurse. “We were afraid of the child's knowing it, my lady, because she would have carried the news to you.”
“Oh, Jane,” sobbed the little girl, “why has your love gone from us? You knew he was dying, and you never told me! you need not have begrudged a kiss to me from him for the last time.”
“I have no longer authority in the house, Lucy,” repeated Jane, “and can but do as I am told. I am but a stranger in it.”
Her tone, broken by suffering, by sorrow, by a sound of injury, struck upon them all, even amidst their own grief.
Laura had been kneeling in the shade since Lady Oakburn's entrance; had neither spoken to her, nor been seen by Lucy. Jane turned to her now.
“And he left you his forgiveness, Laura; his full and free forgivenesss, and his blessing,” she said, as her silent tears dropped. “He died leaving his forgiveness to Mr. Carlton; his good wishes for him. Oh, but that I know my father has gone to peace, to heavenly happiness, this trial would be greater than I could bear!”
The last words appeared to escape her in her excess of anguish. It was indeed a night of bitter trial for them all; but for none perhaps as it was for Jane.
Still, in spite of her grief, she was obliged to forego a great part of her prejudice against Lady Oakburn. It was certainly not a time to retain ill-feeling; and Jane could not close her eyes to facts—that Lady Oakburn had been a good woman in her new home. If Jane could but forgive the marriage, the countess's conduct in all her new duties had been admirable: and as she sobbed that night by Jane's side, and reiterated over and over again her grief, her remorse for the estrangement between the earl and his daughter, her humble prayer that Lady Jane would at least try to learn to look upon her as not an enemy, Jane's heart insensibly warmed, and she unconsciously began to like the countess better than ever she had liked her as Miss Lethwait.
“If I have been wrong in my prejudice, more obstinate than I ought to be, if it brought pain to my dear father, may God forgive me!” she murmured. “Yes, Lady Oakburn, we will be friends henceforth; good friends, I trust; never more enemies.”
And Lady Oakburn took Jane's hand and sobbed over it. The trouble she had brought upon Lady Jane, the estrangement caused by her between Jane and her father, had been the one thorn in the countess's wedded life.
