The county, robbed of a scandal, and handed a love story instead, did what counties do. It adored it. Within a fortnight, there was not a drawing room within 40 mi that had not always known, always said, that the cold Duke of Fosscliffe had a great heart hidden him somewhere, and only wanted the right woman to find the door. And he did court her truly through the short, bright weeks before the wedding, kept his condition to the letter, because he found he wanted to. He who had never in his life gone out of his way to please a soul now schemed and contrived like a boy for the pleasure of her company.
He rode the cliff path each dawn, and she was in the breakfast room each dawn to meet him. And they took the whole of the mornings, now without a groom trailing, and without a county to perform. Walking his land together as two people who owned nothing of each other, and had chosen each other regardless. He carried her father down himself some days to sit in the winter sun with a rug over his knees and watched the sea and sat with the old man an hour and asked him about the soldiering son of a tenant and about Sidwell as a girl and learned that she had always laughed like that water over stones even when there had been very little to laugh about even in the lean years that it was not lightness in her but the opposite a kind of courage a refusal to let the world make her grim. It was, Mr. Glennville said, watching Winston's face the best thing about her, and the thing she gave away most freely, and the thing a wise man would spend his life making sure she never had cause to lose. Winston said that he intended to. The old man looked at him a long moment and nodded, and said he believed him, and that a father could ask no more, and the two men sat in the sun together after that, without needing to say anything else at all.
He gave her one gift before the wedding, and only one, having promised on the terrace to settle nothing on her that she had not earned, and finding a way at last around his own promise. He did not settle money on her. He mended quietly and at his own charge the small shabby house in the next county where she had grown up which her father had thorked for good put the roof right and the garden in order and the old piano fort back in tune and he gave her the deed to it in her own name hers alone to keep or sell or let as she chose tied to no marriage and no duke and no bargain.
"It is not a settlement," he told her when she stared at the paper and then at him with her eyes filling. "It is your own whatever becomes of me or of us. You told me you would walk away from Fossliff with exactly what you brought and nothing more. I could not bear that you should have nothing. So I have given you back the thing you had before you ever met me. A home that is yours and answers to no one. You need never be the poor relation grateful to be allowed to stay. Sidwell, not here, not there, not anywhere, not ever again. That is not charity. That is only justice a very long time late."
She did not laugh. Then she put her face against his coat and wept, which he had not once seen her do, not in the wreck of the ballroom, nor on the terrace, nor on the road. And he held her, and understood that he had at last and by accident given her the one thing all his money could not have bought, and all her courage had never let her ask for, which was to be safe, and to know it, and to be able, therefore, to choose him freely, out of no need at all.
They were married from Foss Cliff on a bright hard day at the turn of the year, with the sea glittering below the cliffs, and the gulls crying over the walled gardens, and Mr. Glennville giving his daughter away from a wheeled chair, with a face of such complete contentment that Sidwell wept before the vows were half spoken. The Doja Duchess wept too, and denied it fiercely, and lived, as it happened, a great many more years than she had feared, long enough to be thoroughly and joyfully in the way, long enough to see the house she had schemed for filled at last with the laughter she had gambled everything to buy. And it was filled. That was the wonder of it the thing Winston never quite got over in all the years that followed however ordinary it became the cold house warmed and stayed warm.
The servants who had gone gray under a grave master grew easy and stayed and their sons and daughters came to service at Foss Cliff as to a good place a happy one which it had not been within living memory and now was. The tenants no longer touched their hats to a stranger on a tall horse. They knew him and he knew them, their roofs and their sons and their failed cheeses, because Sidwell had taught him how, and because once taught, he found he had a gift for it that his fear had hidden even from himself.
The county which had feared him came in time to be fond of him, which was a stranger fate than any and one he bore with a good grace that would have astonished the man he had been. And through all of it at the center of it was his wife. Running his drains and keeping his books and singing tunelessly over both, meeting him in the breakfast room each dawn, so that the first face of every day of his life was hers. Laughing her water over stones laugh in rooms that had not heard laughter in a hundred years, until the very stones of Fosscliffe seemed to have learned the sound and to give it back.
And that night, when the last of the guests had gone, and the great cold house was warm from cellar to attic, for perhaps the first time in a hundred years, the Duke of Foscliffe led his wife out into the long gallery, where a single fiddler he had asked to stay played softly to the two of them alone, and he bowed to her as gravely as he had bowed in the blazing ballroom at Harwick on the night that had started everything.
"One waltz with me," Winston said, "And you'll be my wife." And then he smiled. The real smile, the one she had woken in him, the one the whole county he now swore he had always had. "Though I am given to understand the line has already worked once. I should not like to overtax it."
Sidwell laughed and laid her hand in his exactly as she had that first night. Freckle and mended courage and all, saved that the glove was new now, and the hand no longer trembled. "It is a very good line," she told him. "I said I should remember it. I said I should tell all the young ladies when I am a wrinkled old woman that a duke once offered to marry me across a bowl of [ __ ], and that none of them would believe me, and that I should not care in the least." She stepped into his arms into the place that had been made for her since a night she had thought it all a game. "I was wrong about only the one part, Winston. I said I should not care. I find I care a very great deal. It is the best thing that ever happened to me. And I mean to spend the whole of my life not caring who believes it."
And the Duke of Foscliffe drew his wife close and turned her once slowly in the fire lit gallery. And the fiddle sang, and the sea kept its long, patient time below the cliffs, and the two of them danced the second waltz of their lives. The true one, the chosen one, the one no custom had trapped and no scheme had bought. Round and round in the warm gold light. A man who had forgotten how to be happy, and the woman who had laughed him back into remembering, bound now by nothing in the world, but the thing they had each in the end freely chosen, and neither of them, not [clears throat] that night, nor in all the long treasured years that followed it, minded in the least.