On the Saturday of his appointment Redworth arrived at Copsley, with a
shade deeper of the calculating look under his thick brows, habitual to
him latterly. He found Lady Dunstane at her desk, pen in hand, the paper
untouched; and there was an appearance of trouble about her somewhat
resembling his own, as he would have observed, had he been open-minded
enough to notice anything, except that she was writing a letter. He
begged her to continue it; he proposed to read a book till she was at
leisure.
'I have to write, and scarcely know how,' said she, clearing her face to
make the guest at home, and taking a chair by the fire, 'I would rather
chat for half an hour.'
She spoke of the weather, frosty, but tonic; bad for the last days of
hunting, good for the farmer and the country, let us hope.
Redworth nodded assent. It might be surmised that he was brooding
over those railways, in which he had embarked his fortune. Ah! those
railways! She was not long coming to the wailful exclamation upon them,
both to express her personal sorrow at the disfigurement of our dear
England, and lead to a little, modest, offering of a woman's counsel
to the rash adventurer; for thus could she serviceably put aside her
perplexity awhile. Those railways! When would there be peace in the
land? Where one single nook of shelter and escape from them! And
the English, blunt as their senses are to noise and hubbub, would be
revelling in hisses, shrieks, puffings and screeches, so that travelling
would become an intolerable affliction. 'I speak rather as an invalid,'
she admitted; 'I conjure up all sorts of horrors, the whistle in the
night beneath one's windows, and the smoke of trains defacing the
landscape; hideous accidents too. They will be wholesale and past
help. Imagine a collision! I have borne many changes with equanimity, I
pretend to a certain degree of philosophy, but this mania for cutting up
the land does really cause me to pity those who are to follow us. They
will not see the England we have seen. It will be patched and scored,
disfigured... a sort of barbarous Maori visage--England in a New Zealand
mask. You may call it the sentimental view. In this case, I am decidedly
sentimental: I love my country. I do love quiet, rural England. Well,
and I love beauty, I love simplicity. All that will be destroyed by the
refuse of the towns flooding the land--barring accidents, as Lukin says.
There seems nothing else to save us.'
Redworth acquiesced. 'Nothing.'
'And you do not regret it?' he was asked.
'Not a bit. We have already exchanged opinions on the subject.
Simplicity must go, and the townsman meet his equal in the countryman.
As for beauty, I would sacrifice that to circulate gumption. A bushelful
of nonsense is talked pro and con: it always is at an innovation. What
we are now doing, is to take a longer and a quicker stride, that is
all.'
'And establishing a new field for the speculator.'
'Yes, and I am one, and this is the matter I wanted to discuss with you,
Lady Dunstane,' said Redworth, bending forward, the whole man devoted to
the point of business.
She declared she was complimented; she felt the compliment, and trusted
her advice might be useful, faintly remarking that she had a woman's
head: and 'not less' was implied as much as 'not more,' in order to give
strength to her prospective opposition.
All his money, she heard, was down on the railway table. He might within
a year have a tolerable fortune: and, of course, he might be ruined. He
did not expect it; still he fronted the risks. 'And now,' said he, 'I
come to you for counsel. I am not held among my acquaintances to be a
marrying man, as it's called.'
He paused. Lady Dunstane thought it an occasion to praise him for his
considerateness.
'You involve no one but yourself, you mean?' Her eyes shed approval.
'Still the day may come... I say only that it may: and the wish to marry
is a rosy colouring... equal to a flying chariot in conducting us across
difficulties and obstructions to the deed. And then one may have to
regret a previous rashness.'
These practical men are sometimes obtuse: she dwelt on that vision of
the future.
He listened, and resumed: 'My view of marriage is, that no man should
ask a woman to be his wife unless he is well able to support her in
the comforts, not to say luxuries, she is accustomed to.' His gaze had
wandered to the desk; it fixed there. 'That is Miss Merion's writing,'
he said.
'The letter?' said Lady Dunstane, and she stretched out her hand to
press down a leaf of it. 'Yes; it is from her.'
'Is she quite well?'
'I suppose she is. She does not speak of her health.'
He looked pertinaciously in the direction of the letter, and it was not
rightly mannered. That letter, of all others, was covert and sacred to
the friend. It contained the weightiest of secrets.
'I have not written to her,' said Redworth.
He was astonishing: 'To whom? To Diana? You could very well have done
so, only I fancy she knows nothing, has never given a thought to railway
stocks and shares; she has a loathing for speculation.'
'And speculators too, I dare say!'
'It is extremely probable.' Lady Dunstane spoke with an emphasis, for
the man liked Diana, and would be moved by the idea of forfeiting her
esteem.
'She might blame me if I did anything dishonourable!'
'She certainly would.'
'She will have no cause.'
Lady Dunstane began to look, as at a cloud charged with remote
explosions: and still for the moment she was unsuspecting. But it was
a flitting moment. When he went on, and very singularly droning to her
ear: 'The more a man loves a woman, the more he should be positive,
before asking her, that she will not have to consent to a loss of
position, and I would rather lose her than fail to give her all--not
be sure, as far as a man can be sure, of giving her all I think she's
worthy of': then the cloud shot a lightning flash, and the doors of her
understanding swung wide to the entry of a great wonderment. A shock of
pain succeeded it. Her sympathy was roused so acutely that she slipped
over the reflective rebuke she would have addressed to her silly
delusion concerning his purpose in speaking of his affairs to a woman.
Though he did not mention Diana by name, Diana was clearly the person.
And why had he delayed to speak to her?--Because of this venture of his
money to make him a fortune, for the assurance of her future comfort!
Here was the best of men for the girl, not displeasing to her; a good,
strong, trustworthy man, pleasant to hear and to see, only erring in
being a trifle too scrupulous in love: and a fortnight back she would
have imagined he had no chance; and now she knew that the chance was
excellent in those days, with this revelation in Diana's letter, which
said that all chance was over.
'The courtship of a woman,' he droned away, 'is in my mind not fair to
her until a man has to the full enough to sanction his asking her
to marry him. And if he throws all he possesses on a stake... to win
her--give her what she has a right to claim, he ought.... Only at
present the prospect seems good.... He ought of course to wait. Well,
the value of the stock I hold has doubled, and it increases. I am a
careful watcher of the market. I have friends--brokers and railway
Directors. I can rely on them.'
'Pray,' interposed Lady Dunstane, 'specify--I am rather in a mist--the
exact point upon which you do me the honour to consult me.' She
ridiculed herself for having imagined that such a man would come to
consult her upon a point of business.
'It is,' he replied, 'this: whether, as affairs now stand with me--I
have an income from my office, and personal property... say between
thirteen and fourteen hundred a year to start with--whether you think me
justified in asking a lady to share my lot?'
'Why not? But will you name the lady?'
'Then I may write at once? In your judgement.... Yes, the lady. I have
not named her. I had no right. Besides, the general question first, in
fairness to the petitioner. You might reasonably stipulate for more for
a friend. She could make a match, as you have said...' he muttered of
'brilliant,' and 'the highest'; and his humbleness of the honest man
enamoured touched Lady Dunstane. She saw him now as the man of strength
that she would have selected from a thousand suitors to guide her dear
friend.
She caught at a straw: 'Tell me, it is not Diana?'
'Diana Merion!'
As soon as he had said it he perceived pity, and he drew himself tight
for the stroke. 'She's in love with some one?'
'She is engaged.'
He bore it well. He was a big-chested fellow, and that excruciating
twist within of the revolution of the wheels of the brain snapping their
course to grind the contrary to that of the heart, was revealed in
one short lift and gasp, a compression of the tremendous change he
underwent.
'Why did you not speak before?' said Lady Dunstane. Her words were
tremulous.
'I should have had no justification!'
'You might have won her!' She could have wept; her sympathy and her
self-condolence under disappointment at Diana's conduct joined to swell
the feminine flood.
The poor fellow's quick breathing and blinking reminded her of cruelty
in a retrospect. She generalized, to ease her spirit of regret, by
hinting it without hurting: 'Women really are not puppets. They are not
so excessively luxurious. It is good for young women in the early days
of marriage to rough it a little.' She found herself droning, as he had
done.
He had ears for nothing but the fact.
'Then I am too late!'
'I have heard it to-day.'
'She is engaged! Positively?'
Lady Dunstane glanced backward at the letter on her desk. She had to
answer the strangest of letters that had ever come to her, and it was
from her dear Tony, the baldest intimation of the weightiest piece of
intelligence which a woman can communicate to her heart's friend. The
task of answering it was now doubled. 'I fear so, I fancy so,' she said,
and she longed to cast eye over the letter again, to see if there might
possibly be a loophole behind the lines.
'Then I must make my mind up to it,' said Redworth. 'I think I'll take a
walk.'
She smiled kindly. 'It will be our secret.'
'I thank you with all my heart, Lady Dunstane.'
He was not a weaver of phrases in distress. His blunt reserve was
eloquent of it to her, and she liked him the better; could have thanked
him, too, for leaving her promptly.
When she was alone she took in the contents of the letter at a hasty
glimpse. It was of one paragraph, and fired its shot like a cannon with
the muzzle at her breast:--
'MY OWN EMMY,--I have been asked in marriage by Mr. Warwick, and
have accepted him. Signify your approval, for I have decided that
it is the wisest thing a waif can do. We are to live at The
Crossways for four months of the year, so I shall have Dada in his
best days and all my youngest dreams, my sunrise and morning dew,
surrounding me; my old home for my new one. I write in haste, to
you first, burning to hear from you. Send your blessing to yours in
life and death, through all transformations,
'TONY.'
That was all. Not a word of the lover about to be decorated with the
title of husband. No confession of love, nor a single supplicating word
to her friend, in excuse for the abrupt decision to so grave a step.
Her previous description of, him, as a 'gentlemanly official' in his
appearance, conjured him up most distastefully. True, she might have
made a more lamentable choice; a silly lordling, or a hero of scandals;
but if a gentlemanly official was of stabler mould, he failed to
harmonize quite so well with the idea of a creature like Tony. Perhaps
Mr. Redworth also failed in something. Where was the man fitly to mate
her! Mr. Redworth, however, was manly and trustworthy, of the finest
Saxon type in build and in character. He had great qualities, and his
excess of scrupulousness was most pitiable.
She read: 'The wisest thing a waif can do.' It bore a sound of
desperation. Avowedly Tony had accepted him without being in love. Or
was she masking the passion? No: had it been a case of love, she would
have written very differently to her friend.
Lady Dunstane controlled the pricking of the wound inflicted by Diana's
novel exercise in laconics where the fullest flow was due to tenderness,
and despatched felicitations upon the text of the initial line: 'Wonders
are always happening.' She wrote to hide vexation beneath surprise;
naturally betraying it. 'I must hope and pray that you have not been
precipitate.' Her curiosity to inspect the happiest of men, the most
genuine part of her letter, was expressed coldly.
When she had finished the composition she perused it, and did not
recognize herself in her language, though she had been so guarded to
cover the wound her Tony dealt their friendship--in some degree injuring
their sex. For it might now, after such an example, verily seem that
women are incapable of a translucent perfect confidence: their impulses,
caprices, desperations, tricks of concealment, trip a heart-whole
friendship. Well, to-morrow, if not to-day, the tripping may be
expected! Lady Dunstane resigned herself sadly to a lowered view of
her Tony's character. This was her unconscious act of reprisal. Her
brilliant beloved Tony, dazzling but in beauty and the gifted mind,
stood as one essentially with the common order of women. She wished
to be settled, Mr. Warwick proposed, and for the sake of living at
The Crossways she accepted him--she, the lofty scorner of loveless
marriages! who had said--how many times! that nothing save love excused
it! She degraded their mutual high standard of womankind. Diana was in
eclipse, full three parts. The bulk of the gentlemanly official she had
chosen obscured her. But I have written very carefully, thought Lady
Dunstane, dropping her answer into the post-bag. She had, indeed, been
so care ful, that to cloak her feelings, she had written as another
person. Women with otiose husbands have a task to preserve friendship.
Redworth carried his burden through the frosty air at a pace to melt
icicles in Greenland. He walked unthinkingly, right ahead, to the red
West, as he discovered when pausing to consult his watch. Time was left
to return at the same pace and dress for dinner; he swung round and
picked up remembrances of sensations he had strewn by the way. She knew
these woods; he was walking in her footprints; she was engaged to be
married. Yes, his principle, never to ask a woman to marry him, never to
court her, without bank-book assurance of his ability to support her in
cordial comfort, was right. He maintained it, and owned himself a donkey
for having stuck to it. Between him and his excellent principle there
was war, without the slightest division. Warned of the danger of losing
her, he would have done the same again, confessing himself donkey for
his pains. The principle was right, because it was due to the woman. His
rigid adherence to the principle set him belabouring his donkey-ribs, as
the proper due to himself. For he might have had a chance, all through
two Winters. The opportunities had been numberless. Here, in this beech
wood; near that thornbush; on the juniper slope; from the corner of
chalk and sand in junction, to the corner of clay and chalk; all the
length of the wooded ridge he had reminders of her presence and his
priceless chances: and still the standard of his conduct said No, while
his heart bled.
He felt that a chance had been. More sagacious than Lady Dunstane,
from his not nursing a wound, he divined in the abruptness of Diana's
resolution to accept a suitor, a sober reason, and a fitting one, for
the wish that she might be settled. And had he spoken!--If he had spoken
to her, she might have given her hand to him, to a dishonourable brute!
A blissful brute. But a worse than donkey. Yes, his principle was right,
and he lashed with it, and prodded with it, drove himself out into the
sour wilds where bachelordom crops noxious weeds without a hallowing
luminary, and clung to it, bruised and bleeding though he was.
The gentleness of Lady Dunstane soothed him during the term of a visit
that was rather like purgatory sweetened by angelical tears. He was
glad to go, wretched in having gone. She diverted the incessant conflict
between his insubordinate self and his castigating, but avowedly
sovereign, principle. Away from her, he was the victim of a flagellation
so dire that it almost drove him to revolt against the lord he served,
and somehow the many memories at Copsley kept him away. Sir Lukin, when
speaking of Diana's 'engagement to that fellow Warwick,' exalted her
with an extraordinary enthusiasm, exceedingly hard for the silly beast
who had lost her to bear. For the present the place dearest to Redworth
of all places on earth was unendurable.
Meanwhile the value of railway investments rose in the market, fast
as asparagus-heads for cutting: a circumstance that added stings
to reflection. Had he been only a little bolder, a little less the
fanatical devotee of his rule of masculine honour, less the slave to the
letter of success.... But why reflect at all? Here was a goodly income
approaching, perhaps a seat in Parliament; a station for the airing of
his opinions--and a social status for the wife now denied to him.
The wife was denied to him; he could conceive of no other. The
tyrant-ridden, reticent, tenacious creature had thoroughly wedded her
in mind; her view of things had a throne beside his own, even in their
differences. He perceived, agreeing or disagreeing, the motions of her
brain, as he did with none other of women; and this it is which stamps
character on her, divides her from them, upraises and enspheres. He
declined to live with any other of the sex.
Before he could hear of the sort of man Mr. Warwick was--a perpetual
object of his quest--the bridal bells had rung, and Diana Antonia Merion
lost her maiden name. She became the Mrs. Warwick of our footballing
world.
Why she married, she never told. Possibly, in amazement at herself
subsequently, she forgot the specific reason. That which weighs heavily
in youth, and commits us to desperate action, will be a trifle under
older eyes, to blunter senses, a more enlightened understanding. Her
friend Emma probed for the reason vainly. It was partly revealed to
Redworth, by guess-work and a putting together of pieces, yet quite
luminously, as it were by touch of tentacle-feelers--one evening that he
passed with Sir Lukin Dunstane, when the lachrymose ex-dragoon and son
of Idlesse, had rather more than dined.