WOMAN LEARN TO RESPECT ONE ANOTHER
'You see, you are my crutch,' Lady Dunstane said to him,--raising the
stick in reminder of the present.
He offered his arm and hurriedly informed her, to dispose of dull
personal matter, that he had just landed. She looked at the clock.
'Lukin is in town. You know the song: “Alas, I scarce can go or creep
While Lukin is away.” I do not doubt you have succeeded in your business
over there. Ah! Now I suppose you have confidence in your success. I
should have predicted it, had you come to me.' She stood, either musing
or in weakness, and said abruptly: 'Will you object to lunching at one
o'clock?'
'The sooner the better,' said Redworth. She had sighed: her voice
betrayed some agitation, strange in so serenely-minded a person.
His partial acquaintance with the Herculean Sir Lukin's reputation in
town inspired a fear of his being about to receive admission to the
distressful confidences of the wife, and he asked if Mrs. Warwick was
well. The answer sounded ominous, with its accompaniment of evident
pain: 'I think her health is good.'
Had they quarrelled? He said he had not heard a word of Mrs. Warwick for
several months.
'I--heard from her this morning,' said Lady Dunstane, and motioned him
to a chair beside the sofa, where she half reclined, closing her eyes.
The sight of tears on the eyelashes frightened him. She roused herself
to look at the clock. 'Providence or accident, you are here,' she said.
'I could not have prayed for the coming of a truer' man. Mrs. Warwick is
in great danger.... You know our love. She is the best of me, heart
and soul. Her husband has chosen to act on vile suspicions--baseless,
I could hold my hand in the fire and swear. She has enemies, or the
jealous fury is on the man--I know little of him. He has commenced an
action against her. He will rue it. But she... you understand this of
women at least;--they are not cowards in all things!--but the horror
of facing a public scandal: my poor girl writes of the hatefulness of
having to act the complacent--put on her accustomed self! She would have
to go about, a mark for the talkers, and behave as if nothing were in
the air-full of darts! Oh, that general whisper!--it makes a coup de
massue--a gale to sink the bravest vessel: and a woman must preserve
her smoothest front; chat, smile--or else!--Well, she shrinks from it. I
should too. She is leaving the country.'
'Wrong!' cried Redworth.
'Wrong indeed. She writes, that in two days she will be out of it. Judge
her as I do, though you are a man, I pray. You have seen the hunted
hare. It is our education--we have something of the hare in us when the
hounds are full cry. Our bravest, our best, have an impulse to run. “By
this, poor Wat far off upon a hill.” Shakespeare would have the divine
comprehension. I have thought all round it and come back to him. She
is one of Shakespeare's women: another character, but one of his
own:--another Hermione! I dream of him--seeing her with that eye of
steady flame. The bravest and best of us at bay in the world need an eye
like his, to read deep and not be baffled by inconsistencies.'
Insensibly Redworth blinked. His consciousness of an exalted compassion
for the lady was heated by these flights of advocacy to feel that he was
almost seated beside the sovereign poet thus eulogized, and he was of a
modest nature.
'But you are practical,' pursued Lady Dunstane, observing signs that
she took for impatience. 'You are thinking of what can be done. If Lukin
were here I would send him to The Crossways without a moment's delay, on
the chance, the mere chance:--it shines to me! If I were only a little
stronger! I fear I might break down, and it would be unfair to my
husband. He has trouble enough with my premature infirmities already.
I am certain she will go to The Crossways. Tony is one of the women who
burn to give last kisses to things they love. And she has her little
treasures hoarded there. She was born there. Her father died there. She
is three parts Irish--superstitious in affection. I know her so well. At
this moment I see her there. If not, she has grown unlike herself.'
'Have you a stout horse in the stables?' Redworth asked.
'You remember the mare Bertha; you have ridden her.'
'The mare would do, and better than a dozen horses.' He consulted
his watch. 'Let me mount Bertha, I engage to deliver a letter at The
Crossways to-night.'
Lady Dunstane half inclined to act hesitation in accepting the aid she
sought, but said: 'Will you find your way?'
He spoke of three hours of daylight and a moon to rise. 'She has often
pointed out to me from your ridges where The Crossways lies, about three
miles from the Downs, near a village named Storling, on the road to
Brasted.
The house has a small plantation of firs behind it, and a bit of
river--rare for Sussex--to the right. An old straggling red brick house
at Crossways, a stone's throw from a fingerpost on a square of green:
roads to Brasted, London, Wickford, Riddlehurst. I shall find it. Write
what you have to say, my lady, and confide it to me. She shall have it
to-night, if she's where you suppose. I 'll go, with your permission,
and take a look at the mare. Sussex roads are heavy in this damp
weather, and the frost coming on won't improve them for a tired beast.
We haven't our rails laid down there yet.'
'You make me admit some virtues in the practical,' said Lady Dunstane;
and had the poor fellow vollied forth a tale of the everlastingness of
his passion for Diana, it would have touched her far less than his exact
memory of Diana's description of her loved birthplace.
She wrote:
'I trust my messenger to tell you how I hang on you. I see my ship
making for the rocks. You break your Emma's heart. It will be the
second wrong step. I shall not survive it. The threat has made me
incapable of rushing to you, as I might have had strength to do
yesterday. I am shattered, and I wait panting for Mr. Redworth's
return with you. He has called, by accident, as we say. Trust to
him. If ever heaven was active to avert a fatal mischance it is
to-day. You will not stand against my supplication. It is my life I
cry for. I have no more time. He starts. He leaves me to pray--
like the mother seeing her child on the edge of the cliff. Come.
This is your breast, my Tony? And your soul warns you it is right
to come. Do rightly. Scorn other counsel--the coward's. Come with
our friend--the one man known to me who can be a friend of women.
'Your EMMA.'
Redworth was in the room. 'The mare 'll do it well,' he said. 'She has
had her feed, and in five minutes will be saddled at the door.'
'But you must eat, dear friend,' said the hostess.
'I'll munch at a packet of sandwiches on the way. There seems a chance,
and the time for lunching may miss it.'
'You understand...?'
'Everything, I fancy.'
'If she is there!'
'One break in the run will turn her back.'
The sensitive invalid felt a blow in his following up the simile of the
hunted hare for her friend, but it had a promise of hopefulness. And
this was all that could be done by earthly agents, under direction of
spiritual, as her imagination encouraged her to believe.
She saw him start, after fortifying him with a tumbler of choice
Bordeaux, thinking how Tony would have said she was like a lady arming
her knight for battle. On the back of the mare he passed her window,
after lifting his hat, and he thumped at his breast-pocket, to show her
where the letter housed safely. The packet of provision bulged on his
hip, absurdly and blessedly to her sight, not unlike the man, in his
combination of robust serviceable qualities, as she reflected during
the later hours, until the sun fell on smouldering November woods, and
sensations of the frost he foretold bade her remember that he had gone
forth riding like a huntsman. His great-coat lay on a chair in the hall,
and his travelling-bag was beside it. He had carried it up from the
valley, expecting hospitality, and she had sent him forth half naked to
weather a frosty November night! She called in the groom, whose derision
of a great-coat for any gentleman upon Bertha, meaning work for the
mare, appeased her remorsefulness. Brisby, the groom, reckoned how long
the mare would take to do the distance to Storling, with a rider like
Mr. Redworth on her back. By seven, Brisby calculated, Mr. Redworth
would be knocking at the door of the Three Ravens Inn, at Storling,
when the mare would have a decent grooming, and Mr. Redworth was not the
gentleman to let her be fed out of his eye. More than that, Brisby had
some acquaintance with the people of the inn. He begged to inform her
ladyship that he was half a Sussex man, though not exactly born in the
county; his parents had removed to Sussex after the great event; and the
Downs were his first field of horse-exercise, and no place in the world
was like them, fair weather or foul, Summer or Winter, and snow ten feet
deep in the gullies. The grandest air in England, he had heard say.
His mistress kept him to the discourse, for the comfort of hearing hard
bald matter-of-fact; and she was amused and rebuked by his assumption
that she must be entertaining an anxiety about master's favourite mare.
But, ah! that Diana had delayed in choosing a mate; had avoided her
disastrous union with perhaps a more imposing man, to see the true
beauty of masculine character in Mr. Redworth, as he showed himself
to-day. How could he have doubted succeeding? One grain more of faith
in his energy, and Diana might have been mated to the right husband
for her--an open-minded clear-faced English gentleman. Her speculative
ethereal mind clung to bald matter-of-fact to-day. She would have vowed
that it was the sole potentially heroical. Even Brisby partook of the
reflected rays, and he was very benevolently considered by her. She
dismissed him only when his recounting of the stages of Bertha's journey
began to fatigue her and deaden the medical efficacy of him and his
like. Stretched on the sofa, she watched the early sinking sun in
South-western cloud, and the changes from saffron to intensest crimson,
the crown of a November evening, and one of frost.
Redworth struck on a southward line from chalk-ridge to sand, where he
had a pleasant footing in familiar country, under beeches that browned
the ways, along beside a meadowbrook fed by the heights, through pines
and across deep sand-ruts to full view of weald and Downs. Diana had
been with him here in her maiden days. The coloured back of a coach put
an end to that dream. He lightened his pocket, surveying the land as he
munched. A favourable land for rails: and she had looked over it: and
he was now becoming a wealthy man: and she was a married woman straining
the leash. His errand would not bear examination, it seemed such
a desperate long shot. He shut his inner vision on it, and pricked
forward. When the burning sunset shot waves above the juniper and yews
behind him, he was far on the weald, trotting down an interminable road.
That the people opposing railways were not people of business, was his
reflection, and it returned persistently: for practical men, even the
most devoted among them, will think for themselves; their army, which
is the rational, calls them to its banners, in opposition to the
sentimental; and Redworth joined it in the abstract, summoning the
horrible state of the roads to testify against an enemy wanting almost
in common humaneness. A slip of his excellent stepper in one of the
half-frozen pits of the highway was the principal cause of his confusion
of logic; she was half on her knees. Beyond the market town the roads
were so bad that he quitted them, and with the indifference of an
engineer, struck a line of his own Southeastward over fields and
ditches, favoured by a round horizon moon on his left. So for a couple
of hours he went ahead over rolling fallow land to the meadow-flats and
a pale shining of freshets; then hit on a lane skirting the water,
and reached an amphibious village; five miles from Storling, he was
informed, and a clear traverse of lanes, not to be mistaken, 'if he kept
a sharp eye open.' The sharpness of his eyes was divided between the
sword-belt of the starry Hunter and the shifting lanes that zig-tagged
his course below. The Downs were softly illumined; still it amazed him
to think of a woman like Diana Warwick having an attachment to this
district, so hard of yield, mucky, featureless, fit but for the rails
she sided with her friend in detesting. Reasonable women, too! The moon,
stood high on her march as he entered Storling. He led his good beast
to the stables of The Three Ravens, thanking her and caressing her. The
ostler conjectured from the look of the mare that he had been out with
the hounds and lost his way. It appeared to Redworth singularly, that
near the ending of a wild goose chase, his plight was pretty well
described by the fellow. However, he had to knock at the door of The
Crossways now, in the silent night time, a certainly empty house, to his
fancy. He fed on a snack of cold meat and tea, standing, and set forth,
clearly directed, 'if he kept a sharp eye open.' Hitherto he had proved
his capacity, and he rather smiled at the repetition of the formula to
him, of all men. A turning to the right was taken, one to the left, and
through the churchyard, out of the gate, round to the right, and on.
By this route, after an hour, he found himself passing beneath the bare
chestnuts of the churchyard wall of Storling, and the sparkle of the
edges of the dead chestnut-leaves at his feet reminded him of the very
ideas he had entertained when treading them. The loss of an hour strung
him to pursue the chase in earnest, and he had a beating of the heart
as he thought that it might be serious. He recollected thinking it so
at Copsley. The long ride, and nightfall, with nothing in view, had
obscured his mind to the possible behind the thick obstruction of the
probable; again the possible waved its marsh-light. To help in saving
her from a fatal step, supposing a dozen combinations of the conditional
mood, became his fixed object, since here he was--of that there was
no doubt; and he was not here to play the fool, though the errand were
foolish. He entered the churchyard, crossed the shadow of the tower,
and hastened along the path, fancying he beheld a couple of figures
vanishing before him. He shouted; he hoped to obtain directions from
these natives: the moon was bright, the gravestones legible; but no
answer came back, and the place appeared to belong entirely to the dead.
'I've frightened them,' he thought. They left a queerish sensation
in his frame. A ride down to Sussex to see ghosts would be an odd
experience; but an undigested dinner of tea is the very grandmother of
ghosts; and he accused it of confusing him, sight and mind. Out of the
gate, now for the turning to the right, and on. He turned. He must have
previously turned wrongly somewhere--and where? A light in a cottage
invited him to apply for the needed directions. The door was opened by
a woman, who had never heard tell of The Crossways, nor had her husband,
nor any of the children crowding round them. A voice within ejaculated:
'Crassways!' and soon upon the grating of a chair, an old man, whom the
woman named her lodger, by way of introduction, presented himself with
his hat on, saying: 'I knows the spot they calls Crassways,' and he led.
Redworth understood the intention that a job was to be made of it, and
submitting, said: 'To the right, I think.' He was bidden to come along,
if he wanted 'they Crassways,' and from the right they turned to the
left, and further sharp round, and on to a turn, where the old man,
otherwise incommunicative, said: 'There, down thik theer road, and a
post in the middle.'
'I want a house, not a post!' roared Redworth, spying a bare space.
The old man despatched a finger travelling to his nob. 'Naw, there's
ne'er a house. But that's crassways for four roads, if it 's crassways,
you wants.'
They journeyed backward. They were in such a maze of lanes that the
old man was master, and Redworth vowed to be rid of him at the first
cottage. This, however, they were long in reaching, and the old man
was promptly through the garden-gate, hailing the people and securing
'information, before Redworth could well hear. He smiled at the dogged
astuteness of a dense-headed old creature determined to establish a
claim to his fee. They struck a lane sharp to the left.
'You're Sussex?' Redworth asked him, and was answered: 'Naw; the
Sheers.'
Emerging from deliberation, the old man said: 'Ah'm a Hampshireman.'
'A capital county!'
'Heigh!' The old man heaved his chest. 'Once!'
'Why, what has happened to it?'
'Once it were a capital county, I say. Hah! you asks me what have
happened to it. You take and go and look at it now. And down heer'll
be no better soon, I tells 'em. When ah was a boy, old Hampshire was
a proud country, wi' the old coaches and the old squires, and Harvest
Homes, and Christmas merryings.--Cutting up the land! There's no pride
in livin' theer, nor anywhere, as I sees, now.'
'You mean the railways.'
'It's the Devil come up and abroad ower all England!' exclaimed the
melancholy ancient patriot.
A little cheering was tried on him, but vainly. He saw with unerring
distinctness the triumph of the Foul Potentate, nay his personal
appearance 'in they theer puffin' engines.' The country which had
produced Andrew Hedger, as he stated his name to be, would never show
the same old cricketing commons it did when he was a boy. Old England,
he declared, was done for.
When Redworth applied to his watch under the brilliant moonbeams,
he discovered that he had been listening to this natural outcry of
a decaying and shunted class full three-quarters of an hour, and The
Crossways was not in sight. He remonstrated. The old man plodded along.
'We must do as we're directed,' he said.
Further walking brought them to a turn. Any turn seemed hopeful. Another
turn offered the welcome sight of a blazing doorway on a rise of ground
off the road. Approaching it, the old man requested him to 'bide a bit,'
and stalked the ascent at long strides. A vigorous old fellow. Redworth
waited below, observing how he joined the group at the lighted door,
and, as it was apparent, put his question of the whereabout of The
Crossways. Finally, in extreme impatience, he walked up to the group
of spectators. They were all, and Andrew Hedger among them, the most
entranced and profoundly reverent, observing the dissection of a pig.
Unable to awaken his hearing, Redworth jogged his arm, and the shake was
ineffective until it grew in force.
'I've no time to lose; have they told you the way?'
Andrew Hedger yielded his arm. He slowly withdrew his intent fond gaze
from the fair outstretched white carcase, and with drooping eyelids, he
said: 'Ah could eat hog a solid hower!'
He had forgotten to ask the way, intoxicated by the aspect of the pig;
and when he did ask it, he was hard of understanding, given wholly to
his last glimpses.
Redworth got the directions. He would have dismissed Mr. Andrew Hedger,
but there was no doing so. 'I'll show ye on to The Crossways House,' the
latter said, implying that he had already earned something by showing
him The Crossways post.
'Hog's my feed,' said Andrew Hedger. The gastric springs of eloquence
moved him to discourse, and he unburdened himself between succulent
pauses. 'They've killed him early. He 's fat; and he might ha' been
fatter. But he's fat. They've got their Christmas ready, that they have.
Lord! you should see the chitterlings, and--the sausages hung up to and
along the beams. That's a crown for any dwellin'! They runs 'em round
the top of the room--it's like a May-day wreath in old times. Home-fed
hog! They've a treat in store, they have. And snap your fingers at the
world for many a long day. And the hams! They cure their own hams at
that house. Old style! That's what I say of a hog. He's good from end to
end, and beats a Christian hollow. Everybody knows it and owns it.'
Redworth was getting tired. In sympathy with current conversation, he
said a word for the railways: they would certainly make the flesh of
swine cheaper, bring a heap of hams into the market. But Andrew Hedger
remarked with contempt that he had not much opinion of foreign hams:
nobody, knew what they fed on. Hog, he said, would feed on anything,
where there was no choice they had wonderful stomachs for food. Only,
when they had a choice, they left the worst for last, and home-fed
filled them with stuff to make good meat and fat 'what we calls prime
bacon.' As it is not right to damp a native enthusiasm, Redworth let
him dilate on his theme, and mused on his boast to eat hog a solid hour,
which roused some distant classic recollection:--an odd jumble.
They crossed the wooden bridge of a flooded stream.
'Now ye have it,' said the hog-worshipper; 'that may be the house, I
reckon.'
A dark mass of building, with the moon behind it, shining in spires
through a mound of firs, met Redworth's gaze. The windows all were
blind, no smoke rose from the chimneys. He noted the dusky square of
green, and the finger-post signalling the centre of the four roads.
Andrew Hedger repeated that it was The Crossways house, ne'er a doubt.
Redworth paid him his expected fee, whereupon Andrew, shouldering
off, wished him a hearty good night, and forthwith departed at high
pedestrian pace, manifestly to have a concluding look at the beloved
anatomy.
There stood the house. Absolutely empty! thought Redworth. The sound of
the gate-bell he rang was like an echo to him. The gate was unlocked.
He felt a return of his queer churchyard sensation when walking up the
garden-path, in the shadow of the house. Here she was born: here her
father died: and this was the station of her dreams, as a girl at school
near London and in Paris. Her heart was here. He looked at the windows
facing the Downs with dead eyes. The vivid idea of her was a phantom
presence, and cold, assuring him that the bodily Diana was absent. Had
Lady Dunstane guessed rightly, he might perhaps have been of service!
Anticipating the blank silence, he rang the house-bell. It seemed to set
wagging a weariful tongue in a corpse. The bell did its duty to the
last note, and one thin revival stroke, for a finish, as in days when it
responded livingly to the guest. He pulled, and had the reply, just the
same, with the faint terminal touch, resembling exactly a 'There!' at
the close of a voluble delivery in the negative. Absolutely empty. He
pulled and pulled. The bell wagged, wagged. This had been a house of
a witty host, a merry girl, junketting guests; a house of hilarious
thunders, lightnings of fun and fancy. Death never seemed more voiceful
than in that wagging of the bell.
For conscience' sake, as became a trusty emissary, he walked round to
the back of the house, to verify the total emptiness. His apprehensive
despondency had said that it was absolutely empty, but upon
consideration he supposed the house must have some guardian: likely
enough, an old gardener and his wife, lost in deafness double-shotted by
sleep! There was no sign of them. The night air waxed sensibly crisper.
He thumped the backdoors. Blank hollowness retorted on the blow. He
banged and kicked. The violent altercation with wood and wall lasted
several minutes, ending as it had begun.
Flesh may worry, but is sure to be worsted in such an argument.
'Well, my dear lady!'--Redworth addressed Lady Dunstane aloud, while
driving his hands into his pockets for warmth--'we've done what we
could. The next best thing is to go to bed and see what morning brings
us.'
The temptation to glance at the wild divinings of dreamy-witted women
from the point of view of the practical man, was aided by the intense
frigidity of the atmosphere in leading him to criticize a sex not much
used to the exercise of brains. 'And they hate railways!' He associated
them, in the matter of intelligence, with Andrew Hedger and Company.
They sank to the level of the temperature in his esteem--as regarded
their intellects. He approved their warmth of heart. The nipping of the
victim's toes and finger-tips testified powerfully to that.
Round to the front of the house at a trot, he stood in moonlight. Then,
for involuntarily he now did everything running, with a dash up the
steps he seized the sullen pendant bell-handle, and worked it pumpwise,
till he perceived a smaller bell-knob beside the door, at which he
worked piston-wise. Pump and piston, the hurly-burly and the tinkler
created an alarm to scare cat and mouse and Cardinal spider, all that
run or weave in desolate houses, with the good result of a certain
degree of heat to his frame. He ceased, panting. No stir within, nor
light. That white stare of windows at the moon was undisturbed.
The Downs were like a wavy robe of shadowy grey silk. No wonder that she
had loved to look on them!
And it was no wonder that Andrew Hedger enjoyed prime bacon. Bacon
frizzling, fat rashers of real homefed on the fire-none of your
foreign-suggested a genial refreshment and resistance to antagonistic
elements. Nor was it, granting health, granting a sharp night--the
temperature at least fifteen below zero--an excessive boast for a man to
say he could go on eating for a solid hour.
These were notions darting through a half nourished gentleman nipped in
the frame by a severely frosty night. Truly a most beautiful night!
She would have delighted to see it here. The Downs were like floating
islands, like fairy-laden vapours; solid, as Andrew Hedger's hour of
eating; visionary, as too often his desire!
Redworth muttered to himself, after taking the picture of the house
and surrounding country from the sward, that he thought it about the
sharpest night he had ever encountered in England. He was cold, hungry,
dispirited, and astoundingly stricken with an incapacity to separate any
of his thoughts from old Andrew Hedger. Nature was at her pranks upon
him.
He left the garden briskly, as to the legs, and reluctantly. He would
have liked to know whether Diana had recently visited the house, or was
expected. It could be learnt in the morning; but his mission was urgent
and he on the wings of it. He was vexed and saddened.
Scarcely had he closed the garden-gate when the noise of an opening
window arrested him, and he called. The answer was in a feminine voice,
youngish, not disagreeable, though not Diana's.
He heard none of the words, but rejoined in a bawl: 'Mrs. Warwick!--Mr.
Redworth!'
That was loud enough for the deaf or the dead.
The window closed. He went to the door and waited. It swung wide to him;
and O marvel of a woman's divination of a woman! there stood Diana.