DIALOGUE, AND A SMALL INCIDENT ON THE ROAD
In the morning the fight was over. She looked at the signpost of The
Crossways whilst dressing, and submitted to follow, obediently as a
puppet, the road recommended by friends, though a voice within, that she
took for the intimations of her reason, protested that they were
wrong, that they were judging of her case in the general, and
unwisely--disastrously for her.
The mistaking of her desires for her reasons was peculiar to her
situation.
'So I suppose I shall some day see The Crossways again,' she said, to
conceive a compensation in the abandonment of freedom. The night's red
vision of martyrdom was reserved to console her secretly, among the
unopened lockers in her treasury of thoughts. It helped to sustain her;
and she was too conscious of things necessary for her sustainment to
bring it to the light of day and examine it. She had a pitiful bit of
pleasure in the gratification she imparted to Danvers, by informing her
that the journey of the day was backward to Copsley.
'If I may venture to say so, ma'am, I am very glad,' said her maid.
'You must be prepared for the questions of lawyers, Danvers.'
'Oh, ma'am! they'll get nothing out of me, and their wigs won't frighten
me.'
'It is usually their baldness that is most frightening, my poor
Danvers.'
'Nor their baldness, ma'am,' said the literal maid; 'I never cared for
their heads, or them. I've been in a Case before.'
'Indeed!' exclaimed her mistress; and she had a chill.
Danvers mentioned a notorious Case, adding, 'They got nothing out of
me.'
'In my Case you will please to speak the truth,' said Diana, and beheld
in the looking-glass the primming of her maid's mouth. The sight shot a
sting.
'Understand that there is to be no hesitation about telling the truth of
what you know of me,' said Diana; and the answer was, 'No, ma'am.'
For Danvers could remark to herself that she knew little, and was not
a person to hesitate. She was a maid of the world, with the quality of
faithfulness, by nature, to a good mistress.
Redworth's further difficulties were confined to the hiring of a
conveyance for the travellers, and hot-water bottles, together with a
postillion not addicted to drunkenness. He procured a posting-chariot,
an ancient and musty, of a late autumnal yellow unrefreshed by paint;
the only bottles to be had were Dutch Schiedam. His postillion,
inspected at Storling, carried the flag of habitual inebriation on his
nose, and he deemed it adviseable to ride the mare in accompaniment
as far as Riddlehurst, notwithstanding the postillion's vows upon his
honour that he was no drinker. The emphasis, to a gentleman acquainted
with his countrymen, was not reassuring. He had hopes of enlisting
a trustier fellow at Riddlehurst, but he was disappointed; and while
debating upon what to do, for he shrank from leaving two women to the
conduct of that inflamed troughsnout, Brisby, despatched to Storling by
an afterthought of Lady Dunstane's, rushed out of the Riddlehurst inn
taproom, and relieved him of the charge of the mare. He was accommodated
with a seat on a stool in the chariot. 'My triumphal car,' said his
captive. She was very amusing about her postillion; Danvers had to
beg pardon for laughing. 'You are happy,' observed her mistress. But
Redworth laughed too, and he could not boast of any happiness beyond the
temporary satisfaction, nor could she who sprang the laughter boast
of that little. She said to herself, in the midst of the hilarity,
'Wherever I go now, in all weathers, I am perfectly naked!' And
remembering her readings of a certain wonderful old quarto book in her
father's library, by an eccentric old Scottish nobleman, wherein the
wearing of garments and sleeping in houses is accused as the cause of
human degeneracy, she took a forced merry stand on her return to the
primitive healthful state of man and woman, and affected scorn of our
modern ways of dressing and thinking. Whence it came that she had some
of her wildest seizures of iridescent humour. Danvers attributed the fun
to her mistress's gladness in not having pursued her bent to quit the
country. Redworth saw deeper, and was nevertheless amazed by the airy
hawk-poise and pounce-down of her wit, as she ranged high and low, now
capriciously generalizing, now dropping bolt upon things of passage--the
postillion jogging from rum to gin, the rustics baconly agape, the
horse-kneed ostlers. She touched them to the life in similes and
phrases; and next she was aloft, derisively philosophizing, but with
a comic afflatus that dispersed the sharpness of her irony in
mocking laughter. The afternoon refreshments at the inn of the county
market-town, and the English idea of public hospitality, as to manner
and the substance provided for wayfarers, were among the themes she made
memorable to him. She spoke of everything tolerantly, just naming it in
a simple sentence, that fell with a ring and chimed: their host's ready
acquiescence in receiving, orders, his contemptuous disclaimer of stuff
he did not keep, his flat indifference to the sheep he sheared, and the
phantom half-crown flickering in one eye of the anticipatory waiter; the
pervading and confounding smell of stale beer over all the apartments;
the prevalent, notion of bread, butter, tea, milk, sugar, as matter for
the exercise of a native inventive genius--these were reviewed in quips
of metaphor.
'Come, we can do better at an inn or two known to me,' said Redworth.
'Surely this is the best that can be done for us, when we strike them
with the magic wand of a postillion?' said she.
'It depends, as elsewhere, on the individuals entertaining us.'
'Yet you admit that your railways are rapidly “polishing off” the
individual.'
'They will spread the metropolitan idea of comfort.'
'I fear they will feed us on nothing but that big word. It booms--a
curfew bell--for every poor little light that we would read by.'
Seeing their beacon-nosed postillion preparing too mount and failing
in his jump, Redworth was apprehensive, and questioned the fellow
concerning potation.
'Lord, sir, they call me half a horse, but I can't 'bids water,' was the
reply, with the assurance that he had not 'taken a pailful.'
Habit enabled him to gain his seat.
'It seems to us unnecessary to heap on coal when the chimney is afire;
but he may know the proper course,' Diana said, convulsing Danvers; and
there was discernibly to Redworth, under the influence of her phrases,
a likeness of the flaming 'half-horse,' with the animals all smoking in
the frost, to a railway engine. 'Your wrinkled centaur,' she named the
man. Of course he had to play second to her, and not unwillingly; but
he reflected passingly on the instinctive push of her rich and sparkling
voluble fancy to the initiative, which women do not like in a woman, and
men prefer to distantly admire. English women and men feel toward the
quick-witted of their species as to aliens, having the demerits of
aliens-wordiness, vanity, obscurity, shallowness, an empty glitter,
the sin of posturing. A quick-witted woman exerting her wit is both a
foreigner and potentially a criminal. She is incandescent to a breath of
rumour. It accounted for her having detractors; a heavy counterpoise
to her enthusiastic friends. It might account for her husband's
discontent-the reduction of him to a state of mere masculine antagonism.
What is the husband of a vanward woman? He feels himself but a
diminished man. The English husband of a voluble woman relapses into a
dreary mute. Ah, for the choice of places! Redworth would have yielded
her the loquent lead for the smallest of the privileges due to him who
now rejected all, except the public scourging of her. The conviction was
in his mind that the husband of this woman sought rather to punish than
be rid of her. But a part of his own emotion went to form the judgement.
Furthermore, Lady Dunstane's allusion to her 'enemies' made him set
down her growing crops of backbiters to the trick she had of
ridiculing things English. If the English do it themselves, it is in a
professionally robust, a jocose, kindly way, always with a glance at the
other things, great things, they excel in; and it is done to have the
credit of doing it. They are keen to catch an inimical tone; they will
find occasion to chastise the presumptuous individual, unless it be the
leader of a party, therefore a power; for they respect a power. Redworth
knew their quaintnesses; without overlooking them he winced at the acid
of an irony that seemed to spring from aversion, and regretted it,
for her sake. He had to recollect that she was in a sharp-strung mood,
bitterly surexcited; moreover he reminded himself of her many and
memorable phrases of enthusiasm for England--Shakespeareland, as she
would sometimes perversely term it, to sink the country in the poet.
English fortitude, English integrity, the English disposition to do
justice to dependents, adolescent English ingenuousness, she was always
ready to laud. Only her enthusiasm required rousing by circumstances;
it was less at the brim than her satire. Hence she made enemies among a
placable people.
He felt that he could have helped her under happier conditions. The
beautiful vision she had been on the night of the Irish Ball swept
before him, and he looked at her, smiling.
'Why do you smile?' she said.
'I was thinking of Mr. Sullivan Smith.'
'Ah! my dear compatriot! And think, too, of Lord Larrian.'
She caught her breath. Instead of recreation, the names brought on a fit
of sadness. It deepened; shy neither smiled nor rattled any more. She
gazed across the hedgeways at the white meadows and bare-twigged copses
showing their last leaves in the frost.
'I remember your words: “Observation is the most, enduring of the
pleasures of life”; and so I have found it,' she said. There was a
brightness along her under-eyelids that caused him to look away.
The expected catastrophe occurred on the descent of a cutting in the
sand, where their cordial postillion at a trot bumped the chariot
against the sturdy wheels of a waggon, which sent it reclining for
support upon a beech-tree's huge intertwisted serpent roots, amid strips
of brown bracken and pendant weeds, while he exhibited one short stump
of leg, all boot, in air. No one was hurt. Diana disengaged herself from
the shoulder of Danvers, and mildly said:
'That reminds me, I forgot to ask why we came in a chariot.'
Redworth was excited on her behalf, but the broken glass had done no
damage, nor had Danvers fainted. The remark was unintelligible to him,
apart from the comforting it had been designed to give. He jumped out,
and held a hand for them to do the same. 'I never foresaw an event more
positively,' said he.
'And it was nothing but a back view that inspired you all the way,' said
Diana.
A waggoner held the horses, another assisted Redworth to right the
chariot. The postillion had hastily recovered possession of his official
seat, that he might as soon as possible feel himself again where he was
most intelligent, and was gay in stupidity, indifferent to what happened
behind him. Diana heard him counselling the waggoner as to the common
sense of meeting small accidents with a cheerful soul.
'Lord!' he cried, 'I been pitched a Somerset in my time, and taken up
for dead, and that didn't beat me!'
Disasters of the present kind could hardly affect such a veteran. But
he was painfully disconcerted by Redworth's determination not to
entrust the ladies any farther to his guidance. Danvers had implored
for permission to walk the mile to the town, and thence take a fly to
Copsley. Her mistress rather sided with the postillion; who begged them
to spare him the disgrace of riding in and delivering a box at the Red
Lion.
'What'll they say? And they know Arthur Dance well there,' he groaned.
'What! Arthur! chariotin' a box! And me a better man to his work now
than I been for many a long season, fit for double the journey! A bit of
a shake always braces me up. I could read a newspaper right off, small
print and all. Come along, sir, and hand the ladies in.'
Danvers vowed her thanks to Mr. Redworth for refusing. They walked
ahead; the postillion communicated his mixture of professional and human
feelings to the waggoners, and walked his horses in the rear, meditating
on the weak-heartedness of gentryfolk, and the means for escaping being
chaffed out of his boots at the Old Red Lion, where he was to eat,
drink, and sleep that night. Ladies might be fearsome after a bit of a
shake; he would not have supposed it of a gentleman. He jogged himself
into an arithmetic of the number of nips of liquor he had taken to
soothe him on the road, in spite of the gentleman. 'For some of 'em are
sworn enemies of poor men, as yonder one, ne'er a doubt.'
Diana enjoyed her walk beneath the lingering brown-red of the frosty
November sunset, with the scent of sand-earth strong in the air.
'I had to hire a chariot because there was no two-horse carriage,' said
Redworth, 'and I wished to reach Copsley as early as possible.'
She replied, smiling, that accidents were fated. As a certain marriage
had been! The comparison forced itself on her reflections.
'But this is quite an adventure,' said she, reanimated by the brisker
flow of her blood. 'We ought really to be thankful for it, in days when
nothing happens.'
Redworth accused her of getting that idea from the perusal of romances.
'Yes, our lives require compression, like romances, to be interesting,
and we object to the process,' she said. 'Real happiness is a state of
dulness. When we taste it consciously it becomes mortal--a thing of the
Seasons. But I like my walk. How long these November sunsets burn, and
what hues they have! There is a scientific reason, only don't tell it
me. Now I understand why you always used to choose your holidays in
November.'
She thrilled him with her friendly recollection of his customs.
'As to happiness, the looking forward is happiness,' he remarked.
'Oh, the looking back! back!' she cried.
'Forward! that is life.'
'And backward, death, if you will; and still at is happiness. Death, and
our postillion!'
'Ay; I wonder why the fellow hangs to the rear,' said Redworth, turning
about.
'It's his cunning strategy, poor creature, so that he may be thought to
have delivered us at the head of the town, for us to make a purchase or
two, if we go to the inn on foot,' said Diana. 'We 'll let the manoeuvre
succeed.'
Redworth declared that she had a head for everything, and she was
flattered to hear him.
So passing from the southern into the western road, they saw the
town-lights beneath an amber sky burning out sombrely over the woods of
Copsley, and entered the town, the postillion following.