The fatal time to come for her was in the Summer of that year.
Emma had written her a letter of unwonted bright spirits, contrasting
strangely with an inexplicable oppression of her own that led her to
imagine her recent placid life the pause before thunder, and to sharp
the mood of her solitary friend she flew to Copsley, finding Sir Lukin
absent, as usual. They drove out immediately after breakfast, on one of
those high mornings of the bared bosom of June when distances are given
to our eyes, and a soft air fondles leaf and grass-blade, and beauty and
peace are overhead, reflected, if we will. Rain had fallen in the night.
Here and there hung a milk-white cloud with folded sail. The South-west
left it in its bay of blue, and breathed below. At moments the fresh
scent of herb and mould swung richly in warmth. The young beech-leaves
glittered, pools of rain-water made the roadways laugh, the grass-banks
under hedges rolled their interwoven weeds in cascades of many-shaded
green to right and left of the pair of dappled ponies, and a squirrel
crossed ahead, a lark went up a little way to ease his heart, closing
his wings when the burst was over, startled black-birds, darting with a
clamour like a broken cockcrow, looped the wayside woods from hazel
to oak-scrub; short flights, quick spirts everywhere, steady sunshine
above.
Diana held the reins. The whip was an ornament, as the plume of feathers
to the general officer. Lady Dunstane's ponies were a present from
Redworth, who always chose the pick of the land for his gifts. They
joyed in their trot, and were the very love-birds of the breed for their
pleasure of going together, so like that Diana called them the Dromios.
Through an old gravel-cutting a gateway led to the turf of the down,
springy turf bordered on a long line, clear as a racecourse, by golden
gorse covers, and leftward over the gorse the dark ridge of the fir and
heath country ran companionably to the Southwest, the valley between,
with undulations of wood and meadow sunned or shaded, clumps, mounds,
promontories, away to broad spaces of tillage banked by wooded hills,
and dimmer beyond and farther, the faintest shadowiness of heights, as a
veil to the illimitable. Yews, junipers, radiant beeches, and gleams of
the service-tree or the white-beam spotted the semicircle of swelling
green Down black and silver. The sun in the valley sharpened his beams
on squares of buttercups, and made a pond a diamond.
'You see, Tony,' Emma said, for a comment on the scene, 'I could envy
Italy for having you, more than you for being in Italy.'
'Feature and colour!' said Diana. 'You have them here, and on a scale
that one can embrace. I should like to build a hut on this point, and
wait for such a day to return. It brings me to life.' She lifted her
eyelids on her friend's worn sweet face, and knowing her this friend
up to death, past it in her hopes, she said bravely, 'It is the Emma
of days and scenes to me! It helps me to forget myself, as I do when I
think of you, dearest; but the subject has latterly been haunting me, I
don't know why, and ominously, as if my nature were about to horrify my
soul. But I am not sentimentalizing, you are really this day and scene
in my heart.'
Emma smiled confidingly. She spoke her reflection: 'The heart must be
troubled a little to have the thought. The flower I gather here tells me
that we may be happy in privation and suffering if simply we can accept
beauty. I won't say expel the passions, but keep passion sober, a
trotter in harness.'
Diana caressed the ponies' heads with the droop of her whip: 'I don't
think I know him!' she said.
Between sincerity and a suspicion so cloaked and dull that she did not
feel it to be the opposite of candour, she fancied she was passionless
because she could accept the visible beauty, which was Emma's
prescription and test; and she forced herself to make much of it, cling
to it, devour it; with envy of Emma's contemplative happiness, through
whose grave mind she tried to get to the peace in it, imagining that
she succeeded. The cloaked and dull suspicion weighed within her
nevertheless. She took it for a mania to speculate on herself. There are
states of the crimson blood when the keenest wits are childish, notably
in great-hearted women aiming at the majesty of their sex and fearful of
confounding it by the look direct and the downright word. Yet her nature
compelled her inwardly to phrase the sentence: 'Emma is a wife!' The
character of her husband was not considered, nor was the meaning of the
exclamation pursued.
They drove through the gorse into wild land of heath and flowering
hawthorn, and along by tracts of yew and juniper to another point,
jutting on a furzy sand-mound, rich with the mild splendour of English
scenery, which Emma stamped on her friend's mind by saying: 'A cripple
has little to envy in you who can fly when she has feasts like these at
her doors.'
They had an inclination to boast on the drive home of the solitude they
had enjoyed; and just then, as the road in the wood wound under great
beeches, they beheld a London hat. The hat was plucked from its head. A
clear-faced youth, rather flushed, dusty at the legs, addressed Diana.
'Mr. Rhodes!' she said, not discouragingly.
She was petitioned to excuse him; he thought she would wish to hear the
news in town last night as early as possible; he hesitated and murmured
it.
Diana turned to Emma: 'Lord Dannisburgh!' her paleness told the rest.
Hearing from Mr. Rhodes that he had walked the distance from town,
and had been to Copsley, Lady Dunstane invited him to follow
the pony-carriage thither, where he was fed and refreshed by a
tea-breakfast, as he preferred walking on tea, he said. 'I took the
liberty to call at Mrs. Warwick's house,' he informed her; 'the
footman said she was at Copsley. I found it on the map--I knew the
directions--and started about two in the morning. I wanted a walk.'
It was evident to her that he was one of the young squires bewitched
whom beautiful women are constantly enlisting. There was no concealment
of it, though he stirred a sad enviousness in the invalid lady by
descanting on the raptures of a walk out of London in the youngest light
of day, and on the common objects he had noticed along the roadside,
and through the woods, more sustaining, closer with nature than her
compulsory feeding on the cream of things.
'You are not fatigued?' she inquired, hoping for that confession at
least; but she pardoned his boyish vaunting to walk the distance back
without any fatigue at all.
He had a sweeter reward for his pains; and if the business of the
chronicler allowed him to become attached to pure throbbing felicity
wherever it is encountered, he might be diverted by the blissful
unexpectedness of good fortune befalling Mr. Arthur Rhodes in having the
honour to conduct Mrs. Warwick to town. No imagined happiness, even in
the heart of a young man of two and twenty, could have matched it. He
was by her side, hearing and seeing her, not less than four hours. To
add to his happiness, Lady Dunstane said she would be glad to welcome
him again. She thought him a pleasant specimen of the self-vowed squire.
Diana was sure that there would be a communication for her of some sort
at her house in London; perhaps a message of farewell from the dying
lord, now dead. Mr. Rhodes had only the news of the evening journals,
to the effect that Lord Dannisburgh had expired at his residence, the
Priory, Hallowmere, in Hampshire. A message of farewell from him,
she hoped for: knowing him as she did, it seemed a certainty; and
she hungered for that last gleam of life in her friend. She had no
anticipation of the burden of the message awaiting her.
A consultation as to the despatching of the message, had taken place
among the members of Lord Dannisburgh's family present at his death.
Percy Dacier was one of them, and he settled the disputed point, after
some time had been spent in persuading his father to take the plain view
of obligation in the matter, and in opposing the dowager countess, his
grandmother, by stating that he had already sent a special messenger to
London. Lord Dannisburgh on his death-bed had expressed a wish that Mrs.
Warwick would sit with him for an hour one night before the nails were
knocked in his coffin. He spoke of it twice, putting it the second time
to Percy as a formal request to be made to her, and Percy had promised
him that Mrs. Warwick should have the message. He had done his best
to keep his pledge, aware of the disrelish of the whole family for the
lady's name, to say nothing of her presence.
'She won't come,' said the earl.
'She'll come,' said old Lady Dacier.
'If the woman respects herself she'll hold off it,' the earl insisted
because of his desire that way. He signified in mutterings that the
thing was improper and absurd, a piece of sentiment, sickly senility,
unlike Lord Dannisburgh. Also that Percy had been guilty of excessive
folly.
To which Lady Dacier nodded her assent, remarking, 'The woman is on
her mettle. From what I've heard of her, she's not a woman to stick at
trifles. She'll take it as a sort of ordeal by touch, and she 'll come.'
They joined in abusing Percy, who had driven away to another part of the
country. Lord Creedmore, the heir of the house, was absent, hunting
in America, or he might temporarily have been taken into favour by
contrast. Ultimately they agreed that the woman must be allowed to enter
the house, but could not be received. The earl was a widower; his mother
managed the family, and being hard to convince, she customarily carried
her point, save when it involved Percy's freedom of action. She was one
of the veterans of her sex that age to toughness; and the 'hysterical
fuss' she apprehended in the visit of this woman to Lord Dannisburgh's
death-bed and body, did not alarm her. For the sake of the household she
determined to remain, shut up in her room. Before night the house was
empty of any members of the family excepting old Lady Dacier and the
outstretched figure on the bed.
Dacier fled to escape the hearing of the numberless ejaculations
re-awakened in the family by his uncle's extraordinary dying request.
They were an outrage to the lady, of whom he could now speak as a
privileged champion; and the request itself had an air of proving her
stainless, a white soul and efficacious advocate at the celestial gates
(reading the mind of the dying man). So he thought at one moment: he had
thought so when charged with the message to her; had even thought it
a natural wish that she should look once on the face she would see no
more, and say farewell to it, considering that in life it could not
be requested. But the susceptibility to sentimental emotion beside a
death-bed, with a dying man's voice in the ear, requires fortification
if it is to be maintained;' and the review of his uncle's character
did not tend to make this very singular request a proof that the lady's
innocence was honoured in it. His epicurean uncle had no profound esteem
for the kind of innocence. He had always talked of Mrs. Warwick--with
warm respect for her: Dacier knew that he had bequeathed her a sum of
money. The inferences were either way. Lord Dannisburgh never spoke
evilly of any woman, and he was perhaps bound to indemnify her
materially as well as he could for what she had suffered.--On the
other hand, how easy it was to be the dupe of a woman so handsome
and clever.--Unlikely too that his uncle would consent to sit at
the Platonic banquet with her.--Judging by himself, Dacier deemed it
possible for man. He was not quick to kindle, and had lately seen much
of her, had found her a Lady Egeria, helpful in counsel, prompting,
inspiriting, reviving as well-waters, and as temperately cool: not one
sign of native slipperiness. Nor did she stir the mud in him upon which
proud man is built. The shadow of the scandal had checked a few shifty
sensations rising now and then of their own accord, and had laid them,
with the lady's benign connivance. This was good proof in her favour,
seeing that she must have perceived of late the besetting thirst he had
for her company; and alone or in the medley equally. To see her, hear,
exchange ideas with her; and to talk of new books, try to listen to
music at the opera and at concerts, and admire her playing of
hostess, were novel pleasures, giving him fresh notions of life, and
strengthening rather than disturbing the course of his life's business.
At any rate, she was capable of friendship. Why not resolutely believe
that she had been his uncle's true and simple friend! He adopted the
resolution, thanking her for one recognized fact:--he hated marriage,
and would by this time have been in the yoke, but for the agreeable
deviation of his path to her society. Since his visit to Copsley,
moreover, Lady Dunstane's idolizing, of her friend had influenced him.
Reflecting on it, he recovered from the shock which his uncle's request
had caused.
Certain positive calculations were running side by side with the
speculations in vapour. His messenger would reach her house at about
four of the afternoon. If then at home, would she decide to start
immediately?--Would she come? That was a question he did not delay to
answer. Would she defer the visit? Death replied to that. She would not
delay it.
She would be sure to come at once. And what of the welcome she would
meet? Leaving the station at London at six in the evening, she might
arrive at the Priory, all impediments counted, between ten and eleven at
night. Thence, coldly greeted, or not greeted, to the chamber of death.
A pitiable and cruel reception for a woman upon such a mission!
His mingled calculations and meditations reached that exclamatory
terminus in feeling, and settled on the picture of Diana, about as clear
as light to blinking eyes, but enough for him to realize her being there
and alone, woefully alone. The supposition of an absolute loneliness
was most possible. He had intended to drive back the next day, when the
domestic storm would be over, and take the chances of her coming. It
seemed now a piece of duty to return at night, a traverse of twenty
rough up and down miles from Itchenford to the heath-land rolling on the
chalk wave of the Surrey borders, easily done after the remonstrances of
his host were stopped.
Dacier sat in an open carriage, facing a slip of bright moon. Poetical
impressions, emotions, any stirrings of his mind by the sensational
stamp on it, were new to him, and while he swam in them, both lulled and
pricked by his novel accessibility to nature's lyrical touch, he asked
himself whether, if he were near the throes of death, the thought of
having Diana Warwick to sit beside his vacant semblance for an hour at
night would be comforting. And why had his uncle specified an hour of
the night? It was a sentiment, like the request: curious in a man so
little sentimental. Yonder crescent running the shadowy round of the
hoop roused comparisons. Would one really wish to have her beside one
in death? In life--ah! But suppose her denied to us in life. Then the
desire for her companionship appears passingly comprehensible. Enter
into the sentiment, you see that the hour of darkness is naturally
chosen. And would even a grand old Pagan crave the presence beside his
dead body for an hour of the night of a woman he did not esteem? Dacier
answered no. The negative was not echoed in his mind. He repeated it,
and to the same deadness.
He became aware that he had spoken for himself, and he had a fit of
sourness. For who can say he is not a fool before he has been tried by
a woman! Dacier's wretched tendency under vexation to conceive grotesque
analogies, anti-poetic, not to say cockney similes, which had slightly
chilled Diana at Rovio, set him looking at yonder crescent with the
hoop, as at the shape of a white cat climbing a wheel. Men of the
northern blood will sometimes lend their assent to poetical images, even
to those that do not stun the mind lie bludgeons and imperatively, by
much repetition, command their assent; and it is for a solid exchange
and interest in usury with soft poetical creatures when they are so
condescending; but they are seized by the grotesque. In spite of efforts
to efface or supplant it, he saw the white cat, nothing else, even to
thinking that she had jumped cleverly to catch the wheel. He was a true
descendant of practical hard-grained fighting Northerners, of gnarled
dwarf imaginations, chivalrous though they were, and heroes to have
serviceable and valiant gentlemen for issue. Without at all tracing back
to its origin his detestable image of the white cat on the dead circle,
he kicked at the links between his uncle and Diana Warwick, whatever
they had been; particularly at the present revival of them. Old Lady
Dacier's blunt speech, and his father's fixed opinion, hissed in his
head.
They were ignorant of his autumnal visit to the Italian Lakes, after
the winter's Nile-boat expedition; and also of the degree of his recent
intimacy with Mrs. Warwick; or else, as he knew, he would have heard
more hissing things. Her patronage of Miss Paynham exposed her to
attacks where she was deemed vulnerable; Lady Dacier muttered old
saws as to the flocking of birds; he did not accurately understand it,
thought it indiscreet, at best. But in regard to his experience, he
could tell himself that a woman more guileless of luring never drew
breath. On the contrary, candour said it had always been he who had
schemed and pressed for the meeting. He was at liberty to do it, not
being bound in honour elsewhere. Besides, despite his acknowledgement
of her beauty, Mrs. Warwick was not quite his ideal of the perfectly
beautiful woman.
Constance Asper came nearer to it. He had the English taste for red and
white, and for cold outlines: he secretly admired a statuesque demeanour
with a statue's eyes. The national approbation of a reserved haughtiness
in woman, a tempered disdain in her slightly lifted small upperlip and
drooped eyelids, was shared by him; and Constance Asper, if not exactly
aristocratic by birth, stood well for that aristocratic insular type,
which seems to promise the husband of it a casket of all the trusty
virtues, as well as the security of frigidity in the casket. Such was
Dacier's native taste; consequently the attractions of Diana Warwick for
him were, he thought, chiefly mental, those of a Lady Egeria. She might
or might not be good, in the vulgar sense. She was an agreeable woman,
an amusing companion, very suggestive, inciting, animating; and her past
history must be left as her own. Did it matter to him? What he saw was
bright, a silver crescent on the side of the shadowy ring. Were it
a question of marrying her!--That was out of the possibilities. He
remembered, moreover, having heard from a man, who professed to know,
that Mrs. Warwick had started in married life by treating her husband
cavalierly to an intolerable degree: 'Such as no Englishman could
stand,' the portly old informant thundered, describing it and her in
racy vernacular. She might be a devil of a wife. She was a pleasant
friend; just the soft bit sweeter than male friends which gave the
flavour of sex without the artful seductions. He required them strong to
move him.
He looked at last on the green walls of the Priory, scarcely supposing a
fair watcher to be within; for the contrasting pale colours of dawn had
ceased to quicken the brilliancy of the crescent, and summer daylight
drowned it to fainter than a silver coin in water. It lay dispieced like
a pulled rag. Eastward, over Surrey, stood the full rose of morning. The
Priory clock struck four. When the summons of the bell had gained him
admittance, and he heard that Mrs. Warwick had come in the night, he
looked back through the doorway at the rosy colour, and congratulated
himself to think that her hour of watching was at an end. A sleepy
footman was his informant. Women were in my lord's dressing-room, he
said. Upstairs, at the death-chamber, Dacier paused. No sound came to
him. He hurried to his own room, paced about, and returned. Expecting to
see no one but the dead, he turned the handle, and the two circles of a
shaded lamp, on ceiling and on table, met his gaze.