INDICATIONS OF THE TASK FOR DIANA
An enamoured Egeria who is not a princess in her worldly state nor
a goddess by origin has to play one of those parts which strain the
woman's faculties past naturalness. She must never expose her feelings
to her lover; she must make her counsel weighty--otherwise she is little
his nymph of the pure wells, and what she soon may be, the world will
say. She has also, most imperatively, to dazzle him without the betrayal
of artifice, where simple spontaneousness is beyond conjuring. But
feelings that are constrained becloud the judgement besides arresting
the fine jet of delivery wherewith the mastered lover is taught through
his ears to think himself prompted, and submit to be controlled, by
a creature super-feminine. She must make her counsel so weighty in
poignant praises as to repress impulses that would rouse her own; and
her betraying impulsiveness was a subject of reflection to Diana after
she had given Percy Dacier, metaphorically, the key of her house. Only
as true Egeria could she receive him. She was therefore grateful, she
thanked and venerated this noblest of lovers for his not pressing to the
word of love, and so strengthening her to point his mind, freshen
his moral energies and inspirit him. His chivalrous acceptance of the
conditions of their renewed intimacy was a radiant knightliness to
Diana, elevating her with a living image for worship:--he so near once
to being the absolute lord of her destinies! How to reward him, was her
sole dangerous thought. She prayed and strove that she might give him
of her best, to practically help him; and she had reason to suppose she
could do it, from the visible effect of her phrases. He glistened in
repeating them; he had fallen into the habit; before witnesses too;
in the presence of Miss Paynham, who had taken earnestly to the art of
painting, and obtained her dear Mrs. Warwick's promise of a few sittings
for the sketch of a portrait, near the close of the season. 'A very
daring thing to attempt,' Miss Paynham said, when he was comparing her
first outlines and the beautiful breathing features. 'Even if one gets
the face, the lips will seem speechless, to those who know her.'
'If they have no recollection,' said Dacier.
'I mean, the endeavour should be to represent them at the moment of
speaking.'
'Put it into the eyes.' He looked at the eyes.
She looked at the mouth. 'But it is the mouth, more than the eyes.'
He looked at the face. 'Where there is character, you have only to study
it to be sure of a likeness.'
'That is the task, with one who utters jewels, Mr. Dacier.'
'Bright wit, I fear, is above the powers of your art.'
'Still I feel it could be done. See--now--that!'
Diana's lips had opened to say: 'Confess me a model model: I am
dissected while I sit for portrayal. I must be for a moment like the
frog of the two countrymen who were disputing as to the manner of his
death, when he stretched to yawn, upon which they agreed that he had
defeated the truth for both of them. I am not quite inanimate.'
'Irish countrymen,' said Dacier.
'The story adds, that blows were arrested; so confer the nationality as
you please.'
Diana had often to divert him from a too intent perusal of her features
with sparkles and stories current or invented to serve the immediate
purpose.
Miss Paynham was Mrs. Warwick's guest for a fortnight, and observed them
together. She sometimes charitably laid down her pencil and left them,
having forgotten this or that. They were conversing of general matters
with their usual crisp precision on her return, and she was rather like
the two countrymen, in debating whether it was excess of coolness
or discreetness; though she was convinced of their inclinations, and
expected love some day to be leaping up. Diana noticed that she had no
reminder for leaving the room when it was Mr. Redworth present. These
two had become very friendly, according to her hopes; and Miss Paynham
was extremely solicitous to draw suggestions from Mr. Redworth and win
his approval.
'Do I appear likely to catch the mouth now, do you think, Mr. Redworth?'
He remarked, smiling at Diana's expressive dimple, that the mouth was
difficult to catch. He did not gaze intently. Mr. Redworth was the
genius of friendship, 'the friend of women,' Mrs. Warwick had said of
him. Miss Paynham discovered it, as regarded herself. The portrait was
his commission to her, kindly proposed, secretly of course, to give her
occupation and the chance of winning a vogue with the face of a famous
Beauty. So many, however, were Mrs. Warwick's visitors, and so lively
the chatter she directed, that accurate sketching was difficult to an
amateurish hand. Whitmonby, Sullivan Smith, Westlake, Henry Wilmers,
Arthur Rhodes, and other gentlemen, literary and military, were almost
daily visitors when it became known that the tedium of the beautiful
sitter required beguiling and there was a certainty of finding her at
home. On Mrs. Warwick's Wednesday numerous ladies decorated the group.
Then was heard such a rillet of dialogue without scandal or politics,
as nowhere else in Britain; all vowed it subsequently; for to the
remembrance it seemed magical. Not a breath of scandal, and yet the
liveliest flow. Lady Pennon came attended by a Mr. Alexander Hepburn, a
handsome Scot, at whom Dacier shot one of his instinctive keen glances,
before seeing that the hostess had mounted a transient colour. Mr.
Hepburn, in settling himself on his chair rather too briskly, contrived
the next minute to break a precious bit of China standing by his elbow;
and Lady Pennon cried out, with sympathetic anguish: 'Oh, my dear, what
a trial for you!'
'Brittle is foredoomed,' said Diana, unruffled.
She deserved compliments, and would have had them if she had not wounded
the most jealous and petulant of her courtiers.
'Then the Turk is a sapient custodian!' said Westlake, vexed with her
flush at the entrance of the Scot.
Diana sedately took his challenge. 'We, Mr. Westlake, have the
philosophy of ownership.'
Mr. Hepburn penitentially knelt to pick up the fragments, and Westlake
murmured over his head: 'As long as it is we who are the cracked.'
'Did we not start from China?'
'We were consequently precipitated to Stamboul.'
'You try to elude the lesson.'
'I remember my first paedagogue telling me so when he rapped the book on
my cranium.'
'The mark of the book is not a disfigurement.'
It was gently worded, and the shrewder for it. The mark of the book,
if not a disfigurement, was a characteristic of Westlake's fashion of
speech. Whitmonby nodded twice, for signification of a palpable hit
in that bout; and he noted within him the foolishness of obtruding the
remotest allusion to our personality when crossing the foils with a
woman. She is down on it like the lightning, quick as she is in her
contracted circle, politeness guarding her from a riposte.
Mr. Hepburn apologized very humbly, after regaining his chair. Diana
smiled and said: 'Incidents in a drawing-room are prize-shots at
Dulness.'
'And in a dining-room too,' added Sullivan Smith. 'I was one day at a
dinner-party, apparently of undertakers hired to mourn over the joints
and the birds in the dishes, when the ceiling came down, and we all
sprang up merry as crickets. It led to a pretty encounter and a real
prize-shot.'
'Does that signify a duel?' asked Lady Pennon.
''Twould be the vulgar title, to bring it into discredit with the
populace, my lady.'
'Rank me one of the populace then! I hate duelling and rejoice that it
is discountenanced.'
'The citizens, and not the populace, I think Mr. Sullivan Smith means,'
Diana said. 'The citizen is generally right in morals. My father also
was against the practice, when it raged at its “prettiest.” I have heard
him relate a story of a poor friend of his, who had to march out for a
trifle, and said, as he accepted the invitation, “It's all nonsense!”
and walking to the measured length, “It's all nonsense, you know!”
and when lying on the ground, at his last gasp, “I told you it was all
nonsense!”'
Sullivan Smith leaned over to Whitmonby and Dacier amid the
ejaculations, and whispered: 'A lady's way of telling the story!--and
excuseable to her:--she had to Jonah the adjective. What the poor fellow
said was--' He murmured the sixty-pounder adjective, as in the belly of
the whale, to rightly emphasize his noun.
Whitmonby nodded to the superior relish imparted by the vigour
of masculine veracity in narration. 'A story for its native sauce
piquante,' he said.
'Nothing without it!'
They had each a dissolving grain of contempt for women compelled by
their delicacy to spoil that kind of story which demands the piquant
accompaniment to flavour it racily and make it passable. For to see
insipid mildness complacently swallowed as an excellent thing, knowing
the rich smack of savour proper to the story, is your anecdotal
gentleman's annoyance. But if the anecdote had supported him, Sullivan
Smith would have let the expletive rest.
Major Carew Mahoney capped Mrs. Warwick's tale of the unfortunate
duellist with another, that confessed the practice absurd, though he
approved of it; and he cited Lord Larrian's opinion: 'It keeps men
braced to civil conduct.'
'I would not differ with the dear old lord; but no! the pistol is the
sceptre of the bully,' said Diana.
Mr. Hepburn, with the widest of eyes on her in perpetuity, warmly
agreed; and the man was notorious among men for his contrary action.
'Most righteously our Princess Egeria distinguishes her reign by
prohibiting it,' said Lady Singleby.
'And how,' Sullivan Smith sighed heavily, 'how, I'd ask, are ladies to
be protected from the bully?'
He was beset: 'So it was all for us? all in consideration for our
benefit?'
He mournfully exclaimed: 'Why, surely!'
'That is the funeral apology of the Rod, at the close of every barbarous
chapter,' said Diana.
'Too fine in mind, too fat in body; that is a consequence with men,
dear madam. The conqueror stands to his weapons, or he loses his
possessions.'
'Mr. Sullivan Smith jumps at his pleasure from the special to the
general, and will be back, if we follow him, Lady Pennon. It is the
trick men charge to women, showing that they can resemble us.'
Lady Pennon thumped her knee. 'Not a bit. There's no resemblance, and
they know nothing of us.'
'Women are a blank to them, I believe,' said Whitmonby, treacherously
bowing;--and Westlake said:
'Traces of a singular scrawl have been observed when they were held in
close proximity to the fire.'
'Once, on the top of a coach,' Whitmonby resumed, 'I heard a comely dame
of the period when summers are ceasing threatened by her husband with
a divorce, for omitting to put sandwiches in their luncheon-basket.
She made him the inscrutable answer: “Ah, poor man! you will go down
ignorant to your grave!” We laughed, and to this day I cannot tell you
why.'
'That laugh was from a basket lacking provision; and I think we could
trace our separation to it,' Diana said to Lady Pennon, who replied:
'They expose themselves; they get no nearer to the riddle.'
Miss Courtney, a rising young actress, encouraged by a smile from Mrs.
Warwick, remarked: 'On the stage, we have each our parts equally.'
'And speaking parts; not personae mutae.'
'The stage has advanced in verisimilitude,' Henry Wilmers added slyly;
and Diana rejoined: 'You recognize a verisimilitude of the mirror when
it is in advance of reality. Flatter the sketch, Miss Paynham, for a
likeness to be seen. Probably there are still Old Conservatives who
would prefer the personation of us by boys.'
'I don't know,' Westlake affected dubiousness. 'I have heard that a step
to the riddle is gained by a serious contemplation of boys.'
'Serious?'
'That is the doubt.'
'The doubt throws its light on the step!'
'I advise them not to take any leap from their step,' said Lady Pennon.
'It would be a way of learning that we are no wiser than our sires; but
perhaps too painful a way,' Whitmonby observed. 'Poor Mountford Wilts
boasted of knowing women; and--he married. To jump into the mouth of the
enigma, is not to read it.'
'You are figures of conceit when you speculate on us, Mr. Whitmonby.'
'An occupation of our leisure, my lady, for your amusement.'
'The leisure of the humming-top, a thousand to the minute, with the
pretence that it sleeps!' Diana said.
'The sacrilegious hand to strip you of your mystery is withered as it
stretches,' exclaimed Westlake. 'The sage and the devout are in accord
for once.'
'And whichever of the two I may be, I'm one of them, happy to do my
homage blindfold!' Sullivan Smith waved the sign of it.
Diana sent her eyes over him and Mr. Hepburn, seeing Dacier. 'That rosy
mediaevalism seems the utmost we can expect.' An instant she saddened,
foreboding her words to be ominous, because of suddenly thirsting for
a modern cry from him, the silent. She quitted her woman's fit of
earnestness, and took to the humour that pleased him. 'Aslauga's knight,
at his blind man's buff of devotion, catches the hem of the tapestry and
is found by his lady kissing it in a trance of homage five hours
long! Sir Hilary of Agincourt, returned from the wars to his castle at
midnight, hears that the chitellaine is away dancing, and remains with
all his men mounted in the courtyard till the grey morn brings her back!
Adorable! We had a flag flying in those days. Since men began to fret
the riddle, they have hauled it down half-mast. Soon we shall behold a
bare pole and hats on around it. That is their solution.'
A smile circled at the hearing of Lady Singleby say: 'Well, I am all for
our own times, however literal the men.'
'We are two different species!' thumped Lady Pennon, swimming on the
theme. 'I am sure, I read what they write of women! And their heroines!'
Lady Esquart acquiesced: 'We are utter fools or horrid knaves.'
'Nature's original hieroglyphs--which have that appearance to the
peruser,' Westlake assented.
'And when they would decipher us, and they hit on one of our “arts,” the
literary pirouette they perform is memorable.' Diana looked invitingly
at Dacier. 'But I for one discern a possible relationship and a
likeness.'
'I think it exists--behind a curtain,' Dacier replied.
'Before the era of the Nursery. Liberty to grow; independence is the key
of the secret.'
'And what comes after the independence?' he inquired.
Whitmonby, musing that some distraction of an earnest incentive spoilt
Mrs. Warwick's wit, informed him: 'The two different species then break
their shallow armistice and join the shock of battle for possession of
the earth, and we are outnumbered and exterminated, to a certainty. So I
am against independence.'
'Socially a Mussulman, subject to explosions!' Diana said. 'So the
eternal duel between us is maintained, and men will protest that they
are for civilization. Dear me, I should like to write a sketch of the
women of the future--don't be afraid!--the far future. What a different
earth you will see!'
And very different creatures! the gentlemen unanimously surmised.
Westlake described the fairer portion, no longer the weaker; frightful
hosts.
Diana promised him a sweeter picture, if ever she brought her hand to
paint it.
'You would be offered up to the English national hangman, Jehoiachim
Sneer,' interposed Arthur Rhodes, evidently firing a gun too big for
him, of premeditated charging, as his patroness perceived; but she knew
him to be smarting under recent applications of the swish of Mr. Sneer,
and that he rushed to support her. She covered him by saying: 'If he has
to be encountered, he kills none but the cripple,' wherewith the dead
pause ensuing from a dose of outlandish speech in good company
was bridged, though the youth heard Westlake mutter unpleasantly:
'Jehoiachim,' and had to endure a stare of Dacier's, who did not conceal
his want of comprehension of the place he occupied in Mrs. Warwick's
gatherings.
'They know nothing of us whatever!' Lady Pennon harped on her dictum.
'They put us in a case and profoundly study the captive creature,' said
Diana: 'but would any man understand this...?' She dropped her voice and
drew in the heads of Lady Pennon, Lady Singleby, Lady Esquart and Miss
Courtney: 'Real woman's nature speaks. A maid of mine had a “follower.”
She was a good girl; I was anxious about her and asked her if she could
trust him. “Oh, yes, ma'am,” she replied, “I can; he's quite like a
female.” I longed to see the young man, to tell him he had received the
highest of eulogies.'
The ladies appreciatingly declared that such a tale was beyond the
understandings of men. Miss Paynham primmed her mouth, admitting to
herself her inability to repeat such a tale; an act that she deemed not
'quite like a lady.' She had previously come to the conclusion that
Mrs. Warwick, with all her generous qualities, was deficient in delicate
sentiment--owing perhaps to her coldness of temperament. Like Dacier
also, she failed to comprehend the patronage of Mr. Rhodes: it led to
suppositions; indefinite truly, and not calumnious at all; but a young
poet, rather good-looking and well built, is not the same kind of
wing-chick as a young actress, like Miss Courtney--Mrs. Warwick's latest
shieldling: he is hardly enrolled for the reason that was assumed to
sanction Mrs. Warwick's maid in the encouragement of her follower.
Miss Paynham sketched on, with her thoughts in her bosom: a damsel
castigatingly pursued by the idea of sex as the direct motive of every
act of every person surrounding, her; deductively therefore that a
certain form of the impelling passion, mild or terrible, or capricious,
or it might be less pardonable, was unceasingly at work among the human
couples up to decrepitude. And she too frequently hit the fact to doubt
her gift of reading into them. Mr. Dacier was plain, and the state of
young Mr. Rhodes; and the Scottish gentleman was at least a vehement
admirer. But she penetrated the breast of Mr. Thomas Redworth as well,
mentally tore his mask of friendship to shreds. He was kind indeed in
commissioning her to do the portrait. His desire for it, and his urgency
to have the features exactly given, besides the infrequency of his
visits of late, when a favoured gentleman was present, were the
betraying signs. Deductively, moreover, the lady who inspired the
passion in numbers of gentlemen and set herself to win their admiration
with her lively play of dialogue, must be coquettish; she could hold
them only by coldness. Anecdotes, epigrams, drolleries, do not bubble to
the lips of a woman who is under an emotional spell: rather they prove
that she has the spell for casting. It suited Mr. Dacier, Miss Paynham
thought: it was cruel to Mr. Redworth; at whom, of all her circle, the
beautiful woman looked, when speaking to him, sometimes tenderly.
'Beware the silent one of an assembly!' Diana had written. She did not
think of her words while Miss Paynham continued mutely sketching. The
silent ones, with much conversation around them, have their heads at
work, critically perforce; the faster if their hands are occupied; and
the point they lean to do is the pivot of their thoughts. Miss Paynham
felt for Mr. Redworth.
Diana was unaware of any other critic present than him she sought to
enliven, not unsuccessfully, notwithstanding his English objection to
the pitch of the converse she led, and a suspicion of effort to support
it:--just a doubt, with all her easy voluble run, of the possibility of
naturalness in a continuous cleverness. But he signified pleasure, and
in pleasing him she was happy: in the knowledge that she dazzled, was
her sense of safety. Percy hated scandal; he heard none. He wanted
stirring, cheering; in her house he had it. He came daily, and as it was
her wish that new themes, new flights of converse, should delight him
and show her exhaustless, to preserve her ascendancy, she welcomed
him without consulting the world. He was witness of Mr. Hepburn's
presentation of a costly China vase, to repair the breach in her array
of ornaments, and excuse a visit. Judging by the absence of any blow
within, he saw not a sign of coquettry. Some such visit had been
anticipated by the prescient woman, so there was no reddening. She
brought about an exchange of sentences between him and her furious
admirer, sparing either of them a glimpse of which was the sacrifice to
the other, amusing them both. Dacier could allow Mr. Hepburn to outsit
him; and he left them, proud of his absolute confidence in her.
She was mistaken in imagining that her social vivacity, mixed with
comradeship of the active intellect, was the charm which kept Mr. Percy
Dacier temperate when he well knew her to distinguish him above her
courtiers. Her powers of dazzling kept him tame; they did not stamp her
mark on him. He was one of the order of highly polished men, ignorant of
women, who are impressed for long terms by temporary flashes, that hold
them bound until a fresh impression comes, to confirm or obliterate the
preceding. Affairs of the world he could treat competently; he had a
head for high politics and the management of men; the feminine half
of the world was a confusion and a vexation to his intelligence,
characterless; and one woman at last appearing decipherable, he fancied
it must be owing to her possession of character, a thing prized the more
in women because of his latent doubt of its existence. Character, that
was the mark he aimed at; that moved him to homage as neither sparkling
wit nor incomparable beauty, nor the unusual combination, did. To be
distinguished by a woman of character (beauty and wit for jewellery),
was his minor ambition in life, and if Fortune now gratified it, he
owned to the flattery. It really seemed by every test that she had the
quality. Since the day when he beheld her by the bedside of his dead
uncle, and that one on the French sea-sands, and again at Copsley,
ghostly white out of her wrestle with death, bleeding holy sweat of brow
for her friend, the print of her features had been on him as an index
of depth of character, imposing respect and admiration--a sentiment
imperilled by her consent to fly with him. Her subsequent reserve until
they met--by an accident that the lady at any rate was not responsible
for, proved the quality positively. And the nature of her character,
at first suspected, vanquished him more, by comparison, than her vivid
intellect, which he originally, and still lingeringly, appreciated in
condescension, as a singular accomplishment, thrilling at times, now
and then assailably feminine. But, after her consent to a proposal that
caused him retrospective worldly shudders, and her composed recognition
of the madness, a character capable of holding him in some awe was real
majesty, and it rose to the clear heights, with her mental attributes
for satellites. His tendency to despise women was wholesomely checked by
the experience to justify him in saying, Here is a worthy one! She
was health to him, as well as trusty counsel. Furthermore, where he
respected, he was a governed man, free of the common masculine craze
to scale fortresses for the sake of lowering flags. Whilst under his
impression of her character, he submitted honourably to the ascendancy
of a lady whose conduct suited him and whose preference flattered;
whose presence was very refreshing; whose letters were a stimulant. Her
letters were really running well-waters, not a lover's delusion of the
luminous mind of his lady. They sparkled in review and preserved their
integrity under critical analysis. The reading of them hurried him in
pursuit of her from house to house during the autumn; and as she did
not hint at the shadow his coming cast on her, his conscience was easy.
Regarding their future, his political anxieties were a mountainous
defile, curtaining the outlook. They met at Lockton, where he arrived
after a recent consultation with his Chief, of whom, and the murmurs of
the Cabinet, he spoke to Diana openly, in some dejection.
'They might see he has been breaking with his party for the last four
years,' she said. 'The plunge to be taken is tremendous.'
'But will he? He appears too despondent for a header.'
'We cannot dance on a quaking floor.'
'No; it 's exactly that quake of the floor which gives “much qualms,” to
me as well,' said Dacier.
'A treble Neptune's power!' she rejoined, for his particular
delectation. 'Enough if he hesitates. I forgive him his nausea. He
awaits the impetus, and it will reach him, and soon. He will not wait
for the mob at his heels, I am certain. A Minister who does that, is
a post, and goes down with the first bursting of the dam. He has tried
compromise and discovered that it does not appease the Fates; is not
even a makeshift-mending at this hour. He is a man of nerves, very
sensitively built; as quick--quicker than a woman, I could almost say,
to feel the tremble of the air-forerunner of imperative changes.'
Dacier brightened fondly. 'You positively describe him; paint him to the
life, without knowing him!'
'I have seen him; and if I paint, whose are the colours?'
'Sometimes I repeat you to him, and I get all the credit,' said Dacier.
'I glow with pride to think of speaking anything that you repeat,' said
Diana, and her eyes were proudly lustreful.
Their love was nourished on these mutual flatteries. Thin food
for passion! The innocence of it sanctioned the meetings and the
appointments to meet. When separated they were interchanging letters,
formally worded in the apostrophe and the termination, but throbbingly
full: or Diana thought so of Percy's letters, with grateful justice; for
his manner of opening his heart in amatory correspondence was to confide
important, secret matters, up to which mark she sprang to reply in
counsel. He proved his affection by trusting her; his respect by his
tempered style: 'A Greenland style of writing,' she had said of an
unhappy gentleman's epistolary compositions resembling it; and now the
same official baldness was to her mind Italianly rich; it called forth
such volumes.
Flatteries that were thin food for passion appeared the simplest
exchanges of courtesy, and her meetings with her lover, judging by
the nature of the discourse they held, so, consequent to their joint
interest in the great crisis anticipated, as to rouse her indignant
surprise and a turn for downright rebellion when the Argus world
signified the fact of its having one eye, or more, wide open.
Debit and Credit, too, her buzzing familiars, insisted on an audience at
each ear, and at the house-door, on her return to London.