Close upon the hour of ten every morning the fortuitous meeting of two
gentlemen at Mrs. Warwick's housedoor was a signal for punctiliously
stately greetings, the salutation of the raised hat and a bow of the
head from a position of military erectness, followed by the remark: 'I
trust you are well, sir': to which the reply: 'I am very well, sir, and
trust you are the same,' was deemed a complimentary fulfilment of their
mutual obligation in presence. Mr. Sullivan Smith's initiative imparted
this exercise of formal manners to Mr. Arthur Rhodes, whose renewed
appearance, at the minute of his own arrival, he viewed, as he did not
conceal, with a disappointed and a reproving eye. The inquiry after the
state of Mrs. Warwick's health having received its tolerably comforting
answer from the footman, they left their cards in turn, then descended
the doorsteps, faced for the performance of the salute, and departed
their contrary ways.
The pleasing intelligence refreshed them one morning, that they would be
welcomed by Lady Dunstane. Thereupon Mr. Sullivan Smith wheeled about to
Mr. Arthur Rhodes and observed to him: 'Sir, I might claim, by right of
seniority, to be the foremost of us two in offering my respects to the
lady, but the way is open to you.'
'Sir,' said Mr. Arthur Rhodes, 'permit me to defer to your many superior
titles to that distinction.'
'The honour, sir, lies rather in the bestowing than in the taking.'
'I venture to think, sir, that though I cannot speak pure Castilian, I
require no lesson from a Grandee of Spain in acknowledging the dues of
my betters.'
'I will avow myself conquered, sir, by your overpowering condescension;'
said Mr. Sullivan Smith; 'and I entreat you--to ascribe my acceptance of
your brief retirement to the urgent character of the business I have at
heart.'
He laid his fingers on the panting spot, and bowed.
Mr. Arthur Rhodes, likewise bowing, deferentially fell to rearward.
'If I mistake not,' said the Irish gentleman, 'I am indebted to Mr.
Rhodes; and we have been joint participators in the hospitality of Mrs.
Warwick's table.'
The English gentleman replied: 'It was there that I first had the
pleasure of an acquaintance which is graven on my memory, as the words
of the wise king on tablets of gold and silver.'
Mr. Sullivan Smith gravely smiled at the unwonted match he had found in
ceremonious humour, in Saxonland, and saying: 'I shall not long detain
you, Mr. Rhodes,' he passed through the doorway.
Arthur waited for him, pacing up and down, for a quarter of an hour,
when a totally different man reappeared in the same person, and was the
Sullivan Smith of the rosy beaming features and princely heartiness.
He was accosted: 'Now, my dear boy, it's your turn to try if you have a
chance, and good luck go with ye. I've said what I could on your behalf,
for you're one of ten thousand in this country, you are.'
Mr. Sullivan Smith had solemnified himself to proffer a sober petition
within the walls of the newly widowed lady's house; namely, for nothing
less than that sweet lady's now unfettered hand: and it had therefore
been perfectly natural to him, until his performance ended with the
destruction of his hopes, to deliver himself in the high Castilian
manner. Quite unexpected, however, was the reciprocal loftiness of
tone spontaneously adopted by the young English squire, for whom, in
consequence, he conceived a cordial relish; and as he paced in the
footsteps of Arthur, anxious to quiet his curiosity by hearing how it
had fared with one whom he had to suppose the second applicant, he kept
ejaculating: 'Not a bit! The fellow can't be Saxon! And she had a liking
for him. She's nigh coming of the age when a woman takes to the chicks.
Better he than another, if it's to be any one. For he's got fun in him;
he carries his own condiments, instead of borrowing from the popular
castors, as is their way over here. But I might have known there 's
always sure to be salt and savour in the man she covers with her wing.
Excepting, if you please, my dear lady, a bad shot you made at a rascal
cur, no more worthy of you than Beelzebub of Paradise. No matter! The
daughters' of Erin must share the fate of their mother Isle, that
their tears may shine in the burst of sun to follow. For personal and
patriotic motives, I would have cheered her and been like a wild ass
combed and groomed and tamed by the adorable creature. But her friend
says there 's not a whisk of a chance for me, and I must roam the
desert, kicking up, and worshipping the star I hail brightest. They know
me not, who think I can't worship. Why, what were I without my star? At
best a pickled porker.'
Sullivan Smith became aware of a ravishing melodiousness in the
soliloquy, as well as a clean resemblance in the simile. He would
certainly have proceeded to improvize impassioned verse, if he had not
seen Arthur Rhodes on the pavement. 'So, here's the boy. Query, the face
he wears.'
'How kind of you to wait,' said Arthur.
'We'll call it sympathy, for convenience,' rejoined Sullivan Smith.
'Well, and what next?'
'You know as much as I do. Thank heaven, she is recovering.'
'Is that all?'
'Why, what more?'
Arthur was jealously, inspected.
'You look open-hearted, my dear boy.' Sullivan Smith blew the sound of
a reflected ahem. 'Excuse me for cornemusing in your company,' he said.
'But seriously, there was only one thing to pardon your hurrying to the
lady's door at such a season, when the wind tells tales to the world.
She's down with a cold, you know.'
'An influenza,' said Arthur.
The simplicity of the acquiescence was vexatious to a champion desirous
of hostilities, to vindicate the lady, in addition to his anxiety to
cloak her sad plight.
'She caught it from contact with one of the inhabitants of this country.
'Tis the fate of us Irish, and we're condemned to it for the sin of
getting tired of our own. I begin to sneeze when I land at Holyhead.
Unbutton a waistcoat here, in the hope of meeting a heart, and you're
lucky in escaping a pulmonary attack of no common severity, while the
dog that infected you scampers off, to celebrate his honeymoon mayhap.
Ah, but call at her house in shoals, the world 'll soon be saying
it's worse than a coughing cold. If you came to lead her out of it in
triumph, the laugh 'd be with you, and the lady well covered. D' ye
understand?'
The allusion to the dog's honeymoon had put Arthur Rhodes on the track
of the darting cracker-metaphor.
'I think I do,' he said. 'She will soon be at Copsley--Lady Dunstane's
house, on the hills--and there we can see her.'
'And that's next to the happiness of consoling--if only it had been
granted! She's not an ordinary widow, to be caught when the tear of
lamentation has opened a practicable path or water-way to the poor
nightcapped jewel within. So, and you're a candid admirer, Mr. Rhodes!
Well, and I'll be one with you; for there's not a star in the firmament
more deserving of homage than that lady.'
'Let's walk in the park and talk of her,' said Arthur. 'There's no
sweeter subject to me.'
His boyish frankness rejoiced Sullivan Smith. 'As long as you like!--nor
to me!' he exclaimed. 'And that ever since I first beheld her on the
night of a Ball in Dublin: before I had listened to a word of her
speaking: and she bore her father's Irish name:--none of your Warwicks
and your... but let the cur go barking. He can't tell what he's lost;
perhaps he doesn't care. And after inflicting his hydrophobia on her
tender fame! Pooh, sir; you call it a civilized country, where you and
I and dozens of others are ready to start up as brothers of the lady, to
defend her, and are paralyzed by the Law. 'Tis a law they've instituted
for the protection of dirty dogs--their majority!'
'I owe more to Mrs. Warwick than to any soul I know,' said Arthur.
'Let 's hear,' quoth Sullivan Smith; proceeding: 'She's the Arabian
Nights in person, that's sure; and Shakespeare's Plays, tragic and
comic; and the Book of Celtic History; and Erin incarnate--down with
a cold, no matter where; but we know where it was caught. So there's
a pretty library for who's to own her now she's enfranchized by
circumstances; and a poetical figure too!'
He subsided for his companion to rhapsodize.
Arthur was overcharged with feeling, and could say only: 'It would be
another world to me if I lost her.'
'True; but what of the lady?'
'No praise of mine could do her justice.'
'That may be, but it's negative of yourself, and not a portrait of the
object. Hasn't she the brain of Socrates--or better, say Minerva, on
the bust of Venus, and the remainder of her finished off to an exact
resemblance of her patronymic Goddess of the bow and quiver?'
'She has a wise head and is beautiful.'
'And chaste.'
Arthur reddened: he was prepared to maintain it, could not speak it.
'She is to us in this London, what the run of water was to Theocritus in
Sicily: the nearest to the visibly divine,' he said, and was applauded.
'Good, and on you go. Top me a few superlatives on that, and I 'm your
echo, my friend. Isn't the seeing and listening to her like sitting
under the silvery canopy of a fountain in high Summer?'
'All the comparisons are yours,' Arthur said enviously.
'Mr. Rhodes, you are a poet, I believe, and all you require to loosen
your tongue is a drop of Bacchus, so if you will do me the extreme
honour to dine with me at my Club this evening, we'll resume the toast
that should never be uttered dry. You reprove me justly, my friend.'
Arthur laughed and accepted. The Club was named, and the hour, and some
items of the little dinner: the birds and the year of the wines.
It surprised him to meet Mr. Redworth at the table of his host. A
greater surprise was the partial thaw in Redworth's bearing toward him.
But, as it was partial, and he a youth and poor, not even the genial
influences of Bacchus could lift him to loosen his tongue under the
repressing presence of the man he knew to be his censor, though Sullivan
Smith encouraged him with praises and opportunities. He thought of the
many occasions when Mrs. Warwick's art of management had produced a
tacit harmony between them. She had no peer. The dinner failed of the
pleasure he had expected from it. Redworth's bluntness killed the flying
metaphors, and at the end of the entertainment he and Sullivan Smith
were drumming upon politics.
'Fancies he has the key of the Irish difficulty!' said the latter,
clapping hand on his shoulder, by way of blessing, as they parted at the
Club-steps.
Redworth asked Arthur Rhodes the way he was going, and walked beside
him.
'I suppose you take exercise; don't get colds and that kind of thing,'
he remarked in the old bullying fashion; and changed it abruptly. 'I am
glad to have met you this evening. I hope you'll dine with me one day
next week. Have you seen Mrs. Warwick lately?'
'She is unwell; she has been working too hard,' said Arthur.
'Seriously unwell, do you mean?'
'Lady Dunstane is at her house, and speaks of her recovering.'
'Ah. You've not seen her?'
'Not yet.'
'Well, good-night.'
Redworth left him, and only when moved by gratitude to the lad for
his mention of Mrs. Warwick's 'working too hard,' as the cause of her
illness, recollected the promised dinner and the need for having his
address.
He had met Sullivan Smith accidentally in the morning and accepted the
invitation to meet young Rhodes, because these two, of all men living,
were for the moment dearest to him, as Diana Warwick's true and simple
champions; and he had intended a perfect cordiality toward them both;
the end being a semi-wrangle with the patriot, and a patronizing
bluntness with the boy; who, by the way, would hardly think him sincere
in the offer of a seat at his table. He owned himself incomplete. He
never could do the thing he meant, in the small matters not leading to
fortune. But they led to happiness! Redworth was guilty of a sigh: for
now Diana Warwick stood free; doubly free, he was reduced to reflect in
a wavering dubiousness. Her more than inclination for Dacier, witnessed
by him, and the shot of the world, flying randomly on the subject, had
struck this cuirassier, making light of his armour, without causing any
change of his habitual fresh countenance. As for the scandal, it had
never shaken his faith in her nature. He thought of the passion. His
heart struck at Diana's, and whatever might by chance be true in the
scandal affected him little, if but her heart were at liberty. That
was the prize he coveted, having long read the nature of the woman and
wedded his spirit to it. She would complete him.
Of course, infatuated men argue likewise, and scandal does not move
them. At a glance, the lower instincts and the higher spirit appear
equally to have the philosophy of overlooking blemishes. The difference
between appetite and love is shown when a man, after years of service,
can hear and see, and admit the possible, and still desire in worship;
knowing that we of earth are begrimed and must be cleansed for
presentation daily on our passage through the miry ways, but that our
souls, if flame of a soul shall have come of the agony of flesh, are
beyond the baser mischances: partaking of them indeed, but sublimely.
Now Redworth believed in the soul of Diana. For him it burned, and it
was a celestial radiance about her, unquenched by her shifting fortunes,
her wilfulnesses and, it might be, errors. She was a woman and weak;
that is, not trained for strength. She was a soul; therefore perpetually
pointing to growth in purification. He felt it, and even discerned it
of her, if he could not have phrased it. The something sovereignty
characteristic that aspired in Diana enchained him. With her, or rather
with his thought of her soul, he understood the right union of women
and men, from the roots to the flowering heights of that rare graft. She
gave him comprehension of the meaning of love: a word in many mouths,
not often explained. With her, wound in his idea of her, he perceived
it to signify a new start in our existence, a finer shoot of the tree
stoutly planted in good gross earth; the senses running their live sap,
and the minds companioned, and the spirits made one by the whole-natured
conjunction. In Booth, a happy prospect for the sons and daughters of
Earth, divinely indicating more than happiness: the speeding of us,
compact of what we are, between the ascetic rocks and the sensual
whirlpools, to the creation of certain nobler races, now very dimly
imagined.
Singularly enough, the man of these feelings was far from being a social
rebel. His Diana conjured them forth in relation to her, but was not
on his bosom to enlighten him generally. His notions of citizenship
tolerated the female Pharisees, as ladies offering us an excellent
social concrete where quicksands abound, and without quite justifying
the Lady Wathins and Constance Aspers of the world, whose virtues
he could set down to accident or to acid blood, he considered
them supportable and estimable where the Mrs. Fryar-Gunnetts were
innumerable, threatening to become a majority; as they will constantly
do while the sisterhood of the chaste are wattled in formalism and
throned in sourness.
Thoughts of Diana made phantoms of the reputable and their reverse
alike. He could not choose but think of her. She was free; and he
too; and they were as distant as the horizon sail and the aft-floating
castaway. Her passion for Dacier might have burnt out her heart. And at
present he had no claim to visit her, dared not intrude. He would have
nothing to say, if he went, save to answer questions upon points of
business: as to which, Lady Dunstane would certainly summon him when he
was wanted.
Riding in the park on a frosty morning, he came upon Sir Lukin, who
looked gloomy and inquired for news of Diana Warwick, saying that his
wife had forbidden him to call at her house just yet. 'She's got a cold,
you know,' said Sir Lukin; adding, 'confoundedly hard on women!--eh?
Obliged to keep up a show. And I'd swear, by all that's holy, Diana
Warwick hasn't a spot, not a spot, to reproach herself with. I fancy
I ought to know women by this time. And look here, Redworth, last
night--that is, I mean yesterday evening, I broke with a woman--a lady
of my acquaintance, you know, because she would go on scandal-mongering
about Diana Warwick. I broke with her. I told her I'd have out any man
who abused Diana Warwick, and I broke with her. By Jove! Redworth, those
women can prove spitfires. They've bags of venom under their tongues,
barley-sugar though they look--and that's her colour. But I broke with
her for good. I doubt if I shall ever call on her again. And in point of
fact, I won't.'
Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett was described in the colouring of the lady.
Sir Lukin, after some further remarks, rode on, and Redworth mused on a
moral world that allows a woman of Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett's like to hang
on to it, and to cast a stone at Diana; forgetful, in his championship,
that Diana was not disallowed a similar licence.
When he saw Emma Dunstane, some days later, she was in her carriage
driving, as she said, to Lawyerland, for an interview with old Mr.
Braddock, on her friend's affairs. He took a seat beside her. 'No, Tony
is not well,' she replied to his question, under the veil of candour.
'She is recovering, but she--you can understand--suffered a shock. She
is not able to attend to business, and certain things have to be done.'
'I used to be her man of business,' Redworth observed.
'She speaks of your kind services. This is mere matter for lawyers.'
'She is recovering?'
'You may see her at Copsley next week. You can come down on Wednesdays
or Saturdays?'
'Any day. Tell her I want her opinion upon the state of things.'
'It will please her; but you will have to describe the state of things.'
Emma feared she had said too much. She tried candour again for
concealment. 'My poor Tony has been struck down low. I suppose it is
like losing a diseased limb:--she has her freedom, at the cost of a blow
to the system.'
'She may be trusted for having strength,' said Redworth.'
'Yes.' Emma's mild monosyllable was presently followed by an
exclamation: 'One has to experience the irony of Fate to comprehend
how cruel it is!' Then she remembered that such language was peculiarly
abhorrent to him.
'Irony of Fate!' he echoed her. 'I thought you were above that literary
jargon.'
'And I thought I was: or thought it would be put in a dialect
practically explicable,' she answered, smiling at the lion roused.
'Upon my word,' he burst out, 'I should like to write a book of Fables,
showing how donkeys get into grinding harness, and dogs lose their
bones, and fools have their sconces cracked, and all run jabbering of
the irony of Fate, to escape the annoyance of tracing the causes. And
what are they? nine times out of ten, plain want of patience, or some
debt for indulgence. There's a subject:--let some one write, Fables
in illustration of the irony of Fate: and I'll undertake to tack-on my
grandmother's maxims for a moral to teach of 'em. We prate of that irony
when we slink away from the lesson--the rod we conjure. And you to
talk of Fate! It's the seed we sow, individually or collectively. I'm
bound-up in the prosperity of the country, and if the ship is wrecked,
it ruins my fortune, but not me, unless I'm bound-up in myself. At least
I hope that's my case.'
He apologized for intruding Mr. Thomas Redworth.
His hearer looked at him, thinking he required a more finely pointed
gift of speech for the ironical tongue, but relishing the tonic
directness of his faculty of reason while she considered that the
application of the phrase might be brought home to him so as to render
'my Grandmother's moral' a conclusion less comfortingly, if quite
intelligibly, summary. And then she thought of Tony's piteous instance;
and thinking with her heart, the tears insisted on that bitter irony of
the heavens, which bestowed the long-withheld and coveted boon when it
was empty of value or was but as a handful of spices to a shroud.
Perceiving the moisture in her look, Redworth understood that it was
foolish to talk rationally. But on her return to her beloved, the real
quality of the man had overcome her opposing state of sentiment, and
she spoke of him with an iteration and throb in the voice that set a
singular query whirring round Diana's ears. Her senses were too heavy
for a suspicion.