SHORT EXCURSION IN ANTI-CLIMAX. A mind that after a long season of
oblivion in pain returns to wakefulness without a keen edge for the
world, is much in danger of souring permanently. Diana's love of nature
saved her from the dire mischance during a two months' residence at
Copsley, by stupefying her senses to a state like the barely conscious
breathing on the verge of sleep. February blew South-west for the
pairing of the birds. A broad warm wind rolled clouds of every ambiguity
of form in magnitude over peeping azure, or skimming upon lakes of blue
and lightest green, or piling the amphitheatre for majestic sunset. Or
sometimes those daughters of the wind flew linked and low, semi-purple,
threatening the shower they retained and teaching gloom to rouse a
songful nest in the bosom of the viewer. Sometimes they were April,
variable to soar with rain-skirts and sink with sunshafts. Or they
drenched wood and field for a day and opened on the high South-western
star. Daughters of the wind, but shifty daughters of this wind of
the dropping sun, they have to be watched to be loved in their
transformations.
Diana had Arthur Rhodes and her faithful Leander for walking companions.
If Arthur said: 'Such a day would be considered melancholy by London
people,' she thanked him in her heart, as a benefactor who had revealed
to her things of the deepest. The simplest were her food. Thus does
Nature restore us, by drugging the brain and making her creature
confidingly animal for its new growth. She imagined herself to have
lost the power to think; certainly she had not the striving or the wish.
Exercise of her limbs to reach a point of prospect, and of her ears and
eyes to note what bird had piped, what flower was out on the banks, and
the leaf of what tree it was that lay beneath the budding, satiated her
daily desires. She gathered unknowingly a sheaf of landscapes, images,
keys of dreamed horizons, that opened a world to her at any chance
breath altering shape or hue: a different world from the one of her old
ambition. Her fall had brought her renovatingly to earth, and the
saving naturalness of the woman recreated her childlike, with shrouded
recollections of her strange taste of life behind her; with a tempered
fresh blood to enjoy aimlessly, and what would erewhile have been a
barrenness to her sensibilities.
In time the craving was evolved for positive knowledge, and shells
and stones and weeds were deposited on the library-table at Copsley,
botanical and geological books comparingly examined, Emma Dunstane
always eager to assist; for the samples wafted her into the heart of the
woods. Poor Sir Lukin tried three days of their society, and was driven
away headlong to Club-life. He sent down Redworth, with whom the walks
of the zealous inquirers were profitable, though Diana, in acknowledging
it to herself, reserved a decided preference for her foregone ethereal
mood, larger, and untroubled by the presence of a man. The suspicion
Emma had sown was not excited to an alarming activity; but she began to
question: could the best of men be simply--a woman's friend?--was not
long service rather less than a proof of friendship? She could be blind
when her heart was on fire for another. Her passion for her liberty,
however, received no ominous warning to look to the defences. He was the
same blunt speaker, and knotted his brows as queerly as ever at Arthur,
in a transparent calculation of how this fellow meant to gain his
livelihood. She wilfully put it to the credit of Arthur's tact that his
elder was amiable, without denying her debt to the good man for leaving
her illness and her appearance unmentioned. He forbore even to scan her
features. Diana's wan contemplativeness, in which the sparkle of meaning
slowly rose to flash, as we see a bubble rising from the deeps of
crystal waters, caught at his heart while he talked his matter-of-fact.
But her instinct of a present safety was true. She and Arthur
discovered--and it set her first meditating whether she did know the man
so very accurately--that he had printed, for private circulation, when
at Harrow School, a little book, a record of his observations in nature.
Lady Dunstane was the casual betrayer. He shrugged at the nonsense of a
boy's publishing; anybody's publishing he held for a doubtful proof
of sanity. His excuse was, that he had not published opinions. Let
us observe, and assist in our small sphere; not come mouthing to the
footlights!
'We retire,' Diana said, for herself and Arthur.
'The wise thing, is to avoid the position that enforces publishing,'
said he, to the discomposure of his raw junior.
In the fields he was genially helpful; commending them to the study
of the South-west wind, if they wanted to forecast the weather and
understand the climate of our country. 'We have no Seasons, or only
a shuffle of them. Old calendars give seven months of the year to the
Southwest, and that's about the average. Count on it, you may generally
reckon what to expect. When you don't have the excess for a year or two,
you are drenched the year following.' He knew every bird by its flight
and its pipe, habits, tricks, hints of sagacity homely with the original
human; and his remarks on the sensitive life of trees and herbs were
a spell to his thirsty hearers. Something of astronomy he knew; but in
relation to that science, he sank his voice, touchingly to Diana, who
felt drawn to kinship with him when he had a pupil's tone. An allusion
by Arthur to the poetical work of Aratus, led to a memorably pleasant
evening's discourse upon the long reading of the stars by these
our mortal eyes. Altogether the mind of the practical man became
distinguishable to them as that of a plain brother of the poetic. Diana
said of him to Arthur: 'He does not supply me with similes; he points to
the source of them.' Arthur, with envy of the man of positive knowledge,
disguised an unstrung heart in agreeing.
Redworth alluded passingly to the condition of public affairs. Neither
of them replied. Diana was wondering how one who perused the eternal
of nature should lend a thought to the dusty temporary of the world.
Subsequently she reflected that she was asking him to confine his great
male appetite to the nibble of bread which nourished her immediate sense
of life. Her reflections were thin as mist, coming and going like the
mist, with no direction upon her brain, if they sprang from it. When he
had gone, welcome though Arthur had seen him to be, she rebounded to a
broader and cheerfuller liveliness. Arthur was flattered by an idea of
her casting off incubus--a most worthy gentleman, and a not perfectly
sympathetic associate. Her eyes had their lost light in them, her
step was brisker; she challenged him to former games of conversation,
excursions in blank verse here and there, as the mood dictated. They
amused themselves, and Emma too. She revelled in seeing Tony's younger
face and hearing some of her natural outbursts. That Dacier never could
have been the man for her, would have compressed and subjected her, and
inflicted a further taste of bondage in marriage, she was assured. She
hoped for the day when Tony would know it, and haply that another, whom
she little comprehended, was her rightful mate.
March continued South-westerly and grew rainier, as Redworth had
foretold, bidding them look for gales and storm, and then the change of
wind. It came, after wettings of a couple scorning the refuge of dainty
townsfolk under umbrellas, and proud of their likeness to dripping
wayside wildflowers. Arthur stayed at Copsley for a week of the crisp
North-easter; and what was it, when he had taken his leave, that brought
Tony home from her solitary walk in dejection? It could not be her
seriously regretting the absence of the youthful companion she had
parted with gaily, appointing a time for another meeting on the heights,
and recommending him to repair idle hours with strenuous work. The fit
passed and was not explained. The winds are sharp with memory. The hard
shrill wind crowed to her senses of an hour on the bleak sands of the
French coast; the beginning of the curtained misery, inscribed as her
happiness. She was next day prepared for her term in London with Emma,
who promised her to make an expedition at the end of it by way of
holiday, to see The Crossways, which Mr. Redworth said was not tenanted.
'You won't go through it like a captive?' said Emma.
'I don't like it, dear,' Diana put up a comic mouth. 'The debts we owe
ourselves are the hardest to pay. That is the discovery of advancing
age: and I used to imagine it was quite the other way. But they are the
debts of honour, imperative. I shall go through it grandly, you will
see. If I am stopped at my first recreancy and turned directly the
contrary way, I think I have courage.'
'You will not fear to meet... any one?' said Emma.
'The world and all it contains! I am robust, eager for the fray, an
Amazon, a brazen-faced hussy. Fear and I have parted. I shall not do you
discredit. Besides you intend to have me back here with you? And besides
again, I burn to make a last brave appearance. I have not outraged the
world, dear Emmy, whatever certain creatures in it may fancy.'
She had come out of her dejectedness with a shrewder view of Dacier;
equally painful, for it killed her romance, and changed the garden of
their companionship in imagination to a waste. Her clearing intellect
prompted it, whilst her nature protested, and reviled her to uplift him.
He had loved her. 'I shall die knowing that a man did love me once,' she
said to her widowed heart, and set herself blushing and blanching. But
the thought grew inveterate: 'He could not bear much.' And in her quick
brain it shot up a crop of similitudes for the quality of that man's
love. She shuddered, as at a swift cleaving of cold steel. He had not
given her a chance; he had not replied to her letter written with the
pen dipped in her heart's blood; he must have gone straight away to
the woman he married. This after almost justifying the scandalous
world:--after ... She realized her sensations of that night when
the house-door had closed on him; her feeling of lost sovereignty,
degradation, feminine danger, friendliness: and she was unaware, and
never knew, nor did the world ever know, what cunning had inspired the
frosty Cupid to return to her and be warmed by striking a bargain for
his weighty secret. She knew too well that she was not of the snows
which do not melt, however high her conceit of herself might place her.
Happily she now stood out of the sun, in a bracing temperature, Polar;
and her compassion for women was deeply sisterly in tenderness and
understanding. She spoke of it to Emma as her gain.
'I have not seen that you required to suffer to be considerate,' Emma
said.
'It is on my conscience that I neglected Mary Paynham, among others--and
because you did not take to her, Emmy.'
'The reading of it appears to me, that she has neglected you.'
'She was not in my confidence, and so I construe it as delicacy. One
never loses by believing the best.'
'If one is not duped.'
'Expectations dupe us, not trust. The light of every soul burns upward.
Of course, most of them are candles in the wind. Let us allow for
atmospheric disturbance. Now I thank you, dear, for bringing me back to
life. I see that I was really a selfish suicide, because I feel I have
power to do some good, and belong to the army. When we are beginning to
reflect, as I do now, on a recovered basis of pure health, we have the
world at the dawn and know we are young in it, with great riches, great
things gained and greater to achieve. Personally I behold a queer little
wriggling worm for myself; but as one, of the active world I stand high
and shapely; and the very thought of doing work, is like a draught of
the desert-springs to me. Instead of which, I have once more to go about
presenting my face to vindicate my character. Mr. Redworth would admit
no irony in that! At all events, it is anti-climax.'
'I forgot to tell you, Tony, you have been proposed for,' said Emma; and
there was a rush of savage colour over Tony's cheeks.
Her apparent apprehensions were relieved by hearing the name of Mr.
Sullivan Smith.
'My poor dear countryman! And he thought me worthy, did he? Some day,
when we are past his repeating it, I'll thank him.'
The fact of her smiling happily at the narration of Sullivan Smith's
absurd proposal by mediatrix, proved to Emma how much her nature
thirsted for the smallest support in her self-esteem.
The second campaign of London was of bad augury at the commencement,
owing to the ridiculous intervention of a street-organ, that ground its
pipes in a sprawling roar of one of the Puritani marches, just as the
carriage was landing them at the door of her house. The notes were
harsh, dissonant, drunken, interlocked and horribly torn asunder,
intolerable to ears not keen to extract the tune through dreadful
memories. Diana sat startled and paralyzed. The melody crashed a revival
of her days with Dacier, as in gibes; and yet it reached to her heart.
She imagined a Providence that was trying her on the threshold, striking
at her feebleness. She had to lock herself in her room for an hour of
deadly abandonment to misery, resembling the run of poison through
her blood, before she could bear to lift eyes on her friend; to whom
subsequently she said: 'Emmy, there are wounds that cut sharp as the
enchanter's sword, and we don't know we are in halves till some rough
old intimate claps us on the back, merely to ask us how we are! I have
to join myself together again, as well as I can. It's done, dear; but
don't notice the cement.'
'You will be brave,' Emma petitioned.
'I long to show you I will.'
The meeting with those who could guess a portion of her story, did not
disconcert her. To Lady Pennon and Lady Singleby, she was the brilliant
Diana of her nominal luminary issuing from cloud. Face and tongue, she
was the same; and once in the stream, she soon gathered its current
topics and scattered her arrowy phrases. Lady Pennon ran about with
them, declaring that the beautiful speaker, if ever down, was up, and
up to her finest mark. Mrs. Fryar-Gannett had then become the blazing
regnant antisocial star; a distresser of domesticity, the magnetic
attraction in the spirituous flames of that wild snapdragon bowl,
called the Upper class; and she was angelically blonde, a straw-coloured
Beauty. 'A lovely wheat sheaf, if the head were ripe,' Diana said of
her.
'Threshed, says her fame, my dear,' Lady Pennon replied, otherwise
allusive.
'A wheatsheaf of contention for the bread of wind,' said Diana, thinking
of foolish Sir Lukin; thoughtless of talking to a gossip.
She would have shot a lighter dart, had she meant it to fly and fix.
Proclaim, ye classics, what minor Goddess, or primal, Iris or Ate, sped
straight away on wing to the empty wheatsheaf-ears of the golden-visaged
Amabel Fryar-Gunnett, daughter of Demeter in the field to behold, of
Aphrodite in her rosy incendiarism for the many of men; filling that
pearly concave with a perversion of the uttered speech, such as never
lady could have repeated, nor man, if less than a reaping harvester:
which verily for women to hear, is to stamp a substantial damnatory
verification upon the delivery of the saying:--
'Mrs. Warwick says of you, that you're a bundle of straws for everybody
and bread for nobody.'
Or, stranger speculation, through what, and what number of conduits,
curious, and variously colouring, did it reach the fair Amabel of the
infant-in-cradle smile, in that deformation of the original utterance!
To pursue the thing, would be to enter the subter-sensual perfumed
caverns of a Romance of Fashionable Life, with no hope of coming back to
light, other than by tail of lynx, like the great Arabian seaman, at
the last page of the final chapter. A prospectively popular narrative
indeed! and coin to reward it, and applause. But I am reminded that a
story properly closed on the marriage of the heroine Constance and her
young Minister of State, has no time for conjuring chemists' bouquet
of aristocracy to lure the native taste. When we have satisfied English
sentiment, our task is done, in every branch of art, I hear: and it
will account to posterity for the condition of the branches. Those yet
wakeful eccentrics interested in such a person as Diana, to the extent
of remaining attentive till the curtain falls, demand of me to gather-up
the threads concerning her: which my gardener sweeping his pile of dead
leaves before the storm and night, advises me to do speedily. But it
happens that her resemblance to her sex and species of a civilized
period plants the main threads in her bosom. Rogues and a policeman, or
a hurried change of front of all the actors, are not a part of our slow
machinery.
Nor is she to show herself to advantage. Only those who read her woman's
blood and character with the head, will care for Diana of the Crossways
now that the knot of her history has been unravelled. Some little love
they must have for her likewise: and how it can be quickened on behalf
of a woman who never sentimentalizes publicly, and has no dolly-dolly
compliance, and muses on actual life, and fatigues with the exercise of
brains, and is in sooth an alien: a princess of her kind and time, but
a foreign one, speaking a language distinct from the mercantile,
trafficking in ideas:--this is the problem. For to be true to her, one
cannot attempt at propitiation. She said worse things of the world
than that which was conveyed to the boxed ears of Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett.
Accepting the war declared against her a second time, she performed
the common mental trick in adversity of setting her personally known
innocence to lessen her generally unknown error--but anticipating that
this might become known, and the other not; and feeling that the motives
of the acknowledged error had served to guard her from being the
culprit of the charge she writhed under, she rushed out of a meditation
compounded of mind and nerves, with derision of the world's notion of
innocence and estimate of error. It was a mood lasting through her stay
in London, and longer, to the discomfort of one among her friends; and
it was worthy of The Anti-climax Expedition, as she called it.
For the rest, her demeanour to the old monster world exacting the
servility of her, in repayment for its tolerating countenance, was
faultless. Emma beheld the introduction to Mrs. Warwick of his bride,
by Mr. Percy Dacier. She had watched their approach up the Ball-room,
thinking, how differently would Redworth and Tony have looked.
Differently, had it been Tony and Dacier: but Emma could not persuade
herself of a possible harmony between them, save at the cost of Tony's
expiation of the sin of the greater heart in a performance equivalent
to Suttee. Perfectly an English gentleman of the higher order, he seemed
the effigy of a tombstone one, fixed upright, and civilly proud of his
effigy bride. So far, Emma considered them fitted. She perceived his
quick eye on her corner of the room; necessarily, for a man of his
breeding, without a change of expression. An emblem pertaining to her
creed was on the heroine's neck; also dependant at her waist. She was
white from head to foot; a symbol of purity. Her frail smile appeared
deeply studied in purity. Judging from her look and her reputation,
Emma divined that the man was justly mated with a devious filmy
sentimentalist, likely to 'fiddle harmonics on the sensual strings'
for him at a mad rate in the years to come. Such fiddling is indeed the
peculiar diversion of the opulent of a fatly prosperous people; who take
it, one may concede to them, for an inspired elimination of the higher
notes of life: the very highest. That saying of Tony's ripened with full
significance to Emma now. Not sensualism, but sham spiritualism, was the
meaning; and however fine the notes, they come skilfully evoked of the
under-brute in us. Reasoning it so, she thought it a saying for the
penetration of the most polished and deceptive of the later human masks.
She had besides, be it owned, a triumph in conjuring a sentence of her
friend's, like a sword's edge, to meet them; for she was boiling angrily
at the ironical destiny which had given to those Two a beclouding of her
beloved, whom she could have rebuked in turn for her insane caprice of
passion.
But when her beloved stood-up to greet Mrs. Percy Dacier, all idea save
tremulous admiration of the valiant woman, who had been wounded nigh
to death, passed from Emma's mind. Diana tempered her queenliness to
address the favoured lady with smiles and phrases of gentle warmth, of
goodness of nature; and it became a halo rather than a personal eclipse
that she cast.
Emma looked at Dacier. He wore the prescribed conventional air, subject
in half a minute to a rapid blinking of the eyelids. His wife could have
been inimically imagined fascinated and dwindling. A spot of colour came
to her cheeks. She likewise began to blink.
The happy couple bowed, proceeding; and Emma had Dacier's back for a
study. We score on that flat slate of man, unattractive as it is
to hostile observations, and unprotected, the device we choose. Her
harshest, was the positive thought that he had taken the woman best
suited to him. Doubtless, he was a man to prize the altar-candle
above the lamp of day. She fancied the back-view of him shrunken and
straitened: perhaps a mere hostile fancy: though it was conceivable that
he should desire as little of these meetings as possible. Eclipses are
not courted.
The specially womanly exultation of Emma Dunstane in her friend's
noble attitude, seeing how their sex had been struck to the dust for
a trifling error, easily to be overlooked by a manful lover, and had
asserted its dignity in physical and moral splendour, in self-mastery
and benignness, was unshared by Diana. As soon as the business of the
expedition was over, her orders were issued for the sale of the lease
of her house and all it contained. 'I would sell Danvers too,' she said,
'but the creature declines to be treated as merchandize. It seems I have
a faithful servant; very much like my life, not quite to my taste; the
one thing out of the wreck!--with my dog!'
Before quitting her house for the return to Copsley, she had to
grant Mr. Alexander Hepburn, post-haste from his Caledonia, a private
interview. She came out of it noticeably shattered. Nothing was related
to Emma, beyond the remark: 'I never knew till this morning the force
of No in earnest.' The weighty little word--woman's native watchdog and
guardian, if she calls it to her aid in earnest--had encountered
and withstood a fiery ancient host, astonished at its novel power of
resistance.
Emma contented herself with the result. 'Were you much supplicated?'
'An Operatic Fourth-Act,' said Diana, by no means; feeling so flippantly
as she spoke.
She received, while under the impression of this man's, honest, if
primitive, ardour of courtship, or effort to capture, a characteristic
letter from Westlake, choicely phrased, containing presumeably an
application for her hand, in the generous offer of his own. Her reply
to a pursuer of that sort was easy. Comedy, after the barbaric attack,
refreshed her wits and reliance on her natural fencing weapons. To
Westlake, the unwritten No was conveyed in a series of kindly ironic
subterfuges, that, played it like an impish flea across the pages, just
giving the bloom of the word; and rich smiles come to Emma's life in
reading the dexterous composition: which, however, proved so thoroughly
to Westlake's taste, that a second and a third exercise in the comedy of
the negative had to be despatched to him from Copsley.