A THRICE WHIMSICAL. On their way from London, after leaving the station,
the drive through the valley led them past a field, where cricketers
were at work bowling and batting under a vertical sun: not a very
comprehensible sight to ladies, whose practical tendencies, as
observers of the other sex, incline them to question the gain of such an
expenditure of energy. The dispersal of the alphabet over a printed
page is not less perplexing to the illiterate. As soon as Emma Dunstane
discovered the Copsley head-gamekeeper at one wicket, and, actually,
Thomas Redworth facing him, bat in hand, she sat up, greatly interested.
Sir Lukin stopped the carriage at the gate, and reminded his wife that
it was the day of the year for the men of his estate to encounter a
valley Eleven. Redworth, like the good fellow he was, had come down by
appointment in the morning out of London, to fill the number required,
Copsley being weak this year. Eight of their wickets had fallen for a
lament able figure of twenty-nine runs; himself clean-bowled the first
ball. But Tom Redworth had got fast hold of his wicket, and already
scored fifty to his bat. 'There! grand hit!' Sir Lukin cried, the ball
flying hard at the rails. 'Once a cricketer, always a cricketer,
if you've legs to fetch the runs. And Pullen's not doing badly. His
business is to stick. We shall mark them a hundred yet. I do hate a
score on our side without the two 00's.' He accounted for Redworth's
mixed colours by telling the ladies he had lent him his flannel jacket;
which, against black trousers, looked odd but not ill.
Gradually the enthusiasm of the booth and bystanders converted the
flying of a leather ball into a subject of honourable excitement.
'And why are you doing nothing?' Sir Lukin was asked; and he explained:
'My stumps are down: I'm married.' He took his wife's hand prettily.
Diana had a malicious prompting. She smothered the wasp, and said: 'Oh!
look at that!'
'Grand hit again! Oh! good! good!' cried Sir Lukin, clapping to it,
while the long-hit-off ran spinning his legs into one for an impossible
catch; and the batsmen were running and stretching bats, and the ball
flying away, flying back, and others after it, and still the batsmen
running, till it seemed that the ball had escaped control and was
leading the fielders on a coltish innings of its own, defiant of
bowlers.
Diana said merrily: 'Bravo our side!'
'Bravo, old Tom Redworth'; rejoined Sir Lukin. 'Four, and a three!
And capital weather, haven't we: Hope we shall have same sort day
next month--return match, my ground. I've seen Tom Redworth score--old
days--over two hundred t' his bat. And he used to bowl too. But bowling
wants practice. And, Emmy, look at the old fellows lining the booth,
pipe in mouth and cheering. They do enjoy a day like this. We'll have a
supper for fifty at Copsley's:--it's fun. By Jove! we must have reached
up to near the hundred.'
He commissioned a neighbouring boy to hie to the booth for the latest
figures, and his emissary taught lightning a lesson.
Diana praised the little fellow.
'Yes, he's a real English boy,' said Emma.
'We 've thousands of 'em, thousands, ready to your hand,' exclaimed Sir
Lukin, 'and a confounded Radicalized country...' he murmured gloomily of
'lets us be kicked!... any amount of insult, meek as gruel!... making
of the finest army the world has ever seen! You saw the papers this
morning? Good heaven! how a nation with an atom of self-respect can go
on standing that sort of bullying from foreigners! We do. We're insulted
and we're threatened, and we call for a hymn!--Now then, my man, what is
it?'
The boy had flown back. 'Ninety-two marked, sir; ninety-nine runs; one
more for the hundred.'
'Well reckoned; and mind you're up at Copsley for the return match.--And
Tom Redworth says, they may bite their thumbs to the bone--they don't
hurt us. I tell him, he has no sense of national pride. He says, we're
not prepared for war: We never are! And whose the fault? Says, we're a
peaceful people, but 'ware who touches us! He doesn't feel a kick.--Oh!
clever snick! Hurrah for the hundred!--Two-three. No, don't force the
running, you fools!--though they 're wild with the ball: ha!--no?--all
right!' The wicket stood. Hurrah!
The heat of the noonday sun compelled the ladies to drive on.
'Enthusiasm has the privilege of not knowing monotony,' said Emma. 'He
looks well in flannels.'
'Yes, he does,' Diana replied, aware of the reddening despite her having
spoken so simply. 'I think the chief advantage men have over us is in
their amusements.'
'Their recreations.'
'That is the better word.' Diana fanned her cheeks and said she was
warm. 'I mean, the permanent advantage. For you see that age does not
affect them.'
'Tom Redworth is not a patriarch, my dear.'
'Well, he is what would be called mature.'
'He can't be more than thirty-two or three; and that, for a man of his
constitution, means youth.'
'Well, I can imagine him a patriarch playing cricket.'
'I should imagine you imagine the possible chances. He is the father who
would play with his boys.'
'And lock up his girls in the nursery.' Diana murmured of the
extraordinary heat.
Emma begged her to remember her heterodox views of the education for
girls.
'He bats admirably,' said Diana. 'I wish I could bat half as well.'
'Your batting is with the tongue.'
'Not so good. And a solid bat, or bludgeon, to defend the poor stumps,
is surer. But there is the difference of cricket:--when your stumps are
down, you are idle, at leisure; not a miserable prisoner.'
'Supposing all marriages miserable.'
'To the mind of me,' said Diana, and observed Emma's rather saddened
eyelids for a proof that schemes to rob her of dear liberty were
certainly planned.
They conversed of expeditions to Redworth's Berkshire mansion, and to
The Crossways, untenanted at the moment, as he had informed Emma, who
fancied it would please Tony to pass a night in the house she loved; but
as he was to be of the party she coldly acquiesced.
The woman of flesh refuses pliancy when we want it of her, and will
not, until it is her good pleasure, be bent to the development called
a climax, as the puppet-woman, mother of Fiction and darling of the
multitude! ever amiably does, at a hint of the Nuptial Chapter. Diana in
addition sustained the weight of brains. Neither with waxen optics nor
with subservient jointings did she go through her pathways of the world.
Her direct individuality rejected the performance of simpleton, and her
lively blood, the warmer for its containment quickened her to penetrate
things and natures; and if as yet, in justness to the loyal male friend,
she forbore to name him conspirator, she read both him and Emma, whose
inner bosom was revealed to her, without an effort to see. But her
characteristic chasteness of mind, not coldness of the 'blood,--which
had supported an arduous conflict, past all existing rights closely to
depict, and which barbed her to pierce to the wishes threatening her
freedom, deceived her now to think her flaming blushes came of her
relentless divination on behalf of her recovered treasure: whereby the
clear reading of others distracted the view of herself. For one may be
the cleverest alive, and still hoodwinked while blood is young and warm.
The perpetuity of the contrast presented to her reflections, of
Redworth's healthy, open, practical, cheering life, and her own
freakishly interwinding, darkly penetrative, simulacrum of a life,
cheerless as well as useless, forced her humiliated consciousness by
degrees, in spite of pride, to the knowledge that she was engaged in
a struggle with him; and that he was the stronger;--it might be, the
worthier: she thought him the handsomer. He throve to the light of
day, and she spun a silly web that meshed her in her intricacies. Her
intuition of Emma's wishes led to this; he was constantly before
her. She tried to laugh at the image of the concrete cricketer,
half-flannelled, and red of face: the 'lucky calculator,' as she named
him to Emma, who shook her head, and sighed. The abstract, healthful and
powerful man, able to play besides profitably working, defied those poor
efforts. Consequently, at once she sent up a bubble to the skies, where
it became a spheral realm, of far too fine an atmosphere for men to
breathe in it; and thither she transported herself at will, whenever
the contrast, with its accompanying menace of a tyrannic subjugation,
overshadowed her. In the above, the kingdom composed of her shattered
romance of life and her present aspirings, she was free and safe.
Nothing touched her there--nothing that Redworth did. She could not have
admitted there her ideal of a hero. It was the sublimation of a virgin's
conception of life, better fortified against the enemy. She peopled it
with souls of the great and pure, gave it illimitable horizons, dreamy
nooks, ravishing landscapes, melodies of the poets of music. Higher and
more-celestial than the Salvatore, it was likewise, now she could assure
herself serenely, independent of the horrid blood-emotions. Living up
there, she had not a feeling.
The natural result of this habit of ascending to a superlunary home,
was the loss of an exact sense of how she was behaving below. At the
Berkshire mansion, she wore a supercilious air, almost as icy as she
accused the place of being. Emma knew she must have seen in the library
a row of her literary ventures, exquisitely bound; but there was no
allusion to the books. Mary Paynham's portrait of Mrs. Warwick hung
staring over the fireplace, and was criticized, as though its occupancy
of that position had no significance.
'He thinks she has a streak of genius,' Diana said to Emma.
'It may be shown in time,' Emma replied, for a comment on the work. 'He
should know, for the Spanish pictures are noble acquisitions.'
'They are, doubtless, good investments.'
He had been foolish enough to say, in Diana's hearing, that he
considered the purchase of the Berkshire estate a good investment. It
had not yet a name. She suggested various titles for Emma to propose:
'The Funds'; or 'Capital Towers'; or 'Dividend Manor'; or 'Railholm';
blind to the evidence of inflicting pain. Emma, from what she had guess
concerning the purchaser of The Crossways, apprehended a discovery
there which might make Tony's treatment of him unkinder, seeing that she
appeared actuated contrariously; and only her invalid's new happiness
in the small excursions she was capable of taking to a definite spot, of
some homely attractiveness, moved her to follow her own proposal for
the journey. Diana pleaded urgently, childishly in tone, to have Arthur
Rhodes with them, 'so as to be sure of a sympathetic companion for a
walk on the Downs.' At The Crossways, they were soon aware that Mr.
Redworth's domestics were in attendance to serve them. Manifestly the
house was his property, and not much of an investment! The principal
bed-room, her father's once, and her own, devoted now to Emma's use,
appalled her with a resemblance to her London room. She had noticed some
of her furniture at 'Dividend Manor,' and chosen to consider it in the
light of a bargain from a purchase at the sale of her goods. Here was
her bed, her writing-table, her chair of authorship, desks, books,
ornaments, water-colour sketches. And the drawing-room was fitted with
her brackets and etageres, holding every knickknack she had possessed
and scattered, small bronzes, antiques, ivory junks, quaint ivory
figures Chinese and Japanese, bits of porcelain, silver incense-urns,
dozens of dainty sundries. She had a shamed curiosity to spy for an
omission of one of them; all were there. The Crossways had been turned
into a trap.
Her reply to this blunt wooing, conspired, she felt justifled in
thinking, between him and Emma, was emphatic in muteness. She treated it
as if unobserved. At night, in bed, the scene of his mission from Emma
to her under this roof, barred her customary ascent to her planetary
kingdom. Next day she took Arthur after breakfast for a walk on the
Downs and remained absent till ten minutes before the hour of dinner.
As to that young gentleman, he was near to being caressed in public.
Arthur's opinions, his good sayings, were quoted; his excellent
companionship on really poetical walks, and perfect sympathy, praised to
his face. Challenged by her initiative to a kind of language that threw
Redworth out, he declaimed: 'We pace with some who make young morning
stale.'
'Oh! stale as peel of fruit long since consumed,' she chimed.
And go they proceeded; and they laughed, Emma smiled a little, Redworth
did the same beneath one of his questioning frowns--a sort of fatherly
grimace.
A suspicion that this man, when infatuated, was able to practise the
absurdest benevolence, the burlesque of chivalry, as a man-admiring sex
esteems it, stirred very naughty depths of the woman in Diana, labouring
under her perverted mood. She put him to proof, for the chance of arming
her wickedest to despise him. Arthur was petted, consulted, cited,
flattered all round; all but caressed. She played, with a reserve, the
maturish young woman smitten by an adorable youth; and enjoyed doing it
because she hoped for a visible effect--more paternal benevolence--and
could do it so dispassionately. Coquettry, Emma thought, was most
unworthily shown; and it was of the worst description. Innocent of
conspiracy, she had seen the array of Tony's lost household treasures
she wondered at a heartlessness that would not even utter common thanks
to the friendly man for the compliment of prizing her portrait and the
things she had owned; and there seemed an effort to wound him.
The invalided woman, charitable with allowances for her erratic husband,
could offer none for the woman of a long widowhood, that had become
a trebly sensitive maidenhood; abashed by her knowledge of the world,
animated by her abounding blood; cherishing her new freedom, dreading
the menacer; feeling that though she held the citadel, she was daily
less sure of its foundations, and that her hope of some last romance in
life was going; for in him shone not a glimpse. He appeared to Diana as
a fatal power, attracting her without sympathy, benevolently overcoming:
one of those good men, strong men, who subdue and do not kindle. The
enthralment revolted a nature capable of accepting subjection only by
burning. In return for his moral excellence, she gave him the moral
sentiments: esteem, gratitude, abstract admiration, perfect faith. But
the man? She could not now say she had never been loved; and a flood
of tenderness rose in her bosom, swelling from springs that she had
previously reproved with a desperate severity: the unhappy, unsatisfied
yearning to be more than loved, to love. It was alive, out of the wreck
of its first trial. This, the secret of her natural frailty, was bitter
to her pride: chastely-minded as she was, it whelmed her. And then her
comic imagination pictured Redworth dramatically making love. And to a
widow! It proved him to be senseless of romance. Poetic men take aim
at maidens. His devotedness to a widow was charged against him by the
widow's shudder at antecedents distasteful to her soul, a discolouration
of her life. She wished to look entirely forward, as upon a world washed
clear of night, not to be cast back on her antecedents by practical
wooings or words of love; to live spiritually; free of the shower at her
eyelids attendant on any idea of her loving. The woman who talked of
the sentimentalist's 'fiddling harmonics,' herself stressed the material
chords, in her attempt to escape out of herself and away from her
pursuer.
Meanwhile she was as little conscious of what she was doing as of
how she appeared. Arthur went about with the moony air of surcharged
sweetness, and a speculation on it, alternately tiptoe and prostrate.
More of her intoxicating wine was administered to him, in utter
thoughtlessness of consequences to one who was but a boy and a friend,
almost of her own rearing. She told Emma, when leaving The Crossways,
that she had no desire to look on the place again: she wondered at Mr.
Redworth's liking such a solitude. In truth, the look back on it let her
perceive that her husband haunted it, and disfigured the man, of real
generosity, as her heart confessed, but whom she accused of a lack of
prescient delicacy, for not knowing she would and must be haunted
there. Blaming him, her fountain of colour shot up, at a murmur of her
unjustness and the poor man's hopes.
A week later, the youth she publicly named 'her Arthur' came down to
Copsley with news of his having been recommended by Mr. Redworth for the
post of secretary to an old Whig nobleman famous for his patronage of
men of letters. And besides, he expected to inherit, he said, and gazed
in a way to sharpen her instincts. The wine he had drunk of late from
her flowing vintage was in his eyes. They were on their usual rambles
out along the heights. 'Accept, by all means, and thank Mr. Redworth,'
said she, speeding her tongue to intercept him. 'Literature is a good
stick and a bad horse. Indeed, I ought to know. You can always write; I
hope you will.'
She stepped fast, hearing: 'Mrs. Warwick--Diana! May I take your hand?'
This was her pretty piece of work! 'Why should you? If you speak my
Christian name, no: you forfeit any pretext. And pray, don't loiter.
We are going at the pace of the firm of Potter and Dawdle, and you
know they never got their shutters down till it was time to put them up
again.'
Nimble-footed as she was, she pressed ahead too fleetly for amorous
eloquence to have a chance. She heard 'Diana!' twice, through the
rattling of her discourse and flapping of her dress.
'Christian names are coin that seem to have an indifferent valuation of
the property they claim,' she said in the Copsley garden; 'and as for
hands, at meeting and parting, here is the friendliest you could have.
Only don't look rueful. My dear Arthur, spare me that, or I shall blame
myself horribly.'
His chance had gone, and he composed his face. No hope in speaking had
nerved him; merely the passion to speak. Diana understood the state,
and pitied the naturally modest young fellow, and chafed at herself as
a senseless incendiary, who did mischief right and left, from seeking
to shun the apparently inevitable. A sidethought intruded, that he would
have done his wooing poetically--not in the burly storm, or bull-Saxon,
she apprehended. Supposing it imperative with her to choose? She looked
up, and the bird of broader wing darkened the whole sky, bidding her
know that she had no choice.
Emma was requested to make Mr. Redworth acquainted with her story,
all of it:--'So that this exalted friendship of his may be shaken to a
common level. He has an unbearably high estimate of me, and it hurts me.
Tell him all; and more than even you have known:--but for his coming to
me, on the eve of your passing under the surgeon's hands, I should have
gone--flung the world my glove! A matter of minutes. Ten minutes later!
The train was to start for France at eight, and I was awaited. I have
to thank heaven that the man was one of those who can strike icily. Tell
Mr. Redworth what I say. You two converse upon every subject. One may
be too loftily respected--in my case. By and by--for he is a tolerant
reader of life and women, I think--we shall be humdrum friends of the
lasting order.'
Emma's cheeks were as red as Diana's. 'I fancy Tom Redworth has not much
to learn concerning any person he cares for,' she said. 'You like him? I
have lost touch of you, my dear, and ask.'
'I like him: that I can say. He is everything I am not. But now I am
free, the sense of being undeservedly over-esteemed imposes fetters, and
I don't like them. I have been called a Beauty. Rightly or other, I have
had a Beauty's career; and a curious caged beast's life I have found
it. Will you promise me to speak to him? And also, thank him for helping
Arthur Rhodes to a situation.'
At this, the tears fell from her. And so enigmatical had she grown to
Emma, that her bosom friend took them for a confessed attachment to the
youth.
Diana's wretched emotion shamed her from putting any inquiries whether
Redworth had been told. He came repeatedly, and showed no change of
face, always continuing in the form of huge hovering griffin; until an
idea, instead of the monster bird, struck her. Might she not, after
all, be cowering under imagination? The very maidenly idea wakened
her womanliness--to reproach her remainder of pride, not to see more
accurately. It was the reason why she resolved, against Emma's extreme
entreaties, to take lodgings in the South valley below the heights,
where she could be independent of fancies and perpetual visitors,
but near her beloved at any summons of urgency; which Emma would not
habitually send because of the coming of a particular gentleman. Dresses
were left at Copsley for dining and sleeping there upon occasion, and
poor Danvers, despairing over the riddle of her mistress, was condemned
to the melancholy descent.
'It's my belief,' she confided to Lady Dunstane's maid Bartlett, 'she'll
hate men all her life after that Mr. Dacier.'
If women were deceived, and the riddle deceived herself, there is excuse
for a plain man like Redworth in not having the slightest clue to the
daily shifting feminine maze he beheld. The strange thing was, that
during her maiden time she had never been shifty or flighty, invariably
limpid and direct.