RUN INTO HARNESS
The prophet of the storm had forgotten his prediction; which, however,
was of small concern to him, apart from the ducking he received midway
between the valley and the heights of Copsley; whither he was bound, on
a mission so serious that, according to his custom in such instances, he
chose to take counsel of his active legs: an adviseable course when the
brain wants clearing and the heart fortifying. Diana's face was clearly
before him through the deluge; now in ogle features, the dimple running
from her mouth, the dark bright eyes and cut of eyelids, and nostrils
alive under their lightning; now inkier whole radiant smile, or
musefully listening, nursing a thought. Or she was obscured, and he
felt the face. The individuality of it had him by the heart, beyond his
powers of visioning. On his arrival, he stood in the hall, adrip like
one of the trees of the lawn, laughing at Lady Dunstane's anxious
exclamations. His portmanteau had come and he was expected; she hurried
out at the first ringing of the bell, to greet and reproach him for
walking in such weather.
'Diana has left me,' she said, when he reappeared in dry clothing. 'We
are neighbours; she has taken cottage-lodgings at Selshall, about
an hour's walk:--one of her wild dreams of independence. Are you
disappointed?'
'I am,' Redworth confessed.
Emma coloured. 'She requires an immense deal of humouring at present.
The fit will wear off; only we must wait for it. Any menace to her
precious liberty makes her prickly. She is passing the day with the
Pettigrews, who have taken a place near her village for a month. She
promised to dine and sleep here, if she returned in time. What is your
news?'
'Nothing; the world wags on.'
'You have nothing special to tell her?'
'Nothing'; he hummed; 'nothing, I fancy, that she does not know.'
'You said you were disappointed.'
'It's always a pleasure to see her.'
'Even in her worst moods, I find it so.'
'Oh! moods!' quoth Redworth.
'My friend, they are to be reckoned, with women.'
'Certainly; what I meant was, that I don't count them against women.'
'Good: but my meaning was... I think I remember your once comparing
them and the weather; and you spoke of the “one point more variable
in women.” You may forestall your storms. There is no calculating the
effect of a few little words at a wrong season.'
'With women! I suppose not. I have no pretension to a knowledge of the
sex.'
Emma imagined she had spoken plainly enough, if he had immediate
designs; and she was not sure of that, and wished rather to shun his
confidences while Tony was in her young widowhood, revelling in her joy
of liberty. By and by, was her thought: perhaps next year. She dreaded
Tony's refusal of the yoke, and her iron-hardness to the dearest of men
proposing it; and moreover, her further to be apprehended holding to the
refusal, for the sake of consistency, if it was once uttered. For her
own sake, she shrank from hearing intentions, that distressing the
good man, she would have to discountenance. His candour in confessing
disappointment, and his open face, his excellent sense too, gave her
some assurance of his not being foolishly impetuous. After he had read
to her for an hour, as his habit was on evenings and wet days, their
discussion of this and that in the book lulled any doubts she had of his
prudence, enough to render it even a dubious point whether she might be
speculating upon a wealthy bachelor in the old-fashioned ultra-feminine
manner; the which she so abhorred that she rejected the idea.
Consequently, Redworth's proposal to walk down to the valley for Diana,
and bring her back, struck her as natural when a shaft of western
sunshine from a whitened edge of raincloud struck her windows. She
let him go without an intimated monition or a thought of one; thinking
simply that her Tony would be more likely to come, having him for
escort. Those are silly women who are always imagining designs and
intrigues and future palpitations in the commonest actions of either
sex. Emma Dunstane leaned to the contrast between herself and them.
Danvers was at the house about sunset, reporting her mistress to be on
her way, with Mr. Redworth. The maid's tale of the dreadful state of the
lanes, accounted for their tardiness; and besides the sunset had been
magnificent. Diana knocked at Emma's bedroom door, to say, outside,
hurriedly in passing, how splendid the sunset had been, and beg for an
extra five minutes. Taking full fifteen, she swam into the drawing-room,
lively with kisses on Emma's cheeks, and excuses, referring her
misconduct in being late to the seductions of 'Sol' in his glory.
Redworth said he had rarely seen so wonderful a sunset. The result of
their unanimity stirred Emma's bosom to match-making regrets; and the
walk of the pair together, alone under the propitious laming heavens,
appeared to her now as an opportunity lost. From sisterly sympathy, she
fancied she could understand Tony's liberty-loving reluctance: she had
no comprehension of the backwardness of the man beholding the dear woman
handsomer than in her maiden or her married time: and sprightlier as
well. She chatted deliciously, and drew Redworth to talk his best on his
choicer subjects, playing over them like a fide-wisp, determined at once
to flounder him and to make him shine. Her tender esteem for the man
was transparent through it all; and Emma, whose evening had gone happily
between them, said to her, in their privacy, before parting: 'You seemed
to have been inspired by “Sol,” my dear. You do like him, don't you?'
Diana vowed she adored him; and with a face of laughter in rosy
suffusion, put Sol for Redworth, Redworth for Sol; but, watchful of
Emma's visage, said finally: 'If you mean the mortal man, I think him up
to almost all your hyperboles--as far as men go; and he departed to his
night's rest, which I hope will be good, like a king. Not to admire him,
would argue me senseless, heartless. I do; I have reason to.'
'And you make him the butt of your ridicule, Tony.'
'No; I said “like a king”; and he is one. He has, to me, morally the
grandeur of your Sol sinking, Caesar stabbed, Cato on the sword-point.
He is Roman, Spartan, Imperial; English, if you like, the pick, of the
land. It is an honour to call him friend, and I do trust he will choose
the pick among us, to make her a happy woman--if she's for running in
harness. There, I can't say more.'
Emma had to be satisfied with it, for the present.
They were astonished at breakfast by seeing Sir Lukin ride past the
windows. He entered with the veritable appetite of a cavalier who had
ridden from London fasting; and why he had come at that early hour, he
was too hungry to explain. The ladies retired to read their letters by
the morning's post; whereupon Sir Lukin called to Redworth; 'I met that
woman in the park yesterday, and had to stand a volley. I went beating
about London for you all the afternoon and evening. She swears you rated
her like a scullery wench, and threatened to ruin Wroxeter. Did you see
him? She says, the story's true in one particular, that he did snatch
a kiss, and got mauled. Not so much to pay for it! But what a
ruffian--eh?'
'I saw him,' said Redworth. 'He 's one of the new set of noblemen who
take bribes to serve as baits for transactions in the City. They help to
the ruin of their order, or are signs of its decay. We won't judge it by
him. He favoured me with his “word of honour” that the thing you heard
was entirely a misstatement, and so forth:--apologized, I suppose. He
mumbled something.'
'A thorough cur!'
'He professed his readiness to fight, if either of us was not
contented.'
'He spoke to the wrong man. I've half a mind to ride back and have him
out for that rascal “osculation” and the lady unwilling!--and she a
young one, a girl, under the protection of the house! By Jove! Redworth,
when you come to consider the scoundrels men can be, it stirs a fellow's
bile. There's a deal of that sort of villany going--and succeeding
sometimes! He deserves the whip or a bullet.'
'A sermon from Lukin Dunstane might punish him.'
'Oh! I'm a sinner, I know. But, go and tell one woman of another woman,
and that a lie! That's beyond me.'
'The gradations of the deeps are perhaps measurable to those who are in
them.'
'The sermon's at me--pop!' said Sir Lukin. 'By the way, I'm coming
round to think Diana Warwick was right when she used to jibe at me for
throwing up my commission. Idleness is the devil--or mother of him. I
manage my estates; but the truth is, it doesn't occupy my mind.'
'Your time.'
'My mind, I say.'
'Whichever you please.'
'You're crusty to-day, Redworth. Let me tell you, I think--and hard too,
when the fit's on me. However, you did right in stopping--I'll own--a
piece of folly, and shutting the mouths of those two; though it caused
me to come in for a regular drencher. But a pretty woman in a right-down
termagant passion is good theatre; because it can't last, at that pace;
and you're sure of your agreeable tableau. Not that I trust her ten
minutes out of sight--or any woman, except one or two; my wife and Diana
Warwick. Trust those you've tried, old boy. Diana Warwick ought to be
taught to thank you; though I don't know how it's to be done.'
'The fact of it is,' Redworth frowned and rose, 'I've done mischief. I
had no right to mix myself in it. I'm seldom caught off my feet by an
impulse; but I was. I took the fever from you.'
He squared his figure at the window, and looked up on a driving sky.
'Come, let's play open cards, Tom Redworth,' said Sir Lukin, leaving the
table and joining his friend by the window. 'You moral men are doomed
to be marrying men, always; and quite right. Not that one doesn't hear a
roundabout thing or two about you: no harm. Very much the contrary:--as
the world goes. But you're the man to marry a wife; and if I guess the
lady, she's a sensible girl and won't be jealous. I 'd swear she only
waits for asking.'
'Then you don't guess the lady,' said Redworth.
'Mary Paynham?'
The desperate half-laugh greeting the name convinced more than a dozen
denials.
Sir Lukin kept edging round for a full view of the friend who shunned
inspection. 'But is it?... can it be? it must be, after all!... why, of
course it is! But the thing staring us in the face is just what we never
see. Just the husband for her!--and she's the wife! Why, Diana Warwick
's the very woman, of course! I remember I used to think so before she
was free to wed.'
'She is not of that opinion.' Redworth blew a heavy breath; and it
should be chronicled as a sigh; but it was hugely masculine.
'Because you didn't attack, the moment she was free; that 's what upset
my calculations,' the sagacious gentleman continued, for a vindication
of his acuteness: then seizing the reply: 'Refuses? you don't mean to
say you're the man to take a refusal? and from a green widow in the
blush? Did you see her cheeks when she was peeping at the letter in her
hand? She colours at half a word--takes the lift of a finger for Hymen
coming. And lots of fellows are after her; I know it from Emmy. But
you're not the man to be refused. You're her friend--her champion.
That woman Fryar-Gunnett would have it you were the favoured lover, and
sneered at my talk of old friendship. Women are always down dead on the
facts; can't put them off a scent!'
'There's the mischief!' Redworth blew again. 'I had no right to be
championing Mrs. Warwick's name. Or the world won't give it, at all
events. I'm a blundering donkey. Yes, she wishes to keep her liberty.
And, upon my soul, I'm in love with everything she wishes! I've got the
habit.'
'Habit be hanged!' cried Sir Lukin. 'You're in love with the woman. I
know a little more of you now, Mr. Tom. You're a fellow in earnest about
what you do. You're feeling it now, on the rack, by heaven! though you
keep a bold face. Did she speak positively?--sort of feminine of
“you're the monster, not the man”? or measured little doctor's dose of
pity?--worse sign.' You 're not going?'
'If you'll drive me down in half an hour,' said Redworth.
'Give me an hour,' Sir Lukin replied, and went straight to his wife's
blue-room.
Diana was roused from a meditation on a letter she held, by the entrance
of Emma in her bed-chamber, to whom she said: 'I have here the very
craziest bit of writing!--but what is disturbing you, dear?'
Emma sat beside her, panting and composing her lips to speak. 'Do you,
love me? I throw policy to the winds, if only, I can batter at you for
your heart and find it! Tony, do you love me? But don't answer: give me
your hand. You have rejected him!'
'He has told you?'
'No. He is not the man to cry out for a wound. He heard in London--Lukin
has had the courage to tell me, after his fashion:--Tom Redworth heard
an old story, coming from one of the baser kind of women: grossly false,
he knew. I mention only Lord Wroxeter and Lockton. He went to man and
woman both, and had it refuted, and stopped their tongues, on peril; as
he of all men is able to do when he wills it.'
Observing the quick change in Tony's eyes, Emma exclaimed: 'How you
looked disdain when you asked whether he had told me! But why are you
the handsome tigress to him, of all men living! The dear fellow, dear
to me at least! since the day he first saw you, has worshipped you and
striven to serve you:--and harder than any Scriptural service to have
the beloved woman to wife. I know nothing to compare with it, for he is
a man of warmth. He is one of those rare men of honour who can command
their passion; who venerate when they love: and those are the men that
women select for punishment! Yes, you! It is to the woman he loves that
he cannot show himself as he is, because he is at her feet. You have
managed to stamp your spirit on him; and as a consequence, he defends
you now, for flinging him off. And now his chief regret is, that he has
caused his name to be coupled with yours. I suppose he had some poor
hope, seeing you free. Or else the impulse to protect the woman of his
heart and soul was too strong. I have seen what he suffered, years back,
at the news of your engagement.'
'Oh, for God's sake, don't,' cried Tony, tears running over, and her
dream of freedom, her visions of romance, drowning.
'It was like the snapping of the branch of an oak, when the trunk stands
firm,' Emma resumed, in her desire to scourge as well as to soften. 'But
similes applied to him will strike you as incongruous.' Tony swayed her
body, for a negative, very girlishly and consciously. 'He probably did
not woo you in a poetic style, or the courtly by prescription.' Again
Tony swayed; she had to hug herself under the stripes, and felt as if
alone at sea, with her dear heavens pelting. 'You have sneered at him
for his calculating--to his face: and it was when he was comparatively
poor that he calculated--to his cost! that he dared not ask you to marry
a man who could not offer you a tithe of what he considered fit for the
peerless woman. Peerless, I admit. There he was not wrong. But if he had
valued you half a grain less, he might have won you. You talk much
of chivalry; you conceive a superhuman ideal, to which you fit a very
indifferent wooden model, while the man of all the world the most
chivalrous!... He is a man quite other from what you think him:
anything but a “Cuthbert Dering” or a “Man of Two Minds.” He was in the
drawing-room below, on the day I received your last maiden letter from
The Crossways--now his property, in the hope of making it yours.'
'I behaved abominably there!' interposed Tony, with a gasp.
'Let it pass. At any rate, that was the prick of a needle, not the blow
of a sword.'
'But marriage, dear Emmy! marriage! Is marriage to be the end of me?'
'What amazing apotheosis have you in prospect? And are you steering so
particularly well by yourself?'
'Miserably! But I can dream. And the thought of a husband cuts me from
any dreaming. It's all dead flat earth at once!'
'Would, you lave rejected him when you were a girl?'
'I think so.'
'The superior merits of another...?'
'Oh, no, no, no, no! I might have accepted him: and I might not have
made him happy. I wanted a hero, and the jewelled garb and the feather
did not suit him.'
'No; he is not that description of lay-figure. You have dressed it, and
gemmed it, and--made your discovery. Here is a true man; and if you can
find me any of your heroes to match him, I will thank you. He came on
the day I speak of, to consult me as to whether, with the income he
then had ... Well, I had to tell him you were engaged. The man has
never wavered in his love of you since that day. He has had to bear
something.'
This was an electrical bolt into Tony's bosom, shaking her from
self-pity and shame to remorseful pity of the suffering lover; and the
tears ran in streams, as she said:
'He bore it, Emmy, he bore it.' She sobbed out: 'And he went on building
a fortune and batting! Whatever he undertakes he does perfectly-approve
of the pattern or not. Oh! I have no doubt he had his nest of wish
piping to him all the while: only it seems quaint, dear, quaint, and
against everything we've been reading of lovers! Love was his bread and
butter!' Her dark eyes showered. 'And to tell you what you do not know
of him, his way of making love is really,' she sobbed, 'pretty. It... it
took me by surprise; I was expecting a bellow and an assault of horns;
and if, dear:--you will say, what boarding-school girl have you got with
you! and I feel myself getting childish:--if Sol in his glory had not
been so m ... majestically m... magnificent, nor seemed to show me the
king ... kingdom of my dreams, I might have stammered the opposite word
to the one he heard. Last night, when he took my hand kindly before
going to bed I had a fit for dropping on my knees to him. I saw him
bleed, and he held himself right royally. I told you he did;--Sol in his
moral grandeur! How infinitely above the physical monarch--is he not,
Emmy? What one dislikes, is the devotion of all that grandeur to win a
widow. It should be a maiden princess. You feel it so, I am sure.
And here am I, as if a maiden princess were I, demanding romantic
accessories of rubious vapour in the man condescending to implore
the widow to wed him. But, tell me, does he know everything of his
widow--everything? I shall not have to go through the frightful
chapter?'
'He is a man with his eyes awake; he knows as much as any husband could
require to know,' said Emma; adding: 'My darling! he trusts you. It is
the soul of the man that loves you, as it is mine. You will not tease
him? Promise me. Give yourself frankly. You see it clearly before you.'
'I see compulsion, my dear. What I see, is a regiment of Proverbs,
bearing placards instead of guns, and each one a taunt at women,
especially at widows. They march; they form square; they enclose me in
the middle, and I have their inscriptions to digest. Read that crazy
letter from Mary Paynham while I am putting on my bonnet. I perceive I
have been crying like a raw creature in her teens. I don't know myself.
An advantage of the darker complexions is our speedier concealment of
the traces.'
Emma read Miss Paynham's letter, and returned it with the comment:
'Utterly crazy.' Tony said: 'Is it not? I am to “Pause before I trifle
with a noble heart too long.” She is to “have her happiness in
the constant prayer for ours”; and she is “warned by one of those
intimations never failing her, that he runs a serious danger.” It reads
like a Wizard's Almanack. And here “Homogeneity of sentiment the most
perfect, is unable to contend with the fatal charm, which exercised by
an indifferent person, must be ascribed to original predestination.” She
should be under the wing of Lady Wathin. There is the mother for such
chicks! But I'll own to you, Emmy, that after the perusal, I did ask
myself a question as to my likeness of late to the writer. I have
drivelled... I was shuddering over it when you came in. I have
sentimentalized up to thin smoke. And she tells a truth when she says I
am not to “count social cleverness”--she means volubility--“as a warrant
for domineering a capacious intelligence”: because of the gentleman's
modesty. Agreed: I have done it; I am contrite. I am going into slavery
to make amends for presumption. Banality, thy name is marriage!'
'Your business is to accept life as we have it,' said Emma; and Tony
shrugged. She was precipitate in going forth to her commonplace fate,
and scarcely looked at the man requested by Emma to escort her to her
cottage. After their departure, Emma fell into laughter at the last
words with the kiss of her cheeks: 'Here goes old Ireland!' But, from
her look and from what she had said upstairs, Emma could believe that
the singular sprite of girlishness invading and governing her latterly,
had yielded place to the woman she loved.
CHAPTER XLIII. NUPTIAL CHAPTER; AND OF HOW A BARELY WILLING WOMAN WAS
LED TO BLOOM WITH THE NUPTIAL SENTIMENT
Emma watched them on their way through the park, till they rounded the
beechwood, talking, it could be surmised, of ordinary matters; the face
of the gentleman turning at times to his companion's, which steadily
fronted the gale. She left the ensuing to a prayer for their good
direction, with a chuckle at Tony's evident feeling of a ludicrous
posture, and the desperate rush of her agile limbs to have it over. But
her prayer throbbed almost to a supplication that the wrong done to her
beloved by Dacier--the wound to her own sisterly pride rankling as an
injury to her sex, might be cancelled through the union of the woman
noble in the sight of God with a more manlike man.
Meanwhile the feet of the couple were going faster than their heads
to the end of the journey. Diana knew she would have to hoist the
signal-and how? The prospect was dumb-foundering. She had to think of
appeasing her Emma. Redworth, for his part; actually supposed she had
accepted his escorting in proof of the plain friendship offered him
overnight.
'What do your “birds” do in weather like this?' she said.
'Cling to their perches and wait patiently. It's the bad time with them
when you don't hear them chirp.'
'Of course you foretold the gale.'
'Oh, well, it did not require a shepherd or a skipper for that.'
'Your grand gift will be useful to a yachtsman.'
'You like yachting. When I have tried my new schooner in the Channel,
she is at your command for as long as you and Lady Dunstane please.'
'So you acknowledge that birds--things of nature--have their bad time?'
'They profit ultimately by the deluge and the wreck. Nothing on earth is
“tucked-up” in perpetuity.'
'Except the dead. But why should the schooner be at our command?'
'I shall be in Ireland.'
He could not have said sweeter to her ears or more touching.
'We shall hardly feel safe without the weatherwise on board.'
'You may count on my man Barnes; I have proved him. He is up to his
work even when he's bilious: only, in that case, occurring about once a
fortnight, you must leave him to fight it out with the elements.'
'I rather like men of action to have a temper.'
'I can't say much for a bilious temper.'
The weather to-day really seemed of that kind, she remarked. He
assented, in the shrug manner--not to dissent: she might say what she
would. He helped nowhere to a lead; and so quick are the changes of mood
at such moments that she was now far from him under the failure of an
effort to come near. But thoughts of Emma pressed.
'The name of the new schooner? Her name is her picture to me.'
'I wanted you to christen her.'
'Launched without a name?'
'I took a liberty.'
Needless to ask, but she did. 'With whom?'
'I named her Diana.'
'May the Goddess of the silver bow and crescent protect her! To me the
name is ominous of mischance.'
'I would commit my fortunes and life...!' He checked his tongue,
ejaculating: 'Omens!'
She had veered straight away from her romantic aspirations to the
blunt extreme of thinking that a widow should be wooed in unornamented
matter-of-fact, as she is wedded, with a 'wilt thou,' and 'I will,' and
no decorative illusions. Downright, for the unpoetic creature, if you
please! So she rejected the accompaniment of the silver Goddess and high
seas for an introduction of the crisis.
'This would be a thunderer on our coasts. I had a trial of my sailing
powers in the Mediterranean.'
As she said it, her musings on him then, with the contract of her
position toward him now, fierily brushed her cheeks; and she wished
him the man to make one snatch at her poor lost small butterfly bit of
freedom, so that she might suddenly feel in haven, at peace with her
expectant Emma. He could have seen the inviting consciousness, but he
was absurdly watchful lest the flying sprays of border trees should
strike her. He mentioned his fear, and it became an excuse for her
seeking protection of her veil. 'It is our natural guardian,' she said.
'Not much against timber,' said he.
The worthy creature's anxiety was of the pattern of cavaliers escorting
dames--an exaggeration of honest zeal; a present example of clownish
goodness, it might seem; until entering the larch and firwood along the
beaten heights, there was a rocking and straining of the shallow-rooted
trees in a tremendous gust that quite pardoned him for curving his arm
in a hoop about her and holding a shoulder in front. The veil did her
positive service.
He was honourably scrupulous not to presume. A right good unimpulsive
gentleman: the same that she had always taken him for and liked.
'These firs are not taproots,' he observed, by way of apology.
Her dress volumed and her ribands rattled and chirruped on the verge of
the slope. 'I will take your arm here,' she said.
Redworth received the little hand, saying: 'Lean to me.'
They descended upon great surges of wind piping and driving every light
surface-atom as foam; and they blinked and shook; even the man was
shaken. But their arms were interlinked and they grappled; the battering
enemy made them one. It might mean nothing, or everything: to him it
meant the sheer blissful instant.
At the foot of the hill, he said: 'It's harder to keep to, the terms of
yesterday.'
'What were they?' said she, and took his breath more than the fury of
the storm had done.
'Raise the veil, I beg.'
'Widows do not wear it.'
The look revealed to him was a fugitive of the wilds, no longer the
glittering shooter of arrows.
'Have you...?' changed to me, was the signification understood. 'Can
you?--for life'. Do you think you can?'
His poverty in the pleading language melted her.
'What I cannot do, my best of friends, is to submit to be seated on a
throne, with you petitioning. Yes, as far as concerns this hand of mine,
if you hold it worthy of you. We will speak of that. Now tell me the
name of the weed trailing along the hedge there!
He knew it well; a common hedgerow weed; but the placid diversion
baffled him. It was clematis, he said.
'It drags in the dust when it has no firm arm to cling to. I passed
it beside you yesterday with a flaunting mind and not a suspicion of a
likeness. How foolish I was! I could volubly sermonize; only it should
be a young maid to listen. Forgive me the yesterday.'
'You have never to ask. You withdraw your hand--was I rough?'
'No,' she smiled demurely; 'it must get used to the shackles: but my
cottage is in sight. I have a growing love for the place. We will enter
it like plain people--if you think of coming in.'
As she said it she had a slight shock of cowering under eyes tolerably
hawkish in their male glitter; but her coolness was not disturbed; and
without any apprehensions she reflected on what has been written of the
silly division and war of the sexes:--which two might surely enter on an
engagement to live together amiably, unvexed by that barbarous old fowl
and falcon interlude. Cool herself, she imagined the same of him, having
good grounds for the delusion; so they passed through the cottage-garden
and beneath the low porchway, into her little sitting-room, where she
was proceeding to speak composedly of her preference for cottages,
while untying her bonnet-strings:--'If I had begun my life in a
cottage!'--when really a big storm-wave caught her from shore and
whirled her to mid-sea, out of every sensibility but the swimming one of
her loss of self in the man.
'You would not have been here!' was all he said. She was up at his
heart, fast-locked, undergoing a change greater than the sea works;
her thoughts one blush, her brain a fire-fount. This was not like being
seated on a throne.
'There,' said he, loosening his hug, 'now you belong to me! I know you
from head to foot. After that, my darling, I could leave you for years,
and call you wife, and be sure of you. I could swear it for you--my
life on it! That 's what I think of you. Don't wonder that I took my
chance--the first:--I have waited!'
Truer word was never uttered, she owned, coming into some harmony with
man's kiss on her mouth: the man violently metamorphozed to a stranger,
acting on rights she had given him. And who was she to dream of denying
them? Not an idea in her head! Bound verily to be thankful for such
love, on hearing that it dated from the night in Ireland.... 'So in love
with you that, on my soul, your happiness was my marrow--whatever you
wished; anything you chose. It's reckoned a fool's part. No, it's love:
the love of a woman--the one woman! I was like the hand of a clock to
the springs. I taught this old watch-dog of a heart to keep guard and
bury the bones you tossed him.'
'Ignorantly, admit,' said she, and could have bitten her tongue for
the empty words that provoked: 'Would you have flung him nothing?' and
caused a lowering of her eyelids and shamed glimpses of recollections.
'I hear you have again been defending me. I told you, I think, I
wished I had begun my girl's life in a cottage. All that I have had to
endure!.. or so it seems to me: it may be my way of excusing myself:--I
know my cunning in that peculiar art. I would take my chance of mixing
among the highest and the brightest.'
'Naturally.'
'Culpably.'
'It brings you to me.'
'Through a muddy channel.'
'Your husband has full faith in you, my own.'
'The faith has to be summoned and is buffeted, as we were just now on
the hill. I wish he had taken me from a cottage.'
'You pushed for the best society, like a fish to its native sea.'
'Pray say, a salmon to the riverheads.'
'Better,' Redworth laughed joyfully, between admiration of the tongue
that always outflew him, and of the face he reddened.
By degrees her apter and neater terms of speech helped her to a notion
of regaining some steps of her sunken ascendancy, under the weight of
the novel masculine pressure on her throbbing blood; and when he bent to
her to take her lord's farewell of her, after agreeing to go and delight
Emma with a message, her submission and her personal pride were not so
much at variance: perhaps because her buzzing head had no ideas. 'Tell
Emma you have undertaken to wash the blackamoor as white as she can be,'
she said perversely, in her spite at herself for not coming, as it were,
out of the dawn to the man she could consent to wed: and he replied: 'I
shall tell her my dark girl pleads for a fortnight's grace before she
and I set sail for the West coast of Ireland': conjuring a picture
that checked any protest against the shortness of time:--and Emma would
surely be his ally.
They talked of the Dublin Ball: painfully to some of her thoughts.
But Redworth kissed that distant brilliant night as freshly as if no
belabouring years rolled in the chasm: which led her to conceive partly,
and wonderingly, the nature of a strong man's passion; and it subjugated
the woman knowing of a contrast. The smart of the blow dealt her by him
who had fired the passion in her became a burning regret for the loss
of that fair fame she had sacrificed to him, and could not bring to her
truer lover: though it was but the outer view of herself--the world's
view; only she was generous and of honest conscience, and but for the
sake of her truer lover, she would mentally have allowed the world
to lash and abuse her, without a plea of material purity. Could it be
named? The naming of it in her clear mind lessened it to accidental:--By
good fortune, she was no worse!--She said to Redworth, when finally
dismissing him; 'I bring no real disgrace to you, my friend.'--To have
had this sharp spiritual battle at such a time, was proof of honest
conscience, rarer among women, as the world has fashioned them yet, than
the purity demanded of them.--His answer: 'You are my wife!' rang in her
hearing.
When she sat alone at last, she was incapable, despite her nature's
imaginative leap to brightness, of choosing any single period,
auspicious or luminous or flattering, since the hour of her first
meeting this man, rather than the grey light he cast on her, promising
helpfulness, and inspiring a belief in her capacity to help. Not the
Salvatore high raptures nor the nights of social applause could appear
preferable: she strained her shattered wits to try them. As for
her superlunary sphere, it was in fragments; and she mused on the
singularity, considering that she was not deeply enamoured. Was she
so at all? The question drove her to embrace the dignity of being
reasonable--under Emmy's guidance. For she did not stand firmly alone;
her story confessed it. Marriage might be the archway to the road of
good service, even as our passage through the flesh may lead to
the better state. She had thoughts of the kind, and had them while
encouraging herself to deplore the adieu to her little musk-scented
sitting-room, where a modest freedom breathed, and her individuality had
seemed pointing to a straighter growth.
She nodded subsequently to the truth of her happy Emma's remark: 'You
were created for the world, Tony.' A woman of blood and imagination in
the warring world, without a mate whom she can revere, subscribes to
a likeness with those independent minor realms between greedy mighty
neighbours, which conspire and undermine when they do not openly
threaten to devour. So, then, this union, the return to the wedding
yoke, received sanction of grey-toned reason. She was not enamoured she
could say it to herself. She had, however, been surprised, both by the
man and her unprotesting submission; surprised and warmed, unaccountably
warmed. Clearness of mind in the woman chaste by nature, however little
ignorant it allowed her to be in the general review of herself, could
not compass the immediately personal, with its acknowledgement of her
subserviency to touch and pressure--and more, stranger, her readiness to
kindle. She left it unexplained. Unconsciously the image of Dacier was
effaced. Looking backward, her heart was moved to her long-constant
lover with most pitying tender wonderment--stormy man, as her threatened
senses told her that he was. Looking at him, she had to mask her being
abashed and mastered. And looking forward, her soul fell in prayer for
this true man's never repenting of his choice. Sure of her now, Mr.
Thomas Redworth had returned to the station of the courtier, and her
feminine sovereignty was not ruffled to make her feel too feminine.
Another revelation was his playful talk when they were more closely
intimate. He had his humour as well as his hearty relish of hers.
'If all Englishmen were like him!' she chimed with Emma Dunstane's
eulogies, under the influence.
'My dear,' the latter replied, 'we should simply march over the Four
Quarters and be blessed by the nations! Only, avoid your trick of
dashing headlong to the other extreme. He has his faults.'
'Tell me of them,' Diana cooed for an answer. 'Do. I want the flavour.
A girl would be satisfied with superhuman excellence. A widow asks for
feature.'
'To my thinking, the case is, that if it is a widow who sees the
superhuman excellence in a man, she may be very well contented to cross
the bridge with him,' rejoined Emma....
'Suppose the bridge to break, and for her to fall into the water, he
rescuing her--then perhaps!'
'But it has been happening!'
'But piecemeal, in extension, so slowly. I go to him a derelict, bearing
a story of the sea; empty of ideas. I remember sailing out of harbour
passably well freighted for commerce.'
'When Tom Redworth has had command of the “derelict” a week, I should
like to see her!'
The mention of that positive captaincy drowned Diana in morning colours.
She was dominated, physically and morally, submissively too. What she
craved, in the absence of the public whiteness which could have caused
her to rejoice in herself as a noble gift, was the spring of enthusiasm.
Emma touched a quivering chord of pride with her hint at the good
augury, and foreshadowing of the larger Union, in the Irishwoman's
bestowal of her hand on the open-minded Englishman she had learned to
trust. The aureole glimmered transiently: she could neither think
highly of the woman about to be wedded, nor poetically of the man; nor,
therefore, rosily of the ceremony, nor other than vacuously of life.
And yet, as she avowed to Emma, she had gathered the three rarest good
things of life: a faithful friend, a faithful lover, a faithful servant:
the two latter exposing an unimagined quality of emotion. Danvers,
on the night of the great day for Redworth, had undressed her with
trembling fingers, and her mistress was led to the knowledge that the
maid had always been all eye; and on reflection to admit that it came of
a sympathy she did not share.
But when Celtic brains are reflective on their emotional vessel they
shoot direct as the arrow of logic. Diana's glance at the years behind
lighted every moving figure to a shrewd transparency, herself among
them. She was driven to the conclusion that the granting of any of her
heart's wild wishes in those days would have lowered her--or frozen.
Dacier was a coldly luminous image; still a tolling name; no longer
conceivably her mate. Recollection rocked, not she. The politician and
citizen was admired: she read the man;--more to her own discredit than
to his, but she read him, and if that is done by the one of two lovers
who was true to love, it is the God of the passion pronouncing a final
release from the shadow of his chains.
Three days antecedent to her marriage, she went down the hill over her
cottage chimneys with Redworth, after hearing him praise and cite to
Emma Dunstane sentences of a morning's report of a speech delivered by
Dacier to his constituents. She alluded to it, that she might air her
power of speaking of the man coolly to him, or else for the sake of
stirring afresh some sentiment he had roused; and he repeated his high
opinion of the orator's political wisdom: whereby was revived in
her memory a certain reprehensible view, belonging to her period of
mock-girlish naughtiness--too vile!--as to his paternal benevolence, now
to clear vision the loftiest manliness. What did she do? She was Irish;
therefore intuitively decorous in amatory challenges and interchanges.
But she was an impulsive woman, and foliage was thick around, only a few
small birds and heaven seeing; and penitence and admiration sprang the
impulse. It had to be this or a burst of weeping:--she put a kiss upon
his arm.
She had omitted to think that she was dealing with a lover a man of
smothered fire, who would be electrically alive to the act through a
coat-sleeve. Redworth had his impulse. He kept it under,--she felt the
big breath he drew in. Imagination began busily building a nest for him,
and enthusiasm was not sluggish to make a home of it. The impulse of
each had wedded; in expression and repression; her sensibility told her
of the stronger.
She rose on the morning of her marriage day with his favourite Planxty
Kelly at her lips, a natural bubble of the notes. Emma drove down to the
cottage to breakfast and superintend her bride's adornment, as to
which, Diana had spoken slightingly; as well as of the ceremony, and
the institution, and this life itself:--she would be married out of her
cottage, a widow, a cottager, a woman under a cloud; yes, a sober person
taking at last a right practical step, to please her two best friends.
The change was marked. She wished to hide it, wished to confide it. Emma
was asked: 'How is he this morning?' and at the answer, describing his
fresh and spirited looks, and his kind ways with Arthur Rhodes, and
his fun with Sullivan Smith, and the satisfaction with the bridegroom
declared by Lord Larrian (invalided from his Rock and unexpectingly
informed of the wedding), Diana forgot that she had kissed her, and this
time pressed her lips, in a manner to convey the secret bridally.
'He has a lovely day.'
'And bride,' said Emma.
'If you two think so! I should like to agree with my dear old lord and
bless him for the prize he takes, though it feels itself at present
rather like a Christmas bon-bon--a piece of sugar in the wrap of a
rhymed motto. He is kind to Arthur, you say?'
'Like a cordial elder brother.'
'Dear love, I have it at heart that I was harsh upon Mary Paynham for
her letter. She meant well--and I fear she suffers. And it may have been
a bit my fault. Blind that I was! When you say “cordial elder brother,”
you make him appear beautiful to me. The worst of that is, one becomes
aware of the inability to match him.'
'Read with his eyes when you meet him this morning, my Tony.'
The secret was being clearly perceived by Emma, whose pride in assisting
to dress the beautiful creature for her marriage--with the man of men
had a tinge from the hymenaeal brand, exulting over Dacier, and in the
compensation coming to her beloved for her first luckless footing on
this road.
'How does he go down to the church?' said Diana.
'He walks down. Lukin and his Chief drive. He walks, with your Arthur
and Mr. Sullivan Smith. He is on his way now.'
Diana looked through the window in the direction of the hill. 'That is
so like him, to walk to his wedding!'
Emma took the place of Danvers in the office of the robing, for the
maid, as her mistress managed to hint, was too steeped 'in the colour of
the occasion' to be exactly tasteful, and had the art, no doubt
through sympathy, of charging permissible common words with explosive
meanings:--she was in an amorous palpitation, of the reflected state.
After several knockings and enterings of the bedchamber-door, she came
hurriedly to say: 'And your pillow, ma'am? I had almost forgotten it!'
A question that caused her mistress to drop the gaze of a moan on Emma,
with patience trembling. Diana preferred a hard pillow, and usually
carried her own about. 'Take it,' she had to reply.
The friends embraced before descending to step into the fateful
carriage. 'And tell me,' Emma said, 'are not your views of life brighter
to-day?'
'Too dazzled to know! It may be a lamp close to the eyes or a radiance
of sun. I hope they are.'
'You are beginning to think hopefully again?'
'Who can really think, and not think hopefully? You were in my mind last
night, and you brought a little boat to sail me past despondency of life
and the fear of extinction. When we despair or discolour things, it
is our senses in revolt, and they have made the sovereign brain their
drudge. I heard you whisper; with your very breath in my ear: “There
is nothing the body suffers that the soul may not profit by.” That is
Emma's history. With that I sail into the dark; it is my promise of the
immortal: teaches me to see immortality for us. It comes from you, my
Emmy.'
If not a great saying, it was in the heart of deep thoughts: proof
to Emma that her Tony's mind had resumed its old clear high-aiming
activity; therefore that her nature was working sanely, and that she
accepted her happiness, and bore love for a dower to her husband. No
blushing confession of the woman's love of the man would have told her
so much as the return to mental harmony with the laws of life shown in
her darling's pellucid little sentence.
She revolved it long after the day of the wedding. To Emma, constantly
on the dark decline of the unillumined verge, between the two worlds,
those words were a radiance and a nourishment. Had they waned she would
have trimmed them to feed her during her soul-sister's absence. They
shone to her of their vitality. She was lying along her sofa, facing
her South-western window, one afternoon of late November, expecting Tony
from her lengthened honeymoon trip, while a sunset in the van of frost,
not without celestial musical reminders of Tony's husband, began to
deepen; and as her friend was coming, she mused on the scenes of her
friend's departure, and how Tony, issuing from her cottage porch had
betrayed her feelings in the language of her sex by stooping to lift
above her head and kiss the smallest of her landlady's children
ranged up the garden-path to bid her farewell over their strewing of
flowers;--and of her murmur to Tony, entering the churchyard, among the
grave-mounds: 'Old Ireland won't repent it!' and Tony's rejoinder,
at the sight of the bridegroom advancing, beaming: 'A singular
transformation of Old England!'--and how, having numberless ready
sources of laughter and tears down the run of their heart-in-heart
intimacy, all spouting up for a word in the happy tremour of the
moment, they had both bitten their lips and blinked on a moisture of
the eyelids. Now the dear woman was really wedded, wedded and mated. Her
letters breathed, in their own lively or thoughtful flow, of the perfect
mating. Emma gazed into the depths of the waves of crimson, where
brilliancy of colour came out of central heaven preternaturally near on
earth, till one shade less brilliant seemed an ebbing away to boundless
remoteness. Angelical and mortal mixed, making the glory overhead a
sign of the close union of our human conditions with the ethereal and
psychically divined. Thence it grew that one thought in her breast
became a desire for such extension of days as would give her the
blessedness to clasp in her lap--if those kind heavens would grant
it!--a child of the marriage of the two noblest of human souls, one the
dearest; and so have proof at heart that her country and our earth are
fruitful in the good, for a glowing future. She was deeply a woman,
dumbly a poet. True poets and true women have the native sense of the
divineness of what the world deems gross material substance. Emma's
exaltation in fervour had not subsided when she held her beloved in her
arms under the dusk of the withdrawing redness. They sat embraced, with
hands locked, in the unlighted room, and Tony spoke of the splendid sky.
'You watched it knowing I was on my way to you?'
'Praying, dear.'
'For me?'
'That I might live long enough to be a godmother.'
There was no reply: there was an involuntary little twitch of Tony's
fingers.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS
A witty woman is a treasure; a witty Beauty is a power
A high wind will make a dead leaf fly like a bird
A kindly sense of superiority
Accidents are the specific for averting the maladies of age
Accounting for it, is not the same as excusing
Assist in our small sphere; not come mouthing to the footlights
At war with ourselves, means the best happiness we can have
Avoid the position that enforces publishing
Beautiful women in her position provoke an intemperateness
Beauty is rare; luckily is it rare
Between love grown old and indifference ageing to love
Beware the silent one of an assembly!
Brittle is foredoomed
But they were a hopeless couple, they were so friendly
By resisting, I made him a tyrant
Capacity for thinking should precede the act of writing
Capricious potentate whom they worship
Carry explosives and must particularly guard against sparks
Charitable mercifulness; better than sentimental ointment
Chaste are wattled in formalism and throned in sourness
Circumstances may combine to make a whisper as deadly as a blow
Common sense is the secret of every successful civil agitation
Compared the governing of the Irish to the management of a horse
Could have designed this gabbler for the mate
Could the best of men be simply--a woman's friend?
Debit was eloquent, he was unanswerable
Dedicated to the putrid of the upper circle
Depending for dialogue upon perpetual fresh supplies of scandal
Dose he had taken was not of the sweetest
Dreaded as a scourge, hailed as a refreshment (Scandalsheet)
Elderly martyr for the advancement of his juniors
Enthusiasm has the privilege of not knowing monotony
Envy of the man of positive knowledge
Expectations dupe us, not trust
Explaining of things to a dull head
Externally soft and polished, internally hard and relentless
Favour can't help coming by rotation
Fiddle harmonics on the sensual strings
Flashes bits of speech that catch men in their unguarded corner
For 'tis Ireland gives England her soldiers, her generals too
Friendship, I fancy, means one heart between two
Get back what we give
Goodish sort of fellow; good horseman, good shot, good character
Grossly unlike in likeness (portraits)
Happy in privation and suffering if simply we can accept beauty
He was not a weaver of phrases in distress
He had by nature a tarnishing eye that cast discolouration
He gained much by claiming little
He, by insisting, made me a rebel
He had neat phrases, opinions in packets
He was the maddest of tyrants--a weak one
He's good from end to end, and beats a Christian hollow (a hog)
Heart to keep guard and bury the bones you tossed him
Her peculiar tenacity of the sense of injury
Her feelings--trustier guides than her judgement in this crisis
Her final impression likened him to a house locked up and empty
Herself, content to be dull if he might shine
His gaze and one of his ears, if not the pair, were given
His ridiculous equanimity
Holding to the refusal, for the sake of consistency
How immensely nature seems to prefer men to women!
Human nature to feel an interest in the dog that has bitten you
I wanted a hero
I do not see it, because I will not see it
I never knew till this morning the force of No in earnest
I have and hold--you shall hunger and covet
I don't count them against women (moods)
I'm in love with everything she wishes! I've got the habit
Idea is the only vital breath
If I'm struck, I strike back
If he had valued you half a grain less, he might have won you
Inclined to act hesitation in accepting the aid she sought
Inducement to act the hypocrite before the hypocrite world
Infatuated men argue likewise, and scandal does not move them
Insistency upon there being two sides to a case--to every case
Intrusion of the spontaneous on the stereotyped would clash
Irony that seemed to spring from aversion
It is the best of signs when women take to her
It is the devil's masterstroke to get us to accuse him
Its glee at a catastrophe; its poor stock of mercy
Keep passion sober, a trotter in harness
Lengthened term of peace bred maggots in the heads of the people
Let never Necessity draw the bow of our weakness
Literature is a good stick and a bad horse
Loathing for speculation
Mare would do, and better than a dozen horses
Material good reverses its benefits the more nearly we clasp it
Matter that is not nourishing to brains
Mistake of the world is to think happiness possible to the sense
Mistaking of her desires for her reasons
Money is of course a rough test of virtue
Moral indignation is ever consolatory
Music was resumed to confuse the hearing of the eavesdroppers
Mutual deference
Needed support of facts, and feared them
Never fell far short of outstripping the sturdy pedestrian Time
Nothing the body suffers that the soul may not profit by
Nothing is a secret that has been spoken
Now far from him under the failure of an effort to come near
O self! self! self!
Observation is the most, enduring of the pleasures of life
Omnipotence, which is in the image of themselves
One might build up a respectable figure in negatives
Openly treated; all had an air of being on the surface
Or where you will, so that's in Ireland
Our weakness is the swiftest dog to hunt us
Our bravest, our best, have an impulse to run
Owner of such a woman, and to lose her!
Paint themselves pure white, to the obliteration of minor spots
Perused it, and did not recognize herself in her language
Pride in being always myself
Procrastination and excessive scrupulousness
Question the gain of such an expenditure of energy
Quixottry is agreeable reading, a silly performance
Rare men of honour who can command their passion
Read with his eyes when you meet him this morning
Read deep and not be baffled by inconsistencies
Real happiness is a state of dulness
Reluctant to take the life of flowers for a whim
Rewards, together with the expectations, of the virtuous
Salt of earth, to whom their salt must serve for nourishment
Sentimentality puts up infant hands for absolution
Service of watering the dry and drying the damp (Whiskey)
Sham spiritualism
She had sunk her intelligence in her sensations
She marries, and it's the end of her sparkling
She herself did not like to be seen eating in public
She had a fatal attraction for antiques
Sleepless night
Slightest taste for comic analysis that does not tumble to farce
Smart remarks have their measured distances
Smoky receptacle cherishing millions
Something of the hare in us when the hounds are full cry
Strain to see in the utter dark, and nothing can come of that
Swell and illuminate citizen prose to a princely poetic
Sympathy is for proving, not prating
Tendency to polysyllabic phraseology
Terrible decree, that all must act who would prevail
That is life--when we dare death to live!
That's the natural shamrock, after the artificial
The man had to be endured, like other doses in politics
The burlesque Irishman can't be caricatured
The greed of gain is our volcano
The debts we owe ourselves are the hardest to pay
The well of true wit is truth itself
The blindness of Fortune is her one merit
They have no sensitiveness, we have too much
They create by stoppage a volcano
This love they rattle about and rave about
Tooth that received a stone when it expected candy
Top and bottom sin is cowardice
Touch him with my hand, before he passed from our sight
Trial of her beauty of a woman in a temper
Vagrant compassionateness of sentimentalists
Vowed never more to repeat that offence to his patience
Was not one of the order whose Muse is the Public Taste
We live alone, and do not much feel it till we are visited
We never see peace but in the features of the dead
We must fawn in society
We don't know we are in halves
We're a peaceful people, but 'ware who touches us
Weather and women have some resemblance they say
Weighty little word--woman's native watchdog and guardian (No!)
What might have been
What the world says, is what the wind says
What a woman thinks of women, is the test of her nature
When we despair or discolour things, it is our senses in revolt
Where she appears, the first person falls to second rank
Who can really think, and not think hopefully?
Who venerate when they love
Wife and no wife, a prisoner in liberty
With that I sail into the dark
Without those consolatory efforts, useless between men
Women are taken to be the second thoughts of the Creator
Women with brains, moreover, are all heartless
World is ruthless, dear friends, because the world is hypocrite
World prefers decorum to honesty
Yawns coming alarmingly fast, in the place of ideas
You beat me with the fists, but my spirit is towering
You are entreated to repress alarm
You are entreated to repress alarm