ON THE ROAD TO THE ACT OF PENANCE
His customary wrestle with the night drove Lord Fleetwood in the
stillness of the hour after matins from his hated empty Esslemont up
again to the village of the long-lived people, enjoying the moist
earthiness of the air off the ironstone. He rode fasting, a good
preparatory state for the simple pleasures, which are virtually the Great
Nourisher's teats to her young. The earl was relieved of his dejection
by a sudden filling of his nostrils. Fat Esslemont underneath had no
such air. Except on the mornings of his walk over the Salzkammergut and
Black Forest regions, he had never consciously drawn that deep breath of
the satisfied rapture, charging the whole breast with thankfulness.
Huntsmen would know it, if the chase were not urgent to pull them at
the tail of the running beast. Once or twice on board his yacht he
might have known something like it, but the salt sea-breeze could not
be disconnected from his companion Lord Feltre, and a thought of Feltre
swung vapour of incense all about him. Breathing this air of the young
sun's kiss of earth, his invigoration repelled the seductions of the
burnt Oriental gums.
Besides, as he had told his friend, it was the sincerity of the Catholic
religion, not the seductiveness, that won him to a form of homage--the
bend of the head of a foreign observer at a midnight mass. Asceticism,
though it may not justify error, is a truth in itself, it is the essence
extracted of the scourge, flesh vanquished; and it stands apart from
controversy. Those monks of the forested mountain heights, rambling for
their herbs, know the blessedness to be found in mere breathing:
a neighbour readiness to yield the breath inspires it the more. For when
we do not dread our end, the sense of a free existence comes back to us:
we have the prized gift to infancy under the piloting of manhood. But
before we taste that happiness we must perform our penance; 'No living
happiness can be for the unclean,' as the holy father preached to his
flock of the monastery dispersing at matins.
Ay, but penance? penance? Is there not such a thing as the doing of
penance out of the Church, in the manly fashion? So to regain the right
to be numbered among the captains of the world's fighting men,
incontestably the best of comrades, whether or no they led away on a
cataract leap at the gates of life. Boldly to say we did a wrong will
clear our sky for a few shattering peals.
The penitential act means, youth put behind us, and a steady course
ahead. But, for the keeping of a steady course, men made of blood in the
walks of the world must be steadied. Say it plainly-mated. There is the
humiliating point of our human condition. We must have beside us and
close beside us the woman we have learned to respect; supposing ourselves
lucky enough to have found her; 'that required other scale of the human
balance,' as Woodseer calls her now he has got her, wiser than Lord
Feltre in reference to men and women. We get no balance without her.
That is apparently the positive law; and by reason of men's wretched
enslavement, it is the dance to dissolution when we have not honourable
union with women. Feltre's view of women sees the devilish or the
angelical; and to most men women are knaves or ninnies. Hence do we
behold rascals or imbeciles in the offspring of most men.
He embraced the respected woman's character, with the usual effect:
--to see with her sight; and she beheld a speckled creature of the
intermittent whims and moods and spites; the universal Patron, whose
ambition to be leader of his world made him handle foul brutes--corrupt
and cause their damnation, they retort, with curses, in their pangs.
She was expected to pardon the husband, who had not abstained from his
revenge on her for keeping him to the pledge of his word. And what a
revenge!--he had flung the world at her. She is consequently to be the
young bride she was on the memorable morning of the drive off these
heights of Croridge down to thirty-acre meadow! It must be a saint to
forgive such offences; and she is not one, she is deliciously not one,
neither a Genevieve nor a Griselda. He handed her the rod to chastise
him. Her exchange of Christian names with the Welshman would not do it;
she was too transparently sisterly, provincially simple; she was, in
fact, respected. Any whipping from her was child's play to him, on whom,
if he was to be made to suffer, the vision of the intense felicity of
austerest asceticism brought the sensation as bracingly as the Boreal
morning animates men of high blood in ice regions. She could but gently
sting, even if vindictive.
Along the heights, outside the village, some way below a turn of the road
to Lekkatts, a gentleman waved hand. The earl saluted with his whip, and
waited for him.
'Nothing wrong, Mr. Wythan?'
'Nothing to fear, my lord.'
'I get a trifle uneasy.'
'The countess will not leave her brother.'
A glow of his countess's friendliness for this open-faced, prompt-
speaking, good fellow of the faintly inky eyelids, and possibly sheepish
inclinations, melted Fleetwood. Our downright repentance of misconduct
toward a woman binds us at least to the tolerant recognition of what poor
scraps of consolement she may have picked up between then and now--when
we can stretch fist in flame to defy it on the oath of her being a woman
of honour.
The earl alighted and said: 'Her brother, I suspect, is the key of the
position.'
'He's worth it--she loves her brother,' said Mr. Wythan, betraying a
feature of his quick race, with whom the reflection upon a statement is
its lightning in advance.
Gratified by the instant apprehension of his meaning, Fleetwood
interpreted the Welshman's. 'I have to see the brother worthy of her
love. Can you tell me the hour likely to be convenient?'. . . . .
Mr. Wythan thought an appointment unnecessary which conveyed the
sufficient assurance of audience granted.
'You know her brother well, Mr. Wythan?'
'Know him as if I had known him for years. They both come to the mind as
faith comes--no saying how; one swears by them.'
Fleetwood eyed the Welsh gentleman, with an idea that he might readily do
the same by him.
Mr. Wythan's quarters were at the small village inn, whither he was on
his way to breakfast. The earl slipped an arm through the bridle reins
and walked beside him, listening to an account of the situation at
Lekkatts. It was that extraordinary complication of moves and checks
which presents in the main a knot, for the powers above to cut. A
miserly old lord withholds arrears of wages; his workmen strike at a
critical moment; his nephew, moved by common humanity, draws upon
crippled resources to supply their extremer needs, though they are
ruining his interests. They made one night a demonstration of the
terrorizing sort round Lekkatts, to give him a chorus; and the old lord
fired at them out of window and wounded a man. For that they vowed
vengeance. All the new gunpowder milled in Surrey was, for some purpose
of his own, stored by Lord Levellier on the alder island of the pond near
his workshops, a quarter of a mile below the house. They refused,
whatever their object, to let a pound of it be moved, at a time when at
last the Government had undertaken to submit it to experiments. And
there they stood on ground too strong for 'the Captain,' as they called
him, to force, because of the quantity stored at Lekkatts being largely
beyond the amount under cover of Lord Levellier's licence. The old lord
was very ill, and he declined to see a doctor, but obstinately kept from
dying. His nephew had to guard him and at the same time support an enemy
having just cause of complaint. This, however, his narrow means would
not much longer permit him to do. The alternative was then offered him
of either siding arbitrarily against the men and his conscience or of
taking a course 'imprudent on the part of a presumptive heir,' Mr. Wythan
said hurriedly at the little inn's doorsteps.
'You make one of his lordship's guard?' said Fleetwood.
'The countess, her brother, and I, yes'
'Danger at all?'
'Not so much to fear while the countess is with us.'
'Fear is not a word for Carinthia.'
Her name on the earl's lips drew a keen shot of the eye from Mr. Wythan,
and he read the signification of the spoken name. 'You know what every
Cambrian living thinks of her, my lord.'
'She shall not have one friend the less for me.'
Fleetwood's hand was out for a good-bye, and the hand was grasped by one
who looked happy in doing it. He understood and trusted the man after
that, warmed in thinking how politic his impulses could be.
His intention of riding up to Croridge at noon to request his interview
with Mr. Kirby-Levellier was then stated.
'The key of the position, as you said,' Mr. Wythan remarked, not
proffering an opinion of it more than was expressed by a hearty, rosy
countenance, that had to win its way with the earl before excuse was
found for the venturesome repetition of his phrase.
Cantering back to that home of the loves of Gower Woodseer and Madge
Winch, the thought of his first act of penance done, without his feeling
the poorer for it, reconciled Fleetwood to the aspect of the hollow
place.
He could not stay beneath the roof. His task of breakfasting done, he
was off before the morning's delivery of letters, riding round the
country under Croridge, soon up there again. And Henrietta might be at
home, he was reminded by hearing band-music as he followed the directions
to the house named Stoneridge. The band consisted of eight wind
instruments; they played astonishingly well for itinerant musicians.
By curious chance, they were playing a selection from the Pirata;
presently he heard the notes to 'il mio tradito amor.' They had hit upon
Henrietta's favourite piece!
At the close of it he dismounted, flung the reins to his groom, and,
addressing a compliment to the leader, was deferentially saluted with a
'my lord.' Henrietta stood at the window, a servant held the door open
for him to enter; he went in, and the beautiful young woman welcomed him:
'Oh, my dear lord, you have given me such true delight! How very
generous of you!' He protested ignorance. She had seen him speak to the
conductor and receive the patron's homage; and who but he knew her adored
of operas, or would have had the benevolent impulse to think of solacing
her exile from music in the manner so sure of her taste! She was at her
loveliest: her features were one sweet bloom, as of the sunny flower
garden; and, touched to the heart by the music and the kindness, she
looked the look that kisses; innocently, he felt, feeling himself on the
same good ground while he could own he admired the honey creature, much
as an amateur may admire one of the pictures belonging to the nation.
'And you have come . . .?' she said. 'We are to believe in happy
endings?'
He shrugged, as the modest man should, who says:
'If it depends on me'; but the words were firmly spoken and could be
credited.
'Janey is with her brother down at Lekkatts. Things are at a deadlock.
A spice of danger, enough to relieve the dulness; and where there is
danger Janey's at home.' Henrietta mimicked her Janey. 'Parades with
her brother at night; old military cap on her head; firearms primed;
sings her Austrian mountain songs or the Light Cavalry call, till it
rings all day in my ears--she has a thrilling contralto. You are not to
think her wild, my lord. She's for adventure or domesticity, "whichever
the Fates decree." She really is coming to the perfect tone.'
'Speak of her,' said the earl. 'She can't yet overlook . . . ?'
'It's in the family. She will overlook anything her brother excuses.'
'I'm here to see him.'
'I heard it from Mr. Wythan.'
'"Owain," I believe?'
Henrietta sketched apologies, with a sidled head, soft pout, wavy hand.
'He belongs to the order of primitive people. His wife--the same
pattern, one supposes--pledged them to their Christian names. The man
is a simpleton, but a gentleman; and Janey holds his dying wife's wish
sacred. We are all indebted to him.'
'Whatever she thinks right!' said Fleetwood.
The fair young woman's warm nature flew out to him on a sparkle of
grateful tenderness in return for his magnanimity, oblivious of the
inflamer it was: and her heart thanked him more warmly, without the
perilous show of emotion, when she found herself secure.
She was beautiful, she was tempting, and probably the weakest of players
in the ancient game of two; and clearly she was not disposed to the
outlaw game; was only a creature of ardour. That he could see, seeing
the misinterpretation a fellow like Brailstone would put upon a temporary
flush of the feminine, and the advantage he would take of it, perhaps not
unsuccessfully--the dog! He committed the absurdity of casting a mental
imprecation at the cunning tricksters of emotional women, and yelled at
himself in the worn old surplice of the converted rake. But letting his
mind run this way, the tradito amor of the band outside the lady's window
was instantly traced to Lord Brailstone; so convictingly, that he now
became a very counsel for an injured husband in denunciation of the
seductive compliment.
Henrietta prepared to conduct him to Lekkatts; her bonnet was brought.
She drew forth a letter from a silken work-bag, and raised it,--Livia's
handwriting. 'I 've written my opinion,' he said.
'Not too severe, pray.'
'Posted.'
'Livia wanted a protector.'
'And chose--what on earth are you saying!'
Livia and her boyish lord were abandoned on the spot, though Henrietta
could have affirmed stoutly that there was much to be pleaded, if a
female advocate dared it, and a man would but hear.
His fingers were at the leaves of a Spanish dictionary.
'Oh yes, and here we have a book of Travels in Spain,' she said.
'Everything Spanish for Janey now. You are aware?--no?'
He was unaware and desired to be told.
'Janey's latest idea; only she would have conceived the notion. You
solve our puzzle, my lord.'
She renewed the thanks she persisted in offering for the military music
now just ceasing: vexatiously, considering that it was bad policy for him
to be unmasking Brailstone to her. At the same time, the blindness which
rendered her unconscious of Brailstone's hand in sending members of a
military band to play selections from the favourite opera they had
jointly drunk of to ecstasy, was creditable; touching, when one thought
of the pursuer's many devices, not omitting some treason on the part of
her present friend.
'Tell me--I solve?' he said . . . .
Henrietta spied the donkey-basket bearing the two little ones.
'Yes, I hope so--on our way down,' she made answer. 'I want you to see
the pair of love-birds in a nest.'
The boy and girl were seen lying side by side, both fast asleep; fair-
haired girl, dark-haired boy, faced to one another.
'Temper?' said Fleetwood, when he had taken observation of them.
'Very imperious--Mr. Boy!' she replied, straightening her back under a
pretty frown, to convey the humour of the infant tyrant.
The father's mind ran swiftly on a comparison of the destinies of the two
children, from his estimate of their parents; many of Gower Woodseer's
dicta converging to reawaken thoughts upon Nature's laws, which a
knowledge of his own nature blackened. He had to persuade himself that
this child of his was issue of a loving union; he had to do it violently,
conjuring a vivid picture of the mother in bud, and his recognition of
her young charm; the pain of keeping to his resolve to quit her, lest she
should subjugate him and despoil him of his wrath; the fatalism in his
coming and going; the romantic freak it had been,--a situation then so
clearly wrought, now blurred past comprehension. But there must have
been love, or some love on his part. Otherwise he was bound to pray for
the mother to predominate in the child, all but excluding its father.
Carinthia's image, as a result, ascended sovereignty, and he hung to it.
For if we are human creatures with consciences, nothing is more certain
than that we make our taskmasters of those to whom we have done a wrong,
the philosopher says. Between Lord Feltre and Gower Woodseer, influenced
pretty equally by each of them, this young nobleman was wakening to the
claims of others--Youth's infant conscience. Fleetwood now conceived the
verbal supplication for his wife's forgiveness involved in the act of
penance; and verbal meant abject; with him, going so far, it would mean
naked, precise, no slurring. That he knew, and a tremor went over him.
Women, then, are really the half of the world in power as much as in
their number, if men pretend to a step above the savage. Or, well, his
wife was a power.
He had forgotten the puzzle spoken of by Henrietta, when she used the
word again and expressed her happiness in the prospect before them--
caused by his presence, of course.
'You are aware, my dear lord, Janey worships her brother. He was
defeated, by some dastardly contrivance, in a wager to do wonderful
feats--for money! money! money! a large stake. How we come off our
high horses! I hadn't an idea of money before I was married. I think
of little else. My husband has notions of honour; he engaged himself
to pay a legacy of debts; his uncle would not pay debts long due to him.
He was reduced to the shift of wagering on his great strength and skill.
He could have done it. His enemy managed--enemy there was! He had to
sell out of the army in consequence. I shall never have Janey's face
of suffering away from my sight. He is a soldier above all things. It
seems hard on me, but I cannot blame him for snatching at an opportunity
to win military distinction. He is in treaty for the post of aide to the
Colonel--the General of the English contingent bound for Spain, for the
cause of the Queen. My husband will undertake to be at the orders of his
chief as soon as he can leave this place. Janey goes with him, according
to present arrangements.'
Passing through a turnstile, that led from the road across a meadow-slope
to the, broken land below, Henrietta had view of the earl's hard white
face, and she hastened to say: 'You have altered that, my lord. She is
devoted to her brother; and her brother running dangers . . . and
danger in itself is an attraction to her. But her husband will have the
first claim. She has her good sense. She will never insist on going, if
you oppose. She will be ready to fill her station. It will be-her pride
and her pleasure.'
Henrietta continued in the vein of these assurances; and Carinthia's
character was shooting lightnings through him, withering that of the
woman who referred to his wife's good sense and her station; and
certainly would not have betrayed herself by such drawlings if she had
been very positive that Carinthia's disposition toward wealth and luxury
resembled hers. She knew the reverse; or so his contemptuously generous
effort to frame an apology for the stuff he was hearing considered it.
His wife was lost to him. That fact smote on his breast the moment he
heard of her desire to go with her brother.
Wildest of enterprises! But a criminal saw himself guilty of a large
part in the disaster the two heroical souls were striving desperately to
repair. If her Chillon went, Carinthia would go--sure as flame is drawn
to air. The exceeding splendour in the character of a young woman,
injured as she had been, soft to love, as he knew her, and giving her
husband no other rival than a beloved brother, no ground of complaint
save her devotion to her brother, pervaded him, without illuminating or
lifting; rather with an indication of a foul contrast, that prostrated
him.
Half of our funny heathen lives we are bent double to gather things we
have tossed away! was one of the numbers of apposite sayings that hummed
about him, for a chorus of the world's old wisdom in derision, when he
descended the heathy path and had sight of Carinthia beside her Chillon.
Would it be the same thing if he had it in hand again? Did he wish it to
be the same? Was not he another man? By the leap of his heart to the
woman standing down there, he was a better man.
But recent spiritual exercises brought him to see superstitiously how by
that sign she was lost to him; for everlastingly in this life the better
pays for the worse; thus is the better a proved thing.
Both Chillon and Carinthia, it is probable, might have been stirred to
deeper than compassion, had the proud young nobleman taken them into
his breast to the scouring of it; exposing the grounds of his former
brutality, his gradual enlightenment, his ultimate acknowledgement of
the pricelessness of the woman he had won to lose her. An imploring of
forgiveness would not have been necessary with those two, however great
their--or the woman's--astonishment at the revelation of an abysmal male
humanity. A complete exposure of past meanness is the deed of present
courage certain of its reward without as well as within; for then we show
our fellows that the slough is cast. But life is a continuous fight;
and members of the social world display its degree of civilization by
fighting in armour; most of them are born in it; and their armour is more
sensitive than their skins. It was Fleetwood's instinct of his inability
to fling it off utterly which warned him of his loss of the wife, whose
enthusiasm to wait on her brother in danger might have subsided into the
channel of duty, even tenderness, had he been able resolutely to strip
himself bare. This was the further impossible to him, because of a
belief he now imposed upon himself, to cover the cowardly shrinking from
so extreme a penitential act, that such confessions are due from men to
the priest only, and that he could confess wholly and absolutely to the
priest--to heaven, therefore, under seal, and in safety, but with perfect
repentance.
So, compelled to keep his inner self unknown, he fronted Chillon;
courteously, in the somewhat lofty seeming of a guarded manner, he
requested audience for a few minutes; observing the princely figure of
the once hated man, and understanding Henrietta's sheer womanly choice of
him; Carinthia's idolatry, too, as soon as he had spoken. The man was in
his voice.
Chillon said: 'It concerns my sister, I have to think. In that case, her
wish is to be present. Your lordship will shorten the number of minutes
for the interview by permitting it.'
Fleetwood encountered Carinthia's eyes. They did not entreat or defy.
They seconded her brother, and were a civil shining naught on her
husband. He bowed his head, constrained, feeling heavily the two to one.
She replied to the look: 'My brother and I have a single mind. We save
time by speaking three together, my lord.'
He was led into the long room of the workshop, where various patterns of
muskets, rifles, pistols, and swords were stars, crosses, wedges, over
the walls, and a varnished wooden model of a piece of cannon occupied the
middle place, on a block.
Contempt of military weapons and ridicule of the art of war were common
on those days among a people beginning to sit with habitual snugness at
the festive board provided for them by the valour of their fathers.
Fleetwood had not been on the side of the banqueting citizens, though his
country's journals and her feasted popular wits made a powerful current
to whelm opposition. But the appearance of the woman, his wife, here,
her head surrounded by destructive engines in the form of trophy, and the
knowledge that this woman bearing his name designed to be out at the
heels of a foreign army or tag-rag of uniformed rascals, inspired him to
reprobate men's bad old game as heartily as good sense does in the
abstract, and as derisively as it is the way with comfortable islanders
before the midnight trumpet-notes of panic have tumbled them to their
legs. He took his chair; sickened.
He was the next moment taking Carinthia's impression of Chillon,
compelled to it by an admiration that men and women have alike for shapes
of strength in the mould of grace, over whose firm build a flicker of
agility seems to run. For the young soldier's figure was visibly in its
repose prompt to action as the mind's movement. This was her brother;
her enthusiasm for her brother was explained to him. No sooner did he
have the conception of it than it plucked at him painfully; and, feeling
himself physically eclipsed by the object of Carinthia's enthusiasm, his
pride of the rival counselled him to preserve the mask on what was going
on within, lest it should be seen that he was also morally beaten at the
outset. A trained observation told him, moreover, that her Chillon's
correctly handsome features, despite their conventional urbanity, could
knit to smite, and held less of the reserves of mercy behind them than
Carinthia's glorious barbaric ruggedness. Her eyes, each time she looked
at her brother, had, without doating, the light as of the rise of happy
tears to the underlids as they had on a certain day at the altar, when
'my lord' was 'my husband,'--more shyly then. He would have said, as
beautifully, but for envy of the frank, pellucid worship in that look
on her proved hero. It was the jewel of all the earth to win back to
himself; and it subjected him, through his desire for it, to a
measurement with her idol, in character, quality, strength, hardness.
He heard the couple pronouncing sentence of his loss by anticipation.
Why had she primed her brother to propose the council of three?
Addressing them separately, he could have been his better or truer self.
The sensation of the check imposed on him was instructive as to her craft
and the direction of her wishes. She preferred the braving of hazards
and horrors beside her brother, in scorn of the advantages he could
offer; and he yearned to her for despising by comparison the bribe he
proposed in the hope that he might win her to him. She was with religion
to let him know the meanness of wealth.
Thus, at the edge of the debate, or contest, the young lord's essential
nobility disarmed him; and the revealing of it, which would have appealed
to Carinthia and Chillon both, was forbidden by its constituent pride,
which helped him to live and stood obstructing explanatory speech.