THE LAST: WITH A CONCLUDING WORD BY THE DAME
It is of seemingly good augury for the cause of a suppliant man, however
little for the man himself, when she who has much to pardon can depict
him in a manner that almost smiles, not unlike a dandling nurse the
miniature man-child sobbing off to sleep after a frenzy; an example of a
genus framed for excuses, and he more than others. Chillon was amused up
to inquisitive surprise by Carinthia's novel idea of her formerly dreaded
riddle of a husband. As she sketched the very rational alliance proposed
to her, and his kick at the fetters of Calesford, a shadowy dash for an
image of the solicitous tyrant was added perforce to complete the scene;
following which, her head moved sharply, the subject was flung over her
shoulder.
She was developing; she might hold her ground with the husband, if the
alliance should be resumed; and she would be a companion for Henrietta
in England: she was now independent, as to money, and she could break an
intolerable yoke without suffering privation. He kept his wrath under,
determined not to use his influence either way, sure though he was of her
old father's voting for her to quit the man and enter the field where
qualities would be serviceable. The man probably feared a scandal more
than the loss of his wife in her going. He had never been thrashed--the
sole apology Chillon discovered for him, in a flushed review of the
unavenged list of injuries Carinthia had sustained. His wise old father
insisted on the value of an early thrashing to trim and shape the growth
of most young men. There was no proof of Lord Fleetwood's having schemed
to thwart his wager, so he put that accusation by: thinking for an
instant, that if the man desired to have his wife with him, and she left
the country with her brother, his own act would recoil; or if she stayed
to hear of a villany, Carinthia's show of scorn could lash. Henrietta
praised my lord's kindness. He had been one of the adorers--as what man
would not be!--and upon her at least (he could hardly love her husband)
he had not wreaked his disappointment. A young man of huge wealth,
having nothing to do but fatten his whims, is the monster a rich country
breeds under the blessing of peace. His wife, if a match for him, has
her work traced out:--mean work for the child of their father, Chillon
thought. She might be doing braver, more suitable to the blood in her
veins. But women have to be considered as women, not as possible
heroines; and supposing she held her own with this husband of hers, which
meant, judging by the view of their unfolded characters at present, a
certain command of the freakish beast; she, whatever her task, would not
be the one set trotting. He came to his opinion through the estimate he
had recently formed of Lord Fleetwood, and a study of his changed sister.
Her brows gloomed at a recurrence to that subject. Their business of the
expedition absorbed her, each detail, all the remarks he quoted of his
chief, hopeful or weariful; for difficulties with the Spanish Government,
and with the English too, started up at every turn; and the rank and file
of the contingent were mostly a rough lot, where they were rather better
than soaked weeds. A small body of trained soldiers had sprung to the
call to arms; here and there an officer could wheel a regiment.
Carinthia breasted discouragement. 'English learn from blows, Chillon.'
'He might have added, they lose half their number by having to learn from
blows, Carin.'
'He said, "Let me lead Britons!"'
'When the canteen's fifty leagues to the rear, yes!'
'Yes, it is a wine country,' she sighed. 'But would the Spaniards have
sent for us if their experience told them they could not trust us?'
Chillon brightened rigorously: 'Yes, yes; there's just a something about
our men at their best, hard to find elsewhere. We're right in thinking
that. And our chief 's the right man.'
'He is Owain's friend and countryman,' said Carinthia, and pleased, her
brother for talking like a girl, in the midst of methodical calculations
of the cost of this and that, to purchase the supplies he would need.
She had an organizing head. On her way down from London she had drawn on
instructions from a London physician of old Peninsula experience to
pencil a list of the medical and surgical stores required by a
campaigning army; she had gained information of the London shops where
they were to be procured; she had learned to read medical prescriptions
for the composition of drugs. She was at her Spanish still, not behind
him in the ordinary dialogue, and able to correct him on points of
Spanish history relating to fortresses, especially the Basque.
A French bookseller had supplied her with the Vicomte d'Eschargue's
recently published volume of a Travels in Catalonia. Chillon saw
paragraphs marked, pages dog-eared, for reference. At the same time,
the question of Henrietta touched her anxiously. Lady Arpington's
hints had sunk into them both.
'I have thought of St. Jean de Luz, Chillon, if Riette would consent to
settle there. French people are friendly. You expect most of your work
in and round the Spanish Pyrenees.'
'Riette alone there?' said he, and drew her by her love of him into his
altered mind; for he did not object to his wife's loneliness at Cadiz
when their plan was new.
London had taught her that a young woman in the giddy heyday of her
beauty has to be guarded; her belonging to us is the proud burden
involving sacrifices. But at St. Jean de Luz, if Riette would consent
to reside there, Lord Fleetwood's absence and the neighbourhood of the
war were reckoned on to preserve his yokefellow from any fit of the
abominated softness which she had felt in one premonitory tremor during
their late interview, and deemed it vile compared with the life of action
and service beside, almost beside, her brother, sharing his dangers at
least. She would have had Chillon speak peremptorily to his wife
regarding the residence on the Spanish borders, adding, in a despair:
'And me with her to protect her!'
'Unfair to Riette, if she can't decide voluntarily,' he said.
All he refrained from was, the persuading her to stay in England and live
reconciled with the gaoler of the dungeon, as her feelings pictured it.
Chillon and Carinthia journeyed to London for purchases and a visit to
lawyer, banker, and tradesmen, on their way to meet his chief and Owain
Wythan at Southampton. They lunched with Livia. The morrow was the
great Calesford day; Henrietta carolled of it. Lady Arpington had been
afllictingly demure on the theme of her presence at Calesford within her
term of mourning. 'But I don't mourn, and I'm not related to the
defunct, and I can't be denied the pleasure invented for my personal
gratification,' Henrietta's happy flippancy pouted at the prudish
objections. Moreover, the adored Columelli was to be her slave of song.
The termination of the London season had been postponed a whole week for
Calesford: the utmost possible strain; and her presence was understood to
represent the Countess of Fleetwood, temporarily in decorous retirement.
Chillon was assured by her that the earl had expressed himself satisfied
with his wife's reasonableness. 'The rest will follow.' Pleading on the
earl's behalf was a vain effort, but she had her grounds for painting
Lord Fleetwood's present mood to his countess in warm colours. 'Nothing
short of devotion, Chillon!' London's extreme anxiety to see them united,
and the cause of it, the immense good Janey could do to her country,
should certainly be considered by her, Henrietta said. She spoke
feverishly. A mention of St. Jean de Luz for a residence inflicted,
it appeared, a more violent toothache than she had suffered from the
proposal of quarters in Cadiz. And now her husband had money? . . .
she suggested his reinstatement in the English army. Chillon hushed
that: his chief had his word. Besides, he wanted schooling in war.
Why had he married! His love for her was the answer; and her beauty
argued for the love. But possessing her, he was bound to win her a name.
So his reasoning ran to an accord with his military instincts and
ambition. Nevertheless, the mournful strange fact she recalled, that
they had never waltzed together since they were made one, troubled his
countenance in the mirror of hers. Instead of the waltz, grief, low
worries, dulness, an eclipse of her, had been the beautiful creature's
portion.
It established mighty claims to a young husband's indulgence. She
hummed a few bars of his favourite old Viennese waltz, with 'Chillon!'
invitingly and reproachfully. His loathing of Lord Fleetwood had to
withstand an envious jump at the legs in his vison of her partner on
the morrow. He said: 'You'll think of some one absent.'
'You really do wish me to go, my darling? It is Chillon's wish?' She
begged for the words; she had them, and then her feverishness abated to a
simple sparkling composure.
Carinthia had observed her. She was heart-sick under pressure of
thoughts the heavier for being formless. They signified in the sum her
doom to see her brother leave England for the war, and herself crumble to
pieces from the imagined figure of herself beside him on or near the
field. They could not be phrased, for they accused the beloved brother
of a weakness in the excessive sense of obligation to the beautiful woman
who had wedded him. Driving down to Southampton by the night-coach, her
tenderness toward Henrietta held other thoughts unshaped, except one,
that moved in its twilight, murmuring of how the love of pleasure keeps
us blind children. And how the innocents are pushed by it to snap at
wicked bait, which the wealthy angle with, pointed a charitable index on
some of our social story. The Countess Livia, not an innocent like
Henrietta had escaped the poisoned tongues by contracting a third
marriage--'in time!' Lady Arpington said; and the knotty question was
presented to a young mind: Why are the innocents tempted to their ruin,
and the darker natures allowed an escape? Any street-boy could have told
her of the virtue in quick wits. But her unexercised reflectiveness was
on the highroad of accepted doctrines, with their chorus of the moans of
gossips for supernatural intervention to give us justice. She had not
learnt that those innocents, pushed by an excessive love of pleasure,
are for the term lower in the scale than their wary darker cousins,
and must come to the diviner light of intelligence through suffering.
However, the result of her meditations was to show her she was directed
to be Henrietta's guardian. After that, she had no thoughts; travelling
beside Chillon, she was sheer sore feeling, as of a body aching for its
heart plucked out. The bitterness of the separation to come between them
prophesied a tragedy. She touched his hand. It was warm now.
During six days of travels from port to port along the Southern and
Western coasts, she joined in the inspection of the English contingent
about to be shipped. They and their chief and her brother were plain to
sight, like sample print of a book's first page, blank sheets for the
rest of the volume. If she might have been one among them, she would
have dared the reckless forecast. Her sensations were those of a bird
that has flown into a room, and beats wings against the ceiling and the
window-panes. A close, hard sky, a transparent prison wall, narrowed her
powers, mocked her soul. She spoke little; what she said impressed
Chillon's chief, Owain Wythan was glad to tell her. The good friend had
gone counter to the tide of her breast by showing satisfaction with the
prospect that she would take her rightful place in the world. Her
concentrated mind regarded the good friend as a phantom of a man, the
world's echo. His dead Rebecca would have understood her passion to be
her brother's comrade, her abasement in the staying at home to guard his
butterfly. Owain had never favoured her project; he could not now
perceive the special dangers Chillon would be exposed to in her
separation from him. She had no means of explaining what she felt
intensely, that dangers, death, were nothing to either of them,
if they shared the fate together.
Her rejected petition to her husband for an allowance of money, on the
day in Wales, became the vivid memory which brings out motives in its
glow. Her husband hated her brother; and why? But the answer was
lighted fierily down another avenue. A true husband, a lord of wealth,
would have rejoiced to help the brother of his wife. He was the cause
of Chillon's ruin and this adventure to restore his fortunes. Could she
endure a close alliance with the man while her brother's life was
imperilled? Carinthia rebuked her drowsy head for not having seen his
reason for refusing at the time. 'How long I am before I see anything
that does not stare in my face!' She was a married woman, whose order of
mind rendered her singularly subject to the holiness of the tie; and she
was a weak woman, she feared. Already, at intervals, now that action on
a foreign field of the thunders and lightnings was denied, imagination
revealed her dissolving to the union with her husband, and cried her
comment on herself as the world's basest of women for submitting to it
while Chillon's life ran risks; until finally she said: 'Not before I
have my brother home safe!' an exclamation equal to a vow.
That being settled, some appearance of equanimity returned; she talked of
the scarlet business as one she participated in as a distant spectator.
Chillon's chief was hurrying the embarkation of his troops; within ten
days the whole expedition would be afloat. She was to post to London for
further purchases, he following to take leave of his wife and babe.
Curiously, but hardly remarked on during the bustle of work, Livia had
been the one to send her short account of the great day at Calesford;
Henrietta, the born correspondent, pencilling a couple of lines; she was
well, dreadfully fatigued, rather a fright from a trip of her foot and
fall over a low wire fence. Her message of love thrice underlined the
repeated word.
Henrietta was the last person Carinthia would have expected to meet
midway on the London road. Her name was called from a carriage as she
drove up to the door of the Winchester hostlery, and in the lady, over
whose right eye and cheek a covering fold of silk concealed a bandage,
the voice was her sister Riette's. With her were two babes and their
nursemaids.
'Chillon is down there--you have left him there?' Henrietta greeted her,
saw the reply, and stepped out of her carriage. 'You shall kiss the
children afterwards; come into one of the rooms, Janey.'
Alone together, before an embrace, she said, in the voice of tears
hardening to the world's business, 'Chillon must not enter London. You
see the figure I am. My character's in as bad case up there--thanks to
those men! My husband has lost his "golden Riette." When you see
beneath the bandage! He will have the right to put me away. His "beauty
of beauties"! I'm fit only to dress as a page-boy and run at his heels.
My hero! my poor dear! He thinking I cared for nothing but amusement,
flattery. Was ever a punishment so cruel to the noblest of generous
husbands! Because I know he will overlook it, make light of it, never
reproach his Riette. And the rose he married comes to him a shrivelled
leaf of a potpourri heap. You haven't seen me yet. I was their
"beautiful woman." I feel for my husband most.'
She took breath. Carinthia pressed her lips on the cheek sensible to a
hiss, and Henrietta pursued, in words liker to sobs: 'Anywhere, Cadiz,
St. Jean de Luz, hospital work either, anywhere my husband likes,
anything! I want to work, or I'll sit and rock the children. I'm awake
at last. Janey, we're lambs to vultures with those men. I don't pretend
I was the perfect fool. I thought myself so safe. I let one of them
squeeze my hand one day, he swears. You know what a passion is; you have
it for mountains and battles, I for music. I do remember, one morning
before sunrise, driving back to town out of Windsor,--a dance, the
officers of the Guards,--and my lord's trumpeter at the back of the coach
blowing notes to melt a stone, I found a man's hand had mine. I remember
Lord Fleetwood looking over his shoulder and smiling hard and lashing his
horses. But listen--yes, at Calesford it happened. He--oh, hear the
name, then; Chillon must never hear it;--Lord Brailstone was denied the
right to step on Lord Fleetwood's grounds. The Opera company had
finished selections from my Pirata. I went out for cool air; little Sir
Meeson beside me. I had a folded gauze veil over my head, tied at the
chin in a bow. Some one ran up to me--Lord Brailstone. He poured forth
their poetry. They suppose it the wine for their "beautiful woman."
I dare say I laughed or told him to go, and he began a tirade against
Lord Fleetwood. There's no mighty difference between one beast of prey
and another. Let me get away from them all! Though now! they would not
lift an eyelid. This is my husband's treasure returning to him. We have
to be burnt to come to our senses. Janey--oh! you do well!--it was
fiendish; old ballads, melodrama plays, I see they were built on men's
deeds. Janey, I could not believe it, I have to believe, it is forced
down my throat;--that man, your husband, because he could not forgive my
choosing Chillon, schemed for Chillon's ruin. I could not believe it
until I saw in the glass this disfigured wretch he has made of me. Livia
serves him, she hates him for the tyrant he is; she has opened my eyes.
And not for himself, no, for his revenge on me, for my name to be as my
face is. He tossed me to his dogs; fair game for them! You do well,
Janey; he is capable of any villany. And has been calling at Livia's
door twice a day, inquiring anxiously; begs the first appointment
possible. He has no shame; he is accustomed to buy men and women; he
thinks his money will buy my pardon, give my face a new skin, perhaps.
A woman swears to you, Janey, by all she holds holy on earth, it is not
the loss of her beauty--there will be a wrinkled patch on the cheek for
life, the surgeon says; I am to bear a brown spot, like a bruised peach
they sell at the fruit-shops cheap. Chillon's Riette! I think of that,
the miserable wife I am for him without the beauty he loved so! I think
of myself as guilty, a really guilty woman, when I compare my loss with
my husband's.'
'Your accident, dearest Riette--how it happened?' Carinthia said,
enfolding her.
'Because, Janey, what have I ever been to Chillon but the good-looking
thing he was proud of? It's gone. Oh, the accident. Brailstone had
pushed little Corby away; he held my hand, kept imploring, he wanted the
usual two minutes, and all to warn me against--I've told you; and he saw
Lord Fleetwood coming. I got my hand free, and stepped back, my head
spinning; and I fell. That I recollect, and a sight of flames, like the
end of the world. I fell on one of the oil-lamps bordering the grass; my
veil lighted; I had fainted; those two men saw nothing but one another;
and little Sir Meeson was no help; young Lord Cressett dashed out the
flames. They brought me to my senses for a second swoon. Livia says I
woke moaning to be taken away from that hated Calesford. It was, oh!
never to see that husband of yours again. Forgive him, if you can.
Not I. I carry the mark of him to my grave. I have called myself "Skin-
deep" ever since, day and night--the name I deserve.'
'We will return to Chillon together, my own,' said Carinthia. 'It may
not be so bad.' And in the hope that her lovely sister exaggerated a
defacement leaving not much worse than a small scar, her heart threw off
its load of the recent perplexities, daylight broke through her dark
wood. Henrietta brought her liberty. How far guilty her husband might
be, she was absolved from considering; sufficiently guilty to release
her. Upon that conclusion, pity for the awakened Riette shed purer tear-
drops through the gratitude she could not restrain, could hardly conceal,
on her sister's behalf and her own. Henrietta's prompt despatch to
Croridge to fetch the babes, her journey down out of a sick-room to stop
Chillon's visit to London, proved her an awakened woman, well paid for
the stain on her face, though the stain were lasting. Never had she
loved Henrietta, never shown her so much love, as on the road to the
deepening colours of the West. Her sisterly warmth surprised the woeful
spotted beauty with a reflection that this martial Janey was after all a
woman of feeling, one whom her husband, if he came to know it and the
depth of it, the rich sound of it, would mourn in sackcloth to have lost.
And he did, the Dame interposes for the final word, he mourned his loss
of Carinthia Jane in sackcloth and ashes, notwithstanding that he had the
world's affectionate condolences about him to comfort him, by reason of
his ungovernable countess's misbehaviour once more, according to the
report, in running away with a young officer to take part in a foreign
insurrection; and when he was most the idol of his countrymen and
countrywomen, which it was once his immoderate aim to be, he mourned her
day and night, knowing her spotless, however wild a follower of her
father's MAXIMS FOR MEN. He believed--some have said his belief was not
in error--that the woman to aid and make him man and be the star in human
form to him, was miraculously revealed on the day of his walk through the
foreign pine forest, and his proposal to her at the ducal ball was an
inspiration of his Good Genius, continuing to his marriage morn, and then
running downwards, like an overstrained reel, under the leadership of his
Bad. From turning to turning of that descent, he saw himself advised to
retrieve the fatal steps, at each point attempting it just too late;
until too late by an hour, he reached the seaport where his wife had
embarked; and her brother, Chillon John, cruelly, it was the common
opinion, refused him audience. No syllable of the place whither she fled
abroad was vouchsafed to him; and his confessions of sins and repentance
of them were breathed to empty air. The wealthiest nobleman of all
England stood on the pier, watching the regiments of that doomed
expedition mount ship, ready with the bribe of the greater part of his
possessions for a single word to tell him of his wife's destination.
Lord Feltre, his companion, has done us the service to make his emotions
known. He describes them, true, as the Papist who sees every incident
contribute to precipitate sinners into the bosom of his Church. But
this, we have warrant for saying, did not occur before the earl had
visited and strolled in the woods with his former secretary, Mr. Gower
Woodseer, of whom so much has been told, and he little better than an
infidel, declaring his aim to be at contentedness in life. Lord
Fleetwood might envy for a while, he could not be satisfied with Nature.
Within six months of Carinthia Jane's disappearance, people had begun to
talk of strange doings at Calesford; and some would have it, that it was
the rehearsal of a play, in which friars were prominent characters, for
there the frocked gentry were seen flitting across the ground. Then
the world learnt too surely that the dreaded evil had happened, its
wealthiest nobleman had gone over to the Church of Rome! carrying all his
personal and unentailed estate to squander it on images and a dogma.
Calesford was attacked by the mob;--one of the notorious riots in our
history was a result of the Amazing Marriage, and roused the talk of it
again over Great Britain. When Carinthia Jane, after two years of
adventures and perils rarely encountered by women, returned to these
shores, she was, they say, most anxious for news of her husband; and
then, indeed, it has been conjectured, they might have been united to
walk henceforward as one for life, but for the sad fact that the Earl of
Fleetwood had two months and some days previously abjured his rank, his
remaining property, and his title, to become, there is one report, the
Brother Russett of the mountain monastery he visited in simple curiosity
once with his betraying friend, Lord Feltre. Or some say, and so it may
truly be, it was an amateur monastery established by him down among his
Welsh mountains, in which he served as a simple brother, without any
authority over the priests or what not he paid to act as his superiors.
Monk of some sort he would be. He was never the man to stop at anything
half way.
Mr. Rose Mackrell, in his Memoirs, was the first who revealed to the
world, that the Mademoiselle de Levellier of the French Count fighting
with the Carlists--falsely claimed by him as a Frenchwoman--was, in very
truth, Carinthia Jane, the Countess of Fleetwood, to whom Carlists and
Legitimises alike were indebted for tender care of them on the field and
in hospital; and who rode from one camp through the other up to the tent
of the Pretender to the throne of Spain, bearing her petition for her
brother's release; which was granted, in acknowledgement of her 'renowned
humanity to both conflicting armies,' as the words translated by Dr.
Glossop run. Certain it is she brought her wounded brother safe home to
England, and prisoners in that war usually had short shrift. For three
years longer she was the Countess of Fleetwood, 'widow of a living
suicide,' Mr. Rose Mackrell describes the state of the Marriage at that
period. No whisper of divorce did she tolerate.
Six months after it was proved that Brother Russett had perished of his
austerities, or his heart, we learn she said to the beseeching applicant
for her hand, Mr. Owain Wythan, with the gift of it, in compassion:
'Rebecca could foretell events.' Carinthia Jane had ever been ashamed
of second marriages, and the union with her friend Rebecca's faithful
simpleton gave it, one supposes, a natural air, for he as little as she
had previously known the wedded state. She married him, Henrietta has
written, because of his wooing her with dog's eyes instead of words.
The once famous beauty carried a wrinkled spot on her cheek to her grave;
a saving disfigurement, and the mark of changes in the story told you
enough to make us think it a providential intervention for such ends as
were in view.
So much I can say: the facts related, with some regretted omissions,
by which my story has so skeleton a look, are those that led to the
lamentable conclusion. But the melancholy, the pathos of it, the heart
of all England stirred by it, have been--and the panting excitement it
was to every listener--sacrificed in the vain effort to render events as
consequent to your understanding as a piece of logic, through an exposure
of character! Character must ever be a mystery, only to be explained in
some degree by conduct; and that is very dependent upon accident: and
unless we have a perpetual whipping of the tender part of the reader's
mind, interest in invisible persons must needs flag. For it is an infant
we address, and the storyteller whose art excites an infant to serious
attention succeeds best; with English people assuredly, I rejoice to
think, though I have to pray their patience here while that philosophy
and exposure of character block the course along a road inviting to
traffic of the most animated kind.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
A dumb tongue can be a heavy liar
Advised not to push at a shut gate
As faith comes--no saying how; one swears by them
Bent double to gather things we have tossed away
Contempt of military weapons and ridicule of the art of war
Everlastingly in this life the better pays for the worse
Fatal habit of superiority stopped his tongue
Festive board provided for them by the valour of their fathers
Flung him, pitied him, and passed on
Foe can spoil my face; he beats me if he spoils my temper
He had wealth for a likeness of strength
Himself in the worn old surplice of the converted rake
Ideas in gestation are the dullest matter you can have
Injury forbids us to be friends again
Lies are usurers' coin we pay for ten thousand per cent
Love of pleasure keeps us blind children
Never forgave an injury without a return blow for it
Pebble may roll where it likes--not so the costly jewel
Reflection upon a statement is its lightning in advance
Religion condones offences: Philosophy has no forgiveness
Sensitiveness to the sting, which is not allowed to poison
Strengthening the backbone for a bend of the knee in calamity
Style is the mantle of greatness
That sort of progenitor is your "permanent aristocracy"
There's not an act of a man's life lies dead behind him
Those who have the careless chatter, the ready laugh
Those who know little and dread much
To most men women are knaves or ninnies
Wakening to the claims of others--Youth's infant conscience
We make our taskmasters of those to whom we have done a wrong
We shall go together; we shall not have to weep for one another
Wooing her with dog's eyes instead of words
[The End]