IN WHICH WE HAVE FURTHER GLIMPSES OF THE WONDROUS MECHANISM OF OUR
YOUNGER MAN
The report of Admiral Baldwin Fakenham as having died in the arms of a
stranger visiting the house, hit nearer the mark than usual. He yielded
his last breath as Gower Woodseer was lowering him to his pillow, shortly
after a husky whisper of the letter to Lady Arpington; and that was one
of Gower's crucial trials. It condemned him, for the pacifying of a
dying man, to the murmur and shuffle, which was a lie; and the lie burnt
him, contributed to the brand on his race. He and his father upheld a
solitary bare staff, where the Cambrian flag had flown, before their
people had been trampled in mire, to do as the worms. His loathing of
any shadow of the lie was a protest on behalf of Welsh blood against an
English charge, besides the passion for spiritual cleanliness: without
which was no comprehension, therefore no enjoyment, of Nature possible to
him. For Nature is the Truth.
He begged the countess to let him have the letter; he held to the
petition, with supplications; he spoke of his pledged word, his honour;
and her countenance did not deny to such an object as she beheld the
right to a sense of honour. 'We all have the sentiment, I hope, Mr.
Woodseer,' she said, stupefying the worshipper, who did not see it
manifested. There was a look of gentle intimacy, expressive of common
grounds between them, accompanying the dead words. Mistress of the
letter, and the letter safe under lock, the admiral dead, she had not to
bestow a touch of her hand on his coatsleeve in declining to return it.
A face languidly and benevolently querulous was bent on him, when he,
so clever a man, resumed his very silly petition.
She was moon out of cloud at a change of the theme. Gower journeyed to
London without the letter, intoxicated, and conscious of poison;
enamoured of it, and straining for health. He had to reflect at the
journey's end, that he had picked up nothing on the road, neither a thing
observed nor a thing imagined; he was a troubled pool instead of a
flowing river.
The best help to health for him was a day in his father's house. We are
perpetually at our comparisons of ourselves with others; and they are
mostly profitless; but the man carrying his religious light, to light the
darkest ways of his fellows, and keeping good cheer, as though the heart
of him ran a mountain water through the grimy region, plucked at Gower
with an envy to resemble him in practice. His philosophy, too,
reproached him for being outshone. Apart from his philosophy, he stood
confessed a bankrupt; and it had dwindled to near extinction. Adoration
of a woman takes the breath out of philosophy. And if one had only to
say sheer donkey, he consenting to be driven by her! One has to say
worse in this case; for the words are, liar and traitor.
Carinthia's attitude toward his father conduced to his emulous respect
for the old man, below whom, and indeed below the roadway of ordinary
principles hedged with dull texts, he had strangely fallen. The sight of
her lashed him. She made it her business or it was her pleasure to go
the rounds beside Mr. Woodseer visiting his poor people. She spoke of
the scenes she witnessed, and threw no stress on the wretchedness, having
only the wish to assist in ministering. Probably the great wretchedness
bubbling over the place blunted her feeling of loss at the word of
Admiral Baldwin's end; her bosom sprang up: 'He was next to father,'
was all she said; and she soon reverted to this and that house of the
lodgings of poverty. She had descended on the world. There was of
course a world outside Whitechapel, but Whitechapel was hot about her;
the nests of misery, the sharp note of want in the air, tricks of an
urchin who had amused her.
As to the place itself, she had no judgement to pronounce, except that:
'They have no mornings here'; and the childish remark set her quivering
on her heights, like one seen through a tear, in Gower's memory. Scarce
anything of her hungry impatience to meet her husband was visible: she
had come to London to meet him; she hoped to meet him soon: before her
brother's return, she could have added. She mentioned the goodness of
Sarah Winch in not allowing that she was a burden to support. Money and
its uses had impressed her; the quantity possessed by some, the utter
need of it for the first of human purposes by others. Her speech was not
of so halting or foreign an English. She grew rapidly wherever she was
planted.
Speculation on the conduct of her husband, empty as it might be, was
necessitated in Gower. He pursued it, and listened to his father
similarly at work: 'A young lady fit for any station, the kindest of
souls, a born charitable human creature, void of pride, near in all she
--does and thinks to the Shaping Hand, why should her husband forsake her
on the day of their nuptials.
She is most gracious; the simplicity of an infant. Can you imagine the
doing of an injury by a man to a woman like her?'
Then it was that Gower screwed himself to say:
'Yes, I can imagine it, I'm doing it myself. I shall be doing it till
I've written a letter and paid a visit.'
He took a meditative stride or two in the room, thinking without
revulsion of the Countess Livia under a similitude of the bell of the
plant henbane, and that his father had immunity from temptation because
of the insensibility to beauty. Out of which he passed to the writing of
the letter to Lord Fleetwood, informing his lordship that he intended
immediately to deliver a message to the Marchioness of Arpington from
Admiral Baldwin Fakenham, in relation to the Countess of Fleetwood. A
duty was easily done by Gower when he had surmounted the task of
conceiving his resolution to do it; and this task, involving an offence
to the Lady Livia and intrusion of his name on a nobleman's recollection,
ranked next in severity to the chopping off of his fingers by a man
suspecting them of the bite of rabies.
An interview with Lady Arpington was granted him the following day.
She was a florid, aquiline, loud-voiced lady, evidently having no seat
for her wonderments, after his account of the origin of his acquaintance
with the admiral had quieted her suspicions. The world had only to stand
beside her, and it would hear what she had heard. She rushed to the
conclusion that Lord Fleetwood had married a person of no family.
'Really, really, that young man's freaks appear designed for the express
purpose of heightening our amazement!' she exclaimed. 'He won't easily
get beyond a wife in the east of London, at a shop; but there's no
knowing. Any wish of Admiral Baldwin Fakenham's I hold sacred. At least
I can see for myself. You can't tell me more of the facts? If Lord
Fleetwood's in town, I will call him here at once. I will drive down to
this address you give me. She is a civil person?'
'Her breeding is perfect,' said Gower.
'Perfect breeding, you say?' Lady Arpington was reduced to a murmur.
She considered the speaker: his outlandish garb, his unprotesting self-
possession. He spoke good English by habit, her ear told her. She was
of an eminence to judge of a man impartially, even to the sufferance of
an opinion from him, on a subject that lesser ladies would have denied to
his clothing. Outwardly simple, naturally frank, though a tangle of the
complexities inwardly, he was a touchstone for true aristocracy, as the
humblest who bear the main elements of it must be. Certain humorous
turns in his conversation won him an amicable smile when he bowed to
leave: they were the needed finish of a favourable impression.
One day later the earl arrived in town, read Gower Woodseer's brief
words, and received the consequently expected summons, couched in a great
lady's plain imperative. She was connected with his family on the
paternal side.
He went obediently; not unwillingly, let the deputed historian of the
Marriage, turning over documents, here say. He went to Lady Arpington
disposed for marital humaneness and jog-trot harmony, by condescension;
equivalent to a submitting to the drone of an incessant psalm at the drum
of the ear. He was, in fact, rather more than inclined that way. When
very young, at the age of thirteen, a mood of religious fervour had
spiritualized the dulness of Protestant pew and pulpit for him. Another
fit of it, in the Roman Catholic direction, had proposed, during his
latest dilemma, to relieve him of the burden of his pledged word. He had
plunged for a short space into the rapturous contemplation of a monastic
life--'the clean soul for the macerated flesh,' as that fellow Woodseer
said once: and such as his friend, the Roman Catholic Lord Feltre,
moodily talked of getting in his intervals. He had gone down to a young
and novel trial establishment of English penitents in the forest of a
Midland county, and had watched and envied, and seen the escape from a
lifelong bondage to the 'beautiful Gorgon,' under cover of a white
flannel frock. The world pulled hard, and he gave his body into chains
of a woman, to redeem his word.
But there was a plea on behalf of this woman. The life she offered
might have psalmic iteration; the dead monotony of it in prospect did,
nevertheless, exorcise a devil. Carinthia promised, it might seem to
chase and keep the black beast out of him permanently, as she could,
he now conceived: for since the day of the marriage with her, the devil
inhabiting him had at least been easier, 'up in a corner.'
He held an individual memory of his bride, rose-veiled, secret to them
both, that made them one, by subduing him. For it was a charm; an actual
feminine, an unanticipated personal, charm; past reach of tongue to name,
wordless in thought. There, among the folds of the incense vapours of
our heart's holy of holies, it hung; and it was rare, it was distinctive
of her, and alluring, if one consented to melt to it, and accepted for
compensation the exorcising of a devil.
Oh, but no mere devil by title!--a very devil. It was alert and frisky,
flushing, filling the thin cold idea of Henrietta at a thought; and in
the thought it made Carinthia's intimate charm appear as no better than a
thing to enrich a beggar, while he knew that kings could never command
the charm. Not love, only the bathing in Henrietta's incomparable beauty
and the desire to be, desire to have been, the casket of it, broke the
world to tempest and lightnings at a view of Henrietta the married woman
--married to the brother of the woman calling him husband:--'It is my
husband.' The young tyrant of wealth could have avowed that he did not
love Henrietta; but not the less was he in the swing of a whirlwind at
the hint of her loving the man she had married. Did she? It might be
tried.
She? That Henrietta is one of the creatures who love pleasure, love
flattery, love their beauty: they cannot love a man. Or the love is a
ship that will not sail a sea.
Now, if the fact were declared and attested, if her shallowness were seen
proved, one might get free of the devil she plants in the breast.
Absolutely to despise her would be release, and it would allow of his
tasting Carinthia's charm, reluctantly acknowledged; not 'money of the
country' beside that golden Henrietta's.
Yet who can say?--women are such deceptions. Often their fairest,
apparently sweetest, when brought to the keenest of the tests, are
graceless; or worse, artificially consonant; in either instance barren of
the poetic. Thousands of the confidently expectant among men have been
unbewitched; a lamentable process; and the grimly reticent and the loudly
discursive are equally eloquent of the pretty general disillusion. How
they loathe and tear the mask of the sham attraction that snatched them
to the hag yoke, and fell away to show its grisly horrors within the
round of the month, if not the second enumeration of twelve by the clock!
Fleetwood had heard certain candid seniors talk, delivering their minds
in superior appreciation of unpretentious boor wenches, nature's
products, not esteemed by him. Well, of a truth, she--'Red Hair and
Rugged Brows,' as the fellow Woodseer had called her, in alternation with
'Mountain Face to Sun'--she at the unveiling was gentle, surpassingly;
graceful in the furnace of the trial. She wore through the critic ordeal
his burning sensitiveness to grace and delicacy cast about a woman, and
was rather better than not withered by it.
On the borders between maidenly and wifely, she, a thing of flesh like
other daughters of earth, had impressed her sceptical lord, inclining to
contempt of her and detestation of his bargain, as a flitting hue,
ethereal, a transfiguration of earthliness in the core of the earthly
furnace. And how?--but that it must have been the naked shining forth of
her character, startled to show itself:--'It is my husband':--it must
have been love.
The love that they versify, and strum on guitars, and go crazy over, and
end by roaring at as the delusion; this common bloom of the ripeness of a
season; this would never have utterly captured a sceptic, to vanquish him
in his mastery, snare him in her surrender. It must have been the
veritable passion: a flame kept alive by vestal ministrants in the
yewwood of the forest of Old Romance; planted only in the breasts of very
favourite maidens. Love had eyes, love had a voice that night,-love was
the explicable magic lifting terrestrial to seraphic. Though, true, she
had not Henrietta's golden smoothness of beauty. Henrietta, illumined
with such a love, would outdo all legends, all dreams of the tale of
love. Would she? For credulous men she would be golden coin of the
currency. She would not have a particular wild flavour: charm as of the
running doe that has taken a dart and rolls an eye to burst the hunter's
heart with pity.
Fleetwood went his way to Lady Arpington almost complacently, having
fought and laid his wilder self. He might be likened to the doctor's
patient entering the chemist's shop, with a prescription for a drug of
healing virtue, upon which the palate is as little consulted as a
robustious lollypop boy in the household of ceremonial parents, who have
rung for the troop of their orderly domestics to sit in a row and hearken
the intonation of good words.