WE DESCEND INTO A STEAMER'S ENGINE-ROOM
Fleetwood had dropped his friend Lord Feltre at Ancona; his good fortune
was to be alone when the clang of bells rang through his head in the
reading of Gower's lines. Other letters were opened: from the Countess
Livia, from Lady Arpington, from Captain Kirby-Levellier. There was one
from his lawyers, informing him of their receipt of a communication dated
South Wales, December 11th, and signed Owain Wythan; to the effect, that
the birth of a son to the Earl of Fleetwood was registered on the day of
the date, with a copy of the document forwarded.
Livia scornfully stated the tattling world's 'latest.' The captain was
as brief, in ordinary words, whose quick run to the stop could be taken
for a challenge of the eye. It stamped the adversary's frown on
Fleetwood reading. Lady Arpington was more politic; she wrote of
'a healthy boy,' and 'the healthy mother giving him breast,' this being
'the way for the rearing of strong men.' She condescended to the
particulars, that she might touch him.
The earl had not been so reared: his mother was not the healthy mother.
One of his multitudinous, shifty, but ineradicable ambitions was to
exhibit an excellingly vigorous, tireless constitution. He remembered
the needed refreshment of the sea-breezes aboard his yacht during the
week following the sleep-discarded nights at Scrope's and the green
tables. For a week he hung to the smell of brine, in rapturous amity
with Feltre, until they yellowed, differed, wrangled, hated.
A powerful leaven was put into him by the tidings out of Wales. Gower,
good fellow, had gone down to see the young mother three weeks after the
birth of her child. She was already renewing her bloom. She had
produced the boy in the world's early manner, lightly, without any of the
tragic modern hovering over death to give the life. Gower compared it to
a 'flush of the vernal orchard after a day's drink of sunlight.' That
was well: that was how it should be. One loathes the idea of tortured
women.
The good fellow was perhaps absurdly poetical. Still we must have poetry
to hallow this and other forms of energy: or say, if you like, the right
view of them impels to poetry. Otherwise we are in the breeding yards,
among the litters and the farrows. It is a question of looking down or
looking up. If we are poor creatures--as we are if we do but feast and
gamble and beget--we shall run for a time with the dogs and come to the
finish of swine. Better say, life is holy! Why, then have we to thank
her who teaches it.
He gazed at the string of visions of the woman naming him husband, making
him a father: the imagined Carinthia--beautiful Gorgon, haggard Venus;
the Carinthia of the precipice tree-shoot; Carinthia of the ducal
dancing-hall; and she at the altar rails; she on the coach box; she
alternately softest of brides, doughtiest of Amazons. A mate for the
caress, an electrical heroine, fronted him.
Yes, and she was Lord Fleetwood's wife, cracking sconces,--a demoiselle
Moll Flanders,--the world's Whitechapel Countess out for an airing,
infernally earnest about it, madly ludicrous; the schemer to catch his
word, the petticoated Shylock to bind him to the letter of it; now
persecuting, haunting him, now immoveable for obstinacy; malignant to
stay down in those vile slums and direct tons of sooty waters on his head
from its mains in the sight of London, causing the least histrionic of
men to behave as an actor. He beheld her a skull with a lamp behind the
eyeholes.
But this woman was the woman who made him a father; she was the mother of
the heir of the House; and the boy she clasped and suckled as her boy was
his boy. They met inseparably in that new life.
Truly, there could not be a woman of flesh so near to a likeness with the
beatific image of Feltre's worshipped Madonna!
The thought sparkled and darkened in Fleetwood's mind, as a star passing
into cloud. For an uproarious world claimed the woman, jeered at all
allied with her; at her husband most, of course:--the punctilious noodle!
the golden jackass, tethered and goaded! He had choice among the pick of
women: the daughter of the Old Buccaneer was preferred by the wiseacre
Coelebs. She tricked him cunningly and struck a tremendous return blow
in producing her male infant.
By the way, was she actually born in wedlock? Lord Levellier's
assurances regarding her origin were, by the calculation, a miser's
shuffles to clinch his bargain. Assuming the representative of holy
motherhood to be a woman of illegitimate birth, the history of the House
to which the spotted woman gave an heir would suffer a jolt when touching
on her. And altogether the history fumed rank vapours. Imagine her boy
in his father's name a young collegian! No commonly sensitive lad could
bear the gibes of the fellows raking at antecedents: Fleetwood would be
the name to start roars. Smarting for his name, the earl chafed at the
boy's mother. Her production of a man-child was the further and grosser
offence.
The world sat on him. His confession to some degree of weakness, even to
folly, stung his pride of individuality so that he had to soothe the pain
by tearing himself from a thought of his folly's partner, shutting
himself up and away from her. Then there was a cessation of annoyance,
flatteringly agreeable: which can come to us only of our having done the
right thing, young men will think. He felt at once warmly with the
world, enjoyed the world's kind shelter, and in return for its eulogy of
his unprecedented attachment to the pledge of his word, admitted an
understanding of its laughter at the burlesque edition of a noble lady in
the person of the Whitechapel Countess. The world sat on him heavily.
He recurred to Gower Woodseer's letter.
The pictures and images in it were not the principal matter,--the
impression had been deep. A plain transcription of the young mother's
acts and words did more to portray her: the reader could supply
reflections.
Would her boy's father be very pleased to see him? she had asked.
And she spoke of a fear that the father would try to take her boy from
her.
'Never that--you have my word!' Fleetwood said; and he nodded
consentingly over her next remark
'Not while I live, till he must go to school!'
The stubborn wife would be the last of women to sit and weep as a rifled
mother.
A child of the Countess Carinthia (he phrased it) would not be deficient
in will, nor would the youngster lack bravery.
For his part, comparison rushing at him and searching him, he owned that
he leaned on pride. To think that he did, became a theme for pride. The
mother had the primitive virtues, the father the developed: he was the
richer mine. And besides, he was he, the unriddled, complex, individual
he; she was the plain barbarian survival, good for giving her offspring
bone, muscle, stout heart.
Shape the hypothesis of a fairer woman the mother of the heir to the
earldom.
Henrietta was analyzed in a glimpse. Courage, animal healthfulness, she,
too, might--her husband not obstructing--transmit; and good looks, eyes
of the sapphire AEgean. And therewith such pliability as the Mother of
Love requires of her servants.
Could that woman resist seductions?
Fleetwood's wrath with her for refusing him and inducing him in spite to
pledge his word elsewhere, haphazard, pricked a curiosity to know whether
the woman could be--and easily! easily! he wagered--led to make her
conduct warrant for his contempt of her. Led,--that is, misled, you
might say, if you were pleading for a doll. But it was necessary to bait
the pleasures for the woman, in order to have full view of the precious
fine fate one has escaped. Also to get well rid of a sort of hectic in
the blood, which the woman's beauty has cast on that reflecting tide: a
fever-sign, where the fever has become quite emotionless and is merely
desirous for the stain of it to be washed out. As this is not the desire
to possess or even to taste, contempt will do it. When we know that the
weaver of the fascinations is purchasable, we toss her to the market
where men buy; and we walk released from vile subjection to one of the
female heap: subjection no longer, doubtless, and yet a stain of the past
flush, often colouring our reveries, creating active phantasms of a
passion absolutely extinct, if it ever was the veritable passion.
The plot--formless plot--to get release by the sacrifice or at least a
crucial temptation of the woman, that should wash his blood clean of her
image, had a shade of the devilish, he acknowledged; and the apology
offered no improvement of its aspect. She might come out of the trial
triumphant. And benefit for himself, even a small privilege, even the
pressure of her hand, he not only shrank from the thought of winning,-he
loathed the thought. He was too delicate over the idea of the married
woman whom he fancied he loved in her maidenhood. Others might press her
hand, lead her the dance: he simply wanted his release. She had set him
on fire; he conceived a method for trampling the remaining sparks and
erasing stain and scars; that was all. Henrietta rejected her wealthy
suitor: she might some day hence be seen crawling abjectly to wealth,
glad of a drink from the cup it holds, intoxicated with the draught.
An injured pride could animate his wealth to crave solace of such a
spectacle.
Devilish, if you like. He had expiated the wickedness in Cistercian
seclusion. His wife now drove him to sin again.
She had given him a son. That fluted of home and honourable life.
She had her charm, known to him alone.
But how, supposing she did not rub him to bristle with fresh irritations,
how go to his wife while Henrietta held her throne? Consideration was
due to her until she stumbled. Enough if she wavered. Almost enough is
she stood firm as a statue in the winds, and proved that the first page
of her was a false introduction. The surprising apparition of a
beautiful woman with character; a lightly-thrilled, pleasure-loving woman
devoted to her husband or protected by her rightful self-esteem, would
loosen him creditably. It had to be witnessed, for faith in it. He
reverenced our legendary good women, and he bowed to noble deeds; and he
ascribed the former to poetical creativeness, the latter operated as a
scourging to his flesh to yield its demoniacal inmates. Nothing of the
kind was doing at present.
Or stay: a studious re-perusal of Gower Woodseer's letter enriched a
little incident. Fleetwood gave his wife her name of Carinthia when he
had read deliberately and caught the scene.
Mrs. Wythan down in Wales related it to Gower. Carinthia and Madge,
trudging over the treeless hills, came on a birchen clump round a deep
hollow or gullypit; precipitous, the earl knew, he had peeped over the
edge in his infant days. There at the bottom, in a foot or so of water,
they espied a lamb; and they rescued the poor beastie by going down to
it, one or both. It must have been the mountain-footed one. A man would
hesitate, spying below. Fleetwood wondered how she had managed to climb
up, and carrying the lamb! Down pitches Madge Winch to help--they did it
between them. We who stand aloof admire stupidly. To defend himself
from admiring, he condemned the two women for the risk they ran to save a
probably broken-legged little beast: and he escaped the melting mood by
forcing a sneer at the sort of stuff out of which popular ballads are
woven. Carinthia was accused of letting her adventurous impulses and
sentimental female compassion swamp thought of a mother's duties. If
both those women had broken their legs the child might have cried itself
into fits for the mother, there she would have remained.
Gower wrote in a language transparent of the act, addressed to a reader
whose memory was to be impregnated. His reader would have flown away
from the simple occurrence on arabesques and modulated tones; and then
envisaging them critically, would have tossed his poor little story to
the winds, as a small thing magnified: with an object, being the next
thought about it. He knew his Fleetwood so far.
His letter concluded: 'I am in a small Surrey village over a baker's
shop, rent eight shillings per week, a dame's infant school opposite my
window, miles of firwood, heath, and bracken openings, for the winged or
the nested fancies. Love Nature, she makes you a lord of her boundless,
off any ten square feet of common earth. I go through my illusions and
come always back on that good truth. It says, beware of the world's
passion for flavours and spices. Much tasted, they turn and bite the
biter. My exemplars are the lately breeched youngsters with two pence in
their pockets for the gingerbread-nut booth on a fair day. I learn more
from one of them than you can from the whole cavalcade of your attendant
Ixionides.'
Mounting the box of his coach for the drive to London, Fleetwood had the
new name for the parasitic and sham vital troop at his ears.
'My Ixionides!' he repeated, and did not scorn them so much as he
rejoiced to be enlightened by the title. He craved the presence of the
magician who dropped illumination with a single word; wholesomer to think
of than the whole body of those Ixionides--not bad fellows, here and
there, he reflected, tolerantly, half laughing at some of their clownish
fun. Gower Woodseer and he had not quarrelled? No, they had merely
parted at one of the crossways. The plebeian could teach that son of
the, genuflexions, Lord Feltre, a lesson in manners. Woodseer was the
better comrade and director of routes. Into the forest, up on the
heights; and free, not locked; and not parroting day and night, but quick
for all that the world has learnt and can tell, though two-thirds of it
be composed of Ixionides: that way lies wisdom, and his index was cut
that way.
Arrived in town, he ran over the headings of his letters, in no degree
anxious for a communication from Wales. There was none. Why none?
She might as well have scrawled her announcement of an event pleasing to
her, and, by the calculation, important to him, if not particularly
interesting. The mother's wifeish lines would, perhaps, have been tested
in a furnace. He smarted at the blank of any, of even two or three
formal words. She sulked? 'I am not a fallen lamb!' he said. Evidently
one had to be a shivering beast in trouble, to excite her to move a hand.
Through so slight a fissure as this piece of discontent cracked in him,
the crowd of his grievances with the woman rushed pell-mell, deluging
young shoots of sweeter feelings. She sulked! If that woman could not
get the command, he was to know her incapable of submission. After
besmutting the name she had filched from him, she let him understand that
there was no intention to repent. Possibly she meant war. In which case
a man must fly, or stand assailed by the most intolerable of vulgar
farces;--to be compared to a pelting of one on the stage.
The time came for him to knock at doors and face his public.