Nothing to rouse alarm was discovered at Carlsruhe. Livia’s fair cousin
was there with the red-haired gaunt girl of the mountains; and it was
frankly stated by Henrietta, that she had accompanied the girl a certain
distance along the Strasburg road, for her to see the last of her
brother Chillon on his way to England. Livia was not the woman to push
inquiries. On that subject, she merely said, as soon as they were alone
together:
‘You seem to have had the lion’s share of the parting.’
‘Yes, we passed Mr. Chumley Potts,’ was Henrietta’s immediate answer;
and her reference to him disarmed Livia.
They smiled at his name transiently, but in agreement: the tattler-spout
of their set was, a fatal person to encounter, and each deemed the
sudden apparition of him in the very early morning along the Carlsruhe
road rather magical.
‘You place particular confidence in Russett’s fidelity to his word,
Riette--as you have been hearing yourself called. You should be serious
by this time. Russett won’t bear much more. I counted on the night
of the Ball for the grand effect. You will extinguish every woman
there--and if he is absent?’
‘I shall excuse him.’
‘You are not in a position to be so charitable. You ought to know your
position, and yourself too, a little better than you do. How could you
endure poverty? Chillon Kirby stands in his uniform, and all’s told.
He can manoeuvre, we know. He got the admiral away to take him to those
reviews cleverly. But is he thinking of your interests when he does it?
He requires twenty years of active service to give you a roof to your
head. I hate such allusions. But look for a moment at your character:
you must have ordinary luxuries and pleasures, and if you were to find
yourself grinding against common necessities--imagine it! Russett
is quite manageable. He is, trust me! He is a gentleman; he has more
ability than most young men: he can do anything he sets his mind to do.
He has his great estates and fortune all in his own hands. We call him
eccentric. He is only young, with a lot of power. Add, he’s in love, and
some one distracts him. Not love, do you say?--you look it. He worships.
He has no chance given him to show himself at his best. Perhaps he is
off again now. Will you bet me he is not?’
‘I should incline to make the bet, if I betted,’ said Henrietta. ‘His
pride is in his word, and supposing he’s in love, it’s with his pride,
which never quits him.’
‘There’s firmness in a man who has pride of that kind. You must let me
take you back to Baden. I hold to having you with me to-day. You must
make an appearance there. The admiral will bring us his Miss Kirby
to-morrow, if he is bound to remain here to-night. There’s no harm in
his bachelor dinners. I suspect his twinges of gout come of the prospect
of affairs when he lands in England. Remember our bill with Madame
Clemence. There won’t be the ghost of a bank-note for me if Russett
quits the field; we shall all be stranded.’
Henrietta inquired: ‘Does it depend on my going with you to-day?’
‘Consider, that he is now fancying a thousand things. We won’t talk of
the road to Paris.’
A shot of colour swept over Henrietta.
‘I will speak to papa:--if he can let me go. He has taken to Miss
Kirby.’
‘Does she taste well?’
Henrietta debated. ‘It’s impossible to dislike her. Oh! she is wild!
She knows absolutely nothing of the world. She can do everything we
can’t--or don’t dare to try.--Men would like her. Papa’s beginning to
doat. He says she would have made a first-rate soldier. She fears blood
as little as her morning cup of milk. One of the orderlies fell rather
badly from a frightened horse close by our carriage. She was out in a
moment and had his head on her lap, calling to papa to keep the carriage
fast and block the way of the squadron, for the man’s leg was hurt. I
really thought we were lost. At these manoeuvres anything may happen, at
any instant. Papa will follow the horse-artillery. You know his vanity
to be a military quite as much as a naval commander like the Greeks and
Romans, he says. We took the bruised man into our carriage and drove him
to camp, Carinthia nursing him on the way.’
‘Carinthia! She’s well fitted with her name. What with her name and her
hair and her build and her singular style of attire, one wonders at her
coming into civilized parts. She ‘s utterly unlike Chillon.’
Henrietta reddened at the mention of one of her own thoughts in the
contrasting of the pair.
They had their points of likeness, she said.
It did not concern Livia to hear what these were. Back to Baden, with
means to procure the pleasant shocks of the galvanic battery there, was
her thought; for she had a fear of the earl’s having again departed in a
huff at Henrietta’s behaviour.
The admiral consented that his daughter should go, as soon as he heard
that Miss Kirby was to stay. He had when a young man met her famous
father; he vowed she was the Old Buccaneer young again in petticoats
and had made prize of an English man-of-war by storm; all the profit,
however, being his. This he proved with a courteous clasp of the girl
and a show of the salute on her cheek, which he presumed to take at the
night’s farewell. ‘She’s my tonic,’ he proclaimed heartily. She seemed
to Livia somewhat unstrung and toneless. The separation from her brother
in the morning might account for it. And a man of the admiral’s age
could be excused if he exalted the girl. Senility, like infancy, is fond
of plain outlines for the laying on of its paints. The girl had rugged
brows, a short nose, red hair; no young man would look at her twice. She
was utterly unlike Chillon! Kissing her hand to Henrietta from the steps
of the hotel, the girl’s face improved.
Livia’s little squire, Sir Meeson Corby, ejaculated as they were driving
down the main street, ‘Fleetwood’s tramp! There he goes. Now see,
Miss Fakenham, the kind of object Lord Fleetwood picks up and calls
friend!--calls that object friend!.. But, what? He has been to a tailor
and a barber!’
‘Stop the coachman. Run, tell Mr. Woodseer I wish him to join us,’ Livia
said, and Sir Meeson had to thank his tramp for a second indignity. He
protested, he simulated remonstrance,--he had to go, really feeling a
sickness.
The singular-looking person, whose necessities or sense of the decencies
had, unknown to himself and to the others, put them all in motion that
day, swung round listening to the challenge to arms, as the puffy little
man’s delivery of the countess’s message sounded. He was respectably
clad, he thought, in the relief of his escape from the suit of clothes
discarded, and he silently followed Sir Meeson’s trot to the carriage.
‘Should have mistaken you for a German to-day, sir,’ the latter said,
and trotted on.
‘A stout one,’ Woodseer replied, with his happy indifference to his
exterior.
His dark lady’s eyes were kindly overlooking, like the heavens. Her fair
cousin, to whom he bowed, awakened him to a perception of the spectacle
causing the slight, quick arrest of her look, in an astonishment not
unlike the hiccup in speech, while her act of courtesy proceeded. At
once he was conscious of the price he paid for respectability, and saw
the Teuton skin on the slim Cambrian, baggy at shoulders, baggy at seat,
pinched at the knees, short at the heels, showing outrageously every
spot where he ought to have been bigger or smaller. How accept or how
reject the invitation to drive in such company to Baden!
‘You’re decided enough, sir, in your play, they tell me,’ the vindictive
little baronet commented on his hesitation, and Woodseer sprang to the
proffered vacant place. But he had to speak of his fly waiting for him
at the steps of a certain hotel.
‘Best hotel in the town!’ Sir Beeson exclaimed pointedly to Henrietta,
reading her constraint with this comical object before her. It was the
admiral’s hotel they stopped at.
‘Be so good as to step down and tell the admiral he is to bring Madame
Clemence in his carriage to-morrow; and on your way, you will dismiss
Mr. Woodseer’s fly,’ Livia mildly addressed her squire. He stared: again
he had to go, muttering: ‘That nondescript’s footman!’ and his
mischance in being checked and crossed and humiliated perpetually by a
dirty-fisted vagabond impostor astounded him. He sent the flyman to the
carriage for orders.
Admiral Fakenham and Carinthia descended. Sir Meeson heard her cry
out: ‘Is it you!’ and up stood the pretentious lout in the German sack,
affecting the graces of a born gentleman fresh from Paris,--bowing,
smirking, excusing himself for something; and he jumped down to the
young lady, he talked intimately with her, with a joker’s air; he roused
the admiral to an exchange of jokes, and the countess and Miss
Fakenham more than smiled; evidently at his remarks, unobservant of
the preposterous figure he cut. Sir Meeson Corby had intimations of the
disintegration of his country if a patent tramp burlesquing in those
clothes could be permitted to amuse English ladies of high station,
quite at home with them. Among the signs of England’s downfall, this was
decidedly one. What to think of the admiral’s favourite when, having his
arm paternally on her shoulder, she gave the tramp her hand at parting,
and then blushed! All that the ladies had to say about it was, that a
spread of colour rather went to change the character of her face.
Carinthia had given Woodseer her hand and reddened under the
recollection of Chillon’s words to her as they mounted the rise of the
narrow vale, after leaving the lame gentleman to his tobacco on the
grass below the rocks. Her brother might have counselled her wisely and
was to be obeyed. Only, the great pleasure in seeing the gentleman again
inspired gratitude: he brought the scene to her; and it was alive, it
chatted and it beckoned; it neighboured her home; she had passed it on
her walk away from her home; the gentleman was her link to the mountain
paths; he was just outside an association with her father and mother.
At least, her thinking of them led to him, he to them. Now that she
had lost Chillon, no one was near to do so much. Besides, Chillon
loved Henrietta; he was her own. His heart was hers and his mind his
country’s. This gentleman loved the mountains; the sight of him breathed
mountain air. To see him next day was her anticipation: for it would be
at the skirts of hilly forest land, where pinetrees are a noble family,
different from the dusty firs of the weariful plains, which had tired
her eyes of late.
Baden was her first peep at the edges of the world since she had grown
to be a young woman. She had but a faint idea of the significance of
gambling. The brilliant lights, the band music, the sitting groups and
company of promenaders were novelties; the Ball of the ensuing night
at the Schloss would be a wonder, she acknowledged in response to
Henrietta, who was trying to understand her; and she admired her
ball-dress, she said, looking unintelligently when she heard that she
would be guilty of slaying numbers of gentlemen before the night was
over. Madame Clemence thought her chances in that respect as good as any
other young lady’s, if only she could be got to feel interested. But at
a word of the pine forest, and saying she intended to climb the hills
early with the light in the morning, a pointed eagerness flushed
Carinthia, the cold engraving became a picture of colour.
She was out with the earliest light. Yesterday’s parting between Chillon
and Henrietta had taught her to know some little about love; and if her
voice had been heeded by Chillon’s beloved, it would not have been a
parting. Her only success was to bring a flood of tears from Henrietta.
The tears at least assured her that her brother’s beautiful girl had no
love for the other one,--the young nobleman of the great wealth, who was
to be at the Ball, and had ‘gone flying,’ Admiral Fakenham shrugged to
say; for Lord Fleetwood was nowhere seen.
The much talk of him on the promenade overnight fetched his name to her
thoughts; he scarcely touched a mind that her father filled when she
was once again breathing early morning air among the stems of climbing
pines, broken alleys of the low-sweeping spruce branches and the bare
straight shafts carrying their heads high in the march upward. Her old
father was arch-priest of such forest land, always recoverable to her
there. The suggestion of mountains was enough to make her mind play, and
her old father and she were aware of one another without conversing in
speech. He pointed at things to observe; he shared her satisfied hunger
for the solitudes of the dumb and growing and wild sweet-smelling.
He would not let a sorrowful thought backward or an apprehensive idea
forward disturb the scene. A half-uprooted pine-tree stem propped
mid-fall by standing comrades, and the downy drop to ground and muted
scurry up the bark of long-brush squirrels, cocktail on the wary watch,
were noticed by him as well as by her; even the rotting timber drift,
bark and cones on the yellow pine needles, and the tortuous dwarf
chestnut pushing level out, with a strain of the head up, from a crevice
of mossed rock, among ivy and ferns; he saw what his girl saw. Power of
heart was her conjuring magician.
She climbed to the rock-slabs above. This was too easily done. The poor
bit of effort excited her frame to desire a spice of danger, her walk
was towering in the physical contempt of a mountain girl for petty
lowland obstructions. And it was just then, by the chance of things--by
the direction of events, as Dame Gossip believes it to be--while colour,
expression, and her proud stature marked her from her sex, that a
gentleman, who was no other than Lord Fleetwood, passed Carinthia,
coming out of the deeper pine forest.
Some distance on, round a bend of the path, she was tempted to adventure
by a projected forked head of a sturdy blunted and twisted little
rock-fostered forest tree pushing horizontally for growth about thirty
feet above the lower ground. She looked on it, and took a step down to
the stem soon after.
Fleetwood had turned and followed, merely for the final curious peep at
an unexpected vision; he had noticed the singular shoot of thick timber
from the rock, and the form of the goose-neck it rose to, the sprout of
branches off the bill in the shape of a crest. And now a shameful spasm
of terror seized him at sight of a girl doing what he would have dreaded
to attempt. She footed coolly, well-balanced, upright. She seated
herself.
And there let her be. She was a German girl, apparently. She had an air
of breeding, something more than breeding. German families of the nobles
give out, here and there, as the Great War showed examples of, intrepid
young women, who have the sharp lines of character to render them
independent of the graces. But, if a young woman out alone in the woods
was hardly to be counted among the well-born, she held rank above them.
Her face and bearing might really be taken to symbolize the forest life.
She was as individual a representative as the Tragic and Comic masks,
and should be got to stand between them for sign of the naturally
straight-growing untrained, a noble daughter of the woods.
Not comparable to Henrietta in feminine beauty, she was on an upper
plateau, where questions as to beauty are answered by other than the
shallow aspect of a girl. But would Henrietta eclipse her if they were
side by side? Fleetwood recalled the strange girl’s face. There was
in it a savage poignancy in serenity unexampled among women--or modern
women. One might imagine an apotheosis of a militant young princess of
Goths or Vandals, the glow of blessedness awakening her martial ardours
through the languor of the grave:--Woodseer would comprehend and hit
on the exact image to portray her in a moment, Fleetwood thought, and
longed for that fellow.
He walked hurriedly back to the stunted rock tree. The damsel had
vanished. He glanced below. She had not fallen. He longed to tell
Woodseer he had seen a sort of Carinthia sister, cousin, one of the
family. A single glimpse of her had raised him out of his grovelling
perturbations, cooled and strengthened him, more than diverting the
course of the poison Henrietta infused, and to which it disgraced him
to be so subject. He took love unmanfully; the passion struck at his
weakness; in wrath at the humiliation, if only to revenge himself for
that, he could be fiendish; he knew it, and loathed the desired fair
creature who caused and exposed to him these cracks in his nature,
whence there came a brimstone stench of the infernal pits. And he was
made for better. Of this he was right well assured. Superior to station
and to wealth, to all mundane advantages, he was the puppet of a florid
puppet girl; and he had slept at the small inn of a village hard by,
because it was intolerable to him to see the face that had been tearful
over her lover’s departure, and hear her praises of the man she trusted
to keep his word, however grievously she wounded him.
He was the prisoner of his word;--rather like the donkeys known as
married men: rather more honourable than most of them. He had to be
present at the ball at the Schloss and behold his loathed Henrietta,
suffer torture of chains to the rack, by reason of his having promised
the bitter coquette he would be there. So hellish did the misery seem to
him, that he was relieved by the prospect of lying a whole day long in
loneliness with the sunshine of the woods, occasionally conjuring up the
antidote face of the wood-sprite before he was to undergo it. But, as he
was not by nature a dreamer, only dreamed of the luxury of being one,
he soon looked back with loathing on a notion of relief to come from the
state of ruminating animal, and jumped up and shook off another of men’s
delusions--that they can, if they have the heart to suffer pain, deaden
it with any semi-poetical devices, similar to those which Rufus Abrane’s
‘fiddler fellow’ practised and was able to carry out because he had no
blood. The spite of a present entire opposition to Woodseer’s professed
views made him exult in the thought, that the mouther of sentences was
likely to be at work stultifying them and himself in the halls there
below during the day. An imp of mischief offered consolatory sport
in those halls of the Black Goddess; already he regarded his recent
subservience to the conceited and tripped peripatetic philosopher as
among the ignominies he had cast away on his road to a general contempt;
which is the position of a supreme elevation for particularly sensitive
young men.
Pleasure in the scenery had gone, and the wood-sprite was a flitted
vapour; he longed to be below there, observing Abrane and Potts and the
philosopher confounded, and the legible placidity of Countess Livia.
Nevertheless, he hung aloft, feeding where he could, impatient of the
solitudes, till night, when, according to his guess, the ladies were at
their robing.
Half the fun was over: but the tale of it, narrated in turn by Abrane
and his Chummy Potts on the promenade, was a very good half. The fiddler
had played for the countess and handed her back her empty purse, with a
bow and a pretty speech. Nothing had been seen of him since. He had
lost all his own money besides. ‘As of course he would,’ said Potts. ‘A
fellow calculating the chances catches at a knife in the air.’
‘Every franc-piece he had!’ cried Abrane. ‘And how could the jackass
expect to keep his luck! Flings off his old suit and comes back here
with a rig of German bags--you never saw such a figure!--Shoreditch
Jew’s holiday!--why, of course, the luck wouldn’t stand that.’
They confessed ruefully to having backed him a certain distance,
notwithstanding. ‘He took it so coolly, just as if paying for goods
across a counter.’
‘And he had something to bear, Braney, when you fell on him,’ said
Potts, and murmured aside: ‘He can be smartish. Hears me call Braney
Rufus, and says he, like a fellow-chin on his fiddle--“Captain Mountain,
Rufus Mus’. Not bad, for a counter.”’
Fleetwood glanced round: he could have wrung Woodseer’s hand. He saw
young Cressett instead, and hailed him: ‘Here you are, my gallant! You
shall flash your maiden sword tonight. When I was under your age by
a long count, I dealt sanctimoniousness a flick o’ the cheek, and you
shall, and let ‘em know you’re a man. Come and have your first boar-hunt
along with me. Petticoats be hanged.’
The boy showed some recollection of the lectures of his queen, but he
had not the vocables for resistance to an imperative senior at work upon
sneaking inclinations. ‘Promised Lady F.’--do you hear him?’ Fleetwood
called to the couple behind; and as gamblers must needs be parasites,
manly were the things they spoke to invigorate the youthful plunger and
second the whim of their paymaster.
At half-past eleven, the prisoner of his word entered under the Schloss
partico, having vowed to himself on the way, that he would satisfy the
formulas to gain release by a deferential bow to the great personages,
and straightway slip out into the heavenly starlight, thence down among
the jolly Parisian and Viennese Bacchanals.