CONVENTION
‘It is a dark land,’ Carinthia said, on seeing our Island’s lowered
clouds in swift motion, without a break of their folds, above the sheer
white cliffs. --She said it, we know. That poor child Carinthia Jane,
when first she beheld Old England’s shores, tossing in the packet-boat
on a wild Channel sea, did say it and think it, for it is in the family
that she did; and no wonder that she should, the day being showery from
the bed of the sun, after a frosty three days, at the close of autumn.
We used to have an eye of our own for English weather before printed
Meteorological Observations and Forecasts undertook to supplant the
shepherd and the poacher, and the pilot with his worn brown leather
telescope tucked beneath his arm. All three would have told you, that
the end of a three days’ frost in the late season of the year and the
early, is likely to draw the warm winds from the Atlantic over Cornish
Land’s End and Lizard.
Quite by chance of things, Carinthia Jane looked on the land of her
father and mother for the first time under those conditions. There can
be no harm in quoting her remark. Only--I have to say it--experience
causes apprehension, that we are again to be delayed by descriptions,
and an exposition of feelings; taken for granted,--of course, in a
serious narrative; which it really seems these moderns think designed
for a frequent arrest of the actors in the story and a searching of the
internal state of this one or that one of them: who is laid out stark
naked and probed and expounded, like as in the celebrated picture by a
great painter--and we, thirsting for events as we are, are to stop
to enjoy a lecture on Anatomy. And all the while the windows of the
lecture-room are rattling, if not the whole fabric shaking, with
exterior occurrences or impatience for them to come to pass. Every
explanation is sure to be offered by the course events may take; so do,
in mercy, I say, let us bide for them.
She thought our Island all the darker because Henrietta had induced her
to talk on the boat of her mountain home and her last morning there for
the walk away with Chillon John. Soon it was to appear supernaturally
bright, a very magician’s cave for brilliancy.
Now, this had happened--and comment on it to yourselves, remembering
always, that Chillon John was a lover, and a lover has his excuses,
though they will not obviate the penalties he may incur; and dreadful
they were. After reading Henrietta’s letter to him, he rode out of his
Canterbury quarters across the country to the borders of Sussex, where
his uncle Lord Levellier lived, on the ridge of ironstone, near the wild
land of a forest, Croridge the name of the place. Now, Chillon John knew
his uncle was miserly, and dreaded the prospect of having to support a
niece in the wretched establishment at Lekkatts, or, as it was popularly
called, Leancats; you can understand why. But he managed to assure
himself he must in duty consult with the senior and chief member of his
family on a subject of such importance as the proposal of marriage to
his lordship’s niece.
The consultation was short: ‘You will leave it to me,’ his uncle said:
and we hear of business affairs between them, involving payment of
moneys due to the young man; and how, whenever he touched on them, his
uncle immediately fell back on the honour of the family and Carinthia
Jane’s reputation, her good name to be vindicated, and especially that
there must be no delays, together with as close a reckoning as he
could make of the value of Lord Fleetwood’s estates in Kent and in
Staffordshire and South Wales, and his house property in London.
‘He will have means to support her,’ said the old lord, shrugging as if
at his own incapacity for that burden.
The two then went to the workshops beside a large pond, where there was
an island bordered with birch trees and workmen’s cottages near the main
building; and that was an arsenal containing every kind of sword and
lance and musket, rifle and fowling-piece and pistol, and more gunpowder
than was, I believe, allowed by law. For they were engaged in inventing
a new powder for howitzer shells, of tremendous explosive power.
Nothing further did either of them say, concerning the marriage. Nor did
Carinthia Jane hear any mention of Lord Fleetwood from her brother on
the landing-place at Dover. She was taken to Admiral Baldwin Fakenham’s
house in Hampshire; and there she remained, the delight of his life,
during two months, patiently expecting and rebuking the unmaidenliness
of her expectations, as honest young women in her position used to
do. So did they sometimes wait for years; they have waited until they
withered into their graves, like the vapours of a brief winter’s day: a
moving picture of a sex restrained by modesty in those purer times from
the taking of one step forward unless inquired for.
Two months she waited in our ‘dark land.’ January arrived, and her
brother. Henrietta communicated the news:
‘My Janey, you are asked by Lord Fleetwood whether it is your wish that
he should marry you.’
Now, usually a well-born young woman’s answer, if a willing one, is
an example of weak translation. Here it was the heart’s native tongue,
without any roundabout, simple but direct.
‘Oh, I will, I am ready, tell him.’
Remember, she was not speaking publicly.
Henrietta knew the man enough to be glad he did not hear. She herself
would have felt a little shock on his behalf: only, that answer suited
the scheme of the pair of lovers.
How far those two were innocent in not delivering the whole of Lord
Fleetwood’s message to Carinthia Jane through Lord Levellier, we are
unable to learn. We may suspect the miserly nobleman of curtailing it
for his purposes; and such is my idea. But the answer would have been
the same, I am sure.
In consequence and straight away, Chillon John betakes him to Admiral
Baldwin and informs him of Lord Fleetwood’s proposal on the night
at Baden, and renewal of it through the mouth of Lord Levellier, not
communicating, however (he may really not have known), the story of how
it had been wrung from the earl by a surprise movement on the part of
the one-armed old lord, who burst out on him in the street from the
ambush of a Club-window, where he had been stationed every day for a
fortnight, indefatigably to watch for the passing of the earl, as there
seemed no other way to find him. They say, indeed, there was a scene,
judging by the result, and it would have been an excellent scene for
the stage; though the two noblemen were to all appearance politely
exchanging their remarks. But the audience hearing what passes,
appreciates the courteous restraint of an attitude so contrasting with
their tempers. Behind the ostentation of civility, their words were
daggers.
For it chanced, that the young earl, after a period of refuge at his
Welsh castle, supposing, as he well might, that his latest mad freak of
the proposal of his hand and title to the strange girl in a quadrille at
a foreign castle had been forgotten by her, and the risks of annoyance
on the subject had quite blown over, returned to town, happy in having
done the penance for his impulsiveness, and got clean again--that is
to say, struck off his fetters and escaped from importunities--the very
morning of the day when Lord Levellier sprang upon him! It shows the old
campaigner’s shrewdness in guessing where his prey would come, and not
putting him on his guard by a call at his house. Out of the window he
looked for all the hours of light during an entire fortnight. ‘In the
service of my sister’s child,’ he said. ‘To save him from the cost of
maintaining her,’ say his enemies. At any rate he did it.
He was likely to have done the worse which I suspect.
Now, the imparting of the wonderful news to Admiral Baldwin Fakenham
was, we read, the whiff of a tropical squall to lay him on his beam
ends. He could not but doubt; and his talk was like the sails of a big
ship rattling to the first puff of wind. He had to believe; and then, we
read, he was for hours like a vessel rolling in the trough of the sea.
Of course he was a disappointed father. Naturally his glance at the
loss to Henrietta of the greatest prize of the matrimonial market of all
Europe and America was vexing and saddening. Then he woke up to think
of the fortunes of his ‘other girl,’ as he named her, and cried: ‘Crinny
catches him!’
He cried it in glee and rubbed his hands.
So thereupon, standing before him, Chillon John, from whom he had the
news, bent to him slightly, as his elegant manner was, and lengthened
the admiral’s chaps with another proposal; easy, deliberate, precise,
quite the respectful bandit, if you please, determined on having his
daughter by all means, only much preferring the legal, formal, and
friendly. Upon that, in the moment of indecision, Henrietta enters,
followed by Admiral Baldwin’s heroine, his Crinny, whom he embraced
and kissed, congratulated and kissed again. One sees the contrivance to
soften him.
So it was done, down in that Hampshire household on the heights near the
downs, whence you might behold, off a terra firma resembling a roll of
billows, England’s big battle-ships in line fronting the island; when
they were a spectacle of beauty as well as power: which now they are no
more, but will have to be, if they are both to float and to fight. For
I have, had quoted to me by a great admirer of the Old Buccaneer, one of
the dark sayings in his MAXIMS FOR MEN, where Captain John Peter Kirby
commends his fellow-men to dissatisfaction with themselves if they have
not put an end to their enemy handsomely.. And he advises the copying of
Nature in this; whose elements have always, he says, a pretty, besides a
thorough, style of doing it, when they get the better of us; and the one
by reason of the other. He instances the horse, the yacht, and chiefly
the sword, for proof, that the handsomest is the most effective. And
he prints large: ‘UGLY IS ONLY HALF WAY TO A THING.’ To an invention,
I suppose he intends to say. But looking on our huge foundering
sea-monsters and the disappearance of the unwieldy in Nature, and the
countenances of criminals, who are, he bids us observe, always in the
long run beaten, I seem to see a meaning our country might meditate on.
So, as I said, it was done; for Admiral Baldwin could refuse his Crinny
nothing; as little as he would deny anything to himself, the heartiest
of kindly hosts, fathers, friends. Carinthia Jane’s grand good fortune
covered that pit, the question of money, somehow, and was, we may
conceive, a champagne wine in their reasoning faculties. The admiral
was in debt, Henrietta had no heritage, Chillon John was the heir of a
miserly uncle owing him sums and evading every application for them, yet
they behaved as people who had the cup of golden wishes. Perhaps it was
because Henrietta and her lover were so handsome a match as to make it
seem to them and others they must marry; and as to character, her
father could trust her to the man of her choice more readily than to
the wealthy young nobleman; of whose discreetness he had not the highest
opinion. He reconciled this view with his warm feeling for the Countess
of Fleetwood to be, by saying: ‘Crinny will tame him!’ His faith was in
her dauntless bold spirit, not thinking of the animal she was to tame.
Countess Livia, after receiving Henrietta’s letter of information,
descended on them and thought them each and all a crazed set. Love, as
a motive of action for a woman, she considered the female’s lunacy
and suicide. Men are born subject to it, happily, and thus the balance
between the lordly half of creation and the frail is rectified. We women
dress, and smile, sigh, if you like, to excite the malady. But if we are
the fools to share it, we lose our chance; instead of the queens, we
are the slaves, and instead of a life of pleasure, we pass from fever
to fever at a tyrant’s caprice: he does rightly in despising us. Ay, and
many a worthy woman thinks the same. Educated in dependency as they are,
they come to the idea of love to snatch at it for their weapon of the
man’s weakness. For which my lord calls them heartless, and poets are
angry with them, rightly or wrongly.
It must, I fear, be admitted for a truth, that sorrow is the portion
of young women who give the full measure of love to the engagement,
marrying for love. At least, Countess Livia could declare subsequently
she had foretold it and warned her cousin. Not another reflection do you
hear from me, if I must pay forfeit of my privilege to hurry you on past
descriptions of places and anatomy of character and impertinent talk
about philosophy in a story. When we are startled and offended by the
insinuated tracing of principal incidents to a thread-bare spot in the
nether garments of a man of no significance, I lose patience.
Henrietta’s case was a secondary affair. What with her passion--it was
nothing less--and her lover’s cunning arts, and her father’s consent
given, and in truth the look of the two together, the dissuasion of them
from union was as likely to keep them apart as an exhortation addressed
to magnet and needle. Countess Livia attacked Carinthia Jane and the
admiral backing her. But the admiral, having given his consent to his
daughter’s marriage, in consequence of the earl’s pledged word to ‘his
other girl,’ had become a zealot for this marriage and there was only
not a grand altercation on the subject because Livia shunned annoyances.
Alone with Carinthia Jane, as she reported to Henrietta, she spoke to a
block, that shook a head and wore a thin smile and nursed its own idea
of the better knowledge of Edward Russett, Earl of Fleetwood, gained in
the run of a silly quadrille at a ball:
What is a young man’s word to his partner in a quadrille?
Livia put the question, she put it twice rather sternly, and the girl
came out with: ‘Oh, he meant it!’
The nature, the pride, the shifty and furious moods of Lord Fleetwood
were painted frightful to her.
She had conceived her own image of him.
Whether to set her down as an enamoured idiot or a creature not a
whit less artful than her brother, was Countess Livia’s debate. Her
inclination was to misdoubt the daughter of the Old Buccaneer: she might
be simple, at her age, and she certainly was ignorant; but she clung to
her prize. Still the promise was extracted from her, that she would not
worry the earl to fulfil the word she supposed him to mean in its full
meaning.
The promise was unreluctantly yielded. No, she would not write. Admiral
Fakenham, too, engaged to leave the matter to a man of honour.
Meanwhile, Chillon John had taken a journey to Lekkatts; following
which, his uncle went to London. Lord Fleetwood heard that Miss Kirby
kept him bound. He was again the fated prisoner of his word.
And following that, not so very long, there was the announcement of the
marriage of Chillon John Kirby Levellier, Lieutenant in the King’s Own
Hussars, and Henrietta, daughter of Admiral Baldwin Fakenham. A
county newspaper paragraph was quoted for its eulogy of the Beauty of
Hampshire--not too strong, those acquainted with her thought. Interest
at Court obtained an advancement for the bridegroom: he was gazetted
Captain during his honeymoon, and his prospects under his uncle’s name
were considered fair, though certain people said at the time, it was
likely to be all he would get while old Lord Levellier of Leancats
remained in the flesh.
Now, as it is good for those to tell who intend preserving their taste
for romance and hate anatomical lectures, we never can come to the exact
motives of any extraordinary piece of conduct on the part of man or
woman. Girls are to read; and the study of a boy starts from the monkey.
But no literary surgeon or chemist shall explain positively the cause of
the behaviour of men and women in their relations together; and speaking
to rescue my story, I say we must with due submission accept the facts.
We are not a bit the worse for wondering at them. So it happened that
Lord Fleetwood’s reply to Lord Levellier’s hammer--hammer by post
and messenger at his door, one may call it, on the subject of the
celebration of the marriage of the young Croesus and Carinthia Jane,
in which there was demand for the fixing of a date forthwith, was
despatched on the day when London had tidings of Henrietta Pakenham’s
wedding.
The letter, lost for many years, turned up in the hands of a Kentish
auctioneer, selling it on behalf of a farm-serving man, who had it from
Lord Levellier’s cook and housemaid, among the things she brought him as
her wifely portion after her master’s death, and this she had not found
saleable in her husband’s village at her price, but she had got the
habit of sticking to the scraps, being proud of hearing it said that she
had skinned Leancats to some profit: and her expectation proved correct
after her own demise, for her husband putting it up at the auction; our
relative on the mother’s side, Dr. Glossop, interested in the documents
and particulars of the story as he was, had it knocked down to him, in
contest with an agent of a London gentleman, going as high as two pounds
ten shillings, for the sum of two pounds and fifteen shillings. Count
the amount that makes for each word of a letter a marvel of brevity,
considering the purport! But Dr. Glossop was right in saying he had it
cheap. The value of that letter may now be multiplied by ten: nor for
that sum would he part with it.
Thus it ran, I need not refer to it in Bundle No. 3:
‘MY LORD: I drive to your church-door on the fourteenth of the month
at ten A.M., to keep my appointment with Miss C. J. Kirby, if I do
not blunder the initials.
‘Your lordship’s obedient servant,
‘FLEETWOOD.’
That letter will ever be a treasured family possession with us.
That letter was dated from Lord Fleetwood’s Kentish mansion, Esslemont,
the tenth of the month. He must have quitted London for Esslemont,
for change of scene, for air, the moment after the news of Henrietta’s
marriage. Carinthia Jane received the summons without transmission
of the letter from her uncle on the morning of the twelfth. It was a
peremptory summons.
Unfortunately, Admiral Fakenham, a real knight and chevalier of those
past times, would not let her mount the downs to have her farewell view
of the big ships unaccompanied by him; and partly and largely in pure
chivalry, no doubt; but her young idea of England’s grandeur, as
shown in her great vessels of war, thrilled him, too, and restored his
youthful enthusiasm for his noble profession or made it effervesce.
However it was, he rode beside her and rejoiced to hear the young girl’s
talk of her father as a captain of one of England’s thunderers, and of
the cruelty of that Admiralty to him: at which Admiral Baldwin laughed,
but had not the heart to disagree with her, for he could belabour the
Admiralty in season, cause or no cause. Altogether he much enjoyed the
ride, notwithstanding intimations of the approach of ‘his visitor,’ as
he called his attacks of gout.
Riding home, however, the couple passed through a heavy rainfall, and
the next day, when he was to drive with the bride to Lekkatts, gout, the
fiercest he had ever known, chained him fast to his bed. Such are the
petty accidents affecting circumstances. They are the instruments of
Destiny.
There he lay, protesting that the ceremony could not possibly be for the
fourteenth, because Countess Livia had, he now remembered, written of
her engagement to meet Russett on the night of that day at a ball at
Mrs. Cowper Quillett’s place, Canleys, lying south of the Surrey hills:
a house famed for its gatherings of beautiful women; whither Lord
Fleetwood would be sure to engage to go, the admiral now said; and it
racked him like gout in his mind, and perhaps troubled his conscience
about handing the girl to such a young man. But he was lying on his
back, the posture for memory to play the fiend with us, as we read in
the BOOK of MAXIMS of the Old Buccaneer. Admiral Baldwin wished heartily
to be present at his Crinny’s wedding ‘to see her launched,’ if
wedding it was to be, and he vowed the date of the fourteenth, in Lord
Levellier’s announcement of it, must be an error and might be a month
in advance, and ought to be. But it was sheer talking and raving for
a solace to his disappointment or his anxiety. He had to let Carinthia
Jane depart under the charge of his housekeeper, Mrs. Carthew, a staid
excellent lady, poorly gifted with observation.
Her report of the performance of the ceremony at Croridge village
church, a half mile from Lekkatts, was highly reassuring to the anxious
old admiral still lying on his back with memory and gout at their
fiend’s play, and livid forecasts hovering. He had recollected that
there had been no allusion in Lord Levellier’s message to settlements or
any lawyer’s preliminaries, and he raged at himself for having to own it
would have been the first of questions on behalf of his daughter.
‘All passed off correctly,’ Mrs. Carthew said. ‘The responses of the
bride and bridegroom were particularly articulate.’
She was reserved upon the question of the hospitality of Lekkatts. The
place had entertained her during her necessitated residence there, and
honour forbade her to smile concordantly at the rosy admiral’s
mention of Leancats. She took occasion, however, to praise the Earl of
Fleetwood’s eminently provident considerateness for his bride, inasmuch
as he had packed a hamper in his vehicle, which was a four-in-hand,
driven by himself.
Admiral Baldwin inquired: ‘Bride inside?’
He was informed: ‘The Countess of Fleetwood sat on the box on the left
of my lord.’
She had made no moan about the absence of bridesmaids.
‘She appeared too profoundly happy to meditate an instant upon
deficiencies.’
‘How did the bridegroom behave?’
‘Lord Fleetwood was very methodical. He is not, or was not, voluntarily
a talker.’
‘Blue coat, brass buttons, hot-house flower? old style or new?’
‘His lordship wore a rather low beaver and a buttoned white overcoat,
not out of harmony with the bride’s plain travelling-dress.’
‘Ah! he’s a good whip, men say. Keeps first-rate stables, hacks, and
bloods. Esslemont hard by will be the place for their honeymoon, I
guess. And he’s a lucky dog, if he knows his luck.’
So said Admiral Baldwin. He was proceeding to say more, for he had a
prodigious opinion of the young countess and the benefit of her
marriage to the British race. As it concerned a healthy constitution and
motherhood, Mrs. Carthew coughed and retired. Nor do I reprove either of
them. The speculation and the decorum are equally commendable.
Masculine ideas are one thing; but let feminine ever be feminine, or our
civilization perishes.
At Croridge village church, then, one of the smallest churches in the
kingdom, the ceremony was performed and duly witnessed, names written in
the vestry book, the clergyman’s fee, the clerk, and the pew-woman, paid
by the bridegroom. And thus we see how a pair of lovers, blind with the
one object of lovers in view; and a miserly uncle, all on edge to save
himself the expense of supporting his niece; and an idolatrous old
admiral, on his back with gout; conduced in turn and together to the
marriage gradually exciting the world’s wonder, till it eclipsed the
story of the Old Buccaneer and Countess Fanny, which it caused to be
discussed afresh.
Mrs. Carthew remembered Carinthia Jane’s last maiden remark and her
first bridal utterance. On the way, walking to the church of Croridge
from Lekkatts, the girl said: ‘Going on my feet, I feel I continue the
mountain walk with my brother when we left our home.’ And after leaving
the church, about to mount the coach, she turned to Mrs. Carthew,
saying, as she embraced her:
‘A happy bride’s kiss should bring some good fortune.’ And looking down
from her place on the top of the coach:
‘Adieu, dear Mrs. Carthew. A day of glory it is to-day.’ She must
actually have had it in her sight as a day of glory: and it was a day of
the clouds off our rainy quarter, similar in every way to the day of her
stepping on English soil and saying: ‘It is a dark land.’ For the heart
is truly declared to be our colourist. A day having the gale in its
breast, sweeping the whole country and bending the trees for the twigs
to hiss like spray of the billows around our island, was a day of
golden splendour to the young bride of the Earl of Fleetwood, though he
scarcely addressed one syllable to her, and they sat side by side all
but dumb, he like a coachman driving an unknown lady fare, on a morning
after a night when his wife’s tongue may have soured him for the sex.