THE MORAL EFFECTS THAT MAY COME OF A BORROWED SHIRT
Money of his father’s enabled Gower to take the coach; and studies in
fog, from the specked brown to the woolly white, and the dripping torn,
were proposed to the traveller, whose preference of Nature’s face did
not arrest his observation of her domino and petticoats; across which
blank sheets he curiously read backward, that he journeyed by the aid of
his father’s hard-earned, ungrudged piece of gold. Without it, he would
have been useless in this case of need. The philosopher could starve
with equanimity, and be the stronger. But one had, it seemed here
clearly, to put on harness and trudge along a line, if the unhappy
were to have one’s help. Gradual experiences of his business among his
fellows were teaching an exercised mind to learn in regions where minds
unexercised were doctorial giants beside it.
The study of gout was offered at Chinningfold. Admiral Fakenham’s butler
refused at first to take a name to his master. Gower persisted, stating
the business of his mission; and in spite of the very suspicious glib
good English spoken by a man wearing such a hat and suit, the butler was
induced to consult Mrs. Carthew.
She sprang up alarmed. After having seen the young lady happily married
and off with her lordly young husband, the arrival of a messenger from
the bride gave a stir the wrong way to her flowing recollections; the
scenes and incidents she had smothered under her love of the comfortable
stood forth appallingly. The messenger, the butler said, was no
gentleman. She inspected Gower and heard him speak. An anomaly had come
to the house; for he had the language of a gentleman, the appearance of
a nondescript; he looked indifferent, he spoke sympathetically; and he
was frank as soon as the butler was out of hearing. In return for the
compliment, she invited him to her sitting-room. The story of the young
countess, whom she had seen driven away by her husband from the church
in a coach and four, as being now destitute, praying to see her friends,
in the Whitechapel of London--the noted haunt of thieves and outcasts,
bankrupts and the abandoned; set her asking for the first time, who
was the man with dreadful countenance inside the coach? A previously
disregarded horror of a man. She went trembling to the admiral, though
his health was delicate, his temper excitable. It was, she considered,
an occasion for braving the doctor’s interdict.
Gower was presently summoned to the chamber where Admiral Fakenham
reclined on cushions in an edifice of an arm-chair. He told a plain
tale. Its effect was to straighten the admiral’s back, and enlarge in
grey glass a pair of sea-blue eyes. And, ‘What’s that? Whitechapel?’
the admiral exclaimed,--at high pitch, far above his understanding.
The particulars were repeated, whereupon the sick-room shook with,
‘Greengrocer?’ He stunned himself with another of the monstrous points
in his pet girl’s honeymoon: ‘A prizefight?’
To refresh a saving incredulity, he took a closer view of the messenger.
Gower’s habiliments were those of the ‘queer fish,’ the admiral saw.
But the meeting at Carlsruhe was recalled to him, and there was a worthy
effort to remember it. ‘Prize-fight!--Greengrocer! Whitechapel!’ he
rang the changes rather more moderately; till, swelling and purpling, he
cried: ‘Where’s the husband?’
That was the emissary’s question likewise.
‘If I could have found him, sir, I should not have troubled you.’
‘Disappeared? Plays the man of his word, then plays the madman!
Prize-fight the first day of her honeymoon? Good Lord! Leaves her at the
inn?’
‘She was left.’
‘When was she left?’
‘As soon as the fight was over--as far as I understand.’
The admiral showered briny masculine comments on that bridegroom.
‘Her brother’s travelling somewhere in the Pyrenees--married my
daughter. She has an uncle, a hermit.’ He became pale. ‘I must do it.
The rascal insults us all. Flings her off the day he married her! It ‘s
a slap in the face to all of us. You are acquainted with the lady, sir.
Would you call her a red-haired girl?’
‘Red-gold of the ballads; chestnut-brown, with threads of fire.’
‘She has the eyes for a man to swear by. I feel the loss of her, I can
tell you. She was wine and no penalty to me. Is she much broken under
it?--if I ‘m to credit... I suppose I must. It floors me.’
Admiral Baldwin’s frosty stare returned on him. Gower caught an image of
it, as comparable, without much straining, to an Arctic region smitten
by the beams.
‘Nothing breaks her courage,’ he said.
‘To be sure, my poor dear! Who could have guessed when she left my house
she was on her way to a prizefight and a greengrocer’s in Whitechapel.
But the dog’s not mad, though his bite ‘s bad; he ‘s an eccentric
mongrel. He wants the whip; ought to have had it regularly from his
first breeching. He shall whistle for her when he repents; and he will,
mark me. This gout here will be having a snap at the vitals if I don’t
start to-night. Oblige me, half a minute.’
The admiral stretched his hand for an arm to give support, stood,
and dropped into the chair, signifying a fit of giddiness in the word
‘Head.’
Before the stupor had passed, Mrs. Carthew entered, anxious lest the
admittance of a messenger of evil to her invalid should have been an
error of judgement. The butler had argued it with her. She belonged
to the list of persons appointed to cut life’s thread when it strains,
their general kindness being so liable to misdirection.
Gower left the room and went into the garden. He had never seen a death;
and the admiral’s peculiar pallor intimated events proper to days of
cold mist and a dripping stillness. How we go, was the question among
his problems:--if we are to go! his youthful frame insistingly added.
The fog down a wet laurel-walk contracted his mind with the chilling of
his blood, and he felt that he would have to see the thing if he was to
believe in it. Of course he believed, but life throbbed rebelliously,
and a picture of a desk near a lively fire-grate, books and pen and
paper, and a piece of writing to be approved of by the Hesper of ladies,
held ground with a pathetic heroism against the inevitable. He got
his wits to the front by walking faster; and then thought of the young
countess and the friend she might be about to lose. She could number her
friends on her fingers. Admiral Fakenham’s exclamations of the name of
the place where she now was, conveyed an inky idea of the fall she had
undergone. Counting her absent brother, with himself, his father, and
the two Whitechapel girls, it certainly was an unexampled fall, to
say of her, that they and those two girls had become by the twist of
circumstances the most serviceable of her friends.
Her husband was the unriddled riddle we have in the wealthy young
lord,--burning to possess, and making, tatters of all he grasped, the
moment it was his own. Glints of the devilish had shot from him at the
gamingtables,--fine haunts for the study of our lower man. He could be
magnificent in generosity; he had little humaneness. He coveted beauty
in women hungrily, and seemed to be born hostile to them; or so Gower
judged by the light of the later evidence on unconsidered antecedent
observations of him. Why marry her to cast her off instantly? The crude
philosopher asked it as helplessly as the admiral. And, further, what
did the girl Madge mean by the drop of her voice to a hum of enforced
endurance under injury, like the furnace behind an iron door? Older men
might have understood, as he was aware; he might have guessed, only he
had the habit of scattering meditation upon the game of hawk and fowl.
Dame Gossip boils. Her one idea of animation is to have her dramatis
persona in violent motion, always the biggest foremost; and, indeed,
that is the way to make them credible, for the wind they raise and the
succession of collisions. The fault of the method is, that they do not
instruct; so the breath is out of them before they are put aside; for
the uninstructive are the humanly deficient: they remain with us like
the tolerated old aristocracy, which may not govern, and is but socially
seductive. The deuteragonist or secondary person can at times tell
us more of them than circumstances at furious heat will help them to
reveal; and the Dame will have him only as an index-post. Hence her
endless ejaculations over the mystery of Life, the inscrutability of
character,--in a plain world, in the midst of such readable people! To
preserve Romance (we exchange a sky for a ceiling if we let it go), we
must be inside the heads of our people as well as the hearts, more than
shaking the kaleidoscope of hurried spectacles, in days of a growing
activity of the head.
Gower Woodseer could not know that he was drawn on to fortune and the
sight of his Hesper by Admiral Fakenham’s order that the visitor was to
stay at his house until he should be able to quit his bed, and journey
with him to London, doctor or no doctor. The doctor would not hear of
it. The admiral threatened it every night for the morning, every morning
for the night; and Gower had to submit to postponements balefully
affecting his linen. Remonstrance was not to be thought of; for at a
mere show of reluctance the courtly admiral flushed, frowned, and beat
the bed where he lay, a gouty volcano. Gower’s one shirt was passing
through the various complexions, and had approached the Nubian on
its way to negro. His natural candour checked the downward course. He
mentioned to Mrs. Carthew, with incidental gravity, on a morning at
breakfast, that this article of his attire ‘was beginning to resemble
London snow.’ She was amused; she promised him a change more resembling
country snow. ‘It will save me from buttoning so high up,’ he said, as
he thanked her. She then remembered the daily increase of stiffness in
his figure: and a reflection upon his patient waiting, and simpleness,
and lexicographer speech to expose his minor needs, touched her unused
sense of humour on the side where it is tender in women, from being
motherly.
In consequence, she spoke of him with a pleading warmth to the Countess
Livia, who had come down to see the admiral ‘concerning an absurd but
annoying rumour running over London.’ Gower was out for a walk. He knew
of the affair, Mrs. Carthew said, for an introduction to her excuses of
his clothing.
‘But I know the man,’ said Livia. ‘Lord Fleetwood picked him up
somewhere, and brought him to us. Clever: Why, is he here?’
‘He is here, sent to the admiral, as I understand, my lady.’
‘Sent by whom?’
Having but a weak vocabulary to defend a delicate position, Mrs. Carthew
stuttered into evasions, after the way of ill-armed persons; and naming
herself a stranger to the circumstances, she feebly suggested that the
admiral ought not to be disturbed before the doctor’s next visit; Mr.
Woodseer had been allowed to sit by his bed yesterday only for ten
minutes, to divert him with his talk. She protected in this wretched
manner the poor gentleman she sacrificed and emitted such a smell of
secresy, that Livia wrote three words on her card, for it to be taken
to Admiral Baldwin at once. Mrs. Carthew supplicated faintly; she was
unheeded.
The Countess of Fleetwood mounted the stairs--to descend them with the
knowledge of her being the Dowager Countess of Fleetwood! Henrietta had
spoken of the Countess of Fleetwood’s hatred of the title of Dowager.
But when Lady Fleetwood had the fact from the admiral, would she forbear
to excite him? If she repudiated it, she would provoke him to fire ‘one
of his broadsides,’--as they said in the family, to assert its and that
might exhaust him; and there was peril in that. And who was guilty? Mrs.
Carthew confessed her guilt, asking how it could have been avoided. She
made appeal to Gower on his return, transfixing him.
Not only is he no philosopher who has an idol, he has to learn that he
cannot think rationally; his due sense of weight and measure is lost,
the choice of his thoughts as well. He was in the house with his
devoutly, simply worshipped, pearl of women, and his whole mind fell
to work without ado upon the extravagant height of the admiral’s
shirt-collar cutting his ears. The very beating of his heart was
perplexed to know whether it was for rapture or annoyance. As a result
he was but histrionically master of himself when the Countess Livia or
the nimbus of the lady appeared in the room.
She received his bow; she directed Mrs. Carthew to have the doctor
summoned immediately. The remorseful woman flew.
‘Admiral Fakenham is very ill, Mr. Woodseer, he has had distracting
news. Oh, no, the messenger is not blamed. You are Lord Fleetwood’s
friend and will not allow him to be prejudged. He will be in town
shortly. I know him well, you know him; and could you hear him accused
of cruelty--and to a woman? He is the soul of chivalry. So, in his
way, is the admiral. If he were only more patient! Let us wait for Lord
Fleetwood’s version. I am certain it will satisfy me. The admiral
wishes you to step up to him. Be very quiet; you will be; consent to
everything. I was unaware of his condition: the things I heard were
incredible. I hope the doctor will not delay. Now go. Beg to retire
soon.’
Livia spoke under her breath; she had fears.
Admiral Baldwin lay in his bed, submitting to a nurse-woman-sign of
extreme exhaustion. He plucked strength from the sight of Gower and
bundled the woman out of the room, muttering: ‘Kill myself? Not half
so quick as they’d do it. I can’t rest for that Whitechapel of yours.
Please fetch pen and paper: it’s a letter.’
The letter began, ‘Dear Lady Arpington.’
The dictation of it came in starts. Atone moment it seemed as if life’s
ending shook the curtains on our stage and were about to lift. An old
friend in the reader of the letter would need no excuse for its jerky
brevity. It said that his pet girl, Miss Kirby, was married to the Earl
of Fleetwood in the first week of last month, and was now to be found at
a shop No. 45 Longways, Whitechapel; that the writer was ill, unable
to stir; that he would be in London within eight-and-forty hours at
furthest. He begged Lady Arpington to send down to the place and have
the young countess fetched to her, and keep her until he came.
Admiral Baldwin sat up to sign the letter.
‘Yes, and write “miracles happen when the devil’s abroad”--done it!’
he said, sinking back. ‘Now seal, you’ll find wax--the ring at my
watch-chain.’
He sighed, as it were the sound of his very last; he lay like a sleeper
twitched by a dream. There had been a scene with Livia. The dictating of
the letter took his remainder of strength out of him.
Gower called in the nurse, and went downstairs. He wanted the address of
Lady Arpington’s town house.
‘You have a letter for her?’ said Livia, and held her hand for it in a
way not to be withstood.
‘There’s no superscription,’ he remarked.
‘I will see to that, Mr. Woodseer.’
‘I fancy I am bound, Lady Fleetwood.’
‘By no means.’ She touched his arm. ‘You are Lord Fleetwood’s friend.’
A slight convulsion of the frame struck the admiral’s shirt-collar at
his ears; it virtually prostrated him under foot of a lady so benign
in overlooking the spectacle he presented. Still, he considered; he had
wits alive enough, just to perceive a duty.
‘The letter was entrusted to me, Lady Fleetwood.’
‘You are afraid to entrust it to the post?’
‘I was thinking of delivering it myself in town.’
‘You will entrust it to me.’
‘Anything on earth of my own.’
‘The treasure would be valued. This you confide to my care.’
‘It is important.’
‘No.’
‘Indeed it is.’
‘Say that it is, then. It is quite safe with me. It may be important
that it should not be delivered. Are you not Lord Fleetwood’s friend?
Lady Arpington is not so very, very prominent in the list with you and
me. Besides, I don’t think she has come to town yet. She generally sees
out the end of the hunting season. Leave the letter to me: it shall go.
You, with your keen observation missing nothing, have seen that my uncle
has not his whole judgement at present. There are two sides to a case.
Lord Fleetwood’s friend will know that it would be unfair to offer him
up to his enemies while he is absent. Things going favourably here, I
drive back to town to-morrow, and I hope you will accept a seat in my
carriage.’
He delivered his courtliest; he was riding on cloud.
They talked of Baden. His honourable surrender of her defeated purse was
a subject for gentle humour with her, venturesome compliment with him.
He spoke well; and though his hands were clean of Sir Meeson Corby’s
reproach of them, the caricature of presentable men blushed absurdly and
seemed uneasy in his monstrous collar. The touching of him again would
not be required to set him pacing to her steps. His hang of the head
testified to the unerring stamp of a likeness Captain Abrane could affix
with a stroke: he looked the fiddler over his bow, playing wonderfully
to conceal the crack of a string. The merit of being one of her army of
admirers was accorded to him. The letter to Lady Arpington was retained.
Gower deferred the further mention of the letter until a visit to the
admiral’s chamber should furnish an excuse; and he had to wait for
it. Admiral Baldwin’s condition was becoming ominous. He sent messages
downstairs by the doctor, forbidding his guest’s departure until they
two could make the journey together next day. The tortured and
blissful young man, stripped of his borrowed philosopher’s cloak, hung
conscience-ridden in this delicious bower, which was perceptibly an
antechamber of the vaults, offering him the study he thirsted for,
shrank from, and mixed with his cup of amorous worship.