Pushing through a swarm into the cot, Fleetwood saw Carinthia on a knee
beside a girl’s lap, where the stripped child lay. Its mother held a
basin for the dabbing at raw red spots.
A sting of pain touched the memory of its fright, and brought further
screams, then the sobs. Carinthia hummed a Styrian cradle-song as the
wailing lulled.
She glanced up; she said to the earl: ‘The bite was deep; it was in the
blood. We may have time. Get me an interpreter. I must ask the mother. I
know not many words.’
‘What now?’ said he, at the looming of new vexations.
‘We have no choice. Has a man gone? Dr. Griffiths would hurry fast.
An hour may be too late. The poison travels: Father advised it:--Fifty
years for one brave minute! This child should be helped to live.’
‘We ‘ll do our best. Why an interpreter?’
‘A poker in the fire. The interpreter--whether the mother will bear to
have it done.’
‘Burn, do you mean?’
‘It should be burnt.’
‘Not by you?’
‘Quick! Quick!’
‘But will you--could you? No, I say!’
‘If there is no one else.’
‘You forget your own child.’
‘He is near the end of his mother.’
‘The doctor will soon arrive.’
‘The poison travels. It cannot be overtaken unless we start nearly
equal, father said.’
‘Work like that wants an experienced hand.’
‘A steady one. I would not quake--not tremble.’
‘I cannot permit it.’
‘Mr. Wythan would know!--he would know!
‘Do you hear, Lady Fleetwood--the dog may not be mad!’
‘Signs! He ran heavy, he foamed.’
‘Foam ‘s no sign.’
‘Go; order to me a speaker of English and Welsh.’
The earl spun round, sensible of the novelty of his being commanded, and
submitting; but no sooner had he turned than he fell into her view of
the urgency, and he went, much like the boy we see at school, with a
strong hand on his collar running him in.
Madge entered, and said: ‘Mr. Woodseer has seen baby and Martha and the
donkey all safe.’
‘He is kind,’ said Carinthia. ‘Do we right to bathe the wound? It seems
right to wash it. Little things that seem right may be exactly wrong
after all, when we are ignorant. I know burning the wound is right.’
Madge asked: ‘But, my lady, who is to do it?’
‘You would do it, dear, if I shrank,’ her mistress replied.
‘Oh, my lady, I don’t know, I can’t say. Burning a child! And there’s
our baby.’
‘He has had me nearly his time.’
‘Oh, my dear lady! Would the mother consent?’
‘My Madge! I have so few of their words yet. You would hold the child to
save it from a dreadful end.’
‘God help me, my lady--I would, as long as I live I will.... Oh! poor
infant, we do need our courage now.’
Seeing that her mistress had not a tear or a tremor, the girl blinked
and schooled her quailing heart, still under the wicked hope that the
mother would not consent; in a wonderment at this lady, who was womanly,
and who could hold the red iron at living flesh, to save the poor infant
from a dreadful end. Her flow of love to this dear lady felt the
slicing of a cut; was half revulsion, half worship; uttermost worship in
estrangement, with the further throbbing of her pulses.
The cottage door was pushed open for Lord Fleetwood and Howell Edwards,
whom his master had prepared to stand against immediate operations. A
mounted messenger had been despatched. But it was true, the doctor might
not be at home. Assuming it to be a bite of rabies, minutes lost meant
the terrible: Edwards bowed his head to that. On the other hand,
he foresaw the closest of personal reasons for hesitating to be
in agreement with the lady wholly. The countess was not so much a
persuasive lady as she was, in her breath and gaze, a sweeping and a
wafting power. After a short argument, he had the sense of hanging like
a bank detached to fatality of motion by the crack of a landslip, and
that he would speedily be on his manhood to volunteer for the terrible
work.
He addressed the mother. Her eyes whitened from their red at his first
word of laying hot iron on the child: she ran out with the wild woman’s
howl to her neighbours.
‘Poor mother!’ Carinthia sighed. ‘It may last a year in the child’s
body, and one day he shudders at water. Father saw a bitten man die.
I could fear death with the thought of that poison in me. I pray Dr.
Griffiths may come.’
Fleetwood shuffled a step. ‘He will come, he will come.’
The mother and some women now packed the room.
A gabble arose between them and Edwards. They fired sharp snatches of
speech, and they darted looks at the lady and her lord.
‘They do not know!’ said Carinthia.
Gower brought her news that the dog had been killed; Martha and her
precious burden were outside, a mob of men, too. He was not alarmed; but
she went to the door and took her babe in her arms, and when the women
observed the lady holding her own little one, their looks were softened.
At a hint of explanation from Edwards, the guttural gabble rattled up to
the shrill vowels.
Fleetwood’s endurance broke short. The packed small room, the
caged-monkey lingo, the wailful child, and the past and apprehended
debate upon the burning of flesh, composed an intolerable torture. He
said to Edwards: ‘Go to the men; settle it with them. We have to follow
that man Wythan; no peace otherwise. Tell the men the body of the dog
must be secured for analysis. Mad or not, it’s the same. These Welsh
mothers and grandmothers won’t allow cautery at any price. Hark at
them!’
He turned to Carinthia: ‘Your ladyship will let Mr. Edwards or Mr.
Woodseer conduct you to the house where you are residing. You don’t know
these excitable people. I wish you to leave.’
She replied softly: ‘I stay for the doctor’s coming.’
‘Impossible for me to wait, and I can’t permit you to be here.’
‘It is life and death, and I must not be commanded.’
‘You may be proposing gratuitous agony.’
‘I would do it to my own child.’
The earl attacked Gower: ‘Add your voice to persuade Lady Fleetwood.’
Gower said: ‘What if I think with Lady Fleetwood?’
‘You would see her do it?’
‘Do it myself, if there was no one else’
‘This dog-all of you have gone mad,’ the earl cried.
‘Griffiths may keep his head; it’s the only chance. Take my word, these
Welshwomen just listen to them won’t have it. You ‘ll find yourself in a
nest of Furies. It may be right to do, it’s folly to propose it, madness
to attempt it. And I shall be bitten if I stop here a minute longer; I’m
gone; I can neither command nor influence. I should have thought Gower
Woodseer would have kept his wits.’
Fleetwood’s look fell on Madge amid the group. Gower’s perception of her
mistress through the girl’s devotion to her moved him. He took Madge by
the hand, and the sensation came that it was the next thing to pressing
his wife’s. ‘You’re a loyal girl. You have a mistress it ‘s an honour to
serve. You bind me. By the way, Ines shall run down for a minute before
I go.’
‘Let him stay where he is,’ Madge said, having bobbed her curtsey.
‘Oh, if he’s not to get a welcome!’ said the earl; and he could now fix
a steadier look on his countess, who would have animated him with either
a hostile face or a tender. She had no expression of a feeling. He bent
to her formally.
Carinthia’s words were: ‘Adieu, my lord.’
‘I have only to say, that Esslemont is ready to receive you,’ he
remarked, bowed more curtly, and walked out...
Gower followed him. They might as well have been silent, for any effect
from what was uttered between them. They spoke opinions held by each of
them--adverse mainly; speaking for no other purpose than to hold their
positions.
‘Oh, she has courage, no doubt; no one doubted it,’ Fleetwood said, out
of all relation to the foregoing.
Courage to grapple with his pride and open his heart was wanting in him.
Had that been done, even to the hint of it, instead of the lordly
indifference shown, Gower might have ventured on a suggestion, that the
priceless woman he could call wife was fast slipping away from him and
withering in her allegiance. He did allude to his personal sentiment.
‘One takes aim at Philosophy; Lady Fleetwood pulls us up to pay tribute
to our debts.’ But this was vague, and his hearer needed a present
thunder and lightning to shake and pierce him.
‘I pledged myself to that yacht,’ said Fleetwood, by way of reply, ‘or
you and I would tramp it, as we did once-jolly old days! I shall have
you in mind. Now turn back. Do the best you can.’
They parted midway up the street, Gower bearing away a sharp contrast
of the earl and his countess; for, until their senses are dulled,
impressionable young men, however precociously philosophical, are
mastered by appearances; and they have to reflect under new lights
before vision of the linked eye and mind is given them.
Fleetwood jumped into his carriage and ordered the coachman to drive
smartly. He could not have admitted the feeling small; he felt the
having been diminished, and his requiring a rapid transportation from
these parts for him to regain his proper stature. Had he misconducted
himself at the moment of danger? It is a ghastly thought, that the
craven impulse may overcome us. But no, he could reassure his repute for
manliness. He had done as much as a man could do in such a situation.
At the same time, he had done less than the woman.
Needed she to have gone so far? Why precipitate herself into the jaws of
the beast?
Now she, proposes to burn the child’s wound. And she will do it if they
let her. One, sees her at the work,--pale, flinty; no faces; trebly the
terrific woman in her mild way of doing the work. All because her old
father recommended it. Because she thinks it a duty, we will say; that
is juster. This young woman is a very sword in the hand of her idea
of duty. She can be feminine, too,--there is one who knows. She can
be particularly distant, too. If in timidity, she has a modest view of
herself--or an enormous conception of the magi that married her. Will
she take the world’s polish a little?
Fleetwood asked with the simplicity of the superior being who will
consequently perhaps bestow the debt he owes...
But his was not the surface nature which can put a question of the sort
and pass it. As soon as it had been formed, a vision of the elemental
creature calling him husband smote to shivers the shell we walk on, and
caught him down among the lower forces, up amid the higher; an infernal
and a celestial contest for the extinction of the one or the other of
them, if it was not for their union. She wrestled with him where the
darknesses roll their snake-eyed torrents over between jagged horns
of the netherworld. She stood him in the white ray of the primal vital
heat, to bear unwithering beside her the test of light. They flew, they
chased, battled, embraced, disjoined, adventured apart, brought back the
count of their deeds, compared them,--and name the one crushed! It was
the one weighted to shame, thrust into the cellar-corner of his own
disgust, by his having asked whether that starry warrior spirit in the
woman’s frame would ‘take polish a little.’
Why should it be a contention between them? For this reason: he was
reduced to admire her act; and if he admired, he could not admire
without respecting; if he respected, perforce he reverenced; if he
reverenced, he worshipped. Therefore she had him at her feet. At the
feet of any woman, except for the trifling object! But at the feet of
‘It is my husband!’ That would be a reversal of things.
Are not things reversed when the name Carinthia sounds in the thought of
him who laughed at the name not less angelically martial than Feltre’s
adored silver trumpets of his Papal procession; sweeter of the new
morning for the husband of the woman; if he will but consent to the
worshipper’s posture? Yes, and when Gower Woodseer’s ‘Malady of the
Wealthy,’ as he terms the pivotting of the whole marching and wheeling
world upon the favoured of Fortune’s habits and tastes, promises to quit
its fell clutch on him?
Another voice in the young nobleman cried: Pooh, dolt and dupe! and
surrounded her for half a league with reek of burnt flesh and shrieks of
a tortured child; giving her the aspect of a sister of the Parcw. But
it was not the ascendant’ voice. It growled underneath, much like the
deadly beast at Carinthia’s gown while she stood:--an image of her to
dominate the princeliest of men.
The princeliest must have won his title to the place before he can yield
other than complimentary station to a woman without violation of his
dignity; and vast wealth is not the title; worldly honours are not;
deeds only are the title. Fleetwood consented to tell himself that he
had not yet performed the deeds.
Therefore, for him to be dominated was to be obscured, eclipsed. A man
may outrun us; it is the fortune of war. Eclipsed behind the skirts of a
woman waving her upraised hands, with, ‘Back, pray!’--no, that ignominy
is too horribly abominable! Be sure, the situation will certainly recur
in some form; will constantly recur. She will usurp the lead; she will
play the man.
Let matters go on as they are. We know our personal worth.
Arrived at this point in the perpetual round of the conflict Carinthia
had implanted, Fleetwood entered anew the ranks of the ordinary men of
wealth and a coronet, and he hugged himself. He enjoyed repose; knowing
it might be but a truce. Matters might go on as they were. Still, he
wished her away from those Wythans, residing at Esslemont. There she
might come eventually to a better knowledge of his personal worth:--‘the
gold mine we carry in our bosoms till it is threshed out of us in
sweat,’ that fellow Gower Woodseex says; adding, that we are the richer
for not exploring it. Philosophical cynicism is inconclusive. Fleetwood
knew his large capacities; he had proved them and could again. In case
a certain half foreseen calamity should happen:--imagine it a fact,
imagine him seized, besides admiring her character, with a taste for her
person! Why, then, he would have to impress his own mysteriously deep
character on her portion of understanding. The battle for domination
would then begin.
Anticipation of the possibility of it hewed division between the young
man’s pride of being and his warmer feelings. Had he been free of
the dread of subjection, he would have sunk to kiss the feet of the
statuesque young woman, arms in air, firm-fronted over the hideous death
that tore at her skirts.