The night Lord Fleetwood had passed cured him of the wound Carinthia
dealt, with her blunt, defensive phrase and her Welshman. Seated on his
coach-box, he turned for a look the back way leading to Esslemont, and
saw rosed crag and mountain forest rather than the soft undulations of
parkland pushing green meadows or brown copse up the slopes under
his eye. She had never been courted: she deserved a siege. She was a
daughter of the racy highlands. And she, who could say to her husband,
‘I guard my rooms,’ without sign of the stage-face of scorn or defiance
or flinging of the glove, she would have to be captured by siege, it
was clear. She wore an aspect of the confident fortress, which neither
challenges nor cries to treat, but commands respect. How did she
accomplish this miracle of commanding respect after such a string of
somersaults before the London world?
He had to drive North-westward: his word was pledged to one of his
donkey Ixionides--Abrane, he recollected--to be a witness at some
contemptible exhibition of the fellow’s muscular skill: a match to punt
against a Thames waterman: this time. Odd how it should come about that
the giving of his word forced him now to drive away from the woman once
causing him to curse his luck as the prisoner of his word! However,
there was to be an end of it soon--a change; change as remarkable as
Harry Monmouth’s at the touching of his crown. Though in these days, in
our jog-trot Old England, half a step on the road to greatness is the
utmost we can hop; and all England jeers at the man attempting it. He
caps himself with this or that one of their titles. For it is not the
popular thing among Englishmen. Their hero, when they have done their
fighting, is the wealthy patron of Sport. What sort of creatures are his
comrades? But he cannot have comrades unless he is on the level of them.
Yet let him be never so high above them, they charge him and point him
as a piece of cannon; assenting to the flatteries they puff into him, he
is their engine. ‘The idol of the hour is the mob’s wooden puppet, and
the doing of the popular thing seed of no harvest,’ Gower Woodseer says,
moderately well, snuffing incense of his happy delivery. Not to be
the idol, to have an aim of our own, there lies the truer pride, if we
intend respect of ourselves.
The Mr. Pulpit young men have in them, until their habits have fretted
him out, was directing Lord Fleetwood’s meditations upon the errors
of the general man, as a cover for lateral references to his hitherto
erratic career: not much worse than a swerving from the right line,
which now seemed the desirable road for him, and had previously seemed
so stale, so repulsive. He was, of course, only half-conscious of his
pulpitizing; he fancied the serious vein of his thoughts attributable
to a tumbled night. Nevertheless, he had the question whether that
woman--poor girl!--was influencing his thoughts. For in a moment,
the very word ‘respect’ pitched him upon her character; to see it a
character that emerged beneath obstacles, and overcame ridicule, won
suffrages, won a reluctant husband’s admiration, pricked him from
distaste to what might really be taste for her companionship, or
something more alarming to contemplate in the possibilities,--thirst for
it. He was driving away, and he longed to turn back. He did respect
her character: a character angular as her features were, and similarly
harmonious, splendid in action.
Respect seems a coolish form of tribute from a man who admires. He had
to say that he did not vastly respect beautiful women. Have they all the
poetry? Know them well, and where is it?
The pupil of Gower Woodseer asked himself to specify the poetry
of woman. She is weak and inferior, but she has it; civilized men
acknowledge it; and it is independent, or may be beside her gift of
beauty. She has more of it than we have. Then name it.
Well, the flowers of the field are frail things. Pluck one, and you
have in your hand the frailest of things. But reach through the charm of
colour and the tale of its beneficence in frailty to the poetry of the
flower, and secret of the myriad stars will fail to tell you more than
does that poetry of your little flower. Lord Feltre, at the heels of St.
Francis, agrees in that.
Well, then, much so with the flowers of the two hands and feet. We do
homage to those ungathered, and reserve our supremacy; the gathered, no
longer courted, are the test of men. When the embraced woman breathes
respect into us, she wings a beast. We have from her the poetry of the
tasted life; excelling any garden-gate or threshold lyrics called forth
by purest early bloom. Respect for her person, for her bearing, for her
character that is in the sum a beauty plastic to the civilized young
man’s needs and cravings, as queenly physical loveliness has never so
fully been to him along the walks of life, and as ideal worships cannot
be for our nerving contentment. She brings us to the union of body
and soul; as good as to say, earth and heaven. Secret of all human
aspirations, the ripeness of the creeds, is there; and the passion for
the woman desired has no poetry equalling that of the embraced respected
woman.
Something of this went reeling through Fleetwood; positively to this
end; accompanied the while with flashes of Carinthia, her figure across
the varied scenes. Ridicule vanished. Could it ever have existed? If
London had witnessed the scene down in Wales, London never again would
laugh at the Whitechapel Countess.
He laughed amicably at himself for the citizen sobriety of these views,
on the part of a nobleman whose airy pleasure it had been to flout
your sober citizens, with their toad-at-the-hop notions, their walled
conceptions, their drab propriety; and felt a petted familiar within
him dub all pulpitizing, poetizing drivellers with one of those detested
titles, invented by the English as a corrective of their maladies or the
excesses of their higher moods. But, reflection telling him that he had
done injury to Carinthia--had inflicted the sorest of the wounds a young
woman a new bride can endure, he nodded acquiescence to the charge of
misbehaviour, and muzzled the cynic.
As a consequence, the truisms flooded him and he lost his guard against
our native prosiness. Must we be prosy if we are profoundly, uncynically
sincere? Do but listen to the stuff we are maundering! Extracts of
poetry, if one could hit upon the right, would serve for a relief and a
lift when we are in this ditch of the serious vein. Gower Woodseer would
have any number handy to spout. Or Felter:--your convinced and fervent
Catholic has quotations of images and Latin hymns to his Madonna or
one of his Catherines, by the dozen, to suit an enthusiastic fit of
the worship of some fair woman, and elude the prosy in commending her.
Feltre is enviable there. As he says, it is natural to worship, and only
the Catholics can prostrate themselves with dignity. That is matter for
thought. Stir us to the depths, it will be found that we are poor soupy
stuff. For estimable language, and the preservation of self-respect in
prostration, we want ritual, ceremonial elevation of the visible object
for the soul’s adoring through the eye. So may we escape our foul or
empty selves.
Lord Feltre seemed to Fleetwood at the moment a more serviceable friend
than Gower Woodseer preaching ‘Nature’--an abstraction, not inspiring to
the devout poetic or giving us the tongue above our native prosy. He was
raised and refreshed by recollected lines of a Gregorian chant he and
Feltre had heard together under the roof of that Alpine monastery.
The Dame collapses. There is little doubt of her having the world to
back her in protest against all fine filmy work of the exploration of a
young man’s intricacies or cavities. Let her not forget the fact she has
frequently impressed upon us, that he was ‘the very wealthiest nobleman
of his time,’ instructive to touch inside as well as out. He had his
share of brains, too. And also she should be mindful of an alteration of
English taste likely of occurrence in the remote posterity she vows she
is for addressing after she has exhausted our present hungry generation.
The posterity signified will, it is calculable, it is next to certain,
have studied a developed human nature so far as to know the composition
of it a not unequal mixture of the philosophic and the romantic, and
that credible realism is to be produced solely by an involvement of
those two elements. Or else, she may be sure, her story once out of the
mouth, goes off dead as the spirits of a vapour that has performed the
stroke of energy. She holds a surprising event in the history of ‘the
wealthiest nobleman of his time,’ and she would launch it upon readers
unprepared, with the reference to our mysterious and unfathomable nature
for an explanation of the stunning crack on the skull.
This may do now. It will not do ten centuries hence. For the English,
too, are a changeable people in the sight of ulterior Time.
One of the good pieces of work Lord Fleetwood could suppose he had
performed was recalled to him near the turning to his mews by the
handsome Piccadilly fruit-shop. He jumped to the pavement, merely to
gratify. Sarah Winch with a word of Madge; and being emotional just
then, he spoke of Lady Fleetwood’s attachment to Madge; and he looked at
Sarah straight, he dropped his voice: ‘She said, you remember, you were
sisters to her.’
Sarah remembered that he had spoken of it before. Two brilliant drops
from the deepest of woman’s ready well stood in her eyes.
He carried the light of them away. They were such pure jewels of tribute
to the Carinthia now seen by him as worshipping souls of devotees offer
to their Madonna for her most glorious adornment.