They went to their beds doomed to lie and roam as the solitaries of a
sleepless night. They met next day like a couple emerging from sirocco
deserts, indisposed for conversation or even short companionship, much
of the night’s dry turmoil in their heads. Each would have preferred
the sight of an enemy; and it was hardly concealed by them, for they
inclined to regard one another as the author of their infernal passage
through the drear night’s wilderness.
Fleetwood was the civiller; his immediate prospective duties being
clear, however abhorrent. But he had inflicted a monstrous disturbance
on the man he meant in his rash, decisive way to elevate, if not
benefit. Gower’s imagination, foreign to his desires and his projects,
was playing juggler’s tricks with him, dramatizing upon hypotheses,
which mounted in stages and could pretend to be soberly conceivable,
assuming that the earl’s wild hints overnight were a credible basis.
He transported himself to his first view of the Countess Livia, the
fountain of similes born of his prostrate adoration, close upon the
invasion and capture of him by the combined liqueurs in the giddy Batlen
lights; and joining the Arabian magic in his breast at the time with the
more magical reality now proposed as a sequel to it, he entered the land
where dreams confess they are outstripped by revelations.
Yet it startled him to hear the earl say: ‘You’ll get audience at ten;
I’ve arranged; make the most of the situation to her. I refuse to help.
I foresee it ‘s the only way of solving this precious puzzle. You do
me and every one of us a service past paying. Not a man of her set
worth.... She--but you’ll stop it; no one else can. Of course, you’ve
had your breakfast. Off, and walk yourself into a talkative mood, as you
tell me you do.’
‘One of the things I do when I’ve nobody to hear,’ said Gower,
speculating whether the black sprite in this young nobleman was for
sending him as a rod to scourge the lady: an ingenious device, that
smelt of mediaeval Courts and tickled his humour.
‘Will she listen?’ he said gravely.
‘She will listen; she has not to learn you admire. You admit she
has helped to trim and polish, and the rest. She declares you’re
incorruptible. There’s the ground open. I fling no single sovereign more
into that quicksand, and I want not one word further on the subject. I
follow you to Esslemont. Pray, go.’
Fleetwood pushed into the hall. A footman was ordered to pack and
deposit Mr. Woodseer’s portmanteau at the coach-office.
‘The principal point is to make sure we have all the obligations,’ Gower
said.
‘You know the principal point,’ said the earl. ‘Relieve me.’
He faced to the opening street door. Lord Feltre stood in the framing
of it--a welcome sight. The ‘monastic man of fashion,’ of Gower’s phrase
for him, entered, crooning condolences, with a stretched waxen hand for
his friend, a partial nod for Nature’s worshipper--inefficient at any
serious issue of our human affairs, as the earl would now discover.
Gower left the two young noblemen to their greetings. Happily for him,
philosophy, in the present instance, after a round of profundities,
turned her lantern upon the comic aspect of his errand. Considering
the Countess Livia, and himself, and the tyrant, who benevolently and
providentially, or sardonically, hurled them to their interview,
the situation was comic, certainly, in the sense of its being an
illumination of this life’s odd developments. For thus had things
come about, that if it were possible even to think of the lady’s
condescending, he, thanks to the fair one he would see before evening,
was armed and proof against his old infatuation or any renewal of it.
And he had been taught to read through the beautiful twilighted woman,
as if she were burnt paper held at the fire consuming her. His hopes
hung elsewhere. Nevertheless, an intellectual demon-imp very lively
in his head urged him to speculate on such a contest between them, and
weigh the engaging forces. Difficulties were perceived, the scornful
laughter on her side was plainly heard; but his feeling of savage
mastery, far from beaten down, swelled so as to become irritable for the
trial; and when he was near her house he held a review of every
personal disadvantage he could summon, incited by an array of limping
deficiencies that flattered their arrogant leader with ideas of the
power he had in spite of them.
In fact, his emancipation from sentiment inspired the genial mood to
tease. Women, having to encounter a male adept at the weapon for the
purpose, must be either voluble or supportingly proud to keep the skin
from shrinking: which is a commencement of the retrogression; and that
has frequently been the beginning of a rout. Now the Countess Livia was
a lady of queenly pose and the servitorial conventional speech likely at
a push to prove beggarly. When once on a common platform with a man of
agile tongue instigated by his intellectual demon to pursue inquiries
into her moral resources, after a ruthless exposure of the wrecked
material, she would have to be, after the various fashions, defiant, if
she was to hold her own against pressure; and seeing, as she must, the
road of prudence point to conciliation, it was calculable that she would
take it. Hence a string of possible events, astounding to mankind, but
equally calculable, should one care to give imagination headway. Gower
looked signally Captain Abrane’s ‘fiddler’ while he waited at Livia’s
house door. A studious intimacy with such a lady was rather like the
exposure of the silver moon to the astronomer’s telescope.
The Dame will have nought of an interview and colloquy not found
mentioned in her collection of ballads, concerning a person quite
secondary in Dr. Glossop’s voluminous papers. She as vehemently
prohibits a narration of Gower Woodseer’s proposal some hours later, for
the hand of the Countess of Fleetwood’s transfixed maid Madge, because
of the insignificance of the couple; and though it was a quaint idyll of
an affection slowly formed, rationally based while seeming preposterous,
tending to bluntly funny utterances on both sides. The girl was
a creature of the enthusiasms, and had lifted that passion of her
constitution into higher than the worship of sheer physical bravery.
She had pitied Mr. Gower Woodseer for his apparently extreme, albeit
reverential, devotion to her mistress. The plainly worded terms of his
asking a young woman of her position and her reputation to marry him
came on her like an intrusion of dazzling day upon the closed eyelids of
the night, requiring time, and her mistress’s consent, and his father’s
expressed approval, before she could yield him an answer that might
appear a forgetfulness of her station, her ignorance, her damaged
character. Gower protested himself, with truth, a spotted pard, an
ignoramus, and an outcast of all established classes, as the worshipper
of Nature cannot well avoid being.
‘But what is it you like me for, Mr. Gower?’ Madge longed to know, that
she might see a way in the strange land where he had planted her after
a whirl; and he replied: ‘I ‘ve thought of you till I can say I love you
because you have naturally everything I shoot at.’
The vastness of the compliment drove her to think herself empty of
anything.
He named courage, and its offspring, honesty, and devotedness,
constancy. Her bosom rose at the word.
‘Yes, constancy,’ he repeated; and ‘growing girls have to “turn
corners,” as you told me once.’
‘I did?’ said she, reddening under a memory, and abashed by his
recollection of a moment she knew to have been weak with her, or noisy
of herself.
Madge went straightway to her mistress and related her great event,
in the tone of a confession of crime. Her mistress’s approbation was
timidly suggested rather than besought.
It came on a flood. Carinthia’s eyes filled; she exclaimed: ‘Oh, that
good man!--he chooses my Madge for wife. She said it, Rebecca said it.
Mrs. Wythan saw and said Mr. Woodseer loved my Madge. I hear her saying
it. Then yes, and yes, from me for both your sakes, dear girl. He will
have the faithfullest, he will have the kindest--Oh! and I shall know
there can be a happy marriage in England.’
She summoned Gower; she clasped his hand, to thank him for appreciating
her servant and sister, and for the happiness she had in hearing it;
and she gazed at him and the laden brows of her Madge alternately,
encouraging him to repeat his recital of his pecuniary means, for the
poetry of the fact it verified, feasting on the sketch of a four-roomed
cottage and an agricultural labourer’s widow for cook and housemaid;
Madge to listen to his compositions of the day in the evening; Madge to
praise him, Madge to correct his vanity.
Love was out of the count, but Carinthia’s leaping sympathy decorated
the baldness of the sketch and spied his features through the daubed
mask he chose to wear as a member of the order of husbands, without
taking it for his fun. Dry material statements presented the reality
she doated to think of. Moreover, the marriage of these two renewed her
belief in true marriages, and their intention to unite was evidence of
love.
‘My journey to England was worth all troubles for the meeting Madge,’
she said. ‘I can look with pleasure to that day of my meeting her
first--the day, it was then!’
She stopped. Madge felt the quivering upward of a whimper to a sob in
her breast. She slipped away.
‘It’s a day that has come round to be repaired, Lady Fleetwood,’ said
Gower. ‘If you will. Will you not? He has had a blow--the death of a
friend, violent death. It has broken him. He wants a month or so in
your mountains. I have thought him hard to deal with; he is humane. His
enormous wealth has been his tempter. Madge and I will owe him our means
of livelihood, enough for cottagers, until I carve my way. His feelings
are much more independent of his rank than those of most noblemen. He
will repeat your kind words to Madge and me; I am sure of it. He has
had heavy burdens; he is young, hardly formed yet. He needs a helper; I
mean, one allied to him. You forgive me? I left him with a Catholic lord
for comforter, who regards my prescript of the study of Nature, when
we’re in grief, as about the same as an offer of a dish of cold boiled
greens. Silver and ivory images are more consoling. Neither he nor I
can offer the right thing for Lord Fleetwood. It will be found here. And
then your mountains. More than I, nearly as much as you, he has a
poet’s ardour for mountain land. He and Mr. Wythan would soon learn to
understand one another on that head, if not as to management of mines.’
The pleading was crafty, and it was penetrative in the avoidance of
stress. Carinthia shook herself to feel moved. The endeavour chilled her
to a notion that she was but half alive. She let the question approach
her, whether Chillon could pardon Lord Fleetwood. She, with no idea of
benignness, might speak pardon’s word to him, on a late autumn
evening years hence, perhaps, or to his friends to-morrow, if he
would considerately keep distant. She was upheld by the thought of her
brother’s more honourable likeness to their father, in the certainty
of his refusal to speak pardon’s empty word or touch an offending hand,
without their father’s warrant for the injury wiped out; and as she had
no wish for that to be done, she could anticipate his withholding of the
word.
For her brother at wrestle with his fallen fortunes was now the beating
heart of Carinthia’s mind. Her husband was a shadow there. He did
obscure it, and he might annoy, he was unable to set it in motion. He
sat there somewhat like Youth’s apprehension of Death:--the dark spot
seen mistily at times through people’s tears, or visioned as in
an ambush beyond the hills; occasionally challenged to stimulate
recklessness; oftener overlooked, acknowledged for the undesired remote
of life’s conditions, life’s evil, fatal, ill-assorted yoke-fellow; and
if it was in his power to burst out of his corner and be terrible to
her, she could bring up a force unnamed and unmeasured, that being the
blood of her father in her veins. Having done her utmost to guard her
babe, she said her prayers; she stood for peace or the struggle.
‘Does Lord Fleetwood speak of coming here?’ she said.
‘To-morrow.’
‘I go to Croridge to-morrow.’
‘Your ladyship returns?’
‘Yes, I return Mr. Gower, you have fifty minutes before you dress for
dinner.’
He thought only of the exceeding charity of the intimation; and he may
be excused for his not seeing the feminine full answer it was, in an
implied, unmeditated contrast. He went gladly to find his new comrade,
his flower among grass-blades, the wonderful creature astonishing him
and surcharging his world by setting her face at him, opening her breast
to him, breathing a young man’s word of words from a woman’s mouth. His
flower among grass-blades for a head looking studiously down, she was
his fountain of wisdom as well, in the assurance she gave him of the
wisdom of his choice.
But Madge had put up the ‘prize-fighter’s lass,’ by way of dolly
defence, to cover her amazed confusion when the proposal of this
well-liked gentleman to a girl such as she sounded churchy. He knocked
it over easily; it left, however, a bee at his ear and an itch to
transfer the buzzer’s attentions and tease his darling; for she had
betrayed herself as right good game. Nor is there happier promise of
life-long domestic enlivenment for a prescient man of Letters than he
has in the contemplation of a pretty face showing the sensitiveness to
the sting, which is not allowed to poison her temper, and is short
of fetching tears. The dear innocent girl gave this pleasing promise;
moreover, she could be twisted-to laugh at herself, just a little. Now,
the young woman who can do that has already jumped the hedge into the
highroad of philosophy, and may become a philosopher’s mate in its
by-ways, where the minute discoveries are the notable treasures.
They had their ramble, agreeable to both, despite the admonitory dose
administered to one of them. They might have been espied at a point or
two from across the parkpalings; their laughter would have caught an
outside pedestrian’s hearing. Whatever the case, Owain Wythan, riding
down off Croridge, big with news of her brother for the countess,
dined at her table, and walking up the lane to the Esslemont Arms on a
moonless night, to mount his horse, pitched against an active and, as
it was deemed by Gower’s observation of his eyes, a scientific fist. The
design to black them finely was attributable to the dyeing accuracy of
the stroke. A single blow had done it. Mr. Wythan’s watch and purse were
untouched; and a second look at the swollen blind peepers led Gower to
surmise that they were, in the calculation of the striker, his own.
He walked next day to the Royal Sovereign inn. There he came upon the
earl driving his phaeton. Fleetwood jumped down, and Gower told of the
mysterious incident, as the chief thing he had to tell, not rendering
it so mysterious in his narrative style. He had the art of indicating
darkly.
‘Ines, you mean?’ Fleetwood cried, and he appeared as nauseated and
perplexed as he felt. Why should Ines assault Mr. Wythan? It happened
that the pugilist’s patron had, within the last fifteen minutes,
driven past a certain thirty-acre meadow, sight of which on his way to
Carinthia had stirred him. He had even then an idea of his old deeds
dogging him to bind him, every one of them, the smallest.
‘But you’ve nothing to go by,’ he said. ‘Why guess at this rascal more
than another?’
Gower quoted Mrs. Rundles and the ostler for witnesses to Kit’s visit
yesterday to the Royal Sovereign, though Kit shunned the bar of the
Esslemont Arms.
‘I guess pretty clearly, because I suspect he was hanging about and saw
me and Madge together.’
‘Consolations for failures in town?--by the way, you are complimented,
and I don’t think you deserved it. However, there was just the chance to
stop a run to perdition. But, Madge? Madge? I’d swear to the girl!’
‘Not so hard as I,’ said Gower, and spoke of the oath to come between
the girl and him.
Fleetwood’s dive into the girl’s eyes drew her before him. He checked a
spirt of exclamations.
‘You fancy the brute had a crack for revenge and mistook his man?’
‘That’s what I want her ladyship to know,’ said Gower.
‘How could you let her hear of it?’
‘Nothing can be concealed from her.’
The earl was impressionable to the remark, in his disgust at the
incident. It added a touch of a new kind of power to her image.
‘She’s aware of my coming?’
‘To-day or to-morrow.’
They scaled the phaeton and drove.
‘You undervalue Lord Feltre. You avoid your adversaries,’ Fleetwood now
rebuked his hearer. ‘It ‘s an easy way to have the pull of them in
your own mind. You might learn from him. He’s willing for controversy.
Nature-worship--or “aboriginal genuflexion,” he calls it; Anglicanism,
Methodism; he stands to engage them. It can’t be doubted, that in days
of trouble he has a faith “stout as a rock, with an oracle in it,” as
he says; and he’s right, “men who go into battle require a rock to back
them or a staff to lean on.” You have your “secret,” you think; as far
as I can see, it’s to keep you from going into any form of battle.’
The new influence at work on the young nobleman was evident, if only in
the language used.
Gower answered mildly: ‘That can hardly be said of a man who’s going to
marry.’
‘Perhaps not. Lady Fleetwood is aware?’
‘Lady Fleetwood does me the honour to approve my choice.’
‘You mean, you’re dead on to it with this girl?’
‘For a year or more.’
‘Fond of her?’
‘All my heart.’
‘In love!’
‘Yes, in love. The proof of it is, I ‘ve asked her now I can support her
as a cottager leaning on the Three Per Cents.’
‘Well, it helps you to a human kind of talk. It carries out your
theories. I never disbelieved in your honesty. The wisdom’s another
matter. Did you ever tell any one, that there’s not an act of a man’s
life lies dead behind him, but it is blessing or cursing him every step
he takes?’
‘By that,’ rejoined Gower, ‘I can say Lord Feltre proves there’s wisdom
in the truisms of devoutness.’
He thought the Catholic lord had gone a step or two to catch an eel.
Fleetwood was looking on the backward of his days, beholding a
melancholy sunset, with a grimace in it.
‘Lord Feltre might show you the “leanness of Philosophy”;--you would
learn from hearing him:--“an old gnawed bone for the dog that chooses to
be no better than a dog.”’
‘The vertiginous roast haunch is recommended,’ Gower said.
‘See a higher than your own head, good sir. But, hang the man! he
manages to hit on the thing he wants.’ Fleetwood set his face at Gower
with cutting heartiness. ‘In love, you say, and Madge: and mean it to
be the holy business! Well, poor old Chummy always gave you credit for
knowing how to play your game. She has given proof she ‘s a good girl.
I don’t see why it shouldn’t end well. That attack on the Welshman’s the
bad lookout. Explained, if you like, but women’s impressions won’t
get explained away. We must down on our knees or they. Her ladyship
attentive at all to affairs of the house?’
‘Every day with Queeney; at intervals with Leddings.’
‘Excellent! You speak like a fellow recording the devout observances
of a great dame with her minor and superior, ecclesiastical comforters.
Regular at church?’
‘Her ladyship goes.’
‘A woman without religion, Gower Woodseer, is a weed on the water, or
she’s hard as nails. We shall see. Generally, Madge and the youngster
parade the park at this hour. I drive round to the stables. Go in and
offer your version of that rascally dog’s trick. It seems the nearest we
can come at. He’s a sot, and drunken dogs ‘ll do anything. I’ve had him
on my hands, and I’ve got the stain of him.’
They trotted through Esslemont Park gates. ‘I’ve got that place,
Calesford, on my hands, too,’ the earl said, suddenly moved to a liking
for his Kentish home.
He and Gower were struck by a common thought of the extraordinary
burdens his indulgence in impulses drew upon him. Present circumstances
pictured to Gower the opposing weighed and matured good reason for his
choosing Madge, and he complimented himself in his pity for the earl.
But Fleetwood, as he reviewed a body of acquaintances perfectly free
from the wretched run in harness, though they had their fits and their
whims, was pushed to the conclusion that fatalism marked his particular
course through life. He could not hint at such an idea to the
unsympathetic fellow, or rather, the burly antagonist to anything of the
sort, beside him. Lord Feltre would have understood and appreciated
it instantly. Where is aid to be had if we have the Fates against us?
Feltre knew the Power, he said; was an example of ‘the efficacy of
supplications’; he had been ‘fatally driven to find the Power,’ and had
found it--on the road to Rome, of course: not a delectable road for an
English nobleman, except that the noise of another convert in pilgrimage
on it would deal our English world a lively smack, the very stroke that
heavy body wants. But the figure of a ‘monastic man of fashion’ was
antipathetic to the earl, and he flouted an English Protestant
mass merely because of his being highly individual, and therefore
revolutionary for the minority.
He cast his bitter cud aside. ‘My man should have arrived. Lady
Fleetwood at home?’
Gower spoke of her having gone to Croridge in the morning.
‘Has she taken the child?’
‘She has, yes. For the air of the heights.’
‘For greater security. Lady Arpington praises the thoughtful mother. I
rather expected to see the child.’
‘They can’t be much later,’ Gower supposed.
‘You don’t feel your long separation from “the object”?’
Letting him have his cushion for pins, Gower said ‘It needs all my
philosophy:
He was pricked and probed for the next five minutes; not bad rallying,
the earl could be smart when he smarted. Then they descended the terrace
to meet Lady Fleetwood driving her pony-trap. She gave a brief single
nod to the salute of her lord, quite in the town-lady’s manner,
surprisingly.