WHAT HAPPENED
The Dame is at her thumps for attention to be called to ‘the strangeness
of it,’ that a poor, small, sparse village, hardly above a hamlet,
on the most unproductive of Kentish heights, part of old forest land,
should at this period become ‘the cynosure of a city beautifully named
by the poet Great Augusta, and truly indeed the world’s metropolis.’
Put aside her artful pother to rouse excitement at stages of a
narrative, London’s general eye upon little Croridge was but another
instance of the extraordinary and not so wonderful. Lady Arpington,
equal to a Parliament in herself, spoke of the place and the countess
courted by her repentant lord. Brailstone and Chumley Potts were town
criers of the executioner letter each had received from the earl; Potts
with his chatter of a suicide’s pistol kept loaded in a case under
a two-inch-long silver Cross, and with sundry dramatic taps on the
forehead, Jottings over the breast, and awful grimace of devoutness.
There was no mistaking him. The young nobleman of the millions was
watched; the town spyglass had him in its orbit. Tales of the ancestral
Fleetwoods ran beside rumours of a Papist priest at the bedside of the
Foredoomed to Error’s dying mother. His wealth was counted, multiplied
by the ready naughts of those who know little and dread much. Sir Meeson
Corby referred to an argument Lord Fleetwood had held on an occasion
hotly against the logical consistency of the Protestant faith; and to
his alarm lest some day ‘all that immense amount of money should slip
away from us to favour the machinations of Roman Catholicism!’ The
Countess of Cressett, Livia, anticipated her no surprise at anything
Lord Fleetwood might do: she knew him.
So thereupon, with the whirr of a covey on wing before the fowler, our
crested three of immemorial antiquity and a presumptive immortality,
the Ladies Endor, Eldritch, and Cowry, shot up again, hooting across the
dormant chief city Old England’s fell word of the scarlet shimmer above
the nether pit-flames, Rome. An ancient horror in the blood of the
population, conceiving the word to signify, beak, fang, and claw, the
fiendish ancient enemy of the roasting day of yore, heard and echoed.
Sleepless at the work of the sapper, in preparation for the tiger’s
leap, Rome is keen to spy the foothold of English stability, and her
clasp of a pillar of the structure sends tremors to our foundations.
The coupling of Rome and England’s wealthiest nobleman struck a match to
terrorize the Fire Insurance of Smithfield. That meteoric, intractable,
perhaps wicked, but popular, reputedly clever; manifestly evil-starred,
enormously wealthy, young Earl of Fleetwood, wedded to an adventuress,
and a target for the scandals emanating from the woman, was daily,
without omission of a day, seen walking Piccadilly pavement in company
once more with the pervert, the Jesuit agent, that crafty Catesby of
a Lord Feltre, arm in arm the pair of them, and uninterruptedly
conversing, utterly unlike Englishmen. Mr. Rose Mackrell passed them,
and his breezy salutation of the earl was unobserved in my lord’s
vacant glass optics, as he sketched the scene. London had report of
the sinister tempter and the imperilled young probationer undisguisedly
entering the Roman Catholic chapel of a fashionable district-chapel
erected on pervert’s legacies, down a small street at the
corner of a grandee square, by tolerance or connivance of our
constabulary,--entering it linked; and linked they issued, their heads
bent; for the operation of the tonsure, you would say. Two English
noblemen! But is there no legislation to stop the disease? Our female
government asks it vixenly of our impotent male; which pretends, beneath
an air of sympathy, that we should abstain from any compulsory action
upon the law to interfere, though the situation is confessedly grave;
and the aspect men assume is correspondingly, to the last degree
provokingly, grave-half alive that they are, or void of patriotism, or
Babylonian at heart!
Lord Fleetwood’s yet undocked old associates vowed he ‘smelt strong’ of
the fumes of the whirled silver censer-balls. His disfavour had caused a
stoppage of supplies, causing vociferous abomination of their successful
rivals, the Romish priests. Captain Abrane sniffed, loud as a horse,
condemnatory as a cat, in speaking of him. He said: ‘By George, it comes
to this; we shall have to turn Catholics for a loan!’ Watchdogs of the
three repeated the gigantic gambler’s melancholy roar. And, see what
gap, cried the ratiocination of alarm, see the landslip it is in our
body, national and religious, when exalted personages go that way to
Rome!
As you and the world have reflected in your sager moods, an ordinary
pebble may roll where it likes, for individualism of the multitudinously
obscure little affects us. Not so the costly jewel, which is a
congregation of ourselves, in our envies and longings and genuflexions
thick about its lustres. The lapses of precious things must needs carry
us, both by weight and example, and it will ceaselessly be, that we
are possessed by the treasure we possess, we hang on it. A still, small
voice of England’s mind under panic sent up these truisms containing
admonitions to the governing Ladies. They, the most conservative of
earthly bodies, clamoured in return, like cloud-scud witches that have
caught fire at their skirts from the torches of marsh-fire radicals.
They cited for his arrest the titled millionaire who made a slide for
the idiots of the kingdom; they stigmatized our liberty as a sophistry,
unless we have in it the sustaining element of justice; and where is
the justice that punishes his country for any fatal course a mad young
Croesus may take! They shackled the hands of testators, who endangered
the salvation of coroneted boys by having sanction to bequeath vast
wealth in bulk. They said, in truth, that it was the liberty to be
un-Christian. Finally, they screeched a petitioning of Parliament to
devote a night to a sitting, and empower the Lord Chancellor to lay an
embargo on the personal as well as the real estate of wealthy perverts;
in common prudence depriving Rome of the coveted means to turn our
religious weapons against us.
The three guardian ladies and their strings of followers headed over
the fevered and benighted town, as the records of the period attest,
windpiping these and similar Solan notes from the undigested cropful of
alarms Lord Fleetwood’s expected conduct crammed into them. They and
all the world traced his present madness to the act foregoing: that
marriage! They reviewed it to deplore it, every known incident and the
numbers imagined; yet merely to deplore: frightful comparisons of then
with now rendered the historical shock to the marriage market matter
for a sick smile. Evil genius of some sort beside him the wealthy young
nobleman is sure to have. He has got rid of one to take up with a viler.
First, a sluttish trollop of German origin is foisted on him for life;
next, he is misled to abjure the faith of his fathers for Rome. But
patently, desperation in the husband of such a wife weakened his
resistance to the Roman Catholic pervert’s insinuations. There we
punctuate the full stop to our inquiries; we have the secret.
And upon that, suddenly comes a cyclonic gust; and gossip twirls,
whines, and falls to the twanging of an entirely new set of notes,
that furnish a tolerably agreeable tune, on the whole. O hear! The
Marchioness of Arpington proclaims not merely acquaintanceship with Lord
Fleetwood’s countess, she professes esteem for the young person. She has
been heard to say, that if the Principality of Wales were not a royal
title, a dignity of the kind would be conferred by the people of those
mountains on the Countess of Fleetwood: such unbounded enthusiasm there
was for her character when she sojourned down there. As it is, they
do speak of her in their Welsh by some title. Their bards are offered
prizes to celebrate her deeds. You remember the regiment of mounted
Welsh gentlemen escorting her to her Kentish seat, with their band
of the three-stringed harps! She is well-born, educated, handsome, a
perfectly honest woman, and a sound Protestant. Quite the reverse of
Lord Fleetwood’s seeking to escape her, it is she who flies; she cannot
forgive him his cruelties and infidelities: and that is the reason why
he threatens to commit the act of despair. Only she can save him! She
has flown for refuge to her uncle, Lord Levellier’s house at a place
named Croridge--not in the gazetteer--hard of access and a home of
poachers, where shooting goes on hourly; but most picturesque and
romantic, as she herself is! Lady Arpington found her there, nursing
one of the wounded, and her uncle on his death-bed; obdurate all round
against her husband, but pensive when supplicated to consider her
country endangered by Rome. She is a fervent patriot. The tales of her
Whitechapel origin, and heading mobs wielding bludgeons, are absolutely
false, traceable to scandalizing anecdotists like Mr. Rose Mackrell. She
is the beautiful example of an injured wife doing honour to her sex
in the punishment of a faithless husband, yet so little cherishing her
natural right to deal him retribution, that we dare hope she will listen
to her patriotic duty in consenting to the reconcilement, which is
Lord Fleetwood’s alternative: his wife or Rome! They say she has an
incommunicable charm, accounting for the price he puts on her now she
holds aloof and he misses it. Let her but rescue him from England’s most
vigilant of her deadly enemies, she will be entitled to the nation’s
lasting gratitude. She has her opportunity for winning the Anglican
English, as formerly she won the Dissenter Welsh. She may yet be the
means of leading back the latter to our fold.
A notation of the cries in air at a time of surgent public excitement
can hardly yield us music; and the wording of them, by the aid of
compounds and transplants, metaphors and similes only just within range
of the arrows of Phoebus’ bow (i.e. the farthest flight known), would,
while it might imitate the latent poetry, expose venturesome writers to
the wrath of a people commendably believing their language a
perfected instrument when they prefer the request for a plateful, and
commissioning their literary police to brain audacious experimenters who
enlarge or wing it beyond the downright aim at that mark. The gossip
of the time must therefore appear commonplace, in resemblance to
the panting venue a terre of the toad, instead of the fiery steed’s;
although we have documentary evidence that our country’s heart was
moved;--in no common degree, Dr. Glossop’s lucid English has it, at the
head of a broadsheet ballad discovered by him, wherein the connubially
inclined young earl and the nation in turn beseech the countess to
resume her place at Esslemont, and so save both from a terrific dragon’s
jaw, scarlet as the infernal flames; described as fascinating--
‘The classes with the crests,
And the lining to their vests,
Till down they jump, and empty leave
A headless trunk that rests.’
These ballads, burlesque to present reading, mainly intended for
burlesque by the wits who dogged without much enlivening an anxious
period of our history, when corner-stones were falling the way the
young lord of the millions threatened to go, did, there is little doubt,
according to another part of their design (Rose Mackrell boasts it
indirectly in his Memoirs), interpret public opinion, that is, the
English humour of it--the half laugh in their passing and not simulated
shudder.
Carinthia had a study of the humours of English character in the person
of the wounded man she nursed on little Croridge, imagining it the
most unobserved of English homes, and herself as unimportant an object.
Daniel Charner took his wound, as he took his medicine and his posset
from her hand, kindly, and seemed to have a charitable understanding
of Lord Levellier now that the old nobleman had driven a pellet of lead
into him and laid him flat. It pleased him to assure her that his mates
were men of their word, and had promised to pay the old lord with a
‘rouse’ for it, nothing worse. Her father used to speak of the ‘clean
hearts of the English’ as to the husbanding of revenge; that is, the
‘no spot of bad blood’ to vitiate them. Captain John Peter seconded all
good-humoured fighters ‘for the long account’: they will surely win; and
it was one of his maxims: ‘My foe can spoil my face; he beats me if he
spoils my temper.’
Recalling the scene of her bridal day--the two strong Englishmen at
the shake of hands, that had spoiled one another’s faces, she was
enlightened with a comprehension of her father’s love for the people;
seeing the spiritual of the gross ugly picture, as not every man can
do, and but a warrior Joan among women. Chillon shall teach the Spanish
people English heartiness, she thought. Lord Fleetwood’s remarks on the
expedition would have sufficed to stamp it righteous with her; that was
her logic of the low valuation of him. She fancied herself absolutely
released at his departure. Neither her sister Riette nor her friend
Owain, administering sentiment and common sense to her by turns, could
conceive how the passion for the recovery of her brother’s military name
fed the hope that she might aid in it, how the hope fed the passion.
She had besides her hunger to be at the work she could do; her Chillon’s
glory for morning sky above it.
Such was the mind Lady Arpington brought the world’s wisdom to bear
upon; deeming it in the end female only in its wildness and obstinacy.
Carinthia’s answers were few, barely varied. Her repetition of ‘my
brother’ irritated the great lady, whose argument was directed to make
her see that these duties toward her brother were primarily owing to her
husband, the man she would reclaim and could guide. And the Countess of
Fleetwood’s position, her duty to society, her dispensing of splendid
hospitality, the strengthening of her husband to do his duty to the
nation, the saving of him from a fatal step-from Rome; these were
considerations for a reasonable woman to weigh before she threw up all
to be off on the maddest of adventures. ‘Inconceivable, my dear child!’
Lady Arpington proceeded until she heard herself as droning.
Carinthia’s unmoved aspect of courteous attention appeared to invoke
the prolongation of the sermon it criticized. It had an air of
reversing their positions while she listened to the charge of folly, and
incidentally replied.
Her reason for not fearing Roman Catholic encroachments was, she said,
her having known good Catholics in the country she came from. For
herself, she should die professing the faith of her father and mother.
Behind her correct demeanour a rustic intelligence was exhibited. She
appreciated her duty to her marriage oath: ‘My husband’s honour is quite
safe with me.’ Neither England nor religion, nor woman’s proper devotion
to a husband’s temporal and spiritual welfare, had claims rivalling
her devotion to her brother. She could not explain a devotion that
instigated her to an insensate course. It seemed a kind of enthusiasm;
and it was coldly spoken; in the tone referring to ‘her husband’s
honour.’ Her brother’s enterprise had her approval because ‘her mother’s
prayer was for him to serve in the English army.’ By running over to
take a side in a Spanish squabble? she was asked and answered: ‘He will
learn war; my Chillon will show his value; he will come back a tried
soldier.’
She counted on his coming back? She did.
‘I cannot take a step forward without counting on success. We know the
chances we are to meet. My father has written of death. We do not fear
it, so it is nothing to us. We shall go together; we shall not have to
weep for one another.’
The strange young woman’s avoidance of any popular sniffle of the
pathetic had a recognized merit.
‘Tell me,’ Lady Arpington said abruptly; ‘this maid of yours, who is to
marry the secretary, or whatever he was--you are satisfied with her?’
‘She is my dear servant Madge.’ A cloud opened as Carinthia spoke the
name. ‘She will be a true wife to him. They will always be my friends!’
Nothing against the earl in that direction, apparently; unless his
countess was blest with the density of frigidity.
Society’s emissary sketched its perils for unprotected beautiful woman;
an outline of the London quadrille Henrietta danced in; and she glanced
at Carinthia and asked: ‘Have you thought of it?’
Carinthia’s eyes were on the great lady’s. Their meaning was, ‘You hit
my chief thought.’ They were read as her farthest thought. For the hint
of Henrietta’s weakness deadened her feelings with a reminder of warm
and continued solicitations rebutted; the beautiful creature’s tortures
at the idea of her exile from England. An outwearied hopelessness
expressed a passive sentiment very like indifference in the clear wide
gaze. She replied: ‘I have. My proposal to her was Cadiz, with both our
young ones. She will not.’
And there is an end to that part of the question! Lady Arpington
interpreted it, by the gaze more than the words, under subjection of the
young woman’s character. Nevertheless, she bore away Carinthia’s consent
to a final meeting with the earl at her house in London, as soon as
things were settled at Croridge. Chillon, whom she saw, was just as
hard, unforgiving, careless of his country’s dearest interests; brother
and sister were one heart of their one blood. She mentioned the general
impression in town, that the countess and only she could save the earl
from Rome. A flash of polite laughter was Chillon’s response. But after
her inspection of the elegant athlete, she did fancy it possible for
a young wife, even for Henrietta, to bear his name proudly in his
absence--if that was worth a moment’s consideration beside the serious
issues involved in her appeal to the countess; especially when the
suggestion regarding young wives left unprotected, delicately conveyed
to the husband, had failed of its purpose. The handsome husband’s brows
fluttered an interrogation, as if her clear-obscure should be further
lighted; and it could not be done. He weighed the wife by the measure
of the sister, perhaps; or his military head had no room for either.
His callousness to the danger of his country’s disintegration, from the
incessant, becoming overt, attacks of a foreign priesthood might--an
indignant great lady’s precipitation to prophecy said would--bring
chastisement on him. She said it, and she liked Henrietta, vowing to
defeat her forecast as well as she could in a land seeming forsaken by
stable principles; its nobles breaking up its national church, going
over to Rome, embracing the faith of the impostor Mahomet.
Gossip fed to the starvation bone of Lady Arpington’s report, until one
late afternoon, memorable for the breeding heat in the van of elemental
artillery, newsboys waved damp sheets of fresh print through the
streets, and society’s guardians were brought to confess, in shame and
gladness, that they had been growing sceptical of the active assistance
of Providence. At first the ‘Terrible explosion of gunpowder at
Croridge’ alarmed them lest the timely Power should have done too
much. A day later the general agitation was pacified; Lady Arpington
circulated the word ‘safe,’ and the world knew the disaster had not
engulphed Lady Fleetwood’s valuable life. She had the news by word
of mouth from the lovely Mrs. Kirby-Levellier, sister-in-law to the
countess. We are convinced we have proof of Providence intervening when
some terrific event of the number at its disposal accomplishes the thing
and no more than the thing desired. Pitiful though it may seem for a
miserly old lord to be blown up in his bed, it is necessarily a subject
of congratulation if the life, or poor remnant of a life, sacrificed was
an impediment to our righteous wishes. But this is a theme for the Dame,
who would full surely have committed another breach of the treaty, had
there not been allusion to her sisterhood’s view of the government of
human affairs.
On the day preceding the catastrophe, Chillon’s men returned to work.
He and Carinthia and Mr. Wythan lunched with Henrietta at Stoneridge.
Walking down to Lekkatts, they were astounded to see the figure of the
spectral old lord on the plank to the powder store, clad in his long
black cloak, erect. He was crossing, he told them, to count his barrels;
a dream had disturbed him. Chillon fell to rapid talk upon various
points of business, and dispersed Lord Levellier’s memory relating to
his errand. Leaning on Carinthia’s arm, he went back to the house, where
he was put to bed in peace of mind. His resuscitated physical vigour
blocked all speculation for the young people assembled at Stoneridge
that night. They hardly spoke; they strangled thoughts forming as larvae
of wishes. Henrietta would be away to Lady Arpington’s next day, Mr.
Wythan to Wales. The two voyagers were sadder by sympathy than the two
whom they were leaving to the clock’s round of desert sameness. About
ten at night Chillon and Mr. Wythan escorted Carinthia, for the night’s
watch beside her uncle, down to Lekkatts. It was midway that the
knocks on air, as of a muffled mallet at a door and at farther doors of
caverns, smote their ears and shook the ground.
After an instant of the silence following a shock, Carinthia touched her
brother’s arm; and Chillon said:
‘Not my powder!’
They ran till they had Lekkatts in sight. A half moon showed the house;
it stood. Fifty paces below, a column of opal smoke had begun to wreathe
and stretch a languid flag. The ‘rouse’ promised to Lord Levellier by
Daniel Charner’s humorous mates had hit beyond its aim. Intended to give
him a start--or ‘One-er in return,’ it surpassed his angry shot at the
body of them in effect.
Carinthia entered his room and saw that he was lying stretched
restfully. She whispered of this to Chillon, and began upon her watch,
reading her Spanish phrasebook; and she could have wept, if she had been
a woman for tears. Her duty to stay in England with Chillon’s fair wife
crossed the beckoning pages like a black smoke. Her passion to go and
share her brother’s dangers left the question of its righteousness at
each fall of the big breath.
Her uncle’s grey head on his pillow was like a flintstone in chalk under
her look by light of dawn; the chin had dropped.
CHAPTER XLVI. A CHAPTER OF UNDERCURRENTS AND SOME SURFACE FLASHES
Thus a round and a good old English practical repartee, worthy a
place in England’s book of her historical popular jests; conceived
ingeniously, no bit murderously, even humanely, if Englishmen are to be
allowed indulgence of a jolly hit back for an injury--more a feint
than a real stroke--gave the miserly veteran his final quake and cut
Chillon’s knot.
Lord Levellier dead of the joke detracted from the funny idea there had
been in the anticipation of his hearing the libertine explosion of his
grand new powder, and coming out cloaked to see what walls remained
upright. Its cleverness, however, was magnified by the shades into which
it had despatched him. The man who started the ‘rouse for old Griphard’
was named: nor did he shuffle his honours off. Chillon accused him, and
he regretfully grinned; he would have owned to it eloquently, excited
by the extreme ingenuity, but humour at the criminal bar is an abject
thing, that has to borrow from metaphysics for the expository words. He
lacked them entirely, and as he could not, fronting his master, supply
the defect with oaths, he drew up and let out on the dead old lord,
who wanted a few pounds of blasting powder, like anything else in
everybody’s way. Chillon expected the lowest of his countrymen to show
some degree of chivalry upon occasions like the present. He was too
young to perceive how it is, that a block of our speech in the needed
direction drives it storming in another, not the one closely expressing
us. Carinthia liked the man; she was grieved to hear of his having got
the sack summarily, when he might have had a further month of service
or a month’s pay. Had not the workmen’s forbearance been much tried?
And they had not stolen, they had bought the powder, only intending to
startle.
She touched her brother’s native sense of fairness and vexed him with
his cowardly devil of impatience, which kicked at a simply stupid common
man, and behaved to a lordly offender, smelling rascal, civilly. Just as
her father would have--treated the matter, she said: ‘Are we sorry for
what has happened, Chillon?’ The man had gone, the injustice was done;
the master was left to reflect on the part played by his inheritance of
the half share of ninety thousand pounds in his proper respect for Lord
Levellier’s memory. Harsh to an inferior is a horrible charge. But the
position of debtor to a titled cur brings a worse for endurance. Knowing
a part of Lord Fleetwood’s message to Lord Levellier suppressed, the
bride’s brother, her chief guardian, had treated the omission as of no
importance, and had all the while understood that he ought to give her
his full guess at the reading of it: or so his racked mind understood
it now. His old father had said: A dumb tongue can be a heavy liar; and,
Lies are usurers’ coin we pay for ten thousand per cent. His harshness
in the past hour to a workman who had suffered with him and had not
intended serious mischief was Chillon’s unsounded motive for the
resolution to be out of debt to the man he loathed. There is a Muse that
smiles aloft surveying our acts from the well-springs.
Carinthia heard her brother’s fuller version of the earl’s communication
to her uncle before the wild day of her marriage. ‘Not particularly
fitted for the married state,’ Chillon phrased it, saying: ‘He seems to
have known himself, he was honest so far.’ She was advised to think it
over, that the man was her husband.
She had her brother’s heart in her breast, she could not misread him.
She thought it over, and felt a slight drag of compassion for the
reluctant bridegroom. That was a stretch long leagues distant from love
with her; the sort of feeling one has for strange animals hurt and she
had in her childish blindness done him a hurt, and he had bitten her. He
was a weak young nobleman; he had wealth for a likeness of strength; he
had no glory about his head. Why had he not chosen a woman to sit
beside him who would have fancied his coronet a glory and his luxury a
kindness? But the poor young nobleman did not choose! The sadly comic of
his keeping to the pledge of his word--his real wife--the tyrant of the
tyrant--clothed him; the vision of him at the altar, and on the coach,
and at the Royal Sovereign Inn, and into the dimness where a placidly
smiling recollection met a curtain and lost the smile.
Suppose that her duty condemned her to stay in England on guard over
Chillon’s treasure! The perpetual struggle with a weak young nobleman
of aimless tempers and rightabout changes, pretending to the part of
husband, would, she foresaw, raise another figure of duty, enchaining a
weak young woman. The world supported his pretension; and her passion
to serve as Chillon’s comrade sank at a damping because it was flame.
Chillon had done that; Lady Arpington, to some extent; Henrietta more. A
little incident, pointing in no direction, had left a shadow of a cloud,
consequent upon Lady Arpington’s mention of Henrietta’s unprotectedness.
Stepping up the hill to meet her sister, on the morning of Henrietta’s
departure for London under the convoy of Mr. Wythan, Carinthia’s long
sight spied Kit Ines, or a man like him, in the meadow between Lekkatts
and Croridge. He stood before Henrietta, and vanished light-legged at
a gesture. Henrietta was descending to take her leave of her busied
husband; her cheeks were flushed; she would not speak of the fellow,
except to reply, ‘oh, a beggar,’ and kept asking whether she ought not
to stay at Stoneridge. And if she did she would lose the last of the
Opera in London! How could she help to investigate the cause of an
explosion so considerate to them? She sang snatches of melodies,
clung to her husband, protested her inability to leave him, and went,
appearing torn away. As well bid healthy children lie abed on a bright
summer morning, as think of holding this fair young woman bound to the
circle of safety when she has her view of pleasure sparkling like the
shore-sea mermaid’s mirror.
Suspicions were not of the brood Carinthia’s bosom harboured. Suspicion
of Chillon’s wife Carinthia could not feel. An uncaptained vessel in
the winds on high seas was imagined without a picturing of it. The
apparition of Ives, if it was he, would not fit with any conjecture. She
sent a warning to Madge, and at the same time named the girl’s wedding
day for her; pained in doing it. She had given the dear girl her word
that she would be present at this of all marriages. But a day or two
days or more would have to be spent away from Chillon; and her hunger
for every hour beside her brother confessed to the war going on within
her, as to which was her holier duty, the one on the line of her
inclinations, or that one pointing to luxury-choice between a
battle-horse and a cushioned-chair; between companionship with her
glorious brother facing death, and submission to a weak young nobleman
claiming his husband’s rights over her. She had submitted, had forgotten
his icy strangeness, had thought him love; and hers was a breast for
love, it was owned by the sobbing rise of her breast at the thought. And
she might submit again--in honour? scorning the husband? Chillon scorned
him. Yet Chillon left the decision to her, specified his excuses.
And Henrietta and Owain, Lady Arpington, Gower Woodseer, all the
world--Carinthia shuddered at the world’s blank eye on what it directs
for the acquiescence of the woman. That shred of herself she would
become, she felt herself becoming it when the view of her career beside
her brother waned. The dead Rebecca living in her heart was the only
soul among her friends whose voice was her own against the world’s.
But there came a turn where she and Rebecca separated. Rebecca’s
insurgent wishes taking shape of prophecy, robbed her of her friend
Owain, to present her an impossible object, that her mind could not
compass or figure. She bade Rebecca rest and let her keep the fancy
of Owain as her good ghost of a sun in the mist of a frosty morning;
sweeter to her than an image of love, though it were the very love,
the love of maidens’ dreams, bursting the bud of romance, issuing its
flower. Delusive love drove away with a credulous maiden, under an
English heaven, on a coach and four, from a windy hill-top, to a crash
below, and a stunned recovery in the street of small shops, mud, rain,
gloom, language like musket-fire and the wailing wounded.
No regrets, her father had said; they unman the heart we want for
to-morrow. She kept her look forward at the dead wall Chillon had thrown
up. He did not reject her company; his prospect of it had clouded; and
there were allusions to Henrietta’s loneliness. ‘His Carin could do her
service by staying, if she decided that way.’ Her enthusiasm dropped to
the level of life’s common ground. With her sustainment gone, she beheld
herself a titled doll, and had sternly to shut her eyes on the behind
scenes, bar any shadowy approaches of womanly softness; thinking her
father’s daughter dishonoured in the submissive wife of the weak young
nobleman Chillon despised as below the title of man.
Madge and Gower came to Stoneridge on their road to London three days
before their union. Madge had no fear of Ines, but said: ‘I never let
Mr. Gower out of my sight.’ Perforce of studying him with the thirsty
wonder consequent upon his proposal to her, she had got fast hold of the
skirts of his character; she ‘knew he was happy because he was always
making her laugh at herself.’ Her manner of saying, ‘She hoped to give
him a comfortable home, so that he might never be sorry for what he had
done,’ was toned as in a church, beautiful to her mistress. Speaking of
my lord’s great kindness, her eyes yearned for a second and fell humbly.
She said of Kit Ives, ‘He’s found a new “paytron,” Sarah says Mr.
Woodseer tells her, my lady. It’s another nobleman, Lord Brailstone,
has come into money lately and hired him for his pugilist when it’s
not horseracing.’ Gower spoke of thanks to Lord Fleetwood for the
independence allowing him to take a wife and settle to work in his
little Surrey home. He, too, showed he could have said more and was
advised not to push at a shut gate. My lord would attend their wedding
as well as my lady, Carinthia heard from Madge; counting it a pity that
wealthy noblemen had no professions to hinder the doing of unprofitable
things.
Her sensibility was warmer on the wedding-day of these two dear ones.
He graced the scene, she admitted, when reassured by his perfect reserve
toward her personally. He was the born nobleman in his friendliness with
the bridal pair and respectfulness to Mr. Woodseer. High social breeding
is an exquisite performance on the instrument we are, and his behaviour
to her left her mind at liberty for appreciation of it. Condescension
was not seen, his voice had no false note. During the ceremony his
eyelids blinked rapidly. At the close, he congratulated the united
couple, praising them each for the wisdom of their choice. He said to
his countess:
‘This is one of the hopeful marriages; chiefly of your making.’
She replied: ‘My prayers will be for them always.’
‘They are fortunate who have your prayers,’ he said, and turned to
Sarah Winch. She was to let him know when she also had found her ‘great
philosopher.’ Sarah was like a fish on a bank, taking gasps at the
marvel of it all; she blushed the pale pink of her complexion, and
murmured of ‘happiness.’ Gower had gone headlong into happiness, where
philosophers are smirkers and mouthers of ordinary stuff. His brightest
remark was to put the question to his father: ‘The three good things of
the Isle of Britain?’ and treble the name of Madge Woodseer for a richer
triad than the Glamorgan man could summon. Pardonably foolish; but
mindful of a past condition of indiscipline, Nature’s philosopher said
to the old minister: ‘Your example saved me for this day at a turn of
my road, sir.’ Nature’s poor wild scholar paid that tribute to the
regimental sectarian. Enough for proud philosophy to have done the thing
demonstrably right, Gower’s look at his Madge and the world said. That
‘European rose of the coal-black order,’ as one of his numerous pictures
of her painted the girl, was a torch in a cavern for dusky redness at
her cheeks. Her responses beneath the book Mr. Woodseer held open had
flashed a distant scene through Lord Fleetwood. Quaint to notice was
her reverence for the husband she set on a towering monument, and
her friendly, wifely; whispered jogs at the unpractical creature’s
forgetfulness of his wraps, his books; his writing-desk--on this
tremendous occasion, his pipe. Again the earl could have sworn, that
despite her antecedents, she brought her husband honest dower, as surely
as she gave the lucky Pagan a whole heart; and had a remarkably fine
bust to house the organ, too; and a clarionet of a voice, curiously like
her, mistress’s. And not a bad fellow, but a heathen dog, a worshipper
of Nature, walked off with the girl, whose voice had the ring of
Carinthia’s. The Powers do not explain their dispensations.
These two now one by united good-will for the junction Lord Fleetwood
himself drove through Loudon to the hills, where another carriage
awaited them by his orders, in the town of London’s race-course. As soon
as they were seated he nodded to them curtly from his box, and drove
back, leaving them puzzled. But his countess had not so very coldly seen
him start his horses to convey the modest bridal pair. His impulses to
kindness could be politic. Before quitting Whitechapel, she went with
Sarah to look at the old shop of the fruits and vegetables. They found
it shut, untenanted; Mr. Woodseer told them that the earl was owner of
it by recent purchase, and would not lease it. He had to say why; for
the countess was dull to the notion of a sentimental desecration in
the occupying of her bedchamber by poor tradespeople. She was little
flattered. The great nobleman of her imagination when she lay there
dwindled to a whimsy infant, despot of his nursery, capricious with his
toys; likely to damage himself, if left to himself.
How it might occur, she heard hourly from her hostess, Lady Arpington;
from Henrietta as well, in different terms. He seemed to her no longer
the stationed nobleman, but one of other idle men, and the saddest
of young men. His weakness cast a net on her. Worse than that drag of
compassion, she foresaw the chance of his having experience of her own
weakness, if she was to be one among idle women: she might drop to the
love of him again. Chillon’s damping of her enthusiasm sank her to a
mere breathing body, miserably an animal body, no comrade for a valiant
brother; this young man’s feeble consort, perhaps: and a creature
thirsting for pleasure, disposed to sigh in the prospect of caresses.
Enthusiasm gone, her spirited imagination of active work on the field of
danger beside her brother flapped a broken wing.
She fell too low in her esteem to charge it upon Henrietta that she
stood hesitating, leaning on the hated side of the debate; though she
could almost have blamed Chillon for refusing her his positive counsel,
and not ordering his wife to follow him. Once Lady Arpington, reasoning
with her on behalf of the husband who sought reconciliation, sneered at
her brother’s project, condemned it the more for his resolve to carry it
out now that he had means. The front of a shower sprang to Carinthia’s
eyelids. Now that her brother had means, he from whom she might be
divided was alert to keep his engagement and study war on the field,
as his father had done in foreign service, offering England a trained
soldier, should his country subsequently need him. The contrast of her
heroic brother and a luxurious idle lord scattering blood of bird or
stag, and despising the soldier’s profession, had a singular bitter
effect, consequent on her scorn of words to defend the man her heart
idolized. This last of young women for weeping wept in the lady’s
presence.
The feminine trick was pardoned to her because her unaccustomed betrayal
of that form of enervation was desired. It was read as woman’s act of
self-pity over her perplexity: which is a melting act with the woman
when there is no man to be dissolved by it. So far Lady Arpington judged
rightly; Carinthia’s tears, shed at the thought of her brother under
the world’s false judgement of him, left her spiritless to resist her
husband’s advocates. Unusual as they were, almost unknown, they were
thunder-drops and shook her.
All for the vivid surface, the Dame frets at stresses laid on
undercurrents. There is no bridling her unless the tale be here told of
how Lord Brailstone in his frenzy of the disconcerted rival boasted
over town the counterstroke he had dealt Lord Fleetwood, by sending Mrs.
Levellier a statement of the latter nobleman’s base plot to thwart
her husband’s wager, with his foul agent, the repentant and well-paid
ruffian in person, to verify every written word. The town’s conception
of the necessity for the reunion of the earl and countess was too
intense to let exciting scandal prosper. Moreover, the town’s bright
anticipation of its concluding festivity on the domain of Calesford
argued such tattle down to a baffled adorer’s malice. The Countess of
Cressett, having her cousin, the beautiful Mrs. Kirby-Levellier, in her
house, has denied Lord Brailstone admission at her door, we can affirm.
He has written to her vehemently, has called a second time, has vowed
publicly that Mrs. Levellier shall have her warning against Lord
Fleetwood. The madness of jealousy was exhibited. Lady Arpington
pronounced him in his conduct unworthy the name of gentleman. And
how foolish the scandal he circulates! Lord Fleetwood’s one aim is to
persuade his offended wife to take her place beside him. He expresses
regret everywhere, that the death of her uncle Lord Levellier withholds
her presence from Calesford during her term of mourning; and that he
has given his word for the fete on a particular day, before London runs
quite dry. His pledge of his word is notoriously inviolate. The Countess
of Cressett--an extraordinary instance of a thrice married woman
corrected in her addiction to play by her alliance with a rakish
juvenile--declares she performs the part of hostess at the request of
the Countess of Fleetwood. Perfectly convincing. The more so (if you
have the gossips’ keen scent of a deduction) since Lord Fleetwood
and young Lord Cressett and the Jesuit Lord Feltre have been seen
confabulating with very sacerdotal countenances indeed. Three English
noblemen! not counting eighty years for the whole three! And dear Lady
Cressett fears she may be called on to rescue her boy-husband from a
worse enemy than the green tables, if Lady Fleetwood should unhappily
prove unyielding, as it shames the gentle sex to imagine she will be.
In fact, we know through Mrs. Levellier, the meeting of reconciliation
between the earl and the countess comes off at Lady Arpington’s, by her
express arrangement, to-morrow: ‘none too soon,’ the expectant world of
London declared it.
The meeting came to pass three days before the great day at Calesford.
Carinthia and her lord were alone together. This had been his burning
wish at Croridge, where he could have poured his heart to her and might
have moved the wife’s. But she had formed her estimate of him there: she
had, in the comparison or clash of forces with him, grown to contemplate
the young man of wealth and rank, who had once been impatient of
an allusion to her father, and sought now to part her from her
brother--stop her breathing of fresh air. Sensationally, too, her ardour
for the exercise of her inherited gifts attributed it to him that her
father’s daughter had lived the mean existence in England, pursuing a
husband, hounded by a mother’s terrors. The influences environing her
and pressing her to submission sharpened her perusal of the small
object largely endowed by circumstances to demand it. She stood calmly
discoursing, with a tempered smile: no longer a novice in the social
manner. An equal whom he had injured waited for his remarks, gave ready
replies; and he, bowing to the visible equality, chafed at a sense of
inferiority following his acknowledgement of it. He was alone with her,
and next to dumb; she froze a full heart. As for his heart, it could not
speak at all, it was a swinging lump. The rational view of the situation
was exposed to her; and she listened to that favourably, or at least
attentively; but with an edge to her civil smile when he hinted of
entertainments, voyages, travels, an excursion to her native mountain
land. Her brother would then be facing death. The rational view, she
admitted, was one to be considered. Yes, they were married; they had
a son; they were bound to sink misunderstandings, in the interests of
their little son. He ventured to say that the child was a link uniting
them; and she looked at him. He blinked rapidly, as she had seen him
do of late, but kept his eyes on her through the nervous flutter of the
lids; his pride making a determined stand for physical mastery, though
her look was but a look. Had there been reproach in it, he would have
found the voice to speak out. Her look was a cold sky above a hungering
man. She froze his heart from the marble of her own.
And because she was for adventuring with her brother at bloody work of
civil war in the pay of a foreign government!--he found a short refuge
in that mute sneer, and was hurled from it by an apparition of the Welsh
scene of the bitten infant, and Carinthia volunteering to do the bloody
work which would have saved it; which he had contested, ridiculed. Right
then, her insanity now conjured the wretched figure of him opposing the
martyr her splendid humaneness had offered her to be, and dominated his
reason, subjected him to admire--on to worship of the woman, whatever
she might do. Just such a feeling for a woman he had dreamed of in his
younger time, doubting that he would ever meet the fleshly woman to
impose it. His heart broke the frost she breathed. Yet, if he gave way
to the run of speech, he knew himself unmanned, and the fatal habit of
superiority stopped his tongue after he had uttered the name he loved to
speak, as nearest to the embrace of her.
‘Carinthia--so I think, as I said, we both see the common sense of the
position. I regret over and over again--we’ll discuss all that when we
meet after this Calesford affair. I shall have things to say. You will
overlook, I am sure--well, men are men!--or try to. Perhaps I’m not
worse than--we’ll say, some. You will, I know,--I have learnt it,--be of
great service, help to me; double my value, I believe; more than double
it. You will receive me--here? Or at Croridge or Esslemont; and alone
together, as now, I beg.’
That was what he said. Having said it, his escape from high tragics
in the comfortable worldly tone rejoiced him; to some extent also the
courteous audience she gave him. And her hand was not refused. Judging
by her aspect, the plain common-sense ground of their situation was
accepted for the best opening step to their union; though she must have
had her feelings beneath it, and God knew that he had! Her hand was
friendly. He could have thanked her for yielding her hand without
a stage scene; she had fine breeding by nature. The gracefullest of
trained ladies could not have passed through such an interview so
perfectly in the right key; and this was the woman he had seen at the
wrestle with hideous death to save a muddy street-child! She touched the
gentleman in him. Hard as it was while he held the hand of the wife, his
little son’s mother, who might be called his bride, and drew him by
the contact of their blood to a memory, seeming impossible, some
other world’s attested reality,--she the angel, he the demon of
it,--unimaginable, yet present, palpable, a fact beyond his mind, he let
her hand fall scarce pressed. Did she expect more than the common sense
of it to be said? The ‘more’ was due to her, and should partly be said
at their next meeting for the no further separating; or else he would
vow in his heart to spread it out over a whole life’s course of wakeful
devotion, with here and there a hint of his younger black nature. Better
that except for a desire seizing him to make sacrifice of the demon he
had been, offer him up hideously naked to her mercy. But it was a thing
to be done by hints, by fits, by small doses. She could only gradually
be brought to the comprehension of how the man or demon found
indemnification under his yoke of marriage in snatching her, to torment,
perhaps betray; and solace for the hurt to his pride in spreading a
snare for the beautiful Henrietta. A confession! It could be to none but
the priest.
Knowledge of Carinthia would have urged him to the confession
straightway. In spite of horror, the task of helping to wash a black
soul white would have been her compensation for loss of companionship
with her soldier brother. She would have held hot iron to the rabid
wound and come to a love of the rescued sufferer.
It seemed to please her when he spoke of Mr. Rose Mackrell’s
applications to get back his volume of her father’s Book of Maxims.
‘There is mine,’ she said.
For the sake of winning her quick gleam at any word of the bridal
couple, he conjured a picture of her Madge and his Gower, saying: ‘That
marriage--as you will learn--proves him honest from head to foot; as she
is in her way, too.’
‘Oh, she is,’ was the answer.
‘We shall be driving down to them very soon, Carinthia.’
‘It will delight them to see either of us, my lord.’
‘My lady, adieu until I am over with this Calesford,’ he gestured, as in
fetters.
She spared him the my lording as she said adieu, sensitive as she was,
and to his perception now.
Lady Arpington had a satisfactory two minutes with him before he left
the house. London town, on the great day at Calesford, interchanged
communications, to the comforting effect, that the Countess of Fleetwood
would reign over the next entertainment.