OPENING STAGE OF THE HONEYMOON
A famous maxim in the book of the Old Buccaneer, treating of PRECAUTION,
as 'The brave man's clean conscience,' with sound counsel to the
adventurous, has it:--
'Then you sail away into the tornado, happy as a sealed bottle of ripe
wine.'
It should mean, that brave men entering the jaws of hurricanes are found
to have cheerful hearts in them when they know they have done their best.
But, touching the picture of happiness, conceive the bounteous Bacchic
spirit in the devoutness of a Sophocles, and you find comparison
neighbour closely between the sealed wine-flask and the bride, who is
being driven by her husband to the nest of the unknown on her marriage
morn.
Seated beside him, with bosom at heave and shut mouth, in a strange land,
travelling cloud-like, rushing like the shower-cloud to the vale, this
Carinthia, suddenly wedded, passionately grateful for humbleness exalted,
virginly sensible of treasures of love to give, resembled the inanimate
and most inspiring, was mindless and inexpressive, past memory, beyond
the hopes, a thing of the thrilled blood and skylark air, since she laid
her hand in this young man's. His not speaking to her was accepted.
Her blood rather than recollection revived their exchanges during the
dance at Baden, for assurance that their likings were one, their aims
rapturously one; that he was she, she he, the two hearts making one soul.
Could she give as much as he? It was hardly asked. If we feel we can
give our breath of life, the strength of the feeling fully answers. It
bubbles perpetually from the depth like a well-spring in tumult. Two
hearts that make one soul do not separately count their gifts.
For the rest, her hunger to admire disposed her to an absorbing sentience
of his acts; the trifles, gestures, manner of this and that; which were
seized as they flew, and swiftly assimilated to stamp his personality.
Driving was the piece of skill she could not do. Her husband's mastery
of the reins endowed him with the beauty of those harmonious trotters he
guided and kept to their pace; and the humming rush of the pace, the
smooth torrent of the brown heath-knolls and reddish pits and hedge-lines
and grass-flats and copses pouring the counter-way of her advance,
belonged to his wizardry. The bearing of her onward was her abandonment
to him. Delicious as mountain air, the wind sang; it had a song of many
voices. Quite as much as on the mountains, there was the keen, the
blissful, nerve-knotting catch of the presence of danger in the steep
descents, taken as if swallowed, without swerve or check. She was in her
husband's hands. At times, at the pitch of a rapid shelving, that was
like a fall, her heart went down; and at the next throb exalted before it
rose, not reasoning why;--her confidence was in him; she was his comrade
whatever chanced. Up over the mountain-peaks she had known edged
moments, little heeded in their passage, when life is poised as a crystal
pitcher on the head, in peril of a step. Then she had been dependent on
herself. Now she had the joy of trusting to her husband.
His hard leftward eye had view of her askant, if he cared to see how she
bore the trial; and so relentlessly did he take the slopes, that the man
inside pushed out an inquiring pate, the two grooms tightened arms across
their chests. Her face was calmly set, wakeful, but unwrinkled: the
creature did not count among timid girls--or among civilized. She had
got what she wanted from her madman--mad in his impulses, mad in his
reading of honour. She was the sister of Henrietta's husband. Henrietta
bore the name she had quitted. Could madness go beyond the marrying of
the creature? He chafed at her containment, at her courage, her silence,
her withholding the brazen or the fawnish look-up, either of which he
would have hated.
He, however, was dragged to look down. Neither Gorgon nor Venus, nor a
mingling of them, she had the chasm of the face, recalling the face of
his bondage, seen first that night at Baden. It recalled and it was not
the face; it was the skull of the face, or the flesh of the spirit.
Occasionally she looked, for a twinkle or two, the creature or vision she
had been, as if to mock by reminding him. She was the abhorred delusion,
who captured him by his nerves, ensnared his word--the doing of a foul
witch. How had it leapt from his mouth? She must have worked for it.
The word spoken--she must have known it--he was bound, or the detested
Henrietta would have said: Not even true to his word!
To see her now, this girl, insisting to share his name, for a slip of his
tongue, despite the warning sent her through her uncle, had that face
much as a leaden winter landscape pretends to be the country radiant in
colour. She belonged to the order of the variable animals--a woman
indeed!--womanish enough in that. There are men who love women--the idea
of woman. Woman is their shepherdess of sheep. He loved freedom,
loathed the subjection of a partnership; could undergo it only in
adoration of an ineffable splendour. He had stepped to the altar
fancying she might keep to her part of the contract by appearing the
miracle that subdued him. Seen by light of day, this bitter object
beside him was a witch without her spells; that is, the skeleton of the
seductive, ghastliest among horrors and ironies. Let her have the credit
of doing her work thoroughly before the exposure. She had done it.
She might have helped--such was the stipulation of his mad freak in
consenting to the bondage--yes, she might have helped to soften the sting
of his wound. She was beside him bearing his name, for the perpetual
pouring of an acid on the wound that vile Henrietta--poisoned honey of a
girl!--had dealt.
He glanced down at his possession:--heaven and the yawning pit were the
contrast! Poisoned honey is after all honey while you eat it. Here
there was nothing but a rocky bowl of emptiness. And who was she? She
was the sister of Henrietta's husband. He was expected to embrace the
sister of Henrietta's husband. Those two were on their bridal tour.
This creature was also the daughter of an ancient impostor and desperado
called the Old Buccaneer; a distinguished member of the family of the
Lincolnshire Kirbys, boasting a present representative grimly acquitted,
men said, on a trial for murder. An eminent alliance! Society
considered the Earl of Fleetwood wildish, though he could manage his
affairs. He and his lawyers had them under strict control. How of
himself? The prize of the English marriage market had taken to his bosom
for his winsome bride the daughter of the Old Buccaneer. He was to mix
his blood with the blood of the Lincolnshire Kirbys, lying pallid under
the hesitating acquittal of a divided jury.
How had he come to this pass, which swung him round to think almost
regretfully of the scorned multitude of fair besiegers in the market,
some of whom had their unpoetic charms?
He was renowned and unrivalled as the man of stainless honour: the
one living man of his word. He had never broken it--never would. There
was his distinction among the herd. In that, a man is princely above
princes. The nobility of Edward Russett, Earl of Fleetwood, surpassed
the nobility of common nobles. But, by all that is holy, he pays for
his distinction.
The creature beside him is a franked issue of her old pirate of a father
in one respect--nothing frightens her. There she sits; not a screw of
her brows or her lips; and the coach rocked, they were sharp on a spill
midway of the last descent. It rocks again. She thinks it scarce worth
while to look up to reassure him. She is looking over the country.
'Have you been used to driving?' he said.
She replied: 'No, it is new to me on a coach.'
Carinthia felt at once how wild the wish or half expectation that he
would resume the glowing communion of the night which had plighted them.
She did not this time say 'my husband,' still it flicked a whip at his
ears.
She had made it more offensive, by so richly toning the official title
just won from him as to ring it on the nerves; one had to block it or be
invaded. An anticipation that it would certainly recur haunted every
opening of her mouth.
Now that it did not, he felt the gap, relieved, and yet pricked to
imagine a mimicry of her tones, for the odd foreignness of the word and
the sound. She had a voice of her own besides her courage. At the
altar, her responses had their music. No wonder: the day was hers.
'My husband' was a manner of saying 'my fish.'
He, spoke very civilly. 'Oblige me by telling me what name you are
accustomed to answer to.'
She seemed unaware of an Arctic husband, and replied: 'My father called
me Carin--short for Carinthia. My mother called me Janey; my second name
is Jane. My brother Chillon says both. Henrietta calls me Janey.'
The creature appeared dead flesh to goads. But the name of her sister-
in-law on her lips returned the stroke neatly. She spared him one whip,
to cut him with another.
'You have not informed me which of these names you prefer.'
'Oh, my husband, it is as you shall please.'
Fleetwood smartened the trot of his team, and there was a to-do with the
rakish leaders.
Fairies of a malignant humour in former days used to punish the
unhappiest of the naughty men who were not favourites, by suddenly
planting a hump on their backs. Off the bedevilled wretches pranced,
and they kicked, they snorted, whinnied, rolled, galloped, outflying the
wind, but not the dismal rider. Marriage is our incubus now. No
explanation is offered of why we are afflicted; we have simply offended,
or some one absent has offended, and we are handy. The spiteful hag of
power ties a wife to us; perhaps for the reason, that we behaved in the
spirit of a better time by being chivalrously honourable. Wives are just
as inexplicable curses, just as ineradicable and astonishing as humps
imposed on shapely backs.
Fleetwood lashed his horses until Carinthia's low cry of entreaty rose to
surprise. That stung him.
'Leave the coachman to his devices: we have an appointment and must keep
it,' he said.
'They go so willingly.'
'Good beasts, in their way.'
'I do not like the whip.'
'I have the same objection.'
They were on the level of the vale, going along a road between farms and
mansions, meadows and gardenplots and park-palings. A strong warm wind
drove the pack of clouds over the tree-tops and charged at the branches.
English scenery, animating air; a rouse to the blood and the mind.
Carinthia did not ask for hues. She had come to love of the dark land
with the warm lifting wind, the big trees and the hedges, and the stately
houses, and people requiring to be studied, who mean well and are warm
somewhere below, as chimneypots are, though they are so stiff.
English people dislike endearments, she had found. It might be that her
husband disliked any show of fondness. He would have to be studied very
much. He was not like others, as Henrietta had warned her. From
thinking of him fervidly, she was already past the marvel of the thought
that she called him husband. At the same time, a curious intimation,
gathered she knew not whence, of the word 'husband' on a young wife's
lips as being a foreign sound in England, advised her to withhold it.
His behaviour was instructing her.
'Are you weather-wise?--able to tell when the clouds will hold off or
pelt,' he said, to be very civil to a neighbour.
She collected her understanding, apparently; treating a conversational
run of the tongue as a question to be pondered; and the horses paid for
it. Ordinarily he was gentle with his beasts. He lashed at her in his
heart for perverting the humanest of men.
'Father was,' she replied.
'Oh! I have heard of him.'
Her face lightened. 'Father had a great name in England.'
'The Old Buccaneer, I think.'
'I do not know. He was a seaman of the navy, like Admiral Fakenham is.
Weather at sea, weather on the mountains, he could foretell it always.
He wrote a book; I have a copy you will read. It is a book of Maxims.
He often speaks of the weather. English weather and women, he says.
But not my mother. My mother he stood aside by herself--pas capricieuse
du tout! Because she would be out in the weather and brave the weather.
She rode, she swam, best of any woman. If she could have known you, what
pleasure for me! Mother learnt to read mountain weather from father.
I did it too. But sometimes on the high fields' upper snows it is very
surprising. Father has been caught. Here the cloud is down near the
earth and the strong wind keeps the rain from falling. How long the wind
will blow I cannot guess. But you love the mountains. We spoke . . .
And mountains' adventures we both love. I will talk French if you like,
for, I think, German you do not speak. I may speak English better than
French; but I am afraid of my English with you.'
'Dear me!' quoth Fleetwood, and he murmured politely and cursorily,
attentive to his coachman business. She had a voice that clove the noise
of the wheels, and she had a desire to talk--that was evident. Talk of
her father set her prattling. It became clear also to his not dishonest,
his impressionable mind, that her baby English might be natural. Or she
was mildly playing on it, to give herself an air.
He had no remembrance of such baby English at Baden. There, however,
she was in a state of enthusiasm--the sort of illuminated transparency
they show at the end of fireworks. Mention of her old scapegrace of a
father lit her up again. The girl there and the girl here were no doubt
the same. It could not be said that she had duped him; he had done it
for himself--acted on by a particular agency. This creature had not the
capacity to dupe. He had armed a bluntwitted young woman with his
idiocy, and she had dealt the stroke; different in scarce a degree by
nature from other young women of prey.
But her look at times, and now and then her voice, gave sign that she
counted on befooling him as well, to reconcile him to his bondage. The
calculation was excessive. No woman had done it yet. Idiocy plunged him
the step which reawakened understanding; and to keep his whole mind alert
on guard against any sort of satisfaction with his bargain, he frankly
referred to the cause. Not female arts, but nature's impulses, it was
his passion for the wondrous in the look of a woman's face, the new
morning of the idea of women in the look, and the peep into imaginary
novel character, did the trick of enslaving him. Call it idiocy. Such
it was. Once acknowledged, it is not likely to recur. An implacable
reason sits in its place, with a keen blade for efforts to carry the
imposture further afield or make it agreeable. Yet, after giving his
word to Lord Levellier, he had prodded himself to think the burden of
this wild young woman might be absurdly tolerable and a laugh at the
world.
A solicitude for the animal was marked by his inquiry 'You are not hungry
yet?'
'Oh no, not yet,' said she, oddly enlivened.
They had a hamper and were independent of stoppages for provision, he
informed her. What more delightful? cried her look, seeing the first
mid-day's rest and meal with Chillon on the walk over the mountain from
their empty home.
She could get up enthusiasm for a stocked hamper! And when told of some
business that drew him to a meadow they were nearing, she said she would
be glad to help, if she could. 'I learn quickly, I know.'
His head acquiesced. The daughter of the Old Buccaneer might learn the
business quickly, perhaps; a singularly cutting smile was on his tight
lips, in memory of a desire he had as a boy to join hands with an
Amazonian damsel and be out over the world for adventures, comrade and
bride as one. Here the creature sat. Life is the burlesque of young
dreams; or they precipitate us on the roar and grin of a recognized beast
world.
The devil possessing him gnawed so furiously that a partial mitigation of
the pain was afforded by sight of waving hats on a hill-rise of the road.
He flourished his whip. The hats continued at wind-mill work. It
signified brisk news to him, and prospect of glee to propitiate any
number of devils.
'You will want a maid to attend on you,' he said.
She replied: 'I am not used to attendance on me. Henrietta's maid would
help. I did not want her. I had no maid at home. I can do for myself.
Father and mother liked me to be very independent.'
He supposed he would have to hear her spelling her words out next.
The hill-top was gained; twenty paces of pretty trotting brought up the
coach beside an inn porch, in the style of the finish dear to whips, and
even imperative upon them, if they love their art. Two gentlemen stood
in the road, and a young woman at the inn door; a dark-haired girl of an
anxious countenance. Her puckers vanished at some signal from inside the
coach.
'All right, Madge; nothing to fear,' Fleetwood called to her, and she
curtseyed.
He alighted, saying to her, before he spoke to his friends: 'I've brought
him safe; had him under my eye the last four and twenty hours. He'll do
the trick to-day. You don't bet?'
'Oh! my lord, no.'
'Help the lady down. Out with you, Ines!'
The light-legged barge-faced man touched ground capering. He was greeted
'Kit' by the pair of gentlemen, who shook hands with him, after he had
faintly simulated the challenge to a jig with Madge. She flounced from
him, holding her arms up to the lady. Landlord, landlady, and hostler
besought the lady to stay for the fixing of a ladder. Carinthia stepped,
leaped, and entered the inn, Fleetwood remarking:
'We are very independent, Chummy Potts.'
'Cordy bally, by Jove!' Potts cried. But the moment after this
disengaged ejaculation, he was taken with a bewilderment. 'At the
Opera?' he questioned of his perplexity.
'No, sir, not at the Opera,' Fleetwood rejoined. 'The lady's last public
appearance was at the altar.'
'Sort of a suspicion of having seen her somewhere. Left her husband
behind, has she?'
'You see: she has gone in.'
The scoring of a proposition of Euclid on the forehead of Potts amused
him and the other gentleman, who was hailed 'Mallard!' and cared nothing
for problems involving the female of man when such work was to the fore
as the pugilistic encounter of the Earl of Fleetwood's chosen Kit Ines,
with Lord Brailstone's unbeaten and well-backed Ben Todds.
Ines had done pretty things from the age of seventeen to his twenty-third
year. Remarkably clever things they were, to be called great in the
annals of the Ring. The point, however, was, that the pockets of his
backers had seriously felt his latest fight. He received a dog's licking
at the hands of Lummy Phelps, his inferior in skill, fighting two to one
of the odds; and all because of his fatal addiction to the breaking of
his trainer's imposed fast in liquids on, the night before the battle.
Right through his training, up to that hour, the rascal was devout; the
majority's money rattled all on the snug safe side. And how did he get
at the bottle? His trainers never could say. But what made him turn
himself into a headlong ass, when he had only to wait a night to sit
among friends and worshippers drinking off his tumbler upon tumbler with
the honours? It was past his wits to explain. Endurance of his
privation had snapped in him; or else, which is more likely, this Genius
of the Ring was tempted by his genius on the summit of his perfected
powers to believe the battle his own, and celebrate it, as became a
victor despising the drubbed antagonist.
In any case, he drank, and a minor man gave him the dog's licking..
'Went into it puffy, came out of it bunged,' the chronicle resounding
over England ran. Old England read of an 'eyeless carcase' heroically
stepping up to time for three rounds of mashing punishment. If he had
won the day after all, the country would have been electrified. It
sympathized on the side of his backers too much to do more than nod a
short approval of his fortitude. To sink with flag flying is next to
sinking the enemy. There was talk of a girl present at the fight, and of
how she received the eyeless, almost faceless, carcase of her sweetheart
Kit, and carried him away in a little donkey-cart, comfortably cushioned
to meet disaster. This petty incident drew the attention of the Earl of
Fleetwood, then beginning to be known as the diamond of uncounted facets,
patron of the pick of all departments of manly activity in England.
The devotion of the girl Madge to her sweetheart was really a fine story.
Fleetwood touched on it to Mr. Mallard, speaking of it like the gentleman
he could be, while Chumley Potts wagged impatient acquiescence in a
romantic episode of the Ring, that kept the talk from the hotter theme.
'Money's Bank of England to-day, you think?' he interposed, and had his
answer after Mallard had said:
'The girl 's rather good-looking, too.'
'You may double your bets, Chummy. I had the fellow to his tea at my
dinner-table yesterday evening; locked him in his bedroom, and had him
up and out for a morning spin at six. His trainer, Flipper's on the
field, drove from Esslemont at nine, confident as trumps.'
'Deuce of a good-looking girl,' Potts could now afford to say; and he
sang out: 'Feel fit, lucky dog?'
'Concert pitch!' was the declaration of Kit Ives.
'How about Lord Brailstone's man?'
'Female partner in a quadrille, sir.'
'Ah!' Potts doated on his limbs with a butcher's eye for prize joints.
'Cock-sure has crowed low by sunset,' Mallard observed.
Fleetwood offered him to take his bets.
'You're heavy on it with Brailstone?' said Mallard.
'Three thousand.'
'I'd back you for your luck blindfold.'
A ruffle of sourness shot over the features of the earl, and was noticed
by both eager betters, who exchanged a glance.
Potts inspected his watch, and said half aloud: 'Liver, ten to one! That
never meant bad luck--except bad to act on. We slept here last night,
you know. It 's a mile and a quarter from the Royal Sovereign to the
field of glory. Pretty well time to start. Brailstone has a drive of a
couple of miles. Coaches from London down by this time. Abrane's dead
on Ben Todds, any odds. Poor old Braney! "Steady man, Todds." Backs
him because he's a "respectable citizen,"--don't drink. A prize-fighter
total abstainer has no spurts. Old Braney's branded for the losing side.
You might bet against Braney blindfold, Mallard. How long shall you take
to polish him off, Kit Ines?'
The opponent of Ben Todds calculated.
'Well, sir, steady Benny ought to be satisfied with his dose in, say,
about forty minutes. Maybe he won't own to it before an hour and ten.
He's got a proud English stomach.'
'Shall we be late?' Potts asked.
'Jump in,' Fleetwood said to his man. 'We may be five minutes after
time, Chummy. I had a longer drive, and had to get married on the way,
and--ah, here they are!'
'Lady coming?'
'I fancy she sticks to the coach; I don't know her tastes. Madge must
see her through it, that's positive.'
Potts deferred his astonishment at the things he was hearing and seeing,
which were only Fleetwood's riddles. The fight and the bets rang every
other matter out of his head. He beheld the lady, who had come down from
the coach like a columbine, mount it like Bean-stalk Jack. Madge was not
half so clever, and required a hand at her elbow.
After, giving hurried directions to Rundles, the landlord of the Royal
Sovereign, Fleetwood took the reins, and all three gentlemen touched hats
to the curtseying figure of Mrs. Rundles.
'You have heard, I dare say--it's an English scene,' he spoke, partly
turning his face, to Carinthia; 'particularly select to-day. Their
Majesties might look on, as the Caesars did in Rome. Pity we can't
persuade them. They ought to set the fashion. Here we have the English
people at their grandest, in prime condition, if they were not drunk
overnight; and dogged, perfectly awake, magnanimous, all for fair play;
fine fellows, upon my word. A little blood, of course.'
But the daughter of the Old Buccaneer would have inherited a tenderness
for the sight of blood. She should make a natural Lady Patroness of
England's National Sports. We might turn her to that purpose; wander
over England with a tail of shouting riff-raft; have exhibitions, join
in them, display our accomplishments; issue challenges to fence, shoot,
walk, run, box, in time: the creature has muscle. It's one way of
crowning a freak; we follow the direction, since the deed done can't
be undone; and a precious poetical life, too! You may get as royally
intoxicated on swipes as on choice wine; win a name for yourself as
the husband of such a wife; a name in sporting journals and shilling
biographies: quite a revival of the Peerage they have begun to rail at!
'I would not wish to leave you,' said Carinthia.
'You have chosen,' said Fleetwood.