THE LADY'S LETTER
Is not the lover a prophet? He that fervently desires may well be one;
his hurried nature is alive with warmth to break the possible blow: and
if his fears were not needed they were shadows; and if fulfilled, was he
not convinced of his misfortune by a dark anticipation that rarely erred?
Descending the hills, he remembered several omens: the sun had sunk when
he looked down on the villas and clustered houses, not an edge of the orb
had been seen; the admiral's quarters in tile broad-faced hotel had worn
an appearance resembling the empty house of yesterday; the encounter with
the fellow on the rocks had a bad whisper of impish tripping. And what
moved Carinthia to speak of going on?
A letter was handed to Chillon in the hall of the admiral's hotel, where
his baggage had already been delivered. The manager was deploring the
circumstance that his rooms were full to the roof, when Chillon said:
'Well, we must wash and eat'; and Carinthia, from watching her brother's
forehead during his perusal of the letter, declared her readiness for
anything. He gave her the letter to read by herself while preparing to
sit at table, unwilling to ask her for a further tax on her energies--but
it was she who had spoken of going on! He thought of it as of a debt she
had contracted and might be supposed to think payable to their
misfortune.
She read off the first two sentences.
'We can have a carriage here, Chillon; order a carriage; I shall get as
much sleep in a carriage as in a bed: I shall enjoy driving at night,'
she said immediately, and strongly urged it and forced him to yield, the
manager observing that a carriage could be had.
In the privacy of her room, admiring the clear flowing hand, she read the
words, delicious in their strangeness to her, notwithstanding the heavy
news, as though they were sung out of a night-sky:
'Most picturesque of Castles!
May none these marks efface,
For they appeal from Tyranny . . .'
'We start at noon to-day. Sailing orders have been issued, and I could
only have resisted them in my own person by casting myself overboard.
I go like the boat behind the vessel. You were expected yesterday, at
latest this morning. I have seen boxes in the hall, with a name on them
not foreign to me. Why does the master tarry? Sir, of your valliance
you should have held to your good vow,--quoth the damozel, for now you
see me sore perplexed and that you did not your devoir is my affliction.
Where lingers chivalry, she should have proceeded, if not with my knight?
I feast on your regrets. I would not have you less than miserable: and I
fear the reason is, that I am not so very, very sure you will be so at
all or very hugely, as I would command it of you for just time enough to
see that change over your eyebrows I know so well.
'If you had seen a certain Henrietta yesterday you would have the picture
of how you ought to look. The admiral was heard welcoming a new arrival
--you can hear him. She ran down the stairs quicker than any cascade of
this district, she would have made a bet with Livia that it could be no
one else--her hand was out, before she was aware of the difference it was
locked in Lord F.'s!
'Let the guilty absent suffer for causing such a betrayal of
disappointment. I must be avenged! But if indeed you are unhappy and
would like to chide the innocent, I am full of compassion for the poor
gentleman inheriting my legitimate feelings of wrath, and beg merely that
he will not pour them out on me with pen and paper, but from his lips and
eyes.
'Time pressing, I chatter no more. The destination is Livia's beloved
Baden. We rest a night in the city of Mozart, a night at Munich, a night
at Stuttgart. Baden will detain my cousin full a week. She has Captain
Abrane and Sir Meeson Corby in attendance--her long shadow and her short:
both devoted to Lord F., to win her smile, and how he drives them! The
captain has been paraded on the promenade, to the stupefaction of the
foreigner. Princes, counts, generals, diplomats passed under him in awe.
I am told that he is called St. Christopher.
'Why do we go thus hastily?--my friend, this letter has to be concealed.
I know some one who sees in the dark.
'Think no harm of Livia. She is bent upon my worldly advantage, and that
is plain even to the person rejecting it. How much more so must it be to
papa, though he likes you, and when you are near him would perhaps, in a
fit of unworldliness, be almost as reckless as the creature he calls
madcap and would rather call countess. No! sooner with a Will-o'-the-
wisp, my friend. Who could ever know where the man was when he himself
never knows where he is. He is the wind that bloweth as it listeth--
because it is without an aim or always with a new one. And am I the one
to direct him? I need direction. My lord and sovereign must fix my
mind. I am volatile, earthly, not to be trusted if I do not worship. He
himself said to me that--he reads our characters. "Nothing but a proved
hero will satisfy Henrietta," his words! And the hero must be shining
like a beacon-fire kept in a blaze. Quite true; I own it. Is Chillon
Kirby satisfied? He ought to be.
'But oh!--to be yoked is an insufferable thought, unless we name all the
conditions. But to be yoked to a creature of impulses! Really I could
only describe his erratic nature by commending you to the study of a
dragon-fly. It would map you an idea of what he has been in the twenty-
four hours since we had him here. They tell me a vain sort of person is
the cause. Can she be the cause of his resolving to have a residence
here, to buy up half the valley--erecting a royal palace--and marking
out the site--raving about it in the wildest language, poetical if
it had been a little reasonable--and then, after a night, suddenly,
unaccountably, hating the place, and being under the necessity of flying
from it in hot haste, tearing us all away, as if we were attached to a
kite that will neither mount nor fall, but rushes about headlong. Has he
heard, or suspected? or seen certain boxes bearing a name? Livia has no
suspicion, though she thinks me wonderfully contented in so dull a place,
where it has rained nine days in a fortnight. I ask myself whether my
manner of greeting him betrayed my expectation of another. He has
brains. It is the greatest of errors to suppose him at all like the
common run of rich young noblemen. He seems to thirst for brilliant wits
and original sayings. His ambition is to lead all England in everything!
I readily acknowledge that he has generous ideas too; but try to hold
him, deny him his liberty, and it would be seen how desperate and
relentless he would be to get loose. Of this I am convinced: he would be
either the most abject of lovers, or a woman (if it turned out not to be
love) would find him the most unscrupulous of yoke-fellows. Yoke-fellow!
She would not have her reason in consenting. A lamb and a furious bull!
Papa and I have had a serious talk. He shuts his ears to my comparisons,
but admits, that as I am the principal person concerned, etc. Rich and a
nobleman is too tempting for an anxious father; and Livia's influence is
paramount. She has not said a syllable in depreciation of you. That is
to her credit. She also admits that I must yield freely if at all, and
she grants me the use of similes; but her tactics are to contest them one
by one, and the admirable pretender is not as shifty as the mariner's
breeze, he is not like the wandering spark in burnt paper, of which you
cannot say whether it is chasing or chased: it is I who am the shifty
Pole to the steadiest of magnets. She is a princess in other things
besides her superiority to Physics. There will be wild scenes at Baden.
'My Diary of to-day is all bestowed on you. What have I to write in it
except the pair of commas under the last line of yesterday--" He has not
come!" Oh! to be caring for a he.
'O that I were with your sister now, on one side of her idol, to correct
her extravagant idolatry! I long for her. I had a number of nice little
phrases to pet her with.
'You have said (I have it written) that men who are liked by men are the
best friends for women. In which case, the earl should be worthy of our
friendship; he is liked. Captain Abrane and Sir Meeson, in spite of the
hard service he imposes on them with such comical haughtiness, incline to
speak well of him, and Methuen Rivers--here for two days on his way to
his embassy at Vienna--assured us he is the rarest of gentlemen on the
point of honour of his word. They have stories of him, to confirm
Livia's eulogies, showing him punctilious to chivalry: No man alive is
like him in that, they say. He grieves me. All that you have to fear
is my pity for one so sensitive. So speed, sir! It is not good for us
to be much alone, and I am alone when you are absent.
'I hear military music!
'How grand that music makes the dullest world appear in a minute. There
is a magic in it to bring you to me from the most dreadful of distances.
--Chillon! it would kill me!--Writing here and you perhaps behind the
hill, I can hardly bear it;--I am torn away, my hand will not any more.
This music burst out to mock me! Adieu.
'I am yours.
'Your HENRIETTA.
'A kiss to the sister. It is owing to her.'
Carinthia kissed the letter on that last line. It seemed to her to end
in a celestial shower.
She was oppressed by wonder of the writer who could run like the rill of
the mountains in written speech; and her recollection of the contents
perpetually hurried to the close, which was more in her way of writing,
for there the brief sentences had a throb beneath them.
She did not speak of the letter to her brother when she returned it. A
night in the carriage, against his shoulder, was her happy prospect, in
the thought that she would be with her dearest all night, touching him
asleep, and in the sweet sense of being near to the beloved of the
fairest angel of her sex. They pursued their journey soon after Anton
was dismissed with warm shakes of the hand and appointments for a
possible year in the future.
The blast of the postillion's horn on the dark highway moved Chillon to
say: 'This is what they call posting, my dear.'
She replied: 'Tell me, brother: I do not understand, "Let none these
marks efface," at the commencement, after most "picturesque of Castles":
--that is you.'
'They are quoted from the verses of a lord who was a poet, addressed to
the castle on Lake Leman. She will read them to you.'
'Will she?'
The mention of the lord set Carinthia thinking of the lord whom that
beautiful SHE pitied because she was forced to wound him and he was very
sensitive. Wrapped in Henrietta, she slept through the joltings of the
carriage, the grinding of the wheels, the blowing of the horn, the
flashes of the late moonlight and the kindling of dawn.