AN EXHIBITION OF SOME CHAMPIONS OF THE STRICKEN LADY
Close upon the hour of ten every morning the fortuitous meeting of two
gentlemen at Mrs. Warwick's housedoor was a signal for punctiliously
stately greetings, the salutation of the raised hat and a bow of the head
from a position of military erectness, followed by the remark: 'I trust
you are well, sir': to which the reply: 'I am very well, sir, and trust
you are the same,' was deemed a complimentary fulfilment of their mutual
obligation in presence. Mr. Sullivan Smith's initiative imparted this
exercise of formal manners to Mr. Arthur Rhodes, whose renewed
appearance, at the minute of his own arrival, he viewed, as he did not
conceal, with a disappointed and a reproving eye. The inquiry after the
state of Mrs. Warwick's health having received its tolerably comforting
answer from the footman, they left their cards in turn, then descended
the doorsteps, faced for the performance of the salute, and departed
their contrary ways.
The pleasing intelligence refreshed them one morning, that they would.
be welcomed by Lady Dunstane. Thereupon Mr. Sullivan Smith wheeled about
to Mr. Arthur Rhodes and observed to him: 'Sir, I might claim, by right
of seniority, to be the foremost of us two in offering my respects to the
lady, but the way is open to you.'
'Sir,' said Mr. Arthur Rhodes, 'permit me to defer to your many superior
titles to that distinction.'
'The honour, sir, lies rather in the bestowing than in the taking.'
'I venture to think, sir, that though I cannot speak pure Castilian, I
require no lesson from a Grandee of Spain in acknowledging the dues of my
betters.'
'I will avow myself conquered, sir, by your overpowering condescension;'
said Mr. Sullivan Smith; 'and I entreat you--to ascribe my acceptance of
your brief retirement to the urgent character of the business I have at
heart.'
He laid his fingers on the panting spot, and bowed.
Mr. Arthur Rhodes, likewise bowing, deferentially fell to rearward.
'If I mistake not,' said the Irish gentleman, 'I am indebted to Mr.
Rhodes; and we have been joint participators in the hospitality of Mrs.
Warwick's table.'
The English gentleman replied: 'It was there that I first had the
pleasure of an acquaintance which is graven on my memory, as the words of
the wise king on tablets of gold and silver.'
Mr. Sullivan Smith gravely smiled at the unwonted match he had found in
ceremonious humour, in Saxonland, and saying: 'I shall not long detain
you, Mr. Rhodes,' he passed through the doorway.
Arthur waited for him, pacing up and down, for a quarter of an hour,
when a totally different man reappeared in the same person, and was the
Sullivan Smith of the rosy beaming features and princely heartiness. He
was accosted: 'Now, my dear boy, it's your turn to try if you have a
chance, and good luck go with ye. I've said what I could on your behalf,
for you're one of ten thousand in this country, you are.'
Mr. Sullivan Smith had solemnified himself to proffer a sober petition
within the walls of the newly widowed lady's house; namely, for nothing
less than that sweet lady's now unfettered hand: and it had therefore
been perfectly natural to him, until his performance ended with the
destruction of his hopes, to deliver himself in the high Castilian
manner. Quite unexpected, however, was the reciprocal loftiness of
tone spontaneously adopted by the young English squire, for whom, in
consequence, he conceived a cordial relish; and as he paced in the
footsteps of Arthur, anxious to quiet his curiosity by hearing how it
had fared with one whom he had to suppose the second applicant, he kept
ejaculating: 'Not a bit! The fellow can't be Saxon! And she had a
liking for him. She's nigh coming of the age when a woman takes to the
chicks. Better he than another, if it's to be any one. For he's got fun
in him; he carries his own condiments, instead of borrowing from the
popular castors, as is their way over here. But I might have known there
's always sure to be salt and savour in the man she covers with her wing.
Excepting, if you please, my dear lady, a bad shot you made at a rascal
cur, no more worthy of you than Beelzebub of Paradise. No matter! The
daughters' of Erin must share the fate of their mother Isle, that their
tears may shine in the burst of sun to follow. For personal and
patriotic motives, I would have cheered her and been like a wild ass
combed and groomed and tamed by the adorable creature. But her friend
says there 's not a whisk of a chance for me, and I must roam the desert,
kicking up, and worshipping the star I hail brightest. They know me not,
who think I can't worship. Why, what were I without my star? At best a
pickled porker.'
Sullivan Smith became aware of a ravishing melodiousness in the
soliloquy, as well as a clean resemblance in the simile. He would
certainly have proceeded to improvize impassioned verse, if he had not
seen Arthur Rhodes on the pavement. 'So, here's the boy. Query, the
face he wears.'
'How kind of you to wait,' said Arthur.
'We'll call it sympathy, for convenience,' rejoined Sullivan Smith.
'Well, and what next?'
'You know as much as I do. Thank heaven, she is recovering.'
'Is that all?'
'Why, what more?'
Arthur was jealously, inspected.
'You look open-hearted, my dear boy.' Sullivan Smith blew the sound of a
reflected ahem. 'Excuse me for cornemusing in your company,' he said.
'But seriously, there was only one thing to pardon your hurrying to the
lady's door at such a season, when the wind tells tales to the world.
She's down with a cold, you know.'
'An influenza,' said Arthur.
The simplicity of the acquiescence was vexatious to a champion desirous
of hostilities, to vindicate the lady, in addition to his anxiety to
cloak her sad plight.
'She caught it from contact with one of the inhabitants of this country.
'Tis the fate of us Irish, and we're condemned to it for the sin of
getting tired of our own. I begin to sneeze when I land at Holyhead.
Unbutton a waistcoat here, in the hope of meeting a heart, and you're
lucky in escaping a pulmonary attack of no common severity, while the dog
that infected you scampers off, to celebrate his honeymoon mayhap. Ah,
but call at her house in shoals, the world 'll soon be saying it's worse
than a coughing cold. If you came to lead her out of it in triumph, the
laugh 'd be with you, and the lady well covered. D' ye understand?'
The allusion to the dog's honeymoon had put Arthur Rhodes on the track of
the darting cracker-metaphor.
'I think I do,' he said. 'She will soon be at Copsley--Lady Dunstane's
house, on the hills--and there we can see her.'
'And that's next to the happiness of consoling--if only it had been
granted! She's not an ordinary widow, to be caught when the tear of
lamentation has opened a practicable path or water-way to the poor
nightcapped jewel within. So, and you're a candid admirer, Mr. Rhodes!
Well, and I'll be one with you; for there's not a star in the firmament
more deserving of homage than that lady.'
'Let's walk in the park and talk of her,' said Arthur. 'There's no
sweeter subject to me.'
His boyish frankness rejoiced Sullivan Smith. 'As long as you like!--nor
to me!' he exclaimed. 'And that ever since I first beheld her on the
night of a Ball in Dublin: before I had listened to a word of her
speaking: and she bore her father's Irish name:--none of your Warwicks
and your . . . But let the cur go barking. He can't tell what he's
lost; perhaps he doesn't care. And after inflicting his hydrophobia on
her tender fame! Pooh, sir; you call it a civilized country, where you
and I and dozens of others are ready to start up as brothers of the lady,
to defend her, and are paralyzed by the Law. 'Tis a law they've
instituted for the protection of dirty dogs--their majority!'
'I owe more to Mrs. Warwick than to any soul I know,' said Arthur.
' Let 's hear,' quoth Sullivan Smith; proceeding: 'She's the Arabian
Nights in person, that's sure; and Shakespeare's Plays, tragic and comic;
and the Book of Celtic History; and Erin incarnate--down with a cold,
no matter where; but we know where it was caught. So there's a pretty
library for who's to own her now she's enfranchized by circumstances; and
a poetical figure too!'
He subsided for his companion to rhapsodize.
Arthur was overcharged with feeling, and could say only: 'It would be
another world to me if I lost her.'
'True; but what of the lady?'
'No praise of mine could do her justice.'
'That may be, but it's negative of yourself, and not a portrait of the
object. Hasn't she the brain of Socrates--or better, say Minerva, on the
bust of Venus, and the remainder of her finished off to an exact
resemblance of her patronymic Goddess of the bow and quiver?'
'She has a wise head and is beautiful.'
'And chaste.'
Arthur reddened: he was prepared to maintain it, could not speak it.
'She is to us in this London, what the run of water was to Theocritus in
Sicily: the nearest to the visibly divine,' he said, and was applauded.
'Good, and on you go. Top me a few superlatives on that, and I 'm your
echo, my friend. Isn't the seeing and listening to her like sitting
under the silvery canopy of a fountain in high Summer?'
'All the comparisons are yours,' Arthur said enviously.
'Mr. Rhodes, you are a poet, I believe, and all you require to loosen
your tongue is a drop of Bacchus, so if you will do me the extreme honour
to dine with me at my Club this evening, we'll resume the toast that
should never be uttered dry. You reprove me justly, my friend.'
Arthur laughed and accepted. The Club was named, and the hour, and some
items of the little dinner: the birds and the year of the wines.
It surprised him to meet Mr. Redworth at the table of his host. A
greater surprise was the partial thaw in Redworth's bearing toward him.
But, as it was partial, and he a youth and poor, not even the genial
influences of Bacchus could lift him to loosen his tongue under the
repressing presence of the man he knew to be his censor, though Sullivan
Smith encouraged him with praises and opportunities. He thought of the
many occasions when Mrs. Warwick's art of management had produced a tacit
harmony between them. She had no peer. The dinner failed of the
pleasure he had expected from it. Redworth's bluntness killed the flying
metaphors, and at the end of the entertainment he and Sullivan Smith were
drumming upon politics.
'Fancies he has the key of the Irish difficulty!' said the latter,
clapping hand on his shoulder, by way of blessing, as they parted at the
Club-steps.
Redworth asked Arthur Rhodes the way he was going, and walked beside him.
'I suppose you take exercise; don't get colds and that kind of thing,' he
remarked in the old bullying fashion; and changed it abruptly. 'I am
glad to have met you this evening. I hope you'll dine with me one day
next week. Have you seen Mrs. Warwick lately?'
'She is unwell; she has been working too hard,' said Arthur.
'Seriously unwell, do you mean?'
'Lady Dunstane is at her house, and speaks of her recovering.'
'Ah. You've not seen her?'
'Not yet.'
'Well, good-night.'
Redworth left him, and only when moved by gratitude to the lad for his
mention of Mrs. Warwick's 'working too hard,' as the cause of her
illness, recollected the promised dinner and the need for having his
address.
He had met Sullivan Smith accidentally in the morning and accepted the
invitation to meet young Rhodes, because these two, of all men living,
were for the moment dearest to him, as Diana Warwick's true and simple
champions; and he had intended a perfect cordiality toward them both; the
end being a semi-wrangle with the patriot, and a patronizing bluntness
with the boy; who, by the way, would hardly think him sincere in the
offer of a seat at his table. He owned himself incomplete. He never
could do the thing he meant, in the small matters not leading to fortune.
But they led to happiness! Redworth was guilty of a sigh: for now Diana
Warwick stood free; doubly free, he was reduced to reflect in a wavering
dubiousness. Her more than inclination for Dacier, witnessed by him, and
the shot of the world, flying randomly on the subject, had struck this
cuirassier, making light of his armour, without causing any change of his
habitual fresh countenance. As for the scandal, it had never shaken his
faith in her nature. He thought of the passion. His heart struck at
Diana's, and whatever might by chance be true in the scandal affected him
little, if but her heart were at liberty. That was the prize he coveted,
having long read the nature of the woman and wedded his spirit to it.
She would complete him.
Of course, infatuated men argue likewise, and scandal does not move them.
At a glance, the lower instincts and the higher spirit appear equally to
have the philosophy of overlooking blemishes. The difference between
appetite and love is shown when a man, after years of service, can hear
and see, and admit the possible, and still desire in worship; knowing
that we of earth are begrimed and must be cleansed for presentation daily
on our passage through the miry ways, but that our souls, if flame of a
soul shall have come of the agony of flesh, are beyond the baser
mischances: partaking of them indeed, but sublimely. Now Redworth
believed in the soul of Diana. For him it burned, and it was a celestial
radiance about her, unquenched by her shifting fortunes, her wilfulnesses
and, it might be, errors. She was a woman and weak; that is, not trained
for strength. She was a soul; therefore perpetually pointing to growth
in purification. He felt it, and even discerned it of her, if he could
not have phrased it. The something sovereignty characteristic that
aspired in Diana enchained him. With her, or rather with his thought of
her soul, he understood the right union of women and men, from the roots
to the flowering heights of that rare graft. She gave him comprehension
of the meaning of love: a word in many mouths, not often explained. With
her, wound in his idea of her, he perceived it to signify a new start in
our existence, a finer shoot of the tree stoutly planted in good gross
earth; the senses running their live sap, and the minds companioned, and
the spirits made one by the whole-natured conjunction. In Booth, a happy
prospect for the sons and daughters of Earth, divinely indicating more
than happiness: the speeding of us, compact of what we are, between the
ascetic rocks and the sensual whirlpools, to the creation of certain
nobler races, now very dimly imagined.
Singularly enough, the man of these feelings was far from being a social
rebel. His Diana conjured them forth in relation to her, but was not on
his bosom to enlighten him generally. His notions of citizenship
tolerated the female Pharisees, as ladies offering us an excellent social
concrete where quicksands abound, and without quite justifying the Lady
Wathins and Constance Aspers of the world, whose virtues he could set
down to accident or to acid blood, he considered them supportable and
estimable where the Mrs. Fryar-Gunnetts were innumerable, threatening to
become a majority; as they will constantly do while the sisterhood of the
chaste are wattled in formalism and throned in sourness.
Thoughts of Diana made phantoms of the reputable and their reverse alike.
He could not choose but think of her. She was free; and he too; and they
were as distant as the horizon sail and the aft-floating castaway. Her
passion for Dacier might have burnt out her heart. And at present he had
no claim to visit her, dared not intrude. He would have nothing to say,
if he went, save to answer questions upon points of business: as to
which, Lady Dunstane would certainly summon him when he was wanted.
Riding in the park on a frosty morning, he came upon Sir Lukin, who
looked gloomy and inquired for news of Diana Warwick, saying that his
wife had forbidden him to call at her house just yet. 'She's got a cold,
you know,' said Sir Lukin; adding, 'confoundedly hard on women!--eh?
Obliged to keep up a show. And I'd swear, by all that's holy, Diana
Warwick hasn't a spot, not a spot, to reproach herself with. I fancy
I ought to know women by this time. And look here, Redworth, last night
--that is, I mean yesterday evening, I broke with a woman--a lady of my
acquaintance, you know, because she would go on scandal-mongering about
Diana Warwick. I broke with her. I told her I'd have out any man who
abused Diana Warwick, and I broke with her. By Jove! Redworth, those
women can prove spitfires. They've bags of venom under their tongues,
barley-sugar though they look--and that's her colour. But I broke with
her for good. I doubt if I shall ever call on her again. And in point
of fact, I won't.'
Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett was described in the colouring of the lady.
Sir Lukin, after some further remarks, rode on, and Redworth mused on a
moral world that allows a woman of Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett's like to hang on
to it, and to cast a stone at Diana; forgetful, in his championship, that
Diana was not disallowed a similar licence.
When he saw Emma Dunstane, some days later, she was in her carriage
driving, as she said, to Lawyerland, for an interview with old Mr.
Braddock, on her friend's affairs. He took a seat beside her. 'No, Tony
is not well,' she replied to his question, under the veil of candour.
'She is recovering, but she--you can understand--suffered a shock. She
is not able to attend to business, and certain things have to be done.'
'I used to be her man of business,' Redworth observed.
'She speaks of your kind services. This is mere matter for lawyers.'
'She is recovering?'
'You may see her at Copsley next week. You can come down on Wednesdays
or Saturdays?'
'Any day. Tell her I want her opinion upon the state of things.'
'It will please her; but you will have to describe the state of things.'
Emma feared she had said too much. She tried candour again for
concealment. 'My poor Tony has been struck down low. I suppose it is
like losing a diseased limb:--she has her freedom, at the cost of a blow
to the system.'
'She may be trusted for having strength,' said Redworth.'
'Yes.' Emma's mild monosyllable was presently followed by an
exclamation: 'One has to experience the irony of Fate to comprehend how
cruel it is!' Then she remembered that such language was peculiarly
abhorrent to him.
'Irony of Fate!' he echoed her. 'I thought you were above that literary
jargon.'
'And I thought I was: or thought it would be put in a dialect practically
explicable,' she answered, smiling at the lion roused.
'Upon my word,' he burst out, 'I should like to write a book of Fables,
showing how donkeys get into grinding harness, and dogs lose their bones,
and fools have their sconces cracked, and all run jabbering of the irony
of Fate, to escape the annoyance of tracing the causes. And what are
they? nine times out of ten, plain want of patience, or some debt for
indulgence. There's a subject:--let some one write, Fables in
illustration of the irony of Fate: and I'll undertake to tack-on my
grandmother's maxims for a moral to teach of 'em. We prate of that irony
when we slink away from the lesson--the rod we conjure. And you to talk
of Fate! It's the seed we sow, individually or collectively. I'm bound-
up in the prosperity of the country, and if the ship is wrecked, it ruins
my fortune, but not me, unless I'm bound-up in myself. At least I hope
that's my case.'
He apologized for intruding Mr. Thomas Redworth.
His hearer looked at him, thinking he required a more finely pointed gift
of speech for the ironical tongue, but relishing the tonic directness of
his faculty of reason while she considered that the application of the
phrase might be brought home to him so as to render 'my Grandmother's
moral' a conclusion less comfortingly, if quite intelligibly, summary.
And then she thought of Tony's piteous instance; and thinking with her
heart, the tears insisted on that bitter irony of the heavens, which
bestowed the long-withheld and coveted boon when it was empty of value
or was but as a handful of spices to a shroud.
Perceiving the moisture in her look, Redworth understood that it was
foolish to talk rationally. But on her return to her beloved, the real
quality of the man had overcome her opposing state of sentiment, and she
spoke of him with an iteration and throb in the voice that set a singular
query whirring round Diana's ears. Her senses were too heavy for a
suspicion.