CHAPTER XV. 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.