CHAPTER XVII. RECORDS A SHADOW CONTEST CLOSE ON THE FOREGOING

Kit Ines cocked an eye at Madge, in the midst of the congratulations

and the paeans pumping his arms. As he had been little mauled, he could

present a face to her, expecting a wreath of smiles for the victor.

What are we to think of the contrarious young woman who, when he lay

beaten, drove him off the field and was all tenderness and devotion? She

bobbed her head, hardly more than a trifle pleased, one might say. Just

like females. They’re riddles, not worth spelling. Then, drunk I’ll get

to-night, my pretty dear! the man muttered, soured by her inopportune

staidness, as an opponent’s bruisings could never have rendered him.

She smiled a lively beam in answer to the earl; ‘Oh yes I ‘m glad. It’s

your doing, my lord.’ Him it was that she thanked, and for the moment

prized most. The female riddle is hard to read, because it is compounded

of sensations, and they rouse and appeal to the similar cockatrices in

us, which either hiss back or coil upon themselves. She admired Kit Ines

for his valour: she hated that ruinous and besotting drink. It flung

skeletons of a married couple on the wall of the future. Nevertheless

her love had been all maternal to him when he lay chastised and

disgraced on account of his vice. Pity had done it. Pity not being

stirred, her admiration of the hero declared victorious, whose fortunes

in uncertainty had stopped the beating of her heart, was eclipsed

by gratitude toward his preserver, and a sentiment eclipsed becomes

temporarily coldish, against our wish and our efforts, in a way to

astonish; making her think that she cannot hold two sentiments at a

time; when it is but the fact that she is unable to keep the two equally

warm.

Carinthia said to her: ‘He is brave.’

‘Oh yes, he’s brave,’ Madge assented.

Lord Brailstone, flourishing his whip, cried out: ‘At Canleys to-night?’

The earl nodded: ‘I shall be there.’

‘You, too, Chummy?’ came from Abrane.

‘To see you dance,’ Potts rejoined, and mumbled

‘But will he dance! Old Braney’s down on his luck; he’s a specimen of

a fellow emptier and not lighter. And won’t be till supper-time. But,

I say, Fleet, how the deuce?--funny sort of proceeding!--You haven’t

introduced me.’

‘The lady bears my name, Mr. Chumley Potts.’

With a bow to the lady’s profile and a mention of a glimpse at Baden,

Potts ejaculated: ‘It happened this morning?’

‘You allude to the marriage. It happened this morning.’

‘How do I get to Canleys?’

‘I drive you. Another team from the Esslemont stables is waiting at the

Royal.’

‘You stay at Canleys?’

‘No.’

‘No? Oh! Funny, upon my word. Though I don’t know why not--except that

people...’

‘Count your winnings, Chummy.’

Fleetwood remarked to his bride: ‘Our friend has the habit of

soliloquizing in company. I forgot to tell you of an appointment of mine

at a place called Canleys, about twenty miles or more from here. I gave

my word, so I keep it. The landlady at the inn, Mrs. Rundles, motherly

kind of woman; she will be attentive. They don’t cook badly, for an

English inn, I have heard. Madge here will act as your lady’s-maid for

the time. You will find her serviceable; she’s a bruiser’s lass and

something above it. Ines informed me, Madge, you were going to friends

of yours at the Wells. You will stay at the Royal and wait on this lady,

who bears my name. You understand?--A girl I can trust for courage,

if the article is in request,’ he resumed to his bride; and talked

generally of the inn and the management of it, and its favoured

position outside the village and contiguous to the river, upon which it

subsisted.

Carinthia had heard. She was more than ever the stunned young woman she

had been since her mounting of the coach, between the village church and

Lekkatts.

She said not a word. Why should she? her object was won. Give her that,

and a woman’s tongue will consent to rest. The dreaded weapon rest, also

when she is kept spinning by the whip. She gives out a pleasant hum,

too. Her complexion must be pronounced dull in repose. A bride on her

travels with an aspect of wet chalk, rather helps to scare mankind from

marriage: which may be good or bad; but she reflects a sicklier hue on

the captured Chessman calling her his own. Let her shine in privacy.

Fleetwood drew up at the Royal Sovereign, whereof the reigning monarch,

in blue uniform on the signboard, curtseyed to his equally windy

subjects; and a small congregation of the aged, and some cripples

and infants, greeted the patron of Old England’s manfullest display,

cheering at news of the fight, brought them by many little runners.

‘Your box has been conveyed to your room,’ he said to his bride.

She bowed. This time she descended the coach by the aid of the ladder.

Ines, victorious in battle, had scant notice from his love. ‘Yes, I ‘m

glad,’ and she passed him to follow her newly constituted mistress. His

pride was dashed, all the foam of the first draw on the top of him blown

off, as he figuratively explained the cause of his gloom to the earl.

‘I drink and I gets a licking--that girl nurses and cossets me. I don’t

drink and I whops my man--she shows me her back. Ain’t it encouragement,

my lord?’

‘You ought to know them by this time, you dolt,’ returned his patron,

and complimented him on his bearing in the fight. ‘You shall have your

two hundred, and something will be added. Hold handy here till I mount.

I start in ten minutes.’

Whether to speak a polite adieu to the bride, whose absurd position

she had brought on her own head, was debated for half a minute. He

considered that the wet chalk-quarry of a beauty had at all events

the merit of not being a creature to make scenes. He went up to the

sitting-room. If she was not there, he would leave his excuses.

She was there, and seated; neither crying, nor smiling, nor pointedly

serious in any way, not conventionally at her ease either. And

so clearly was he impressed by her transparency in simplicity of

expression, that he took without a spurn at it the picture of a woman

half drained of her blood, veiling the wound. And a young woman, a

stranger to suffering: perhaps--as the creatures do looking for the

usual flummery tenderness, what they call happiness; wondering at

the absence of it and the shifty ghost of a husband she has got by

floundering into the bog known as Marriage. She would have it, and here

she was!

He entered the situation and was possessed by the shivering delicacy of

it. Surface emotions were not seen on her. She might be a creature

with a soul. Here and there the thing has been found in women. It is

priceless when found, and she could not be acting. One might swear the

creature had no power to act.

She spoke without offence, the simplest of words, affected no

solicitudes, put on no gilt smiles, wore no reproaches: spoke to him as

if so it happened--he had necessarily a journey to perform. One could

see all the while big drops falling from the wound within. One could

hear it in her voice. Imagine a crack of the string at the bow’s deep

stress. Or imagine the bow paralyzed at the moment of the deepest

sounding. And yet the voice did not waver. She had now the richness of

tone carrying on a music through silence.

Well, then, at least, he had not been the utterly duped fool he thought

himself since the consent was pledged to wed her.

More, she had beauty--of its kind. Or splendour or grandeur, was the

term for it. But it bore no name. None of her qualities--if they were

qualities--had a name. She stood with a dignity that the word did not

express. She endured meekly, when there was no meekness. Pain breathed

out of her, and not a sign of pain was visible. She had, under his

present observation of her, beauty, with the lines of her face breaking

in revolt from beauty--or requiring a superterrestrial illumination to

show the harmony. He, as he now saw, had erred grossly in supposing her

insensitive, and therefore slow of a woman’s understanding. She drew the

breath of pain through the lips: red lips and well cut. Her brown eyes

were tearless, not alluring or beseeching or repelling; they did but

look, much like the skies opening high aloof on a wreck of storm. Her

reddish hair-chestnut, if you will--let fall a skein over one of the

rugged brows, and softened the ruggedness by making it wilder, as if

a great bird were winging across a shoulder of the mountain ridges.

Conceived of the mountains, built in their image, the face partook

alternately of mountain terror or splendour; wholly, he remembered,

of the splendour when her blood ran warm. No longer the chalk-quarry

face,--its paleness now was that of night Alps beneath a moon chasing

the shadows.

She might be casting her spells again.

‘You remember I told you,’ he said, ‘I have given my word--I don’t break

it--to be at a Ball. Your uncle was urgent to have the ceremony over.

These clashes occur. The people here--I have spoken of that: people of

good repute for attention to guests. I am uncertain of the time... we

have all to learn to wait. So then, good-bye till we meet.’

He was experiencing a novel nip of torment, of just the degree which

takes a partial appeasement from the inflicting of it, and calls up a

loathed compassion. She might have been in his arms for a step, though

she would not have been the better loved.

He was allowed his escape, bearing with him enough of husband to

execrate another enslaving pledge of his word, that begat a frenzy to

wreak some caresses on the creature’s intolerably haunting image. Of

course, he could not return to her. How would she receive him? There was

no salt in the thought of it; she was too submissive.

However, there would be fun with Chummy Potts on the drive to Canleys;

fun with Rufus Abrane at Mrs. Cowper Quillett’s; and with the Countess

Livia, smothered, struggling, fighting for life with the title of

Dowager. A desire for unbridled fun had hold of any amount of it, to

excess in any direction. And though this cloud as a dry tongue after

much wine craves water, glimpses of his tramp’s walk with a fellow tramp

on a different road, enjoying strangely healthy vagabond sensations and

vast ideas; brought the vagrant philosopher refreshfully to his mind:

chiefly for the reason that while in Woodseer’s company he had hardly

suffered a stroke of pain from the thought of Henrietta. She was now a

married woman, he was a married man by the register. Stronger proof of

the maddest of worlds could not be furnished.

Sane in so mad a world, a man is your flabby citizen among outlaws, good

for plucking. Fun, at any cost, is the one object worth a shot in such

a world. And the fun is not to stop. If it does, we are likely to be got

hold of, and lugged away to the altar--the terminus. That foul disaster

has happened, through our having temporarily yielded to a fit of the

dumps and treated a mad world’s lunatic issue with some seriousness.

But fun shall be had with the aid of His Highness below. The madder

the world, the madder the fun. And the mixing in it of another element,

which it has to beguile us--romance--is not at all bad cookery. Poetic

romance is delusion--a tale of a Corsair; a poet’s brain, a bottle of

gin, and a theatrical wardrobe. Comic romance is about us everywhere,

alive for the tapping.

A daughter of the Old Buccaneer should participate in it by right of

birth: she would expect it in order to feel herself perfectly at home.

Then, be sure, she finds an English tongue and prattles away as merrily

as she does when her old scapegrace of a father is the theme. Son-in-law

to him! But the path of wisdom runs in the line of facts, and to have

wild fun and romance on this pantomime path, instead of kicking to break

away from it, we follow things conceived by the genius of the situation,

for the delectation of the fair Countess of Fleetwood and the earl, her

delighted husband, quite in the spirit of the Old Buccaneer, father of

the bride.

Carinthia sat beside the fire, seeing nothing in the room or on the

road. Up in her bedchamber, the girl Madge was at her window. She saw

Lord Fleetwood standing alone, laughing, it seemed, at some thought;

he threw up his head. Was it a newly married man leaving his bride and

laughing? The bride was a dear lady, fit for better than to be driven

to look on at a prize-fight--a terrible scene to a lady. She was left

solitary: and this her wedding day? The earl had said it, he had said

she bore his name, spoke of coming from the altar, and the lady had

blushed to hear herself called Miss. The pressure of her hand was warm

with Madge: her situation roused the fervid latent sisterhood in the

breast of women.

Before he mounted the coach, Lord Fleetwood talked to Kit Ives. He

pointed at an upper window, seemed to be issuing directions. Kit nodded;

he understood it, whatever it was. You might have said, a pair of

burglars. The girl ran downstairs to bid her lover good-bye and show him

she really rejoiced in his victory. Kit came to her saying: ‘Given my

word of honour I won’t make a beast of myself to-night. Got to watch

over you and your lady.’

Lord Fleetwood started his fresh team, casting no glance at the windows

of the room where his bride was. He and the gentlemen on the coach were

laughing.

His leaving of his young bride to herself this day was classed among

the murky flashes which distinguished the deeds of noblemen. But his

laughter on leaving her stamped it a cruelty; of the kind that plain

mortals, who can be monsters, commit. Madge conceived a pretext for

going into the presence of her mistress, whose attitude was the same as

when she first sat in the chair. The lady smiled and said: ‘He is not

hurt much?’ She thought for them about her.

The girl’s, heart of sympathy thumped, and her hero became a very minute

object. He had spoken previously of the making or not making a beast of

himself; without inflicting a picture of the beast. His words took shape

now, and in consequence a little self-pity began to move. It stirred to

swell the great wave of pity for the lady, that was in her bosom. ‘Oh,

he!’ she said, and extinguished the thought of him; and at once her

under-lip was shivering, her eyes filled and poured.

Carinthia rose anxiously. The girl dropped at her feet. ‘You have been

so good to me to-day, my lady! so good to me to-day! I can’t help it--I

don’t often just for this moment; I’ve been excited. Oh, he’s well, he

will do; he’s nothing. You say “poor child!” But I’m not; it’s only.

excitement. I do long to serve you the best I can.’

She stood up in obedience and had the arms of her young mistress

pressing her. Tears also were streaming from Carinthia’s eyes. Heartily

she thanked the girl for the excuse to cry.

They were two women. On the road to Canleys, the coach conveying

men spouted with the lusty anecdote, relieved of the interdict of a

tyrannical sex.