CHAPTER XXI. IN WHICH WE HAVE FURTHER GLIMPSES OF THE WONDROUS MECHANISM

OF OUR YOUNGER MAN

The report of Admiral Baldwin Fakenham as having died in the arms of a

stranger visiting the house, hit nearer the mark than usual. He yielded

his last breath as Gower Woodseer was lowering him to his pillow,

shortly after a husky whisper of the letter to Lady Arpington; and that

was one of Gower’s crucial trials. It condemned him, for the pacifying

of a dying man, to the murmur and shuffle, which was a lie; and the

lie burnt him, contributed to the brand on his race. He and his father

upheld a solitary bare staff, where the Cambrian flag had flown, before

their people had been trampled in mire, to do as the worms. His loathing

of any shadow of the lie was a protest on behalf of Welsh blood against

an English charge, besides the passion for spiritual cleanliness:

without which was no comprehension, therefore no enjoyment, of Nature

possible to him. For Nature is the Truth.

He begged the countess to let him have the letter; he held to the

petition, with supplications; he spoke of his pledged word, his honour;

and her countenance did not deny to such an object as she beheld the

right to a sense of honour. ‘We all have the sentiment, I hope, Mr.

Woodseer,’ she said, stupefying the worshipper, who did not see it

manifested. There was a look of gentle intimacy, expressive of common

grounds between them, accompanying the dead words. Mistress of the

letter, and the letter safe under lock, the admiral dead, she had not to

bestow a touch of her hand on his coatsleeve in declining to return it.

A face languidly and benevolently querulous was bent on him, when he, so

clever a man, resumed his very silly petition.

She was moon out of cloud at a change of the theme. Gower journeyed

to London without the letter, intoxicated, and conscious of poison;

enamoured of it, and straining for health. He had to reflect at the

journey’s end, that he had picked up nothing on the road, neither a

thing observed nor a thing imagined; he was a troubled pool instead of a

flowing river.

The best help to health for him was a day in his father’s house. We are

perpetually at our comparisons of ourselves with others; and they are

mostly profitless; but the man carrying his religious light, to light

the darkest ways of his fellows, and keeping good cheer, as though the

heart of him ran a mountain water through the grimy region, plucked at

Gower with an envy to resemble him in practice. His philosophy, too,

reproached him for being outshone. Apart from his philosophy, he stood

confessed a bankrupt; and it had dwindled to near extinction. Adoration

of a woman takes the breath out of philosophy. And if one had only to

say sheer donkey, he consenting to be driven by her! One has to say

worse in this case; for the words are, liar and traitor.

Carinthia’s attitude toward his father conduced to his emulous respect

for the old man, below whom, and indeed below the roadway of ordinary

principles hedged with dull texts, he had strangely fallen. The sight

of her lashed him. She made it her business or it was her pleasure to

go the rounds beside Mr. Woodseer visiting his poor people. She spoke

of the scenes she witnessed, and threw no stress on the wretchedness,

having only the wish to assist in ministering. Probably the great

wretchedness bubbling over the place blunted her feeling of loss at

the word of Admiral Baldwin’s end; her bosom sprang up: ‘He was next to

father,’ was all she said; and she soon reverted to this and that house

of the lodgings of poverty. She had descended on the world. There was of

course a world outside Whitechapel, but Whitechapel was hot about her;

the nests of misery, the sharp note of want in the air, tricks of an

urchin who had amused her.

As to the place itself, she had no judgement to pronounce, except that:

‘They have no mornings here’; and the childish remark set her quivering

on her heights, like one seen through a tear, in Gower’s memory. Scarce

anything of her hungry impatience to meet her husband was visible: she

had come to London to meet him; she hoped to meet him soon: before her

brother’s return, she could have added. She mentioned the goodness of

Sarah Winch in not allowing that she was a burden to support. Money and

its uses had impressed her; the quantity possessed by some, the utter

need of it for the first of human purposes by others. Her speech was not

of so halting or foreign an English. She grew rapidly wherever she was

planted.

Speculation on the conduct of her husband, empty as it might be,

was necessitated in Gower. He pursued it, and listened to his father

similarly at work: ‘A young lady fit for any station, the kindest of

souls, a born charitable human creature, void of pride, near in all

she--does and thinks to the Shaping Hand, why should her husband forsake

her on the day of their nuptials.

She is most gracious; the simplicity of an infant. Can you imagine the

doing of an injury by a man to a woman like her?’

Then it was that Gower screwed himself to say:

‘Yes, I can imagine it, I’m doing it myself. I shall be doing it till

I’ve written a letter and paid a visit.’

He took a meditative stride or two in the room, thinking without

revulsion of the Countess Livia under a similitude of the bell of the

plant henbane, and that his father had immunity from temptation because

of the insensibility to beauty. Out of which he passed to the writing

of the letter to Lord Fleetwood, informing his lordship that he intended

immediately to deliver a message to the Marchioness of Arpington from

Admiral Baldwin Fakenham, in relation to the Countess of Fleetwood.

A duty was easily done by Gower when he had surmounted the task of

conceiving his resolution to do it; and this task, involving an

offence to the Lady Livia and intrusion of his name on a nobleman’s

recollection, ranked next in severity to the chopping off of his fingers

by a man suspecting them of the bite of rabies.

An interview with Lady Arpington was granted him the following day.

She was a florid, aquiline, loud-voiced lady, evidently having no seat

for her wonderments, after his account of the origin of his acquaintance

with the admiral had quieted her suspicions. The world had only to stand

beside her, and it would hear what she had heard. She rushed to the

conclusion that Lord Fleetwood had married a person of no family.

‘Really, really, that young man’s freaks appear designed for the express

purpose of heightening our amazement!’ she exclaimed. ‘He won’t easily

get beyond a wife in the east of London, at a shop; but there’s no

knowing. Any wish of Admiral Baldwin Fakenham’s I hold sacred. At least

I can see for myself. You can’t tell me more of the facts? If Lord

Fleetwood’s in town, I will call him here at once. I will drive down to

this address you give me. She is a civil person?’

‘Her breeding is perfect,’ said Gower.

‘Perfect breeding, you say?’ Lady Arpington was reduced to a murmur.

She considered the speaker: his outlandish garb, his unprotesting

self-possession. He spoke good English by habit, her ear told her. She

was of an eminence to judge of a man impartially, even to the sufferance

of an opinion from him, on a subject that lesser ladies would have

denied to his clothing. Outwardly simple, naturally frank, though

a tangle of the complexities inwardly, he was a touchstone for true

aristocracy, as the humblest who bear the main elements of it must be.

Certain humorous turns in his conversation won him an amicable smile

when he bowed to leave: they were the needed finish of a favourable

impression.

One day later the earl arrived in town, read Gower Woodseer’s brief

words, and received the consequently expected summons, couched in a

great lady’s plain imperative. She was connected with his family on the

paternal side.

He went obediently; not unwillingly, let the deputed historian of the

Marriage, turning over documents, here say. He went to Lady Arpington

disposed for marital humaneness and jog-trot harmony, by condescension;

equivalent to a submitting to the drone of an incessant psalm at the

drum of the ear. He was, in fact, rather more than inclined that way.

When very young, at the age of thirteen, a mood of religious fervour had

spiritualized the dulness of Protestant pew and pulpit for him. Another

fit of it, in the Roman Catholic direction, had proposed, during his

latest dilemma, to relieve him of the burden of his pledged word. He had

plunged for a short space into the rapturous contemplation of a monastic

life--‘the clean soul for the macerated flesh,’ as that fellow Woodseer

said once: and such as his friend, the Roman Catholic Lord Feltre,

moodily talked of getting in his intervals. He had gone down to a young

and novel trial establishment of English penitents in the forest of a

Midland county, and had watched and envied, and seen the escape from

a lifelong bondage to the ‘beautiful Gorgon,’ under cover of a white

flannel frock. The world pulled hard, and he gave his body into chains

of a woman, to redeem his word.

But there was a plea on behalf of this woman. The life she offered

might have psalmic iteration; the dead monotony of it in prospect did,

nevertheless, exorcise a devil. Carinthia promised, it might seem to

chase and keep the black beast out of him permanently, as she could,

he now conceived: for since the day of the marriage with her, the devil

inhabiting him had at least been easier, ‘up in a corner.’

He held an individual memory of his bride, rose-veiled, secret to them

both, that made them one, by subduing him. For it was a charm; an actual

feminine, an unanticipated personal, charm; past reach of tongue to

name, wordless in thought. There, among the folds of the incense

vapours of our heart’s holy of holies, it hung; and it was rare, it was

distinctive of her, and alluring, if one consented to melt to it, and

accepted for compensation the exorcising of a devil.

Oh, but no mere devil by title!--a very devil. It was alert and frisky,

flushing, filling the thin cold idea of Henrietta at a thought; and in

the thought it made Carinthia’s intimate charm appear as no better than

a thing to enrich a beggar, while he knew that kings could never command

the charm. Not love, only the bathing in Henrietta’s incomparable beauty

and the desire to be, desire to have been, the casket of it, broke

the world to tempest and lightnings at a view of Henrietta the married

woman--married to the brother of the woman calling him husband:--‘It is

my husband.’ The young tyrant of wealth could have avowed that he did

not love Henrietta; but not the less was he in the swing of a whirlwind

at the hint of her loving the man she had married. Did she? It might be

tried.

She? That Henrietta is one of the creatures who love pleasure, love

flattery, love their beauty: they cannot love a man. Or the love is a

ship that will not sail a sea.

Now, if the fact were declared and attested, if her shallowness were

seen proved, one might get free of the devil she plants in the breast.

Absolutely to despise her would be release, and it would allow of his

tasting Carinthia’s charm, reluctantly acknowledged; not ‘money of the

country’ beside that golden Henrietta’s.

Yet who can say?--women are such deceptions. Often their fairest,

apparently sweetest, when brought to the keenest of the tests, are

graceless; or worse, artificially consonant; in either instance barren

of the poetic. Thousands of the confidently expectant among men have

been unbewitched; a lamentable process; and the grimly reticent and

the loudly discursive are equally eloquent of the pretty general

disillusion. How they loathe and tear the mask of the sham attraction

that snatched them to the hag yoke, and fell away to show its grisly

horrors within the round of the month, if not the second enumeration of

twelve by the clock! Fleetwood had heard certain candid seniors talk,

delivering their minds in superior appreciation of unpretentious boor

wenches, nature’s products, not esteemed by him. Well, of a truth,

she--‘Red Hair and Rugged Brows,’ as the fellow Woodseer had called her,

in alternation with ‘Mountain Face to Sun’--she at the unveiling was

gentle, surpassingly; graceful in the furnace of the trial. She wore

through the critic ordeal his burning sensitiveness to grace and

delicacy cast about a woman, and was rather better than not withered by

it.

On the borders between maidenly and wifely, she, a thing of flesh like

other daughters of earth, had impressed her sceptical lord, inclining

to contempt of her and detestation of his bargain, as a flitting hue,

ethereal, a transfiguration of earthliness in the core of the earthly

furnace. And how?--but that it must have been the naked shining forth

of her character, startled to show itself:--‘It is my husband’:--it must

have been love.

The love that they versify, and strum on guitars, and go crazy over, and

end by roaring at as the delusion; this common bloom of the ripeness of

a season; this would never have utterly captured a sceptic, to vanquish

him in his mastery, snare him in her surrender. It must have been the

veritable passion: a flame kept alive by vestal ministrants in the

yewwood of the forest of Old Romance; planted only in the breasts of

very favourite maidens. Love had eyes, love had a voice that night,-love

was the explicable magic lifting terrestrial to seraphic. Though,

true, she had not Henrietta’s golden smoothness of beauty. Henrietta,

illumined with such a love, would outdo all legends, all dreams of the

tale of love. Would she? For credulous men she would be golden coin of

the currency. She would not have a particular wild flavour: charm as

of the running doe that has taken a dart and rolls an eye to burst the

hunter’s heart with pity.

Fleetwood went his way to Lady Arpington almost complacently, having

fought and laid his wilder self. He might be likened to the doctor’s

patient entering the chemist’s shop, with a prescription for a drug

of healing virtue, upon which the palate is as little consulted as a

robustious lollypop boy in the household of ceremonial parents, who

have rung for the troop of their orderly domestics to sit in a row and

hearken the intonation of good words.