CHAPTER XXIII. IN DAME GOSSIP’S VEIN

Right soon the London pot began to bubble. There was a marriage.

‘There are marriages by the thousand every day of the year that is

not consecrated to prayer for the forgiveness of our sins,’ the Old

Buccaneer, writing it with simple intent, says, by way of preface to a

series of Maxims for men who contemplate acceptance of the yoke.

This was a marriage high as the firmament over common occurrences, black

as Erebus to confound; it involved the wreck of expectations, disastrous

eclipse of a sovereign luminary in the splendour of his rise, Phaethon’s

descent to the Shades through a smoking and a crackling world. Asserted

here, verified there, the rumour gathered volume, and from a serpent of

vapour resolved to sturdy concrete before it was tangible. Contradiction

retired into corners, only to be swept out of them. For this marriage,

abominable to hear of, was of so wonderful a sort, that the story filled

the mind, and the discrediting of the story threatened the great world’s

cranium with a vacuity yet more monstrously abominable.

For he, the planet Croesus of his time, recently, scarce later than last

night, a glorious object of the mid-heavens above the market, has been

enveloped, caught, gobbled up by one of the nameless little witches

riding after dusk the way of the wind on broomsticks-by one of them! She

caught him like a fly in the hand off a pane of glass, gobbled him with

the customary facility of a pecking pullet.

But was the planet Croesus of his time a young man to be so caught, so

gobbled?

There is the mystery of it. On his coming of age, that young man gave

sign of his having a city head. He put his guardians deliberately aside,

had his lawyers and bailiffs and stewards thoroughly under control:

managed a particularly difficult step-mother; escaped the snares of

her lovely cousin; and drove his team of sycophants exactly the road he

chose to go and no other. He had a will.

The world accounted him wildish?

Always from his own offset, to his own ends. Never for another’s

dictation or beguilement. Never for a woman. He was born with a

suspicion of the sex. Poetry decorated women, he said, to lime and drag

men in the foulest ruts of prose.

We are to believe he has been effectively captured?

It is positively a marriage; he admits it.

Where celebrated?

There we are at hoodman-blind for the moment. Three counties claim the

church; two ends of London.

She is not a person of society, lineage?

Nor of beauty. She is a witch; ordinarily petticoated and not squeaking

like a shrew-mouse in her flights, but not a whit less a moon-shade

witch. The kind is famous. Fairy tales and terrible romances tell of

her; she is just as much at home in life, and springs usually from the

mire to enthral our knightliest. Is it a popular hero? She has him,

sooner or later. A planet Croesus? He falls to her.

That is, if his people fail to attach him in legal bonds to a damsel of

a corresponding birth on the day when he is breeched.

Small is her need to be young--especially if it is the man who is very

young. She is the created among women armed with the deadly instinct for

the motive force in men, and shameless to attract it. Self-respecting

women treat men as their tamed housemates. She blows the horn of the

wild old forest, irresistible to the animal. O the droop of the eyelids,

the curve of a lip, the rustle of silks, the much heart, the neat ankle;

and the sparkling agreement, the reserve--the motherly feminine petition

that she may retain her own small petted babe of an opinion, legitimate

or not, by permission of superior authority!--proof at once of her

intelligence and her appreciativeness. Her infinitesimal spells are

seen; yet, despite experience, the magnetism in their repulsive display

is barely apprehended by sedate observers until the astounding capture

is proclaimed. It is visible enough then:--and O men! O morals! If she

can but trick the smallest bit in stooping, she has the pick of men.

Our present sample shows her to be young: she is young and a foreigner.

Mr. Chumley Potts vouches for it. Speaks foreign English. He thinks her

more ninny than knave: she is the tool of a wily plotter, picked up off

the highway road by Lord Fleetwood as soon as he had her in his eye. Sir

Meeson Corby wrings his frilled hands to depict the horror of the hands

of that tramp the young lord had her from. They afflict him malariously

still. The man, he says, the man as well was an infatuation, because he

talks like a Dictionary Cheap Jack, and may have had an education and

dropped into vagrancy, owing to indiscretions. Lord Fleetwood ran about

in Germany repeating his remarks. But the man is really an accomplished

violinist, we hear. She dances the tambourine business. A sister of the

man, perhaps, if we must be charitable. They are, some say, a couple of

Hungarian gypsies Lord F. found at a show and brought over to England,

and soon had it on his conscience that he ought to marry her, like the

Quixote of honour that he is; which is equal to saying crazy, as there

is no doubt his mother was.

The marriage is no longer disputable; poor Lady Fleetwood, whatever

her faults as a step-mother, does no longer deny the celebration of a

marriage; though she might reasonably discredit any such story if he, on

the evening of the date of the wedding day, was at a Ball, seen by her

at the supper-table; though it is admitted he left the Ball-room at

night. But the next day he certainly was in his place among the Peers

and voted against the Government, and then went down to his estates in

Wales, being an excellent holder of the reins, whether on the coach box

or over the cash box.

More and more wonderful, we hear that he drove his bride straight

from the church to the field of a prizefight, arranged for her special

delectation. She doats on seeing blood-shed and drinking champagne.

Young Mr. Mallard is our authority; and he says, she enjoyed it, and

cheered the victor for being her husband’s man. And after the shocking

exhibition, good-bye; the Countess of Fleetwood was left sole occupant

of a wayside inn, and may have learnt in her solitude that she would

have been wise to feign disgust; for men to the smallest degree

cultivated are unable to pardon a want of delicacy in a woman who has

chosen them, as they are taught to think by their having chosen her.

So talked, so twittered, piped and croaked the London world over the

early rumours of the marriage, this Amazing Marriage; which it got to be

called, from the number of items flocking to swell the wonder.

Ravens ravening by night, poised peregrines by day, provision-merchants

for the dispensing of dainty scraps to tickle the ears, to arm the

tongues, to explode reputations, those great ladies, the Ladies Endor,

Eldritch, and Cowry, fateful three of their period, avenged and scourged

both innocence and naughtiness; innocence, on the whole, the least, when

their withering suspicion of it had hunted the unhappy thing to the

bank of Ophelia’s ditch. Mallard and Chumley Potts, Captain Abrane, Sir

Meeson Corby, Lord Brailstone, were plucked at and rattled, put to the

blush, by a pursuit of inquiries conducted with beaks. High-nosed dames

will surpass eminent judges in their temerity on the border-line where

Ahem sounds the warning note to curtained decency. The courtly M. de

St. Ombre had to stand confused. He, however, gave another version of

Captain Abrane’s ‘fiddler,’ and precipitated the great ladies into

the reflection, that French gentlemen, since the execrable French

Revolution, have lost their proper sense of the distinctions of Class.

Homme d’esprit, applied to a roving adventurer, a scarce other than

vagabond, was either an undiscriminating epithet or else a further

example of the French deficiency in humour.

Dexterous contriver, he undoubtedly is. Lady Cowry has it from Sir

Meeson Corby, who had it from the poor dowager, that Lord Fleetwood

has installed the man in his house and sits at the opposite end of

his table; fished him up from Whitechapel, where the countess is left

serving oranges at a small fruit-shop. With her own eyes, Lady Arpington

saw her there; and she can’t be got to leave the place unless her

husband drives his coach down to fetch her. That he declines to do; so

she remains the Whitechapel Countess, all on her hind heels against the

offer of a shilling of her husband’s money, if she ‘s not to bring him

to his knees; and goes about at night with a low Methodist singing

hymns along those dreadful streets, while Lord Fleetwood gives gorgeous

entertainments. One signal from the man he has hired, and he stops

drinking--he will stop speaking as soon as the man’s mouth is open. He

is under a complete fascination, attributable, some say, to passes

of the hands, which the man won’t wash lest he should weaken their

influence.

For it cannot be simply his violin playing. They say he was a pupil of

a master of the dark art in Germany, and can practise on us to make us

think his commonest utterances extraordinarily acute and precious. Lord

Fleetwood runs round quoting him to everybody, quite ridiculously. But

the man’s influence is sufficient to induce his patron to drive down and

fetch the Whitechapel Countess home in state, as she insists--if the man

wishes it. Depend upon it he is the key of the mystery.

Totally the contrary, Lady Arpington declares! the man is a learned man,

formerly a Professor of English Literature in a German University,

and no connection of the Whitechapel Countess whatever, a chance

acquaintance at the most. He operates on Lord Fleetwood with doses of

German philosophy; otherwise, a harmless creature; and has consented to

wash and dress. It is my lord who has had the chief influence. And the

Countess Livia now backs him in maintaining that there is nowhere a more

honest young man to be found. She may have her reasons.

As for the Whitechapel Countess... the whole story of the Old Buccaneer

and Countess Fanny was retold, and it formed a terrific halo, presage

of rains and hurricane tempest, over the girl the young earl had

incomprehensibly espoused to discard. Those two had a son and a daughter

born aboard:--in wedlock, we trust. The girl may be as wild a one as the

mother. She has a will as determined as her husband’s. She is offered

Esslemont, the earl’s Kentish mansion, for a residence, and she will

none of it until she has him down in the east of London on his knees

to entreat her. The injury was deep on one side or the other. It may

be almost surely prophesied that the two will never come together. Will

either of them deal the stroke for freedom? And which is the likelier?

Meanwhile Lord Fleetwood and his Whitechapel Countess composed the laugh

of London. Straightway Invention, the violent propagator, sprang from

his shades at a call of the great world’s appetite for more, and,

rushing upon stationary Fact, supplied the required. Marvel upon marvel

was recounted. The mixed origin of the singular issue could not be

examined, where all was increasingly funny.

Always the shout for more produced it. She and her band of Whitechapel

boys were about in ambush to waylay the earl wherever he went. She stood

knocking at his door through a whole night. He dared not lug her before

a magistrate for fear of exposure. Once, riding in the park with a troop

of friends he had a young woman pointed out to him, and her finger was

levelled, and she cried: ‘There is the English nobleman who marries a

girl and leaves her to go selling cabbages!’

He left town for the Island, and beheld his yacht sailing the

Solent:--my lady the countess was on board! A pair of Tyrolese minstrels

in the square kindled his enthusiasm at one of his dinners; he sent them

a sovereign; their humble, hearty thanks were returned to him in the

name of Die Grafin von Fleetwood.

The Ladies Endor, Eldritch, and Cowry sifted their best. They let

pass incredible stories: among others, that she had sent cards to the

nobility and gentry of the West End of London, offering to deliver

sacks of potatoes by newly-established donkey-cart at the doors of their

residences, at so much per sack, bills quarterly; with the postscript,

Vive L’aristocratie! Their informant had seen a card, and the stamp of

the Fleetwood dragoncrest was on it.

He has enemies, was variously said of the persecuted nobleman. But it

was nothing worse than the parasite that he had. This was the parasite’s

gentle treason. He found it an easy road to humour; it pricked the slug

fancy in him to stir and curl; gave him occasion to bundle and bustle

his patron kindly. Abrane, Potts, Mallard, and Sir Meeson Corby were

personages during the town’s excitement, besought for having something

to say. Petrels of the sea of tattle, they were buoyed by the hubbub

they created, and felt the tipsy happiness of being certain to rouse the

laugh wherever they alighted. Sir Meeson Corby, important to himself in

an eminent degree, enjoyed the novel sense of his importance with his

fellows. They crowded round the bore who had scattered them.

He traced the miserable catastrophe in the earl’s fortunes to the

cunning of the rascal now sponging on Fleetwood and trying to dress like

a gentleman: a convicted tramp, elevated by the caprice of the young

nobleman he was plotting to ruin. Sir Meeson quoted Captain Abrane’s

latest effort to hit the dirty object’s name, by calling him

‘Fleetwood’s Mr. Woodlouse.’ And was the rascal a sorcerer? Sir Meeson

spoke of him in the hearing of the Countess Livia, and she, previously

echoing his disgust, corrected him sharply, and said: ‘I begin to be of

Russett’s opinion, that his fault is his honesty.’ The rascal had won or

partly won the empress of her sex! This Lady Livia, haughtiest and most

fastidious of our younger great dames, had become the indulgent

critic of the tramp’s borrowed plumes! Nay, she would not listen to a

depreciatory word on him from her cousin Henrietta Kirby-Levellier.

Perhaps, after all, of all places for an encounter between the Earl of

Fleetwood and the countess, those vulgar Gardens across the water, long

since abandoned by the Fashion, were the most suitable. Thither one

fair June night, for the sake of showing the dowager countess and her

beautiful cousin, the French nobleman, Sir Meeson Corby, and others,

what were the pleasures of the London lower orders, my lord had the whim

to conduct them,--merely a parade of observation once round;--the ladies

veiled, the gentlemen with sticks, and two servants following, one of

whom, dressed in quiet black, like the peacefullest of parsons, was my

lord’s pugilist, Christopher Ives.

Now, here we come to history: though you will remember what History is.

The party walked round the Gardens unmolested nor have we grounds

for supposing they assumed airs of state in the style of a previous

generation. Only, as it happened, a gentleman of the party was a wag; no

less than the famous, well-seasoned John Rose Mackrell, bent on amusing

Mrs. Kirby-Levellier, to hear her lovely laughter; and his wit and his

anecdotes, both inexhaustible, proved, as he said, ‘that a dried fish

is no stale fish, and a smoky flavour to an old chimney story will

often render it more piquant to the taste than one jumping fresh off the

incident.’ His exact meaning in ‘smoky flavour’ we are not to know; but

whether that M. de St. Ombre should witness the effect of English humour

upon them, or that the ladies could permit themselves to laugh, their

voices accompanied the gentlemen in silvery volleys. There had been

‘Mackrell’ at Fleetwood’s dinner-table; which was then a way of saying

that dry throats made no count of the quantity of champagne imbibed,

owing to the fits Rose Mackrell caused. However, there was loud

laughter as they strolled, and it was noticed; and Fleetwood crying out,

‘Mackrell! Mackrell!’ in delighted repudiation of the wag’s last sally,

the cry of ‘Hooray, Mackrell!’ was caught up by the crowd. They were

not the primary offenders, for loud laughter in an isolated party is bad

breeding; but they had not the plea of a copious dinner.

So this affair began; inoffensively at the start, for my lord was

good-humoured about it.

Kit Ines, of the mercurial legs, must now give impromptu display of his

dancing. He seized a partner, in the manner of a Roman the Sabine,

sure of pleasing his patron; and the maid, passing from surprise to

merriment, entered the quadrille perforce, all giggles, not without

emulation, for she likewise had the passion for the dance. Whereby it

befell that the pair footed in a way to gather observant spectators;

and if it had not been that the man from whom the maid was willy-nilly

snatched, conceived resentment, things might have passed comfortably;

for Kit’s quips and cuts and high capers, and the Sunday gravity of the

barge face while the legs were at their impish trickery, double motion

to the music, won the crowd to cheer. They conjectured him to be

a British sailor. But the destituted man said, sailor or no

sailor,--bos’en be hanged! he should pay for his whistle.

Honourably at the close of the quadrille, Kit brought her back; none the

worse for it, he boldly affirmed, and he thanked the man for the short

loan of her.--The man had an itch to strike. Choosing rather to be

struck first, he vented nasty remarks. My lord spoke to Kit and moved

on. At the moment of the step, Rose Mackrell uttered something, a

waggery of some sort, heard to be forgotten, but of such instantaneous

effect, that the prompt and immoderate laugh succeeding it might

reasonably be taken for a fling of scorn at himself, by an injured man.

They were a party; he therefore proceeded to make one, appealing to

English sentiment and right feeling. The blameless and repentant maid

plucked at his coat to keep him from dogging the heels of the gentlemen.

Fun was promised; consequently the crowd waxed.

‘My lord,’ had been let fall by Kit Ines. Conjoined to ‘Mackrell,’

it rang finely, and a trumpeting of ‘Lord Mackrell’ resounded. Lord

Mackrell was asked for ‘more capers and not so much sauce.’ Various fish

took part in his title of nobility. The wag Mackrell continuing to be

discreetly silent, and Kit Ines acting as a pacific rearguard, the crowd

fell in love with their display of English humour, disposed to the surly

satisfaction of a big street dog that has been appeased by a smaller

one’s total cessation of growls.

All might have gone well but for the sudden appearance of two figures

of young women on the scene. They fronted the advance of the procession.

They wanted to have a word with Lord Mackrell. Not a bit of it--he won’t

listen, turns away; and one of the pair slips round him. It’s regular

imploring: ‘my lord! my lord!’

O you naughty Surrey melodram villain of a Lord Mackrell! Listen to

the young woman, you Mackrell, or you’ll get Billingsgate! Here’s Mr.

Jig-and-Reel behind here, says she’s done him! By Gosh! What’s up now?

One of the young ladies of the party ahead had rushed up to the young

woman dodging to stand in Lord Mackrell’s way. The crowd pressed to see.

Kit Ines and his mate shouldered them off. They performed an envelopment

of the gentlemen and ladies, including the two young women. Kit left

his mate and ran to the young woman hitherto the quieter of the two. He

rattled at her. But she had a tongue of her own and rattled it at him.

What did she say?

Merely to hear, for no other reason,’ a peace-loving crowd of clerks and

tradesmen, workmen and their girls, young aspirants to the professions,

night-larks of different classes, both sexes, there in that place for

simple entertainment, animated simply by the spirit of English humour,

contracted, so closing upon the Mackrell party as to seem threatening to

the most orderly and apprehensive member of it, who was the baronet, Sir

Meeson Corby.

He was a man for the constables in town emergencies, and he shouted.

‘Cock Robin crowing’ provoked a jolly round of barking chaff. The noise

in a dense ring drew Fleetwood’s temper. He gave the word to Kit Ines,

and immediately two men dropped; a dozen staggered unhit. The fists

worked right and left; such a clearing of ground was never seen for

sickle or scythe. And it was taken respectfully; for Science proclaimed

her venerable self in the style and the perfect sufficiency of the

strokes. A bruiser delivered them. No shame to back away before a

bruiser. There was rather an admiring envy of the party claiming the

nimble champion on their side, until the very moderate lot of the

Mackrells went stepping forward along the strewn path with sticks

pointed.

If they had walked it like gentlemen, they would have been allowed to

get through. An aggressive minority, and with Cock Robin squealing for

constables in the midst, is that insolent upstart thing which howls to

have a lesson. The sticks were fallen on; bump came the mass. Kit Ines

had to fight his way back to his mate, and the couple scoured a clearish

ring, but the gentlemen were at short thrusts, affable in tone, to

cheer the spirits of the ladies:--‘All right, my friend, you’re a trifle

mistaken, it ‘s my stick, not yours.’ Therewith the wrestle for the

stick.

The one stick not pointed was wrenched from the grasp of Sir Meeson

Corby; and by a woman, the young woman who had accosted my lord; not

a common young woman either, as she appeared when beseeching him. Her

stature rose to battle heights: she made play with Sir Meeson Corby’s

ebony stick, using it in one hand as a dwarf quarterstaff to flail the

sconces, then to dash the point at faces; and she being a woman, a girl,

perhaps a lady, her cool warrior method of cleaving way, without so much

as tightening her lips, was found notable; and to this degree (vouched

for by Rose Mackrell, who heard it), that a fellow, rubbing his head,

cried: ‘Damn it all, she’s clever, though!’ She took her station beside

Lord Fleetwood.

He had been as cool as she, or almost. Now he was maddened; she defended

him, she warded and thrust for him, only for him, to save him a touch;

unasked, undesired, detested for the box on his ears of to-morrow’s

public mockery, as she would be, overwhelming him with ridicule. Have

you seen the kick and tug at the straps of the mettled pony in stables

that betrays the mishandling of him by his groom? Something so did

Fleetwood plunge and dart to be free of her, and his desperate soul

cried out on her sticking to him like a plaster!

Welcome were the constables. His guineas winked at their chief, as fair

women convey their meanings, with no motion of eyelids; and the officers

of the law knew the voice habituated to command, and answered two words

of his: ‘Right, my lord,’ smelling my lord in the unerring manner of

those days. My lord’s party were escorted to the gates, not a little

jeered; though they by no means had the worst of the tussle. But the

puffing indignation of Sir Meesan Corby over his battered hat and

torn frill and buttons plucked from his coat, and his threat of the

magistrates, excited the crowd to derisive yells.

My lord spoke something to his man, handing his purse.

The ladies were spared the hearing of bad language. They, according to

the joint testimony of M. de St. Ombre and Mr. Rose Mackrell, comported

themselves throughout as became the daughters of a warrior race. Both

gentlemen were emphatic to praise the unknown Britomart who had done

such gallant service with Sir Meeson’s ebony wand. He was beginning

to fuss vociferously about the loss of the stick--a family stick,

goldheaded, the family crest on it, priceless to the family--when Mrs.

Kirby-Levellier handed it to him inside the coach.

‘But where is she?’ M. de St. Ombre said, and took the hint of Livia’s

touch on his arm in the dark.

At the silence following the question, Mr. Rose Mackrell murmured, ‘Ah!’

He and the French gentleman understood that there might have been a

manifestation of the notorious Whitechapel Countess.

They were two; and a slower-witted third was travelling to his ideas on

the subject. Three men, witnesses of a remarkable incident in connection

with a boiling topic of current scandal,--glaringly illustrative of it,

moreover,--were unlikely to keep close tongues, even if they had been

sworn to secresy. Fleetwood knew it, and he scorned to solicit them; an

exaction of their idle vows would be merely the humiliation of himself.

So he tossed his dignity to recklessness, as the ultraconvivial give

the last wink of reason to the wine-cup. Persecuted as he was, nothing

remained for him but the nether-sublime of a statuesque desperation.

That was his feeling; and his way of cloaking it under light sallies at

Sir Meeson and easy chat with Henrietta made it visible to her, from its

being the contrary of what the world might expect a proud young nobleman

to exhibit. She pitied him: she had done him some wrong. She read into

him, too, as none else could. Seeing the solitary tortures behind the

pleasant social mask, she was drawn to partake of them; and the mask

seemed pathetic. She longed to speak a word in sympathy or relieve her

bosom of tears. Carinthia had sunk herself, was unpardonable, hardly

mentionable. Any of the tales told of her might be credited after this!

The incorrigible cause of humiliation for everybody connected with her

pictured, at a word of her name, the crowd pressing and the London world

acting audience. Livia spoke the name when they had reached their house

and were alone. Henrietta responded with the imperceptible shrug which

is more eloquent than a cry to tell of the most monstrous of loads. My

lord, it was thought by the ladies, had directed his man to convey her

safely to her chosen home, whence she might be expected very soon to be

issuing and striking the gong of London again.