CHAPTER XLI. IN WHICH THE FATES ARE SEEN AND A CHOICE OF THE REFUGES

FROM THEM

The home of husband and wife was under one roof at last. Fleetwood went,

like one deported, to his wing of the house, physically sensible, in

the back turned to his wife’s along the corridor, that our ordinary

comparison for the division of a wedded twain is correct. She was

Arctic, and Antarctic he had to be, perforce of the distance she put

between them. A removal of either of them from life--or from ‘the act of

breathing,’ as Gower Woodseer’s contempt of the talk about death would

call it--was an imaginable way of making it a wider division. Ambrose

Mallard was far enough from his fatal lady now--farther than the Poles

asunder. Ambrose, if the clergy will allow him, has found his peace..

But the road and the means he chose were a madman’s.

The blotting of our character, to close our troubles, is the final proof

of our being ‘sons of vapour,’ according to Gower Woodseer’s heartless

term for poor Ambrose and the lot. They have their souls; and above

philosophy, ‘natural’ or unnatural, they may find a shelter. They can

show in their desperation that they are made of blood, as philosophers

rather fail of doing. An insignificant brainless creature like Feltre

had wits, by the aid of his religion, to help or be charitable to his

fellows, particularly the sinners, in the crisis of life, surpassing any

philosopher’s.

Information of her ladyship’s having inspected the apartments, to see to

the minutest of his customary luxuries, cut at him all round. His valet

had it from the footmen and maids; and their speaking of it meant

a liking for their mistress; and that liking, added to her official

solicitude on his behalf, touched a soft place in him and blew an

icy wind; he was frozen where he was warmed. Here was evidence of her

intending the division to be a fixed gap. She had entered this room and

looked about her. He was here to feel her presence in her absence.

Some one or something had schooled her, too. Her large-eyed directness

of gaze was the same as at that inn and in Wales, but her easy

sedateness was novel, her English, almost the tone of the English world:

he gathered it, at least, from the few remarks below stairs.

His desire to be with her was the desire to escape the phantasm of the

woman haunting to subjugate him when they were separate. He could kill

illusion by magnifying and clawing at her visible angles and audible

false notes; and he did it until his recollections joined to the sight

of her, when a clash of the thought of what she had been and the thought

of what she was had the effect of conjuring a bitter sweet image that

was a more seductive illusion. Strange to think, this woman once loved

the man who was not half the value of the man she no longer loved. He

took a shot at cynicism, but hit no mark. This woman protected her whole

sex.

They sat at the dinner-table alone, thanks to a handsome wench’s

attractions for a philosopher. Married, and parents of a lusty son, this

was their first sitting at table together. The mouth that said ‘I guard

my rooms’ was not obtruded; she talked passingly of her brother, much

of Lady Arpington and of old Mr. Woodseer; and, though she reserved a

smile, there was no look of a lock on her face. She seemed pleased to

be treated very courteously; she returned the stately politeness in

exactest measure; very simply, as well. Her face had now an air of

homeliness, well suited to an English household interior. She could

chat. Any pauses occurring, he was the one guilty of them; she did not

allow them to be barrier chasms, or ‘strids’ for the leap with effort;

she crossed them like the mountain maid over a gorge’s plank--kept her

tones perfectly. Her Madge and Mr. Gower Woodseer made a conversible

topic. She was inquisitive for accounts of Spanish history and the land

of Spain.

They passed into the drawing-room. She had heard of the fate of the poor

child in Wales, she said, without a comment.

‘I see now, I ought to have backed your proposal,’ he confessed, and was

near on shivering. She kept silent, proudly or regretfully.

Open on her workbasket was a Spanish guide-book and a map attached to

it. She listened to descriptions of Cadiz, Malaga, Seville, Granada.

Her curiosity was chiefly for detailed accounts of Catalonia and the

Pyrenees.

‘Hardly the place for you; there’s a perpetual heaving of Carlism in

those mountains; your own are quieter for travellers,’ he remarked; and

for a moment her lips moved to some likeness of a smile; a dimple in a

flowing thought.

He remarked the come and go of it.

He regretted his inability to add to her knowledge of the Spanish

Pyrenees.

Books helped her at present, she said.

Feeling acutely that hostility would have brought them closer than her

uninviting civility, he spoke of the assault on Mr. Wythan, and Gower

Woodseer’s conjecture, and of his having long since discharged the

rascal Ines.

To which her unreproachful answer, ‘You made use of those men, my lord,’

sent a cry ringing through him, recalling Feltre’s words, as to the grip

men progressively are held in by their deeds done.

‘Oh, quite true, we change our views and ways of life,’ he said,

thinking she might set her considerations on other points of his

character. But this reflection was a piece of humility not yet in his

particular estimate of his character, and he spurned it: an act of pride

that drove his mind, for occupation, to contemplate hers; which speedily

became an embrace of her character, until he was asking whether the

woman he called wife and dared not clasp was one of those rarest, who

can be idealized by virtue of their being known. For the young man

embracing a character loses grasp of his own, is plucked out of himself

and passes into it, to see the creature he is with the other’s eyes,

and feel for the other as a very self. Such is the privilege and the

chastisement of the young.

Gower Woodseer’s engagement with the girl Madge was a happier subject

for expatiation and agreement. Her deeper tones threw a light on

Gower, and where she saw goodness, he could at least behold the natural

philosopher practically philosophizing.

‘The girl shall have a dowry from me,’ he said; and the sum named was

large. Her head bent acknowledgingly; money had small weight with her

now. His perception of it stripped him and lamed him.

He wished her ladyship good-night. She stood up and performed a

semi-ceremonious obeisance, neatly adapted to their mutual position. She

had a well-bred mother.

Probably she would sleep. No such expectation could soothe the friend,

and some might be thinking misleader, of Ambrose Mallard, before he had

ocular proof that the body lay underground. His promise was given to

follow it to the grave, a grave in consecrated earth. Ambrose died of

the accidental shot of a pocket-pistol he customarily carried loaded.

Two intimate associates of the dead man swore to that habit of his.

They lied to get him undisputed Christian burial. Aha! The earl laughed

outright at Chummy Potts’s nursery qualms. The old fellow had to do it,

and he lied like a man for the sake of Ambrose Mallard’s family. So much

is owing to our friend.

Can ecclesiastical casuists decide upon cases of conscience affecting

men of the world?

A council sat upon the case the whole night long. A committee of the

worldly held argumentation in a lower chamber.

These are nights that weaken us to below the level of women. A shuttle

worked in Fleetwood’s head. He defended the men of the world. Lord

Feltre oiled them, damned them, kindled them to a terrific expiatory

blaze, and extinguishingly salved and wafted aloft the released essence

of them. Maniacal for argument, Fleetwood rejected the forgiveness

of sins, if sins they be. Prove them sins, and the suffering is of

necessity everlasting, his insomnia logic insisted. Whichever side he

took, his wife was against him; not in speech, but in her look. She was

a dumb figure among the wranglers, clouded up to the neck. Her look said

she knew more of him than they knew.

He departed next day for London, after kissing his child; and he would

have done wisely to abstain from his exhibition of the paternal. Knowing

it a step to conciliation, he checked his impulsive warmth, under the

apprehension that the mother would take it for a piece of acting to

propitiate--and his lips pecked the baby’s cheek. Its mother held arms

for it immediately.

Not without reason did his heart denounce her as a mere mother, with

little of a mind to see.

The recent series of feverishly sleepless nights disposed him to

snappish irritability or the thirst for tenderness. Gower had singular

experiences of him on the drive North-westward. He scarcely spoke; he

said once: ‘If you mean to marry, you’ll be wanting to marry soon, of

course,’ and his curt nod before the reply was formulated appeared to

signify, the sooner the better, and deliverance for both of us. Honest

though he might, be sometimes deep and sometimes picturesque, the

philosopher’s day had come to an end. How can Philosophy minister to

raw wounds, when we are in a rageing gale of the vexations, battered

to right and left! Religion has a nourishing breast: Philosophy is

breastless. Religion condones offences: Philosophy has no forgiveness,

is an untenanted confessional: ‘wide air to a cry in anguish,’ Feltre

says.

All the way to London Fleetwood endured his companion, letting him talk

when he would.

He spent the greater part of the night discussing human affairs

and spiritual with Lord Feltre, whose dialectical exhortations and

insinuations were of the feeblest, but to an isolated young man,

yearning for the tenderness of a woman thinking but of her grievances,

the ointment brought comfort.

It soothed him during his march to and away from Ambrose Mallard’s

grave; where it seemed to him curious and even pitiable that Chumley

Potts should be so inconsolably shaken. Well, and if the priests have

the secret of strengthening the backbone for a bend of the knee in

calamity, why not go to the priests, Chummy? Potts’s hearing was not

addressed; nor was the chief person in the meditation affected by a

question that merely jumped out of his perturbed interior.

Business at Calesford kept Fleetwood hanging about London several days

further; and his hatred of a place he wasted time and money to decorate

grew immeasurable. It distorted the features of the beautiful woman for

whose pleasure the grand entertainments to be held there had, somewhere

or other--when felon spectres were abroad over earth--been conceived.

He could then return to Esslemont. Gower was told kindly, with

intentional coldness, that he could take a seat in the phaeton if he

liked; and he liked, and took it. Anything to get to that girl of his!

Whatever the earl’s inferiors did, their inferior station was not

suffered to discolour it for his judgement. But an increasing antagonism

to Woodseer’s philosophy--which the fellow carried through with

perpetual scorings of satisfaction--caused him to set a hard eye on the

damsel under the grisly spotting shadow of the sottish bruiser, of whom,

after once touching the beast, he could not rub his hands clean; and

he chose to consider the winning of the prize-fighter’s lass the final

triumph or flag on the apex of the now despised philosophy. Vain to

ask how he had come to be mixed up with the lot, or why the stolidly

conceited, pretentious fellow had seat here, as by right, beside him!

We sow and we reap; ‘plant for sugar and taste the cane,’ some one

says--this Woodseer, probably; he can, when it suits him, tickle the

ears of the worldlings. And there is worthier stuff to remember; stuff

to nourish: Feltre’s ‘wisdom of our fathers,’ rightly named Religion.

More in the country, when he traversed sweep and rise of open land,

Carinthia’s image began to shine, and she threw some of her light on

Madge, who made Woodseer appear tolerable, sagacious, absurdly enviable,

as when we have the fit to wish we were some four-foot. The fellow’s

philosophy wore a look of practical craft.

He was going to the girl he liked, and she was, one could swear, an

honest girl; and she was a comely girl, a girl to stick to a man. Her

throwing over a sot was creditable. Her mistress loved her. That said

much for any mortal creature. Man or woman loved by Carinthia could

not be cowardly, could not be vile, must have high qualities. Next

to Religion, she stood for a test of us. Had she any strong sense of

Religion, in addition to the formal trooping to one of their pallid

Protestant churches? Lord Feltre might prove useful to her. For merely

the comprehension of the signification of Religion steadies us. It had

done that for him, the earl owned.

He broke a prolonged silence by remarking to Gower ‘You haven’t much

to say to-day’; and the answer was ‘Very little. When I’m walking, I’m

picking up; and when I’m driving, I’m putting together.’

Gower was rallied on the pursuit of the personal object in both cases.

He pointed at sheep, shepherd, farmer, over the hedge, all similarly

occupied; and admitted shamelessly, that he had not a thought for

company, scarce a word to fling. ‘Ideas in gestation are the dullest

matter you can have.’

‘There I quite agree with you,’ said Fleetwood. Abrane, Chummy Potts,

Brailstone, little Corby, were brighter comrades. And these were

his Ixionides! Hitherto his carving of a way in the world had been

sufficiently ill-considered. Was it preferable to be a loutish

philosopher? Since the death of Ambrose Mallard, he felt Woodseer’s

title for that crew grind harshly; and he tried to provoke a repetition

of it, that he might burst out in wrathful defence of his friends--to be

named friends when they were vilified: defence of poor Ambrose at least,

the sinner who, or one as bad, might have reached to pardon through the

priesthood.

Gower offered him no chance..

Entering Esslemont air, Fleetwood tossed his black mood to the winds.

She breathed it. She was a mountain girl, and found it hard to forgive

our lowlands. She would learn tolerance, taking her flights at seasons.

The yacht, if she is anything of a sailor, may give her a taste of

England’s pleasures. She will have a special allowance for distribution

among old Mr. Woodseer’s people. As to the rest of the Countess of

Fleetwood’s wishes, her family ranks with her husband’s in claims of

any kind on him. There would be--she would require and had a right to

demand--say, a warm half-hour of explanations: he knew the tone for

them, and so little did he revolve it apprehensively, that his mind

sprang beyond, to the hearing from her mouth of her not intending

further to ‘guard her rooms.’ How quietly the words were spoken! There

was a charm in the retrospect of her mouth and manner. One of the

rare women who never pout or attitudinize, she could fling her glove

gracefully--one might add, capturingly under every aspect, she was a

handsome belligerent. The words he had to combat pleased his memory.

Some good friend, Lady Arpington probably, had instructed her in the art

of dressing to match her colour.

Concerning himself, he made no stipulation, but he reflected on Lord

Feltre’s likely estimate of her as a bit of a heathen. And it might

be to her advantage, were she and Feltre to have some conversations.

Whatever the faith, a faith should exist, for without the sentiment of

religion, a woman, he says, is where she was when she left the gates

of Eden. A man is not much farther. Feltre might have saved Ambrose

Mallard. He is, however, right in saying, that the woman with

the sentiment of religion in her bosom is a box of holy incense

distinguishing her from all other women. Empty of it, she is devil’s

bait. At best, she is a creature who cannot overlook an injury, or must

be exacting God knows what humiliations before she signs the treaty.

Informed at the house that her ladyship had been staying up on Croridge

for the last two days, Fleetwood sent his hardest shot of the eyes at

Gower. Let her be absent: it was equal to the first move of war,

and absolved him from contemplated proposals to make amends. But the

enforced solitary companionship with this ruminator of a fellow set him

asking whether the godless dog he had picked up by the wayside was not

incarnate another of the sins he had to expiate. Day after day,

almost hourly, some new stroke fell on him. Why? Was he selected for

persecution because he was wealthy? The Fates were driving him in one

direction, no doubt of that.

This further black mood evaporated, and like a cessation of English

storm-weather bequeathed him gloom. Ashamed of the mood, he was

nevertheless directed by its final shadows to see the ruminating

tramp in Gower, and in Madge the prize-fighter’s jilt: and round about

Esslemont a world eyeing an Earl of Fleetwood, who painted himself the

man he was, or was held to be, by getting together such a collection,

from the daughter of the Old Buccaneer to the ghastly corpse of Ambrose

Mallard. Why, clearly, wealth was the sole origin and agent of the

mischief. With somewhat less of it, he might have walked in his place

among the nation’s elect, the ‘herd of the gilt horns,’ untroubled by

ambitions and ideas.

Arriving thus far, he chanced to behold Gower and Madge walking over the

grounds near the western plantation, and he regretted the disappearance

of them, with the fellow talking hard into the girl’s ear. Those two

could think he had been of some use. The man pretending to philosophical

depth was at any rate honest; one could swear to the honesty of the

girl, though she had been a reckless hussy. Their humble little hopes

and means to come to union approached, after a fashion, hymning at his

ears. Those two were pleasanter to look on than amorous lords and great

ladies, who are interesting only when they are wicked.

Four days of desolate wanderings over the estate were occupied chiefly

in his decreeing the fall of timber that obstructed views, and was the

more imperatively doomed for his bailiff’s intercession. ‘Sound wood’

the trees might be: they had to assist in defraying the expense of

separate establishments. A messenger to Queeney from Croridge then

announced the Countess’s return ‘for a couple of hours.’ Queeney said

it was the day when her ladyship examined the weekly bills of the

household. That was in the early morning. The post brought my lord a

letter from Countess Livia, a most infrequent writer. She had his word

to pay her debts; what next was she for asking? He shrugged, opened the

letter, and stared at the half dozen lines. The signification of

them rapped on his consciousness of another heavy blow before he was

perfectly intelligent.

All possible anticipation seemed here outdone: insomuch that he held

palpable evidence of the Fates at work to harass and drive him. She was

married to the young Earl of Cressett!’

Fleetwood printed the lines on his eyeballs. They were the politely

flowing feminine of a statement of the fact, which might have been in

one line. They flourished wantonly: they were deadly blunt. And of

all men, this youngster, who struck at him through her lips with the

reproach, that he had sped the good-looking little beast upon his road

to ruin:--perhaps to Ambrose Mallard’s end!