CHAPTER XLII. THE RETARDED COURTSHIP

Carinthia reached Esslemont near noon. She came on foot, and had come

unaccompanied, stick in hand, her dress looped for the roads. Madge

bustled her shorter steps up the park beside her; Fleetwood met her on

the terrace.

‘No one can be spared at Croridge,’ she said. ‘I go back before dark.’

Apology was not thought of; she seemed wound to the pitch.

He bowed; he led into the morning-room. ‘The boy is at Croridge?’

‘With me. He has his nurse. Madge was at home here more than there.’

‘Why do you go back?’

‘I am of use to my brother.’

‘Forgive me--in what way?’

‘He has enemies about him. They are the workmen of Lord Levellier. They

attacked Lekkatts the other night, and my uncle fired at them out of

a window and wounded a man. They have sworn they will be revenged. Mr.

Wythan is with my brother to protect him.’

‘Two men, very well; they don’t want, if there’s danger, a woman’s aid

in protecting him?’

She smiled, and her smile was like the hint of the steel blade an inch

out of sheath.

‘My brother does not count me a weak woman.’

‘Oh no! No one would think that,’ Fleetwood said hurriedly and heartily.

‘Least of all men, I, Carinthia. But you might be rash.’

‘My brother knows me cautious.’

‘Chillon?’

‘It is my brother’s name.’

‘You used to call him by his name.

‘I love his name.’

‘Ah, well! I may be pardoned for wishing to hear what part you play

there.’

‘I go the rounds with my brother.’

‘Armed?’

‘We carry arms.’

‘Queer sight to see in England. But there are rascals in this country,

too.’

She was guilty of saying, though not pointedly: ‘We do not hire

defenders.’

‘In civilized lands...’ he began and stopped ‘You have Mr. Wythan?’

‘Yes, we are three.’

‘You call him, I think, Owain?’

‘I do.’

‘In your brother’s hearing?’

‘Yes, my lord; it would be in your hearing if you were near.’

‘No harm, no doubt.’

‘There is none.’

‘But you will not call your brother Chillon to me.’

‘You dislike the name.’

‘I learn to like everything you do and say; and every person you like.’

‘It is by Mr. Wythan’s dead wife’s request that I call him by his name.

He is our friend. He is a man to trust.’

‘The situation...’ Fleetwood hung swaying between the worldly view of it

and the white light of this woman’s nature flashed on his emotion into

his mind. ‘You shall be trusted for judging. If he is your friend, he

is my friend. I have missed the sight of our boy. You heard I was at

Esslemont?’

‘I heard from Madge!’

‘It is positive you must return to Croridge?’

‘I must be with my brother, yes.’

‘Your ladyship will permit me to conduct you.’

Her head assented. There was nothing to complain of, but he had not

gained a step.

The rule is, that when we have yielded initiative to a woman, we are

unable to recover it without uncivil bluster. So, therefore, women

dealing with gentlemen are allowed unreasonable advantages. He had never

granted it in colloquy or act to any woman but this one. Consequently,

he was to see, that if the gentleman in him was not put aside, the

lady would continue moving on lines of the independence he had likewise

yielded, or rather flung, to her. Unless, as a result, he besieged and

wooed his wife, his wife would hold on a course inclining constantly

farther from the union he desired. Yet how could he begin to woo her

if he saw no spark of womanly tenderness? He asked himself, because the

beginning of the wooing might be checked by the call on him for words of

repentance only just possible to conceive. Imagine them uttered, and she

has the initiative for life.

She would not have it, certainly, with a downright brute. But he was not

that. In an extremity of bitterness, he fished up a drowned old thought,

of all his torments being due to the impulsive half-brute he was. And

between the good and the bad in him, the sole point of strength was a

pride likely, as the smooth simplicity of her indifference showed him,

soon to be going down prostrate beneath her feet. Wholly a brute--well?

He had to say, that playing the perfect brute with any other woman he

would have his mastery. The summoning of an idea of personal power to

match this woman in a contest was an effort exhausting the idea.

They passed out of Esslemont gates together at that hour of the late

afternoon when South-westerly breezes, after a summer gale, drive their

huge white flocks over blue fields fresh as morning, on the march to

pile the crown of the sphere, and end a troubled day with grandeur. Up

the lane by the park they had open land to the heights of Croridge.

‘Splendid clouds,’ Fleetwood remarked.

She looked up, thinking of the happy long day’s walk with her brother to

the Styrian Baths. Pleasure in the sight made her face shine superbly.

‘A flying Switzerland, Mr. Woodseer says,’ she replied. ‘England is

beautiful on days like these.--For walking, I think the English climate

very good.’

He dropped a murmur: ‘It should suit so good a walker,’ and burned to

compliment--her spirited easy stepping, and scorned himself for the

sycophancy it would be before they were on the common ground of a

restored understanding. But an approval of any of her acts threatened

him with enthusiasm for the whole of them, her person included; and a

dam in his breast had to keep back the flood.

‘You quote Woodseer to me, Carinthia. I wish you knew Lord Feltre. He

can tell you of every cathedral, convent, and monastery in Europe and

Syria. Nature is well enough; she is, as he says, a savage. Men’s works,

acting under divine direction to escape from that tangle, are better

worthy of study, perhaps. If one has done wrong, for example.’

‘I could listen to him,’ she said.

‘You would not need--except, yes, one thing. Your father’s book speaks

of not forgiving an injury.’

‘My father does. He thinks it weakness to forgive an injury. Women do,

and are disgraced, they are thought slavish. My brother is much stronger

than I am. He is my father alive in that.’

‘It is anti-Christian, some would think.’

‘Let offending people go. He would not punish them. They may go where

they will be forgiven. For them our religion is a happy retreat; we are

glad they have it. My father and my brother say that injury forbids us

to be friends again. My father was injured by the English Admiralty:

he never forgave it; but he would have fought one of their ships and

offered his blood any day, if his country called to battle.’

‘You have the same feeling, you mean.’

‘I am a woman. I follow my brother, whatever he decides. It is not to

say he is the enemy of persons offending him; only that they have put

the division.’

‘They repent?’

‘If they do, they do well for themselves.’

‘You would see them in sackcloth and ashes?’

‘I would pray to be spared seeing them.’

‘You can entirely forget--well, other moments, other feelings?’

‘They may heighten the injury.’

‘Carinthia, I should wish to speak plainly, if I could, and tell

you....’

‘You speak quite plainly, my lord.’

‘You and I cannot be strangers or enemies.’

‘We cannot be, I would not be. To be friends, we should be separate.’

‘You say you are a woman; you have a heart, then?’--for, if not, what

have you? was added in the tone.

‘My heart is my brother’s,’ she said.

‘All your heart?’

‘My heart is my brother’s until one of us drops.’

‘There is not another on earth beside your brother Chillon?’

‘There is my child.’

The dwarf square tower of Croridge village church fronted them against

the sky, seen of both.

‘You remember it,’ he said; and she answered: ‘I was married there.’

‘You have not forgotten that injury, Carinthia?’

‘I am a mother.’

‘By all the saints! you hit hard. Justly. Not you. Our deeds are the

hard hitters. We learn when they begin to flagellate, stroke upon

stroke! Suppose we hold a costly thing in the hand and dash it to the

ground--no recovery of it, none! That must be what your father meant. I

can’t regret you are a mother. We have a son, a bond. How can I describe

the man I was!’ he muttered,--‘possessed! sort of werewolf! You are my

wife?’

‘I was married to you, my lord.’

‘It’s a tie of a kind.’

‘It binds me.’

‘Obey, you said.’

‘Obey it. I do.’

‘You consider it holy?’

‘My father and my mother spoke to me of the marriage-tie. I read the

service before I stood at the altar. It is holy. It is dreadful. I will

be true to it.’

‘To your husband?’

‘To his name, to his honour.’

‘To the vow to live with him?’

‘My husband broke that for me.’

‘Carinthia, if he bids you, begs you to renew it? God knows what you may

save me from!’

‘Pray to God. Do not beg of me, my lord. I have my brother and my little

son. No more of husband for me! God has given me a friend, too,--a man

of humble heart, my brother’s friend, my dear Rebecca’s husband. He can

take them from me: no one but God. See the splendid sky we have.’

With those words she barred the gates on him; at the same time she

bestowed the frank look of an amiable face brilliant in the lively red

of her exercise, in its bent-bow curve along the forehead, out of the

line of beauty, touching, as her voice was, to make an undertone of

anguish swell an ecstasy. So he felt it, for his mood was now the

lover’s. A torture smote him, to find himself transported by that voice

at his ear to the scene of the young bride in thirty-acre meadow.

‘I propose to call on Captain Kirby-Levellier tomorrow, Carinthia,’ he

said. ‘The name of his house?’

‘My brother is not now any more in the English army,’ she replied. ‘He

has hired a furnished house named Stoneridge.’

‘He will receive me, I presume?’

‘My brother is a courteous gentleman, my lord.’

‘Here is the church, and here we have to part for today. Do we?’

‘Good-bye to you, my lord,’ she said.

He took her hand and dropped the dead thing.

‘Your idea is, to return to Esslemont some day or other?’

‘For the present,’ was her strange answer.

She bowed, she stepped on. On she sped, leaving him at the stammered

beginning of his appeal to her.

Their parting by the graveyard of the church that had united them was

what the world would class as curious. To him it was a further and a

well-marked stroke of the fatality pursuing him. He sauntered by the

graveyard wall until her figure slipped out of sight. It went like a

puffed candle, and still it haunted the corner where last seen. Her

vanishing seemed to say, that less of her belonged to him than the

phantom his eyes retained behind them somewhere.

There was in his pocket a memento of Ambrose Mallard, that the family

had given him at his request. He felt the lump. It had an answer for

all perplexities. It had been charged and emptied since it was in his

possession; and it could be charged again. The thing was a volume as

big as the world to study. For the touch of a finger, one could have

its entirely satisfying contents, and fly and be a raven of that night

wherein poor Ambrose wanders lost, but cured of human wounds.

He leaned on the churchyard wall, having the graves to the front of eyes

bent inward. They were Protestant graves, not so impressive to him as

the wreathed and gilt of those under dedication to Feltre’s Madonna. But

whatever they were, they had ceased to nurse an injury or feel the pain

for having inflicted it. Their wrinkles had gone from them, whether

of anger or suffering. Ambrose Mallard lay as peaceful in consecrated

ground: and Chumley Potts would be unlikely to think that the helping

to lay Ambrose in his quiet last home would cost him a roasting until

priestly intercession availed. So Chummy continues a Protestant; dull

consciences can! But this is incomprehensible, that she, nursing her

injury, should be perfectly civil. She is a woman without emotion. She

is a woman full of emotion, one man knows. She ties him to her, to make

him feel the lash of his remorse. He feels it because of her casting him

from her--and so civilly. If this were a Catholic church, one might go

in and give the stained soul free way to get a cleansing. As it is,

here are the graves; the dead everywhere have their sanctity, even the

heathen.

Fleetwood read the name of the family of Meek on several boards at the

head of the graves. Jonathan Meek died at the age of ninety-five. A

female Meek had eighty-nine years in this life. Ezra Meek gave up

the ghost prematurely, with a couplet, at eighty-one. A healthy spot,

Croridge, or there were virtues in the Meek family, he reflected,

and had a shudder that he did not trace to its cause, beyond an

acknowledgement of a desire for the warm smell of incense.