CHAPTER XLIV. BETWEEN THE EARL, THE COUNTESS AND HER BROTHER, AND OF A
SILVER CROSS
Carinthia was pleased by hearing Lord Fleetwood say to her: ‘Your Madge
and my Gower are waiting to have the day named for them.’
She said: ‘I respect him so much for his choice of Madge. They shall not
wait, if I am to decide.’
‘Old Mr. Woodseer has undertaken to join them.’
‘It is in Whitechapel they will be married.’
The blow that struck was not intended, and Fleetwood passed it, under
her brother’s judicial eye. Any small chance word may carry a sting for
the neophyte in penitence.
‘My lawyers will send down the settlement on her, to be read to them
to-day or to-morrow. With the interest on that and the sum he tells me
he has in the Funds, they keep the wolf from the door--a cottage door.
They have their cottage. There’s an old song of love in a cottage. His
liking for it makes him seem wiser than his clever sayings. He’ll work
in that cottage.’
‘They have a good friend to them in you, my lord. It will not be poverty
for their simple wants. I hear of the little cottage in Surrey where
they are to lodge at first, before they take one of their own.’
‘We will visit them.’
‘When I am in England I shall visit them often.’
He submitted.
‘The man up here wounded is recovering?’
‘Yes, my lord. I am learning to nurse the wounded, with the surgeon to
direct me.’
‘Matters are sobering down?--The workmen?’
‘They listen to reason so willingly when we speak personally, we find.’
The earl addressed Chillon. ‘Your project of a Spanish expedition
reminds me of favourable reports of your chief.’
‘Thoroughly able and up to the work,’ Chillon answered.
‘Queer people to meddle with.’
‘We ‘re on the right side on the dispute.’
‘It counts, Napoleon says. A Spanish civil war promises bloody doings.’
‘Any war does that.’
‘In the Peninsula it’s war to the knife, a merciless business.’
‘Good schooling for the profession.’
Fleetwood glanced: she was collected and attentive. ‘I hear from Mrs.
Levellier that Carinthia would like to be your companion.’
‘My sister has the making of a serviceable hospital nurse.’
‘You hear the chatter of London!’
‘I have heard it.’
‘You encourage her, Mr. Levellier?’
‘She will be useful--better there than here, my lord.’
‘I claim a part in the consultation.’
‘There ‘s no consultation; she determines to go.’
‘We can advise her of all the risks.’
‘She has weighed them, every one.’
‘In the event of accidents, the responsibility for having persuaded her
would rest on you.’
‘My brother has not persuaded me,’ Carinthia’s belltones intervened. ‘I
proposed it. The persuasion was mine. It is my happiness to be near him,
helping, if I can.’
‘Lady Fleetwood, I am entitled to think that your brother yielded to a
request urged in ignorance of the nature of the risks a woman runs.’
‘My brother does not yield to a request without examining it all round,
my lord, and I do not. I know the risks. An evil that we should not
endure,--life may go. There can be no fear for me.’
She spoke plain truth. The soul of this woman came out in its radiance
to subdue him, as her visage sometimes did; and her voice enlarged her
words. She was a warrior woman, Life her sword, Death her target, never
to be put to shame, unconquerable. No such symbolical image smote
him, but he had an impression, the prose of it. As in the scene of
the miners’ cottares, her lord could have knelt to her: and for an
unprotesting longer space now. He choked a sigh, shrugged, and said, in
the world’s patient manner with mad people: ‘You have set your mind on
it; you see it rose-coloured. You would not fear, no, but your friends
would have good reason to fear. It’s a menagerie in revolt over there.
It is not really the place for you. Abandon the thought, I beg.’
‘I shall, if my brother does not go,’ said Carinthia.
Laughter of spite at a remark either silly or slyly defiant was checked
in Fleetwood by the horror of the feeling that she had gone, was
ankle-deep in bloody mire, captive, prey of a rabble soldiery,
meditating the shot or stab of the blessed end out of woman’s half of
our human muddle.
He said to Chillon: ‘Pardon me, war is a detestable game. Women in the
thick of it add a touch to the brutal hideousness of the whole thing.’
Chillon said: ‘We are all of that opinion. Men have to play the game;
women serving in hospital make it humaner.’
‘Their hospitals are not safe.’
‘Well! Safety!’
For safety is nowhere to be had. But the earl pleaded: ‘At least in our
country.’
‘In our country women are safe?’
‘They are, we may say, protected.’
‘Laws and constables are poor protection for them.’
‘The women we name ladies are pretty safe, as a rule.’
‘My sister, then, was the exception.’
After a burning half minute the earl said: ‘I have to hear it from you,
Mr. Levellier. You see me here.’
That was handsomely spoken. But Lord Fleetwood had been judged and put
aside. His opening of an old case to hint at repentance for brutality
annoyed the man who had let him go scathless for a sister’s sake.
‘The grounds of your coming, my lord, are not seen; my time is short.’
‘I must, I repeat, be consulted with regard to Lady Fleetwood’s
movements.’
‘My sister does not acknowledge your claim.’
‘The Countess of Fleetwood’s acts involve her husband.’
‘One has to listen at times to what old sailors call Caribbee!’ Chillon
exclaimed impatiently, half aloud. ‘My sister received your title; she
has to support it. She did not receive the treatment of a wife:--or
lady, or woman, or domestic animal. The bond is broken, as far as it
bears on her subjection. She holds to the rite, thinks it sacred. You
can be at rest as to her behaviour. In other respects, your lordship
does not exist for her.’
‘The father of her child must exist for her.’
‘You raise that curtain, my lord!’
In the presence of three it would not bear a shaking.
Carinthia said, in pity of his torture:--
‘I have my freedom, and am thankful for it, to follow my brother, to
share his dangers with him. That is more to me than luxury and the
married state. I take only my freedom.’
‘Our boy? You take the boy?’
‘My child is with my sister Henrietta!
‘Where?’
‘We none know yet.’
‘You still mistrust me?’
Her eyes were on a man that she had put from her peaceably; and she
replied, with sweetness in his ears, with shocks to a sinking heart, ‘My
lord, you may learn to be a gentle father to the child. I pray you may.
My brother and I will go. If it is death for us, I pray my child may
have his father, and God directing his father.’
Her speech had the clang of the final.
‘Yes, I hope--if it be the worst happening, I pray, too,’ said he, and
drooped and brightened desperately: ‘But you, too, Carinthia, you could
aid by staying, by being with the boy and me. Carinthia!’ he clasped her
name, the vapour left to him of her: ‘I have learnt learnt what I am,
what you are; I have to climb a height to win back the wife I threw
away. She was unknown to me; I to myself nearly as much. I sent a
warning of the kind of husband for you--a poor kind; I just knew myself
well enough for that. You claimed my word--the blessing of my life, if I
had known it! We were married; I played--I see the beast I played.
Money is power, they say. I see the means it is to damn the soul, unless
we--unless a man does what I do now.’
Fleetwood stopped. He had never spoken such words--arterial words, as
they were, though the commonest, and with moist brows, dry lips, he
could have resumed, have said more, have taken this woman, this dream
of the former bride, the present stranger, into his chamber of the brave
aims and sentenced deeds. Her brother in the room was the barrier; and
she sat mute, large-eyed, expressionless. He had plunged low in the
man’s hearing; the air of his lungs was thick, hard to breathe, for
shame of a degradation so extreme.
Chillon imagined him to be sighing. He had to listen further. ‘Soul’ had
been an uttered word. When the dishonouring and mishandling brute of
a young nobleman stuttered a compliment to Carinthia on her ‘faith in
God’s assistance and the efficacy of prayer,’ he jumped to his legs,
not to be shouting ‘Hound!’ at him. He said, under control: ‘God’s name
shall be left to the Church. My sister need not be further troubled. She
has shown she is not persuaded by me. Matters arranged here quickly,--we
start. If I am asked whether I think she does wisely to run the risks
in an insurrectionary country rather than remain at home exposed to the
honours and amusements your lordship offers, I think so; she is acting
in her best interests. She has the choice of being abroad with me or
staying here unguarded by me. She has had her experience. She chooses
rightly. Paint the risks she runs, you lay the colours on those she
escapes.’ She thanks the treatment she has undergone for her freedom to
choose. I am responsible for nothing but the not having stood against
her most wretched marriage. It might have been foreseen. Out there in
the war she is protected. Here she is with--I spare your lordship the
name.’
Fleetwood would have heard harsher had he not been Carinthia’s husband.
He withheld his reply. The language moved him to proud hostility: but
the speaker was Carinthia’s brother.
He said to her: ‘You won’t forget Gower and Madge?’
She gave him a smile in saying: ‘It shall be settled for a day after
next week.’
The forms of courtesy were exchanged.
At the closing of the door on him, Chillon said: ‘He did send a message:
I gathered it--without the words--from our Uncle Griphard. I thought him
in honour bound to you--and it suited me that I should.’
‘I was a blindfold girl, dearest; no warning would have given me sight,’
said Carinthia. ‘That was my treachery to the love of my brother.. I
dream of father and mother reproaching me.’
The misery of her time in England had darkened her mind’s picture of the
early hour with Chillon on the heights above the forsaken old home; and
the enthusiasm of her renewed devotion to her brother giving it again,
as no light of a lost Eden, as the brilliant step she was taking with
him from their morning Eastern Alps to smoky-crimson Pyrenees and
Spanish Sierras; she could imagine the cavernous interval her punishment
for having abandoned a sister’s duties in the quest of personal
happiness.
But simultaneously, the growing force of her mind’s intelligence,
wherein was no enthusiasm to misdirect by overcolouring, enabled her
to gather more than a suspicion of comparative feebleness in the man
stripped of his terrors. She penetrated the discrowned tyrant’s nature
some distance, deep enough to be quit of her foregoing alarms. These,
combined with his assured high style, had woven him the magical coat,
threadbare to quiet scrutiny. She matched him beside her brother. The
dwarfed object was then observed; and it was not for a woman to measure
herself beside him. She came, however, of a powerful blood, and he was
pressing her back on her resources: without the measurement or a thought
of it, she did that which is the most ordinary and the least noticed of
our daily acts in civilized intercourse, she subjected him to the trial
of the elements composing him, by collision with what she felt of her
own; and it was because she felt them strongly, aware of her feeling
them, but unaware of any conflict, that the wrestle occurred. She flung
him, pitied him, and passed on along her path elsewhere. This can be
done when love is gone. It is done more or less at any meeting of
men and men; and men and women who love not are perpetually doing it,
unconsciously or sensibly. Even in their love, a time for the trial
arrives among certain of them; and the leadership is assumed, and
submission ensues, tacitly; nothing of the contention being spoken,
perhaps, nothing definitely known.
In Carinthia’s case, her revived enthusiasm for her brother drove to the
penetration of the husband pleading to thwart its course. His offer was
wealth: that is, luxury, amusement, ease. The sub-audible ‘himself’ into
the bargain was disregarded, not counting with one who was an upward
rush of fire at the thought that she was called to share her brother’s
dangers.
Chillon cordially believed the earl to be the pestilent half madman,
junction with whom is a constant trepidation for the wife, when it is
not a screaming plight. He said so, and Carinthia let him retain his
opinion. She would have said it herself to support her scheme, though
‘mad’ applied to a man moving in the world with other men was not
understood by her.
With Henrietta for the earl’s advocate, she was patient as the deaf
rock-wall enthusiam can be against entreaties to change its direction or
bid it disperse: The ‘private band of picked musicians’ at the disposal
of the Countess of Fleetwood, and Opera singers (Henrietta mentioned
resonant names) hired for wonderful nights at Esslemont and Calesford
or on board the earl’s beautiful schooner yacht, were no temptation. Nor
did Henrietta’s allusions to his broken appearance move his wife, except
in her saying regretfully: ‘He changes.’
On the hall table at Esslemont, a letter from his bankers informed the
earl of a considerable sum of money paid in to his account in the name
of Lord Brailstone. Chumley Potts, hanging at him like a dog without
a master since the death of his friend Ambrose, had journeyed down:
‘Anxious about you,’ he said. Anxious about or attracted by the
possessor of Ambrose Mallard’s ‘clean sweeper,’ the silver-mounted small
pistol; sight of which he begged to have; and to lengthened his jaw
on hearing it was loaded. A loaded pistol, this dark little one to the
right of the earl’s blotting-pad and pens, had the look of a fearful
link with his fallen chaps and fishy hue. Potts maundered moralities
upon ‘life,’ holding the thing in his hand, weighing it, eyeing the
muzzle. He ‘couldn’t help thinking of what is going to happen to us
after it all’: and ‘Brosey knows now!’ was followed by a twitch of one
cheek and the ejaculation ‘Forever!’ Fleetwood alive and Ambrose dead
were plucking the startled worldling to a peep over the verge into our
abyss; and the young lord’s evident doing of the same commanded Chumley
Potts’ imitation of him under the cloud Ambrose had become for both of
them.
He was recommended to see Lord Feltre, if he had a desire to be
instructed on the subject of the mitigation of our pains in the regions
below. Potts affirmed that he meant to die a Protestant Christian.
Thereupon, carrying a leaden burden of unlaughed laughable stuff in his
breast, and Chummy’s concluding remark to speed him: ‘Damn it, no, we’ll
stick to our religion!’ Fleetwood strode off to his library, and with
the names of the Ixionides of his acquaintance ringing round his head,
proceeded to strike one of them off the number privileged at the moment
to intrude on him. Others would follow; this one must be the first to
go. He wrote the famous letter to Lord Brailstone, which debarred the
wily pursuer from any pretext to be running down into Mrs. Levellier’s
neighbourhood, and also precluded the chance of his meeting the fair
lady at Calesford. With the brevity equivalent to the flick of a glove
on the cheek, Lord Brailstone was given to understand by Lord Fleetwood
that relations were at an end between them. No explanation was added; a
single sentence executed the work, and in the third person. He did not
once reflect on the outcry in the ear of London coming from the receiver
of such a letter upon payment of a debt.
The letter posted and flying, Lord Fleetwood was kinder to Chumley
Potts; he had a friendly word for Gower Woodseer; though both were
heathens, after their diverse fashions, neither of them likely ever to
set out upon the grand old road of Rome: Lord Feltre’s ‘Appian Way of
the Saints and Comforters.’
Chummy was pardoned when they separated at night for his reiterated
allusions to the temptation of poor Ambrose Mallard’s conclusive little
weapon lying on the library table within reach of a man’s arm-chair: in
its case, and the case locked, yes, but easily opened, ‘provoking every
damnable sort of mortal curiosity!’ The soundest men among us have their
fits of the blues, Fleetwood was told. ‘Not wholesome!’ Chummy shook his
head resolutely, and made himself comprehensibly mysterious. He meant
well. He begged his old friend to promise he would unload and keep it
unloaded. ‘For I know the infernal worry you have--deuced deal worse
than a night’s bad luck!’ said he; and Fleetwood smiled sourly at the
world’s total ignorance of causes. His wretchedness was due now to
the fact that the aforetime huntress refused to be captured. He took a
silver cross from a table-drawer and laid it on the pistol-case. ‘There,
Chummy,’ he said; that was all; not sermonizing or proselytizing. He
was partly comprehended by Chumley Potts, fully a week later. The
unsuspecting fellow, soon to be despatched in the suite of Brailstone,
bore away an unwontedly affectionate dismissal to his bed, and spoke
some rather squeamish words himself, as he recollected with disgust when
he ran about over London repeating his executioner’s.
The Cross on the pistol-case may have conduced to Lord Fleetwood’s
thought, that his days among unrepentant ephemeral Protestant sinners
must have their immediate termination. These old friends were the
plague-infected clothes he flung off his body. But the Cross where it
lay, forbidding a movement of the hand to that box, was authoritative to
decree his passage through a present torture, by the agency of the hand
he held back from the solution of his perplexity, at the cost which his
belief in the Eternal would pay. Henrietta had mentioned her husband’s
defeat, by some dastardly contrivance. He had to communicate, for the
disburdening of his soul, not only that he was guilty, but the meanest
of criminals, in being no more than half guilty. His training told him
of the contempt women entertain toward the midway or cripple sinner,
when they have no special desire to think him innocent. How write, or
even how phrase his having merely breathed in his ruffian’s hearing the
wish that he might hear of her husband’s defeat! And with what object?
Here, too, a woman might, years hence, if not forgive, bend her head
resignedly over the man’s vile nature, supposing strong passion his
motive. But the name for the actual motive? It would not bear writing,
or any phrasing round it. An unsceptred despot bidden take a fair
woman’s eyes into his breast, saw and shrank. And now the eyes were
Carinthia’s: he saw a savage bridegroom, and a black ladder-climber, and
the sweetest of pardoning brides, and the devil in him still insatiate
for revenge upon her who held him to his word.
He wrote, read, tore the page, trimmed the lamp, and wrote again. He
remembered Gower Woodseer’s having warned him he would finish his career
a monk. Not, like Feltre, an oily convert, but under the hood, yes, and
extracting a chartreuse from his ramble through woods richer far than
the philosopher’s milk of Mother Nature’s bosom. There flamed the
burning signal of release from his torments; there his absolving refuge,
instead of his writing fruitless, intricate, impossible stuff to a
woman. The letter was renounced and shredded: the dedicated ascetic
contemplated a hooded shape, washed of every earthly fleck. It proved
how men may by power of grip squeeze raptures out of pain.