CHAPTER XLV. CONTAINS A RECORD OF WHAT WAS FEARED, WHAT WAS HOPED, AND
WHAT HAPPENED
The Dame is at her thumps for attention to be called to ‘the strangeness
of it,’ that a poor, small, sparse village, hardly above a hamlet,
on the most unproductive of Kentish heights, part of old forest land,
should at this period become ‘the cynosure of a city beautifully named
by the poet Great Augusta, and truly indeed the world’s metropolis.’
Put aside her artful pother to rouse excitement at stages of a
narrative, London’s general eye upon little Croridge was but another
instance of the extraordinary and not so wonderful. Lady Arpington,
equal to a Parliament in herself, spoke of the place and the countess
courted by her repentant lord. Brailstone and Chumley Potts were town
criers of the executioner letter each had received from the earl; Potts
with his chatter of a suicide’s pistol kept loaded in a case under
a two-inch-long silver Cross, and with sundry dramatic taps on the
forehead, Jottings over the breast, and awful grimace of devoutness.
There was no mistaking him. The young nobleman of the millions was
watched; the town spyglass had him in its orbit. Tales of the ancestral
Fleetwoods ran beside rumours of a Papist priest at the bedside of the
Foredoomed to Error’s dying mother. His wealth was counted, multiplied
by the ready naughts of those who know little and dread much. Sir Meeson
Corby referred to an argument Lord Fleetwood had held on an occasion
hotly against the logical consistency of the Protestant faith; and to
his alarm lest some day ‘all that immense amount of money should slip
away from us to favour the machinations of Roman Catholicism!’ The
Countess of Cressett, Livia, anticipated her no surprise at anything
Lord Fleetwood might do: she knew him.
So thereupon, with the whirr of a covey on wing before the fowler, our
crested three of immemorial antiquity and a presumptive immortality,
the Ladies Endor, Eldritch, and Cowry, shot up again, hooting across the
dormant chief city Old England’s fell word of the scarlet shimmer above
the nether pit-flames, Rome. An ancient horror in the blood of the
population, conceiving the word to signify, beak, fang, and claw, the
fiendish ancient enemy of the roasting day of yore, heard and echoed.
Sleepless at the work of the sapper, in preparation for the tiger’s
leap, Rome is keen to spy the foothold of English stability, and her
clasp of a pillar of the structure sends tremors to our foundations.
The coupling of Rome and England’s wealthiest nobleman struck a match to
terrorize the Fire Insurance of Smithfield. That meteoric, intractable,
perhaps wicked, but popular, reputedly clever; manifestly evil-starred,
enormously wealthy, young Earl of Fleetwood, wedded to an adventuress,
and a target for the scandals emanating from the woman, was daily,
without omission of a day, seen walking Piccadilly pavement in company
once more with the pervert, the Jesuit agent, that crafty Catesby of
a Lord Feltre, arm in arm the pair of them, and uninterruptedly
conversing, utterly unlike Englishmen. Mr. Rose Mackrell passed them,
and his breezy salutation of the earl was unobserved in my lord’s
vacant glass optics, as he sketched the scene. London had report of
the sinister tempter and the imperilled young probationer undisguisedly
entering the Roman Catholic chapel of a fashionable district-chapel
erected on pervert’s legacies, down a small street at the
corner of a grandee square, by tolerance or connivance of our
constabulary,--entering it linked; and linked they issued, their heads
bent; for the operation of the tonsure, you would say. Two English
noblemen! But is there no legislation to stop the disease? Our female
government asks it vixenly of our impotent male; which pretends, beneath
an air of sympathy, that we should abstain from any compulsory action
upon the law to interfere, though the situation is confessedly grave;
and the aspect men assume is correspondingly, to the last degree
provokingly, grave-half alive that they are, or void of patriotism, or
Babylonian at heart!
Lord Fleetwood’s yet undocked old associates vowed he ‘smelt strong’ of
the fumes of the whirled silver censer-balls. His disfavour had caused a
stoppage of supplies, causing vociferous abomination of their successful
rivals, the Romish priests. Captain Abrane sniffed, loud as a horse,
condemnatory as a cat, in speaking of him. He said: ‘By George, it comes
to this; we shall have to turn Catholics for a loan!’ Watchdogs of the
three repeated the gigantic gambler’s melancholy roar. And, see what
gap, cried the ratiocination of alarm, see the landslip it is in our
body, national and religious, when exalted personages go that way to
Rome!
As you and the world have reflected in your sager moods, an ordinary
pebble may roll where it likes, for individualism of the multitudinously
obscure little affects us. Not so the costly jewel, which is a
congregation of ourselves, in our envies and longings and genuflexions
thick about its lustres. The lapses of precious things must needs carry
us, both by weight and example, and it will ceaselessly be, that we
are possessed by the treasure we possess, we hang on it. A still, small
voice of England’s mind under panic sent up these truisms containing
admonitions to the governing Ladies. They, the most conservative of
earthly bodies, clamoured in return, like cloud-scud witches that have
caught fire at their skirts from the torches of marsh-fire radicals.
They cited for his arrest the titled millionaire who made a slide for
the idiots of the kingdom; they stigmatized our liberty as a sophistry,
unless we have in it the sustaining element of justice; and where is
the justice that punishes his country for any fatal course a mad young
Croesus may take! They shackled the hands of testators, who endangered
the salvation of coroneted boys by having sanction to bequeath vast
wealth in bulk. They said, in truth, that it was the liberty to be
un-Christian. Finally, they screeched a petitioning of Parliament to
devote a night to a sitting, and empower the Lord Chancellor to lay an
embargo on the personal as well as the real estate of wealthy perverts;
in common prudence depriving Rome of the coveted means to turn our
religious weapons against us.
The three guardian ladies and their strings of followers headed over
the fevered and benighted town, as the records of the period attest,
windpiping these and similar Solan notes from the undigested cropful of
alarms Lord Fleetwood’s expected conduct crammed into them. They and
all the world traced his present madness to the act foregoing: that
marriage! They reviewed it to deplore it, every known incident and the
numbers imagined; yet merely to deplore: frightful comparisons of then
with now rendered the historical shock to the marriage market matter
for a sick smile. Evil genius of some sort beside him the wealthy young
nobleman is sure to have. He has got rid of one to take up with a viler.
First, a sluttish trollop of German origin is foisted on him for life;
next, he is misled to abjure the faith of his fathers for Rome. But
patently, desperation in the husband of such a wife weakened his
resistance to the Roman Catholic pervert’s insinuations. There we
punctuate the full stop to our inquiries; we have the secret.
And upon that, suddenly comes a cyclonic gust; and gossip twirls,
whines, and falls to the twanging of an entirely new set of notes,
that furnish a tolerably agreeable tune, on the whole. O hear! The
Marchioness of Arpington proclaims not merely acquaintanceship with Lord
Fleetwood’s countess, she professes esteem for the young person. She has
been heard to say, that if the Principality of Wales were not a royal
title, a dignity of the kind would be conferred by the people of those
mountains on the Countess of Fleetwood: such unbounded enthusiasm there
was for her character when she sojourned down there. As it is, they
do speak of her in their Welsh by some title. Their bards are offered
prizes to celebrate her deeds. You remember the regiment of mounted
Welsh gentlemen escorting her to her Kentish seat, with their band
of the three-stringed harps! She is well-born, educated, handsome, a
perfectly honest woman, and a sound Protestant. Quite the reverse of
Lord Fleetwood’s seeking to escape her, it is she who flies; she cannot
forgive him his cruelties and infidelities: and that is the reason why
he threatens to commit the act of despair. Only she can save him! She
has flown for refuge to her uncle, Lord Levellier’s house at a place
named Croridge--not in the gazetteer--hard of access and a home of
poachers, where shooting goes on hourly; but most picturesque and
romantic, as she herself is! Lady Arpington found her there, nursing
one of the wounded, and her uncle on his death-bed; obdurate all round
against her husband, but pensive when supplicated to consider her
country endangered by Rome. She is a fervent patriot. The tales of her
Whitechapel origin, and heading mobs wielding bludgeons, are absolutely
false, traceable to scandalizing anecdotists like Mr. Rose Mackrell. She
is the beautiful example of an injured wife doing honour to her sex
in the punishment of a faithless husband, yet so little cherishing her
natural right to deal him retribution, that we dare hope she will listen
to her patriotic duty in consenting to the reconcilement, which is
Lord Fleetwood’s alternative: his wife or Rome! They say she has an
incommunicable charm, accounting for the price he puts on her now she
holds aloof and he misses it. Let her but rescue him from England’s most
vigilant of her deadly enemies, she will be entitled to the nation’s
lasting gratitude. She has her opportunity for winning the Anglican
English, as formerly she won the Dissenter Welsh. She may yet be the
means of leading back the latter to our fold.
A notation of the cries in air at a time of surgent public excitement
can hardly yield us music; and the wording of them, by the aid of
compounds and transplants, metaphors and similes only just within range
of the arrows of Phoebus’ bow (i.e. the farthest flight known), would,
while it might imitate the latent poetry, expose venturesome writers to
the wrath of a people commendably believing their language a
perfected instrument when they prefer the request for a plateful, and
commissioning their literary police to brain audacious experimenters who
enlarge or wing it beyond the downright aim at that mark. The gossip
of the time must therefore appear commonplace, in resemblance to
the panting venue a terre of the toad, instead of the fiery steed’s;
although we have documentary evidence that our country’s heart was
moved;--in no common degree, Dr. Glossop’s lucid English has it, at the
head of a broadsheet ballad discovered by him, wherein the connubially
inclined young earl and the nation in turn beseech the countess to
resume her place at Esslemont, and so save both from a terrific dragon’s
jaw, scarlet as the infernal flames; described as fascinating--
‘The classes with the crests,
And the lining to their vests,
Till down they jump, and empty leave
A headless trunk that rests.’
These ballads, burlesque to present reading, mainly intended for
burlesque by the wits who dogged without much enlivening an anxious
period of our history, when corner-stones were falling the way the
young lord of the millions threatened to go, did, there is little doubt,
according to another part of their design (Rose Mackrell boasts it
indirectly in his Memoirs), interpret public opinion, that is, the
English humour of it--the half laugh in their passing and not simulated
shudder.
Carinthia had a study of the humours of English character in the person
of the wounded man she nursed on little Croridge, imagining it the
most unobserved of English homes, and herself as unimportant an object.
Daniel Charner took his wound, as he took his medicine and his posset
from her hand, kindly, and seemed to have a charitable understanding
of Lord Levellier now that the old nobleman had driven a pellet of lead
into him and laid him flat. It pleased him to assure her that his mates
were men of their word, and had promised to pay the old lord with a
‘rouse’ for it, nothing worse. Her father used to speak of the ‘clean
hearts of the English’ as to the husbanding of revenge; that is, the
‘no spot of bad blood’ to vitiate them. Captain John Peter seconded all
good-humoured fighters ‘for the long account’: they will surely win; and
it was one of his maxims: ‘My foe can spoil my face; he beats me if he
spoils my temper.’
Recalling the scene of her bridal day--the two strong Englishmen at
the shake of hands, that had spoiled one another’s faces, she was
enlightened with a comprehension of her father’s love for the people;
seeing the spiritual of the gross ugly picture, as not every man can
do, and but a warrior Joan among women. Chillon shall teach the Spanish
people English heartiness, she thought. Lord Fleetwood’s remarks on the
expedition would have sufficed to stamp it righteous with her; that was
her logic of the low valuation of him. She fancied herself absolutely
released at his departure. Neither her sister Riette nor her friend
Owain, administering sentiment and common sense to her by turns, could
conceive how the passion for the recovery of her brother’s military name
fed the hope that she might aid in it, how the hope fed the passion.
She had besides her hunger to be at the work she could do; her Chillon’s
glory for morning sky above it.
Such was the mind Lady Arpington brought the world’s wisdom to bear
upon; deeming it in the end female only in its wildness and obstinacy.
Carinthia’s answers were few, barely varied. Her repetition of ‘my
brother’ irritated the great lady, whose argument was directed to make
her see that these duties toward her brother were primarily owing to her
husband, the man she would reclaim and could guide. And the Countess of
Fleetwood’s position, her duty to society, her dispensing of splendid
hospitality, the strengthening of her husband to do his duty to the
nation, the saving of him from a fatal step-from Rome; these were
considerations for a reasonable woman to weigh before she threw up all
to be off on the maddest of adventures. ‘Inconceivable, my dear child!’
Lady Arpington proceeded until she heard herself as droning.
Carinthia’s unmoved aspect of courteous attention appeared to invoke
the prolongation of the sermon it criticized. It had an air of
reversing their positions while she listened to the charge of folly, and
incidentally replied.
Her reason for not fearing Roman Catholic encroachments was, she said,
her having known good Catholics in the country she came from. For
herself, she should die professing the faith of her father and mother.
Behind her correct demeanour a rustic intelligence was exhibited. She
appreciated her duty to her marriage oath: ‘My husband’s honour is quite
safe with me.’ Neither England nor religion, nor woman’s proper devotion
to a husband’s temporal and spiritual welfare, had claims rivalling
her devotion to her brother. She could not explain a devotion that
instigated her to an insensate course. It seemed a kind of enthusiasm;
and it was coldly spoken; in the tone referring to ‘her husband’s
honour.’ Her brother’s enterprise had her approval because ‘her mother’s
prayer was for him to serve in the English army.’ By running over to
take a side in a Spanish squabble? she was asked and answered: ‘He will
learn war; my Chillon will show his value; he will come back a tried
soldier.’
She counted on his coming back? She did.
‘I cannot take a step forward without counting on success. We know the
chances we are to meet. My father has written of death. We do not fear
it, so it is nothing to us. We shall go together; we shall not have to
weep for one another.’
The strange young woman’s avoidance of any popular sniffle of the
pathetic had a recognized merit.
‘Tell me,’ Lady Arpington said abruptly; ‘this maid of yours, who is to
marry the secretary, or whatever he was--you are satisfied with her?’
‘She is my dear servant Madge.’ A cloud opened as Carinthia spoke the
name. ‘She will be a true wife to him. They will always be my friends!’
Nothing against the earl in that direction, apparently; unless his
countess was blest with the density of frigidity.
Society’s emissary sketched its perils for unprotected beautiful woman;
an outline of the London quadrille Henrietta danced in; and she glanced
at Carinthia and asked: ‘Have you thought of it?’
Carinthia’s eyes were on the great lady’s. Their meaning was, ‘You hit
my chief thought.’ They were read as her farthest thought. For the hint
of Henrietta’s weakness deadened her feelings with a reminder of warm
and continued solicitations rebutted; the beautiful creature’s tortures
at the idea of her exile from England. An outwearied hopelessness
expressed a passive sentiment very like indifference in the clear wide
gaze. She replied: ‘I have. My proposal to her was Cadiz, with both our
young ones. She will not.’
And there is an end to that part of the question! Lady Arpington
interpreted it, by the gaze more than the words, under subjection of the
young woman’s character. Nevertheless, she bore away Carinthia’s consent
to a final meeting with the earl at her house in London, as soon as
things were settled at Croridge. Chillon, whom she saw, was just as
hard, unforgiving, careless of his country’s dearest interests; brother
and sister were one heart of their one blood. She mentioned the general
impression in town, that the countess and only she could save the earl
from Rome. A flash of polite laughter was Chillon’s response. But after
her inspection of the elegant athlete, she did fancy it possible for
a young wife, even for Henrietta, to bear his name proudly in his
absence--if that was worth a moment’s consideration beside the serious
issues involved in her appeal to the countess; especially when the
suggestion regarding young wives left unprotected, delicately conveyed
to the husband, had failed of its purpose. The handsome husband’s brows
fluttered an interrogation, as if her clear-obscure should be further
lighted; and it could not be done. He weighed the wife by the measure
of the sister, perhaps; or his military head had no room for either.
His callousness to the danger of his country’s disintegration, from the
incessant, becoming overt, attacks of a foreign priesthood might--an
indignant great lady’s precipitation to prophecy said would--bring
chastisement on him. She said it, and she liked Henrietta, vowing to
defeat her forecast as well as she could in a land seeming forsaken by
stable principles; its nobles breaking up its national church, going
over to Rome, embracing the faith of the impostor Mahomet.
Gossip fed to the starvation bone of Lady Arpington’s report, until one
late afternoon, memorable for the breeding heat in the van of elemental
artillery, newsboys waved damp sheets of fresh print through the
streets, and society’s guardians were brought to confess, in shame and
gladness, that they had been growing sceptical of the active assistance
of Providence. At first the ‘Terrible explosion of gunpowder at
Croridge’ alarmed them lest the timely Power should have done too
much. A day later the general agitation was pacified; Lady Arpington
circulated the word ‘safe,’ and the world knew the disaster had not
engulphed Lady Fleetwood’s valuable life. She had the news by word
of mouth from the lovely Mrs. Kirby-Levellier, sister-in-law to the
countess. We are convinced we have proof of Providence intervening when
some terrific event of the number at its disposal accomplishes the thing
and no more than the thing desired. Pitiful though it may seem for a
miserly old lord to be blown up in his bed, it is necessarily a subject
of congratulation if the life, or poor remnant of a life, sacrificed was
an impediment to our righteous wishes. But this is a theme for the Dame,
who would full surely have committed another breach of the treaty, had
there not been allusion to her sisterhood’s view of the government of
human affairs.
On the day preceding the catastrophe, Chillon’s men returned to work.
He and Carinthia and Mr. Wythan lunched with Henrietta at Stoneridge.
Walking down to Lekkatts, they were astounded to see the figure of the
spectral old lord on the plank to the powder store, clad in his long
black cloak, erect. He was crossing, he told them, to count his barrels;
a dream had disturbed him. Chillon fell to rapid talk upon various
points of business, and dispersed Lord Levellier’s memory relating to
his errand. Leaning on Carinthia’s arm, he went back to the house, where
he was put to bed in peace of mind. His resuscitated physical vigour
blocked all speculation for the young people assembled at Stoneridge
that night. They hardly spoke; they strangled thoughts forming as larvae
of wishes. Henrietta would be away to Lady Arpington’s next day, Mr.
Wythan to Wales. The two voyagers were sadder by sympathy than the two
whom they were leaving to the clock’s round of desert sameness. About
ten at night Chillon and Mr. Wythan escorted Carinthia, for the night’s
watch beside her uncle, down to Lekkatts. It was midway that the
knocks on air, as of a muffled mallet at a door and at farther doors of
caverns, smote their ears and shook the ground.
After an instant of the silence following a shock, Carinthia touched her
brother’s arm; and Chillon said:
‘Not my powder!’
They ran till they had Lekkatts in sight. A half moon showed the house;
it stood. Fifty paces below, a column of opal smoke had begun to wreathe
and stretch a languid flag. The ‘rouse’ promised to Lord Levellier by
Daniel Charner’s humorous mates had hit beyond its aim. Intended to give
him a start--or ‘One-er in return,’ it surpassed his angry shot at the
body of them in effect.
Carinthia entered his room and saw that he was lying stretched
restfully. She whispered of this to Chillon, and began upon her watch,
reading her Spanish phrasebook; and she could have wept, if she had been
a woman for tears. Her duty to stay in England with Chillon’s fair wife
crossed the beckoning pages like a black smoke. Her passion to go and
share her brother’s dangers left the question of its righteousness at
each fall of the big breath.
Her uncle’s grey head on his pillow was like a flintstone in chalk under
her look by light of dawn; the chin had dropped.