CHAPTER XLVI. A CHAPTER OF UNDERCURRENTS AND SOME SURFACE FLASHES
Thus a round and a good old English practical repartee, worthy a
place in England’s book of her historical popular jests; conceived
ingeniously, no bit murderously, even humanely, if Englishmen are to be
allowed indulgence of a jolly hit back for an injury--more a feint
than a real stroke--gave the miserly veteran his final quake and cut
Chillon’s knot.
Lord Levellier dead of the joke detracted from the funny idea there had
been in the anticipation of his hearing the libertine explosion of his
grand new powder, and coming out cloaked to see what walls remained
upright. Its cleverness, however, was magnified by the shades into which
it had despatched him. The man who started the ‘rouse for old Griphard’
was named: nor did he shuffle his honours off. Chillon accused him, and
he regretfully grinned; he would have owned to it eloquently, excited
by the extreme ingenuity, but humour at the criminal bar is an abject
thing, that has to borrow from metaphysics for the expository words. He
lacked them entirely, and as he could not, fronting his master, supply
the defect with oaths, he drew up and let out on the dead old lord,
who wanted a few pounds of blasting powder, like anything else in
everybody’s way. Chillon expected the lowest of his countrymen to show
some degree of chivalry upon occasions like the present. He was too
young to perceive how it is, that a block of our speech in the needed
direction drives it storming in another, not the one closely expressing
us. Carinthia liked the man; she was grieved to hear of his having got
the sack summarily, when he might have had a further month of service
or a month’s pay. Had not the workmen’s forbearance been much tried?
And they had not stolen, they had bought the powder, only intending to
startle.
She touched her brother’s native sense of fairness and vexed him with
his cowardly devil of impatience, which kicked at a simply stupid common
man, and behaved to a lordly offender, smelling rascal, civilly. Just as
her father would have--treated the matter, she said: ‘Are we sorry for
what has happened, Chillon?’ The man had gone, the injustice was done;
the master was left to reflect on the part played by his inheritance of
the half share of ninety thousand pounds in his proper respect for Lord
Levellier’s memory. Harsh to an inferior is a horrible charge. But the
position of debtor to a titled cur brings a worse for endurance. Knowing
a part of Lord Fleetwood’s message to Lord Levellier suppressed, the
bride’s brother, her chief guardian, had treated the omission as of no
importance, and had all the while understood that he ought to give her
his full guess at the reading of it: or so his racked mind understood
it now. His old father had said: A dumb tongue can be a heavy liar; and,
Lies are usurers’ coin we pay for ten thousand per cent. His harshness
in the past hour to a workman who had suffered with him and had not
intended serious mischief was Chillon’s unsounded motive for the
resolution to be out of debt to the man he loathed. There is a Muse that
smiles aloft surveying our acts from the well-springs.
Carinthia heard her brother’s fuller version of the earl’s communication
to her uncle before the wild day of her marriage. ‘Not particularly
fitted for the married state,’ Chillon phrased it, saying: ‘He seems to
have known himself, he was honest so far.’ She was advised to think it
over, that the man was her husband.
She had her brother’s heart in her breast, she could not misread him.
She thought it over, and felt a slight drag of compassion for the
reluctant bridegroom. That was a stretch long leagues distant from love
with her; the sort of feeling one has for strange animals hurt and she
had in her childish blindness done him a hurt, and he had bitten her. He
was a weak young nobleman; he had wealth for a likeness of strength; he
had no glory about his head. Why had he not chosen a woman to sit
beside him who would have fancied his coronet a glory and his luxury a
kindness? But the poor young nobleman did not choose! The sadly comic of
his keeping to the pledge of his word--his real wife--the tyrant of the
tyrant--clothed him; the vision of him at the altar, and on the coach,
and at the Royal Sovereign Inn, and into the dimness where a placidly
smiling recollection met a curtain and lost the smile.
Suppose that her duty condemned her to stay in England on guard over
Chillon’s treasure! The perpetual struggle with a weak young nobleman
of aimless tempers and rightabout changes, pretending to the part of
husband, would, she foresaw, raise another figure of duty, enchaining a
weak young woman. The world supported his pretension; and her passion
to serve as Chillon’s comrade sank at a damping because it was flame.
Chillon had done that; Lady Arpington, to some extent; Henrietta more. A
little incident, pointing in no direction, had left a shadow of a cloud,
consequent upon Lady Arpington’s mention of Henrietta’s unprotectedness.
Stepping up the hill to meet her sister, on the morning of Henrietta’s
departure for London under the convoy of Mr. Wythan, Carinthia’s long
sight spied Kit Ines, or a man like him, in the meadow between Lekkatts
and Croridge. He stood before Henrietta, and vanished light-legged at
a gesture. Henrietta was descending to take her leave of her busied
husband; her cheeks were flushed; she would not speak of the fellow,
except to reply, ‘oh, a beggar,’ and kept asking whether she ought not
to stay at Stoneridge. And if she did she would lose the last of the
Opera in London! How could she help to investigate the cause of an
explosion so considerate to them? She sang snatches of melodies,
clung to her husband, protested her inability to leave him, and went,
appearing torn away. As well bid healthy children lie abed on a bright
summer morning, as think of holding this fair young woman bound to the
circle of safety when she has her view of pleasure sparkling like the
shore-sea mermaid’s mirror.
Suspicions were not of the brood Carinthia’s bosom harboured. Suspicion
of Chillon’s wife Carinthia could not feel. An uncaptained vessel in
the winds on high seas was imagined without a picturing of it. The
apparition of Ives, if it was he, would not fit with any conjecture. She
sent a warning to Madge, and at the same time named the girl’s wedding
day for her; pained in doing it. She had given the dear girl her word
that she would be present at this of all marriages. But a day or two
days or more would have to be spent away from Chillon; and her hunger
for every hour beside her brother confessed to the war going on within
her, as to which was her holier duty, the one on the line of her
inclinations, or that one pointing to luxury-choice between a
battle-horse and a cushioned-chair; between companionship with her
glorious brother facing death, and submission to a weak young nobleman
claiming his husband’s rights over her. She had submitted, had forgotten
his icy strangeness, had thought him love; and hers was a breast for
love, it was owned by the sobbing rise of her breast at the thought. And
she might submit again--in honour? scorning the husband? Chillon scorned
him. Yet Chillon left the decision to her, specified his excuses.
And Henrietta and Owain, Lady Arpington, Gower Woodseer, all the
world--Carinthia shuddered at the world’s blank eye on what it directs
for the acquiescence of the woman. That shred of herself she would
become, she felt herself becoming it when the view of her career beside
her brother waned. The dead Rebecca living in her heart was the only
soul among her friends whose voice was her own against the world’s.
But there came a turn where she and Rebecca separated. Rebecca’s
insurgent wishes taking shape of prophecy, robbed her of her friend
Owain, to present her an impossible object, that her mind could not
compass or figure. She bade Rebecca rest and let her keep the fancy
of Owain as her good ghost of a sun in the mist of a frosty morning;
sweeter to her than an image of love, though it were the very love,
the love of maidens’ dreams, bursting the bud of romance, issuing its
flower. Delusive love drove away with a credulous maiden, under an
English heaven, on a coach and four, from a windy hill-top, to a crash
below, and a stunned recovery in the street of small shops, mud, rain,
gloom, language like musket-fire and the wailing wounded.
No regrets, her father had said; they unman the heart we want for
to-morrow. She kept her look forward at the dead wall Chillon had thrown
up. He did not reject her company; his prospect of it had clouded; and
there were allusions to Henrietta’s loneliness. ‘His Carin could do her
service by staying, if she decided that way.’ Her enthusiasm dropped to
the level of life’s common ground. With her sustainment gone, she beheld
herself a titled doll, and had sternly to shut her eyes on the behind
scenes, bar any shadowy approaches of womanly softness; thinking her
father’s daughter dishonoured in the submissive wife of the weak young
nobleman Chillon despised as below the title of man.
Madge and Gower came to Stoneridge on their road to London three days
before their union. Madge had no fear of Ines, but said: ‘I never let
Mr. Gower out of my sight.’ Perforce of studying him with the thirsty
wonder consequent upon his proposal to her, she had got fast hold of the
skirts of his character; she ‘knew he was happy because he was always
making her laugh at herself.’ Her manner of saying, ‘She hoped to give
him a comfortable home, so that he might never be sorry for what he had
done,’ was toned as in a church, beautiful to her mistress. Speaking of
my lord’s great kindness, her eyes yearned for a second and fell humbly.
She said of Kit Ives, ‘He’s found a new “paytron,” Sarah says Mr.
Woodseer tells her, my lady. It’s another nobleman, Lord Brailstone,
has come into money lately and hired him for his pugilist when it’s
not horseracing.’ Gower spoke of thanks to Lord Fleetwood for the
independence allowing him to take a wife and settle to work in his
little Surrey home. He, too, showed he could have said more and was
advised not to push at a shut gate. My lord would attend their wedding
as well as my lady, Carinthia heard from Madge; counting it a pity that
wealthy noblemen had no professions to hinder the doing of unprofitable
things.
Her sensibility was warmer on the wedding-day of these two dear ones.
He graced the scene, she admitted, when reassured by his perfect reserve
toward her personally. He was the born nobleman in his friendliness with
the bridal pair and respectfulness to Mr. Woodseer. High social breeding
is an exquisite performance on the instrument we are, and his behaviour
to her left her mind at liberty for appreciation of it. Condescension
was not seen, his voice had no false note. During the ceremony his
eyelids blinked rapidly. At the close, he congratulated the united
couple, praising them each for the wisdom of their choice. He said to
his countess:
‘This is one of the hopeful marriages; chiefly of your making.’
She replied: ‘My prayers will be for them always.’
‘They are fortunate who have your prayers,’ he said, and turned to
Sarah Winch. She was to let him know when she also had found her ‘great
philosopher.’ Sarah was like a fish on a bank, taking gasps at the
marvel of it all; she blushed the pale pink of her complexion, and
murmured of ‘happiness.’ Gower had gone headlong into happiness, where
philosophers are smirkers and mouthers of ordinary stuff. His brightest
remark was to put the question to his father: ‘The three good things of
the Isle of Britain?’ and treble the name of Madge Woodseer for a richer
triad than the Glamorgan man could summon. Pardonably foolish; but
mindful of a past condition of indiscipline, Nature’s philosopher said
to the old minister: ‘Your example saved me for this day at a turn of
my road, sir.’ Nature’s poor wild scholar paid that tribute to the
regimental sectarian. Enough for proud philosophy to have done the thing
demonstrably right, Gower’s look at his Madge and the world said. That
‘European rose of the coal-black order,’ as one of his numerous pictures
of her painted the girl, was a torch in a cavern for dusky redness at
her cheeks. Her responses beneath the book Mr. Woodseer held open had
flashed a distant scene through Lord Fleetwood. Quaint to notice was
her reverence for the husband she set on a towering monument, and
her friendly, wifely; whispered jogs at the unpractical creature’s
forgetfulness of his wraps, his books; his writing-desk--on this
tremendous occasion, his pipe. Again the earl could have sworn, that
despite her antecedents, she brought her husband honest dower, as surely
as she gave the lucky Pagan a whole heart; and had a remarkably fine
bust to house the organ, too; and a clarionet of a voice, curiously like
her, mistress’s. And not a bad fellow, but a heathen dog, a worshipper
of Nature, walked off with the girl, whose voice had the ring of
Carinthia’s. The Powers do not explain their dispensations.
These two now one by united good-will for the junction Lord Fleetwood
himself drove through Loudon to the hills, where another carriage
awaited them by his orders, in the town of London’s race-course. As soon
as they were seated he nodded to them curtly from his box, and drove
back, leaving them puzzled. But his countess had not so very coldly seen
him start his horses to convey the modest bridal pair. His impulses to
kindness could be politic. Before quitting Whitechapel, she went with
Sarah to look at the old shop of the fruits and vegetables. They found
it shut, untenanted; Mr. Woodseer told them that the earl was owner of
it by recent purchase, and would not lease it. He had to say why; for
the countess was dull to the notion of a sentimental desecration in
the occupying of her bedchamber by poor tradespeople. She was little
flattered. The great nobleman of her imagination when she lay there
dwindled to a whimsy infant, despot of his nursery, capricious with his
toys; likely to damage himself, if left to himself.
How it might occur, she heard hourly from her hostess, Lady Arpington;
from Henrietta as well, in different terms. He seemed to her no longer
the stationed nobleman, but one of other idle men, and the saddest
of young men. His weakness cast a net on her. Worse than that drag of
compassion, she foresaw the chance of his having experience of her own
weakness, if she was to be one among idle women: she might drop to the
love of him again. Chillon’s damping of her enthusiasm sank her to a
mere breathing body, miserably an animal body, no comrade for a valiant
brother; this young man’s feeble consort, perhaps: and a creature
thirsting for pleasure, disposed to sigh in the prospect of caresses.
Enthusiasm gone, her spirited imagination of active work on the field of
danger beside her brother flapped a broken wing.
She fell too low in her esteem to charge it upon Henrietta that she
stood hesitating, leaning on the hated side of the debate; though she
could almost have blamed Chillon for refusing her his positive counsel,
and not ordering his wife to follow him. Once Lady Arpington, reasoning
with her on behalf of the husband who sought reconciliation, sneered at
her brother’s project, condemned it the more for his resolve to carry it
out now that he had means. The front of a shower sprang to Carinthia’s
eyelids. Now that her brother had means, he from whom she might be
divided was alert to keep his engagement and study war on the field,
as his father had done in foreign service, offering England a trained
soldier, should his country subsequently need him. The contrast of her
heroic brother and a luxurious idle lord scattering blood of bird or
stag, and despising the soldier’s profession, had a singular bitter
effect, consequent on her scorn of words to defend the man her heart
idolized. This last of young women for weeping wept in the lady’s
presence.
The feminine trick was pardoned to her because her unaccustomed betrayal
of that form of enervation was desired. It was read as woman’s act of
self-pity over her perplexity: which is a melting act with the woman
when there is no man to be dissolved by it. So far Lady Arpington judged
rightly; Carinthia’s tears, shed at the thought of her brother under
the world’s false judgement of him, left her spiritless to resist her
husband’s advocates. Unusual as they were, almost unknown, they were
thunder-drops and shook her.
All for the vivid surface, the Dame frets at stresses laid on
undercurrents. There is no bridling her unless the tale be here told of
how Lord Brailstone in his frenzy of the disconcerted rival boasted
over town the counterstroke he had dealt Lord Fleetwood, by sending Mrs.
Levellier a statement of the latter nobleman’s base plot to thwart
her husband’s wager, with his foul agent, the repentant and well-paid
ruffian in person, to verify every written word. The town’s conception
of the necessity for the reunion of the earl and countess was too
intense to let exciting scandal prosper. Moreover, the town’s bright
anticipation of its concluding festivity on the domain of Calesford
argued such tattle down to a baffled adorer’s malice. The Countess of
Cressett, having her cousin, the beautiful Mrs. Kirby-Levellier, in her
house, has denied Lord Brailstone admission at her door, we can affirm.
He has written to her vehemently, has called a second time, has vowed
publicly that Mrs. Levellier shall have her warning against Lord
Fleetwood. The madness of jealousy was exhibited. Lady Arpington
pronounced him in his conduct unworthy the name of gentleman. And
how foolish the scandal he circulates! Lord Fleetwood’s one aim is to
persuade his offended wife to take her place beside him. He expresses
regret everywhere, that the death of her uncle Lord Levellier withholds
her presence from Calesford during her term of mourning; and that he
has given his word for the fete on a particular day, before London runs
quite dry. His pledge of his word is notoriously inviolate. The Countess
of Cressett--an extraordinary instance of a thrice married woman
corrected in her addiction to play by her alliance with a rakish
juvenile--declares she performs the part of hostess at the request of
the Countess of Fleetwood. Perfectly convincing. The more so (if you
have the gossips’ keen scent of a deduction) since Lord Fleetwood
and young Lord Cressett and the Jesuit Lord Feltre have been seen
confabulating with very sacerdotal countenances indeed. Three English
noblemen! not counting eighty years for the whole three! And dear Lady
Cressett fears she may be called on to rescue her boy-husband from a
worse enemy than the green tables, if Lady Fleetwood should unhappily
prove unyielding, as it shames the gentle sex to imagine she will be.
In fact, we know through Mrs. Levellier, the meeting of reconciliation
between the earl and the countess comes off at Lady Arpington’s, by her
express arrangement, to-morrow: ‘none too soon,’ the expectant world of
London declared it.
The meeting came to pass three days before the great day at Calesford.
Carinthia and her lord were alone together. This had been his burning
wish at Croridge, where he could have poured his heart to her and might
have moved the wife’s. But she had formed her estimate of him there: she
had, in the comparison or clash of forces with him, grown to contemplate
the young man of wealth and rank, who had once been impatient of
an allusion to her father, and sought now to part her from her
brother--stop her breathing of fresh air. Sensationally, too, her ardour
for the exercise of her inherited gifts attributed it to him that her
father’s daughter had lived the mean existence in England, pursuing a
husband, hounded by a mother’s terrors. The influences environing her
and pressing her to submission sharpened her perusal of the small
object largely endowed by circumstances to demand it. She stood calmly
discoursing, with a tempered smile: no longer a novice in the social
manner. An equal whom he had injured waited for his remarks, gave ready
replies; and he, bowing to the visible equality, chafed at a sense of
inferiority following his acknowledgement of it. He was alone with her,
and next to dumb; she froze a full heart. As for his heart, it could not
speak at all, it was a swinging lump. The rational view of the situation
was exposed to her; and she listened to that favourably, or at least
attentively; but with an edge to her civil smile when he hinted of
entertainments, voyages, travels, an excursion to her native mountain
land. Her brother would then be facing death. The rational view, she
admitted, was one to be considered. Yes, they were married; they had
a son; they were bound to sink misunderstandings, in the interests of
their little son. He ventured to say that the child was a link uniting
them; and she looked at him. He blinked rapidly, as she had seen him
do of late, but kept his eyes on her through the nervous flutter of the
lids; his pride making a determined stand for physical mastery, though
her look was but a look. Had there been reproach in it, he would have
found the voice to speak out. Her look was a cold sky above a hungering
man. She froze his heart from the marble of her own.
And because she was for adventuring with her brother at bloody work of
civil war in the pay of a foreign government!--he found a short refuge
in that mute sneer, and was hurled from it by an apparition of the Welsh
scene of the bitten infant, and Carinthia volunteering to do the bloody
work which would have saved it; which he had contested, ridiculed. Right
then, her insanity now conjured the wretched figure of him opposing the
martyr her splendid humaneness had offered her to be, and dominated his
reason, subjected him to admire--on to worship of the woman, whatever
she might do. Just such a feeling for a woman he had dreamed of in his
younger time, doubting that he would ever meet the fleshly woman to
impose it. His heart broke the frost she breathed. Yet, if he gave way
to the run of speech, he knew himself unmanned, and the fatal habit of
superiority stopped his tongue after he had uttered the name he loved to
speak, as nearest to the embrace of her.
‘Carinthia--so I think, as I said, we both see the common sense of the
position. I regret over and over again--we’ll discuss all that when we
meet after this Calesford affair. I shall have things to say. You will
overlook, I am sure--well, men are men!--or try to. Perhaps I’m not
worse than--we’ll say, some. You will, I know,--I have learnt it,--be of
great service, help to me; double my value, I believe; more than double
it. You will receive me--here? Or at Croridge or Esslemont; and alone
together, as now, I beg.’
That was what he said. Having said it, his escape from high tragics
in the comfortable worldly tone rejoiced him; to some extent also the
courteous audience she gave him. And her hand was not refused. Judging
by her aspect, the plain common-sense ground of their situation was
accepted for the best opening step to their union; though she must have
had her feelings beneath it, and God knew that he had! Her hand was
friendly. He could have thanked her for yielding her hand without
a stage scene; she had fine breeding by nature. The gracefullest of
trained ladies could not have passed through such an interview so
perfectly in the right key; and this was the woman he had seen at the
wrestle with hideous death to save a muddy street-child! She touched the
gentleman in him. Hard as it was while he held the hand of the wife, his
little son’s mother, who might be called his bride, and drew him by
the contact of their blood to a memory, seeming impossible, some
other world’s attested reality,--she the angel, he the demon of
it,--unimaginable, yet present, palpable, a fact beyond his mind, he let
her hand fall scarce pressed. Did she expect more than the common sense
of it to be said? The ‘more’ was due to her, and should partly be said
at their next meeting for the no further separating; or else he would
vow in his heart to spread it out over a whole life’s course of wakeful
devotion, with here and there a hint of his younger black nature. Better
that except for a desire seizing him to make sacrifice of the demon he
had been, offer him up hideously naked to her mercy. But it was a thing
to be done by hints, by fits, by small doses. She could only gradually
be brought to the comprehension of how the man or demon found
indemnification under his yoke of marriage in snatching her, to torment,
perhaps betray; and solace for the hurt to his pride in spreading a
snare for the beautiful Henrietta. A confession! It could be to none but
the priest.
Knowledge of Carinthia would have urged him to the confession
straightway. In spite of horror, the task of helping to wash a black
soul white would have been her compensation for loss of companionship
with her soldier brother. She would have held hot iron to the rabid
wound and come to a love of the rescued sufferer.
It seemed to please her when he spoke of Mr. Rose Mackrell’s
applications to get back his volume of her father’s Book of Maxims.
‘There is mine,’ she said.
For the sake of winning her quick gleam at any word of the bridal
couple, he conjured a picture of her Madge and his Gower, saying: ‘That
marriage--as you will learn--proves him honest from head to foot; as she
is in her way, too.’
‘Oh, she is,’ was the answer.
‘We shall be driving down to them very soon, Carinthia.’
‘It will delight them to see either of us, my lord.’
‘My lady, adieu until I am over with this Calesford,’ he gestured, as in
fetters.
She spared him the my lording as she said adieu, sensitive as she was,
and to his perception now.
Lady Arpington had a satisfactory two minutes with him before he left
the house. London town, on the great day at Calesford, interchanged
communications, to the comforting effect, that the Countess of Fleetwood
would reign over the next entertainment.