CHAPTER XLVII. THE LAST: WITH A CONCLUDING WORD BY THE DAME

It is of seemingly good augury for the cause of a suppliant man, however

little for the man himself, when she who has much to pardon can depict

him in a manner that almost smiles, not unlike a dandling nurse the

miniature man-child sobbing off to sleep after a frenzy; an example of a

genus framed for excuses, and he more than others. Chillon was amused

up to inquisitive surprise by Carinthia’s novel idea of her formerly

dreaded riddle of a husband. As she sketched the very rational alliance

proposed to her, and his kick at the fetters of Calesford, a shadowy

dash for an image of the solicitous tyrant was added perforce to

complete the scene; following which, her head moved sharply, the subject

was flung over her shoulder.

She was developing; she might hold her ground with the husband, if the

alliance should be resumed; and she would be a companion for Henrietta

in England: she was now independent, as to money, and she could break an

intolerable yoke without suffering privation. He kept his wrath under,

determined not to use his influence either way, sure though he was of

her old father’s voting for her to quit the man and enter the field

where qualities would be serviceable. The man probably feared a

scandal more than the loss of his wife in her going. He had never been

thrashed--the sole apology Chillon discovered for him, in a flushed

review of the unavenged list of injuries Carinthia had sustained. His

wise old father insisted on the value of an early thrashing to trim

and shape the growth of most young men. There was no proof of Lord

Fleetwood’s having schemed to thwart his wager, so he put that

accusation by: thinking for an instant, that if the man desired to have

his wife with him, and she left the country with her brother, his own

act would recoil; or if she stayed to hear of a villany, Carinthia’s

show of scorn could lash. Henrietta praised my lord’s kindness. He had

been one of the adorers--as what man would not be!--and upon her

at least (he could hardly love her husband) he had not wreaked his

disappointment. A young man of huge wealth, having nothing to do

but fatten his whims, is the monster a rich country breeds under the

blessing of peace. His wife, if a match for him, has her work traced

out:--mean work for the child of their father, Chillon thought. She

might be doing braver, more suitable to the blood in her veins. But

women have to be considered as women, not as possible heroines; and

supposing she held her own with this husband of hers, which meant,

judging by the view of their unfolded characters at present, a certain

command of the freakish beast; she, whatever her task, would not be the

one set trotting. He came to his opinion through the estimate he had

recently formed of Lord Fleetwood, and a study of his changed sister.

Her brows gloomed at a recurrence to that subject. Their business of the

expedition absorbed her, each detail, all the remarks he quoted of

his chief, hopeful or weariful; for difficulties with the Spanish

Government, and with the English too, started up at every turn; and the

rank and file of the contingent were mostly a rough lot, where they were

rather better than soaked weeds. A small body of trained soldiers had

sprung to the call to arms; here and there an officer could wheel a

regiment.

Carinthia breasted discouragement. ‘English learn from blows, Chillon.’

‘He might have added, they lose half their number by having to learn

from blows, Carin.’

‘He said, “Let me lead Britons!”’

‘When the canteen’s fifty leagues to the rear, yes!’

‘Yes, it is a wine country,’ she sighed. ‘But would the Spaniards have

sent for us if their experience told them they could not trust us?’

Chillon brightened rigorously: ‘Yes, yes; there’s just a something about

our men at their best, hard to find elsewhere. We’re right in thinking

that. And our chief ‘s the right man.’

‘He is Owain’s friend and countryman,’ said Carinthia, and pleased, her

brother for talking like a girl, in the midst of methodical calculations

of the cost of this and that, to purchase the supplies he would need.

She had an organizing head. On her way down from London she had drawn

on instructions from a London physician of old Peninsula experience

to pencil a list of the medical and surgical stores required by a

campaigning army; she had gained information of the London shops where

they were to be procured; she had learned to read medical prescriptions

for the composition of drugs. She was at her Spanish still, not behind

him in the ordinary dialogue, and able to correct him on points of

Spanish history relating to fortresses, especially the Basque. A French

bookseller had supplied her with the Vicomte d’Eschargue’s recently

published volume of a Travels in Catalonia. Chillon saw paragraphs

marked, pages dog-eared, for reference. At the same time, the question

of Henrietta touched her anxiously. Lady Arpington’s hints had sunk into

them both.

‘I have thought of St. Jean de Luz, Chillon, if Riette would consent to

settle there. French people are friendly. You expect most of your work

in and round the Spanish Pyrenees.’

‘Riette alone there?’ said he, and drew her by her love of him into his

altered mind; for he did not object to his wife’s loneliness at Cadiz

when their plan was new.

London had taught her that a young woman in the giddy heyday of her

beauty has to be guarded; her belonging to us is the proud burden

involving sacrifices. But at St. Jean de Luz, if Riette would consent to

reside there, Lord Fleetwood’s absence and the neighbourhood of the

war were reckoned on to preserve his yokefellow from any fit of the

abominated softness which she had felt in one premonitory tremor during

their late interview, and deemed it vile compared with the life of

action and service beside, almost beside, her brother, sharing his

dangers at least. She would have had Chillon speak peremptorily to

his wife regarding the residence on the Spanish borders, adding, in a

despair: ‘And me with her to protect her!’

‘Unfair to Riette, if she can’t decide voluntarily,’ he said.

All he refrained from was, the persuading her to stay in England and

live reconciled with the gaoler of the dungeon, as her feelings pictured

it.

Chillon and Carinthia journeyed to London for purchases and a visit to

lawyer, banker, and tradesmen, on their way to meet his chief and Owain

Wythan at Southampton. They lunched with Livia. The morrow was the

great Calesford day; Henrietta carolled of it. Lady Arpington had been

afllictingly demure on the theme of her presence at Calesford within

her term of mourning. ‘But I don’t mourn, and I’m not related to the

defunct, and I can’t be denied the pleasure invented for my personal

gratification,’ Henrietta’s happy flippancy pouted at the prudish

objections. Moreover, the adored Columelli was to be her slave of song.

The termination of the London season had been postponed a whole week for

Calesford: the utmost possible strain; and her presence was understood

to represent the Countess of Fleetwood, temporarily in decorous

retirement. Chillon was assured by her that the earl had expressed

himself satisfied with his wife’s reasonableness. ‘The rest will

follow.’ Pleading on the earl’s behalf was a vain effort, but she had

her grounds for painting Lord Fleetwood’s present mood to his countess

in warm colours. ‘Nothing short of devotion, Chillon!’ London’s extreme

anxiety to see them united, and the cause of it, the immense good

Janey could do to her country, should certainly be considered by her,

Henrietta said. She spoke feverishly. A mention of St. Jean de Luz for a

residence inflicted, it appeared, a more violent toothache than she had

suffered from the proposal of quarters in Cadiz. And now her husband had

money?... she suggested his reinstatement in the English army. Chillon

hushed that: his chief had his word. Besides, he wanted schooling in

war. Why had he married! His love for her was the answer; and her beauty

argued for the love. But possessing her, he was bound to win her a

name. So his reasoning ran to an accord with his military instincts and

ambition. Nevertheless, the mournful strange fact she recalled, that

they had never waltzed together since they were made one, troubled his

countenance in the mirror of hers. Instead of the waltz, grief, low

worries, dulness, an eclipse of her, had been the beautiful creature’s

portion.

It established mighty claims to a young husband’s indulgence. She

hummed a few bars of his favourite old Viennese waltz, with ‘Chillon!’

invitingly and reproachfully. His loathing of Lord Fleetwood had to

withstand an envious jump at the legs in his vison of her partner on the

morrow. He said: ‘You’ll think of some one absent.’

‘You really do wish me to go, my darling? It is Chillon’s wish?’ She

begged for the words; she had them, and then her feverishness abated to

a simple sparkling composure.

Carinthia had observed her. She was heart-sick under pressure of

thoughts the heavier for being formless. They signified in the sum her

doom to see her brother leave England for the war, and herself crumble

to pieces from the imagined figure of herself beside him on or near the

field. They could not be phrased, for they accused the beloved brother

of a weakness in the excessive sense of obligation to the beautiful

woman who had wedded him. Driving down to Southampton by the

night-coach, her tenderness toward Henrietta held other thoughts

unshaped, except one, that moved in its twilight, murmuring of how the

love of pleasure keeps us blind children. And how the innocents are

pushed by it to snap at wicked bait, which the wealthy angle with,

pointed a charitable index on some of our social story. The Countess

Livia, not an innocent like Henrietta had escaped the poisoned tongues

by contracting a third marriage--‘in time!’ Lady Arpington said; and

the knotty question was presented to a young mind: Why are the innocents

tempted to their ruin, and the darker natures allowed an escape? Any

street-boy could have told her of the virtue in quick wits. But her

unexercised reflectiveness was on the highroad of accepted doctrines,

with their chorus of the moans of gossips for supernatural intervention

to give us justice. She had not learnt that those innocents, pushed by

an excessive love of pleasure, are for the term lower in the scale

than their wary darker cousins, and must come to the diviner light of

intelligence through suffering.

However, the result of her meditations was to show her she was directed

to be Henrietta’s guardian. After that, she had no thoughts; travelling

beside Chillon, she was sheer sore feeling, as of a body aching for its

heart plucked out. The bitterness of the separation to come between them

prophesied a tragedy. She touched his hand. It was warm now.

During six days of travels from port to port along the Southern and

Western coasts, she joined in the inspection of the English contingent

about to be shipped. They and their chief and her brother were plain to

sight, like sample print of a book’s first page, blank sheets for the

rest of the volume. If she might have been one among them, she would

have dared the reckless forecast. Her sensations were those of a bird

that has flown into a room, and beats wings against the ceiling and the

window-panes. A close, hard sky, a transparent prison wall, narrowed

her powers, mocked her soul. She spoke little; what she said impressed

Chillon’s chief, Owain Wythan was glad to tell her. The good friend had

gone counter to the tide of her breast by showing satisfaction with

the prospect that she would take her rightful place in the world. Her

concentrated mind regarded the good friend as a phantom of a man, the

world’s echo. His dead Rebecca would have understood her passion to be

her brother’s comrade, her abasement in the staying at home to guard

his butterfly. Owain had never favoured her project; he could not

now perceive the special dangers Chillon would be exposed to in her

separation from him. She had no means of explaining what she felt

intensely, that dangers, death, were nothing to either of them, if they

shared the fate together.

Her rejected petition to her husband for an allowance of money, on the

day in Wales, became the vivid memory which brings out motives in its

glow. Her husband hated her brother; and why? But the answer was lighted

fierily down another avenue. A true husband, a lord of wealth, would

have rejoiced to help the brother of his wife. He was the cause of

Chillon’s ruin and this adventure to restore his fortunes. Could she

endure a close alliance with the man while her brother’s life was

imperilled? Carinthia rebuked her drowsy head for not having seen his

reason for refusing at the time. ‘How long I am before I see anything

that does not stare in my face!’ She was a married woman, whose order of

mind rendered her singularly subject to the holiness of the tie; and she

was a weak woman, she feared. Already, at intervals, now that action on

a foreign field of the thunders and lightnings was denied, imagination

revealed her dissolving to the union with her husband, and cried her

comment on herself as the world’s basest of women for submitting to it

while Chillon’s life ran risks; until finally she said: ‘Not before I

have my brother home safe!’ an exclamation equal to a vow.

That being settled, some appearance of equanimity returned; she

talked of the scarlet business as one she participated in as a distant

spectator. Chillon’s chief was hurrying the embarkation of his troops;

within ten days the whole expedition would be afloat. She was to post to

London for further purchases, he following to take leave of his wife and

babe. Curiously, but hardly remarked on during the bustle of work,

Livia had been the one to send her short account of the great day at

Calesford; Henrietta, the born correspondent, pencilling a couple of

lines; she was well, dreadfully fatigued, rather a fright from a trip

of her foot and fall over a low wire fence. Her message of love thrice

underlined the repeated word.

Henrietta was the last person Carinthia would have expected to meet

midway on the London road. Her name was called from a carriage as she

drove up to the door of the Winchester hostlery, and in the lady, over

whose right eye and cheek a covering fold of silk concealed a bandage,

the voice was her sister Riette’s. With her were two babes and their

nursemaids.

‘Chillon is down there--you have left him there?’ Henrietta greeted

her, saw the reply, and stepped out of her carriage. ‘You shall kiss the

children afterwards; come into one of the rooms, Janey.’

Alone together, before an embrace, she said, in the voice of tears

hardening to the world’s business, ‘Chillon must not enter London. You

see the figure I am. My character’s in as bad case up there--thanks to

those men! My husband has lost his “golden Riette.” When you see beneath

the bandage! He will have the right to put me away. His “beauty of

beauties”! I’m fit only to dress as a page-boy and run at his heels.

My hero! my poor dear! He thinking I cared for nothing but amusement,

flattery. Was ever a punishment so cruel to the noblest of generous

husbands! Because I know he will overlook it, make light of it, never

reproach his Riette. And the rose he married comes to him a shrivelled

leaf of a potpourri heap. You haven’t seen me yet. I was their

“beautiful woman.” I feel for my husband most.’

She took breath. Carinthia pressed her lips on the cheek sensible to a

hiss, and Henrietta pursued, in words liker to sobs: ‘Anywhere, Cadiz,

St. Jean de Luz, hospital work either, anywhere my husband likes,

anything! I want to work, or I’ll sit and rock the children. I’m awake

at last. Janey, we’re lambs to vultures with those men. I don’t pretend

I was the perfect fool. I thought myself so safe. I let one of them

squeeze my hand one day, he swears. You know what a passion is; you have

it for mountains and battles, I for music. I do remember, one morning

before sunrise, driving back to town out of Windsor,--a dance, the

officers of the Guards,--and my lord’s trumpeter at the back of the

coach blowing notes to melt a stone, I found a man’s hand had mine. I

remember Lord Fleetwood looking over his shoulder and smiling hard and

lashing his horses. But listen--yes, at Calesford it happened. He--oh,

hear the name, then; Chillon must never hear it;--Lord Brailstone was

denied the right to step on Lord Fleetwood’s grounds. The Opera company

had finished selections from my Pirata. I went out for cool air; little

Sir Meeson beside me. I had a folded gauze veil over my head, tied at

the chin in a bow. Some one ran up to me--Lord Brailstone. He poured

forth their poetry. They suppose it the wine for their “beautiful

woman.” I dare say I laughed or told him to go, and he began a tirade

against Lord Fleetwood. There’s no mighty difference between one beast

of prey and another. Let me get away from them all! Though now! they

would not lift an eyelid. This is my husband’s treasure returning

to him. We have to be burnt to come to our senses. Janey--oh! you do

well!--it was fiendish; old ballads, melodrama plays, I see they were

built on men’s deeds. Janey, I could not believe it, I have to believe,

it is forced down my throat;--that man, your husband, because he could

not forgive my choosing Chillon, schemed for Chillon’s ruin. I could not

believe it until I saw in the glass this disfigured wretch he has made

of me. Livia serves him, she hates him for the tyrant he is; she has

opened my eyes. And not for himself, no, for his revenge on me, for my

name to be as my face is. He tossed me to his dogs; fair game for them!

You do well, Janey; he is capable of any villany. And has been calling

at Livia’s door twice a day, inquiring anxiously; begs the first

appointment possible. He has no shame; he is accustomed to buy men and

women; he thinks his money will buy my pardon, give my face a new skin,

perhaps. A woman swears to you, Janey, by all she holds holy on earth,

it is not the loss of her beauty--there will be a wrinkled patch on

the cheek for life, the surgeon says; I am to bear a brown spot, like

a bruised peach they sell at the fruit-shops cheap. Chillon’s Riette!

I think of that, the miserable wife I am for him without the beauty he

loved so! I think of myself as guilty, a really guilty woman, when I

compare my loss with my husband’s.’

‘Your accident, dearest Riette--how it happened?’ Carinthia said,

enfolding her.

‘Because, Janey, what have I ever been to Chillon but the good-looking

thing he was proud of? It’s gone. Oh, the accident. Brailstone had

pushed little Corby away; he held my hand, kept imploring, he wanted the

usual two minutes, and all to warn me against--I’ve told you; and he

saw Lord Fleetwood coming. I got my hand free, and stepped back, my head

spinning; and I fell. That I recollect, and a sight of flames, like the

end of the world. I fell on one of the oil-lamps bordering the grass; my

veil lighted; I had fainted; those two men saw nothing but one another;

and little Sir Meeson was no help; young Lord Cressett dashed out the

flames. They brought me to my senses for a second swoon. Livia says I

woke moaning to be taken away from that hated Calesford. It was, oh!

never to see that husband of yours again. Forgive him, if you can. Not

I. I carry the mark of him to my grave. I have called myself “Skin-deep”

ever since, day and night--the name I deserve.’

‘We will return to Chillon together, my own,’ said Carinthia. ‘It may

not be so bad.’ And in the hope that her lovely sister exaggerated a

defacement leaving not much worse than a small scar, her heart threw

off its load of the recent perplexities, daylight broke through her dark

wood. Henrietta brought her liberty. How far guilty her husband might

be, she was absolved from considering; sufficiently guilty to release

her. Upon that conclusion, pity for the awakened Riette shed purer

tear-drops through the gratitude she could not restrain, could hardly

conceal, on her sister’s behalf and her own. Henrietta’s prompt despatch

to Croridge to fetch the babes, her journey down out of a sick-room to

stop Chillon’s visit to London, proved her an awakened woman, well paid

for the stain on her face, though the stain were lasting. Never had she

loved Henrietta, never shown her so much love, as on the road to the

deepening colours of the West. Her sisterly warmth surprised the woeful

spotted beauty with a reflection that this martial Janey was after all

a woman of feeling, one whom her husband, if he came to know it and

the depth of it, the rich sound of it, would mourn in sackcloth to have

lost.

And he did, the Dame interposes for the final word, he mourned his loss

of Carinthia Jane in sackcloth and ashes, notwithstanding that he had

the world’s affectionate condolences about him to comfort him, by reason

of his ungovernable countess’s misbehaviour once more, according to the

report, in running away with a young officer to take part in a foreign

insurrection; and when he was most the idol of his countrymen and

countrywomen, which it was once his immoderate aim to be, he mourned

her day and night, knowing her spotless, however wild a follower of her

father’s MAXIMS FOR MEN. He believed--some have said his belief was

not in error--that the woman to aid and make him man and be the star

in human form to him, was miraculously revealed on the day of his walk

through the foreign pine forest, and his proposal to her at the ducal

ball was an inspiration of his Good Genius, continuing to his marriage

morn, and then running downwards, like an overstrained reel, under the

leadership of his Bad. From turning to turning of that descent, he saw

himself advised to retrieve the fatal steps, at each point attempting it

just too late; until too late by an hour, he reached the seaport where

his wife had embarked; and her brother, Chillon John, cruelly, it was

the common opinion, refused him audience. No syllable of the place

whither she fled abroad was vouchsafed to him; and his confessions of

sins and repentance of them were breathed to empty air. The wealthiest

nobleman of all England stood on the pier, watching the regiments of

that doomed expedition mount ship, ready with the bribe of the greater

part of his possessions for a single word to tell him of his wife’s

destination. Lord Feltre, his companion, has done us the service to

make his emotions known. He describes them, true, as the Papist who sees

every incident contribute to precipitate sinners into the bosom of his

Church. But this, we have warrant for saying, did not occur before the

earl had visited and strolled in the woods with his former secretary,

Mr. Gower Woodseer, of whom so much has been told, and he little better

than an infidel, declaring his aim to be at contentedness in life. Lord

Fleetwood might envy for a while, he could not be satisfied with Nature.

Within six months of Carinthia Jane’s disappearance, people had begun to

talk of strange doings at Calesford; and some would have it, that it was

the rehearsal of a play, in which friars were prominent characters, for

there the frocked gentry were seen flitting across the ground. Then

the world learnt too surely that the dreaded evil had happened, its

wealthiest nobleman had gone over to the Church of Rome! carrying all

his personal and unentailed estate to squander it on images and a dogma.

Calesford was attacked by the mob;--one of the notorious riots in our

history was a result of the Amazing Marriage, and roused the talk of

it again over Great Britain. When Carinthia Jane, after two years of

adventures and perils rarely encountered by women, returned to these

shores, she was, they say, most anxious for news of her husband; and

then, indeed, it has been conjectured, they might have been united to

walk henceforward as one for life, but for the sad fact that the Earl of

Fleetwood had two months and some days previously abjured his rank, his

remaining property, and his title, to become, there is one report, the

Brother Russett of the mountain monastery he visited in simple curiosity

once with his betraying friend, Lord Feltre. Or some say, and so it may

truly be, it was an amateur monastery established by him down among his

Welsh mountains, in which he served as a simple brother, without any

authority over the priests or what not he paid to act as his superiors.

Monk of some sort he would be. He was never the man to stop at anything

half way.

Mr. Rose Mackrell, in his Memoirs, was the first who revealed to the

world, that the Mademoiselle de Levellier of the French Count fighting

with the Carlists--falsely claimed by him as a Frenchwoman--was, in very

truth, Carinthia Jane, the Countess of Fleetwood, to whom Carlists and

Legitimises alike were indebted for tender care of them on the field and

in hospital; and who rode from one camp through the other up to the tent

of the Pretender to the throne of Spain, bearing her petition for

her brother’s release; which was granted, in acknowledgement of her

‘renowned humanity to both conflicting armies,’ as the words translated

by Dr. Glossop run. Certain it is she brought her wounded brother safe

home to England, and prisoners in that war usually had short shrift. For

three years longer she was the Countess of Fleetwood, ‘widow of a living

suicide,’ Mr. Rose Mackrell describes the state of the Marriage at that

period. No whisper of divorce did she tolerate.

Six months after it was proved that Brother Russett had perished of his

austerities, or his heart, we learn she said to the beseeching applicant

for her hand, Mr. Owain Wythan, with the gift of it, in compassion:

‘Rebecca could foretell events.’ Carinthia Jane had ever been ashamed

of second marriages, and the union with her friend Rebecca’s faithful

simpleton gave it, one supposes, a natural air, for he as little as she

had previously known the wedded state. She married him, Henrietta has

written, because of his wooing her with dog’s eyes instead of words. The

once famous beauty carried a wrinkled spot on her cheek to her grave;

a saving disfigurement, and the mark of changes in the story told you

enough to make us think it a providential intervention for such ends as

were in view.

So much I can say: the facts related, with some regretted omissions,

by which my story has so skeleton a look, are those that led to the

lamentable conclusion. But the melancholy, the pathos of it, the heart

of all England stirred by it, have been--and the panting excitement it

was to every listener--sacrificed in the vain effort to render events

as consequent to your understanding as a piece of logic, through an

exposure of character! Character must ever be a mystery, only to be

explained in some degree by conduct; and that is very dependent upon

accident: and unless we have a perpetual whipping of the tender part of

the reader’s mind, interest in invisible persons must needs flag. For it

is an infant we address, and the storyteller whose art excites an infant

to serious attention succeeds best; with English people assuredly, I

rejoice to think, though I have to pray their patience here while that

philosophy and exposure of character block the course along a road

inviting to traffic of the most animated kind.

ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS

A dumb tongue can be a heavy liar

Accounting his tight blue tail coat and brass buttons a victory

Advised not to push at a shut gate

Always the shout for more produced it (“News”)

Amused after their tiresome work of slaughter

And her voice, against herself, was for England

Anecdotist to slaughter families for the amusement

As faith comes--no saying how; one swears by them

As for comparisons, they are flowers thrown into the fire

As if the age were the injury!

Be the woman and have the last word!

Bent double to gather things we have tossed away

Brains will beat Grim Death if we have enough of them

But a great success is full of temptations

Call of the great world’s appetite for more (Invented news)

Charity that supplied the place of justice was not thanked

Cock-sure has crowed low by sunset

Contempt of military weapons and ridicule of the art of war

Could affect me then, without being flung at me

Country enclosed us to make us feel snug in our own importance

Courage to grapple with his pride and open his heart was wanting

Deeds only are the title

Detested titles, invented by the English

Did not know the nature of an oath, and was dismissed

Dogs’ eyes have such a sick look of love

Drank to show his disdain of its powers

Drink is their death’s river, rolling them on helpless

Earl of Cressett fell from his coach-box in a fit

Enemy’s laugh is a bugle blown in the night

Everlastingly in this life the better pays for the worse

Fatal habit of superiority stopped his tongue

Father used to say, four hours for a man, six for a woman

Father and she were aware of one another without conversing

Festive board provided for them by the valour of their fathers

Flung him, pitied him, and passed on

Foe can spoil my face; he beats me if he spoils my temper

Fond, as they say, of his glass and his girl

Found that he ‘cursed better upon water’

Fun, at any cost, is the one object worth a shot

Good-bye to sorrow for a while--Keep your tears for the living

Had got the trick of lying, through fear of telling the truth

Hard enough for a man to be married to a fool

He did not vastly respect beautiful women

He was a figure on a horse, and naught when off it

He had wealth for a likeness of strength

He wants the whip; ought to have had it regularly

He was the prisoner of his word

Heartily she thanked the girl for the excuse to cry

Hearts that make one soul do not separately count their gifts

Her intimacy with a man old enough to be her grandfather

Himself in the worn old surplice of the converted rake

I hate sleep: I hate anything that robs me of my will

Ideas in gestation are the dullest matter you can have

Injury forbids us to be friends again

Innocence and uncleanness may go together

It was an honest buss, but dear at ten thousand

Lies are usurers’ coin we pay for ten thousand per cent

Life is the burlesque of young dreams

Limit was two bottles of port wine at a sitting

Little boy named Tommy Wedger said he saw a dead body go by

Look backward only to correct an error of conduct in future

Love of pleasure keeps us blind children

Magnificent in generosity; he had little humaneness

Make a girl drink her tears, if they ain’t to be let fall

Meditations upon the errors of the general man, as a cover

Mighty Highnesses who had only smelt the outside edge of battle

Never forgave an injury without a return blow for it

No enemy’s shot is equal to a weak heart in the act

Not afford to lose, and a disposition free of the craving to win

Not to be the idol, to have an aim of our own

Objects elevated even by a decayed world have their magnetism

On a morning when day and night were made one by fog

One idea is a bullet

Past, future, and present, the three weights upon humanity

Pebble may roll where it likes--not so the costly jewel

Poetic romance is delusion

Push me to condense my thoughts to a tight ball

Put material aid at a lower mark than gentleness

Puzzle to connect the foregoing and the succeeding

Quick to understand, she is in the quick of understanding

Reflection upon a statement is its lightning in advance

Religion condones offences: Philosophy has no forgiveness

Religion is the one refuge from women

Scorn titles which did not distinguish practical offices

Sensitiveness to the sting, which is not allowed to poison

Seventy, when most men are reaping and stacking their sins

She seemed really a soaring bird brought down by the fowler

She was thrust away because because he had offended

She stood with a dignity that the word did not express

She endured meekly, when there was no meekness

Should we leave a good deed half done

Showery, replied the admiral, as his cocked-hat was knocked off

So much for morality in those days!

So indulgent when they drop their blot on a lady’s character

Steady shakes them

Strengthening the backbone for a bend of the knee in calamity

Style is the mantle of greatness

Sweetest on earth to her was to be prized by her brother

That sort of progenitor is your “permanent aristocracy”

The habit of the defensive paralyzes will

The embraced respected woman

The idol of the hour is the mob’s wooden puppet

The divinely damnable naked truth won’t wear ornaments

Their sneer withers

There is no driver like stomach

There’s not an act of a man’s life lies dead behind him

They could have pardoned her a younger lover

Those who have the careless chatter, the ready laugh

Those who know little and dread much

Thus are we stricken by the days of our youth

Tighter than ever I was tight I’ll be to-night

To most men women are knaves or ninnies

Touch sin and you accommodate yourself to its vileness

Truth is, they have taken a stain from the life they lead

Very little parleying between determined men

Wakening to the claims of others--Youth’s infant conscience

Warm, is hardly the word--Winter’s warm on skates

We make our taskmasters of those to whom we have done a wrong

We shall go together; we shall not have to weep for one another

With one idea, we see nothing--nothing but itself

Woman finds herself on board a rudderless vessel

Women treat men as their tamed housemates

Wooing her with dog’s eyes instead of words

Writer society delights in, to show what it is composed of

You played for gain, and that was a licenced thieving

You saw nothing but handkerchiefs out all over the theatre

You are to imagine that they know everything

You want me to flick your indecision

End of Project Gutenberg’s The Amazing Marriage, Complete, by George Meredith