CHAPTER IV

CONTAINING HINTS OF DIANA'S EXPERIENCES AND OF WHAT THEY LED TO

A fortnight after this memorable Ball the principal actors of both sexes

had crossed the Channel back to England, and old Ireland was left to her

rains from above and her undrained bogs below; her physical and her

mental vapours; her ailments and her bog-bred doctors; as to whom the

governing country trusted they would be silent or discourse humorously.

The residence of Sir Lukin Dunstane, in the county of Surrey, inherited

by him during his recent term of Indian services, was on the hills, where

a day of Italian sky, or better, a day of our breezy South-west, washed

from the showery night, gives distantly a tower to view, and a murky web,

not without colour: the ever-flying banner of the metropolis, the smoke

of the city's chimneys, if you prefer plain language. At a first

inspection of the house, Lady Dunstane did not like it, and it was

advertized to be let, and the auctioneer proclaimed it in his dialect.

Her taste was delicate; she had the sensitiveness of an invalid: twice

she read the stalking advertizement of the attractions of Copsley, and

hearing Diana call it 'the plush of speech,' she shuddered; she decided

that a place where her husband's family had lived ought not to stand

forth meretriciously spangled and daubed, like a show-booth at a fair,

for a bait; though the grandiloquent man of advertizing letters assured

Sir Lukin that a public agape for the big and gaudy mouthful is in no

milder way to be caught; as it is apparently the case. She withdrew the

trumpeting placard. Retract we likewise 'banner of the metropolis.' That

plush of speech haunts all efforts to swell and illuminate citizen prose

to a princely poetic.

Yet Lady Dunstane herself could name the bank of smoke, when looking

North-eastward from her summerhouse, the flag of London: and she was a

person of the critical mind, well able to distinguish between the simple

metaphor and the superobese. A year of habitation induced her to conceal

her dislike of the place in love: cat's love, she owned. Here, she

confessed to Diana, she would wish to live to her end. It seemed remote,

where an invigorating upper air gave new bloom to her cheeks; but she

kept one secret from her friend.

Copsley was an estate of nearly twelve hundred acres, extending across

the ridge of the hills to the slopes North and South. Seven counties

rolled their backs under this commanding height, and it would have tasked

a pigeon to fly within an hour the stretch of country visible at the

Copsley windows. Sunrise to right, sunset leftward, the borders of the

grounds held both flaming horizons. So much of the heavens and of earth

is rarely granted to a dwelling. The drawback was the structure, which

had no charm, scarce a face. 'It is written that I should live in

barracks,' Lady Dunstane said. The colour of it taught white to impose a

sense of gloom. Her cat's love of the familiar inside corners was never

able to embrace the outer walls. Her sensitiveness, too, was racked by

the presentation of so pitiably ugly a figure to the landscape. She

likened it to a coarse-featured country wench, whose cleaning and

decorating of her countenance makes complexion grin and ruggedness yawn.

Dirty, dilapidated, hung with weeds and parasites, it would have been

more tolerable. She tried the effect of various creepers, and they were

as a staring paint. What it was like then, she had no heart to say.

One may, however, fall on a pleasurable resignation in accepting great

indemnities, as Diana bade her believe, when the first disgust began to

ebb. 'A good hundred over there would think it a Paradise for an asylum':

she signified London. Her friend bore such reminders meekly. They were

readers of books of all sorts, political, philosophical, economical,

romantic; and they mixed the diverse readings in thought, after the

fashion of the ardently youthful. Romance affected politics, transformed

economy, irradiated philosophy. They discussed the knotty question, Why

things were not done, the things being confessedly to do; and they cut

the knot: Men, men calling themselves statesmen, declined to perform that

operation, because, forsooth, other men objected to have it performed on

them. And common humanity declared it to be for the common weal! If so,

then it is clearly indicated as a course of action: we shut our eyes

against logic and the vaunted laws of economy. They are the knot we cut;

or would cut, had we the sword. Diana did it to the tune of Garryowen or

Planxty Kelly. O for a despot! The cry was for a beneficent despot,

naturally: a large-minded benevolent despot. In short, a despot to obey

their bidding. Thoughtful young people who think through the heart soon

come to this conclusion. The heart is the beneficent despot they would

be. He cures those miseries; he creates the novel harmony. He sees all

difficulties through his own sanguine hues. He is the musical poet of the

problem, demanding merely to have it solved that he may sing: clear proof

of the necessity for solving it immediately.

Thus far in their pursuit of methods for the government of a nation, to

make it happy, Diana was leader. Her fine ardour and resonance, and more

than the convincing ring of her voice, the girl's impassioned rapidity in

rushing through any perceptible avenue of the labyrinth, or beating down

obstacles to form one, and coming swiftly to some solution, constituted

her the chief of the pair of democratic rebels in questions that

clamoured for instant solution. By dint of reading solid writers, using

the brains they possessed, it was revealed to them gradually that their

particular impatience came perhaps of the most earnest desire to get to a

comfortable termination of the inquiry: the heart aching for mankind

sought a nest for itself. At this point Lady Dunstane took the lead.

Diana had to be tugged to follow. She could not accept a 'perhaps' that

cast dubiousness on her disinterested championship. She protested a

perfect certainty of the single aim of her heart outward. But she

reflected. She discovered that her friend had gone ahead of her.

The discovery was reached, and even acknowledged, before she could

persuade herself to swallow the repulsive truth. O self! self! self! are

we eternally masking in a domino that reveals your hideous old face when

we could be most positive we had escaped you? Eternally! the desolating

answer knelled. Nevertheless the poor, the starving, the overtaxed in

labour, they have a right to the cry of Now! now! They have; and if a cry

could conduct us to the secret of aiding, healing, feeding, elevating

them, we might swell the cry. As it is, we must lay it on our wits

patiently to track and find the secret; and meantime do what the

individual with his poor pittance can. A miserable contribution! sighed

the girl. Old Self was perceived in the sigh. She was haunted.

After all, one must live one's life. Placing her on a lower pedestal in

her self-esteem, the philosophy of youth revived her; and if the

abatement of her personal pride was dispiriting, she began to see an

advantage in getting inward eyes.

'It's infinitely better I should know it, Emmy--I'm a reptile! Pleasure

here, pleasure there, I'm always thinking of pleasure. I shall give up

thinking and take to drifting. Neither of us can do more than open

purses; and mine's lean. If the old Crossways had no tenant, it would be

a purse all mouth. And charity is haunted, like everything we do. Only I

say with my whole strength yes, I am sure, in spite of the men professing

that they are practical, the rich will not move without a goad. I have

and hold--you shall hunger and covet, until you are strong enough to

force my hand:--that 's the speech of the wealthy. And they are

Christians. In name. Well, I thank heaven I'm at war, with myself.'

'You always manage to strike out a sentence worth remembering, Tony,'

said Lady Dunstane. 'At war with ourselves, means the best happiness we

can have.'

It suited her, frail as her health was, and her wisdom striving to the

spiritual of happiness. War with herself was far from happiness in the

bosom of Diana. She wanted external life, action, fields for energies, to

vary the struggle. It fretted and rendered her ill at ease. In her

solitary rides with Sir Lukin through a long winter season, she appalled

that excellent but conventionally-minded gentleman by starting, nay

supporting, theories next to profane in the consideration of a

land-owner. She spoke of Reform: of the Repeal of the Corn Laws as the

simple beginning of the grants due to the people. She had her ideas, of

course, from that fellow Redworth, an occasional visitor at Copsley; and

a man might be a donkey and think what he pleased, since he had a

vocabulary to back his opinions. A woman, Sir Lukin held, was by nature a

mute in politics. Of the thing called a Radical woman, he could not

believe that she was less than monstrous: 'with a nose,' he said; and

doubtless, horse teeth, hatchet jaws, slatternly in the gown, slipshod,

awful. As for a girl, an unmarried, handsome girl, admittedly beautiful,

her interjections, echoing a man, were ridiculous, and not a little

annoying now and them, for she could be piercingly sarcastic. Her

vocabulary in irony was a quiverful. He admired her and liked her

immensely; complaining only of her turn for unfeminine topics. He

pardoned her on the score of the petty difference rankling between them

in reference to his abandonment of his Profession, for here she was

patriotically wrong-headed. Everybody knew that he had sold out in order

to look after his estates of Copsley and Dunena, secondly: and in the

first place, to nurse and be a companion to his wife. He had left her but

four times in five months; he had spent just three weeks of that time

away from her in London. No one could doubt of his having kept his

pledge, although his wife occupied herself with books and notions and

subjects foreign to his taste--his understanding, too, he owned. And

Redworth had approved of his retirement, had a contempt for soldiering.

'Quite as great as yours for civilians, I can tell you,' Sir Lukin said,

dashing out of politics to the vexatious personal subject. Her

unexpressed disdain was ruffling.

'Mr. Redworth recommends work: he respects the working soldier,' said

Diana.

Sir Lukin exclaimed that he had been a working soldier; he was ready to

serve if his country wanted him. He directed her to anathematize Peace,

instead of scorning a fellow for doing the duties next about him: and the

mention of Peace fetched him at a bound back to politics. He quoted a

distinguished Tory orator, to the effect, that any lengthened term of

peace bred maggots in the heads of the people.

'Mr. Redworth spoke of it: he translated something from Aristophanes for

a retort,' said Diana.

'Well, we're friends, eh?' Sir Lukin put forth a hand.

She looked at him surprised at the unnecessary call for a show, of

friendship; she touched his hand with two tips of her fingers, remarking,

'I should think so, indeed.'

He deemed it prudent to hint to his wife that Diana Merion appeared to be

meditating upon Mr. Redworth.

'That is a serious misfortune, if true,' said Lady Dunstane. She thought

so for two reasons: Mr. Redworth generally disagreed in opinion with

Diana, and contradicted her so flatly as to produce the impression of his

not even sharing the popular admiration of her beauty; and, further, she

hoped for Diana to make a splendid marriage. The nibbles threatened to be

snaps and bites. There had been a proposal, in an epistle, a quaint

effusion, from a gentleman avowing that he had seen her, and had not

danced with her on the night of the Irish ball. He was rejected, but

Diana groaned over the task of replying to the unfortunate applicant, so

as not to wound him. 'Shall I have to do this often, I wonder?' she said.

'Unless you capitulate,' said her friend.

Diana's exclamation: 'May I be heart-free for another ten years!'

encouraged Lady Dunstane to suppose her husband quite mistaken.

In the Spring Diana, went on a first pilgrimage to her old home, The

Crossways, and was kindly entertained by the uncle and aunt of a

treasured nephew, Mr. Augustus Warwick. She rode with him on the Downs. A

visit of a week humanized her view of the intruders. She wrote almost

tenderly of her host and hostess to Lady Dunstane; they had but 'the one

fault--of spoiling their nephew.' Him she described as a 'gentlemanly

official,' a picture of him. His age was thirty-four. He seemed 'fond of

her scenery.' Then her pen swept over the Downs like a flying horse. Lady

Dunstane thought no more of the gentlemanly official. He was a barrister

who did not practise: in nothing the man for Diana. Letters came from the

house of the Pettigrews in Kent; from London; from Halford Manor in

Hertfordshire; from Lockton Grange in Lincolnshire: after which they

ceased to be the thrice weekly; and reading the latest of them, Lady

Dunstane imagined a flustered quill. The letter succeeding the omission

contained no excuse, and it was brief. There was a strange interjection,

as to the wearifulness of constantly wandering, like a leaf off the tree.

Diana spoke of looking for a return of the dear winter days at Copsley.

That was her station. Either she must have had some disturbing

experience, or Copsley was dear for a Redworth reason, thought the

anxious peruser; musing, dreaming, putting together divers shreds of

correspondence and testing them with her intimate knowledge of Diana's

character, Lady Dunstane conceived that the unprotected beautiful girl

had suffered a persecution, it might be an insult. She spelt over the

names of the guests at the houses. Lord Wroxeter was of evil report:

Captain Rampan, a Turf captain, had the like notoriety. And it is

impossible in a great house for the hostess to spread her aegis to cover

every dame and damsel present. She has to depend on the women being

discreet, the men civilized.

'How brutal men can be!' was one of Diana's incidental remarks, in a

subsequent letter, relating simply to masculine habits. In those days the

famous ancestral plea of 'the passion for his charmer' had not been

altogether socially quashed down among the provinces, where the bottle

maintained a sort of sway, and the beauty which inflamed the sons of men

was held to be in coy expectation of violent effects upon their boiling

blood. There were, one hears that there still are, remnants of the

pristine male, who, if resisted in their suing, conclude that they are

scorned, and it infuriates them: some also whose 'passion for the

charmer' is an instinct to pull down the standard of the sex, by a bully

imposition of sheer physical ascendancy, whenever they see it flying with

an air of gallant independence: and some who dedicate their lives to a

study of the arts of the Lord Of Reptiles, until they have worked the

crisis for a display of him in person. Assault or siege, they have

achieved their triumphs; they have dominated a frailer system of nerves,

and a young woman without father, or brother, or husband, to defend her,

is cryingly a weak one, therefore inviting to such an order of heroes.

Lady Dunstane was quick-witted and had a talkative husband; she knew a

little of the upper social world of her time. She was heartily glad to

have Diana by her side again.

Not a word of any serious experience was uttered. Only on one occasion

while they conversed, something being mentioned of her tolerance, a flush

of swarthy crimson shot over Diana, and she frowned, with the outcry 'Oh!

I have discovered that I can be a tigress!'

Her friend pressed her hand, saying, 'The cause a good one!'

'Women have to fight.'

Diana said no more. There had been a bad experience of her isolated

position in the world.

Lady Dunstane now indulged a partial hope that Mr. Redworth might see in

this unprotected beautiful girl a person worthy of his esteem. He had his

opportunities, and evidently he liked her. She appeared to take more

cordially to him. She valued the sterling nature of the man. But they

were a hopeless couple, they were so friendly. Both ladies noticed in him

an abstractedness of look, often when conversing, as of a man in

calculation; they put it down to an ambitious mind. Yet Diana said then,

and said always, that it was he who had first taught her the art of

observing. On the whole, the brilliant marriage seemed a fairer prospect

for her; how reasonable to anticipate, Lady Dunstane often thought when

admiring the advance of Diana's beauty in queenliness, for never did

woman carry her head more grandly, more thrillingly make her presence

felt; and if only she had been an actress showing herself nightly on a

London stage, she would before now have met the superb appreciation,

melancholy to reflect upon!

Diana regained her happy composure at Copsley. She had, as she imagined,

no ambition. The dulness of the place conveyed a charm to a nature

recovering from disturbance to its clear smooth flow. Air, light, books,

and her friend, these good things she had; they were all she wanted. She

rode, she walked, with Sir Lukin or Mr. Redworth, for companion; or with

Saturday and Sunday guests, Lord Larrian, her declared admirer, among

them. 'Twenty years younger!' he said to her, shrugging, with a merry

smile drawn a little at the corners to sober sourness; and she vowed to

her friend that she would not have had the heart to refuse him. 'Though,'

said she, 'speaking generally, I cannot tell you what a foreign animal a

husband would appear in my kingdom.' Her experience had wakened a sexual

aversion, of some slight kind, enough to make her feminine pride

stipulate for perfect independence, that she might have the calm out of

which imagination spreads wing. Imagination had become her broader life,

and on such an earth, under such skies, a husband who is not the fountain

of it, certainly is a foreign animal: he is a discordant note. He

contracts the ethereal world, deadens radiancy. He is gross fact, a

leash, a muzzle, harness, a hood; whatever is detestable to the free

limbs and senses. It amused Lady Dunstane to hear Diana say, one evening

when their conversation fell by hazard on her future, that the idea of a

convent was more welcome to her than the most splendid marriage. 'For,'

she added, 'as I am sure I shall never know anything of this love they

rattle about and rave about, I shall do well to keep to my good single

path; and I have a warning within me that a step out of it will be a

wrong one--for me, dearest!'

She wished her view of the yoke to be considered purely personal, drawn

from no examples and comparisons. The excellent Sir Lukin was passing a

great deal of his time in London. His wife had not a word of blame for

him; he was a respectful husband, and attentive when present; but so

uncertain, owing to the sudden pressure of engagements, that Diana, bound

on a second visit to The Crossways, doubted whether she would be able to

quit her friend, whose condition did not allow of her being left solitary

at Copsley. He came nevertheless a day before Diana's appointed departure

on her round of visits. She was pleased with him, and let him see it, for

the encouragement of a husband in the observance of his duties. One of

the horses had fallen lame, so they went out for a walk, at Lady

Dunstane's request. It was a delicious afternoon of Spring, with the full

red disk of sun dropping behind the brown beech-twigs. She remembered

long afterward the sweet simpleness of her feelings as she took in the

scent of wild flowers along the lanes and entered the woods jaws of

another monstrous and blackening experience. He fell into the sentimental

vein, and a man coming from that heated London life to these glorified

woods, might be excused for doing so, though it sounded to her just a

little ludicrous in him. She played tolerantly second to it; she quoted a

snatch of poetry, and his whole face was bent to her, with the petition

that she would repeat the verse. Much struck was this giant ex-dragoon.

Ah! how fine! grand! He would rather hear that than any opera: it was

diviner! 'Yes, the best poetry is,' she assented. 'On your lips,' he

said. She laughed. 'I am not a particularly melodious reciter.' He vowed

he could listen to her eternally, eternally. His face, on a screw of the

neck and shoulders, was now perpetually three-quarters fronting. Ah! she

was going to leave. 'Yes, and you will find my return quite early

enough,' said Diana, stepping a trifle more briskly. His fist was raised

on the length of the arm, as if in invocation. 'Not in the whole of

London is there a woman worthy to fasten your shoe-buckles! My oath on

it! I look; I can't spy one.' Such was his flattering eloquence.

She told him not to think it necessary to pay her compliments. 'And here,

of all places!' They were in the heart of the woods. She found her hand

seized--her waist. Even then, so impossible is it to conceive the

unimaginable even when the apparition of it smites us, she expected some

protesting absurdity, or that he had seen something in her path.--What

did she hear? And from her friend's husband!

If stricken idiotic, he was a gentleman; the tigress she had detected in

her composition did not require to be called forth; half-a-dozen words,

direct, sharp as fangs and teeth, with the eyes burning over them,

sufficed for the work of defence. 'The man who swore loyalty to Emma!'

Her reproachful repulsion of eyes was unmistakeable, withering; as

masterful as a superior force on his muscles.--What thing had he been

taking her for?--She asked it within: and he of himself, in a reflective

gasp. Those eyes of hers appeared as in a cloud, with the wrath above:

she had: the look of a Goddess in anger. He stammered, pleaded across her

flying shoulder--Oh! horrible, loathsome, pitiable to hear! . . . 'A

momentary aberration . . . her beauty . . . he deserved to be shot! . . .

could not help admiring . . . quite lost his head . . on his honour!

never again!'

Once in the roadway, and Copsley visible, she checked her arrowy pace for

breath, and almost commiserated the dejected wretch in her thankfulness

to him for silence. Nothing exonerated him, but at least he had the grace

not to beg secresy. That would have been an intolerable whine of a

poltroon, adding to her humiliation. He abstained; he stood at her mercy

without appealing.

She was not the woman to take poor vengeance. But, Oh! she was profoundly

humiliated, shamed through and through. The question, was I guilty of any

lightness--anything to bring this on me? would not be laid. And how she

pitied her friend! This house, her heart's home, was now a wreck to her:

nay, worse, a hostile citadel. The burden of the task of meeting Emma

with an open face, crushed her like very guilt. Yet she succeeded. After

an hour in her bedchamber she managed to lock up her heart and summon the

sprite of acting to her tongue and features: which ready attendant on the

suffering female host performed his liveliest throughout the evening, to

Emma's amusement, and to the culprit ex-dragoon's astonishment; in whom,

to tell the truth of him, her sparkle and fun kindled the sense of his

being less criminal than he had supposed, with a dim vision of himself as

the real proven donkey for not having been a harmless dash more so. But,

to be just as well as penetrating, this was only the effect of her

personal charm on his nature. So it spurred him a moment, when it struck

this doleful man that to have secured one kiss of those fresh and witty

sparkling lips he would endure forfeits, pangs, anything save the hanging

of his culprit's head before his Emma. Reflection washed him clean.

Secresy is not a medical restorative, by no means a good thing for the

baffled amorously-adventurous cavalier, unless the lady's character shall

have been firmly established in or over his hazy wagging noddle.

Reflection informed him that the honourable, generous, proud girl spared

him for the sake of the house she loved. After a night of tossing, he

rose right heartily repentant. He showed it in the best manner, not

dramatically. On her accepting his offer to drive her down to the valley

to meet the coach, a genuine illumination of pure gratitude made a better

man of him, both to look at and in feeling. She did not hesitate to

consent; and he had half expected a refusal. She talked on the way quite

as usual, cheerfully, if not altogether so spiritedly. A flash of her

matchless wit now and then reduced him to that abject state of man beside

the fair person he has treated high cavalierly, which one craves

permission to describe as pulp. He was utterly beaten.

The sight of Redworth on the valley road was a relief to them both. He

had slept in one of the houses of the valley, and spoke of having had the

intention to mount to Copsley. Sir Lukin proposed to drive him back. He

glanced at Diana, still with that calculating abstract air of his; and he

was rallied. He confessed to being absorbed in railways, the new lines of

railways projected to thread the land and fast mapping it.

'You 've not embarked money in them?' said Sir Lukin.

The answer was: 'I have; all I possess.' And Redworth for a sharp instant

set his eyes on Diana, indifferent to Sir Lukin's bellow of stupefaction

at such gambling on the part of a prudent fellow.

He asked her where she was to be met, where written to, during the

Summer, in case of his wishing to send her news.

She replied: 'Copsley will be the surest. I am always in communication

with Lady Dunstane.' She coloured deeply. The recollection of the change

of her feeling for Copsley suffused her maiden mind.

The strange blush prompted an impulse in Redworth to speak to her at once

of his venture in railways. But what would she understand of them, as

connected with the mighty stake he was playing for? He delayed. The coach

came at a trot of the horses, admired by Sir Lukin, round a corner. She

entered it, her maid followed, the door banged, the horses trotted. She

was off.

Her destiny of the Crossways tied a knot, barred a gate, and pointed to a

new direction of the road on that fine spring morning, when beech-buds

were near the burst, cowslips yellowed the meadow-flats, and skylarks

quivered upward.

For many long years Redworth had in his memory, for a comment on

procrastination and excessive scrupulousness in his calculating faculty,

the blue back of a coach.

He declined the vacated place beside Sir Lukin, promising to come and

spend a couple of days at Copsley in a fortnight--Saturday week. He

wanted, he said, to have a talk with Lady Dunstane. Evidently he had

railways on the brain, and Sir Lukin warned his wife to be guarded

against the speculative mania, and advise the man, if she could.