CHAPTER XV

INTRODUCES THE HON. PERCY DACIER

The Gods of this world's contests, against whom our poor stripped

individual is commonly in revolt, are, as we know, not miners, they are

reapers; and if we appear no longer on the surface, they cease to bruise

us: they will allow an arena character to be cleansed and made

presentable while enthusiastic friends preserve discretion. It is of

course less than magnanimity; they are not proposed to you for your

worship; they are little Gods, temporary as that great wave, their parent

human mass of the hour. But they have one worshipful element in them,

which is, the divine insistency upon there being two sides to a case--to

every case. And the People so far directed by them may boast of

healthfulness. Let the individual shriek, the innocent, triumphant, have

in honesty to admit the fact. One side is vanquished, according to decree

of Law, but the superior Council does not allow it to be extinguished.

Diana's battle was fought shadowily behind her for the space of a week or

so, with some advocates on behalf of the beaten man; then it became a

recollection of a beautiful woman, possibly erring, misvalued by a

husband, who was neither a man of the world nor a gracious yokefellow,

nor anything to match her. She, however, once out of the public flames,

had to recall her scorchings to be gentle with herself. Under a defeat,

she would have been angrily self-vindicated. The victory of the ashen

laurels drove her mind inward to gird at the hateful yoke, in compassion

for its pair of victims. Quite earnestly by such means, yet always

bearing a comical eye on her subterfuges, she escaped the extremes of

personal blame. Those advocates of her opponent in and out of court

compelled her honest heart to search within and own to faults. But were

they not natural faults? It was her marriage; it was marriage in the

abstract: her own mistake and the world's clumsy machinery of

civilization: these were the capital offenders: not the wife who would

laugh ringingly, and would have friends of the other sex, and shot her

epigrams at the helpless despot, and was at times--yes, vixenish; a

nature driven to it, but that was the word. She was too generous to

recount her charges against the vanquished. If his wretched jealousy had

ruined her, the secret high tribunal within her bosom, which judged her

guiltless for putting the sword between their marriage tie when they

stood as one, because a quarrelling couple could not in honour play the

embracing, pronounced him just pardonable. She distinguished that he

could only suppose, manlikely, one bad cause for the division.

To this extent she used her unerring brains, more openly than on her

night of debate at The Crossways. The next moment she was off in vapour,

meditating grandly on her independence of her sex and the passions. Love!

she did not know it, she was not acquainted with either the criminal or

the domestic God, and persuaded herself that she never could be. She was

a Diana of coldness, preferring friendship; she could be the friend of

men. There was another who could be the friend of women. Her heart leapt

to Redworth. Conjuring up his clear trusty face, at their grasp of hands

when parting, she thought of her visions of her future about the period

of the Dublin Ball, and acknowledged, despite the erratic step to

wedlock, a gain in having met and proved so true a friend. His face,

figure, character, lightest look, lightest word, all were loyal signs of

a man of honour, cold as she; he was the man to whom she could have

opened her heart for inspection. Rejoicing in her independence of an

emotional sex, the impulsive woman burned with a regret that at their

parting she had not broken down conventional barriers and given her cheek

to his lips in the antiinsular fashion with a brotherly friend. And why

not when both were cold? Spirit to spirit, she did, delightfully

refreshed by her capacity to do so without a throb. He had held her hands

and looked into her eyes half a minute, like a dear comrade; as little

arousing her instincts of defensiveness as the clearing heavens; and

sisterly love for it was his due, a sister's kiss. He needed a sister,

and should have one in her. Emma's recollected talk of 'Tom Redworth'

painted him from head to foot, brought the living man over the waters to

the deck of the yacht. A stout champion in the person of Tom Redworth was

left on British land; but for some reason past analysis, intermixed, that

is, among a swarm of sensations, Diana named her champion to herself with

the formal prefix: perhaps because she knew a man's Christian name to be

dangerous handling. They differed besides frequently in opinion, when the

habit of thinking of him as Mr. Redworth would be best. Women are bound

to such small observances, and especially the beautiful of the

sisterhood, whom the world soon warns that they carry explosives and must

particularly guard against the ignition of petty sparks. She was less

indiscreet in her thoughts than in her acts, as is the way with the

reflective daughter of impulse; though she had fine mental distinctions:

what she could offer to do 'spirit to spirit,' for instance, held nothing

to her mind of the intimacy of calling the gentleman plain Tom in mere

contemplation of him. Her friend and champion was a volunteer, far from a

mercenary, and he deserved the reward, if she could bestow it unalarmed.

They were to meet in Egypt. Meanwhile England loomed the home of hostile

forces ready to shock, had she been a visible planet, and ready to

secrete a virus of her past history, had she been making new.

She was happily away, borne by a whiter than swan's wing on the sapphire

Mediterranean. Her letters to Emma were peeps of splendour for the

invalid: her way of life on board the yacht, and sketches of her host and

hostess as lovers in wedlock on the other side of our perilous forties;

sketches of the bays, the towns, the people-priests, dames, cavaliers,

urchins, infants, shifting groups of supple southerners-flashed across

the page like a web of silk, and were dashed off, redolent of herself, as

lightly as the silvery spray of the blue waves she furrowed; telling,

without allusions to the land behind her, that she had dipped in the

wells of blissful oblivion. Emma Dunstane, as is usual with those who

receive exhilarating correspondence from makers of books, condemned the

authoress in comparison, and now first saw that she had the gift of

writing. Only one cry: 'Italy, Eden of exiles!' betrayed the seeming of a

moan. She wrote of her poet and others immediately. Thither had they

fled; with adieu to England!

How many have waved the adieu! And it is England nourishing, England

protecting them, England clothing them in the honours they wear. Only the

posturing lower natures, on the level of their buskins, can pluck out the

pocket-knife of sentimental spite to cut themselves loose from her at

heart in earnest. The higher, bleed as they may, too pressingly feel

their debt. Diana had the Celtic vivid sense of country. In England she

was Irish, by hereditary, and by wilful opposition. Abroad, gazing along

the waters, observing, comparing, reflecting, above all, reading of the

struggles at home, the things done and attempted, her soul of generosity

made her, though not less Irish, a daughter of Britain. It is at a

distance that striving countries should be seen if we would have them in

the pure idea; and this young woman of fervid mind, a reader of public

speeches and speculator on the tides of politics (desirous, further, to

feel herself rather more in the pure idea), began to yearn for England

long before her term of holiday exile had ended. She had been flattered

by her friend, her 'wedded martyr at the stake,' as she named him, to

believe that she could exercise a judgement in politics--could think,

even speak acutely, on public affairs. The reports of speeches delivered

by the men she knew or knew of, set her thrilling; and she fancied the

sensibility to be as independent of her sympathy with the orators as her

political notions were sovereignty above a sex devoted to trifles, and

the feelings of a woman who had gone through fire. She fancied it

confidently, notwithstanding a peculiar intuition that the plunge into

the nobler business of the world would be a haven of safety for a woman

with blood and imagination, when writing to Emma: 'Mr. Redworth's great

success in Parliament is good in itself, whatever his views of present

questions; and I do not heed them when I look to what may be done by a

man of such power in striking at unjust laws, which keep the really

numerically better-half of the population in a state of slavery. If he

had been a lawyer! It must be a lawyer's initiative--a lawyer's Bill. Mr.

Percy Dacier also spoke well, as might have been expected, and his

uncle's compliment to him was merited. Should you meet him sound him. He

has read for the Bar, and is younger than Mr. Redworth. The very young

men and the old are our hope. The middleaged are hard and fast for

existing facts. We pick our leaders on the slopes, the incline and

decline of the mountain--not on the upper table-land midway, where all

appears to men so solid, so tolerably smooth, save for a few

excrescences, roughnesses, gradually to be levelled at their leisure;

which induces one to protest that the middle-age of men is their time of

delusion. It is no paradox. They may be publicly useful in a small way. I

do not deny it at all. They must be near the gates of life--the opening

or the closing--for their minds to be accessible to the urgency of the

greater questions. Otherwise the world presents itself to them under too

settled an aspect--unless, of course, Vesuvian Revolution shakes the

land. And that touches only their nerves. I dream of some old Judge!

There is one--if having caught we could keep him. But I dread so tricksy

a pilot. You have guessed him--the ancient Puck! We have laughed all day

over the paper telling us of his worrying the Lords. Lady Esquart

congratulates her husband on being out of it. Puck 'biens ride' and

bewigged might perhaps--except that at the critical moment he would be

sure to plead allegiance to Oberon. However, the work will be performed

by some one: I am prophetic:--when maidens are grandmothers!--when your

Tony is wearing a perpetual laugh in the unhusbanded regions where there

is no institution of the wedding-tie.'

For the reason that she was not to participate in the result of the old

Judge's or young hero's happy championship of the cause of her sex, she

conceived her separateness high aloof, and actually supposed she was a

contemplative, simply speculative political spirit, impersonal albeit a

woman. This, as Emma, smiling at the lines, had not to learn, was always

her secret pride of fancy--the belief in her possession of a disengaged

intellect.

The strange illusion, so clearly exposed to her correspondent, was

maintained through a series of letters very slightly descriptive, dated

from the Piraeus, the Bosphorus, the coasts of the Crimea, all more or

less relating to the latest news of the journals received on board the

yacht, and of English visitors fresh from the country she now seemed fond

of calling 'home.' Politics, and gentle allusions to the curious

exhibition of 'love in marriage' shown by her amiable host and hostess:

'these dear Esquarts, who are never tired of one another, but courtly

courting, tempting me to think it possible that a fortunate selection and

a mutual deference may subscribe to human happiness:--filled the

paragraphs. Reviews of her first literary venture were mentioned once: 'I

was well advised by Mr. Redworth in putting ANTONIA for authoress. She is

a buff jerkin to the stripes, and I suspect that the signature of D. E.

M., written in full, would have cawed woefully to hear that her style is

affected, her characters nullities, her cleverness forced, etc., etc. As

it is, I have much the same contempt for poor Antonia's performance.

Cease penning, little fool! She writes, "with some comprehension of the

passion of love." I know her to be a stranger to the earliest cry. So you

see, dear, that utter ignorance is the mother of the Art. Dialogues

"occasionally pointed." She has a sister who may do better.--But why was

I not apprenticed to a serviceable profession or a trade? I perceive now

that a hanger-on of the market had no right to expect a happier fate than

mine has been.'

On the Nile, in the winter of the year, Diana met the Hon. Percy Dacier.

He was introduced to her at Cairo by Redworth. The two gentlemen had

struck up a House of Commons acquaintanceship, and finding themselves

bound for the same destination, had grown friendly. Redworth's arrival

had been pleasantly expected. She remarked on Dacier's presence to Emma,

without sketch or note of him as other than much esteemed by Lord and

Lady Esquart. These, with Diana, Redworth, Dacier, the German Eastern

traveller Schweizerbarth, and the French Consul and Egyptologist

Duriette, composed a voyaging party up the river, of which expedition

Redworth was Lady Dunstane's chief writer of the records. His novel

perceptiveness and shrewdness of touch made them amusing; and his

tenderness to the Beauty's coquettry between the two foreign rivals,

moved a deeper feeling. The German had a guitar, the Frenchman a voice;

Diana joined them in harmony. They complained apart severally of the

accompaniment and the singer. Our English criticized them apart; and that

is at any rate to occupy a post, though it contributes nothing to

entertainment. At home the Esquarts had sung duets; Diana had assisted

Redworth's manly chest-notes at the piano. Each of them declined to be

vocal. Diana sang alone for the credit of the country, Italian and French

songs, Irish also. She was in her mood of Planxty Kelly and Garryowen all

the way. 'Madame est Irlandaise?' Redworth heard the Frenchman say, and

he owned to what was implied in the answering tone of the question. 'We

should be dull dogs without the Irish leaven!' So Tony in exile still

managed to do something for her darling Erin. The solitary woman on her

heights at Copsley raised an exclamation of, 'Oh! that those two had been

or could be united!' She was conscious of a mystic symbolism in the

prayer.

She was not apprehensive of any ominous intervention of another. Writing

from Venice, Diana mentioned Mr. Percy Dacier as being engaged to an

heiress; 'A Miss Asper, niece of a mighty shipowner, Mr. Quintin Manx,

Lady Esquart tells me: money fabulous, and necessary to a younger son

devoured with ambition. The elder brother, Lord Creedmore, is a common

Nimrod, always absent in Hungary, Russia, America, hunting somewhere. Mr.

Dacier will be in the Cabinet with the next Ministry.' No more of him. A

new work by ANTONIA was progressing.

The Summer in South Tyrol passed like a royal procession before young

eyes for Diana, and at the close of it, descending the Stelvio, idling

through the Valtelline, Como Lake was reached, Diana full of her work,

living the double life of the author. At Bellagio one afternoon Mr. Percy

Dacier appeared. She remembered subsequently a disappointment she felt in

not beholding Mr. Redworth either with him or displacing him. If engaged

to a lady, he was not an ardent suitor; nor was he a pointedly

complimentary acquaintance. His enthusiasm was reserved for Italian

scenery. She had already formed a sort of estimate of his character, as

an indifferent observer may do, and any woman previous to the inflaming

of her imagination, if that is in store for her; and she now fell to work

resetting the puzzle it became as soon her positive conclusions had to be

shaped again. 'But women never can know young men,' she wrote to Emma,

after praising his good repute as one of the brotherhood. 'He drops

pretty sentences now and then: no compliments; milky nuts. Of course he

has a head, or he would not be where he is--and that seems always to me

the most enviable place a young man can occupy.' She observed in him a

singular conflicting of a buoyant animal nature with a curb of

studiousness, as if the fardels of age were piling on his shoulders

before youth had quitted its pastures.

His build of limbs and his features were those of the finely-bred

English; he had the English taste for sports, games, manly diversions;

and in the bloom of life, under thirty, his head was given to bend. The

head bending on a tall upright figure, where there was breadth of chest,

told of weights working. She recollected his open look, larger than

inquiring, at the introduction to her; and it recurred when she uttered

anything specially taking. What it meant was past a guess, though

comparing it with the frank directness of Redworth's eyes, she saw the

difference between a look that accepted her and one that dilated on two

opinions.

Her thought of the gentleman was of a brilliant young charioteer in the

ruck of the race, watchful for his chance to push to the front; and she

could have said that a dubious consort might spoil a promising career. It

flattered her to think that she sometimes prompted him, sometimes

illumined. He repeated sentences she had spoken. 'I shall be better able

to describe Mr. Dacier when you and I sit together, my Emmy, and a stroke

here and there completes the painting. Set descriptions are good for

puppets. Living men and women are too various in the mixture fashioning

them--even the "external presentment"--to be livingly rendered in a

formal sketch. I may tell you his eyes are pale blue, his features

regular, his hair silky, brownish, his legs long, his head rather

stooping (only the head), his mouth commonly closed; these are the facts,

and you have seen much the same in a nursery doll. Such literary craft is

of the nursery. So with landscapes. The art of the pen (we write on

darkness) is to rouse the inward vision, instead of labouring with a

Drop-scene brush, as if it were to the eye; because our flying minds

cannot contain a protracted description. That is why the poets, who

spring imagination with a word or a phrase, paint lasting pictures. The

Shakespearian, the Dantesque, are in a line, two at most. He lends an

attentive ear when I speak, agrees or has a quaint pucker of the eyebrows

dissenting inwardly. He lacks mental liveliness--cheerfulness, I should

say, and is thankful to have it imparted. One suspects he would be a dull

domestic companion. He has a veritable thirst for hopeful views of the

world, and no spiritual distillery of his own. He leans to depression.

Why! The broken reed you call your Tony carries a cargo, all of her

manufacture--she reeks of secret stills; and here is a young man--a

sapling oak--inclined to droop. His nature has an air of imploring me que

je d'arrose! I begin to perform Mrs. Dr. Pangloss on purpose to brighten

him--the mind, the views. He is not altogether deficient in

conversational gaiety, and he shines in exercise. But the world is a poor

old ball bounding down a hill--to an Irish melody in the evening

generally, by request. So far of Mr. Percy Dacier, of whom I have some

hopes--distant, perhaps delusive--that he may be of use to our cause. He

listens. It is an auspicious commencement.'

Lugano is the Italian lake most lovingly encircled by mountain arms, and

every height about it may be scaled with esce. The heights have their

nest of waters below for a home scene, the southern Swiss peaks, with

celestial Monta Rosa, in prospect. It was there that Diana reawakened,

after the trance of a deadly draught, to the glory of the earth and her

share in it. She wakened like the Princess of the Kiss; happily not to

kisses; to no sign, touch or call that she could trace backward. The

change befell her without a warning. After writing deliberately to her

friend Emma, she laid down her pen and thought of nothing; and into this

dreamfulness a wine passed, filling her veins, suffusing her mind,

quickening her soul: and coming whence? out of air, out of the yonder of

air. She could have imagined a seraphic presence in the room, that bade

her arise and live; take the cup of the wells of youth arrested at her

lips by her marriage; quit her wintry bondage for warmth, light, space,

the quick of simple being. And the strange pure ecstasy was not a

transient electrification; it came in waves on a continuous tide; looking

was living; walking flying. She hardly knew that she slept. The heights

she had seen rosy at eve were marked for her ascent in the dawn. Sleep

was one wink, and fresh as the dewy field and rockflowers on her way

upward, she sprang to more and more of heaven, insatiable, happily

chirruping over her possessions. The threading of the town among the dear

common people before others were abroad, was a pleasure and pleasant her

solitariness threading the gardens at the base of the rock, only she

astir; and the first rough steps of the winding footpath, the first

closed buds, the sharper air, the uprising of the mountain with her

ascent; and pleasant too was her hunger and the nibble at a little loaf

of bread. A linnet sang in her breast, an eagle lifted her feet. The feet

were verily winged, as they are in a season of youth when the blood leaps

to light from the pressure of the under forces, like a source at the

wellheads, and the whole creature blooms, vital in every energy as a

spirit. To be a girl again was magical. She could fancy her having risen

from the dead. And to be a girl, with a woman's broader vision and

receptiveness of soul, with knowledge of evil, and winging to ethereal

happiness, this was a revelation of our human powers.

She attributed the change to the influences of nature's beauty and

grandeur. Nor had her woman's consciousness to play the chrysalis in any

shy recesses of her heart; she was nowhere veiled or torpid; she was

illumined, like the Salvatore she saw in the evening beams and mounted in

the morning's; and she had not a spot of seeresy; all her nature flew and

bloomed; she was bird, flower, flowing river, a quivering sensibility

unweighted, enshrouded. Desires and hopes would surely have weighted and

shrouded her. She had none, save for the upper air, the eyes of the

mountain.

Which was the dream--her past life or this ethereal existence? But this

ran spontaneously, and the other had often been stimulated--her

vivaciousness on the Nile-boat, for a recent example. She had not a doubt

that her past life was the dream, or deception: and for the reason that

now she was compassionate, large of heart toward all beneath her. Let

them but leave her free, they were forgiven, even to prayers for their

well-being! The plural number in the case was an involuntary multiplying

of the single, coming of her incapacity during this elevation and rapture

of the senses to think distinctly of that One who had discoloured her

opening life. Freedom to breathe, gaze, climb, grow with the grasses, fly

with the clouds, to muse, to sing, to be an unclaimed self, dispersed

upon earth, air, sky, to find a keener transfigured self in that

radiation--she craved no more.

Bear in mind her beauty, her charm of tongue, her present state of white

simplicity in fervour: was there ever so perilous a woman for the most

guarded and clearest-eyed of young men to meet at early morn upon a

mountain side?