CHAPTER XXXIX

OF NATURE WITH ONE OF HER CULTIVATED DAUGHTERS AND A SHORT EXCURSION IN

ANTI-CLIMAX

A mind that after a long season of oblivion in pain returns to

wakefulness without a keen edge for the world, is much in danger of

souring permanently. Diana's love of nature saved her from the dire

mischance during a two months' residence at Copsley, by stupefying her

senses to a state like the barely conscious breathing on the verge of

sleep. February blew South-west for the pairing of the birds. A broad

warm wind rolled clouds of every ambiguity of form in magnitude over

peeping azure, or skimming upon lakes of blue and lightest green, or

piling the amphitheatre for majestic sunset. Or sometimes those daughters

of the wind flew linked and low, semi-purple, threatening the shower they

retained and teaching gloom to rouse a songful nest in the bosom of the

viewer. Sometimes they were April, variable to soar with rain-skirts and

sink with sunshafts. Or they drenched wood and field for a day and opened

on the high South-western star. Daughters of the wind, but shifty

daughters of this wind of the dropping sun, they have to be watched to be

loved in their transformations.

Diana had Arthur Rhodes and her faithful Leander for walking companions.

If Arthur said: 'Such a day would be considered melancholy by London

people,' she thanked him in her heart, as a benefactor who had revealed

to her things of the deepest. The simplest were her food. Thus does

Nature restore us, by drugging the brain and making her creature

confidingly animal for its new growth. She imagined herself to have lost

the power to think; certainly she had not the striving or the wish.

Exercise of her limbs to reach a point of prospect, and of her ears and

eyes to note what bird had piped, what flower was out on the banks, and

the leaf of what tree it was that lay beneath the budding, satiated her

daily desires. She gathered unknowingly a sheaf of landscapes, images,

keys of dreamed horizons, that opened a world to her at any chance breath

altering shape or hue: a different world from the one of her old

ambition. Her fall had brought her renovatingly to earth, and the saving

naturalness of the woman recreated her childlike, with shrouded

recollections of her strange taste of life behind her; with a tempered

fresh blood to enjoy aimlessly, and what would erewhile have been a

barrenness to her sensibilities.

In time the craving was evolved for positive knowledge, and shells and

stones and weeds were deposited on the library-table at Copsley,

botanical and geological books comparingly examined, Emma Dunstane always

eager to assist; for the samples wafted her into the heart of the woods.

Poor Sir Lukin tried three days of their society, and was driven away

headlong to Club-life. He sent down Redworth, with whom the walks of the

zealous inquirers were profitable, though Diana, in acknowledging it to

herself, reserved a decided preference for her foregone ethereal mood,

larger, and untroubled by the presence of a man. The suspicion Emma had

sown was not excited to an alarming activity; but she began to question:

could the best of men be simply--a woman's friend?--was not long service

rather less than a proof of friendship? She could be blind when her heart

was on fire for another. Her passion for her liberty, however, received

no ominous warning to look to the defences. He was the same blunt

speaker, and knotted his brows as queerly as ever at Arthur, in a

transparent calculation of how this fellow meant to gain his livelihood.

She wilfully put it to the credit of Arthur's tact that his elder was

amiable, without denying her debt to the good man for leaving her illness

and her appearance unmentioned. He forbore even to scan her features.

Diana's wan contemplativeness, in which the sparkle of meaning slowly

rose to flash, as we see a bubble rising from the deeps of crystal

waters, caught at his heart while he talked his matter-of-fact. But her

instinct of a present safety was true. She and Arthur discovered--and it

set her first meditating whether she did know the man so very

accurately--that he had printed, for private circulation, when at Harrow

School, a little book, a record of his observations in nature. Lady

Dunstane was the casual betrayer. He shrugged at the nonsense of a boy's

publishing; anybody's publishing he held for a doubtful proof of sanity.

His excuse was, that he had not published opinions. Let us observe, and

assist in our small sphere; not come mouthing to the footlights!

'We retire,' Diana said, for herself and Arthur.

'The wise thing, is to avoid the position that enforces publishing,' said

he, to the discomposure of his raw junior.

In the fields he was genially helpful; commending them to the study of

the South-west wind, if they wanted to forecast the weather and

understand the climate of our country. 'We have no Seasons, or only a

shuffle of them. Old calendars give seven months of the year to the

Southwest, and that's about the average. Count on it, you may generally

reckon what to expect. When you don't have the excess for a year or two,

you are drenched the year following.' He knew every bird by its flight

and its pipe, habits, tricks, hints of sagacity homely with the original

human; and his remarks on the sensitive life of trees and herbs were a

spell to his thirsty hearers. Something of astronomy he knew; but in

relation to that science, he sank his voice, touchingly to Diana, who

felt drawn to kinship with him when he had a pupil's tone. An allusion by

Arthur to the poetical work of Aratus, led to a memorably pleasant

evening's discourse upon the long reading of the stars by these our

mortal eyes. Altogether the mind of the practical man became

distinguishable to them as that of a plain brother of the poetic. Diana

said of him to Arthur: 'He does not supply me with similes; he points to

the source of them.' Arthur, with envy of the man of positive knowledge,

disguised an unstrung heart in agreeing.

Redworth alluded passingly to the condition of public affairs. Neither of

them replied. Diana was wondering how one who perused the eternal of

nature should lend a thought to the dusty temporary of the world.

Subsequently she reflected that she was asking him to confine his great

male appetite to the nibble of bread which nourished her immediate sense

of life. Her reflections were thin as mist, coming and going like the

mist, with no direction upon her brain, if they sprang from it. When he

had gone, welcome though Arthur had seen him to be, she rebounded to a

broader and cheerfuller liveliness. Arthur was flattered by an idea of

her casting off incubus--a most worthy gentleman, and a not perfectly

sympathetic associate. Her eyes had their lost light in them, her step

was brisker; she challenged him to former games of conversation,

excursions in blank verse here and there, as the mood dictated. They

amused themselves, and Emma too. She revelled in seeing Tony's younger

face and hearing some of her natural outbursts. That Dacier never could

have been the man for her, would have compressed and subjected her, and

inflicted a further taste of bondage in marriage, she was assured. She

hoped for the day when Tony would know it, and haply that another, whom

she little comprehended, was her rightful mate.

March continued South-westerly and grew rainier, as Redworth had

foretold, bidding them look for gales and storm, and then the change of

wind. It came, after wettings of a couple scorning the refuge of dainty

townsfolk under umbrellas, and proud of their likeness to dripping

wayside wildflowers. Arthur stayed at Copsley for a week of the crisp

North-easter; and what was it, when he had taken his leave, that brought

Tony home from her solitary walk in dejection? It could not be her

seriously regretting the absence of the youthful companion she had parted

with gaily, appointing a time for another meeting on the heights, and

recommending him to repair idle hours with strenuous work. The fit passed

and was not explained. The winds are sharp with memory. The hard shrill

wind crowed to her senses of an hour on the bleak sands of the French

coast; the beginning of the curtained misery, inscribed as her happiness.

She was next day prepared for her term in London with Emma, who promised

her to make an expedition at the end of it by way of holiday, to see The

Crossways, which Mr. Redworth said was not tenanted.

'You won't go through it like a captive?' said Emma.

'I don't like it, dear,' Diana put up a comic mouth. 'The debts we owe

ourselves are the hardest to pay. That is the discovery of advancing age:

and I used to imagine it was quite the other way. But they are the debts

of honour, imperative. I shall go through it grandly, you will see. If I

am stopped at my first recreancy and turned directly the contrary way, I

think I have courage.'

'You will not fear to meet . . . any one?' said Emma.

'The world and all it contains! I am robust, eager for the fray, an

Amazon, a brazen-faced hussy. Fear and I have parted. I shall not do you

discredit. Besides you intend to have me back here with you? And besides

again, I burn to make a last brave appearance. I have not outraged the

world, dear Emmy, whatever certain creatures in it may fancy.'

She had come out of her dejectedness with a shrewder view of Dacier;

equally painful, for it killed her romance, and changed the garden of

their companionship in imagination to a waste. Her clearing intellect

prompted it, whilst her nature protested, and reviled her to uplift him.

He had loved her. 'I shall die knowing that a man did love me once,' she

said to her widowed heart, and set herself blushing and blanching. But

the thought grew inveterate: 'He could not bear much.' And in her quick

brain it shot up a crop of similitudes for the quality of that man's

love. She shuddered, as at a swift cleaving of cold steel. He had not

given her a chance; he had not replied to her letter written with the pen

dipped in her heart's blood; he must have gone straight away to the woman

he married. This after almost justifying the scandalous world:--after

. . . She realized her sensations of that night when the house-door had

closed on him; her feeling of lost sovereignty, degradation, feminine

danger, friendliness: and she was unaware, and never knew, nor did the

world ever know, what cunning had inspired the frosty Cupid to return to

her and be warmed by striking a bargain for his weighty secret. She knew

too well that she was not of the snows which do not melt, however high

her conceit of herself might place her. Happily she now stood out of the

sun, in a bracing temperature, Polar; and her compassion for women was

deeply sisterly in tenderness and understanding. She spoke of it to Emma

as her gain.

'I have not seen that you required to suffer to be considerate,' Emma

said.

'It is on my conscience that I neglected Mary Paynham, among others--and

because you did not take to her, Emmy.'

'The reading of it appears to me, that she has neglected you.'

'She was not in my confidence, and so I construe it as delicacy. One

never loses by believing the best.'

'If one is not duped.'

'Expectations dupe us, not trust. The light of every soul burns upward.

Of course, most of them are candles in the wind. Let us allow for

atmospheric disturbance. Now I thank you, dear, for bringing me back to

life. I see that I was really a selfish suicide, because I feel I have

power to do some good, and belong to the army. When we are beginning to

reflect, as I do now, on a recovered basis of pure health, we have the

world at the dawn and know we are young in it, with great riches, great

things gained and greater to achieve. Personally I behold a queer little

wriggling worm for myself; but as one, of the active world I stand high

and shapely; and the very thought of doing work, is like a draught of the

desert-springs to me. Instead of which, I have once more to go about

presenting my face to vindicate my character. Mr. Redworth would admit no

irony in that! At all events, it is anti-climax.'

'I forgot to tell you, Tony, you have been proposed for,' said Emma; and

there was a rush of savage colour over Tony's cheeks.

Her apparent apprehensions were relieved by hearing the name of Mr.

Sullivan Smith.

'My poor dear countryman! And he thought me worthy, did he? Some day,

when we are past his repeating it, I'll thank him.'

The fact of her smiling happily at the narration of Sullivan Smith's

absurd proposal by mediatrix, proved to Emma how much her nature thirsted

for the smallest support in her self-esteem.

The second campaign of London was of bad augury at the commencement,

owing to the ridiculous intervention of a street-organ, that ground its

pipes in a sprawling roar of one of the Puritani marches, just as the

carriage was landing them at the door of her house. The notes were harsh,

dissonant, drunken, interlocked and horribly torn asunder, intolerable to

ears not keen to extract the tune through dreadful memories. Diana sat

startled and paralyzed. The melody crashed a revival of her days with

Dacier, as in gibes; and yet it reached to her heart. She imagined a

Providence that was trying her on the threshold, striking at her

feebleness. She had to lock herself in her room for an hour of deadly

abandonment to misery, resembling the run of poison through her blood,

before she could bear to lift eyes on her friend; to whom subsequently

she said: 'Emmy, there are wounds that cut sharp as the enchanter's

sword, and we don't know we are in halves till some rough old intimate

claps us on the back, merely to ask us how we are! I have to join myself

together again, as well as I can. It's done, dear; but don't notice the

cement.'

'You will be brave,' Emma petitioned.

'I long to show you I will.'

The meeting with those who could guess a portion of her story, did not

disconcert her. To Lady Pennon and Lady Singleby, she was the brilliant

Diana of her nominal luminary issuing from cloud. Face and tongue, she

was the same; and once in the stream, she soon gathered its current

topics and scattered her arrowy phrases. Lady Pennon ran about with them,

declaring that the beautiful speaker, if ever down, was up, and up to her

finest mark. Mrs. Fryar-Gannett had then become the blazing regnant

antisocial star; a distresser of domesticity, the magnetic attraction in

the spirituous flames of that wild snapdragon bowl, called the Upper

class; and she was angelically blonde, a straw-coloured Beauty. 'A lovely

wheat sheaf, if the head were ripe,' Diana said of her.

'Threshed, says her fame, my dear,' Lady Pennon replied, otherwise

allusive.

'A wheatsheaf of contention for the bread of wind,' said Diana, thinking

of foolish Sir Lukin; thoughtless of talking to a gossip.

She would have shot a lighter dart, had she meant it to fly and fix.

Proclaim, ye classics, what minor Goddess, or primal, Iris or Ate, sped

straight away on wing to the empty wheatsheaf-ears of the golden-visaged

Amabel Fryar-Gunnett, daughter of Demeter in the field to behold, of

Aphrodite in her rosy incendiarism for the many of men; filling that

pearly concave with a perversion of the uttered speech, such as never

lady could have repeated, nor man, if less than a reaping harvester:

which verily for women to hear, is to stamp a substantial damnatory

verification upon the delivery of the saying:--

'Mrs. Warwick says of you, that you're a bundle of straws for everybody

and bread for nobody.'

Or, stranger speculation, through what, and what number of conduits,

curious, and variously colouring, did it reach the fair Amabel of the

infant-in-cradle smile, in that deformation of the original utterance! To

pursue the thing, would be to enter the subter-sensual perfumed caverns

of a Romance of Fashionable Life, with no hope of coming back to light,

other than by tail of lynx, like the great Arabian seaman, at the last

page of the final chapter. A prospectively popular narrative indeed! and

coin to reward it, and applause. But I am reminded that a story properly

closed on the marriage of the heroine Constance and her young Minister of

State, has no time for conjuring chemists' bouquet of aristocracy to lure

the native taste. When we have satisfied English sentiment, our task is

done, in every branch of art, I hear: and it will account to posterity

for the condition of the branches. Those yet wakeful eccentrics

interested in such a person as Diana, to the extent of remaining

attentive till the curtain falls, demand of me to gather-up the threads

concerning her: which my gardener sweeping his pile of dead leaves before

the storm and night, advises me to do speedily. But it happens that her

resemblance to her sex and species of a civilized period plants the main

threads in her bosom. Rogues and a policeman, or a hurried change of

front of all the actors, are not a part of our slow machinery.

Nor is she to show herself to advantage. Only those who read her woman's

blood and character with the head, will care for Diana of the Crossways

now that the knot of her history has been unravelled. Some little love

they must have for her likewise: and how it can be quickened on behalf of

a woman who never sentimentalizes publicly, and has no dolly-dolly

compliance, and muses on actual life, and fatigues with the exercise of

brains, and is in sooth an alien: a princess of her kind and time, but a

foreign one, speaking a language distinct from the mercantile,

trafficking in ideas:--this is the problem. For to be true to her, one

cannot attempt at propitiation. She said worse things of the world than

that which was conveyed to the boxed ears of Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett.

Accepting the war declared against her a second time, she performed the

common mental trick in adversity of setting her personally known

innocence to lessen her generally unknown error--but anticipating that

this might become known, and the other not; and feeling that the motives

of the acknowledged error had served to guard her from being the culprit

of the charge she writhed under, she rushed out of a meditation

compounded of mind and nerves, with derision of the world's notion of

innocence and estimate of error. It was a mood lasting through her stay

in London, and longer, to the discomfort of one among her friends; and it

was worthy of The Anti-climax Expedition, as she called it.

For the rest, her demeanour to the old monster world exacting the

servility of her, in repayment for its tolerating countenance, was

faultless. Emma beheld the introduction to Mrs. Warwick of his bride, by

Mr. Percy Dacier. She had watched their approach up the Ball-room,

thinking, how differently would Redworth and Tony have looked.

Differently, had it been Tony and Dacier: but Emma could not persuade

herself of a possible harmony between them, save at the cost of Tony's

expiation of the sin of the greater heart in a performance equivalent to

Suttee. Perfectly an English gentleman of the higher order, he seemed the

effigy of a tombstone one, fixed upright, and civilly proud of his effigy

bride. So far, Emma considered them fitted. She perceived his quick eye

on her corner of the room; necessarily, for a man of his breeding,

without a change of expression. An emblem pertaining to her creed was on

the heroine's neck; also dependant at her waist. She was white from head

to foot; a symbol of purity. Her frail smile appeared deeply studied in

purity. Judging from her look and her reputation, Emma divined that the

man was justly mated with a devious filmy sentimentalist, likely to

'fiddle harmonics on the sensual strings' for him at a mad rate in the

years to come. Such fiddling is indeed the peculiar diversion of the

opulent of a fatly prosperous people; who take it, one may concede to

them, for an inspired elimination of the higher notes of life: the very

highest. That saying of Tony's ripened with full significance to Emma

now. Not sensualism, but sham spiritualism, was the meaning; and however

fine the notes, they come skilfully evoked of the under-brute in us.

Reasoning it so, she thought it a saying for the penetration of the most

polished and deceptive of the later human masks. She had besides, be it

owned, a triumph in conjuring a sentence of her friend's, like a sword's

edge, to meet them; for she was boiling angrily at the ironical destiny

which had given to those Two a beclouding of her beloved, whom she could

have rebuked in turn for her insane caprice of passion.

But when her beloved stood-up to greet Mrs. Percy Dacier, all idea save

tremulous admiration of the valiant woman, who had been wounded nigh to

death, passed from Emma's mind. Diana tempered her queenliness to address

the favoured lady with smiles and phrases of gentle warmth, of goodness

of nature; and it became a halo rather than a personal eclipse that she

cast.

Emma looked at Dacier. He wore the prescribed conventional air, subject

in half a minute to a rapid blinking of the eyelids. His wife could have

been inimically imagined fascinated and dwindling. A spot of colour came

to her cheeks. She likewise began to blink.

The happy couple bowed, proceeding; and Emma had Dacier's back for a

study. We score on that flat slate of man, unattractive as it is to

hostile observations, and unprotected, the device we choose. Her

harshest, was the positive thought that he had taken the woman best

suited to him. Doubtless, he was a man to prize the altar-candle above

the lamp of day. She fancied the back-view of him shrunken and

straitened: perhaps a mere hostile fancy: though it was conceivable that

he should desire as little of these meetings as possible. Eclipses are

not courted.

The specially womanly exultation of Emma Dunstane in her friend's noble

attitude, seeing how their sex had been struck to the dust for a trifling

error, easily to be overlooked by a manful lover, and had asserted its

dignity in physical and moral splendour, in self-mastery and benignness,

was unshared by Diana. As soon as the business of the expedition was

over, her orders were issued for the sale of the lease of her house and

all it contained. 'I would sell Danvers too,' she said, 'but the creature

declines to be treated as merchandize. It seems I have a faithful

servant; very much like my life, not quite to my taste; the one thing out

of the wreck!--with my dog!'

Before quitting her house for the return to Copsley, she had to grant Mr.

Alexander Hepburn, post-haste from his Caledonia, a private interview.

She came out of it noticeably shattered. Nothing was related to Emma,

beyond the remark: 'I never knew till this morning the force of No in

earnest.' The weighty little word--woman's native watchdog and guardian,

if she calls it to her aid in earnest--had encountered and withstood a

fiery ancient host, astonished at its novel power of resistance.

Emma contented herself with the result. 'Were you much supplicated?'

'An Operatic Fourth-Act,' said Diana, by no means; feeling so flippantly

as she spoke.

She received, while under the impression of this man's, honest, if

primitive, ardour of courtship, or effort to capture, a characteristic

letter from Westlake, choicely phrased, containing presumeably an

application for her hand, in the generous offer of his own. Her reply to

a pursuer of that sort was easy. Comedy, after the barbaric attack,

refreshed her wits and reliance on her natural fencing weapons. To

Westlake, the unwritten No was conveyed in a series of kindly ironic

subterfuges, that, played it like an impish flea across the pages, just

giving the bloom of the word; and rich smiles come to Emma's life in

reading the dexterous composition: which, however, proved so thoroughly

to Westlake's taste, that a second and a third exercise in the comedy of

the negative had to be despatched to him from Copsley.