CHAPTER XLII

THE PENULTIMATE: SHOWING A FINAL STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY AND RUN INTO

HARNESS

The prophet of the storm had forgotten his prediction; which, however,

was of small concern to him, apart from the ducking he received midway

between the valley and the heights of Copsley; whither he was bound, on a

mission so serious that, according to his custom in such instances, he

chose to take counsel of his active legs: an adviseable course when the

brain wants clearing and the heart fortifying. Diana's face was clearly

before him through the deluge; now in ogle features, the dimple running

from her mouth, the dark bright eyes and cut of eyelids, and nostrils

alive under their lightning; now inkier whole radiant smile, or musefully

listening, nursing a thought. Or she was obscured, and he felt the face.

The individuality of it had him by the heart, beyond his powers of

visioning. On his arrival, he stood in the hall, adrip like one of the

trees of the lawn, laughing at Lady Dunstane's anxious exclamations. His

portmanteau had come and he was expected; she hurried out at the first

ringing of the bell, to greet and reproach him for walking in such

weather.

'Diana has left me,' she said, when he reappeared in dry clothing. 'We

are neighbours; she has taken cottage-lodgings at Selshall, about an

hour's walk:--one of her wild dreams of independence. Are you

disappointed?'

'I am,' Redworth confessed.

Emma coloured. 'She requires an immense deal of humouring at present. The

fit will wear off; only we must wait for it. Any menace to her precious

liberty makes her prickly. She is passing the day with the Pettigrews,

who have taken a place near her village for a month. She promised to dine

and sleep here, if she returned in time. What is your news?'

'Nothing; the world wags on.'

'You have nothing special to tell her?'

'Nothing'; he hummed; 'nothing, I fancy, that she does not know.'

'You said you were disappointed.'

'It's always a pleasure to see her.'

'Even in her worst moods, I find it so.'

'Oh! moods!' quoth Redworth.

'My friend, they are to be reckoned, with women.'

'Certainly; what I meant was, that I don't count them against women.'

'Good: but my meaning was . . . I think I remember your once comparing

them and the weather; and you spoke of the "one point more variable in

women." You may forestall your storms. There is no calculating the effect

of a few little words at a wrong season.'

'With women! I suppose not. I have no pretension to a knowledge of the

sex.'

Emma imagined she had spoken plainly enough, if he had immediate designs;

and she was not sure of that, and wished rather to shun his confidences

while Tony was in her young widowhood, revelling in her joy of liberty.

By and by, was her thought: perhaps next year. She dreaded Tony's refusal

of the yoke, and her iron-hardness to the dearest of men proposing it;

and moreover, her further to be apprehended holding to the refusal, for

the sake of consistency, if it was once uttered. For her own sake, she

shrank from hearing intentions, that distressing the good man, she would

have to discountenance. His candour in confessing disappointment, and his

open face, his excellent sense too, gave her some assurance of his not

being foolishly impetuous. After he had read to her for an hour, as his

habit was on evenings and wet days, their discussion of this and that in

the book lulled any doubts she had of his prudence, enough to render it

even a dubious point whether she might be speculating upon a wealthy

bachelor in the old-fashioned ultra-feminine manner; the which she so

abhorred that she rejected the idea. Consequently, Redworth's proposal to

walk down to the valley for Diana, and bring her back, struck her as

natural when a shaft of western sunshine from a whitened edge of

raincloud struck her windows. She let him go without an intimated

monition or a thought of one; thinking simply that her Tony would be more

likely to come, having him for escort. Those are silly women who are

always imagining designs and intrigues and future palpitations in the

commonest actions of either sex. Emma Dunstane leaned to the contrast

between herself and them.

Danvers was at the house about sunset, reporting her mistress to be on

her way, with Mr. Redworth. The maid's tale of the dreadful state of the

lanes, accounted for their tardiness; and besides the sunset had been

magnificent. Diana knocked at Emma's bedroom door, to say, outside,

hurriedly in passing, how splendid the sunset had been, and beg for an

extra five minutes. Taking full fifteen, she swam into the drawing-room,

lively with kisses on Emma's cheeks, and excuses, referring her

misconduct in being late to the seductions of 'Sol' in his glory.

Redworth said he had rarely seen so wonderful a sunset. The result of

their unanimity stirred Emma's bosom to match-making regrets; and the

walk of the pair together, alone under the propitious laming heavens,

appeared to her now as an opportunity lost. From sisterly sympathy, she

fancied she could understand Tony's liberty-loving reluctance: she had no

comprehension of the backwardness of the man beholding the dear woman

handsomer than in her maiden or her married time: and sprightlier as

well. She chatted deliciously, and drew Redworth to talk his best on his

choicer subjects, playing over them like a fide-wisp, determined at once

to flounder him and to make him shine. Her tender esteem for the man was

transparent through it all; and Emma, whose evening had gone happily

between them, said to her, in their privacy, before parting: 'You seemed

to have been inspired by "Sol," my dear. You do like him, don't you?'

Diana vowed she adored him; and with a face of laughter in rosy

suffusion, put Sol for Redworth, Redworth for Sol; but, watchful of

Emma's visage, said finally: 'If you mean the mortal man, I think him up

to almost all your hyperboles--as far as men go; and he departed to his

night's rest, which I hope will be good, like a king. Not to admire him,

would argue me senseless, heartless. I do; I have reason to.'

'And you make him the butt of your ridicule, Tony.'

'No; I said "like a king"; and he is one. He has, to me, morally the

grandeur of your Sol sinking, Caesar stabbed, Cato on the sword-point. He

is Roman, Spartan, Imperial; English, if you like, the pick, of the land.

It is an honour to call him friend, and I do trust he will choose the

pick among us, to make her a happy woman--if she's for running in

harness. There, I can't say more.'

Emma had to be satisfied with it, for the present.

They were astonished at breakfast by seeing Sir Lukin ride past the

windows. He entered with the veritable appetite of a cavalier who had

ridden from London fasting; and why he had come at that early hour, he

was too hungry to explain. The ladies retired to read their letters by

the morning's post; whereupon Sir Lukin called to Redworth; 'I met that

woman in the park yesterday, and had to stand a volley. I went beating

about London for you all the afternoon and evening. She swears you rated

her like a scullery wench, and threatened to ruin Wroxeter. Did you see

him? She says, the story's true in one particular, that he did snatch a

kiss, and got mauled. Not so much to pay for it! But what a ruffian--eh?'

'I saw him,' said Redworth. 'He 's one of the new set of noblemen who

take bribes to serve as baits for transactions in the City. They help to

the ruin of their order, or are signs of its decay. We won't judge it by

him. He favoured me with his "word of honour" that the thing you heard

was entirely a misstatement, and so forth:--apologized, I suppose. He

mumbled something.'

'A thorough cur!'

'He professed his readiness to fight, if either of us was not contented.'

'He spoke to the wrong man. I've half a mind to ride back and have him

out for that rascal "osculation" and the lady unwilling!--and she a young

one, a girl, under the protection of the house! By Jove! Redworth, when

you come to consider the scoundrels men can be, it stirs a fellow's bile.

There's a deal of that sort of villany going--and succeeding sometimes!

He deserves the whip or a bullet.'

'A sermon from Lukin Dunstane might punish him.'

'Oh! I'm a sinner, I know. But, go and tell one woman of another woman,

and that a lie! That's beyond me.'

'The gradations of the deeps are perhaps measurable to those who are in

them.'

'The sermon's at me--pop!' said Sir Lukin. 'By the way, I'm coming round

to think Diana Warwick was right when she used to jibe at me for throwing

up my commission. Idleness is the devil--or mother of him. I manage my

estates; but the truth is, it doesn't occupy my mind.'

'Your time.'

'My mind, I say.'

'Whichever you please.'

'You're crusty to-day, Redworth. Let me tell you, I think--and hard too,

when the fit's on me. However, you did right in stopping--I'll own--a

piece of folly, and shutting the mouths of those two; though it caused me

to come in for a regular drencher. But a pretty woman in a right-down

termagant passion is good theatre; because it can't last, at that pace;

and you're sure of your agreeable tableau. Not that I trust her ten

minutes out of sight--or any woman, except one or two; my wife and Diana

Warwick. Trust those you've tried, old boy. Diana Warwick ought to be

taught to thank you; though I don't know how it's to be done.'

'The fact of it is,' Redworth frowned and rose, 'I've done mischief. I

had no right to mix myself in it. I'm seldom caught off my feet by an

impulse; but I was. I took the fever from you.'

He squared his figure at the window, and looked up on a driving sky.

'Come, let's play open cards, Tom Redworth,' said Sir Lukin, leaving the

table and joining his friend by the window. 'You moral men are doomed to

be marrying men, always; and quite right. Not that one doesn't hear a

roundabout thing or two about you: no harm. Very much the contrary:--as

the world goes. But you're the man to marry a wife; and if I guess the

lady, she's a sensible girl and won't be jealous. I 'd swear she only

waits for asking.'

'Then you don't guess the lady,' said Redworth.

'Mary Paynham?'

The desperate half-laugh greeting the name convinced more than a dozen

denials.

Sir Lukin kept edging round for a full view of the friend who shunned

inspection. 'But is it? . . . can it be? it must be, after all! . . .

why, of course it is! But the thing staring us in the face is just what

we never see. Just the husband for her!--and she's the wife! Why, Diana

Warwick 's the very woman, of course! I remember I used to think so

before she was free to wed.'

'She is not of that opinion.' Redworth blew a heavy breath; and it should

be chronicled as a sigh; but it was hugely masculine.

'Because you didn't attack, the moment she was free; that 's what upset

my calculations,' the sagacious gentleman continued, for a vindication of

his acuteness: then seizing the reply: 'Refuses? you don't mean to say

you're the man to take a refusal? and from a green widow in the blush?

Did you see her cheeks when she was peeping at the letter in her hand?

She colours at half a word--takes the lift of a finger for Hymen coming.

And lots of fellows are after her; I know it from Emmy. But you're not

the man to be refused. You're her friend--her champion. That woman

Fryar-Gunnett would have it you were the favoured lover, and sneered at

my talk of old friendship. Women are always down dead on the facts; can't

put them off a scent!'

'There's the mischief!' Redworth blew again. 'I had no right to be

championing Mrs. Warwick's name. Or the world won't give it, at all

events. I'm a blundering donkey. Yes, she wishes to keep her liberty.

And, upon my soul, I'm in love with everything she wishes! I've got the

habit.'

'Habit be hanged!' cried Sir Lukin. 'You're in love with the woman. I

know a little more of you now, Mr. Tom. You're a fellow in earnest about

what you do. You're feeling it now, on the rack, by heaven! though you

keep a bold face. Did she speak positively?--sort of feminine of "you're

the monster, not the man"? or measured little doctor's dose of

pity?--worse sign.' You 're not going?'

'If you'll drive me down in half an hour,' said Redworth.

'Give me an hour,' Sir Lukin replied, and went straight to his wife's

blue-room.

Diana was roused from a meditation on a letter she held, by the entrance

of Emma in her bed-chamber, to whom she said: 'I have here the very

craziest bit of writing!--but what is disturbing you, dear?'

Emma sat beside her, panting and composing her lips to speak. 'Do you,

love me? I throw policy to the winds, if only, I can batter at you for

your heart and find it! Tony, do you love me? But don't answer: give me

your hand. You have rejected him!'

'He has told you?'

'No. He is not the man to cry out for a wound. He heard in London--Lukin

has had the courage to tell me, after his fashion:--Tom Redworth heard an

old story, coming from one of the baser kind of women: grossly false, he

knew. I mention only Lord Wroxeter and Lockton. He went to man and woman

both, and had it refuted, and stopped their tongues, on peril; as he of

all men is able to do when he wills it.'

Observing the quick change in Tony's eyes, Emma exclaimed: 'How you

looked disdain when you asked whether he had told me! But why are you the

handsome tigress to him, of all men living! The dear fellow, dear to me

at least! since the day he first saw you, has worshipped you and striven

to serve you:--and harder than any Scriptural service to have the beloved

woman to wife. I know nothing to compare with it, for he is a man of

warmth. He is one of those rare men of honour who can command their

passion; who venerate when they love: and those are the men that women

select for punishment! Yes, you! It is to the woman he loves that he

cannot show himself as he is, because he is at her feet. You have managed

to stamp your spirit on him; and as a consequence, he defends you now,

for flinging him off. And now his chief regret is, that he has caused his

name to be coupled with yours. I suppose he had some poor hope, seeing

you free. Or else the impulse to protect the woman of his heart and soul

was too strong. I have seen what he suffered, years back, at the news of

your engagement.'

'Oh, for God's sake, don't,' cried Tony, tears running over, and her

dream of freedom, her visions of romance, drowning.

'It was like the snapping of the branch of an oak, when the trunk stands

firm,' Emma resumed, in her desire to scourge as well as to soften. 'But

similes applied to him will strike you as incongruous.' Tony swayed her

body, for a negative, very girlishly and consciously. 'He probably did

not woo you in a poetic style, or the courtly by prescription.' Again

Tony swayed; she had to hug herself under the stripes, and felt as if

alone at sea, with her dear heavens pelting. 'You have sneered at him for

his calculating--to his face: and it was when he was comparatively poor

that he calculated--to his cost! that he dared not ask you to marry a man

who could not offer you a tithe of what he considered fit for the

peerless woman. Peerless, I admit. There he was not wrong. But if he had

valued you half a grain less, he might have won you. You talk much of

chivalry; you conceive a superhuman ideal, to which you fit a very

indifferent wooden model, while the man of all the world the most

chivalrous! . . . He is a man quite other from what you think him:

anything but a "Cuthbert Dering" or a "Man of Two Minds." He was in the

drawing-room below, on the day I received your last maiden letter from

The Crossways--now his property, in the hope of making it yours.'

'I behaved abominably there!' interposed Tony, with a gasp.

'Let it pass. At any rate, that was the prick of a needle, not the blow

of a sword.'

'But marriage, dear Emmy! marriage! Is marriage to be the end of me?'

'What amazing apotheosis have you in prospect? And are you steering so

particularly well by yourself?'

'Miserably! But I can dream. And the thought of a husband cuts me from

any dreaming. It's all dead flat earth at once!'

'Would, you lave rejected him when you were a girl?'

'I think so.'

'The superior merits of another . . .?'

'Oh, no, no, no, no! I might have accepted him: and I might not have made

him happy. I wanted a hero, and the jewelled garb and the feather did not

suit him.'

'No; he is not that description of lay-figure. You have dressed it, and

gemmed it, and--made your discovery. Here is a true man; and if you can

find me any of your heroes to match him, I will thank you. He came on the

day I speak of, to consult me as to whether, with the income he then had

. . . Well, I had to tell him you were engaged. The man has never wavered

in his love of you since that day. He has had to bear something.'

This was an electrical bolt into Tony's bosom, shaking her from self-pity

and shame to remorseful pity of the suffering lover; and the tears ran in

streams, as she said:

'He bore it, Emmy, he bore it.' She sobbed out: 'And he went on building

a fortune and batting! Whatever he undertakes he does perfectly-approve

of the pattern or not. Oh! I have no doubt he had his nest of wish piping

to him all the while: only it seems quaint, dear, quaint, and against

everything we've been reading of lovers! Love was his bread and butter!'

Her dark eyes showered. 'And to tell you what you do not know of him, his

way of making love is really,' she sobbed, 'pretty. It . . . it took me

by surprise; I was expecting a bellow and an assault of horns; and if,

dear:--you will say, what boarding-school girl have you got with you! and

I feel myself getting childish:--if Sol in his glory had not been so m

. . . majestically m . . . magnificent, nor seemed to show me the king

. . . kingdom of my dreams, I might have stammered the opposite word to the

one he heard. Last night, when he took my hand kindly before going to bed

I had a fit for dropping on my knees to him. I saw him bleed, and he held

himself right royally. I told you he did;--Sol in his moral grandeur! How

infinitely above the physical monarch--is he not, Emmy? What one

dislikes, is the devotion of all that grandeur to win a widow. It should

be a maiden princess. You feel it so, I am sure. And here am I, as if a

maiden princess were I, demanding romantic accessories of rubious vapour

in the man condescending to implore the widow to wed him. But, tell me,

does he know everything of his widow--everything? I shall not have to go

through the frightful chapter?'

'He is a man with his eyes awake; he knows as much as any husband could

require to know,' said Emma; adding: 'My darling! he trusts you. It is

the soul of the man that loves you, as it is mine. You will not tease

him? Promise me. Give yourself frankly. You see it clearly before you.'

'I see compulsion, my dear. What I see, is a regiment of Proverbs,

bearing placards instead of guns, and each one a taunt at women,

especially at widows. They march; they form square; they enclose me in

the middle, and I have their inscriptions to digest. Read that crazy

letter from Mary Paynham while I am putting on my bonnet. I perceive I

have been crying like a raw creature in her teens. I don't know myself.

An advantage of the darker complexions is our speedier concealment of the

traces.'

Emma read Miss Paynham's letter, and returned it with the comment:

'Utterly crazy.' Tony said: 'Is it not? I am to "Pause before I trifle

with a noble heart too long." She is to "have her happiness in the

constant prayer for ours"; and she is "warned by one of those intimations

never failing her, that he runs a serious danger." It reads like a

Wizard's Almanack. And here "Homogeneity of sentiment the most perfect,

is unable to contend with the fatal charm, which exercised by an

indifferent person, must be ascribed to original predestination." She

should be under the wing of Lady Wathin. There is the mother for such

chicks! But I'll own to you, Emmy, that after the perusal, I did ask

myself a question as to my likeness of late to the writer. I have

drivelled . . . I was shuddering over it when you came in. I have

sentimentalized up to thin smoke. And she tells a truth when she says I

am not to "count social cleverness"--she means volubility--"as a warrant

for domineering a capacious intelligence": because of the gentleman's

modesty. Agreed: I have done it; I am contrite. I am going into slavery

to make amends for presumption. Banality, thy name is marriage!'

'Your business is to accept life as we have it,' said Emma; and Tony

shrugged. She was precipitate in going forth to her commonplace fate, and

scarcely looked at the man requested by Emma to escort her to her

cottage. After their departure, Emma fell into laughter at the last words

with the kiss of her cheeks: 'Here goes old Ireland!' But, from her look

and from what she had said upstairs, Emma could believe that the singular

sprite of girlishness invading and governing her latterly, had yielded

place to the woman she loved.