CHAPTER XI

THE PRISONER OF HIS WORD

Nothing to rouse alarm was discovered at Carlsruhe. Livia's fair cousin

was there with the red-haired gaunt girl of the mountains; and it was

frankly stated by Henrietta, that she had accompanied the girl a certain

distance along the Strasburg road, for her to see the last of her brother

Chillon on his way to England. Livia was not the woman to push inquiries.

On that subject, she merely said, as soon as they were alone together:

'You seem to have had the lion's share of the parting.'

'Yes, we passed Mr. Chumley Potts,' was Henrietta's immediate answer; and

her reference to him disarmed Livia.

They smiled at his name transiently, but in agreement: the tattler-spout

of their set was, a fatal person to encounter, and each deemed the sudden

apparition of him in the very early morning along the Carlsruhe road

rather magical.

'You place particular confidence in Russett's fidelity to his word,

Riette--as you have been hearing yourself called. You should be serious

by this time. Russett won't bear much more. I counted on the night of the

Ball for the grand effect. You will extinguish every woman there--and if

he is absent?'

'I shall excuse him.'

'You are not in a position to be so charitable. You ought to know your

position, and yourself too, a little better than you do. How could you

endure poverty? Chillon Kirby stands in his uniform, and all's told. He

can manoeuvre, we know. He got the admiral away to take him to those

reviews cleverly. But is he thinking of your interests when he does it?

He requires twenty years of active service to give you a roof to your

head. I hate such allusions. But look for a moment at your character: you

must have ordinary luxuries and pleasures, and if you were to find

yourself grinding against common necessities--imagine it! Russett is

quite manageable. He is, trust me! He is a gentleman; he has more ability

than most young men: he can do anything he sets his mind to do. He has

his great estates and fortune all in his own hands. We call him

eccentric. He is only young, with a lot of power. Add, he's in love, and

some one distracts him. Not love, do you say?--you look it. He worships.

He has no chance given him to show himself at his best. Perhaps he is off

again now. Will you bet me he is not?'

'I should incline to make the bet, if I betted,' said Henrietta. 'His

pride is in his word, and supposing he's in love, it's with his pride,

which never quits him.'

'There's firmness in a man who has pride of that kind. You must let me

take you back to Baden. I hold to having you with me to-day. You must

make an appearance there. The admiral will bring us his Miss Kirby

to-morrow, if he is bound to remain here to-night. There's no harm in his

bachelor dinners. I suspect his twinges of gout come of the prospect of

affairs when he lands in England. Remember our bill with Madame Clemence.

There won't be the ghost of a bank-note for me if Russett quits the

field; we shall all be stranded.'

Henrietta inquired: 'Does it depend on my going with you to-day?'

'Consider, that he is now fancying a thousand things. We won't talk of

the road to Paris.'

A shot of colour swept over Henrietta.

'I will speak to papa:--if he can let me go. He has taken to Miss Kirby.'

'Does she taste well?'

Henrietta debated. 'It's impossible to dislike her. Oh! she is wild! She

knows absolutely nothing of the world. She can do everything we can't--or

don't dare to try.--Men would like her. Papa's beginning to doat. He says

she would have made a first-rate soldier. She fears blood as little as

her morning cup of milk. One of the orderlies fell rather badly from a

frightened horse close by our carriage. She was out in a moment and had

his head on her lap, calling to papa to keep the carriage fast and block

the way of the squadron, for the man's leg was hurt. I really thought we

were lost. At these manoeuvres anything may happen, at any instant. Papa

will follow the horse-artillery. You know his vanity to be a military

quite as much as a naval commander like the Greeks and Romans, he says.

We took the bruised man into our carriage and drove him to camp,

Carinthia nursing him on the way.'

'Carinthia! She's well fitted with her name. What with her name and her

hair and her build and her singular style of attire, one wonders at her

coming into civilized parts. She 's utterly unlike Chillon.'

Henrietta reddened at the mention of one of her own thoughts in the

contrasting of the pair.

They had their points of likeness, she said.

It did not concern Livia to hear what these were. Back to Baden, with

means to procure the pleasant shocks of the galvanic battery there, was

her thought; for she had a fear of the earl's having again departed in a

huff at Henrietta's behaviour.

The admiral consented that his daughter should go, as soon as he heard

that Miss Kirby was to stay. He had when a young man met her famous

father; he vowed she was the Old Buccaneer young again in petticoats and

had made prize of an English man-of-war by storm; all the profit,

however, being his. This he proved with a courteous clasp of the girl and

a show of the salute on her cheek, which he presumed to take at the

night's farewell. 'She's my tonic,' he proclaimed heartily. She seemed to

Livia somewhat unstrung and toneless. The separation from her brother in

the morning might account for it. And a man of the admiral's age could be

excused if he exalted the girl. Senility, like infancy, is fond of plain

outlines for the laying on of its paints. The girl had rugged brows, a

short nose, red hair; no young man would look at her twice. She was

utterly unlike Chillon! Kissing her hand to Henrietta from the steps of

the hotel, the girl's face improved.

Livia's little squire, Sir Meeson Corby, ejaculated as they were driving

down the main street, 'Fleetwood's tramp! There he goes. Now see, Miss

Fakenham, the kind of object Lord Fleetwood picks up and calls

friend!--calls that object friend! . . But, what? He has been to a tailor

and a barber!'

'Stop the coachman. Run, tell Mr. Woodseer I wish him to join us,' Livia

said, and Sir Meeson had to thank his tramp for a second indignity. He

protested, he simulated remonstrance,--he had to go, really feeling a

sickness.

The singular-looking person, whose necessities or sense of the decencies

had, unknown to himself and to the others, put them all in motion that

day, swung round listening to the challenge to arms, as the puffy little

man's delivery of the countess's message sounded. He was respectably

clad, he thought, in the relief of his escape from the suit of clothes

discarded, and he silently followed Sir Meeson's trot to the carriage.

'Should have mistaken you for a German to-day, sir,' the latter said, and

trotted on.

'A stout one,' Woodseer replied, with his happy indifference to his

exterior.

His dark lady's eyes were kindly overlooking, like the heavens. Her fair

cousin, to whom he bowed, awakened him to a perception of the spectacle

causing the slight, quick arrest of her look, in an astonishment not

unlike the hiccup in speech, while her act of courtesy proceeded. At once

he was conscious of the price he paid for respectability, and saw the

Teuton skin on the slim Cambrian, baggy at shoulders, baggy at seat,

pinched at the knees, short at the heels, showing outrageously every spot

where he ought to have been bigger or smaller. How accept or how reject

the invitation to drive in such company to Baden!

'You're decided enough, sir, in your play, they tell me,' the vindictive

little baronet commented on his hesitation, and Woodseer sprang to the

proffered vacant place. But he had to speak of his fly waiting for him at

the steps of a certain hotel.

'Best hotel in the town!' Sir Beeson exclaimed pointedly to Henrietta,

reading her constraint with this comical object before her. It was the

admiral's hotel they stopped at.

'Be so good as to step down and tell the admiral he is to bring Madame

Clemence in his carriage to-morrow; and on your way, you will dismiss Mr.

Woodseer's fly,' Livia mildly addressed her squire. He stared: again he

had to go, muttering: 'That nondescript's footman!' and his mischance in

being checked and crossed and humiliated perpetually by a dirty-fisted

vagabond impostor astounded him. He sent the flyman to the carriage for

orders.

Admiral Fakenham and Carinthia descended. Sir Meeson heard her cry out:

'Is it you!' and up stood the pretentious lout in the German sack,

affecting the graces of a born gentleman fresh from Paris,--bowing,

smirking, excusing himself for something; and he jumped down to the young

lady, he talked intimately with her, with a joker's air; he roused the

admiral to an exchange of jokes, and the countess and Miss Fakenham more

than smiled; evidently at his remarks, unobservant of the preposterous

figure he cut. Sir Meeson Corby had intimations of the disintegration of

his country if a patent tramp burlesquing in those clothes could be

permitted to amuse English ladies of high station, quite at home with

them. Among the signs of England's downfall, this was decidedly one. What

to think of the admiral's favourite when, having his arm paternally on

her shoulder, she gave the tramp her hand at parting, and then blushed!

All that the ladies had to say about it was, that a spread of colour

rather went to change the character of her face.

Carinthia had given Woodseer her hand and reddened under the recollection

of Chillon's words to her as they mounted the rise of the narrow vale,

after leaving the lame gentleman to his tobacco on the grass below the

rocks. Her brother might have counselled her wisely and was to be obeyed.

Only, the great pleasure in seeing the gentleman again inspired

gratitude: he brought the scene to her; and it was alive, it chatted and

it beckoned; it neighboured her home; she had passed it on her walk away

from her home; the gentleman was her link to the mountain paths; he was

just outside an association with her father and mother. At least, her

thinking of them led to him, he to them. Now that she had lost Chillon,

no one was near to do so much. Besides, Chillon loved Henrietta; he was

her own. His heart was hers and his mind his country's. This gentleman

loved the mountains; the sight of him breathed mountain air. To see him

next day was her anticipation: for it would be at the skirts of hilly

forest land, where pinetrees are a noble family, different from the dusty

firs of the weariful plains, which had tired her eyes of late.

Baden was her first peep at the edges of the world since she had grown to

be a young woman. She had but a faint idea of the significance of

gambling. The brilliant lights, the band music, the sitting groups and

company of promenaders were novelties; the Ball of the ensuing night at

the Schloss would be a wonder, she acknowledged in response to Henrietta,

who was trying to understand her; and she admired her ball-dress, she

said, looking unintelligently when she heard that she would be guilty of

slaying numbers of gentlemen before the night was over. Madame Clemence

thought her chances in that respect as good as any other young lady's, if

only she could be got to feel interested. But at a word of the pine

forest, and saying she intended to climb the hills early with the light

in the morning, a pointed eagerness flushed Carinthia, the cold engraving

became a picture of colour.

She was out with the earliest light. Yesterday's parting between Chillon

and Henrietta had taught her to know some little about love; and if her

voice had been heeded by Chillon's beloved, it would not have been a

parting. Her only success was to bring a flood of tears from Henrietta.

The tears at least assured her that her brother's beautiful girl had no

love for the other one,--the young nobleman of the great wealth, who was

to be at the Ball, and had 'gone flying,' Admiral Fakenham shrugged to

say; for Lord Fleetwood was nowhere seen.

The much talk of him on the promenade overnight fetched his name to her

thoughts; he scarcely touched a mind that her father filled when she was

once again breathing early morning air among the stems of climbing pines,

broken alleys of the low-sweeping spruce branches and the bare straight

shafts carrying their heads high in the march upward. Her old father was

arch-priest of such forest land, always recoverable to her there. The

suggestion of mountains was enough to make her mind play, and her old

father and she were aware of one another without conversing in speech. He

pointed at things to observe; he shared her satisfied hunger for the

solitudes of the dumb and growing and wild sweet-smelling. He would not

let a sorrowful thought backward or an apprehensive idea forward disturb

the scene. A half-uprooted pine-tree stem propped mid-fall by standing

comrades, and the downy drop to ground and muted scurry up the bark of

long-brush squirrels, cocktail on the wary watch, were noticed by him as

well as by her; even the rotting timber drift, bark and cones on the

yellow pine needles, and the tortuous dwarf chestnut pushing level out,

with a strain of the head up, from a crevice of mossed rock, among ivy

and ferns; he saw what his girl saw. Power of heart was her conjuring

magician.

She climbed to the rock-slabs above. This was too easily done. The poor

bit of effort excited her frame to desire a spice of danger, her walk was

towering in the physical contempt of a mountain girl for petty lowland

obstructions. And it was just then, by the chance of things--by the

direction of events, as Dame Gossip believes it to be--while colour,

expression, and her proud stature marked her from her sex, that a

gentleman, who was no other than Lord Fleetwood, passed Carinthia, coming

out of the deeper pine forest.

Some distance on, round a bend of the path, she was tempted to adventure

by a projected forked head of a sturdy blunted and twisted little

rock-fostered forest tree pushing horizontally for growth about thirty

feet above the lower ground. She looked on it, and took a step down to

the stem soon after.

Fleetwood had turned and followed, merely for the final curious peep at

an unexpected vision; he had noticed the singular shoot of thick timber

from the rock, and the form of the goose-neck it rose to, the sprout of

branches off the bill in the shape of a crest. And now a shameful spasm

of terror seized him at sight of a girl doing what he would have dreaded

to attempt. She footed coolly, well-balanced, upright. She seated

herself.

And there let her be. She was a German girl, apparently. She had an air

of breeding, something more than breeding. German families of the nobles

give out, here and there, as the Great War showed examples of, intrepid

young women, who have the sharp lines of character to render them

independent of the graces. But, if a young woman out alone in the woods

was hardly to be counted among the well-born, she held rank above them.

Her face and bearing might really be taken to symbolize the forest life.

She was as individual a representative as the Tragic and Comic masks, and

should be got to stand between them for sign of the naturally

straight-growing untrained, a noble daughter of the woods.

Not comparable to Henrietta in feminine beauty, she was on an upper

plateau, where questions as to beauty are answered by other than the

shallow aspect of a girl. But would Henrietta eclipse her if they were

side by side? Fleetwood recalled the strange girl's face. There was in it

a savage poignancy in serenity unexampled among women--or modern women.

One might imagine an apotheosis of a militant young princess of Goths or

Vandals, the glow of blessedness awakening her martial ardours through

the languor of the grave:--Woodseer would comprehend and hit on the exact

image to portray her in a moment, Fleetwood thought, and longed for that

fellow.

He walked hurriedly back to the stunted rock tree. The damsel had

vanished. He glanced below. She had not fallen. He longed to tell

Woodseer he had seen a sort of Carinthia sister, cousin, one of the

family. A single glimpse of her had raised him out of his grovelling

perturbations, cooled and strengthened him, more than diverting the

course of the poison Henrietta infused, and to which it disgraced him to

be so subject. He took love unmanfully; the passion struck at his

weakness; in wrath at the humiliation, if only to revenge himself for

that, he could be fiendish; he knew it, and loathed the desired fair

creature who caused and exposed to him these cracks in his nature, whence

there came a brimstone stench of the infernal pits. And he was made for

better. Of this he was right well assured. Superior to station and to

wealth, to all mundane advantages, he was the puppet of a florid puppet

girl; and he had slept at the small inn of a village hard by, because it

was intolerable to him to see the face that had been tearful over her

lover's departure, and hear her praises of the man she trusted to keep

his word, however grievously she wounded him.

He was the prisoner of his word;--rather like the donkeys known as

married men: rather more honourable than most of them. He had to be

present at the ball at the Schloss and behold his loathed Henrietta,

suffer torture of chains to the rack, by reason of his having promised

the bitter coquette he would be there. So hellish did the misery seem to

him, that he was relieved by the prospect of lying a whole day long in

loneliness with the sunshine of the woods, occasionally conjuring up the

antidote face of the wood-sprite before he was to undergo it. But, as he

was not by nature a dreamer, only dreamed of the luxury of being one, he

soon looked back with loathing on a notion of relief to come from the

state of ruminating animal, and jumped up and shook off another of men's

delusions--that they can, if they have the heart to suffer pain, deaden

it with any semi-poetical devices, similar to those which Rufus Abrane's

'fiddler fellow' practised and was able to carry out because he had no

blood. The spite of a present entire opposition to Woodseer's professed

views made him exult in the thought, that the mouther of sentences was

likely to be at work stultifying them and himself in the halls there

below during the day. An imp of mischief offered consolatory sport in

those halls of the Black Goddess; already he regarded his recent

subservience to the conceited and tripped peripatetic philosopher as

among the ignominies he had cast away on his road to a general contempt;

which is the position of a supreme elevation for particularly sensitive

young men.

Pleasure in the scenery had gone, and the wood-sprite was a flitted

vapour; he longed to be below there, observing Abrane and Potts and the

philosopher confounded, and the legible placidity of Countess Livia.

Nevertheless, he hung aloft, feeding where he could, impatient of the

solitudes, till night, when, according to his guess, the ladies were at

their robing.

Half the fun was over: but the tale of it, narrated in turn by Abrane and

his Chummy Potts on the promenade, was a very good half. The fiddler had

played for the countess and handed her back her empty purse, with a bow

and a pretty speech. Nothing had been seen of him since. He had lost all

his own money besides. 'As of course he would,' said Potts. 'A fellow

calculating the chances catches at a knife in the air.'

'Every franc-piece he had!' cried Abrane. 'And how could the jackass

expect to keep his luck! Flings off his old suit and comes back here with

a rig of German bags--you never saw such a figure!--Shoreditch Jew's

holiday!--why, of course, the luck wouldn't stand that.'

They confessed ruefully to having backed him a certain distance,

notwithstanding. 'He took it so coolly, just as if paying for goods

across a counter.'

'And he had something to bear, Braney, when you fell on him,' said Potts,

and murmured aside: 'He can be smartish. Hears me call Braney Rufus, and

says he, like a fellow-chin on his fiddle--"Captain Mountain, Rufus Mus'.

Not bad, for a counter."'

Fleetwood glanced round: he could have wrung Woodseer's hand. He saw

young Cressett instead, and hailed him: 'Here you are, my gallant! You

shall flash your maiden sword tonight. When I was under your age by a

long count, I dealt sanctimoniousness a flick o' the cheek, and you

shall, and let 'em know you're a man. Come and have your first boar-hunt

along with me. Petticoats be hanged.'

The boy showed some recollection of the lectures of his queen, but he had

not the vocables for resistance to an imperative senior at work upon

sneaking inclinations. 'Promised Lady F.'--do you hear him?' Fleetwood

called to the couple behind; and as gamblers must needs be parasites,

manly were the things they spoke to invigorate the youthful plunger and

second the whim of their paymaster.

At half-past eleven, the prisoner of his word entered under the Schloss

partico, having vowed to himself on the way, that he would satisfy the

formulas to gain release by a deferential bow to the great personages,

and straightway slip out into the heavenly starlight, thence down among

the jolly Parisian and Viennese Bacchanals.