CHAPTER XX

STUDIES IN FOG, GOUT, AN OLD SEAMAN, A LOVELY SERPENT, AND THE MORAL

EFFECTS THAT MAY COME OF A BORROWED SHIRT

Money of his father's enabled Gower to take the coach; and studies in

fog, from the specked brown to the woolly white, and the dripping torn,

were proposed to the traveller, whose preference of Nature's face did not

arrest his observation of her domino and petticoats; across which blank

sheets he curiously read backward, that he journeyed by the aid of his

father's hard-earned, ungrudged piece of gold. Without it, he would have

been useless in this case of need. The philosopher could starve with

equanimity, and be the stronger. But one had, it seemed here clearly, to

put on harness and trudge along a line, if the unhappy were to have one's

help. Gradual experiences of his business among his fellows were teaching

an exercised mind to learn in regions where minds unexercised were

doctorial giants beside it.

The study of gout was offered at Chinningfold. Admiral Fakenham's butler

refused at first to take a name to his master. Gower persisted, stating

the business of his mission; and in spite of the very suspicious glib

good English spoken by a man wearing such a hat and suit, the butler was

induced to consult Mrs. Carthew.

She sprang up alarmed. After having seen the young lady happily married

and off with her lordly young husband, the arrival of a messenger from

the bride gave a stir the wrong way to her flowing recollections; the

scenes and incidents she had smothered under her love of the comfortable

stood forth appallingly. The messenger, the butler said, was no

gentleman. She inspected Gower and heard him speak. An anomaly had come

to the house; for he had the language of a gentleman, the appearance of a

nondescript; he looked indifferent, he spoke sympathetically; and he was

frank as soon as the butler was out of hearing. In return for the

compliment, she invited him to her sitting-room. The story of the young

countess, whom she had seen driven away by her husband from the church in

a coach and four, as being now destitute, praying to see her friends, in

the Whitechapel of London--the noted haunt of thieves and outcasts,

bankrupts and the abandoned; set her asking for the first time, who was

the man with dreadful countenance inside the coach? A previously

disregarded horror of a man. She went trembling to the admiral, though

his health was delicate, his temper excitable. It was, she considered, an

occasion for braving the doctor's interdict.

Gower was presently summoned to the chamber where Admiral Fakenham

reclined on cushions in an edifice of an arm-chair. He told a plain tale.

Its effect was to straighten the admiral's back, and enlarge in grey

glass a pair of sea-blue eyes. And, 'What's that? Whitechapel?' the

admiral exclaimed,--at high pitch, far above his understanding. The

particulars were repeated, whereupon the sick-room shook with,

'Greengrocer?' He stunned himself with another of the monstrous points in

his pet girl's honeymoon: 'A prizefight?'

To refresh a saving incredulity, he took a closer view of the messenger.

Gower's habiliments were those of the 'queer fish,' the admiral saw. But

the meeting at Carlsruhe was recalled to him, and there was a worthy

effort to remember it. 'Prize-fight!--Greengrocer! Whitechapel!' he rang

the changes rather more moderately; till, swelling and purpling, he

cried: 'Where's the husband?'

That was the emissary's question likewise.

'If I could have found him, sir, I should not have troubled you.'

'Disappeared? Plays the man of his word, then plays the madman!

Prize-fight the first day of her honeymoon? Good Lord! Leaves her at the

inn?'

'She was left.'

'When was she left?'

'As soon as the fight was over--as far as I understand.'

The admiral showered briny masculine comments on that bridegroom.

'Her brother's travelling somewhere in the Pyrenees--married my daughter.

She has an uncle, a hermit.' He became pale. 'I must do it. The rascal

insults us all. Flings her off the day he married her! It 's a slap in

the face to all of us. You are acquainted with the lady, sir. Would you

call her a red-haired girl?'

'Red-gold of the ballads; chestnut-brown, with threads of fire.'

'She has the eyes for a man to swear by. I feel the loss of her, I can

tell you. She was wine and no penalty to me. Is she much broken under

it?--if I 'm to credit . . . I suppose I must. It floors me.'

Admiral Baldwin's frosty stare returned on him. Gower caught an image of

it, as comparable, without much straining, to an Arctic region smitten by

the beams.

'Nothing breaks her courage,' he said.

'To be sure, my poor dear! Who could have guessed when she left my house

she was on her way to a prizefight and a greengrocer's in Whitechapel.

But the dog's not mad, though his bite 's bad; he 's an eccentric

mongrel. He wants the whip; ought to have had it regularly from his first

breeching. He shall whistle for her when he repents; and he will, mark

me. This gout here will be having a snap at the vitals if I don't start

to-night. Oblige me, half a minute.'

The admiral stretched his hand for an arm to give support, stood, and

dropped into the chair, signifying a fit of giddiness in the word 'Head.'

Before the stupor had passed, Mrs. Carthew entered, anxious lest the

admittance of a messenger of evil to her invalid should have been an

error of judgement. The butler had argued it with her. She belonged to

the list of persons appointed to cut life's thread when it strains, their

general kindness being so liable to misdirection.

Gower left the room and went into the garden. He had never seen a death;

and the admiral's peculiar pallor intimated events proper to days of cold

mist and a dripping stillness. How we go, was the question among his

problems:--if we are to go! his youthful frame insistingly added.

The fog down a wet laurel-walk contracted his mind with the chilling of

his blood, and he felt that he would have to see the thing if he was to

believe in it. Of course he believed, but life throbbed rebelliously, and

a picture of a desk near a lively fire-grate, books and pen and paper,

and a piece of writing to be approved of by the Hesper of ladies, held

ground with a pathetic heroism against the inevitable. He got his wits to

the front by walking faster; and then thought of the young countess and

the friend she might be about to lose. She could number her friends on

her fingers. Admiral Fakenham's exclamations of the name of the place

where she now was, conveyed an inky idea of the fall she had undergone.

Counting her absent brother, with himself, his father, and the two

Whitechapel girls, it certainly was an unexampled fall, to say of her,

that they and those two girls had become by the twist of circumstances

the most serviceable of her friends.

Her husband was the unriddled riddle we have in the wealthy young

lord,--burning to possess, and making, tatters of all he grasped, the

moment it was his own. Glints of the devilish had shot from him at the

gamingtables,--fine haunts for the study of our lower man. He could be

magnificent in generosity; he had little humaneness. He coveted beauty in

women hungrily, and seemed to be born hostile to them; or so Gower judged

by the light of the later evidence on unconsidered antecedent

observations of him. Why marry her to cast her off instantly? The crude

philosopher asked it as helplessly as the admiral. And, further, what did

the girl Madge mean by the drop of her voice to a hum of enforced

endurance under injury, like the furnace behind an iron door? Older men

might have understood, as he was aware; he might have guessed, only he

had the habit of scattering meditation upon the game of hawk and fowl.

Dame Gossip boils. Her one idea of animation is to have her dramatis

persona in violent motion, always the biggest foremost; and, indeed, that

is the way to make them credible, for the wind they raise and the

succession of collisions. The fault of the method is, that they do not

instruct; so the breath is out of them before they are put aside; for the

uninstructive are the humanly deficient: they remain with us like the

tolerated old aristocracy, which may not govern, and is but socially

seductive. The deuteragonist or secondary person can at times tell us

more of them than circumstances at furious heat will help them to reveal;

and the Dame will have him only as an index-post. Hence her endless

ejaculations over the mystery of Life, the inscrutability of

character,--in a plain world, in the midst of such readable people! To

preserve Romance (we exchange a sky for a ceiling if we let it go), we

must be inside the heads of our people as well as the hearts, more than

shaking the kaleidoscope of hurried spectacles, in days of a growing

activity of the head.

Gower Woodseer could not know that he was drawn on to fortune and the

sight of his Hesper by Admiral Fakenham's order that the visitor was to

stay at his house until he should be able to quit his bed, and journey

with him to London, doctor or no doctor. The doctor would not hear of it.

The admiral threatened it every night for the morning, every morning for

the night; and Gower had to submit to postponements balefully affecting

his linen. Remonstrance was not to be thought of; for at a mere show of

reluctance the courtly admiral flushed, frowned, and beat the bed where

he lay, a gouty volcano. Gower's one shirt was passing through the

various complexions, and had approached the Nubian on its way to negro.

His natural candour checked the downward course. He mentioned to Mrs.

Carthew, with incidental gravity, on a morning at breakfast, that this

article of his attire 'was beginning to resemble London snow.' She was

amused; she promised him a change more resembling country snow. 'It will

save me from buttoning so high up,' he said, as he thanked her. She then

remembered the daily increase of stiffness in his figure: and a

reflection upon his patient waiting, and simpleness, and lexicographer

speech to expose his minor needs, touched her unused sense of humour on

the side where it is tender in women, from being motherly.

In consequence, she spoke of him with a pleading warmth to the Countess

Livia, who had come down to see the admiral 'concerning an absurd but

annoying rumour running over London.' Gower was out for a walk. He knew

of the affair, Mrs. Carthew said, for an introduction to her excuses of

his clothing.

'But I know the man,' said Livia. 'Lord Fleetwood picked him up

somewhere, and brought him to us. Clever: Why, is he here?'

'He is here, sent to the admiral, as I understand, my lady.'

'Sent by whom?'

Having but a weak vocabulary to defend a delicate position, Mrs. Carthew

stuttered into evasions, after the way of ill-armed persons; and naming

herself a stranger to the circumstances, she feebly suggested that the

admiral ought not to be disturbed before the doctor's next visit; Mr.

Woodseer had been allowed to sit by his bed yesterday only for ten

minutes, to divert him with his talk. She protected in this wretched

manner the poor gentleman she sacrificed and emitted such a smell of

secresy, that Livia wrote three words on her card, for it to be taken to

Admiral Baldwin at once. Mrs. Carthew supplicated faintly; she was

unheeded.

The Countess of Fleetwood mounted the stairs--to descend them with the

knowledge of her being the Dowager Countess of Fleetwood! Henrietta had

spoken of the Countess of Fleetwood's hatred of the title of Dowager. But

when Lady Fleetwood had the fact from the admiral, would she forbear to

excite him? If she repudiated it, she would provoke him to fire 'one of

his broadsides,'--as they said in the family, to assert its and that

might exhaust him; and there was peril in that. And who was guilty? Mrs.

Carthew confessed her guilt, asking how it could have been avoided. She

made appeal to Gower on his return, transfixing him.

Not only is he no philosopher who has an idol, he has to learn that he

cannot think rationally; his due sense of weight and measure is lost, the

choice of his thoughts as well. He was in the house with his devoutly,

simply worshipped, pearl of women, and his whole mind fell to work

without ado upon the extravagant height of the admiral's shirt-collar

cutting his ears. The very beating of his heart was perplexed to know

whether it was for rapture or annoyance. As a result he was but

histrionically master of himself when the Countess Livia or the nimbus of

the lady appeared in the room.

She received his bow; she directed Mrs. Carthew to have the doctor

summoned immediately. The remorseful woman flew.

'Admiral Fakenham is very ill, Mr. Woodseer, he has had distracting news.

Oh, no, the messenger is not blamed. You are Lord Fleetwood's friend and

will not allow him to be prejudged. He will be in town shortly. I know

him well, you know him; and could you hear him accused of cruelty--and to

a woman? He is the soul of chivalry. So, in his way, is the admiral. If

he were only more patient! Let us wait for Lord Fleetwood's version. I am

certain it will satisfy me. The admiral wishes you to step up to him. Be

very quiet; you will be; consent to everything. I was unaware of his

condition: the things I heard were incredible. I hope the doctor will not

delay. Now go. Beg to retire soon.'

Livia spoke under her breath; she had fears.

Admiral Baldwin lay in his bed, submitting to a nurse-woman-sign of

extreme exhaustion. He plucked strength from the sight of Gower and

bundled the woman out of the room, muttering: 'Kill myself? Not half so

quick as they'd do it. I can't rest for that Whitechapel of yours. Please

fetch pen and paper: it's a letter.'

The letter began, 'Dear Lady Arpington.'

The dictation of it came in starts. Atone moment it seemed as if life's

ending shook the curtains on our stage and were about to lift. An old

friend in the reader of the letter would need no excuse for its jerky

brevity. It said that his pet girl, Miss Kirby, was married to the Earl

of Fleetwood in the first week of last month, and was now to be found at

a shop No. 45 Longways, Whitechapel; that the writer was ill, unable to

stir; that he would be in London within eight-and-forty hours at

furthest. He begged Lady Arpington to send down to the place and have the

young countess fetched to her, and keep her until he came.

Admiral Baldwin sat up to sign the letter.

'Yes, and write "miracles happen when the devil's abroad"--done it!' he

said, sinking back. 'Now seal, you'll find wax--the ring at my

watch-chain.'

He sighed, as it were the sound of his very last; he lay like a sleeper

twitched by a dream. There had been a scene with Livia. The dictating of

the letter took his remainder of strength out of him.

Gower called in the nurse, and went downstairs. He wanted the address of

Lady Arpington's town house.

'You have a letter for her?' said Livia, and held her hand for it in a

way not to be withstood.

'There's no superscription,' he remarked.

'I will see to that, Mr. Woodseer.'

'I fancy I am bound, Lady Fleetwood.'

'By no means.' She touched his arm. 'You are Lord Fleetwood's friend.'

A slight convulsion of the frame struck the admiral's shirt-collar at his

ears; it virtually prostrated him under foot of a lady so benign in

overlooking the spectacle he presented. Still, he considered; he had wits

alive enough, just to perceive a duty.

'The letter was entrusted to me, Lady Fleetwood.'

'You are afraid to entrust it to the post?'

'I was thinking of delivering it myself in town.'

'You will entrust it to me.'

'Anything on earth of my own.'

'The treasure would be valued. This you confide to my care.'

'It is important.'

'No.'

'Indeed it is.'

'Say that it is, then. It is quite safe with me. It may be important that

it should not be delivered. Are you not Lord Fleetwood's friend? Lady

Arpington is not so very, very prominent in the list with you and me.

Besides, I don't think she has come to town yet. She generally sees out

the end of the hunting season. Leave the letter to me: it shall go. You,

with your keen observation missing nothing, have seen that my uncle has

not his whole judgement at present. There are two sides to a case. Lord

Fleetwood's friend will know that it would be unfair to offer him up to

his enemies while he is absent. Things going favourably here, I drive

back to town to-morrow, and I hope you will accept a seat in my

carriage.'

He delivered his courtliest; he was riding on cloud.

They talked of Baden. His honourable surrender of her defeated purse was

a subject for gentle humour with her, venturesome compliment with him. He

spoke well; and though his hands were clean of Sir Meeson Corby's

reproach of them, the caricature of presentable men blushed absurdly and

seemed uneasy in his monstrous collar. The touching of him again would

not be required to set him pacing to her steps. His hang of the head

testified to the unerring stamp of a likeness Captain Abrane could affix

with a stroke: he looked the fiddler over his bow, playing wonderfully to

conceal the crack of a string. The merit of being one of her army of

admirers was accorded to him. The letter to Lady Arpington was retained.

Gower deferred the further mention of the letter until a visit to the

admiral's chamber should furnish an excuse; and he had to wait for it.

Admiral Baldwin's condition was becoming ominous. He sent messages

downstairs by the doctor, forbidding his guest's departure until they two

could make the journey together next day. The tortured and blissful young

man, stripped of his borrowed philosopher's cloak, hung conscience-ridden

in this delicious bower, which was perceptibly an antechamber of the

vaults, offering him the study he thirsted for, shrank from, and mixed

with his cup of amorous worship.