CHAPTER XXXIV

A SURVEY OF THE RIDE OF THE WELSH CAVALIERS ESCORTING THE COUNTESS OF

FLEETWOOD TO KENTISH ESSLEMONT

A formal notification from the earl, addressed to the Countess of

Fleetwood in the third person, that Esslemont stood ready to receive her,

autocratically concealed her lord's impatience to have her there; and by

the careful precision with which the stages of her journey were marked,

as places where the servants despatched to convey their lady would find

preparations for her comfort, again alarmed the disordered mother's mind

on behalf of the child she deemed an object of the father's hatred,

second to his hatred of the mother. But the mother could defend herself,

the child was prey the child of a detested wife was heir to his title

and estates. His look at the child, his hasty one look down at her

innocent, was conjured before her as resembling a kick at a stone in his

path. His indifference to the child's Christian names pointed darkly over

its future.

The distempered wilfulness of a bruised young woman directed her

thoughts. She spoke them in the tone of reason to her invalid friend

Rebecca Wythan, who saw with her, felt with her, yearned to retain her

till breath was gone. Owain Wythan had his doubts of the tyrant guilty of

maltreating this woman of women. 'But when you do leave Wales,' he said,

'you shall be guarded up to your haven.'

Carinthia was not awake to his meaning then. She sent a short letter of

reply, imitating the style of her lord; very baldly stating, that she was

unable to leave Wales because of her friend's illness and her part as

nurse. Regrets were unmentioned.

Meanwhile Rebecca Wythan was passing to death. Not cheerlessly, more and

more faintly, her thread of life ran to pause, resembling a rill of the

drought; and the thinner-it grew, the shrewder were her murmurs for

Carinthia's ears in commending 'the most real of husbands of an unreal

wife' to her friendly care of him when he would no longer see the shadow

he had wedded. She had the privilege of a soul beyond our minor rules and

restrainings to speak her wishes to the true wife of a mock husband-no

husband; less a husband than this shadow of a woman a wife, she said; and

spoke them without adjuring the bowed head beside her to record a promise

or seem to show the far willingness, but merely that the wishes should be

heard on earth in her last breath, for a good man's remaining one chance

of happiness. On the theme touching her husband Owain, it was verily to

hear a soul speak, and have knowledge of the broader range, the rich

interflowings of the tuned discords, a spirit past the flesh can find.

Her mind was at the same time alive to our worldly conventions when other

people came under its light; she sketched them and their views in her

brief words between the gasps, with perspicuous, humorous bluntness, as

vividly as her twitched eyebrows indicated the laugh. Gower Woodseer she

read startlingly, if correctly.

Carinthia could not leave her. Attendance upon this dying woman was a

drinking at the springs of life.

Rebecca Wythan under earth, the earl was briefly informed of Lady

Fleetwood's consent to quit Wales, obedient to a summons two months

old,--and that she would be properly escorted; for the which her lord had

made provision. Consequently the tyrant swallowed his wrath, little

conceiving the monstrous blow she was about to strike.

In peril of fresh floods from our Dame, who should be satisfied with the

inspiring of these pages, it is owned that her story of 'the four and

twenty squires of Glamorgan and Caermarthen in their brass-buttoned green

coats and buckskins, mounted and armed, an escort of the Countess of

Fleetwood across the swollen Severn, along midwinter roads, up to the

Kentish gates of Esslemont,' has a foundation, though the story is not

the more credible for her flourish of documentary old ballad-sheets,

printed when London's wags had ears on cock to any whisper of the doings.

of their favourite Whitechapel Countess; and indeed hardly depended on

whispers.

Enthusiasm sufficient to troop forth four and twenty and more hundreds of

Cambrian gentlemen, and still more of the common folk, as far as they

could journey afoot, was over the two halves of the Principality, to give

the countess a reputable and gallant body-guard. London had intimations

of kindling circumstances concerning her, and magnified them in the

interests of the national humour: which is the English way of exalting to

criticize, criticizing to depreciate, and depreciating to restore,

ultimately to cherish, in reward for the amusement furnished by an

eccentric person, not devoid of merit.

These little tales of her, pricking cool blood to some activity, were

furze-fires among the Welsh. But where the latter heard Bardic strings

inviting a chorus, the former as unanimously obeyed the stroke of their

humorous conductor's baton for an outburst from the ribs or below. And it

was really funny to hear of Whitechapel's titled heroine roaming

Taffyland at her old pranks.

Catching a maddened bull by the horns in the marketplace, and hanging to

the infuriate beast, a wild whirl of clouts, till he is reduced to be a

subject for steaks, that is no common feat.

Her performances down mines were things of the underworld. England

clapped hands, merely objecting to her not having changed her garb for

the picador's or matador's, before she seized the bull. Wales adopted and

was proud of her in any costume. Welshmen North and South, united for the

nonce, now propose her gallantry as a theme to the rival Bards at the

next Eisteddfod. She is to sit throned in full assembly, oak leaves and

mistletoe interwoven on her head, a white robe and green sash to clothe

her, and the vanquished beast's horns on a gilded pole behind the dais;

hearing the eulogies respectively interpreted to her by Colonel Fluellen

Wythan at one ear, and Captain Agincourt Gower at the other. A splendid

scene; she might well insist to be present.

There, however, we are at the pitch of burlesque beyond her illustrious

lord's capacity to stand. Peremptory orders from England arrive,

commanding her return. She temporizes, postpones, and supplicates to have

the period extended up to the close of the Eisteddfod. My lord's orders

are imperatively repeated, and very blunt. He will not have her 'continue

playing the fool down there.' She holds her ground from August into

February, and then sets forth, to undergo the further process of her

taming at Esslemont in England; with Llewellyn and Vaughan and

Cadwallader, and Watkyn and Shenkyn and the remains of the race of Owen

Tudor, attending her; vowed to extract a receipt from the earl her lord's

responsible servitors for the safe delivery of their heroine's person at

the gates of Esslemont; ich dien their trumpeted motto.

Counting the number at four and twenty, it wears the look of an invasion.

But the said number is a ballad number, and has been since the antique

time. There was, at a lesser number, enough of a challenge about it for

squires of England, never in those days backward to pick up a glove or

give the ringing rejoinder for a thumb-bite, to ride out and tilt

compliments with the Whitechapel Countess's green cavaliers, rally their

sprites and entertain them exactly according to their degrees of dignity,

as exhibited by their 'haviour under something of a trial; and satisfy

also such temporary appetites as might be excited in them by (among other

matters left to the luck of events) a metropolitan play upon the Saxon

tongue, hard of understanding to the leeky cocks until their ready store

of native pepper seasons it; which may require a corresponding English

condiment to rectify the flavour of the stew.

Now the number of Saxe-Normans riding out to meet and greet the Welshmen

is declared to have not exceeded nine. So much pretends to be historic,

in opposition to the poetic version. They would, we may be sure, have

made it a point of honour to meet and greet their invading guests in

precisely similar numbers a larger would have overshot the mark of

courtesy; and doubtless a smaller have fallen deplorably short of it.

Therefore, an acquaintance with her chivalrous, if less impulsive,

countrymen compels to the dismissing of the Dame's ballad authorities.

She has every right to quote them for her own good pleasure, and may

create in others an enjoyment of what has been called 'the Mackrell fry.'

Her notion of a ballad is, that it grows like mushrooms from a scuffle of

feet on grass overnight, and is a sort of forest mother of the pied

infant reared and trimmed by historians to show the world its fatherly

antecedent steps. The hand of Rose Mackrell is at least suggested in more

than one of the ballads. Here the Welsh irruption is a Chevy Chase; next

we have the countess for a disputed Helen.

The lady's lord is not a shining figure. How can an undecided one be a

dispenser of light? Poetry could never allow him to say with her:

'Where'er I go I make a name,

And leave a song to follow.'

Yet he was the master of her fortunes at the time; all the material power

was his. Even doggerel verse (it is worth while to brood on the fact)

denies a surviving pre-eminence to the potent moody, reverses the

position between the driven and the driver. Poetry, however erratic, is

less a servant of the bully Present, or pomlious Past, than History. The

Muse of History has neither the same divination of the intrinsic nor the

devotion to it, though truly, she has possession of all the positive

matter and holds us faster by the crediting senses.

Nine English cavaliers, then, left London early on a January or February

morning in a Southerly direction, bearing East; and they were the Earl of

Fleetwood's intimates, of the half-dependent order; so we may suppose

them to have gone at his bidding. That they met the procession of the

Welsh, and claimed to take charge of the countess's carriage, near the

Kentish border-line, is an assertion supported by testimony fairly

acceptable.

Intelligence of the advancing party had reached the earl by courier, from

the date of the first gathering on the bridge of Pont-y-pridd; and from

Gloucester, along to the Thames at Reading; thence away to the Mole, from

Mickleham, where the Surrey chalk runs its final turfy spine

North-eastward to the slope upon Kentish soil.

Greatly to the astonishment of the Welsh cavaliers, a mounted footman,

clad in the green and scarlet facings of Lord Fleetwood's livery, rode up

to them a mile outside the principal towns and named the inn where the

earl had ordered preparations for the reception of them. England's

hospitality was offered on a princely scale. Cleverer fencing could not

be.

The meeting, in no sense an encounter, occurred close by a thirty-acre

meadow, famous over the county; and was remarkable for the punctilious

exchange of ceremonial speech, danger being present; as we see

powder-magazines protected by their walls and fosses and covered alleys.

Notwithstanding which, there was a scintillation of sparks.

Lord Brailstone, spokesman of the welcoming party, expressed comic

regrets that they had not an interpreter with them.

Mr. Owain Wythan, in the name of the Cambrian chivalry, assured him of

their comprehension and appreciation of English slang.

Both gentlemen kept their heads uncovered in a suspense; they might for a

word or two more of that savour have turned into the conveniently

spacious meadow. They were induced, on the contrary, to enter the channel

of English humour, by hearing Chumley Potts exclaim: 'His nob!' and all

of them laughed at the condensed description of a good hit back, at the

English party's cost.

Laughter, let it be but genuine, is of a common nationality, indeed a

common fireside; and profound disagreement is not easy after it. The Dame

professes to believe that 'Carinthia Jane' had to intervene as

peacemaker, before the united races took the table in Esslemont's

dining-hall for a memorable night of it, and a contest nearer the mark of

veracity than that shown in another of the ballads she would have us

follow. Whatever happened, they sat down at table together, and the point

of honour for them each and every was, not to be first to rise from it.

Once more the pure Briton and the mixed if not fused English engaged,

Bacchus for instrument this time, Bacchus for arbiter of the fray.

You may imagine! says the Dame. She cites the old butler at Esslemont,

'as having been much questioned on the subject by her family relative,

Dr. Glossop, and others interested to know the smallest items of the

facts,'--and he is her authority for the declaration that the Welsh

gentlemen and the English gentlemen, 'whatever their united number,'

consumed the number of nine dozen and a half of old Esslemont wine before

they rose, or as possibly sank, at the festive board at the hour of five

of the morning.

Years later, this butler, Joshua Queeney, 'a much enfeebled old man,'

retold and enlarged the tale of the enormous consumption of his best

wine; with a sacred oath to confirm it, and a tear expressive of

elegiacal feelings.

'They bled me twelve dozen, not a bottle less,' she quotes him, after a

minute description of his countenance and scrupulously brushed black

suit, pensioner though he had become. He had grown, during the interval,

to be more communicative as to particulars. The wines were four. Sherry

led off the parade pace, Hock the trot into the merry canter, Champagne

the racing gallop, Burgundy the grand trial of constitutional endurance

for the enforced finish. All these wines, except the sparkling, had their

date of birth in the precedent century. 'They went like water.'

Questioned anxiously by Dr. Glossop, Queeney maintained an impartial

attitude, and said there was no victor, no vanquished. They did not sit

in blocks. The tactics for preserving peace intermingled them. Each

English gentleman had a Welsh gentleman beside him; they both sat firm;

both fell together. The bottles or decanters were not stationary for the

guest to fill his glass, they circulated, returning to an empty glass.

All drank equally. Often the voices were high, the talk was loud. The

gentlemen were too serious to sing.

At one moment of the evening Queeney confidently anticipated a

'fracassy,' he said. One of the foreign party--and they all spoke

English, after five dozen bottles had gone the round, as correct as the

English themselves--remarked on the seventy-years Old Brown Sherry, that

'it had a Madeira flavour.' He spoke it approvingly. Thereupon Lord Simon

Pitscrew calls to Queeney, asking him 'why Madeira had been supplied

instead of Esslemont's renowned old Sherry?' A second Welsh gentleman

gave his assurances that his friend had not said it was Madeira. But Lord

Brailstone accused them of the worse unkindness to a venerable Old Brown

Sherry, in attributing a Madeira flavour to it. Then another Welsh

gentleman briskly and emphatically stated his opinion, that the

attribution of Madeira flavour to it was a compliment. At this, which

smelt strongly, he said, of insult, Captain Abrane called on the name of

their absent host to warrant the demand of an apology to the Old Brown

Sherry, for the imputation denying it an individual distinction. Chumley

Potts offered generally to bet that he would distinguish blindfold at a

single sip any Madeira from any first-class Sherry, Old Brown or Pale.

'Single sip or smell!' Ambrose Mallard cried, either for himself or his

comrade, Queeney could not say which.

Of all Lord Fleetwood's following, Mr. Potts and Mr. Mallard were, the

Dame informs us, Queeney's favourites, because they were so genial; and

he remembered most of what they said and did, being moved to it by 'poor

young Mr. Mallard's melancholy end and Mr. Potts's grief!'

The Welsh gentlemen, after paying their devoirs to the countess next

morning, rode on in fresh health and spirits at mid-day to Barlings, the

seat of Mr. Mason Fennell, a friend of Mr. Owain Wythan's. They shouted,

in an unseemly way, Queeney thought, at their breakfast-table, to hear

that three of the English party, namely, Captain Abrane, Mr. Mallard, and

Mr. Potts, had rung for tea and toast in bed. Lord Simon Pitscrew, Lord

Brailstone, and the rest of the English were sore about it; for it

certainly wore a look of constitutional inferiority on the English side,

which could boast of indubitably stouter muscles. The frenzied spirits of

the Welsh gentlemen, when riding off, let it be known what their opinion

was. Under the protection of the countess's presence, they were so cheery

as to seem triumphantly ironical; they sent messages of condolence to the

three in bed.

With an undisguised reluctance, the countess, holding Mr. Owain Wythan's

hand longer than was publicly decent, calling him by his Christian name,

consented to their departure. As they left, they defiled before her; the

vow was uttered by each, that at the instant of her summons he would

mount and devote himself to her service, individually or collectively.

She waved her hand to them. They ranged in line and saluted. She kissed

her hand. Sweeping the cavaliers' obeisance, gallantest of bows, they

rode away.

A striking scene, Dame Gossip says; but raises a wind over the clipped

adventure, and is for recounting what London believed about it. Enough

has been conceded for the stoppage of her intrusion; she is left in the

likeness of a full-charged pistol capless to the clapping trigger.

That which London believed, or affected to believe about it, would fill

chapters. There was during many months an impression of Lord Fleetwood's

countess as of a tenacious, dread, prevailing young woman, both intrepid

and astute, who had, by an exercise of various arts, legitimate in open

war of husband and wife, gathered the pick of the Principality to storm

and carry another of her husband's houses. The certification that her

cavaliers were Welsh gentlemen of wealth and position required a broader

sneer at the Welsh than was warranted by later and more intimate

acquaintance, if it could be made to redound to her discredit. So,

therefore, added to the national liking for a plucky woman, she gained

the respect for power. Whitechapel was round her like London's one

street's length extension of smoky haze, reminder of the morning's fog

under novel sunbeams.

Simultaneously, strange to say, her connubial antagonist, far from being

overshadowed, grew to be proportionately respected, and on the strength

of his deserts, apart from his title and his wealth. He defended himself,

as he was bound to do, by welcoming the picked Welsh squires with

hospitable embrace, providing ceremonies, receptions, and most

comfortable arrangements for them, along the route. But in thus gravely

entering into the knightly burlesque of the procession, and assisting to

swell the same, he not only drew the venom from it, he stood forth as

England's deputed representative, equal to her invasive challengeing

guests at all points, comic, tragic, or cordial. He saw that it had to be

treated as a national affair; and he parried the imputation which would

have injured his country's name for courtly breeding, had they been

ill-received, while he rescued his own good name from derision by joining

the extravagance.

He was well inspired. It was popularly felt to be the supreme of

clever-nay, noble-fencing. Really noble, though the cleverness was

conspicuous. A defensive stroke, protecting him against his fair one's

violent charge of horse, warded off an implied attack upon Old England,

in Old England's best-humoured easy manner.

Supposing the earl to have acted otherwise, his countess would virtually

have ridden over him, and wild Wales have cast a shadow on the chivalry

of magisterial England. He and his country stood to meet the issue

together the moment the Countess of Fleetwood and her escort crossed the

Welsh border; when it became a question between the hot-hearted, at their

impetuous gallop, and the sedatively minded, in an unfortified camp of

arm-chairs. The earl's adroitness, averting a collision fatal or

discomforting to both, disengaged him from an incumbent odium, of which,

it need hardly be stated, neither the lady nor her attendant cavaliers

had any notion at the hour of the assembly for the start for England on

the bridge of Pont-y-pridd. The hungry mother had the safety of her babe

in thought. The hotheaded Welshmen were sworn to guard their heroine.

That is the case presented by the Dame's papers, when the incredible is

excised. She claims the being a good friend to fiction in feeding popular

voracity with all her stores. But the Old Buccaneer, no professed friend

to it, is a sounder guide in the maxim, where he says: Deliver yourself

by permit of your cheque on the 'Bank of Reason, and your account is

increased instead of lessened.

Our account with credulity, he would signify.

The Dame does not like the shaking for a sifting. Romance, however, is

not a mountain made of gold, but a vein running some way through; and it

must be engineered, else either we are filled with wind from swallowing

indigestible substance, or we consent to a debasing of the currency,

which means her to-morrow's bankruptcy; and the spectacle of Romance in

the bankruptcy court degrades us (who believe we are allied to her) as

cruelly as it appals. It gives the cynic licence to bark day and night

for an entire generation.

Surely the Countess of Fleetwood's drive from the Welsh borders to

Esslemont, accompanied by the chosen of the land, followed by the vivats

of the whole Principality, and England gaping to hear the stages of her

progress, may be held sufficiently romantic without stuffing of surprises

and conflicts, adventures at inns, alarms at midnight, windings of a horn

over hilly verges of black heaths, and the rape of the child, the

pursuit, the recovery of the child, after a new set of heroine

performances on the part of a strung-wire mother, whose outcry in a waste

country district, as she clasps her boy to her bosom again: 'There's a

farm I see for milk for him!' the Dame repeats, having begun with an

admission that the tale has been contradicted, and is not produced on

authority. The end in design is to win the ear by making a fuss, and roll

event upon event for the braining of common intelligence, until her

narrative resembles dusty troopings along a road to the races.

Carinthia and her babe reached Esslemont, no matter what impediments.

There, like a stopped runner whose pantings lengthen to the longer

breath, her alarms over the infant subsided, ceasing for as long as she

clasped it or was in the room with it. Walking behind the precious

donkey-basket round the park, she went armed, and she soon won a fearful

name at Kentish cottage-hearths, though she 'was not black to see, nor

old. No, she was very young. But she did all the things that soldiers

do,--was a bit of a foreigner;--she brought a reputation up from the

Welsh land, and it had a raven's croak and a glow-worm's drapery and a

goblin's origin.

Something was hinted of her having agitated London once. Somebody dropped

word of her and that old Lord Levellier up at Croridge. She stalked park

and country at night. Stories, one or two near the truth, were told of a

restless and a very decided lady down these parts as well; and the earl

her husband daren't come nigh in his dread of her, so that he runs as if

to save his life out of every place she enters. And he's not one to run

for a trifle. His pride is pretty well a match for princes and

princesses.

All the same, he shakes in his shoes before her, durst hardly spy at

Esslemont again while she's in occupation. His managing gentleman comes

down from him, and goes up from her; that's how they communicate. One

week she's quite solitary; another week the house is brimful as can be.

She 's the great lady entertaining then. Yet they say it 's a fact, she

has not a shilling of her own to fling at a beggar. She 'll stock a

cottage wanting it with provision for a fortnight or more, and she'll

order the doctor in, and she'll call and see the right things done for

illness. 'But no money; no one's to expect money of her. The shots you

hear in Esslemont grounds out of season are she and her maid, always

alongside her, at it before a target on a bank, trying that old Lord

Levellier's gunpowder out of his mill; and he's got no money either; not

for his workmen, they say, until they congregate, and a threatening to

blow him up brings forth half their pay, on account. But he 's a known

miser. She's not that. She's a pleasant-faced lady for the poor. She has

the voice poor people like. It's only her enemy, maybe her husband, she

can be terrible to. She'd drive a hole through a robber stopping her on

the road, as soon as look at him.

This was Esslemont's atmosphere working its way to the earl, not so very

long after the establishment of his countess there. She could lay hold of

the English, too, it seemed. Did she call any gentleman of the district

by his Christian name? Lord Simon Pitscrew reported her doing so in the

case of one of the Welshmen. Those Welshmen! Apparently they are making a

push for importance in the kingdom!