CHAPTER XL

RECORD OF MINOR INCIDENTS

They went to their beds doomed to lie and roam as the solitaries of a

sleepless night. They met next day like a couple emerging from sirocco

deserts, indisposed for conversation or even short companionship, much of

the night's dry turmoil in their heads. Each would have preferred the

sight of an enemy; and it was hardly concealed by them, for they inclined

to regard one another as the author of their infernal passage through the

drear night's wilderness.

Fleetwood was the civiller; his immediate prospective duties being clear,

however abhorrent. But he had inflicted a monstrous disturbance on the

man he meant in his rash, decisive way to elevate, if not benefit.

Gower's imagination, foreign to his desires and his projects, was playing

juggler's tricks with him, dramatizing upon hypotheses, which mounted in

stages and could pretend to be soberly conceivable, assuming that the

earl's wild hints overnight were a credible basis. He transported himself

to his first view of the Countess Livia, the fountain of similes born of

his prostrate adoration, close upon the invasion and capture of him by

the combined liqueurs in the giddy Batlen lights; and joining the Arabian

magic in his breast at the time with the more magical reality now

proposed as a sequel to it, he entered the land where dreams confess they

are outstripped by revelations.

Yet it startled him to hear the earl say: 'You'll get audience at ten;

I've arranged; make the most of the situation to her. I refuse to help. I

foresee it 's the only way of solving this precious puzzle. You do me and

every one of us a service past paying. Not a man of her set worth. . . .

She--but you'll stop it; no one else can. Of course, you've had your

breakfast. Off, and walk yourself into a talkative mood, as you tell me

you do.'

'One of the things I do when I've nobody to hear,' said Gower,

speculating whether the black sprite in this young nobleman was for

sending him as a rod to scourge the lady: an ingenious device, that smelt

of mediaeval Courts and tickled his humour.

'Will she listen?' he said gravely.

'She will listen; she has not to learn you admire. You admit she has

helped to trim and polish, and the rest. She declares you're

incorruptible. There's the ground open. I fling no single sovereign more

into that quicksand, and I want not one word further on the subject. I

follow you to Esslemont. Pray, go.'

Fleetwood pushed into the hall. A footman was ordered to pack and deposit

Mr. Woodseer's portmanteau at the coach-office.

'The principal point is to make sure we have all the obligations,' Gower

said.

'You know the principal point,' said the earl. 'Relieve me.'

He faced to the opening street door. Lord Feltre stood in the framing of

it--a welcome sight. The 'monastic man of fashion,' of Gower's phrase for

him, entered, crooning condolences, with a stretched waxen hand for his

friend, a partial nod for Nature's worshipper--inefficient at any serious

issue of our human affairs, as the earl would now discover.

Gower left the two young noblemen to their greetings. Happily for him,

philosophy, in the present instance, after a round of profundities,

turned her lantern upon the comic aspect of his errand. Considering the

Countess Livia, and himself, and the tyrant, who benevolently and

providentially, or sardonically, hurled them to their interview, the

situation was comic, certainly, in the sense of its being an illumination

of this life's odd developments. For thus had things come about, that if

it were possible even to think of the lady's condescending, he, thanks to

the fair one he would see before evening, was armed and proof against his

old infatuation or any renewal of it. And he had been taught to read

through the beautiful twilighted woman, as if she were burnt paper held

at the fire consuming her. His hopes hung elsewhere. Nevertheless, an

intellectual demon-imp very lively in his head urged him to speculate on

such a contest between them, and weigh the engaging forces. Difficulties

were perceived, the scornful laughter on her side was plainly heard; but

his feeling of savage mastery, far from beaten down, swelled so as to

become irritable for the trial; and when he was near her house he held a

review of every personal disadvantage he could summon, incited by an

array of limping deficiencies that flattered their arrogant leader with

ideas of the power he had in spite of them.

In fact, his emancipation from sentiment inspired the genial mood to

tease. Women, having to encounter a male adept at the weapon for the

purpose, must be either voluble or supportingly proud to keep the skin

from shrinking: which is a commencement of the retrogression; and that

has frequently been the beginning of a rout. Now the Countess Livia was a

lady of queenly pose and the servitorial conventional speech likely at a

push to prove beggarly. When once on a common platform with a man of

agile tongue instigated by his intellectual demon to pursue inquiries

into her moral resources, after a ruthless exposure of the wrecked

material, she would have to be, after the various fashions, defiant, if

she was to hold her own against pressure; and seeing, as she must, the

road of prudence point to conciliation, it was calculable that she would

take it. Hence a string of possible events, astounding to mankind, but

equally calculable, should one care to give imagination headway. Gower

looked signally Captain Abrane's 'fiddler' while he waited at Livia's

house door. A studious intimacy with such a lady was rather like the

exposure of the silver moon to the astronomer's telescope.

The Dame will have nought of an interview and colloquy not found

mentioned in her collection of ballads, concerning a person quite

secondary in Dr. Glossop's voluminous papers. She as vehemently prohibits

a narration of Gower Woodseer's proposal some hours later, for the hand

of the Countess of Fleetwood's transfixed maid Madge, because of the

insignificance of the couple; and though it was a quaint idyll of an

affection slowly formed, rationally based while seeming preposterous,

tending to bluntly funny utterances on both sides. The girl was a

creature of the enthusiasms, and had lifted that passion of her

constitution into higher than the worship of sheer physical bravery. She

had pitied Mr. Gower Woodseer for his apparently extreme, albeit

reverential, devotion to her mistress. The plainly worded terms of his

asking a young woman of her position and her reputation to marry him came

on her like an intrusion of dazzling day upon the closed eyelids of the

night, requiring time, and her mistress's consent, and his father's

expressed approval, before she could yield him an answer that might

appear a forgetfulness of her station, her ignorance, her damaged

character. Gower protested himself, with truth, a spotted pard, an

ignoramus, and an outcast of all established classes, as the worshipper

of Nature cannot well avoid being.

'But what is it you like me for, Mr. Gower?' Madge longed to know, that

she might see a way in the strange land where he had planted her after a

whirl; and he replied: 'I 've thought of you till I can say I love you

because you have naturally everything I shoot at.'

The vastness of the compliment drove her to think herself empty of

anything.

He named courage, and its offspring, honesty, and devotedness, constancy.

Her bosom rose at the word.

'Yes, constancy,' he repeated; and 'growing girls have to "turn corners,"

as you told me once.'

'I did?' said she, reddening under a memory, and abashed by his

recollection of a moment she knew to have been weak with her, or noisy of

herself.

Madge went straightway to her mistress and related her great event, in

the tone of a confession of crime. Her mistress's approbation was timidly

suggested rather than besought.

It came on a flood. Carinthia's eyes filled; she exclaimed: 'Oh, that

good man!--he chooses my Madge for wife. She said it, Rebecca said it.

Mrs. Wythan saw and said Mr. Woodseer loved my Madge. I hear her saying

it. Then yes, and yes, from me for both your sakes, dear girl. He will

have the faithfullest, he will have the kindest--Oh! and I shall know

there can be a happy marriage in England.'

She summoned Gower; she clasped his hand, to thank him for appreciating

her servant and sister, and for the happiness she had in hearing it; and

she gazed at him and the laden brows of her Madge alternately,

encouraging him to repeat his recital of his pecuniary means, for the

poetry of the fact it verified, feasting on the sketch of a four-roomed

cottage and an agricultural labourer's widow for cook and housemaid;

Madge to listen to his compositions of the day in the evening; Madge to

praise him, Madge to correct his vanity.

Love was out of the count, but Carinthia's leaping sympathy decorated the

baldness of the sketch and spied his features through the daubed mask he

chose to wear as a member of the order of husbands, without taking it for

his fun. Dry material statements presented the reality she doated to

think of. Moreover, the marriage of these two renewed her belief in true

marriages, and their intention to unite was evidence of love.

'My journey to England was worth all troubles for the meeting Madge,' she

said. 'I can look with pleasure to that day of my meeting her first--the

day, it was then!'

She stopped. Madge felt the quivering upward of a whimper to a sob in her

breast. She slipped away.

'It's a day that has come round to be repaired, Lady Fleetwood,' said

Gower. 'If you will. Will you not? He has had a blow--the death of a

friend, violent death. It has broken him. He wants a month or so in your

mountains. I have thought him hard to deal with; he is humane. His

enormous wealth has been his tempter. Madge and I will owe him our means

of livelihood, enough for cottagers, until I carve my way. His feelings

are much more independent of his rank than those of most noblemen. He

will repeat your kind words to Madge and me; I am sure of it. He has had

heavy burdens; he is young, hardly formed yet. He needs a helper; I mean,

one allied to him. You forgive me? I left him with a Catholic lord for

comforter, who regards my prescript of the study of Nature, when we're in

grief, as about the same as an offer of a dish of cold boiled greens.

Silver and ivory images are more consoling. Neither he nor I can offer

the right thing for Lord Fleetwood. It will be found here. And then your

mountains. More than I, nearly as much as you, he has a poet's ardour for

mountain land. He and Mr. Wythan would soon learn to understand one

another on that head, if not as to management of mines.'

The pleading was crafty, and it was penetrative in the avoidance of

stress. Carinthia shook herself to feel moved. The endeavour chilled her

to a notion that she was but half alive. She let the question approach

her, whether Chillon could pardon Lord Fleetwood. She, with no idea of

benignness, might speak pardon's word to him, on a late autumn evening

years hence, perhaps, or to his friends to-morrow, if he would

considerately keep distant. She was upheld by the thought of her

brother's more honourable likeness to their father, in the certainty of

his refusal to speak pardon's empty word or touch an offending hand,

without their father's warrant for the injury wiped out; and as she had

no wish for that to be done, she could anticipate his withholding of the

word.

For her brother at wrestle with his fallen fortunes was now the beating

heart of Carinthia's mind. Her husband was a shadow there. He did obscure

it, and he might annoy, he was unable to set it in motion. He sat there

somewhat like Youth's apprehension of Death:--the dark spot seen mistily

at times through people's tears, or visioned as in an ambush beyond the

hills; occasionally challenged to stimulate recklessness; oftener

overlooked, acknowledged for the undesired remote of life's conditions,

life's evil, fatal, ill-assorted yoke-fellow; and if it was in his power

to burst out of his corner and be terrible to her, she could bring up a

force unnamed and unmeasured, that being the blood of her father in her

veins. Having done her utmost to guard her babe, she said her prayers;

she stood for peace or the struggle.

'Does Lord Fleetwood speak of coming here?' she said.

'To-morrow.'

'I go to Croridge to-morrow.'

'Your ladyship returns?'

'Yes, I return Mr. Gower, you have fifty minutes before you dress for

dinner.'

He thought only of the exceeding charity of the intimation; and he may be

excused for his not seeing the feminine full answer it was, in an

implied, unmeditated contrast. He went gladly to find his new comrade,

his flower among grass-blades, the wonderful creature astonishing him and

surcharging his world by setting her face at him, opening her breast to

him, breathing a young man's word of words from a woman's mouth. His

flower among grass-blades for a head looking studiously down, she was his

fountain of wisdom as well, in the assurance she gave him of the wisdom

of his choice.

But Madge had put up the 'prize-fighter's lass,' by way of dolly defence,

to cover her amazed confusion when the proposal of this well-liked

gentleman to a girl such as she sounded churchy. He knocked it over

easily; it left, however, a bee at his ear and an itch to transfer the

buzzer's attentions and tease his darling; for she had betrayed herself

as right good game. Nor is there happier promise of life-long domestic

enlivenment for a prescient man of Letters than he has in the

contemplation of a pretty face showing the sensitiveness to the sting,

which is not allowed to poison her temper, and is short of fetching

tears. The dear innocent girl gave this pleasing promise; moreover, she

could be twisted-to laugh at herself, just a little. Now, the young woman

who can do that has already jumped the hedge into the highroad of

philosophy, and may become a philosopher's mate in its by-ways, where the

minute discoveries are the notable treasures.

They had their ramble, agreeable to both, despite the admonitory dose

administered to one of them. They might have been espied at a point or

two from across the parkpalings; their laughter would have caught an

outside pedestrian's hearing. Whatever the case, Owain Wythan, riding

down off Croridge, big with news of her brother for the countess, dined

at her table, and walking up the lane to the Esslemont Arms on a moonless

night, to mount his horse, pitched against an active and, as it was

deemed by Gower's observation of his eyes, a scientific fist. The design

to black them finely was attributable to the dyeing accuracy of the

stroke. A single blow had done it. Mr. Wythan's watch and purse were

untouched; and a second look at the swollen blind peepers led Gower to

surmise that they were, in the calculation of the striker, his own.

He walked next day to the Royal Sovereign inn. There he came upon the

earl driving his phaeton. Fleetwood jumped down, and Gower told of the

mysterious incident, as the chief thing he had to tell, not rendering it

so mysterious in his narrative style. He had the art of indicating

darkly.

'Ines, you mean?' Fleetwood cried, and he appeared as nauseated and

perplexed as he felt. Why should Ines assault Mr. Wythan? It happened

that the pugilist's patron had, within the last fifteen minutes, driven

past a certain thirty-acre meadow, sight of which on his way to Carinthia

had stirred him. He had even then an idea of his old deeds dogging him to

bind him, every one of them, the smallest.

'But you've nothing to go by,' he said. 'Why guess at this rascal more

than another?'

Gower quoted Mrs. Rundles and the ostler for witnesses to Kit's visit

yesterday to the Royal Sovereign, though Kit shunned the bar of the

Esslemont Arms.

'I guess pretty clearly, because I suspect he was hanging about and saw

me and Madge together.'

'Consolations for failures in town?--by the way, you are complimented,

and I don't think you deserved it. However, there was just the chance to

stop a run to perdition. But, Madge? Madge? I'd swear to the girl!'

'Not so hard as I,' said Gower, and spoke of the oath to come between the

girl and him.

Fleetwood's dive into the girl's eyes drew her before him. He checked a

spirt of exclamations.

'You fancy the brute had a crack for revenge and mistook his man?'

'That's what I want her ladyship to know,' said Gower.

'How could you let her hear of it?'

'Nothing can be concealed from her.'

The earl was impressionable to the remark, in his disgust at the

incident. It added a touch of a new kind of power to her image.

'She's aware of my coming?'

'To-day or to-morrow.'

They scaled the phaeton and drove.

'You undervalue Lord Feltre. You avoid your adversaries,' Fleetwood now

rebuked his hearer. 'It 's an easy way to have the pull of them in your

own mind. You might learn from him. He's willing for controversy.

Nature-worship--or "aboriginal genuflexion," he calls it; Anglicanism,

Methodism; he stands to engage them. It can't be doubted, that in days of

trouble he has a faith "stout as a rock, with an oracle in it," as he

says; and he's right, "men who go into battle require a rock to back them

or a staff to lean on." You have your "secret," you think; as far as I

can see, it's to keep you from going into any form of battle.'

The new influence at work on the young nobleman was evident, if only in

the language used.

Gower answered mildly: 'That can hardly be said of a man who's going to

marry.'

'Perhaps not. Lady Fleetwood is aware?'

'Lady Fleetwood does me the honour to approve my choice.'

'You mean, you're dead on to it with this girl?'

'For a year or more.'

'Fond of her?'

'All my heart.'

'In love!'

'Yes, in love. The proof of it is, I 've asked her now I can support her

as a cottager leaning on the Three Per Cents.'

'Well, it helps you to a human kind of talk. It carries out your

theories. I never disbelieved in your honesty. The wisdom's another

matter. Did you ever tell any one, that there's not an act of a man's

life lies dead behind him, but it is blessing or cursing him every step

he takes?'

'By that,' rejoined Gower, 'I can say Lord Feltre proves there's wisdom

in the truisms of devoutness.'

He thought the Catholic lord had gone a step or two to catch an eel.

Fleetwood was looking on the backward of his days, beholding a melancholy

sunset, with a grimace in it.

'Lord Feltre might show you the "leanness of Philosophy";--you would

learn from hearing him:--"an old gnawed bone for the dog that chooses to

be no better than a dog."'

'The vertiginous roast haunch is recommended,' Gower said.

'See a higher than your own head, good sir. But, hang the man! he manages

to hit on the thing he wants.' Fleetwood set his face at Gower with

cutting heartiness. 'In love, you say, and Madge: and mean it to be the

holy business! Well, poor old Chummy always gave you credit for knowing

how to play your game. She has given proof she 's a good girl. I don't

see why it shouldn't end well. That attack on the Welshman's the bad

lookout. Explained, if you like, but women's impressions won't get

explained away. We must down on our knees or they. Her ladyship attentive

at all to affairs of the house?'

'Every day with Queeney; at intervals with Leddings.'

'Excellent! You speak like a fellow recording the devout observances of a

great dame with her minor and superior, ecclesiastical comforters.

Regular at church?'

'Her ladyship goes.'

'A woman without religion, Gower Woodseer, is a weed on the water, or

she's hard as nails. We shall see. Generally, Madge and the youngster

parade the park at this hour. I drive round to the stables. Go in and

offer your version of that rascally dog's trick. It seems the nearest we

can come at. He's a sot, and drunken dogs 'll do anything. I've had him

on my hands, and I've got the stain of him.'

They trotted through Esslemont Park gates. 'I've got that place,

Calesford, on my hands, too,' the earl said, suddenly moved to a liking

for his Kentish home.

He and Gower were struck by a common thought of the extraordinary burdens

his indulgence in impulses drew upon him. Present circumstances pictured

to Gower the opposing weighed and matured good reason for his choosing

Madge, and he complimented himself in his pity for the earl. But

Fleetwood, as he reviewed a body of acquaintances perfectly free from the

wretched run in harness, though they had their fits and their whims, was

pushed to the conclusion that fatalism marked his particular course

through life. He could not hint at such an idea to the unsympathetic

fellow, or rather, the burly antagonist to anything of the sort, beside

him. Lord Feltre would have understood and appreciated it instantly.

Where is aid to be had if we have the Fates against us? Feltre knew the

Power, he said; was an example of 'the efficacy of supplications'; he had

been 'fatally driven to find the Power,' and had found it--on the road to

Rome, of course: not a delectable road for an English nobleman, except

that the noise of another convert in pilgrimage on it would deal our

English world a lively smack, the very stroke that heavy body wants. But

the figure of a 'monastic man of fashion' was antipathetic to the earl,

and he flouted an English Protestant mass merely because of his being

highly individual, and therefore revolutionary for the minority.

He cast his bitter cud aside. 'My man should have arrived. Lady Fleetwood

at home?'

Gower spoke of her having gone to Croridge in the morning.

'Has she taken the child?'

'She has, yes. For the air of the heights.'

'For greater security. Lady Arpington praises the thoughtful mother. I

rather expected to see the child.'

'They can't be much later,' Gower supposed.

'You don't feel your long separation from "the object"?'

Letting him have his cushion for pins, Gower said 'It needs all my

philosophy:

He was pricked and probed for the next five minutes; not bad rallying,

the earl could be smart when he smarted. Then they descended the terrace

to meet Lady Fleetwood driving her pony-trap. She gave a brief single nod

to the salute of her lord, quite in the town-lady's manner, surprisingly.