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.
CHAPTER XLI. IN WHICH THE FATES ARE SEEN AND A CHOICE OF THE REFUGES FROM THEM
The home of husband and wife was under one roof at last. Fleetwood went, like one deported, to his wing of the house, physically sensible, in the back turned to his wife’s along the corridor, that our ordinary comparison for the division of a wedded twain is correct. She was Arctic, and Antarctic he had to be, perforce of the distance she put between them. A removal of either of them from life—or from ‘the act of breathing,’ as Gower Woodseer’s contempt of the talk about death would call it—was an imaginable way of making it a wider division. Ambrose Mallard was far enough from his fatal lady now—farther than the Poles asunder. Ambrose, if the clergy will allow him, has found his peace.. But the road and the means he chose were a madman’s.
The blotting of our character, to close our troubles, is the final proof of our being ‘sons of vapour,’ according to Gower Woodseer’s heartless term for poor Ambrose and the lot. They have their souls; and above philosophy, ‘natural’ or unnatural, they may find a shelter. They can show in their desperation that they are made of blood, as philosophers rather fail of doing. An insignificant brainless creature like Feltre had wits, by the aid of his religion, to help or be charitable to his fellows, particularly the sinners, in the crisis of life, surpassing any philosopher’s.
Information of her ladyship’s having inspected the apartments, to see to the minutest of his customary luxuries, cut at him all round. His valet had it from the footmen and maids; and their speaking of it meant a liking for their mistress; and that liking, added to her official solicitude on his behalf, touched a soft place in him and blew an icy wind; he was frozen where he was warmed. Here was evidence of her intending the division to be a fixed gap. She had entered this room and looked about her. He was here to feel her presence in her absence.
Some one or something had schooled her, too. Her large-eyed directness of gaze was the same as at that inn and in Wales, but her easy sedateness was novel, her English, almost the tone of the English world: he gathered it, at least, from the few remarks below stairs.
His desire to be with her was the desire to escape the phantasm of the woman haunting to subjugate him when they were separate. He could kill illusion by magnifying and clawing at her visible angles and audible false notes; and he did it until his recollections joined to the sight of her, when a clash of the thought of what she had been and the thought of what she was had the effect of conjuring a bitter sweet image that was a more seductive illusion. Strange to think, this woman once loved the man who was not half the value of the man she no longer loved. He took a shot at cynicism, but hit no mark. This woman protected her whole sex.
They sat at the dinner-table alone, thanks to a handsome wench’s attractions for a philosopher. Married, and parents of a lusty son, this was their first sitting at table together. The mouth that said ‘I guard my rooms’ was not obtruded; she talked passingly of her brother, much of Lady Arpington and of old Mr. Woodseer; and, though she reserved a smile, there was no look of a lock on her face. She seemed pleased to be treated very courteously; she returned the stately politeness in exactest measure; very simply, as well. Her face had now an air of homeliness, well suited to an English household interior. She could chat. Any pauses occurring, he was the one guilty of them; she did not allow them to be barrier chasms, or ‘strids’ for the leap with effort; she crossed them like the mountain maid over a gorge’s plank—kept her tones perfectly. Her Madge and Mr. Gower Woodseer made a conversible topic. She was inquisitive for accounts of Spanish history and the land of Spain.
They passed into the drawing-room. She had heard of the fate of the poor child in Wales, she said, without a comment.
‘I see now, I ought to have backed your proposal,’ he confessed, and was near on shivering. She kept silent, proudly or regretfully.
Open on her workbasket was a Spanish guide-book and a map attached to it. She listened to descriptions of Cadiz, Malaga, Seville, Granada. Her curiosity was chiefly for detailed accounts of Catalonia and the Pyrenees.
‘Hardly the place for you; there’s a perpetual heaving of Carlism in those mountains; your own are quieter for travellers,’ he remarked; and for a moment her lips moved to some likeness of a smile; a dimple in a flowing thought.
He remarked the come and go of it.
He regretted his inability to add to her knowledge of the Spanish Pyrenees.
Books helped her at present, she said.
Feeling acutely that hostility would have brought them closer than her uninviting civility, he spoke of the assault on Mr. Wythan, and Gower Woodseer’s conjecture, and of his having long since discharged the rascal Ines.
To which her unreproachful answer, ‘You made use of those men, my lord,’ sent a cry ringing through him, recalling Feltre’s words, as to the grip men progressively are held in by their deeds done.
‘Oh, quite true, we change our views and ways of life,’ he said, thinking she might set her considerations on other points of his character. But this reflection was a piece of humility not yet in his particular estimate of his character, and he spurned it: an act of pride that drove his mind, for occupation, to contemplate hers; which speedily became an embrace of her character, until he was asking whether the woman he called wife and dared not clasp was one of those rarest, who can be idealized by virtue of their being known. For the young man embracing a character loses grasp of his own, is plucked out of himself and passes into it, to see the creature he is with the other’s eyes, and feel for the other as a very self. Such is the privilege and the chastisement of the young.
Gower Woodseer’s engagement with the girl Madge was a happier subject for expatiation and agreement. Her deeper tones threw a light on Gower, and where she saw goodness, he could at least behold the natural philosopher practically philosophizing.
‘The girl shall have a dowry from me,’ he said; and the sum named was large. Her head bent acknowledgingly; money had small weight with her now. His perception of it stripped him and lamed him.
He wished her ladyship good-night. She stood up and performed a semi-ceremonious obeisance, neatly adapted to their mutual position. She had a well-bred mother.
Probably she would sleep. No such expectation could soothe the friend, and some might be thinking misleader, of Ambrose Mallard, before he had ocular proof that the body lay underground. His promise was given to follow it to the grave, a grave in consecrated earth. Ambrose died of the accidental shot of a pocket-pistol he customarily carried loaded. Two intimate associates of the dead man swore to that habit of his. They lied to get him undisputed Christian burial. Aha! The earl laughed outright at Chummy Potts’s nursery qualms. The old fellow had to do it, and he lied like a man for the sake of Ambrose Mallard’s family. So much is owing to our friend.
Can ecclesiastical casuists decide upon cases of conscience affecting men of the world?
A council sat upon the case the whole night long. A committee of the worldly held argumentation in a lower chamber.
These are nights that weaken us to below the level of women. A shuttle worked in Fleetwood’s head. He defended the men of the world. Lord Feltre oiled them, damned them, kindled them to a terrific expiatory blaze, and extinguishingly salved and wafted aloft the released essence of them. Maniacal for argument, Fleetwood rejected the forgiveness of sins, if sins they be. Prove them sins, and the suffering is of necessity everlasting, his insomnia logic insisted. Whichever side he took, his wife was against him; not in speech, but in her look. She was a dumb figure among the wranglers, clouded up to the neck. Her look said she knew more of him than they knew.
He departed next day for London, after kissing his child; and he would have done wisely to abstain from his exhibition of the paternal. Knowing it a step to conciliation, he checked his impulsive warmth, under the apprehension that the mother would take it for a piece of acting to propitiate—and his lips pecked the baby’s cheek. Its mother held arms for it immediately.
Not without reason did his heart denounce her as a mere mother, with little of a mind to see.
The recent series of feverishly sleepless nights disposed him to snappish irritability or the thirst for tenderness. Gower had singular experiences of him on the drive North-westward. He scarcely spoke; he said once: ‘If you mean to marry, you’ll be wanting to marry soon, of course,’ and his curt nod before the reply was formulated appeared to signify, the sooner the better, and deliverance for both of us. Honest though he might, be sometimes deep and sometimes picturesque, the philosopher’s day had come to an end. How can Philosophy minister to raw wounds, when we are in a rageing gale of the vexations, battered to right and left! Religion has a nourishing breast: Philosophy is breastless. Religion condones offences: Philosophy has no forgiveness, is an untenanted confessional: ‘wide air to a cry in anguish,’ Feltre says.
All the way to London Fleetwood endured his companion, letting him talk when he would.
He spent the greater part of the night discussing human affairs and spiritual with Lord Feltre, whose dialectical exhortations and insinuations were of the feeblest, but to an isolated young man, yearning for the tenderness of a woman thinking but of her grievances, the ointment brought comfort.
It soothed him during his march to and away from Ambrose Mallard’s grave; where it seemed to him curious and even pitiable that Chumley Potts should be so inconsolably shaken. Well, and if the priests have the secret of strengthening the backbone for a bend of the knee in calamity, why not go to the priests, Chummy? Potts’s hearing was not addressed; nor was the chief person in the meditation affected by a question that merely jumped out of his perturbed interior.
Business at Calesford kept Fleetwood hanging about London several days further; and his hatred of a place he wasted time and money to decorate grew immeasurable. It distorted the features of the beautiful woman for whose pleasure the grand entertainments to be held there had, somewhere or other—when felon spectres were abroad over earth—been conceived.
He could then return to Esslemont. Gower was told kindly, with intentional coldness, that he could take a seat in the phaeton if he liked; and he liked, and took it. Anything to get to that girl of his!
Whatever the earl’s inferiors did, their inferior station was not suffered to discolour it for his judgement. But an increasing antagonism to Woodseer’s philosophy—which the fellow carried through with perpetual scorings of satisfaction—caused him to set a hard eye on the damsel under the grisly spotting shadow of the sottish bruiser, of whom, after once touching the beast, he could not rub his hands clean; and he chose to consider the winning of the prize-fighter’s lass the final triumph or flag on the apex of the now despised philosophy. Vain to ask how he had come to be mixed up with the lot, or why the stolidly conceited, pretentious fellow had seat here, as by right, beside him! We sow and we reap; ‘plant for sugar and taste the cane,’ some one says—this Woodseer, probably; he can, when it suits him, tickle the ears of the worldlings. And there is worthier stuff to remember; stuff to nourish: Feltre’s ‘wisdom of our fathers,’ rightly named Religion.
More in the country, when he traversed sweep and rise of open land, Carinthia’s image began to shine, and she threw some of her light on Madge, who made Woodseer appear tolerable, sagacious, absurdly enviable, as when we have the fit to wish we were some four-foot. The fellow’s philosophy wore a look of practical craft.
He was going to the girl he liked, and she was, one could swear, an honest girl; and she was a comely girl, a girl to stick to a man. Her throwing over a sot was creditable. Her mistress loved her. That said much for any mortal creature. Man or woman loved by Carinthia could not be cowardly, could not be vile, must have high qualities. Next to Religion, she stood for a test of us. Had she any strong sense of Religion, in addition to the formal trooping to one of their pallid Protestant churches? Lord Feltre might prove useful to her. For merely the comprehension of the signification of Religion steadies us. It had done that for him, the earl owned.
He broke a prolonged silence by remarking to Gower ‘You haven’t much to say to-day’; and the answer was ‘Very little. When I’m walking, I’m picking up; and when I’m driving, I’m putting together.’
Gower was rallied on the pursuit of the personal object in both cases. He pointed at sheep, shepherd, farmer, over the hedge, all similarly occupied; and admitted shamelessly, that he had not a thought for company, scarce a word to fling. ‘Ideas in gestation are the dullest matter you can have.’
‘There I quite agree with you,’ said Fleetwood. Abrane, Chummy Potts, Brailstone, little Corby, were brighter comrades. And these were his Ixionides! Hitherto his carving of a way in the world had been sufficiently ill-considered. Was it preferable to be a loutish philosopher? Since the death of Ambrose Mallard, he felt Woodseer’s title for that crew grind harshly; and he tried to provoke a repetition of it, that he might burst out in wrathful defence of his friends—to be named friends when they were vilified: defence of poor Ambrose at least, the sinner who, or one as bad, might have reached to pardon through the priesthood.
Gower offered him no chance..
Entering Esslemont air, Fleetwood tossed his black mood to the winds. She breathed it. She was a mountain girl, and found it hard to forgive our lowlands. She would learn tolerance, taking her flights at seasons. The yacht, if she is anything of a sailor, may give her a taste of England’s pleasures. She will have a special allowance for distribution among old Mr. Woodseer’s people. As to the rest of the Countess of Fleetwood’s wishes, her family ranks with her husband’s in claims of any kind on him. There would be—she would require and had a right to demand—say, a warm half-hour of explanations: he knew the tone for them, and so little did he revolve it apprehensively, that his mind sprang beyond, to the hearing from her mouth of her not intending further to ‘guard her rooms.’ How quietly the words were spoken! There was a charm in the retrospect of her mouth and manner. One of the rare women who never pout or attitudinize, she could fling her glove gracefully—one might add, capturingly under every aspect, she was a handsome belligerent. The words he had to combat pleased his memory. Some good friend, Lady Arpington probably, had instructed her in the art of dressing to match her colour.
Concerning himself, he made no stipulation, but he reflected on Lord Feltre’s likely estimate of her as a bit of a heathen. And it might be to her advantage, were she and Feltre to have some conversations. Whatever the faith, a faith should exist, for without the sentiment of religion, a woman, he says, is where she was when she left the gates of Eden. A man is not much farther. Feltre might have saved Ambrose Mallard. He is, however, right in saying, that the woman with the sentiment of religion in her bosom is a box of holy incense distinguishing her from all other women. Empty of it, she is devil’s bait. At best, she is a creature who cannot overlook an injury, or must be exacting God knows what humiliations before she signs the treaty.
Informed at the house that her ladyship had been staying up on Croridge for the last two days, Fleetwood sent his hardest shot of the eyes at Gower. Let her be absent: it was equal to the first move of war, and absolved him from contemplated proposals to make amends. But the enforced solitary companionship with this ruminator of a fellow set him asking whether the godless dog he had picked up by the wayside was not incarnate another of the sins he had to expiate. Day after day, almost hourly, some new stroke fell on him. Why? Was he selected for persecution because he was wealthy? The Fates were driving him in one direction, no doubt of that.
This further black mood evaporated, and like a cessation of English storm-weather bequeathed him gloom. Ashamed of the mood, he was nevertheless directed by its final shadows to see the ruminating tramp in Gower, and in Madge the prize-fighter’s jilt: and round about Esslemont a world eyeing an Earl of Fleetwood, who painted himself the man he was, or was held to be, by getting together such a collection, from the daughter of the Old Buccaneer to the ghastly corpse of Ambrose Mallard. Why, clearly, wealth was the sole origin and agent of the mischief. With somewhat less of it, he might have walked in his place among the nation’s elect, the ‘herd of the gilt horns,’ untroubled by ambitions and ideas.
Arriving thus far, he chanced to behold Gower and Madge walking over the grounds near the western plantation, and he regretted the disappearance of them, with the fellow talking hard into the girl’s ear. Those two could think he had been of some use. The man pretending to philosophical depth was at any rate honest; one could swear to the honesty of the girl, though she had been a reckless hussy. Their humble little hopes and means to come to union approached, after a fashion, hymning at his ears. Those two were pleasanter to look on than amorous lords and great ladies, who are interesting only when they are wicked.
Four days of desolate wanderings over the estate were occupied chiefly in his decreeing the fall of timber that obstructed views, and was the more imperatively doomed for his bailiff’s intercession. ‘Sound wood’ the trees might be: they had to assist in defraying the expense of separate establishments. A messenger to Queeney from Croridge then announced the Countess’s return ‘for a couple of hours.’ Queeney said it was the day when her ladyship examined the weekly bills of the household. That was in the early morning. The post brought my lord a letter from Countess Livia, a most infrequent writer. She had his word to pay her debts; what next was she for asking? He shrugged, opened the letter, and stared at the half dozen lines. The signification of them rapped on his consciousness of another heavy blow before he was perfectly intelligent.
All possible anticipation seemed here outdone: insomuch that he held palpable evidence of the Fates at work to harass and drive him. She was married to the young Earl of Cressett!’
Fleetwood printed the lines on his eyeballs. They were the politely flowing feminine of a statement of the fact, which might have been in one line. They flourished wantonly: they were deadly blunt. And of all men, this youngster, who struck at him through her lips with the reproach, that he had sped the good-looking little beast upon his road to ruin:—perhaps to Ambrose Mallard’s end!