CHAPTER XLIII. ON THE ROAD TO THE ACT OF PENANCE
His customary wrestle with the night drove Lord Fleetwood in the stillness of the hour after matins from his hated empty Esslemont up again to the village of the long-lived people, enjoying the moist earthiness of the air off the ironstone. He rode fasting, a good preparatory state for the simple pleasures, which are virtually the Great Nourisher’s teats to her young. The earl was relieved of his dejection by a sudden filling of his nostrils. Fat Esslemont underneath had no such air. Except on the mornings of his walk over the Salzkammergut and Black Forest regions, he had never consciously drawn that deep breath of the satisfied rapture, charging the whole breast with thankfulness. Huntsmen would know it, if the chase were not urgent to pull them at the tail of the running beast. Once or twice on board his yacht he might have known something like it, but the salt sea-breeze could not be disconnected from his companion Lord Feltre, and a thought of Feltre swung vapour of incense all about him. Breathing this air of the young sun’s kiss of earth, his invigoration repelled the seductions of the burnt Oriental gums.
Besides, as he had told his friend, it was the sincerity of the Catholic religion, not the seductiveness, that won him to a form of homage—the bend of the head of a foreign observer at a midnight mass. Asceticism, though it may not justify error, is a truth in itself, it is the essence extracted of the scourge, flesh vanquished; and it stands apart from controversy. Those monks of the forested mountain heights, rambling for their herbs, know the blessedness to be found in mere breathing: a neighbour readiness to yield the breath inspires it the more. For when we do not dread our end, the sense of a free existence comes back to us: we have the prized gift to infancy under the piloting of manhood. But before we taste that happiness we must perform our penance; ‘No living happiness can be for the unclean,’ as the holy father preached to his flock of the monastery dispersing at matins.
Ay, but penance? penance? Is there not such a thing as the doing of penance out of the Church, in the manly fashion? So to regain the right to be numbered among the captains of the world’s fighting men, incontestably the best of comrades, whether or no they led away on a cataract leap at the gates of life. Boldly to say we did a wrong will clear our sky for a few shattering peals.
The penitential act means, youth put behind us, and a steady course ahead. But, for the keeping of a steady course, men made of blood in the walks of the world must be steadied. Say it plainly-mated. There is the humiliating point of our human condition. We must have beside us and close beside us the woman we have learned to respect; supposing ourselves lucky enough to have found her; ‘that required other scale of the human balance,’ as Woodseer calls her now he has got her, wiser than Lord Feltre in reference to men and women. We get no balance without her. That is apparently the positive law; and by reason of men’s wretched enslavement, it is the dance to dissolution when we have not honourable union with women. Feltre’s view of women sees the devilish or the angelical; and to most men women are knaves or ninnies. Hence do we behold rascals or imbeciles in the offspring of most men.
He embraced the respected woman’s character, with the usual effect:—to see with her sight; and she beheld a speckled creature of the intermittent whims and moods and spites; the universal Patron, whose ambition to be leader of his world made him handle foul brutes—corrupt and cause their damnation, they retort, with curses, in their pangs. She was expected to pardon the husband, who had not abstained from his revenge on her for keeping him to the pledge of his word. And what a revenge!—he had flung the world at her. She is consequently to be the young bride she was on the memorable morning of the drive off these heights of Croridge down to thirty-acre meadow! It must be a saint to forgive such offences; and she is not one, she is deliciously not one, neither a Genevieve nor a Griselda. He handed her the rod to chastise him. Her exchange of Christian names with the Welshman would not do it; she was too transparently sisterly, provincially simple; she was, in fact, respected. Any whipping from her was child’s play to him, on whom, if he was to be made to suffer, the vision of the intense felicity of austerest asceticism brought the sensation as bracingly as the Boreal morning animates men of high blood in ice regions. She could but gently sting, even if vindictive.
Along the heights, outside the village, some way below a turn of the road to Lekkatts, a gentleman waved hand. The earl saluted with his whip, and waited for him.
‘Nothing wrong, Mr. Wythan?’
‘Nothing to fear, my lord.’
‘I get a trifle uneasy.’
‘The countess will not leave her brother.’
A glow of his countess’s friendliness for this open-faced, prompt-speaking, good fellow of the faintly inky eyelids, and possibly sheepish inclinations, melted Fleetwood. Our downright repentance of misconduct toward a woman binds us at least to the tolerant recognition of what poor scraps of consolement she may have picked up between then and now—when we can stretch fist in flame to defy it on the oath of her being a woman of honour.
The earl alighted and said: ‘Her brother, I suspect, is the key of the position.’
‘He’s worth it—she loves her brother,’ said Mr. Wythan, betraying a feature of his quick race, with whom the reflection upon a statement is its lightning in advance.
Gratified by the instant apprehension of his meaning, Fleetwood interpreted the Welshman’s. ‘I have to see the brother worthy of her love. Can you tell me the hour likely to be convenient?’.....
Mr. Wythan thought an appointment unnecessary which conveyed the sufficient assurance of audience granted.
‘You know her brother well, Mr. Wythan?’
‘Know him as if I had known him for years. They both come to the mind as faith comes—no saying how; one swears by them.’
Fleetwood eyed the Welsh gentleman, with an idea that he might readily do the same by him.
Mr. Wythan’s quarters were at the small village inn, whither he was on his way to breakfast. The earl slipped an arm through the bridle reins and walked beside him, listening to an account of the situation at Lekkatts. It was that extraordinary complication of moves and checks which presents in the main a knot, for the powers above to cut. A miserly old lord withholds arrears of wages; his workmen strike at a critical moment; his nephew, moved by common humanity, draws upon crippled resources to supply their extremer needs, though they are ruining his interests. They made one night a demonstration of the terrorizing sort round Lekkatts, to give him a chorus; and the old lord fired at them out of window and wounded a man. For that they vowed vengeance. All the new gunpowder milled in Surrey was, for some purpose of his own, stored by Lord Levellier on the alder island of the pond near his workshops, a quarter of a mile below the house. They refused, whatever their object, to let a pound of it be moved, at a time when at last the Government had undertaken to submit it to experiments. And there they stood on ground too strong for ‘the Captain,’ as they called him, to force, because of the quantity stored at Lekkatts being largely beyond the amount under cover of Lord Levellier’s licence. The old lord was very ill, and he declined to see a doctor, but obstinately kept from dying. His nephew had to guard him and at the same time support an enemy having just cause of complaint. This, however, his narrow means would not much longer permit him to do. The alternative was then offered him of either siding arbitrarily against the men and his conscience or of taking a course ‘imprudent on the part of a presumptive heir,’ Mr. Wythan said hurriedly at the little inn’s doorsteps.
‘You make one of his lordship’s guard?’ said Fleetwood.
‘The countess, her brother, and I, yes’
‘Danger at all?’
‘Not so much to fear while the countess is with us.’
‘Fear is not a word for Carinthia.’
Her name on the earl’s lips drew a keen shot of the eye from Mr. Wythan, and he read the signification of the spoken name. ‘You know what every Cambrian living thinks of her, my lord.’
‘She shall not have one friend the less for me.’
Fleetwood’s hand was out for a good-bye, and the hand was grasped by one who looked happy in doing it. He understood and trusted the man after that, warmed in thinking how politic his impulses could be.
His intention of riding up to Croridge at noon to request his interview with Mr. Kirby-Levellier was then stated.
‘The key of the position, as you said,’ Mr. Wythan remarked, not proffering an opinion of it more than was expressed by a hearty, rosy countenance, that had to win its way with the earl before excuse was found for the venturesome repetition of his phrase.
Cantering back to that home of the loves of Gower Woodseer and Madge Winch, the thought of his first act of penance done, without his feeling the poorer for it, reconciled Fleetwood to the aspect of the hollow place.
He could not stay beneath the roof. His task of breakfasting done, he was off before the morning’s delivery of letters, riding round the country under Croridge, soon up there again. And Henrietta might be at home, he was reminded by hearing band-music as he followed the directions to the house named Stoneridge. The band consisted of eight wind instruments; they played astonishingly well for itinerant musicians. By curious chance, they were playing a selection from the Pirata; presently he heard the notes to ‘il mio tradito amor.’ They had hit upon Henrietta’s favourite piece!
At the close of it he dismounted, flung the reins to his groom, and, addressing a compliment to the leader, was deferentially saluted with a ‘my lord.’ Henrietta stood at the window, a servant held the door open for him to enter; he went in, and the beautiful young woman welcomed him: ‘Oh, my dear lord, you have given me such true delight! How very generous of you!’ He protested ignorance. She had seen him speak to the conductor and receive the patron’s homage; and who but he knew her adored of operas, or would have had the benevolent impulse to think of solacing her exile from music in the manner so sure of her taste! She was at her loveliest: her features were one sweet bloom, as of the sunny flower garden; and, touched to the heart by the music and the kindness, she looked the look that kisses; innocently, he felt, feeling himself on the same good ground while he could own he admired the honey creature, much as an amateur may admire one of the pictures belonging to the nation.
‘And you have come...?’ she said. ‘We are to believe in happy endings?’
He shrugged, as the modest man should, who says:
‘If it depends on me’; but the words were firmly spoken and could be credited.
‘Janey is with her brother down at Lekkatts. Things are at a deadlock. A spice of danger, enough to relieve the dulness; and where there is danger Janey’s at home.’ Henrietta mimicked her Janey. ‘Parades with her brother at night; old military cap on her head; firearms primed; sings her Austrian mountain songs or the Light Cavalry call, till it rings all day in my ears—she has a thrilling contralto. You are not to think her wild, my lord. She’s for adventure or domesticity, “whichever the Fates decree.” She really is coming to the perfect tone.’
‘Speak of her,’ said the earl. ‘She can’t yet overlook...?’
‘It’s in the family. She will overlook anything her brother excuses.’
‘I’m here to see him.’
‘I heard it from Mr. Wythan.’
‘“Owain,” I believe?’
Henrietta sketched apologies, with a sidled head, soft pout, wavy hand. ‘He belongs to the order of primitive people. His wife—the same pattern, one supposes—pledged them to their Christian names. The man is a simpleton, but a gentleman; and Janey holds his dying wife’s wish sacred. We are all indebted to him.’
‘Whatever she thinks right!’ said Fleetwood.
The fair young woman’s warm nature flew out to him on a sparkle of grateful tenderness in return for his magnanimity, oblivious of the inflamer it was: and her heart thanked him more warmly, without the perilous show of emotion, when she found herself secure.
She was beautiful, she was tempting, and probably the weakest of players in the ancient game of two; and clearly she was not disposed to the outlaw game; was only a creature of ardour. That he could see, seeing the misinterpretation a fellow like Brailstone would put upon a temporary flush of the feminine, and the advantage he would take of it, perhaps not unsuccessfully—the dog! He committed the absurdity of casting a mental imprecation at the cunning tricksters of emotional women, and yelled at himself in the worn old surplice of the converted rake. But letting his mind run this way, the tradito amor of the band outside the lady’s window was instantly traced to Lord Brailstone; so convincingly, that he now became a very counsel for an injured husband in denunciation of the seductive compliment.
Henrietta prepared to conduct him to Lekkatts; her bonnet was brought. She drew forth a letter from a silken work-bag, and raised it,—Livia’s handwriting. ‘I ‘ve written my opinion,’ he said.
‘Not too severe, pray.’
‘Posted.’
‘Livia wanted a protector.’
‘And chose—what on earth are you saying!’
Livia and her boyish lord were abandoned on the spot, though Henrietta could have affirmed stoutly that there was much to be pleaded, if a female advocate dared it, and a man would but hear.
His fingers were at the leaves of a Spanish dictionary.
‘Oh yes, and here we have a book of Travels in Spain,’ she said. ‘Everything Spanish for Janey now. You are aware?—no?’
He was unaware and desired to be told.
‘Janey’s latest idea; only she would have conceived the notion. You solve our puzzle, my lord.’
She renewed the thanks she persisted in offering for the military music now just ceasing: vexatiously, considering that it was bad policy for him to be unmasking Brailstone to her. At the same time, the blindness which rendered her unconscious of Brailstone’s hand in sending members of a military band to play selections from the favourite opera they had jointly drunk of to ecstasy, was creditable; touching, when one thought of the pursuer’s many devices, not omitting some treason on the part of her present friend.
‘Tell me—I solve?’ he said....
Henrietta spied the donkey-basket bearing the two little ones.
‘Yes, I hope so—on our way down,’ she made answer. ‘I want you to see the pair of love-birds in a nest.’
The boy and girl were seen lying side by side, both fast asleep; fair-haired girl, dark-haired boy, faced to one another.
‘Temper?’ said Fleetwood, when he had taken observation of them.
‘Very imperious—Mr. Boy!’ she replied, straightening her back under a pretty frown, to convey the humour of the infant tyrant.
The father’s mind ran swiftly on a comparison of the destinies of the two children, from his estimate of their parents; many of Gower Woodseer’s dicta converging to reawaken thoughts upon Nature’s laws, which a knowledge of his own nature blackened. He had to persuade himself that this child of his was issue of a loving union; he had to do it violently, conjuring a vivid picture of the mother in bud, and his recognition of her young charm; the pain of keeping to his resolve to quit her, lest she should subjugate him and despoil him of his wrath; the fatalism in his coming and going; the romantic freak it had been,—a situation then so clearly wrought, now blurred past comprehension. But there must have been love, or some love on his part. Otherwise he was bound to pray for the mother to predominate in the child, all but excluding its father.
Carinthia’s image, as a result, ascended sovereignty, and he hung to it.
For if we are human creatures with consciences, nothing is more certain than that we make our taskmasters of those to whom we have done a wrong, the philosopher says. Between Lord Feltre and Gower Woodseer, influenced pretty equally by each of them, this young nobleman was wakening to the claims of others—Youth’s infant conscience. Fleetwood now conceived the verbal supplication for his wife’s forgiveness involved in the act of penance; and verbal meant abject; with him, going so far, it would mean naked, precise, no slurring. That he knew, and a tremor went over him. Women, then, are really the half of the world in power as much as in their number, if men pretend to a step above the savage. Or, well, his wife was a power.
He had forgotten the puzzle spoken of by Henrietta, when she used the word again and expressed her happiness in the prospect before them—caused by his presence, of course.
‘You are aware, my dear lord, Janey worships her brother. He was defeated, by some dastardly contrivance, in a wager to do wonderful feats—for money! money! money! a large stake. How we come off our high horses! I hadn’t an idea of money before I was married. I think of little else. My husband has notions of honour; he engaged himself to pay a legacy of debts; his uncle would not pay debts long due to him. He was reduced to the shift of wagering on his great strength and skill. He could have done it. His enemy managed—enemy there was! He had to sell out of the army in consequence. I shall never have Janey’s face of suffering away from my sight. He is a soldier above all things. It seems hard on me, but I cannot blame him for snatching at an opportunity to win military distinction. He is in treaty for the post of aide to the Colonel—the General of the English contingent bound for Spain, for the cause of the Queen. My husband will undertake to be at the orders of his chief as soon as he can leave this place. Janey goes with him, according to present arrangements.’
Passing through a turnstile, that led from the road across a meadow-slope to the broken land below, Henrietta had view of the earl’s hard white face, and she hastened to say: ‘You have altered that, my lord. She is devoted to her brother; and her brother running dangers... and danger in itself is an attraction to her. But her husband will have the first claim. She has her good sense. She will never insist on going, if you oppose. She will be ready to fill her station. It will be-her pride and her pleasure.’
Henrietta continued in the vein of these assurances; and Carinthia’s character was shooting lightnings through him, withering that of the woman who referred to his wife’s good sense and her station; and certainly would not have betrayed herself by such drawlings if she had been very positive that Carinthia’s disposition toward wealth and luxury resembled hers. She knew the reverse; or so his contemptuously generous effort to frame an apology for the stuff he was hearing considered it. His wife was lost to him. That fact smote on his breast the moment he heard of her desire to go with her brother.
Wildest of enterprises! But a criminal saw himself guilty of a large part in the disaster the two heroical souls were striving desperately to repair. If her Chillon went, Carinthia would go—sure as flame is drawn to air. The exceeding splendour in the character of a young woman, injured as she had been, soft to love, as he knew her, and giving her husband no other rival than a beloved brother, no ground of complaint save her devotion to her brother, pervaded him, without illuminating or lifting; rather with an indication of a foul contrast, that prostrated him.
Half of our funny heathen lives we are bent double to gather things we have tossed away! was one of the numbers of apposite sayings that hummed about him, for a chorus of the world’s old wisdom in derision, when he descended the heathy path and had sight of Carinthia beside her Chillon. Would it be the same thing if he had it in hand again? Did he wish it to be the same? Was not he another man? By the leap of his heart to the woman standing down there, he was a better man.
But recent spiritual exercises brought him to see superstitiously how by that sign she was lost to him; for everlastingly in this life the better pays for the worse; thus is the better a proved thing.
Both Chillon and Carinthia, it is probable, might have been stirred to deeper than compassion, had the proud young nobleman taken them into his breast to the scouring of it; exposing the grounds of his former brutality, his gradual enlightenment, his ultimate acknowledgement of the pricelessness of the woman he had won to lose her. An imploring of forgiveness would not have been necessary with those two, however great their—or the woman’s—astonishment at the revelation of an abysmal male humanity. A complete exposure of past meanness is the deed of present courage certain of its reward without as well as within; for then we show our fellows that the slough is cast. But life is a continuous fight; and members of the social world display its degree of civilization by fighting in armour; most of them are born in it; and their armour is more sensitive than their skins. It was Fleetwood’s instinct of his inability to fling it off utterly which warned him of his loss of the wife, whose enthusiasm to wait on her brother in danger might have subsided into the channel of duty, even tenderness, had he been able resolutely to strip himself bare. This was the further impossible to him, because of a belief he now imposed upon himself, to cover the cowardly shrinking from so extreme a penitential act, that such confessions are due from men to the priest only, and that he could confess wholly and absolutely to the priest—to heaven, therefore, under seal, and in safety, but with perfect repentance.
So, compelled to keep his inner self unknown, he fronted Chillon; courteously, in the somewhat lofty seeming of a guarded manner, he requested audience for a few minutes; observing the princely figure of the once hated man, and understanding Henrietta’s sheer womanly choice of him; Carinthia’s idolatry, too, as soon as he had spoken. The man was in his voice.
Chillon said: ‘It concerns my sister, I have to think. In that case, her wish is to be present. Your lordship will shorten the number of minutes for the interview by permitting it.’
Fleetwood encountered Carinthia’s eyes. They did not entreat or defy. They seconded her brother, and were a civil shining naught on her husband. He bowed his head, constrained, feeling heavily the two to one.
She replied to the look: ‘My brother and I have a single mind. We save time by speaking three together, my lord.’
He was led into the long room of the workshop, where various patterns of muskets, rifles, pistols, and swords were stars, crosses, wedges, over the walls, and a varnished wooden model of a piece of cannon occupied the middle place, on a block.
Contempt of military weapons and ridicule of the art of war were common on those days among a people beginning to sit with habitual snugness at the festive board provided for them by the valour of their fathers. Fleetwood had not been on the side of the banqueting citizens, though his country’s journals and her feasted popular wits made a powerful current to whelm opposition. But the appearance of the woman, his wife, here, her head surrounded by destructive engines in the form of trophy, and the knowledge that this woman bearing his name designed to be out at the heels of a foreign army or tag-rag of uniformed rascals, inspired him to reprobate men’s bad old game as heartily as good sense does in the abstract, and as derisively as it is the way with comfortable islanders before the midnight trumpet-notes of panic have tumbled them to their legs. He took his chair; sickened.
He was the next moment taking Carinthia’s impression of Chillon, compelled to it by an admiration that men and women have alike for shapes of strength in the mould of grace, over whose firm build a flicker of agility seems to run. For the young soldier’s figure was visibly in its repose prompt to action as the mind’s movement. This was her brother; her enthusiasm for her brother was explained to him. No sooner did he have the conception of it than it plucked at him painfully; and, feeling himself physically eclipsed by the object of Carinthia’s enthusiasm, his pride of the rival counselled him to preserve the mask on what was going on within, lest it should be seen that he was also morally beaten at the outset. A trained observation told him, moreover, that her Chillon’s correctly handsome features, despite their conventional urbanity, could knit to smite, and held less of the reserves of mercy behind them than Carinthia’s glorious barbaric ruggedness. Her eyes, each time she looked at her brother, had, without doating, the light as of the rise of happy tears to the underlids as they had on a certain day at the altar, when ‘my lord’ was ‘my husband,’—more shyly then. He would have said, as beautifully, but for envy of the frank, pellucid worship in that look on her proved hero. It was the jewel of all the earth to win back to himself; and it subjected him, through his desire for it, to a measurement with her idol, in character, quality, strength, hardness. He heard the couple pronouncing sentence of his loss by anticipation.
Why had she primed her brother to propose the council of three? Addressing them separately, he could have been his better or truer self. The sensation of the check imposed on him was instructive as to her craft and the direction of her wishes. She preferred the braving of hazards and horrors beside her brother, in scorn of the advantages he could offer; and he yearned to her for despising by comparison the bribe he proposed in the hope that he might win her to him. She was with religion to let him know the meanness of wealth.
Thus, at the edge of the debate, or contest, the young lord’s essential nobility disarmed him; and the revealing of it, which would have appealed to Carinthia and Chillon both, was forbidden by its constituent pride, which helped him to live and stood obstructing explanatory speech.
CHAPTER XLIV. BETWEEN THE EARL, THE COUNTESS AND HER BROTHER, AND OF A SILVER CROSS
Carinthia was pleased by hearing Lord Fleetwood say to her: ‘Your Madge and my Gower are waiting to have the day named for them.’
She said: ‘I respect him so much for his choice of Madge. They shall not wait, if I am to decide.’
‘Old Mr. Woodseer has undertaken to join them.’
‘It is in Whitechapel they will be married.’
The blow that struck was not intended, and Fleetwood passed it, under her brother’s judicial eye. Any small chance word may carry a sting for the neophyte in penitence.
‘My lawyers will send down the settlement on her, to be read to them to-day or to-morrow. With the interest on that and the sum he tells me he has in the Funds, they keep the wolf from the door—a cottage door. They have their cottage. There’s an old song of love in a cottage. His liking for it makes him seem wiser than his clever sayings. He’ll work in that cottage.’
‘They have a good friend to them in you, my lord. It will not be poverty for their simple wants. I hear of the little cottage in Surrey where they are to lodge at first, before they take one of their own.’
‘We will visit them.’
‘When I am in England I shall visit them often.’
He submitted.
‘The man up here wounded is recovering?’
‘Yes, my lord. I am learning to nurse the wounded, with the surgeon to direct me.’
‘Matters are sobering down?—The workmen?’
‘They listen to reason so willingly when we speak personally, we find.’
The earl addressed Chillon. ‘Your project of a Spanish expedition reminds me of favourable reports of your chief.’
‘Thoroughly able and up to the work,’ Chillon answered.
‘Queer people to meddle with.’
‘We ‘re on the right side on the dispute.’
‘It counts, Napoleon says. A Spanish civil war promises bloody doings.’
‘Any war does that.’
‘In the Peninsula it’s war to the knife, a merciless business.’
‘Good schooling for the profession.’
Fleetwood glanced: she was collected and attentive. ‘I hear from Mrs. Levellier that Carinthia would like to be your companion.’
‘My sister has the making of a serviceable hospital nurse.’
‘You hear the chatter of London!’
‘I have heard it.’
‘You encourage her, Mr. Levellier?’
‘She will be useful—better there than here, my lord.’
‘I claim a part in the consultation.’
‘There ‘s no consultation; she determines to go.’
‘We can advise her of all the risks.’
‘She has weighed them, every one.’
‘In the event of accidents, the responsibility for having persuaded her would rest on you.’
‘My brother has not persuaded me,’ Carinthia’s belltones intervened. ‘I proposed it. The persuasion was mine. It is my happiness to be near him, helping, if I can.’
‘Lady Fleetwood, I am entitled to think that your brother yielded to a request urged in ignorance of the nature of the risks a woman runs.’
‘My brother does not yield to a request without examining it all round, my lord, and I do not. I know the risks. An evil that we should not endure,—life may go. There can be no fear for me.’
She spoke plain truth. The soul of this woman came out in its radiance to subdue him, as her visage sometimes did; and her voice enlarged her words. She was a warrior woman, Life her sword, Death her target, never to be put to shame, unconquerable. No such symbolical image smote him, but he had an impression, the prose of it. As in the scene of the miners’ cottares, her lord could have knelt to her: and for an unprotesting longer space now. He choked a sigh, shrugged, and said, in the world’s patient manner with mad people: ‘You have set your mind on it; you see it rose-coloured. You would not fear, no, but your friends would have good reason to fear. It’s a menagerie in revolt over there. It is not really the place for you. Abandon the thought, I beg.’
‘I shall, if my brother does not go,’ said Carinthia.
Laughter of spite at a remark either silly or slyly defiant was checked in Fleetwood by the horror of the feeling that she had gone, was ankle-deep in bloody mire, captive, prey of a rabble soldiery, meditating the shot or stab of the blessed end out of woman’s half of our human muddle.
He said to Chillon: ‘Pardon me, war is a detestable game. Women in the thick of it add a touch to the brutal hideousness of the whole thing.’
Chillon said: ‘We are all of that opinion. Men have to play the game; women serving in hospital make it humaner.’
‘Their hospitals are not safe.’
‘Well! Safety!’
For safety is nowhere to be had. But the earl pleaded: ‘At least in our country.’
‘In our country women are safe?’
‘They are, we may say, protected.’
‘Laws and constables are poor protection for them.’
‘The women we name ladies are pretty safe, as a rule.’
‘My sister, then, was the exception.’
After a burning half minute the earl said: ‘I have to hear it from you, Mr. Levellier. You see me here.’
That was handsomely spoken. But Lord Fleetwood had been judged and put aside. His opening of an old case to hint at repentance for brutality annoyed the man who had let him go scathless for a sister’s sake.
‘The grounds of your coming, my lord, are not seen; my time is short.’
‘I must, I repeat, be consulted with regard to Lady Fleetwood’s movements.’
‘My sister does not acknowledge your claim.’
‘The Countess of Fleetwood’s acts involve her husband.’
‘One has to listen at times to what old sailors call Caribbee!’ Chillon exclaimed impatiently, half aloud. ‘My sister received your title; she has to support it. She did not receive the treatment of a wife:—or lady, or woman, or domestic animal. The bond is broken, as far as it bears on her subjection. She holds to the rite, thinks it sacred. You can be at rest as to her behaviour. In other respects, your lordship does not exist for her.’
‘The father of her child must exist for her.’
‘You raise that curtain, my lord!’
In the presence of three it would not bear a shaking.
Carinthia said, in pity of his torture:—
‘I have my freedom, and am thankful for it, to follow my brother, to share his dangers with him. That is more to me than luxury and the married state. I take only my freedom.’
‘Our boy? You take the boy?’
‘My child is with my sister Henrietta!
‘Where?’
‘We none know yet.’
‘You still mistrust me?’
Her eyes were on a man that she had put from her peaceably; and she replied, with sweetness in his ears, with shocks to a sinking heart, ‘My lord, you may learn to be a gentle father to the child. I pray you may. My brother and I will go. If it is death for us, I pray my child may have his father, and God directing his father.’
Her speech had the clang of the final.
‘Yes, I hope—if it be the worst happening, I pray, too,’ said he, and drooped and brightened desperately: ‘But you, too, Carinthia, you could aid by staying, by being with the boy and me. Carinthia!’ he clasped her name, the vapour left to him of her: ‘I have learnt learnt what I am, what you are; I have to climb a height to win back the wife I threw away. She was unknown to me; I to myself nearly as much. I sent a warning of the kind of husband for you—a poor kind; I just knew myself well enough for that. You claimed my word—the blessing of my life, if I had known it! We were married; I played—I see the beast I played. Money is power, they say. I see the means it is to damn the soul, unless we—unless a man does what I do now.’
Fleetwood stopped. He had never spoken such words—arterial words, as they were, though the commonest, and with moist brows, dry lips, he could have resumed, have said more, have taken this woman, this dream of the former bride, the present stranger, into his chamber of the brave aims and sentenced deeds. Her brother in the room was the barrier; and she sat mute, large-eyed, expressionless. He had plunged low in the man’s hearing; the air of his lungs was thick, hard to breathe, for shame of a degradation so extreme.
Chillon imagined him to be sighing. He had to listen further. ‘Soul’ had been an uttered word. When the dishonouring and mishandling brute of a young nobleman stuttered a compliment to Carinthia on her ‘faith in God’s assistance and the efficacy of prayer,’ he jumped to his legs, not to be shouting ‘Hound!’ at him. He said, under control: ‘God’s name shall be left to the Church. My sister need not be further troubled. She has shown she is not persuaded by me. Matters arranged here quickly,—we start. If I am asked whether I think she does wisely to run the risks in an insurrectionary country rather than remain at home exposed to the honours and amusements your lordship offers, I think so; she is acting in her best interests. She has the choice of being abroad with me or staying here unguarded by me. She has had her experience. She chooses rightly. Paint the risks she runs, you lay the colours on those she escapes.’ She thanks the treatment she has undergone for her freedom to choose. I am responsible for nothing but the not having stood against her most wretched marriage. It might have been foreseen. Out there in the war she is protected. Here she is with—I spare your lordship the name.’
Fleetwood would have heard harsher had he not been Carinthia’s husband. He withheld his reply. The language moved him to proud hostility: but the speaker was Carinthia’s brother.
He said to her: ‘You won’t forget Gower and Madge?’
She gave him a smile in saying: ‘It shall be settled for a day after next week.’
The forms of courtesy were exchanged.
At the closing of the door on him, Chillon said: ‘He did send a message: I gathered it—without the words—from our Uncle Griphard. I thought him in honour bound to you—and it suited me that I should.’
‘I was a blindfold girl, dearest; no warning would have given me sight,’ said Carinthia. ‘That was my treachery to the love of my brother.. I dream of father and mother reproaching me.’
The misery of her time in England had darkened her mind’s picture of the early hour with Chillon on the heights above the forsaken old home; and the enthusiasm of her renewed devotion to her brother giving it again, as no light of a lost Eden, as the brilliant step she was taking with him from their morning Eastern Alps to smoky-crimson Pyrenees and Spanish Sierras; she could imagine the cavernous interval her punishment for having abandoned a sister’s duties in the quest of personal happiness.
But simultaneously, the growing force of her mind’s intelligence, wherein was no enthusiasm to misdirect by overcolouring, enabled her to gather more than a suspicion of comparative feebleness in the man stripped of his terrors. She penetrated the discrowned tyrant’s nature some distance, deep enough to be quit of her foregoing alarms. These, combined with his assured high style, had woven him the magical coat, threadbare to quiet scrutiny. She matched him beside her brother. The dwarfed object was then observed; and it was not for a woman to measure herself beside him. She came, however, of a powerful blood, and he was pressing her back on her resources: without the measurement or a thought of it, she did that which is the most ordinary and the least noticed of our daily acts in civilized intercourse, she subjected him to the trial of the elements composing him, by collision with what she felt of her own; and it was because she felt them strongly, aware of her feeling them, but unaware of any conflict, that the wrestle occurred. She flung him, pitied him, and passed on along her path elsewhere. This can be done when love is gone. It is done more or less at any meeting of men and men; and men and women who love not are perpetually doing it, unconsciously or sensibly. Even in their love, a time for the trial arrives among certain of them; and the leadership is assumed, and submission ensues, tacitly; nothing of the contention being spoken, perhaps, nothing definitely known.
In Carinthia’s case, her revived enthusiasm for her brother drove to the penetration of the husband pleading to thwart its course. His offer was wealth: that is, luxury, amusement, ease. The sub-audible ‘himself’ into the bargain was disregarded, not counting with one who was an upward rush of fire at the thought that she was called to share her brother’s dangers.
Chillon cordially believed the earl to be the pestilent half madman, junction with whom is a constant trepidation for the wife, when it is not a screaming plight. He said so, and Carinthia let him retain his opinion. She would have said it herself to support her scheme, though ‘mad’ applied to a man moving in the world with other men was not understood by her.
With Henrietta for the earl’s advocate, she was patient as the deaf rock-wall enthusiam can be against entreaties to change its direction or bid it disperse: The ‘private band of picked musicians’ at the disposal of the Countess of Fleetwood, and Opera singers (Henrietta mentioned resonant names) hired for wonderful nights at Esslemont and Calesford or on board the earl’s beautiful schooner yacht, were no temptation. Nor did Henrietta’s allusions to his broken appearance move his wife, except in her saying regretfully: ‘He changes.’
On the hall table at Esslemont, a letter from his bankers informed the earl of a considerable sum of money paid in to his account in the name of Lord Brailstone. Chumley Potts, hanging at him like a dog without a master since the death of his friend Ambrose, had journeyed down: ‘Anxious about you,’ he said. Anxious about or attracted by the possessor of Ambrose Mallard’s ‘clean sweeper,’ the silver-mounted small pistol; sight of which he begged to have; and to lengthened his jaw on hearing it was loaded. A loaded pistol, this dark little one to the right of the earl’s blotting-pad and pens, had the look of a fearful link with his fallen chaps and fishy hue. Potts maundered moralities upon ‘life,’ holding the thing in his hand, weighing it, eyeing the muzzle. He ‘couldn’t help thinking of what is going to happen to us after it all’: and ‘Brosey knows now!’ was followed by a twitch of one cheek and the ejaculation ‘Forever!’ Fleetwood alive and Ambrose dead were plucking the startled worldling to a peep over the verge into our abyss; and the young lord’s evident doing of the same commanded Chumley Potts’ imitation of him under the cloud Ambrose had become for both of them.
He was recommended to see Lord Feltre, if he had a desire to be instructed on the subject of the mitigation of our pains in the regions below. Potts affirmed that he meant to die a Protestant Christian. Thereupon, carrying a leaden burden of unlaughed laughable stuff in his breast, and Chummy’s concluding remark to speed him: ‘Damn it, no, we’ll stick to our religion!’ Fleetwood strode off to his library, and with the names of the Ixionides of his acquaintance ringing round his head, proceeded to strike one of them off the number privileged at the moment to intrude on him. Others would follow; this one must be the first to go. He wrote the famous letter to Lord Brailstone, which debarred the wily pursuer from any pretext to be running down into Mrs. Levellier’s neighbourhood, and also precluded the chance of his meeting the fair lady at Calesford. With the brevity equivalent to the flick of a glove on the cheek, Lord Brailstone was given to understand by Lord Fleetwood that relations were at an end between them. No explanation was added; a single sentence executed the work, and in the third person. He did not once reflect on the outcry in the ear of London coming from the receiver of such a letter upon payment of a debt.
The letter posted and flying, Lord Fleetwood was kinder to Chumley Potts; he had a friendly word for Gower Woodseer; though both were heathens, after their diverse fashions, neither of them likely ever to set out upon the grand old road of Rome: Lord Feltre’s ‘Appian Way of the Saints and Comforters.’
Chummy was pardoned when they separated at night for his reiterated allusions to the temptation of poor Ambrose Mallard’s conclusive little weapon lying on the library table within reach of a man’s arm-chair: in its case, and the case locked, yes, but easily opened, ‘provoking every damnable sort of mortal curiosity!’ The soundest men among us have their fits of the blues, Fleetwood was told. ‘Not wholesome!’ Chummy shook his head resolutely, and made himself comprehensibly mysterious. He meant well. He begged his old friend to promise he would unload and keep it unloaded. ‘For I know the infernal worry you have—deuced deal worse than a night’s bad luck!’ said he; and Fleetwood smiled sourly at the world’s total ignorance of causes. His wretchedness was due now to the fact that the aforetime huntress refused to be captured. He took a silver cross from a table-drawer and laid it on the pistol-case. ‘There, Chummy,’ he said; that was all; not sermonizing or proselytizing. He was partly comprehended by Chumley Potts, fully a week later. The unsuspecting fellow, soon to be despatched in the suite of Brailstone, bore away an unwontedly affectionate dismissal to his bed, and spoke some rather squeamish words himself, as he recollected with disgust when he ran about over London repeating his executioner’s.
The Cross on the pistol-case may have conduced to Lord Fleetwood’s thought, that his days among unrepentant ephemeral Protestant sinners must have their immediate termination. These old friends were the plague-infected clothes he flung off his body. But the Cross where it lay, forbidding a movement of the hand to that box, was authoritative to decree his passage through a present torture, by the agency of the hand he held back from the solution of his perplexity, at the cost which his belief in the Eternal would pay. Henrietta had mentioned her husband’s defeat, by some dastardly contrivance. He had to communicate, for the disburdening of his soul, not only that he was guilty, but the meanest of criminals, in being no more than half guilty. His training told him of the contempt women entertain toward the midway or cripple sinner, when they have no special desire to think him innocent. How write, or even how phrase his having merely breathed in his ruffian’s hearing the wish that he might hear of her husband’s defeat! And with what object? Here, too, a woman might, years hence, if not forgive, bend her head resignedly over the man’s vile nature, supposing strong passion his motive. But the name for the actual motive? It would not bear writing, or any phrasing round it. An unsceptred despot bidden take a fair woman’s eyes into his breast, saw and shrank. And now the eyes were Carinthia’s: he saw a savage bridegroom, and a black ladder-climber, and the sweetest of pardoning brides, and the devil in him still insatiate for revenge upon her who held him to his word.
He wrote, read, tore the page, trimmed the lamp, and wrote again. He remembered Gower Woodseer’s having warned him he would finish his career a monk. Not, like Feltre, an oily convert, but under the hood, yes, and extracting a chartreuse from his ramble through woods richer far than the philosopher’s milk of Mother Nature’s bosom. There flamed the burning signal of release from his torments; there his absolving refuge, instead of his writing fruitless, intricate, impossible stuff to a woman. The letter was renounced and shredded: the dedicated ascetic contemplated a hooded shape, washed of every earthly fleck. It proved how men may by power of grip squeeze raptures out of pain.
CHAPTER XLV. CONTAINS A RECORD OF WHAT WAS FEARED, WHAT WAS HOPED, AND WHAT HAPPENED
The Dame is at her thumps for attention to be called to ‘the strangeness of it,’ that a poor, small, sparse village, hardly above a hamlet, on the most unproductive of Kentish heights, part of old forest land, should at this period become ‘the cynosure of a city beautifully named by the poet Great Augusta, and truly indeed the world’s metropolis.’
Put aside her artful pother to rouse excitement at stages of a narrative, London’s general eye upon little Croridge was but another instance of the extraordinary and not so wonderful. Lady Arpington, equal to a Parliament in herself, spoke of the place and the countess courted by her repentant lord. Brailstone and Chumley Potts were town criers of the executioner letter each had received from the earl; Potts with his chatter of a suicide’s pistol kept loaded in a case under a two-inch-long silver Cross, and with sundry dramatic taps on the forehead, Jottings over the breast, and awful grimace of devoutness. There was no mistaking him. The young nobleman of the millions was watched; the town spyglass had him in its orbit. Tales of the ancestral Fleetwoods ran beside rumours of a Papist priest at the bedside of the Foredoomed to Error’s dying mother. His wealth was counted, multiplied by the ready naughts of those who know little and dread much. Sir Meeson Corby referred to an argument Lord Fleetwood had held on an occasion hotly against the logical consistency of the Protestant faith; and to his alarm lest some day ‘all that immense amount of money should slip away from us to favour the machinations of Roman Catholicism!’ The Countess of Cressett, Livia, anticipated her no surprise at anything Lord Fleetwood might do: she knew him.
So thereupon, with the whirr of a covey on wing before the fowler, our crested three of immemorial antiquity and a presumptive immortality, the Ladies Endor, Eldritch, and Cowry, shot up again, hooting across the dormant chief city Old England’s fell word of the scarlet shimmer above the nether pit-flames, Rome. An ancient horror in the blood of the population, conceiving the word to signify, beak, fang, and claw, the fiendish ancient enemy of the roasting day of yore, heard and echoed. Sleepless at the work of the sapper, in preparation for the tiger’s leap, Rome is keen to spy the foothold of English stability, and her clasp of a pillar of the structure sends tremors to our foundations.
The coupling of Rome and England’s wealthiest nobleman struck a match to terrorize the Fire Insurance of Smithfield. That meteoric, intractable, perhaps wicked, but popular, reputedly clever; manifestly evil-starred, enormously wealthy, young Earl of Fleetwood, wedded to an adventuress, and a target for the scandals emanating from the woman, was daily, without omission of a day, seen walking Piccadilly pavement in company once more with the pervert, the Jesuit agent, that crafty Catesby of a Lord Feltre, arm in arm the pair of them, and uninterruptedly conversing, utterly unlike Englishmen. Mr. Rose Mackrell passed them, and his breezy salutation of the earl was unobserved in my lord’s vacant glass optics, as he sketched the scene. London had report of the sinister tempter and the imperilled young probationer undisguisedly entering the Roman Catholic chapel of a fashionable district-chapel erected on pervert’s legacies, down a small street at the corner of a grandee square, by tolerance or connivance of our constabulary,—entering it linked; and linked they issued, their heads bent; for the operation of the tonsure, you would say. Two English noblemen! But is there no legislation to stop the disease? Our female government asks it vixenly of our impotent male; which pretends, beneath an air of sympathy, that we should abstain from any compulsory action upon the law to interfere, though the situation is confessedly grave; and the aspect men assume is correspondingly, to the last degree provokingly, grave-half alive that they are, or void of patriotism, or Babylonian at heart!
Lord Fleetwood’s yet undocked old associates vowed he ‘smelt strong’ of the fumes of the whirled silver censer-balls. His disfavour had caused a stoppage of supplies, causing vociferous abomination of their successful rivals, the Romish priests. Captain Abrane sniffed, loud as a horse, condemnatory as a cat, in speaking of him. He said: ‘By George, it comes to this; we shall have to turn Catholics for a loan!’ Watchdogs of the three repeated the gigantic gambler’s melancholy roar. And, see what gap, cried the ratiocination of alarm, see the landslip it is in our body, national and religious, when exalted personages go that way to Rome!
As you and the world have reflected in your sager moods, an ordinary pebble may roll where it likes, for individualism of the multitudinously obscure little affects us. Not so the costly jewel, which is a congregation of ourselves, in our envies and longings and genuflexions thick about its lustres. The lapses of precious things must needs carry us, both by weight and example, and it will ceaselessly be, that we are possessed by the treasure we possess, we hang on it. A still, small voice of England’s mind under panic sent up these truisms containing admonitions to the governing Ladies. They, the most conservative of earthly bodies, clamoured in return, like cloud-scud witches that have caught fire at their skirts from the torches of marsh-fire radicals. They cited for his arrest the titled millionaire who made a slide for the idiots of the kingdom; they stigmatized our liberty as a sophistry, unless we have in it the sustaining element of justice; and where is the justice that punishes his country for any fatal course a mad young Croesus may take! They shackled the hands of testators, who endangered the salvation of coroneted boys by having sanction to bequeath vast wealth in bulk. They said, in truth, that it was the liberty to be un-Christian. Finally, they screeched a petitioning of Parliament to devote a night to a sitting, and empower the Lord Chancellor to lay an embargo on the personal as well as the real estate of wealthy perverts; in common prudence depriving Rome of the coveted means to turn our religious weapons against us.
The three guardian ladies and their strings of followers headed over the fevered and benighted town, as the records of the period attest, windpiping these and similar Solan notes from the undigested cropful of alarms Lord Fleetwood’s expected conduct crammed into them. They and all the world traced his present madness to the act foregoing: that marriage! They reviewed it to deplore it, every known incident and the numbers imagined; yet merely to deplore: frightful comparisons of then with now rendered the historical shock to the marriage market matter for a sick smile. Evil genius of some sort beside him the wealthy young nobleman is sure to have. He has got rid of one to take up with a viler. First, a sluttish trollop of German origin is foisted on him for life; next, he is misled to abjure the faith of his fathers for Rome. But patently, desperation in the husband of such a wife weakened his resistance to the Roman Catholic pervert’s insinuations. There we punctuate the full stop to our inquiries; we have the secret.
And upon that, suddenly comes a cyclonic gust; and gossip twirls, whines, and falls to the twanging of an entirely new set of notes, that furnish a tolerably agreeable tune, on the whole. O hear! The Marchioness of Arpington proclaims not merely acquaintanceship with Lord Fleetwood’s countess, she professes esteem for the young person. She has been heard to say, that if the Principality of Wales were not a royal title, a dignity of the kind would be conferred by the people of those mountains on the Countess of Fleetwood: such unbounded enthusiasm there was for her character when she sojourned down there. As it is, they do speak of her in their Welsh by some title. Their bards are offered prizes to celebrate her deeds. You remember the regiment of mounted Welsh gentlemen escorting her to her Kentish seat, with their band of the three-stringed harps! She is well-born, educated, handsome, a perfectly honest woman, and a sound Protestant. Quite the reverse of Lord Fleetwood’s seeking to escape her, it is she who flies; she cannot forgive him his cruelties and infidelities: and that is the reason why he threatens to commit the act of despair. Only she can save him! She has flown for refuge to her uncle, Lord Levellier’s house at a place named Croridge—not in the gazetteer—hard of access and a home of poachers, where shooting goes on hourly; but most picturesque and romantic, as she herself is! Lady Arpington found her there, nursing one of the wounded, and her uncle on his death-bed; obdurate all round against her husband, but pensive when supplicated to consider her country endangered by Rome. She is a fervent patriot. The tales of her Whitechapel origin, and heading mobs wielding bludgeons, are absolutely false, traceable to scandalizing anecdotists like Mr. Rose Mackrell. She is the beautiful example of an injured wife doing honour to her sex in the punishment of a faithless husband, yet so little cherishing her natural right to deal him retribution, that we dare hope she will listen to her patriotic duty in consenting to the reconcilement, which is Lord Fleetwood’s alternative: his wife or Rome! They say she has an incommunicable charm, accounting for the price he puts on her now she holds aloof and he misses it. Let her but rescue him from England’s most vigilant of her deadly enemies, she will be entitled to the nation’s lasting gratitude. She has her opportunity for winning the Anglican English, as formerly she won the Dissenter Welsh. She may yet be the means of leading back the latter to our fold.
A notation of the cries in air at a time of surgent public excitement can hardly yield us music; and the wording of them, by the aid of compounds and transplants, metaphors and similes only just within range of the arrows of Phoebus’ bow (i.e. the farthest flight known), would, while it might imitate the latent poetry, expose venturesome writers to the wrath of a people commendably believing their language a perfected instrument when they prefer the request for a plateful, and commissioning their literary police to brain audacious experimenters who enlarge or wing it beyond the downright aim at that mark. The gossip of the time must therefore appear commonplace, in resemblance to the panting venue a terre of the toad, instead of the fiery steed’s; although we have documentary evidence that our country’s heart was moved;—in no common degree, Dr. Glossop’s lucid English has it, at the head of a broadsheet ballad discovered by him, wherein the connubially inclined young earl and the nation in turn beseech the countess to resume her place at Esslemont, and so save both from a terrific dragon’s jaw, scarlet as the infernal flames; described as fascinating—
‘The classes with the crests,
And the lining to their vests,
Till down they jump, and empty leave
A headless trunk that rests.’
These ballads, burlesque to present reading, mainly intended for burlesque by the wits who dogged without much enlivening an anxious period of our history, when corner-stones were falling the way the young lord of the millions threatened to go, did, there is little doubt, according to another part of their design (Rose Mackrell boasts it indirectly in his Memoirs), interpret public opinion, that is, the English humour of it—the half laugh in their passing and not simulated shudder.
Carinthia had a study of the humours of English character in the person of the wounded man she nursed on little Croridge, imagining it the most unobserved of English homes, and herself as unimportant an object. Daniel Charner took his wound, as he took his medicine and his posset from her hand, kindly, and seemed to have a charitable understanding of Lord Levellier now that the old nobleman had driven a pellet of lead into him and laid him flat. It pleased him to assure her that his mates were men of their word, and had promised to pay the old lord with a ‘rouse’ for it, nothing worse. Her father used to speak of the ‘clean hearts of the English’ as to the husbanding of revenge; that is, the ‘no spot of bad blood’ to vitiate them. Captain John Peter seconded all good-humoured fighters ‘for the long account’: they will surely win; and it was one of his maxims: ‘My foe can spoil my face; he beats me if he spoils my temper.’
Recalling the scene of her bridal day—the two strong Englishmen at the shake of hands, that had spoiled one another’s faces, she was enlightened with a comprehension of her father’s love for the people; seeing the spiritual of the gross ugly picture, as not every man can do, and but a warrior Joan among women. Chillon shall teach the Spanish people English heartiness, she thought. Lord Fleetwood’s remarks on the expedition would have sufficed to stamp it righteous with her; that was her logic of the low valuation of him. She fancied herself absolutely released at his departure. Neither her sister Riette nor her friend Owain, administering sentiment and common sense to her by turns, could conceive how the passion for the recovery of her brother’s military name fed the hope that she might aid in it, how the hope fed the passion. She had besides her hunger to be at the work she could do; her Chillon’s glory for morning sky above it.
Such was the mind Lady Arpington brought the world’s wisdom to bear upon; deeming it in the end female only in its wildness and obstinacy. Carinthia’s answers were few, barely varied. Her repetition of ‘my brother’ irritated the great lady, whose argument was directed to make her see that these duties toward her brother were primarily owing to her husband, the man she would reclaim and could guide. And the Countess of Fleetwood’s position, her duty to society, her dispensing of splendid hospitality, the strengthening of her husband to do his duty to the nation, the saving of him from a fatal step-from Rome; these were considerations for a reasonable woman to weigh before she threw up all to be off on the maddest of adventures. ‘Inconceivable, my dear child!’ Lady Arpington proceeded until she heard herself as droning.
Carinthia’s unmoved aspect of courteous attention appeared to invoke the prolongation of the sermon it criticized. It had an air of reversing their positions while she listened to the charge of folly, and incidentally replied.
Her reason for not fearing Roman Catholic encroachments was, she said, her having known good Catholics in the country she came from. For herself, she should die professing the faith of her father and mother. Behind her correct demeanour a rustic intelligence was exhibited. She appreciated her duty to her marriage oath: ‘My husband’s honour is quite safe with me.’ Neither England nor religion, nor woman’s proper devotion to a husband’s temporal and spiritual welfare, had claims rivalling her devotion to her brother. She could not explain a devotion that instigated her to an insensate course. It seemed a kind of enthusiasm; and it was coldly spoken; in the tone referring to ‘her husband’s honour.’ Her brother’s enterprise had her approval because ‘her mother’s prayer was for him to serve in the English army.’ By running over to take a side in a Spanish squabble? she was asked and answered: ‘He will learn war; my Chillon will show his value; he will come back a tried soldier.’
She counted on his coming back? She did.
‘I cannot take a step forward without counting on success. We know the chances we are to meet. My father has written of death. We do not fear it, so it is nothing to us. We shall go together; we shall not have to weep for one another.’
The strange young woman’s avoidance of any popular sniffle of the pathetic had a recognized merit.
‘Tell me,’ Lady Arpington said abruptly; ‘this maid of yours, who is to marry the secretary, or whatever he was—you are satisfied with her?’
‘She is my dear servant Madge.’ A cloud opened as Carinthia spoke the name. ‘She will be a true wife to him. They will always be my friends!’
Nothing against the earl in that direction, apparently; unless his countess was blest with the density of frigidity.
Society’s emissary sketched its perils for unprotected beautiful woman; an outline of the London quadrille Henrietta danced in; and she glanced at Carinthia and asked: ‘Have you thought of it?’
Carinthia’s eyes were on the great lady’s. Their meaning was, ‘You hit my chief thought.’ They were read as her farthest thought. For the hint of Henrietta’s weakness deadened her feelings with a reminder of warm and continued solicitations rebutted; the beautiful creature’s tortures at the idea of her exile from England. An outwearied hopelessness expressed a passive sentiment very like indifference in the clear wide gaze. She replied: ‘I have. My proposal to her was Cadiz, with both our young ones. She will not.’
And there is an end to that part of the question! Lady Arpington interpreted it, by the gaze more than the words, under subjection of the young woman’s character. Nevertheless, she bore away Carinthia’s consent to a final meeting with the earl at her house in London, as soon as things were settled at Croridge. Chillon, whom she saw, was just as hard, unforgiving, careless of his country’s dearest interests; brother and sister were one heart of their one blood. She mentioned the general impression in town, that the countess and only she could save the earl from Rome. A flash of polite laughter was Chillon’s response. But after her inspection of the elegant athlete, she did fancy it possible for a young wife, even for Henrietta, to bear his name proudly in his absence—if that was worth a moment’s consideration beside the serious issues involved in her appeal to the countess; especially when the suggestion regarding young wives left unprotected, delicately conveyed to the husband, had failed of its purpose. The handsome husband’s brows fluttered an interrogation, as if her clear-obscure should be further lighted; and it could not be done. He weighed the wife by the measure of the sister, perhaps; or his military head had no room for either. His callousness to the danger of his country’s disintegration, from the incessant, becoming overt, attacks of a foreign priesthood might—an indignant great lady’s precipitation to prophecy said would—bring chastisement on him. She said it, and she liked Henrietta, vowing to defeat her forecast as well as she could in a land seeming forsaken by stable principles; its nobles breaking up its national church, going over to Rome, embracing the faith of the impostor Mahomet.
Gossip fed to the starvation bone of Lady Arpington’s report, until one late afternoon, memorable for the breeding heat in the van of elemental artillery, newsboys waved damp sheets of fresh print through the streets, and society’s guardians were brought to confess, in shame and gladness, that they had been growing sceptical of the active assistance of Providence. At first the ‘Terrible explosion of gunpowder at Croridge’ alarmed them lest the timely Power should have done too much. A day later the general agitation was pacified; Lady Arpington circulated the word ‘safe,’ and the world knew the disaster had not engulphed Lady Fleetwood’s valuable life. She had the news by word of mouth from the lovely Mrs. Kirby-Levellier, sister-in-law to the countess. We are convinced we have proof of Providence intervening when some terrific event of the number at its disposal accomplishes the thing and no more than the thing desired. Pitiful though it may seem for a miserly old lord to be blown up in his bed, it is necessarily a subject of congratulation if the life, or poor remnant of a life, sacrificed was an impediment to our righteous wishes. But this is a theme for the Dame, who would full surely have committed another breach of the treaty, had there not been allusion to her sisterhood’s view of the government of human affairs.
On the day preceding the catastrophe, Chillon’s men returned to work. He and Carinthia and Mr. Wythan lunched with Henrietta at Stoneridge. Walking down to Lekkatts, they were astounded to see the figure of the spectral old lord on the plank to the powder store, clad in his long black cloak, erect. He was crossing, he told them, to count his barrels; a dream had disturbed him. Chillon fell to rapid talk upon various points of business, and dispersed Lord Levellier’s memory relating to his errand. Leaning on Carinthia’s arm, he went back to the house, where he was put to bed in peace of mind. His resuscitated physical vigour blocked all speculation for the young people assembled at Stoneridge that night. They hardly spoke; they strangled thoughts forming as larvae of wishes. Henrietta would be away to Lady Arpington’s next day, Mr. Wythan to Wales. The two voyagers were sadder by sympathy than the two whom they were leaving to the clock’s round of desert sameness. About ten at night Chillon and Mr. Wythan escorted Carinthia, for the night’s watch beside her uncle, down to Lekkatts. It was midway that the knocks on air, as of a muffled mallet at a door and at farther doors of caverns, smote their ears and shook the ground.
After an instant of the silence following a shock, Carinthia touched her brother’s arm; and Chillon said:
‘Not my powder!’
They ran till they had Lekkatts in sight. A half moon showed the house; it stood. Fifty paces below, a column of opal smoke had begun to wreathe and stretch a languid flag. The ‘rouse’ promised to Lord Levellier by Daniel Charner’s humorous mates had hit beyond its aim. Intended to give him a start—or ‘One-er in return,’ it surpassed his angry shot at the body of them in effect.
Carinthia entered his room and saw that he was lying stretched restfully. She whispered of this to Chillon, and began upon her watch, reading her Spanish phrasebook; and she could have wept, if she had been a woman for tears. Her duty to stay in England with Chillon’s fair wife crossed the beckoning pages like a black smoke. Her passion to go and share her brother’s dangers left the question of its righteousness at each fall of the big breath.
Her uncle’s grey head on his pillow was like a flintstone in chalk under her look by light of dawn; the chin had dropped.