CHAPTER XV. OPENING STAGE OF THE HONEYMOON
A famous maxim in the book of the Old Buccaneer, treating of PRECAUTION, as ‘The brave man’s clean conscience,’ with sound counsel to the adventurous, has it:—
‘Then you sail away into the tornado, happy as a sealed bottle of ripe wine.’
It should mean, that brave men entering the jaws of hurricanes are found to have cheerful hearts in them when they know they have done their best. But, touching the picture of happiness, conceive the bounteous Bacchic spirit in the devoutness of a Sophocles, and you find comparison neighbour closely between the sealed wine-flask and the bride, who is being driven by her husband to the nest of the unknown on her marriage morn.
Seated beside him, with bosom at heave and shut mouth, in a strange land, travelling cloud-like, rushing like the shower-cloud to the vale, this Carinthia, suddenly wedded, passionately grateful for humbleness exalted, virginly sensible of treasures of love to give, resembled the inanimate and most inspiring, was mindless and inexpressive, past memory, beyond the hopes, a thing of the thrilled blood and skylark air, since she laid her hand in this young man’s. His not speaking to her was accepted. Her blood rather than recollection revived their exchanges during the dance at Baden, for assurance that their likings were one, their aims rapturously one; that he was she, she he, the two hearts making one soul.
Could she give as much as he? It was hardly asked. If we feel we can give our breath of life, the strength of the feeling fully answers. It bubbles perpetually from the depth like a well-spring in tumult. Two hearts that make one soul do not separately count their gifts.
For the rest, her hunger to admire disposed her to an absorbing sentience of his acts; the trifles, gestures, manner of this and that; which were seized as they flew, and swiftly assimilated to stamp his personality. Driving was the piece of skill she could not do. Her husband’s mastery of the reins endowed him with the beauty of those harmonious trotters he guided and kept to their pace; and the humming rush of the pace, the smooth torrent of the brown heath-knolls and reddish pits and hedge-lines and grass-flats and copses pouring the counter-way of her advance, belonged to his wizardry. The bearing of her onward was her abandonment to him. Delicious as mountain air, the wind sang; it had a song of many voices. Quite as much as on the mountains, there was the keen, the blissful, nerve-knotting catch of the presence of danger in the steep descents, taken as if swallowed, without swerve or check. She was in her husband’s hands. At times, at the pitch of a rapid shelving, that was like a fall, her heart went down; and at the next throb exalted before it rose, not reasoning why;—her confidence was in him; she was his comrade whatever chanced. Up over the mountain-peaks she had known edged moments, little heeded in their passage, when life is poised as a crystal pitcher on the head, in peril of a step. Then she had been dependent on herself. Now she had the joy of trusting to her husband.
His hard leftward eye had view of her askant, if he cared to see how she bore the trial; and so relentlessly did he take the slopes, that the man inside pushed out an inquiring pate, the two grooms tightened arms across their chests. Her face was calmly set, wakeful, but unwrinkled: the creature did not count among timid girls—or among civilized. She had got what she wanted from her madman—mad in his impulses, mad in his reading of honour. She was the sister of Henrietta’s husband. Henrietta bore the name she had quitted. Could madness go beyond the marrying of the creature? He chafed at her containment, at her courage, her silence, her withholding the brazen or the fawnish look-up, either of which he would have hated.
He, however, was dragged to look down. Neither Gorgon nor Venus, nor a mingling of them, she had the chasm of the face, recalling the face of his bondage, seen first that night at Baden. It recalled and it was not the face; it was the skull of the face, or the flesh of the spirit. Occasionally she looked, for a twinkle or two, the creature or vision she had been, as if to mock by reminding him. She was the abhorred delusion, who captured him by his nerves, ensnared his word—the doing of a foul witch. How had it leapt from his mouth? She must have worked for it. The word spoken—she must have known it—he was bound, or the detested Henrietta would have said: Not even true to his word!
To see her now, this girl, insisting to share his name, for a slip of his tongue, despite the warning sent her through her uncle, had that face much as a leaden winter landscape pretends to be the country radiant in colour. She belonged to the order of the variable animals—a woman indeed!—womanish enough in that. There are men who love women—the idea of woman. Woman is their shepherdess of sheep. He loved freedom, loathed the subjection of a partnership; could undergo it only in adoration of an ineffable splendour. He had stepped to the altar fancying she might keep to her part of the contract by appearing the miracle that subdued him. Seen by light of day, this bitter object beside him was a witch without her spells; that is, the skeleton of the seductive, ghastliest among horrors and ironies. Let her have the credit of doing her work thoroughly before the exposure. She had done it. She might have helped—such was the stipulation of his mad freak in consenting to the bondage—yes, she might have helped to soften the sting of his wound. She was beside him bearing his name, for the perpetual pouring of an acid on the wound that vile Henrietta—poisoned honey of a girl!—had dealt.
He glanced down at his possession:—heaven and the yawning pit were the contrast! Poisoned honey is after all honey while you eat it. Here there was nothing but a rocky bowl of emptiness. And who was she? She was the sister of Henrietta’s husband. He was expected to embrace the sister of Henrietta’s husband. Those two were on their bridal tour.
This creature was also the daughter of an ancient impostor and desperado called the Old Buccaneer; a distinguished member of the family of the Lincolnshire Kirbys, boasting a present representative grimly acquitted, men said, on a trial for murder. An eminent alliance! Society considered the Earl of Fleetwood wildish, though he could manage his affairs. He and his lawyers had them under strict control. How of himself? The prize of the English marriage market had taken to his bosom for his winsome bride the daughter of the Old Buccaneer. He was to mix his blood with the blood of the Lincolnshire Kirbys, lying pallid under the hesitating acquittal of a divided jury.
How had he come to this pass, which swung him round to think almost regretfully of the scorned multitude of fair besiegers in the market, some of whom had their unpoetic charms?
He was renowned and unrivalled as the man of stainless honour: the one living man of his word. He had never broken it—never would. There was his distinction among the herd. In that, a man is princely above princes. The nobility of Edward Russett, Earl of Fleetwood, surpassed the nobility of common nobles. But, by all that is holy, he pays for his distinction.
The creature beside him is a franked issue of her old pirate of a father in one respect—nothing frightens her. There she sits; not a screw of her brows or her lips; and the coach rocked, they were sharp on a spill midway of the last descent. It rocks again. She thinks it scarce worth while to look up to reassure him. She is looking over the country.
‘Have you been used to driving?’ he said.
She replied: ‘No, it is new to me on a coach.’
Carinthia felt at once how wild the wish or half expectation that he would resume the glowing communion of the night which had plighted them.
She did not this time say ‘my husband,’ still it flicked a whip at his ears.
She had made it more offensive, by so richly toning the official title just won from him as to ring it on the nerves; one had to block it or be invaded. An anticipation that it would certainly recur haunted every opening of her mouth.
Now that it did not, he felt the gap, relieved, and yet pricked to imagine a mimicry of her tones, for the odd foreignness of the word and the sound. She had a voice of her own besides her courage. At the altar, her responses had their music. No wonder: the day was hers. ‘My husband’ was a manner of saying ‘my fish.’
He, spoke very civilly. ‘Oblige me by telling me what name you are accustomed to answer to.’
She seemed unaware of an Arctic husband, and replied: ‘My father called me Carin—short for Carinthia. My mother called me Janey; my second name is Jane. My brother Chillon says both. Henrietta calls me Janey.’
The creature appeared dead flesh to goads. But the name of her sister-in-law on her lips returned the stroke neatly. She spared him one whip, to cut him with another.
‘You have not informed me which of these names you prefer.’
‘Oh, my husband, it is as you shall please.’
Fleetwood smartened the trot of his team, and there was a to-do with the rakish leaders.
Fairies of a malignant humour in former days used to punish the unhappiest of the naughty men who were not favourites, by suddenly planting a hump on their backs. Off the bedevilled wretches pranced, and they kicked, they snorted, whinnied, rolled, galloped, outflying the wind, but not the dismal rider. Marriage is our incubus now. No explanation is offered of why we are afflicted; we have simply offended, or some one absent has offended, and we are handy. The spiteful hag of power ties a wife to us; perhaps for the reason, that we behaved in the spirit of a better time by being chivalrously honourable. Wives are just as inexplicable curses, just as ineradicable and astonishing as humps imposed on shapely backs.
Fleetwood lashed his horses until Carinthia’s low cry of entreaty rose to surprise. That stung him.
‘Leave the coachman to his devices: we have an appointment and must keep it,’ he said.
‘They go so willingly.’
‘Good beasts, in their way.’
‘I do not like the whip.’
‘I have the same objection.’
They were on the level of the vale, going along a road between farms and mansions, meadows and gardenplots and park-palings. A strong warm wind drove the pack of clouds over the tree-tops and charged at the branches. English scenery, animating air; a rouse to the blood and the mind. Carinthia did not ask for hues. She had come to love of the dark land with the warm lifting wind, the big trees and the hedges, and the stately houses, and people requiring to be studied, who mean well and are warm somewhere below, as chimneypots are, though they are so stiff.
English people dislike endearments, she had found. It might be that her husband disliked any show of fondness. He would have to be studied very much. He was not like others, as Henrietta had warned her. From thinking of him fervidly, she was already past the marvel of the thought that she called him husband. At the same time, a curious intimation, gathered she knew not whence, of the word ‘husband’ on a young wife’s lips as being a foreign sound in England, advised her to withhold it. His behaviour was instructing her.
‘Are you weather-wise?—able to tell when the clouds will hold off or pelt,’ he said, to be very civil to a neighbour.
She collected her understanding, apparently; treating a conversational run of the tongue as a question to be pondered; and the horses paid for it. Ordinarily he was gentle with his beasts. He lashed at her in his heart for perverting the humanest of men.
‘Father was,’ she replied.
‘Oh! I have heard of him.’
Her face lightened. ‘Father had a great name in England.’
‘The Old Buccaneer, I think.’
‘I do not know. He was a seaman of the navy, like Admiral Fakenham is. Weather at sea, weather on the mountains, he could foretell it always. He wrote a book; I have a copy you will read. It is a book of Maxims. He often speaks of the weather. English weather and women, he says. But not my mother. My mother he stood aside by herself—pas capricieuse du tout! Because she would be out in the weather and brave the weather. She rode, she swam, best of any woman. If she could have known you, what pleasure for me! Mother learnt to read mountain weather from father. I did it too. But sometimes on the high fields’ upper snows it is very surprising. Father has been caught. Here the cloud is down near the earth and the strong wind keeps the rain from falling. How long the wind will blow I cannot guess. But you love the mountains. We spoke... And mountains’ adventures we both love. I will talk French if you like, for, I think, German you do not speak. I may speak English better than French; but I am afraid of my English with you.’
‘Dear me!’ quoth Fleetwood, and he murmured politely and cursorily, attentive to his coachman business. She had a voice that clove the noise of the wheels, and she had a desire to talk—that was evident. Talk of her father set her prattling. It became clear also to his not dishonest, his impressionable mind, that her baby English might be natural. Or she was mildly playing on it, to give herself an air.
He had no remembrance of such baby English at Baden. There, however, she was in a state of enthusiasm—the sort of illuminated transparency they show at the end of fireworks. Mention of her old scapegrace of a father lit her up again. The girl there and the girl here were no doubt the same. It could not be said that she had duped him; he had done it for himself—acted on by a particular agency. This creature had not the capacity to dupe. He had armed a bluntwitted young woman with his idiocy, and she had dealt the stroke; different in scarce a degree by nature from other young women of prey.
But her look at times, and now and then her voice, gave sign that she counted on befooling him as well, to reconcile him to his bondage. The calculation was excessive. No woman had done it yet. Idiocy plunged him the step which reawakened understanding; and to keep his whole mind alert on guard against any sort of satisfaction with his bargain, he frankly referred to the cause. Not female arts, but nature’s impulses, it was his passion for the wondrous in the look of a woman’s face, the new morning of the idea of women in the look, and the peep into imaginary novel character, did the trick of enslaving him. Call it idiocy. Such it was. Once acknowledged, it is not likely to recur. An implacable reason sits in its place, with a keen blade for efforts to carry the imposture further afield or make it agreeable. Yet, after giving his word to Lord Levellier, he had prodded himself to think the burden of this wild young woman might be absurdly tolerable and a laugh at the world.
A solicitude for the animal was marked by his inquiry ‘You are not hungry yet?’
‘Oh no, not yet,’ said she, oddly enlivened.
They had a hamper and were independent of stoppages for provision, he informed her. What more delightful? cried her look, seeing the first mid-day’s rest and meal with Chillon on the walk over the mountain from their empty home.
She could get up enthusiasm for a stocked hamper! And when told of some business that drew him to a meadow they were nearing, she said she would be glad to help, if she could. ‘I learn quickly, I know.’
His head acquiesced. The daughter of the Old Buccaneer might learn the business quickly, perhaps; a singularly cutting smile was on his tight lips, in memory of a desire he had as a boy to join hands with an Amazonian damsel and be out over the world for adventures, comrade and bride as one. Here the creature sat. Life is the burlesque of young dreams; or they precipitate us on the roar and grin of a recognized beast world.
The devil possessing him gnawed so furiously that a partial mitigation of the pain was afforded by sight of waving hats on a hill-rise of the road. He flourished his whip. The hats continued at wind-mill work. It signified brisk news to him, and prospect of glee to propitiate any number of devils.
‘You will want a maid to attend on you,’ he said.
She replied: ‘I am not used to attendance on me. Henrietta’s maid would help. I did not want her. I had no maid at home. I can do for myself. Father and mother liked me to be very independent.’
He supposed he would have to hear her spelling her words out next.
The hill-top was gained; twenty paces of pretty trotting brought up the coach beside an inn porch, in the style of the finish dear to whips, and even imperative upon them, if they love their art. Two gentlemen stood in the road, and a young woman at the inn door; a dark-haired girl of an anxious countenance. Her puckers vanished at some signal from inside the coach.
‘All right, Madge; nothing to fear,’ Fleetwood called to her, and she curtseyed.
He alighted, saying to her, before he spoke to his friends: ‘I’ve brought him safe; had him under my eye the last four and twenty hours. He’ll do the trick to-day. You don’t bet?’
‘Oh! my lord, no.’
‘Help the lady down. Out with you, Ines!’
The light-legged barge-faced man touched ground capering. He was greeted ‘Kit’ by the pair of gentlemen, who shook hands with him, after he had faintly simulated the challenge to a jig with Madge. She flounced from him, holding her arms up to the lady. Landlord, landlady, and hostler besought the lady to stay for the fixing of a ladder. Carinthia stepped, leaped, and entered the inn, Fleetwood remarking:
‘We are very independent, Chummy Potts.’
‘Cordy bally, by Jove!’ Potts cried. But the moment after this disengaged ejaculation, he was taken with a bewilderment. ‘At the Opera?’ he questioned of his perplexity.
‘No, sir, not at the Opera,’ Fleetwood rejoined. ‘The lady’s last public appearance was at the altar.’
‘Sort of a suspicion of having seen her somewhere. Left her husband behind, has she?’
‘You see: she has gone in.’
The scoring of a proposition of Euclid on the forehead of Potts amused him and the other gentleman, who was hailed ‘Mallard!’ and cared nothing for problems involving the female of man when such work was to the fore as the pugilistic encounter of the Earl of Fleetwood’s chosen Kit Ines, with Lord Brailstone’s unbeaten and well-backed Ben Todds.
Ines had done pretty things from the age of seventeen to his twenty-third year. Remarkably clever things they were, to be called great in the annals of the Ring. The point, however, was, that the pockets of his backers had seriously felt his latest fight. He received a dog’s licking at the hands of Lummy Phelps, his inferior in skill, fighting two to one of the odds; and all because of his fatal addiction to the breaking of his trainer’s imposed fast in liquids on, the night before the battle. Right through his training, up to that hour, the rascal was devout; the majority’s money rattled all on the snug safe side. And how did he get at the bottle? His trainers never could say. But what made him turn himself into a headlong ass, when he had only to wait a night to sit among friends and worshippers drinking off his tumbler upon tumbler with the honours? It was past his wits to explain. Endurance of his privation had snapped in him; or else, which is more likely, this Genius of the Ring was tempted by his genius on the summit of his perfected powers to believe the battle his own, and celebrate it, as became a victor despising the drubbed antagonist.
In any case, he drank, and a minor man gave him the dog’s licking.. ‘Went into it puffy, came out of it bunged,’ the chronicle resounding over England ran. Old England read of an ‘eyeless carcase’ heroically stepping up to time for three rounds of mashing punishment. If he had won the day after all, the country would have been electrified. It sympathized on the side of his backers too much to do more than nod a short approval of his fortitude. To sink with flag flying is next to sinking the enemy. There was talk of a girl present at the fight, and of how she received the eyeless, almost faceless, carcase of her sweetheart Kit, and carried him away in a little donkey-cart, comfortably cushioned to meet disaster. This petty incident drew the attention of the Earl of Fleetwood, then beginning to be known as the diamond of uncounted facets, patron of the pick of all departments of manly activity in England.
The devotion of the girl Madge to her sweetheart was really a fine story. Fleetwood touched on it to Mr. Mallard, speaking of it like the gentleman he could be, while Chumley Potts wagged impatient acquiescence in a romantic episode of the Ring, that kept the talk from the hotter theme.
‘Money’s Bank of England to-day, you think?’ he interposed, and had his answer after Mallard had said:
‘The girl ‘s rather good-looking, too.’
‘You may double your bets, Chummy. I had the fellow to his tea at my dinner-table yesterday evening; locked him in his bedroom, and had him up and out for a morning spin at six. His trainer, Flipper’s on the field, drove from Esslemont at nine, confident as trumps.’
‘Deuce of a good-looking girl,’ Potts could now afford to say; and he sang out: ‘Feel fit, lucky dog?’
‘Concert pitch!’ was the declaration of Kit Ives.
‘How about Lord Brailstone’s man?’
‘Female partner in a quadrille, sir.’
‘Ah!’ Potts doated on his limbs with a butcher’s eye for prize joints.
‘Cock-sure has crowed low by sunset,’ Mallard observed.
Fleetwood offered him to take his bets.
‘You’re heavy on it with Brailstone?’ said Mallard.
‘Three thousand.’
‘I’d back you for your luck blindfold.’
A ruffle of sourness shot over the features of the earl, and was noticed by both eager betters, who exchanged a glance.
Potts inspected his watch, and said half aloud: ‘Liver, ten to one! That never meant bad luck—except bad to act on. We slept here last night, you know. It ‘s a mile and a quarter from the Royal Sovereign to the field of glory. Pretty well time to start. Brailstone has a drive of a couple of miles. Coaches from London down by this time. Abrane’s dead on Ben Todds, any odds. Poor old Braney! “Steady man, Todds.” Backs him because he’s a “respectable citizen,”—don’t drink. A prize-fighter total abstainer has no spurts. Old Braney’s branded for the losing side. You might bet against Braney blindfold, Mallard. How long shall you take to polish him off, Kit Ines?’
The opponent of Ben Todds calculated.
‘Well, sir, steady Benny ought to be satisfied with his dose in, say, about forty minutes. Maybe he won’t own to it before an hour and ten. He’s got a proud English stomach.’
‘Shall we be late?’ Potts asked.
‘Jump in,’ Fleetwood said to his man. ‘We may be five minutes after time, Chummy. I had a longer drive, and had to get married on the way, and—ah, here they are!’
‘Lady coming?’
‘I fancy she sticks to the coach; I don’t know her tastes. Madge must see her through it, that’s positive.’
Potts deferred his astonishment at the things he was hearing and seeing, which were only Fleetwood’s riddles. The fight and the bets rang every other matter out of his head. He beheld the lady, who had come down from the coach like a columbine, mount it like Bean-stalk Jack. Madge was not half so clever, and required a hand at her elbow.
After, giving hurried directions to Rundles, the landlord of the Royal Sovereign, Fleetwood took the reins, and all three gentlemen touched hats to the curtseying figure of Mrs. Rundles.
‘You have heard, I dare say—it’s an English scene,’ he spoke, partly turning his face, to Carinthia; ‘particularly select to-day. Their Majesties might look on, as the Caesars did in Rome. Pity we can’t persuade them. They ought to set the fashion. Here we have the English people at their grandest, in prime condition, if they were not drunk overnight; and dogged, perfectly awake, magnanimous, all for fair play; fine fellows, upon my word. A little blood, of course.’
But the daughter of the Old Buccaneer would have inherited a tenderness for the sight of blood. She should make a natural Lady Patroness of England’s National Sports. We might turn her to that purpose; wander over England with a tail of shouting riff-raft; have exhibitions, join in them, display our accomplishments; issue challenges to fence, shoot, walk, run, box, in time: the creature has muscle. It’s one way of crowning a freak; we follow the direction, since the deed done can’t be undone; and a precious poetical life, too! You may get as royally intoxicated on swipes as on choice wine; win a name for yourself as the husband of such a wife; a name in sporting journals and shilling biographies: quite a revival of the Peerage they have begun to rail at!
‘I would not wish to leave you,’ said Carinthia.
‘You have chosen,’ said Fleetwood.
CHAPTER XVI. IN WHICH THE BRIDE FROM FOREIGN PARTS IS GIVEN A TASTE OF OLD ENGLAND
Cheers at an open gate of a field saluted the familiar scarlet of the Earl of Fleetwood’s coach in Kentish land. They were chorister cheers, the spontaneous ringing out of English country hearts in homage to the nobleman who brightened the heaviness of life on English land with a spectacle of the noble art distinguishing their fathers. He drove along over muffling turf; ploughboys and blue butcher-boys, and smocked old men, with an approach to a hundred-weight on their heels, at the trot to right and left; all hoping for an occasional sight of the jewel called Kitty, that he carried inside. Kitty was there.
Kitty’s eyes are shut. Think of that: cradled innocence and angels’ dreams and the whole of the hymn just before ding-dong-bang on noses and jaws! That means confidence? Looks like it. But Kitty’s not asleep you try him. He’s only quiet because he has got to undergo great exertion. Last fight he was knocked out of time, because he went into it honest drunk, they tell. And the earl took him up, to give him a chance of recovering his good name, and that’s Christian. But the earl, he knows a man as well as a horse. He’s one to follow. Go to a fayte down at Esslemont, you won’t forget your day. See there, he’s brought a lady on the top o’ the coach. That seems for to signify he don’t expect it’s going to be much of a bloody business. But there’s no accounting. Anyhow, Broadfield ‘ll have a name in the papers for Sunday reading. In comes t’ other lord’s coach. They’ve timed it together closes they have.
They were pronounced to be both the right sort of noblemen for the country. Lord Brailstone’s blue coach rattled through an eastern gate to the corner of the thirty-acre meadow, where Lord Fleetwood had drawn up, a toss from the ring. The meeting of the blue and scarlet coaches drew forth Old England’s thunders; and when the costly treasures contained in them popped out heads, the moment was delirious. Kit Ines came after his head on a bound. Ben Todds was ostentatiously deliberate: his party said he was no dancing-master. He stepped out, grave as a barge emerging from a lock, though alive to the hurrahs of supporters and punctilious in returning the formal portion of his rival’s too roguish nod. Their look was sharp into the eyes, just an instant.
Brailstone and Fleetwood jumped to the grass and met, talking and laughing, precise upon points of business, otherwise cordial: plenipotentiaries of great powers, whom they have set in motion and bind to the ceremonial opening steps, according to the rules of civilized warfare. They had a short colloquy with newspaper reporters;—an absolutely fair, square, upright fight of Britons was to be chronicled. Captain Abrane, a tower in the crowd, registered bets whenever he could. Curricles, gigs, carts, pony-traps, boys on ponies, a swarm on legs, flowed to the central point and huddled there.
Was either champion born in Kent? An audacious boy proclaimed Kit Ines a man of Kent. Why, of course he was! and that was why the Earl of Fleetwood backed our cocky Kitty, and means to land him on the top of his profession. Ben Todds was shuffled aside; as one of their Londoners, destitute of county savour.
All very well, but have a spy at Benny Todds. Who looks the square man? And hear what that big gentleman of the other lord’s party says. A gentleman of his height and weight has a right to his opinion. He ‘s dead against Kit Ines: it’s fists, not feet, he says, ‘ll do it to-day; stamina, he says. Benny has got the stamina.
Todds’ possession of the stamina, and the grand voice of Captain Abrane, and the Father Christmas, roast-beef-of-Old England face of the umpire declared to be on the side of Lord Brailstone’s colour blue, darkened the star of Kit Ines till a characteristic piece of behaviour was espied. He dashed his cap into the ring and followed it, with the lightest of vaults across the ropes. There he was, the first in the ring: and that stands for promise of first blow, first blood, first flat knock-down, and last to cry for quarter. His pair of seconds were soon after him. Fleetwood mounted his box.
‘Is it to fight?’ said Carinthia.
‘To see which is the master.’
‘They fight to see?’
‘Generally until one or the other can’t see. You are not obliged to see it; you can be driven away if you wish.’
‘I will be here, if you are here.’
‘You choose it.’
Fleetwood leaned over to Chumley Potts on the turf. ‘Abrane’s ruining himself.’
Potts frankly hoped that his friend might be doing so. ‘Todds is jolly well backed. He’s in prime condition. He’s the favourite of the knowing ones.’
‘You wouldn’t have the odds, if he weren’t.’
‘No; but the odds are like ten per cent.: they conjure the gale, and be hanged,’ said Potts; he swore at his betting mania, which destroyed the pleasure of the show he loved.
All in the ring were shaking hands. Shots of a desire to question and comment sped through Carinthia’s veins and hurt her. She had gathered that she spoke foolishly to her husband’s ear, so she kept her mouth shut, though the unanswered of her inquisitive ignorance in the strange land pricked painfully at her bosom. She heard the girl behind her say: ‘Our colours!’ when the colour scarlet unwound with Lord Brailstone’s blue was tied to the stake: and her husband nodded; he smiled; he liked to hear the girl.
Potts climbed up, crying: ‘Toilets complete! Now for paws out, and then at it, my hearties!’
Choice of corners under the leaden low cloud counted for little. A signal was given; a man outside the ring eyed a watch, raised a hand; the two umpires were on foot in their places; the pair of opposing seconds hurried out cheery or bolt-business words to their men; and the champions advanced to the scratch. Todds first, by the courtesy of Ines, whose decorous control of his legs at a weighty moment was rightly read by his party.
Their hands grasped firmly: thereupon becoming fists of a hostile couple in position. And simply to learn which of us two is the better man! Or in other words, with four simple fists to compass a patent fact and stand it on the historic pedestal, with a little red writing underneath: you never can patent a fact without it. But mark the differences of this kind of contention from all other—especially the Parliamentary: this is positive, it has a beginning and an end; and it is good-humoured from beginning to end; trial of skill, trial of stamina; Nature and Art; Old English; which made us what we are; and no rancours, no vows of vengeance; the beaten man of the two bowing to the bit of history he has helped to make.
Kittites had need to be confident in the skill of their lither lad. His facer looked granite. Fronting that mass, Kit you might—not to lash about for comparisons—call a bundle of bamboo. Ay, but well knitted, springy, alive every inch of him; crafty, too, as you will soon bear witness. He knows he has got his task, and he’s the man to do it.
There was wary sparring, and mirrors watched them.
‘Bigger fellow: but have no fear,’ the earl said over his shoulder to Madge.
She said in return: ‘Oh, I don’t know, I’m praying.’
Kit was now on his toes, all himself, like one who has found the key. He feinted. Quick as lightning, he landed a bolt on Ben’s jib, just at the toll-bar of the bridge, between the eyes, and was off, out of reach, elastic; Ben’s counter fell short by a couple of inches. Cheers for first blow.
The earl clucked to Madge. Her gaze at the ring was a sullen intensity.
Will you believe it?—Ben received a second spanking cracker on the spectacles-seat: neat indeed; and, poor payment for the compliment, he managed to dig a drive at the ribs. As much of that game as may suit you, sturdy Ben! But hear the shout, and behold!
First blood to Kit Ines! That tell-tale nose of old Ben’s has mounted the Earl of Fleetwood’s colours, and all his party are looking Brailstone-blue.
‘So far!’ said Fleetwood. His grooms took an indication: the hamper was unfastened; sandwiches were handed. Carinthia held one; she tried to nibble, in obedience to her husband’s example. Madge refused a bite of food.
Hearing Carinthia say to her: ‘I hope he will not be beaten, I hope, I hope,’ she made answer: ‘You are very good, Miss’; and the young lady flushed.
Gentlemen below were talking up to the earl. A Kentish squire of an estate neighbouring Esslemont introduced a Welsh squire he had driven to see the fun, by the name of Mr. Owain Wythan, a neighbour of the earl’s down in Wales. Refreshments were offered. Carinthia submissively sipped the sparkling wine, which stings the lips when they are indisposed to it. The voice of the girl Madge rang on the tightened chords of her breast. Madge had said she was praying: and to pray was all that could be done by two women. Her husband could laugh loudly with Mr. Potts and the other gentlemen and the strangers. He was quite sure the man he supported would win; he might have means of knowing. Carinthia clung to his bare words, for the sake of the girl.
A roaring peal went up from the circle of combat. Kit had it this time. Attacking Ben’s peepers, he was bent on defending his own, and he caught a bodyblow that sent him hopping back to his pair of seconds, five clear hops to the rear, like a smashed surge-wave off the rock. He was respectful for the remainder of the round. But hammering at the system he had formed, in the very next round he dropped from a tremendous repetition of the blow, and lay flat as a turbot. The bets against him had simultaneously a see-saw rise.
‘Bellows, he appears to have none,’ was the comment of Chumley Potts.
‘Now for training, Chummy!’ said Lord Fleetwood.
‘Chummy!’ signifying a crow over Potts, rang out of the hollows of Captain Abrane on Lord Brailstone’s coach.
Carinthia put a hand behind her to Madge. It was grasped, in gratitude for sympathy or in feminine politeness. The girl murmured: ‘I’ve seen worse.’ She was not speaking to ears.
Lord Fleetwood sat watch in hand. ‘Up,’ he said; and, as if hearing him, Kit rose from the ministering second’s knee. He walked stiffly, squared after the fashion of a man taught caution. Ben made play. They rounded the ring, giving and taking. Ben rushed, and had an emollient; spouted again and was corked; again, and received a neat red-waxen stopper. He would not be denied at Kit’s door, found him at home and hugged him. Kit got himself to grass, after a spell of heavy fibbing, Ben’s game.
It did him no great harm; it might be taken for an enlivener; he was dead on his favourite spot the ensuing round, played postman on it. So cleverly, easily, dancingly did he perform the double knock and the retreat, that Chumley Potts was moved to forget his wagers and exclaim: ‘Racket-ball, by Jove!’
‘If he doesn’t let the fellow fib the wind out of him,’ Mallard addressed his own crab eyeballs.
Lord Fleetwood heard and said coolly: ‘Tightstrung. I kept him fasting since he earned his breakfast. You don’t wind an empty rascal fit for action. A sword through the lungs won’t kill when there’s no air in them.’
That was printed in the ‘Few Words before the Encounter’, in the Book Of MAXIMS FOR MEN. Carinthia, hearing everything her husband uttered, burned to remind him of the similarity between his opinions and her father’s.
She was learning, that for some reason, allusions to her father were not acceptable. She squeezed the hand of Madge, and felt a pressure, like a scream, telling her the girl’s heart was with the fight beneath them. She thought it natural for her. She wished she could continue looking as intently. She looked because her husband looked. The dark hills and clouds curtaining the run of the stretch of fields relieved her sight.
The clouds went their way; the hills were solid, but like a blue smoke; the scene here made them very distant and strange. Those two men were still hitting, not hating one another; only to gratify a number of unintelligible people and win a success. But the earth and sky seemed to say, What is the glory? They were insensible to it, as they are not—they are never insensible to noble grounds of strife. They bless the spot, they light lamps on it; they put it into books of history, make it holy, if the cause was a noble one or a good one.
Or supposing both those men loved the girl, who loved one of them! Then would Carinthia be less reluctantly interested in their blows.
Her infant logic stumbled on for a reason while she repressed the torture the scene was becoming, as though a reason could be found by her submissive observation of it. And she was right in believing that a reason for the scene must or should exist. Only, like other bewildered instinctive believers, she could not summon the great universe or a life’s experience to unfold it. Her one consolation was in squeezing the hand of the girl from time to time.
Not stealthily done, it was not objected to by the husband whose eye was on all. But the persistence in doing it sank her from the benignity of her station to the girl’s level: it was conduct much too raw, and grated on the deed of the man who had given her his name.
Madge pleased him better. She had the right to be excited, and she was very little demonstrative. She had—well, in justice, the couple of them had, only she had it more—the tone of the women who can be screwed to witness a spill of blood, peculiarly catching to hear;—a tone of every string in them snapped except the silver string. Catching to hear? It is worth a stretching of them on the rack to hear that low buzz-hum of their inner breast... By heaven! we have them at their best when they sing that note.
His watch was near an hour of the contest, and Brailstone’s man had scored first knock-down blow, a particularly clean floorer. Thinking of that, he was cheered by hearing Chummy Potts, whose opinions he despised, cry out to Abrane:—
‘Yeast to him!’ For the face of Todds was visibly swelling to the ripest of plums from Kit’s deliveries.
Down he went. He had the sturdy legs which are no legs to a clean blow. Odds were offered against him.
‘Oh! pretty play with your right, Kit!’ exclaimed Mallard, as Kit fetched his man an ugly stroke on the round of the waist behind, and the crowd sent up the name of the great organs affected: a sickener of a stroke, if dealt soundly. It meant more than 4 showed. Kit was now for taking liberties. Light as ever on his pins, he now and then varied his attentions to the yeasty part, delivering a wakener in unexpected quarters: masterly as the skilled cook’s carving of a joint with hungry guests for admirers.
‘Eh, Madge?’ the earl said.
She kept her sight fixed, replying: ‘Yes, I think...’ Carinthia joined with her: ‘I must believe it that he will: but will the other man, poor man, submit? I entreat him to put away his pride. It is his—oh, poor man!’
Ben was having it hot and fast on a torso physiognomy.
The voices of these alien women thrilled the fray and were a Bardic harp to Lord Fleetwood.
He dropped a pleasant word on the heads in the curricle.
Mr. Owain Wythan looked up. ‘Worthy of Theocritus. It’s the Boxing Twin and the Bembrycian giant. The style of each. To the letter!’
‘Kit is assiduously fastening Ben’s blinkers,’ Potts remarked.
He explained to the incomprehensible lady he fancied he had somewhere seen, that the battle might be known as near the finish by the behaviour on board Lord Brailstone’s coach.
‘It’s like Foreign Affairs and the Stock Exchange,’ he said to the more intelligent males. ‘If I want to know exactly how the country stands, I turn to the Money Article in the papers. That’s a barometrical certainty. No use inquiring abroad. Look at old Rufus Abrane. I see the state of the fight on the old fellow’s mug. He hasn’t a bet left in him!’
‘Captain Mountain—Rufus Mus!’ cried Lord Fleetwood, and laughed at the penetrative portrait Woodseer’s epigram sketched; he had a desire for the presence of the singular vagabond.
The Rufus Mus in the Captain Mountain exposed his view of the encounter, by growing stiller, apparently growing smaller, without a squeak, like the entrapped; and profoundly contemplative, after the style of the absolutely detached, who foresee the fatal crash, and are calculating, far ahead of events, the means for meeting their personal losses.
The close of the battle was on the visage of Rufus Abrane fifteen minutes before that Elgin marble under red paint in the ring sat on the knee of a succouring seconder, mopped, rubbed, dram-primed, puppy-peeping, inconsolably comforted, preparatory to the resumption of the great-coat he had so hopefully cast from his shoulders. Not downcast by any means. Like an old Roman, the man of the sheer hulk with purple eyemounds found his legs to do the manful thing, show that there was no bad blood, stand equal to all forms. Ben Todds, if ever man in Old England, looked the picture you might label ‘Bellyful,’ it was remarked. Kit Ines had an appearance of springy readiness to lead off again. So they faced on the opening step of their march into English History.
Vanquisher and vanquished shook hands, engaged in a parting rally of good-humoured banter; the beaten man said his handsome word; the best man capped it with a compliment to him. They drink of different cups to-day. Both will drink of one cup in the day to come. But the day went too clearly to crown the light and the tight and the right man of the two, for moralizing to wag its tail at the end. Oldsters and youngsters agreed to that. Science had done it: happy the backers of Science! Not one of them alluded to the philosophical ‘hundred years hence.’ For when England, thanks to a spirited pair of our young noblemen, has exhibited one of her characteristic performances consummately, Philosophy is bidden fly; she is a foreign bird.