They agreed that persuasions need not be addressed to the countess. She was and would remain Mr. Wythan’s guest. As for the earl, Gower inclined to plead hesitatingly, still to plead, on behalf of a nobleman owning his influence and very susceptible to his wisdom, whose echo of a pointed saying nearly equalled the satisfaction bestowed by print. The titled man affected the philosopher in that manner; or rather, the crude philosopher’s relish of brilliant appreciation stripped him of his robe. For he was with Owain Wythan at heart to scorn titles which did not distinguish practical offices. A nation bowing to them has gone to pith, for him; he had to shake himself, that he might not similarly stick; he had to do it often. Objects elevated even by a decayed world have their magnetism for us unless we nerve the mind to wakeful repulsion. He protested he had reason to think the earl was humanizing, though he might be killing a woman in the process. ‘Could she wish for better?’ he asked, with at least the gravity of the undermining humourist; and he started Owain to course an idea when he remarked of Lord Fleetwood: ‘Imagine a devil on his back on a river, flying a cherub.’
Owain sparkled from the vision of the thing to wrath with it.
‘Ay, but while he’s floating, his people are edging on starvation. And I’ve a personal grievance. I keep, you know, open hall, bread and cheese and beer, for poor mates. His men are favouring us with a call. We have to cart treble from the town. If I straighten the sticks he dies to bend, it’ll be a grievance against me—and a fig for it! But I like to be at peace with my neighbours, and waft them “penillion” instead of dealing the “cleddyfal” of Llewellyn.’
At last the tension ceased; they had intelligence of the earl’s arrival.
His countess was little moved by it; and the reason for that lay in her imagination being absorbed. Henrietta had posted her a journal telling of a deed of Chillon’s: no great feat, but precious for its ‘likeness to him,’ as they phrased it; that is, for the light it cast on their conception of the man. Heading a squadron in a riotous Midland town, he stopped a charge, after fire of a shot from the mob, and galloped up the street to catch a staggering urchin to his saddle-bow, and place the mite in safety. Then it was a simple trot of the hussars ahead; way was made for him.
Now, to see what banquet there is for the big of heart in the world’s hot stress, take the view of Carinthia, to whom her brother’s thoughtful little act of gentleness at the moment of the red-of-the-powder smoke was divinest bread and wine, when calamity hung around, with the future an unfooted wilderness, her powers untried, her husband her enemy.
CHAPTER XXXI. WE HAVE AGAIN TO DEAL WITH THE EXAMPLES OF OUR YOUNGER MAN
The most urgent of Dames is working herself up to a grey squall in her detestation of imagerial epigrams. Otherwise Gower Woodseer’s dash at the quintessential young man of wealth would prompt to the carrying of it further, and telling how the tethered flutterer above a ‘devil on his back on a river’ was beginning to pull if not drag his withholder and teaser.
Fleetwood had almost a desire to see the small dot of humanity which drew the breath from him;—and was indistinguishably the bubbly grin and gurgle of the nurses, he could swear. He kicked at the bondage to our common fleshly nature imposed on him by the mother of the little animal. But there had been a mother to his father: odd movements of a warmish curiosity brushed him when the cynic was not mounting guard. They were, it seemed, external—no part of him: like blasts of a wayside furnace across wintry air. They were, as it chanced, Nature’s woman in him plucking at her separated partner, Custom’s man; something of an oriental voluptuary on his isolated regal seat; and he would suck the pleasures without a descent into the stale old ruts where Life’s convict couple walk linked to one another, to their issue more.