All the same, he shakes in his shoes before her, durst hardly spy at Esslemont again while she’s in occupation. His managing gentleman comes down from him, and goes up from her; that’s how they communicate. One week she’s quite solitary; another week the house is brimful as can be. She ‘s the great lady entertaining then. Yet they say it ‘s a fact, she has not a shilling of her own to fling at a beggar. She ‘ll stock a cottage wanting it with provision for a fortnight or more, and she’ll order the doctor in, and she’ll call and see the right things done for illness. ‘But no money; no one’s to expect money of her. The shots you hear in Esslemont grounds out of season are she and her maid, always alongside her, at it before a target on a bank, trying that old Lord Levellier’s gunpowder out of his mill; and he’s got no money either; not for his workmen, they say, until they congregate, and a threatening to blow him up brings forth half their pay, on account. But he ‘s a known miser. She’s not that. She’s a pleasant-faced lady for the poor. She has the voice poor people like. It’s only her enemy, maybe her husband, she can be terrible to. She’d drive a hole through a robber stopping her on the road, as soon as look at him.
This was Esslemont’s atmosphere working its way to the earl, not so very long after the establishment of his countess there. She could lay hold of the English, too, it seemed. Did she call any gentleman of the district by his Christian name? Lord Simon Pitscrew reported her doing so in the case of one of the Welshmen. Those Welshmen! Apparently they are making a push for importance in the kingdom!
CHAPTER XXXV. IN WHICH CERTAIN CHANGES MAY BE DISCERNED
Behind his white plaster of composure, Lord Fleetwood had alternately raged and wondered during the passage of the Welsh cavalcade up Eastward: a gigantic burlesque, that would have swept any husband of their heroine off the scene had he failed to encounter it deferentially, preserving his countenance and ostensibly his temper. An idiot of a woman, incurable in her lunacy, suspects the father of the infant as guilty of designs done to death in romances; and so she manages to set going solemnly a bigger blazing Tom Fool’s show than any known or written romance gives word of! And that fellow, Gower Woodseer, pleads, in apology, for her husband’s confusion, physiologically, that it comes of her having been carried off and kept a prisoner when she was bearing the child and knitting her whole mind to ensure the child. But what sheer animals these women are, if they take impressions in such a manner! And Mr. Philosopher argues that the abusing of women proves the hating of Nature; names it ‘the commonest insanity, and the deadliest,’ and men are ‘planted in the bog of their unclean animal condition until they do proper homage to the animal Nature makes the woman be.’ Oh, pish, sir!—as Meeson Corby had the habit of exclaiming when Abrane’s ‘fiddler’ argues him into a corner. The fellow can fiddle fine things and occasionally clear sense:—‘Men hating Nature are insane. Women and Nature are close. If it is rather general to hate Nature and maltreat women, we begin to see why the world is a mad world.’ That is the tune of the fiddler’s fiddling. As for him, something protects him. He was the slave of Countess Livia; like Abrane, Mallard, Corby, St. Ombre, young Cressett, and the dozens. He is now her master. Can a man like that be foolish, in saying of the Countess Carinthia, she is ‘not only quick to understand, she is in the quick of understanding’? Gower Woodseer said it of her in Wales, and again on the day of his walk up to London from Esslemont, after pedestrian exercise, which may heat the frame, but cools the mind. She stamped that idea on a thoughtful fellow.
He’s a Welshman. They are all excitable,—have heads on hound’s legs for a flying figure in front. Still, they must have an object, definitely seen by them—definite to them if dim to their neighbours; and it will run in the poetic direction: and the woman to win them, win all classes of them, within so short a term, is a toss above extraordinary. She is named Carinthia—suitable name for the Welsh pantomimic procession. Or cry out the word in an amphitheatre of Alpine crags,—it sounds at home.
She is a daughter of the mountains,—should never have left them. She is also a daughter of the Old Buccaneer—no poor specimen of the fighting Englishman of his day. According to Rose Mackrell, he, this Old Buccaneer, it was, who, by strange adventures, brought the great Welsh mines into the family! He would not be ashamed in spying through his nautical glass, up or down, at his daughter’s doings. She has not yet developed a taste for the mother’s tricks:—the mother, said to have been a kindler. That Countess of Cressett was a romantic little fly-away bird. Both parents were brave: the daughter would inherit gallantry. She inherits a kind of thwarted beauty. Or it needs the situation seen in Wales: her arms up and her unaffrighted eyes over the unappeasable growl. She had then the beauty coming from the fathom depths, with the torch of Life in the jaws of Death to light her: beauty of the nether kingdom mounting to an upper place in the higher. Her beauty recognized, the name of the man who married her is not Longears—not to himself, is the main point; nor will it be to the world when he shows that it is not so to himself.
Suppose he went to her, would she be trying at domination? The woman’s pitch above woman’s beauty was perceived to be no intermittent beam, but so living as to take the stamp of permanence. More than to say it was hers, it was she. What a deadly peril brought into view was her character-soul, some call it: generally a thing rather distasteful in women, or chilling to the masculine temperament. Here it attracts. Here, strange to say, it is the decided attraction, in a woman of a splendid figure and a known softness. By rights, she should have more understanding than to suspect the husband as guilty of designs done to death in romances. However, she is not a craven who compliments him by rearing him, and he might prove that there is no need for fear. But she would be expecting explanations before the reconcilement. The bosom of these women will keep on at its quick heaving until they have heard certain formal words, oaths to boot. How speak them?
His old road of the ladder appeared to Fleetwood an excellent one for obviating explanations and effecting the reconcilement without any temporary seeming forfeit of the native male superiority. For there she is at Esslemont now; any night the window could be scaled. ‘It is my husband.’ The soul was in her voice when she said it.
He remembered that it had not ennobled her to him then; had not endeared; was taken for a foreign example of the childish artless, imperfectly suited to our English clime.’ The tone of adorable utterances, however much desired, is never for repetition; nor is the cast of divine sweet looks; nor are the particular deeds-once pardonable, fitly pleaded. A second scaling of her window—no, night’s black hills girdle the scene with hoarse echoes; the moon rushes out of her clouds grimacing. Even Fleetwood’s devil, much addicted to cape and sword and ladder, the vulpine and the gryphine, rejected it.