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.