A	>>	B	>>	C	>>	D	>>	E
F	>>	G	>>	H	>>	I	>>	J
K	>>	L	>>	M	>>	N	>>	O
P	>>	R	>>		S	>>		T
U	>>		V			>>		W

Max Brand - "Black Jack"

Gilbert Parker - "The Money Master, Volume 2."

Richard F. Burton - "Supplemental Nights, Volume 2"

Gilbert Parker - "The Weavers, Volume 4."

Diana of the Crossways, Complete

G >> George Meredith >> Diana of the Crossways, Complete




Diana's days were spent in reasoning. Her nights were not so tuneable to
the superior mind. When asleep she was the sport of elves that danced her
into tangles too deliciously unravelled, and left new problems for the
wise-eyed and anxious morning. She solved them with the thought that in
sleep it was the mere ordinary woman who fell a prey to her tormentors;
awake, she dispersed the swarm, her sky was clear. Gradually the
persecution ceased, thanks to her active pen.

A letter from her legal adviser, old Mr. Braddock, informed her that no
grounds existed for apprehending marital annoyance, and late in May her
household had resumed its customary round.

She examined her accounts. The Debit and Credit sides presented much of
the appearance of male and female in our jog-trot civilization. They
matched middling well; with rather too marked a tendency to strain the
leash and run frolic on the part of friend Debit (the wanton male), which
deepened the blush of the comparison. Her father had noticed the same
funny thing in his effort to balance his tugging accounts: 'Now then for
a look at Man and Wife': except that he made Debit stand for the portly
frisky female, Credit the decorous and contracted other half, a prim
gentleman of a constitutionally lean habit of body, remonstrating with
her. 'You seem to forget that we are married, my dear, and must walk in
step or bundle into the Bench,' Dan Merion used to say.

Diana had not so much to rebuke in Mr. Debit; or not at the first
reckoning. But his ways were curious. She grew distrustful of him, after
dismissing him with a quiet admonition and discovering a series of ambush
bills, which he must have been aware of when he was allowed to pass as an
honourable citizen. His answer to her reproaches pleaded the
necessitousness of his purchases and expenditure: a capital plea; and
Mrs. Credit was requested by him, in a courteous manner, to drive her pen
the faster, so that she might wax to a corresponding size and satisfy the
world's idea of fitness in couples. She would have costly furniture,
because it pleased her taste; and a French cook, for a like reason, in
justice to her guests; and trained servants; and her tribe of pensioners;
flowers she would have profuse and fresh at her windows and over the
rooms; and the pictures and engravings on the walls were (always for the
good reason mentioned) choice ones; and she had a love of old lace, she
loved colours as she loved cheerfulness, and silks, and satin hangings,
Indian ivory carvings, countless mirrors, Oriental woods, chairs and
desks with some feature or a flourish in them, delicate tables with
antelope legs, of approved workmanship in the chronology of European
upholstery, and marble clocks of cunning device to symbol Time,
mantelpiece decorations, illustrated editions of her favourite authors;
her bed-chambers, too, gave the nest for sleep a dainty cosiness in
aerial draperies. Hence, more or less directly, the peccant bills. Credit
was reduced to reckon to a nicety the amount she could rely on
positively: her fixed income from her investments and the letting of The
Crossways: the days of half-yearly payments that would magnify her to
some proportions beside the alarming growth of her partner, who was proud
of it, and referred her to the treasures she could summon with her pen,
at a murmur of dissatisfaction. His compliments were sincere; they were
seductive. He assured her that she had struck a rich vein in an
inexhaustible mine; by writing only a very little faster she could double
her income; counting a broader popularity, treble it; and so on a tide of
success down the widening river to a sea sheer golden. Behold how it
sparkles! Are we then to stint our winged hours of youth for want of
courage to realize the riches we can command? Debit was eloquent, he was
unanswerable.

Another calculator, an accustomed and lamentably-scrupulous
arithmetician, had been at work for some time upon a speculative summing
of the outlay of Diana's establishment, as to its chances of swamping the
income. Redworth could guess pretty closely the cost of a house hold, if
his care for the holder set him venturing on aver ages. He knew nothing
of her ten per cent. investment and considered her fixed income a
beggarly regiment to marshal against the invader. He fancied however, in
his ignorance of literary profits, that a popular writer, selling several
editions, had come to an El Dorado. There was the mine. It required a
diligent worker. Diana was often struck by hearing Redworth ask her when
her next book might be expected. He appeared to have an eagerness in
hurrying her to produce, and she had to say that she was not a nimble
writer. His flattering impatience was vexatious. He admired her work, yet
he did his utmost to render it little admirable. His literary taste was
not that of young Arthur Rhodes, to whom she could read her chapters,
appearing to take counsel upon them while drinking the eulogies: she
suspected him of prosaic ally wishing her to make money, and though her
exchequer was beginning to know the need of it, the author's lofty mind
disdained such sordidness: to be excused, possibly, for a failing
productive energy. She encountered obstacles to imaginative composition.
With the pen in her hand, she would fall into heavy musings; break a
sentence to muse, and not on the subject. She slept unevenly at night,
was drowsy by day, unless the open air was about her, or animating
friends. Redworth's urgency to get her to publish was particularly
annoying when she felt how greatly THE YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE would have
been improved had she retained the work to brood over it, polish,
re-write passages, perfect it. Her musings embraced long dialogues of
that work, never printed; they sprang up, they passed from memory;
leaving a distaste for her present work: THE CANTATRICE: far more
poetical than the preceding, in the opinion of Arthur Rhodes; and the
story was more romantic; modelled on a Prima Donna she had met at the
musical parties of Henry Wilmers, after hearing Redworth tell of Charles
Rainer's quaint passion for the woman, or the idea of the woman. Diana
had courted her, studied and liked her. The picture she was drawing of
the amiable and gifted Italian, of her villain Roumanian husband, and of
the eccentric, high-minded, devoted Englishman, was good in a fashion;
but considering the theme, she had reasonable apprehension that her
CANTATRICE would not repay her for the time and labour bestowed on it. No
clever transcripts of the dialogue of the day occurred; no hair-breadth
'scapes, perils by sea and land, heroisms of the hero, fine shrieks of
the heroine; no set scenes of catching pathos and humour; no
distinguishable points of social satire--equivalent to a smacking of the
public on the chaps, which excites it to grin with keen discernment of
the author's intention. She did not appeal to the senses nor to a
superficial discernment. So she had the anticipatory sense of its
failure; and she wrote her best, in perverseness; of course she wrote
slowly; she wrote more and more realistically of the characters and the
downright human emotions, less of the wooden supernumeraries of her
story, labelled for broad guffaw or deluge tears--the grappling natural
links between our public and an author. Her feelings were aloof. They
flowed at a hint of a scene of THE YOUNG MINISTER. She could not put them
into THE CANTATRICE. And Arthur Rhodes pronounced this work poetical
beyond its predecessors, for the reason that the chief characters were
alive and the reader felt their pulses. He meant to say, they were
poetical inasmuch as they were creations.

The slow progress of a work not driven by the author's feelings
necessitated frequent consultations between Debit and Credit, resulting
in altercations, recriminations, discord of the yoked and divergent
couple. To restore them to their proper trot in harness, Diana
reluctantly went to her publisher for an advance item of the sum she was
to receive, and the act increased her distaste. An idea came that she
would soon cease to be able to write at all. What then? Perhaps by
selling her invested money, and ultimately The Crossways, she would have
enough for her term upon earth. Necessarily she had to think that short,
in order to reckon it as nearly enough. 'I am sure,' she said to herself,
'I shall not trouble the world very long.' A strange languor beset her;
scarcely melancholy, for she conceived the cheerfulness of life and added
to it in company; but a nervelessness, as though she had been left by the
stream on the banks, and saw beauty and pleasure sweep along and away,
while the sun that primed them dried her veins. At this time she was
gaining her widest reputation for brilliancy of wit. Only to welcome
guests were her evenings ever spent at home. She had no intimate
understanding of the deadly wrestle of the conventional woman with her
nature which she was undergoing below the surface. Perplexities she
acknowledged, and the prudence of guardedness. 'But as I am sure not to
live very long, we may as well meet.' Her meetings with Percy Dacier were
therefore hardly shunned; and his behaviour did not warn her to
discountenance them. It would have been cruel to exclude him from her
select little dinners of eight. Whitmonby, Westlake, Henry Wilmers and
the rest, she perhaps aiding, schooled him in the conversational art. She
heard it said of him, that the courted discarder of the sex, hitherto a
mere politician, was wonderfully humanized. Lady Pennon fell to talking
of him hopefully. She declared him to be one of the men who unfold
tardily, and only await the mastering passion. If the passion had come,
it was controlled. His command of himself melted Diana. How could she
forbid his entry to the houses she frequented? She was glad to see him.
He showed his pleasure in seeing her. Remembering his tentative
indiscretion on those foreign sands, she reflected that he had been
easily checked: and the like was not to be said of some others. Beautiful
women in her position provoke an intemperateness that contrasts
touchingly with the self-restraint of a particular admirer. Her
'impassioned Caledonian' was one of a host, to speak of whom and their
fits of lunacy even to her friend Emma, was repulsive. She bore with
them, foiled them, passed them, and recovered her equanimity; but the
contrast called to her to dwell on it, the self-restraint whispered of a
depth of passion . . . .

She was shocked at herself for a singular tremble 'she experienced,
without any beating of the heart, on hearing one day that the marriage of
Percy Dacier and Miss Asper was at last definitely fixed. Mary Paynham
brought her the news. She had it from a lady who had come across Miss
Asper at Lady Wathin's assemblies, and considered the great heiress
extraordinarily handsome.

'A golden miracle,' Diana gave her words to say. 'Good looks and gold
together are rather superhuman. The report may be this time true.' Next
afternoon the card of Lady Wathin requested Mrs. Warwick to grant her a
private interview.

Lady Wathin, as one of the order of women who can do anything in a holy
cause, advanced toward Mrs. Warwick, unabashed by the burden of her
mission, and spinally prepared, behind benevolent smilings, to repay
dignity of mien with a similar erectness of dignity. They touched fingers
and sat. The preliminaries to the matter of the interview were brief
between ladies physically sensible of antagonism and mutually too
scornful of subterfuges in one another's presence to beat the bush.

Lady Wathin began. 'I am, you are aware, Mrs. Warwick, a cousin of your
friend Lady Dunstane.'

'You come to me on business?' Diana said.

'It may be so termed. I have no personal interest in it. I come to lay
certain facts before you which I think you should know. We think it
better that an acquaintance, and one of your sex, should state the case
to you, instead of having recourse to formal intermediaries, lawyers--'

'Lawyers?'

'Well, my husband is a lawyer, it is true. In the course of his
professional vocations he became acquainted with Mr. Warwick. We have
latterly seen a good deal of him. He is, I regret to say, seriously
unwell.'

'I have heard of it.'

'He has no female relations, it appears. He needs more care than he can
receive from hirelings.'

'Are you empowered by him, Lady Wathin?'

'I am, Mrs. Warwick. We will not waste time in apologies. He is most
anxious for a reconciliation. It seems to Sir Cramborne and to me the
most desireable thing for all parties concerned, if you can be induced to
regard it in that light. Mr. Warwick may or may not live; but the
estrangement is quite undoubtedly the cause of his illness. I touch on
nothing connected with it. I simply wish that you should not be in
ignorance of his proposal and his condition.'

Diana bowed calmly. 'I grieve at his condition. His proposal has already
been made and replied to.'

'Oh, but, Mrs. Warwick, an immediate and decisive refusal of a proposal
so fraught with consequences . . . !'

'Ah, but, Lady Wathin, you are now outstepping the limits prescribed by
the office you have undertaken.'

'You will not lend ear to an intercession?'

'I will not.'

'Of course, Mrs. Warwick, it is not for me to hint at things that lawyers
could say on the subject.'

'Your forbearance is creditable, Lady Wathin.'

'Believe me, Mrs. Warwick, the step is--I speak in my husband's name as
well as my own--strongly to be advised.'

'If I hear one word more of it, I leave the country.'

'I should be sorry indeed at any piece of rashness depriving your
numerous friends of your society. We have recently become acquainted with
Mr. Redworth, and I know the loss you would be to them. I have not
attempted an appeal to your feelings, Mrs. Warwick.'

'I thank you warmly, Lady Wathin, for what you have not done.'

The aristocratic airs of Mrs. Warwick were annoying to Lady Wathin when
she considered that they were borrowed, and that a pattern morality could
regard the woman as ostracized: nor was it agreeable to be looked at
through eyelashes under partially lifted brows. She had come to appeal to
the feelings of the wife; at any rate, to discover if she had some and
was better than a wild adventuress.

'Our life below is short!' she said. To which Diana tacitly assented.

'We have our little term, Mrs. Warwick. It is soon over.'

'On the other hand, the platitudes concerning it are eternal.'

Lady Wathin closed her eyes, that the like effect might be produced on
her ears. 'Ah! they are the truths. But it is not my business to preach.
Permit me to say that I feel deeply for your husband.'

'I am glad of Mr. Warwick's having friends; and they are many, I hope.'

'They cannot behold him perishing, without an effort on his behalf.'

A chasm of silence intervened. Wifely pity was not sounded in it.

'He will question me, Mrs. Warwick.'

'You can report to him the heads of our conversation, Lady Wathin.'

'Would you--it is your husband's most earnest wish; and our house is open
to his wife and to him for the purpose; and it seems to us that . . .
indeed it might avert a catastrophe you would necessarily deplore:--would
you consent to meet him at my house?'

'It has already been asked, Lady Wathin, and refused.'

'But at my house-under our auspices!'

Diana glanced at the clock. 'Nowhere.'

'Is it not--pardon me--a wife's duty, Mrs. Warwick, at least to listen?'

'Lady Wathin, I have listened to you.'

'In the case of his extreme generosity so putting it, for the present,
Mrs. Warwick, that he asks only to be heard personally by his wife! It
may preclude so much.'

Diana felt a hot wind across her skin.

She smiled and said: 'Let me thank you for bringing to an end a mission
that must have been unpleasant to you.'

'But you will meditate on it, Mrs. Warwick, will you not? Give me that
assurance!'

'I shall not forget it,' said Diana.

Again the ladies touched fingers, with an interchange of the social
grimace of cordiality. A few words of compassion for poor Lady Dunstane's
invalided state covered Lady Wathin's retreat.

She left, it struck her ruffled sentiments, an icy libertine, whom any
husband caring for his dignity and comfort was well rid of; and if only
she could have contrived allusively to bring in the name of Mr. Percy
Dacier, just to show these arrant coquettes, or worse, that they were not
quite so privileged to pursue their intrigues obscurely as they imagined,
it would have soothed her exasperation.

She left a woman the prey of panic.

Diana thought of Emma and Redworth, and of their foolish interposition to
save her character and keep her bound. She might now have been free! The
struggle with her manacles reduced her to a state of rebelliousness, from
which issued vivid illuminations of the one means of certain escape; an
abhorrent hissing cavern, that led to a place named Liberty, her refuge,
but a hectic place.

Unable to write, hating the house which held her a fixed mark for these
attacks, she had an idea of flying straight to her beloved Lugano lake,
and there hiding, abandoning her friends, casting off the slave's name
she bore, and living free in spirit. She went so far as to reckon the
cost of a small household there, and justify the violent step by an
exposition of retrenchment upon her large London expenditure. She had but
to say farewell to Emma, no other tie to cut! One morning on the
Salvatore heights would wash her clear of the webs defacing and
entangling her.




CHAPTER XXIV

INDICATES A SOUL PREPARED FOR DESPERATION

The month was August, four days before the closing of Parliament, and
Diana fancied it good for Arthur Rhodes to run down with her to Copsley.
He came to her invitation joyfully, reminding her of Lady Dunstane's wish
to hear some chapters of THE CANTATRICE, and the MS. was packed. They
started, taking rail and fly, and winding up the distance on foot. August
is the month of sober maturity and majestic foliage, songless, but a
crowned and royal-robed queenly month; and the youngster's appreciation
of the homely scenery refreshed Diana; his delight in being with her was
also pleasant. She had no wish to exchange him for another; and that was
a strengthening thought.

At Copsley the arrival of their luggage had prepared the welcome. Warm
though it was, Diana perceived a change in Emma, an unwonted reserve, a
doubtfulness of her eyes, in spite of tenderness; and thus thrown back on
herself, thinking that if she had followed her own counsel (as she called
her impulse) in old days, there would have been no such present misery,
she at once, and unconsciously, assumed a guarded look. Based on her
knowledge of her honest footing, it was a little defiant. Secretly in her
bosom it was sharpened to a slight hostility by the knowledge that her
mind had been straying. The guilt and the innocence combined to clothe
her in mail, the innocence being positive, the guilt so vapoury. But she
was armed only if necessary, and there was no requirement for armour.
Emma did not question at all. She saw the alteration in her Tony: she was
too full of the tragic apprehensiveness, overmastering her to speak of
trifles. She had never confided to Tony the exact nature and the growth
of her malady, thinking it mortal, and fearing to alarm her dearest.

A portion of the manuscript was read out by Arthur Rhodes in the evening;
the remainder next morning. Redworth perceptibly was the model of the
English hero; and as to his person, no friend could complain of the
sketch; his clear-eyed heartiness, manliness, wholesomeness--a word of
Lady Dunstane's regarding him,--and his handsome braced figure, were well
painted. Emma forgave the insistance on a certain bluntness of the nose,
in consideration of the fond limning of his honest and expressive eyes,
and the 'light on his temples,' which they had noticed together. She
could not so easily forgive the realistic picture of the man: an
exaggeration, she thought, of small foibles, that even if they existed,
should not have been stressed. The turn for 'calculating' was shown up
ridiculously; Mr. Cuthbert Dering was calculating in his impassioned
moods as well as in his cold. His head was a long division of ciphers. He
had statistics for spectacles, and beheld the world through them, and the
mistress he worshipped.

'I see,' said Emma, during a pause; 'he is a Saxon. You still affect to
have the race en grippe, Tony.'

'I give him every credit for what he is,' Diana replied. 'I admire the
finer qualities of the race as much as any one. You want to have them
presented to you in enamel, Emmy.'

But the worst was an indication that the mania for calculating in and out
of season would lead to the catastrophe destructive of his happiness.
Emma could not bear that. Without asking herself whether it could be
possible that Tony knew the secret, or whether she would have laid it
bare, her sympathy for Redworth revolted at the exposure. She was
chilled. She let it pass; she merely said: 'I like the writing.'

Diana understood that her story was condemned.

She put on her robes of philosophy to cloak discouragement. 'I am glad
the writing pleases you.'

'The characters are as true as life!' cried Arthur Rhodes. 'The
Cantatrice drinking porter from the pewter at the slips after harrowing
the hearts of her audience, is dearer to me than if she had tottered to a
sofa declining sustenance; and because her creatrix has infused such
blood of life into her that you accept naturally whatever she does. She
was exhausted, and required the porter, like a labourer in the
cornfield.'

Emma looked at him, and perceived the poet swamped by the admirer. Taken
in conjunction with Mr. Cuthbert Dering's frenzy for calculating, she
disliked the incident of the porter and the pewter.

'While the Cantatrice swallowed her draught, I suppose Mr. Dering counted
the cost?' she said.

'It really might be hinted,' said Diana.

The discussion closed with the accustomed pro and con upon the wart of
Cromwell's nose, Realism rejoicing in it, Idealism objecting.

Arthur Rhodes was bidden to stretch his legs on a walk along the heights
in the afternoon, and Emma was further vexed by hearing Tony complain of
Redworth's treatment of the lad, whom he would not assist to any of the
snug little posts he was notoriously able to dispense.

'He has talked of Mr. Rhodes to me,' said Emma. 'He thinks the profession
of literature a delusion, and doubts the wisdom of having poets for
clerks.'

'John-Bullish!' Diana exclaimed. 'He speaks contemptuously of the poor
boy.'

'Only inasmuch as the foolishness of the young man in throwing up the Law
provokes his practical mind to speak.'

'He might take my word for the "young man's" ability. I want him to have
the means of living, that he may write. He has genius.'

'He may have it. I like him, and have said so. If he were to go back to
his law-stool, I have no doubt that Redworth would manage to help him.'

'And make a worthy ancient Braddock of a youth of splendid promise! Have
I sketched him too Saxon?'

'It is the lens, and hot the tribe, Tony.'

THE CANTATRICE was not alluded to any more; but Emma's disapproval
blocked the current of composition, already subject to chokings in the
brain of the author. Diana stayed three days at Copsley, one longer than
she had intended, so that Arthur Rhodes might have his fill of country
air.

'I would keep him, but I should be no companion for him,' Emma said.

'I suspect the gallant squire is only to be satisfied by landing me
safely,' said Diana, and that small remark grated, though Emma saw the
simple meaning. When they parted, she kissed her Tony many times. Tears
were in her eyes. It seemed to Diana that she was anxious to make amends
for the fit of alienation, and she was kissed in return warmly, quite
forgiven, notwithstanding the deadly blank she had caused in the
imagination of the writer for pay, distracted by the squabbles of Debit
and Credit.

Diana chatted spiritedly to young Rhodes on their drive to the train. She
was profoundly discouraged by Emma's disapproval of her work. It wanted
but that one drop to make a recurrence to the work impossible. There it
must lie! And what of the aspects of her household?--Perhaps, after all,
the Redworths of the world are right, and Literature as a profession is a
delusive pursuit. She did not assent to it without hostility to the
world's Redworths.--'They have no sensitiveness, we have too much. We are
made of bubbles that a wind will burst, and as the wind is always
blowing, your practical Redworths have their crow of us.'

She suggested advice to Arthur Rhodes upon the prudence of his resuming
the yoke of the Law.

He laughed at such a notion, saying that he had some expectations of
money to come.

'But I fear,' said he, 'that Lady Dunstane is very very ill. She begged
me to keep her informed of your address.'

Diana told him he was one of those who should know it whithersoever she
went. She spoke impulsively, her sentiments of friendliness for the youth
being temporarily brightened by the strangeness of Emma's conduct in
deputing it to him to fulfil a duty she had never omitted. 'What can she
think I am going to do!'