Diana of the Crossways, v1

G >> George Meredith >> Diana of the Crossways, v1

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8

Lady Dunstane had the faint lines of a decorous laugh on her lips, as she
said: 'How odd it is that our men show to such disadvantage in a Ball-
room. I have seen them in danger, and there they shine first of any, and
one is proud of them. They should always be facing the elements or in
action.' She glanced at the minuet, which had become a petrified figure,
still palpitating, bent forward, an interrogative reminder.

Mr. Redworth reserved his assent to the proclamation of any English
disadvantage. A whiff of Celtic hostility in the atmosphere put him on
his mettle. 'Wherever the man is tried,' he said.

'My lady!' the Irish gentleman bowed to Lady Dunstane. 'I had the honour
. . . Sullivan Smith . . . at the castle . . .'

She responded to the salute, and Mr. Sullivan Smith proceeded to tell
her, half in speech, half in dots most luminous, of a civil contention
between the English gentleman and himself, as to the possession of the
loveliest of partners for this particular ensuing dance, and that they
had simultaneously made a rush from the Lower Courts, namely, their
cards, to the Upper, being the lady; and Mr. Sullivan Smith partly
founded his preferable claim on her Irish descent, and on his
acquaintance with her eminent defunct father--one of the ever-radiating
stars of his quenchless country.

Lady Dunstane sympathized with him for his not intruding his claim when
the young lady stood pre-engaged, as well as in humorous appreciation of
his imaginative logic.

'There will be dancing enough after supper,' she said.

'If I could score one dance with her, I'd go home supperless and
feasted,' said he. 'And that's not saying much among the hordes of
hungry troopers tip-toe for the signal to the buffet. See, my lady, the
gentleman, as we call him; there he is working his gamut perpetually up
to da capo. Oh! but it's a sheep trying to be wolf; he 's sheep-eyed and
he 's wolf-fanged, pathetic and larcenous! Oh, now! who'd believe it!--
the man has dared . . . I'd as soon think of committing sacrilege in a
cathedral!'

The man was actually; to quote his indignant rival, 'breaching the
fortress,' and pointing out to Diana Merion 'her name on his dirty scrap
of paper': a shocking sight when the lady's recollection was the sole
point to be aimed at, and the only umpire. 'As if all of us couldn't
have written that, and hadn't done it!' Mr. Sullivan Smith groaned
disgusted. He hated bad manners, particularly in cases involving ladies;
and the bad manners of a Saxon fired his antagonism to the race;
individual members of which he boasted of forgiving and embracing,
honouring. So the man blackened the race for him, and the race was
excused in the man. But his hatred of bad manners was vehement, and
would have extended to a fellow-countryman. His own were of the
antecedent century, therefore venerable.

Diana turned from her pursuer with a comic woeful lifting of the brows at
her friend. Lady Dunstane motioned her fan, and Diana came, bending
head.

'Are you bound in honour?'

'I don't think I am. And I do want to go on talking with the General.
He is so delightful and modest--my dream of a true soldier!--telling me
of his last big battle, bit by bit, to my fishing.'

'Put off this person for a square dance down the list, and take out Mr.
Redworth--Miss Diana Merlon, Mr. Redworth: he will bring you back to the
General, who must not totally absorb you, or he will forfeit his
popularity.'

Diana instantly struck a treaty with the pertinacious advocate of his
claims, to whom, on his relinquishing her, Mr. Sullivan Smith remarked:
'Oh! sir, the law of it, where a lady's concerned! You're one for
evictions, I should guess, and the anti-human process. It's that letter
of the law that stands between you and me and mine and yours. But you've
got your congee, and my blessing on ye!'

'It was a positive engagement,' said the enemy.

Mr. Sullivan Smith derided him. 'And a pretty partner you've pickled for
yourself when she keeps her positive engagement!'

He besought Lady Dunstane to console him with a turn. She pleaded
weariness. He proposed to sit beside her and divert her. She smiled,
but warned him that she was English in every vein. He interjected:
'Irish men and English women! though it's putting the cart before the
horse--the copper pennies where the gold guineas should be. So here's
the gentleman who takes the oyster, like the lawyer of the fable.
English is he? But we read, the last shall be first. And English women
and Irish men make the finest coupling in the universe.'

'Well, you must submit to see an Irish woman led out by an English man,'
said Lady Dunstane, at the same time informing the obedient Diana, then
bestowing her hand on Mr. Redworth to please her friend, that he was a
schoolfellow of her husband's.

'Favour can't help coming by rotation, except in very extraordinary
circumstances, and he was ahead of me with you, and takes my due, and
'twould be hard on me if I weren't thoroughly indemnified.' Mr. Sullivan
Smith bowed. 'You gave them just the start over the frozen minute for
conversation; they were total strangers, and he doesn't appear a bad sort
of fellow for a temporary mate, though he's not perfectly sure of his
legs. And that we'll excuse to any man leading out such a fresh young
beauty of a Bright Eyes--like the stars of a winter's night in the frosty
season over Columkill, or where you will, so that's in Ireland, to be
sure of the likeness to her.'

'Her mother was half English.'

'Of course she was. And what was my observation about the coupling?
Dan Merion would make her Irish all over. And she has a vein of Spanish
blood in her; for he had; and she's got the colour.--But you spoke of
their coupling--or I did. Oh, a man can hold his own with an English
roly-poly mate: he's not stifled! But a woman hasn't his power of
resistance to dead weight. She's volatile, she's frivolous, a rattler
and gabbler--haven't I heard what they say of Irish girls over there?
She marries, and it's the end of her sparkling. She must choose at home
for a perfect harmonious partner.'

Lady Dunstane expressed her opinion that her couple danced excellently
together.

'It'd be a bitter thing to see, if the fellow couldn't dance, after
leading her out!' sighed Mr. Sullivan Smith. 'I heard of her over there.
They, call her the Black Pearl, and the Irish Lily--because she's dark.
They rack their poor brains to get the laugh of us.'

'And I listen to you,' said Lady Dunstane.

'Ah! if all England, half, a quarter, the smallest piece of the land
were like you, my lady, I'd be loyal to the finger-nails. Now, is she
engaged?--when I get a word with her?'

'She is nineteen, or nearly, and she ought to have five good years of
freedom, I think.'

'And five good years of serfdom I'd serve to win her!'

A look at him under the eyelids assured Lady Dunstane that there would be
small chance for Mr. Sullivan Smith; after a life of bondage, if she knew
her Diana, in spite of his tongue, his tact, his lively features, and
breadth of shoulders.

Up he sprang. Diana was on Mr. Redworth's arm. 'No refreshments,' she
said; and 'this is my refreshment,' taking the seat of Mr. Sullivan
Smith, who ejaculated,

'I must go and have that gentleman's name.' He wanted a foe.

'You know you are ready to coquette with the General at any moment,
Tony,' said her friend.

'Yes, with the General!'

'He is a noble old man.'

'Superb. And don't say "old man." With his uniform and his height and
his grey head, he is like a glorious October day just before the brown
leaves fall.'

Diana hummed a little of the air of Planxty Kelly, the favourite of her
childhood, as Lady Dunstane well remembered, they smiled together at the
scenes and times it recalled.

'Do you still write verses, Tony?'

'I could about him. At one part of the fight he thought he would be
beaten. He was overmatched in artillery, and it was a cavalry charge he
thundered on them, riding across the field to give the word of command to
the couple of regiments, riddled to threads, that gained the day. That
is life--when we dare death to live! I wonder at men, who are men, being
anything but soldiers! I told you, madre, my own Emmy, I forgave you for
marrying, because it was a soldier.'

'Perhaps a soldier is to be the happy man. But you have not told me a
word of yourself. What has been done with the old Crossways?'

'The house, you know, is mine. And it's all I have: ten acres and the
house, furnished, and let for less than two hundred a year. Oh! how I
long to evict the tenants! They can't have my feeling for the place
where I was born. They're people of tolerably good connections, middling
wealthy, I suppose, of the name of Warwick, and, as far as I can
understand, they stick there to be near the Sussex Downs, for a nephew,
who likes to ride on them. I've a half engagement, barely legible, to
visit them on an indefinite day, and can't bear the idea of strangers
masters in the old house. I must be driven there for shelter, for a
roof, some month. And I could make a pilgrimage in rain or snow just to
doat on the outside of it. That's your Tony.'

'She's my darling.'

'I hear myself speak! But your voice or mine, madre, it's one soul. Be
sure I am giving up the ghost when I cease to be one soul with you, dear
and dearest! No secrets, never a shadow of a deception, or else I shall
feel I am not fit to live. Was I a bad correspondent when you were in
India?'

'Pretty well. Copious letters when you did write.'

'I was shy. I knew I should be writing, to Emmy and another, and only
when I came to the flow could I forget him. He is very finely built; and
I dare say he has a head. I read of his deeds in India and quivered.
But he was just a bit in the way. Men are the barriers to perfect
naturalness, at least, with girls, I think. You wrote to me in the same
tone as ever, and at first I had a struggle to reply. And I, who have
such pride in being always myself!'

Two staring semi-circles had formed, one to front the Hero; the other the
Beauty. These half moons imperceptibly dissolved to replenish, and
became a fixed obstruction.

'Yes, they look,' Diana made answer to Lady Dunstane's comment on the
curious impertinence. She was getting used to it, and her friend had a
gratification in seeing how little this affected her perfect naturalness.

'You are often in the world--dinners, dances?' she said.

'People are kind.'

'Any proposals?'

'Nibbles.'

'Quite heart-free?'

'Absolutely.'

Diana's unshadowed bright face defied all menace of an eclipse.

The block of sturdy gazers began to melt. The General had dispersed his
group of satellites by a movement with the Mayoress on his arm, construed
as the signal for procession to the supper-table.

CHAPTER III

THE INTERIOR OF MR. REDWORTH, AND THE EXTERIOR OF MR. SULLIVAN SMITH

'It may be as well to take Mr. Redworth's arm; you will escape the crush
for you,' said Lady Dunstane to Diana. 'I don't sup. Yes! go! You
must eat, and he is handiest to conduct you.'

Diana thought of her chaperon and the lateness of the hour. She
murmured, to soften her conscience, 'Poor Mrs. Pettigrew!'

And once more Mr. Redworth, outwardly imperturbable, was in the maelstrom
of a happiness resembling tempest. He talked, and knew not what he
uttered. To give this matchless girl the best to eat and drink was his
business, and he performed it. Oddly, for a man who had no loaded
design, marshalling the troops in his active and capacious cranium, he
fell upon calculations of his income, present and prospective, while she
sat at the table and he stood behind her. Others were wrangling for
places, chairs, plates, glasses, game-pie, champagne: she had them; the
lady under his charge to a certainty would have them; so far good; and he
had seven hundred pounds per annum--seven hundred and fifty, in a
favourable aspect, at a stretch . . . .

'Yes, the pleasantest thing to me after working all day is an opera of
Carini's,' she said, in full accord with her taste, 'and Tellio for
tenor, certainly.'

--A fair enough sum for a bachelor: four hundred personal income, and a
prospect of higher dividends to increase it; three hundred odd from his
office, and no immediate prospects of an increase there; no one died
there, no elderly martyr for the advancement of his juniors could be
persuaded to die; they were too tough to think of retiring. Say, seven
hundred and fifty . . . . eight hundred, if the commerce of the
country fortified the Bank his property was embarked in; or eight-fifty
or nine ten. . . .

'I could call him my poet also,' Mr. Redworth agreed with her taste in
poets. 'His letters are among the best ever written--or ever published:
the raciest English I know. Frank, straight out: capital descriptions.
The best English letter-writers are as good as the French--

You don't think so?--in their way, of course. I dare' say we don't
sufficiently cultivate the art. We require the supple tongue a closer
intercourse of society gives.'

--Eight or ten hundred. Comfortable enough for a man in chambers. To
dream of entering as a householder on that sum, in these days, would be
stark nonsense: and a man two removes from a baronetcy has no right to
set his reckoning on deaths:--if he does, he becomes a sort of meditative
assassin. But what were the Fates about when they planted a man of the
ability of Tom Redworth in a Government office! Clearly they intended
him to remain a bachelor for life. And they sent him over to Ireland on
inspection duty for a month to have sight of an Irish Beauty . . . .

'Think war the finest subject for poets?' he exclaimed. 'Flatly no: I
don't think it. I think exactly the reverse. It brings out the noblest
traits in human character? I won't own that even. It brings out some
but under excitement, when you have not always the real man.--Pray don't
sneer at domestic life. Well, there was a suspicion of disdain.--Yes, I
can respect the hero, military or civil; with this distinction, that the
military hero aims at personal reward--'

'He braves wounds and death,' interposed Diana.

'Whereas the civilian hero--'

'Pardon me, let me deny that the soldier-hero aims at a personal reward,'
she again interposed.

'He gets it.'

'If he is not beaten.'

'And then he is no longer a hero.'

'He is to me.'

She had a woman's inveterate admiration of the profession of aims.
Mr. Redworth endeavoured to render practicable an opening in her mind to
reason. He admitted the grandeur of the poetry of Homer. We are a few
centuries in advance of Homer. We do not slay damsels for a sacrifice
to propitiate celestial wrath; nor do we revel in details of slaughter.
He reasoned with her; he repeated stories known to him of civilian
heroes, and won her assent to the heroical title for their deeds, but it
was languid, or not so bright as the deeds deserved--or as the young lady
could look; and he insisted on the civilian hero, impelled by some
unconscious motive to make her see the thing he thought, also the thing
he was--his plain mind and matter-of-fact nature. Possibly she caught a
glimpse of that. After a turn of fencing, in which he was impressed by
the vibration of her tones when speaking of military heroes, she quitted
the table, saying: 'An argument between one at supper and another handing
plates, is rather unequal if eloquence is needed. As Pat said to the
constable, when his hands were tied, You beat me with the fists, but my
spirit is towering and kicks freely.'

--Eight hundred? a thousand a year, two thousand, are as nothing in the
calculation of a householder who means that the mistress of the house
shall have the choicest of the fruits and flowers of the Four Quarters;
and Thomas Redworth had vowed at his first outlook on the world of women,
that never should one of the sisterhood coming under his charge complain
of not having them in profusion. Consequently he was a settled bachelor.
In the character of disengaged and unaspiring philosophical bachelor, he
reviewed the revelations of her character betrayed by the beautiful
virgin devoted to the sanguine coat. The thrill of her voice in speaking
of soldier-heroes shot him to the yonder side of a gulf. Not knowing
why, for he had no scheme, desperate or other, in his head, the least
affrighted of men was frightened by her tastes, and by her aplomb, her
inoffensiveness in freedom of manner and self-sufficiency--sign of purest
breeding: and by her easy, peerless vivacity, her proofs of descent from
the blood of Dan Merion--a wildish blood. The candour of the look of her
eyes in speaking, her power of looking forthright at men, and looking the
thing she spoke, and the play of her voluble lips, the significant repose
of her lips in silence, her weighing of the words he uttered, for a
moment before the prompt apposite reply, down to her simple quotation of
Pat, alarmed him; he did not ask himself why. His manly self was not
intruded on his cogitations. A mere eight hundred or thousand per annum
had no place in that midst. He beheld her quietly selecting the position
of dignity to suit her: an eminent military man, or statesman, or wealthy
nobleman: she had but to choose. A war would offer her the decorated
soldier she wanted. A war! Such are women of this kind! The thought
revolted him, and pricked his appetite for supper. He did service by
Mrs. Pettigrew, to which lady Miss Merion, as she said, promoted him, at
the table, and then began to refresh in person, standing.

'Malkin! that's the fellow's name' he heard close at his ear.

Mr. Sullivan Smith had drained a champagne-glass, bottle in hand, and was
priming the successor to it. He cocked his eye at Mr. Redworth's quick
stare. 'Malkin!' And now we'll see whether the interior of him is grey,
or black, or tabby, or tortoise-shell, or any other colour of the Malkin
breed.'

He explained to Mr. Redworth that he had summoned Mr. Malkin to answer to
him as a gentleman for calling Miss Merion a jilt. 'The man, sir, said
in my hearing, she jilted him, and that's to call the lady a jilt.
There's not a point of difference, not a shade. I overheard him. I
happened by the blessing of Providence to be by when he named her
publicly jilt. And it's enough that she's a lady to have me for her
champion. The same if she had been an Esquimaux squaw. I'll never live
to hear a lady insulted.'

'You don't mean to say you're the donkey to provoke a duel!'
Mr. Redworth burst out gruffly, through turkey and stuffing.

'And an Irish lady, the young Beauty of Erin!' Mr. Sullivan Smith was
flowing on. He became frigid, he politely bowed: 'Two, sir, if you
haven't the grace to withdraw the offensive term before it cools and
can't be obliterated.'

'Fiddle! and go to the deuce!' Mr. Redworth cried.

'Would a soft slap o' the cheek persuade you, sir?'

'Try it outside, and don't bother me with nonsense of that sort at my
supper. If I'm struck, I strike back. I keep my pistols for bandits and
law-breakers. Here,' said Mr. Redworth, better inspired as to the way of
treating an ultra of the isle; 'touch glasses: you're a gentleman, and
won't disturb good company. By-and-by.'

The pleasing prospect of by-and-by renewed in Mr. Sullivan Smith his
composure. They touched the foaming glasses: upon which, in a friendly
manner, Mr. Sullivan Smith proposed that they should go outside as soon
as Mr. Redworth had finished supper-quite finished supper: for the reason
that the term 'donkey' affixed to him was like a minster cap of
schooldays, ringing bells on his topknot, and also that it stuck in his
gizzard.

Mr. Redworth declared the term to be simply hypothetical. 'If you fight,
you're a donkey for doing it. But you won't fight.'

'But I will fight.'

'He won't fight.'

'Then for the honour of your country you must. But I'd rather have him
first, for I haven't drunk with him, and it should be a case of necessity
to put a bullet or a couple of inches of steel through the man you've
drunk with. And what's in your favour, she danced with ye. She seemed
to take to ye, and the man she has the smallest sugar-melting for is
sacred if he's not sweet to me. If he retracts!'

'Hypothetically, No.'

'But supposititiously?'

'Certainly.'

'Then we grasp hands on it. It's Malkin or nothing!' said Mr. Sullivan
Smith, swinging his heel moodily to wander in search of the foe. How one
sane man could name another a donkey for fighting to clear an innocent
young lady's reputation, passed his rational conception.

Sir Lukin hastened to Mr. Redworth to have a talk over old schooldays and
fellows.

'I'll tell you what,' said the civilian, 'There are Irishmen and
Irishmen. I've met cool heads and long heads among them, and you and I
knew Jack Derry, who was good at most things. But the burlesque Irishman
can't be caricatured. Nature strained herself in a 'fit of absurdity to
produce him, and all that Art can do is to copy.'

This was his prelude to an account of Mr. Sullivan Smith, whom, as a
specimen, he rejoiced to have met.

'There's a chance of mischief,' said Sir Lukin. 'I know nothing of the
man he calls Malkin. I'll inquire presently.'

He talked of his prospects, and of the women. Fair ones, in his opinion,
besides Miss Merion were parading; he sketched two or three of his
partners with a broad brush of epithets.

'It won't do for Miss Merion's name to be mixed up in a duel,' said
Redworth.

'Not if she's to make her fortune in England,' said Sir Lukin. 'It's
probably all smoke.'

The remark had hardly escaped him when a wreath of metaphorical smoke,
and fire, and no mean report, startled the company of supping gentlemen.
At the pitch of his voice, Mr. Sullivan Smith denounced Mr. Malkin in
presence for a cur masquerading as a cat.

'And that is not the scoundrel's prime offence. For what d' ye think?
He trumps up an engagement to dance with a beautiful lady, and because
she can't remember, binds her to an oath for a dance to come, and then,
holding her prisoner to 'm, he sulks, the dirty dogcat goes and sulks,
and he won't dance and won't do anything but screech up in corners that
he's jilted. He said the word. Dozens of gentlemen heard the word. And
I demand an apology of Misterr Malkin--or . . ! And none of your
guerrier nodding and bravado, Mister Malkin, at me, if you please. The
case is for settlement between gentlemen.'

The harassed gentleman of the name of Malkin, driven to extremity by the
worrying, stood in braced preparation for the English attitude of
defence. His tormentor drew closer to him.

'Mind, I give you warning, if you lay a finger on me I'll knock you
down,' said he.

Most joyfully Mr. Sullivan Smith uttered a low melodious cry. 'For a
specimen of manners, in an assembly of ladies and gentlemen . . . I
ask ye!' he addressed the ring about him, to put his adversary entirely
in the wrong before provoking the act of war. And then, as one intending
gently to remonstrate, he was on the point of stretching out his finger
to the shoulder of Mr. Malkin, when Redworth seized his arm, saying: 'I
'm your man: me first: you're due to me.'

Mr. Sullivan Smith beheld the vanishing of his foe in a cloud of faces.
Now was he wroth on patently reasonable grounds. He threatened Saxondom.
Man up, man down, he challenged the race of short-legged, thickset,
wooden-gated curmudgeons: and let it be pugilism if their white livers
shivered at the notion of powder and ball. Redworth, in the struggle to
haul him away, received a blow from him. 'And you've got it! you would
have it!' roared the Celt.

'Excuse yourself to the company for a misdirected effort,' Redworth said;
and he observed generally: 'No Irish gentleman strikes a blow in good
company.'

'But that's true as Writ! And I offer excuses--if you'll come along with
me and a couple of friends. The thing has been done before by
torchlight--and neatly.'

'Come along, and come alone,' said Redworth.

A way was cleared for them. Sir Lukin hurried up to Redworth, who had no
doubt of his ability to manage Mr. Sullivan Smith.

He managed that fine-hearted but purely sensational fellow so well that
Lady Dunstane and Diana, after hearing in some anxiety of the hubbub
below, beheld them entering the long saloon amicably, with the nods and
looks of gentlemen quietly accordant.

A little later, Lady Dunstane questioned Redworth, and he smoothed her
apprehensions, delivering himself, much to her comfort, thus: 'In no case
would any lady's name have been raised. The whole affair was
nonsensical. He's a capital fellow of a kind, capable of behaving like a
man of the world and a gentleman. Only he has, or thinks he has, like
lots of his countrymen, a raw wound--something that itches to be grazed.
Champagne on that! . . . Irishmen, as far as I have seen of them,
are, like horses, bundles of nerves; and you must manage them, as you do
with all nervous creatures, with firmness, but good temper. You must
never get into a fury of the nerves yourself with them. Spur and whip
they don't want; they'll be off with you in a jiffy if you try it.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8