Diana of the Crossways, v1

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

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She read by a dull November fog-light a mixture of the dreadful and the
comforting, and dwelt upon the latter in abandonment, hugged it, though
conscious of evil and the little that there was to veritably console.

The close of the letter struck the blow. After bluntly stating that Mr.
Warwick had served her with a process, and that he had no case without
suborning witnesses, Diana said: 'But I leave the case, and him, to the
world. Ireland, or else America, it is a guiltless kind of suicide to
bury myself abroad. He has my letters. They are such as I can own to
you; and ask you to kiss me--and kiss me when you have heard all the
evidence, all that I can add to it, kiss me. You know me too well to
think I would ask you to kiss criminal lips. But I cannot face the
world. In the dock, yes. Not where I am expected to smile and sparkle,
on pain of incurring suspicion if I show a sign of oppression. I cannot
do that. I see myself wearing a false grin--your Tony! No, I do well to
go. This is my resolution; and in consequence,--my beloved! my only
truly loved on earth! I do not come to you, to grieve you, as I surely
should. Nor would it soothe me, dearest. This will be to you the best
of reasons. It could not soothe me to see myself giving pain to Emma.
I am like a pestilence, and let me swing away to the desert, for there
I do no harm. I know I am right. I have questioned myself--it is not
cowardice. I do not quail. I abhor the part of actress. I should do it
well--too well; destroy my soul in the performance. Is a good name
before such a world as this worth that sacrifice? A convent and self-
quenching;--cloisters would seem to me like holy dew. But that would be
sleep, and I feel the powers of life. Never have I felt them so
mightily. If it were not for being called on to act and mew, I would
stay, fight, meet a bayonet-hedge of charges and rebut them. I have my
natural weapons and my cause. It must be confessed that I have also more
knowledge of men and the secret contempt--it must be--the best of them
entertain for us. Oh! and we confirm it if we trust them. But they have
been at a wicked school.

'I will write. From whatever place, you shall have letters, and
constant. I write no more now. In my present mood I find no alternative
between rageing and drivelling. I am henceforth dead to the world.
Never dead to Emma till my breath is gone--poor flame! I blow at a bed-
room candle, by which I write in a brown fog, and behold what I am--
though not even serving to write such a tangled scrawl as this. I am of
no mortal service. In two days I shall be out of England. Within a week
you shall hear where. I long for your heart on mine, your dear eyes.
You have faith in me, and I fly from you!--I must be mad. Yet I feel
calmly reasonable. I know that this is the thing to do. Some years
hence a grey woman may return, to hear of a butterfly Diana, that had her
day and disappeared. Better than a mewing and courtseying simulacrum of
the woman--I drivel again. Adieu. I suppose I am not liable to capture
and imprisonment until the day when my name is cited to appear. I have
left London. This letter and I quit the scene by different routes--I
would they were one. My beloved! I have an ache--I think I am wronging
you. I am not mistress of myself, and do as something within me, wiser,
than I, dictates.--You will write kindly. Write your whole heart. It is
not compassion I want, I want you. I can bear stripes from you. Let me
hear Emma's voice--the true voice. This running away merits your
reproaches. It will look like--. I have more to confess: the tigress in
me wishes it were! I should then have a reckless passion to fold me
about, and the glory infernal, if you name it so, and so it would be--
of suffering for and with some one else. As it is, I am utterly
solitary, sustained neither from above nor below, except within myself,
and that is all fire and smoke, like their new engines.--I kiss this
miserable sheet of paper. Yes, I judge that I have run off a line--and
what a line! which hardly shows a trace for breathing things to follow
until they feel the transgression in wreck. How immensely nature seems
to prefer men to women!--But this paper is happier than the writer.

'Your TONY.'

That was the end. Emma kissed it in tears. They had often talked of the
possibility of a classic friendship between women, the alliance of a
mutual devotedness men choose to doubt of. She caught herself accusing
Tony of the lapse from friendship. Hither should the true friend have
flown unerringly.

The blunt ending of the letter likewise dealt a wound. She reperused it,
perused and meditated. The flight of Mrs. Warwick! She heard that cry-
fatal! But she had no means of putting a hand on her. 'Your Tony.' The
coldness might be set down to exhaustion: it might, yet her not coming to
her friend for counsel and love was a positive weight in the indifferent
scale. She read the letter backwards, and by snatches here and there;
many perusals and hours passed before the scattered creature exhibited in
its pages came to her out of the flying threads of the web as her living
Tony, whom she loved and prized and was ready to defend gainst the world.
By that time the fog had lifted; she saw the sky on the borders of milky
cloudfolds. Her invalid's chill sensitiveness conceived a sympathy in
the baring heavens, and lying on her sofa in the drawing-room she gained
strength of meditative vision, weak though she was to help, through
ceasing to brood on her wound and herself. She cast herself into her
dear Tony's feelings; and thus it came, that she imagined Tony would
visit The Crossways, where she kept souvenirs of her father, his cane,
and his writing-desk, and a precious miniature of him hanging above it,
before leaving England forever. The fancy sprang to certainty; every
speculation confirmed it.

Had Sir Lukin been at home she would have despatched him to The Crossways
at once. The West wind blew, and gave her a view of the Downs beyond the
Weald from her southern window. She thought it even possible to drive
there and reach the place, on the chance of her vivid suggestion, some
time after nightfall; but a walk across the room to try her forces was
too convincing of her inability. She walked with an ebony silver-mounted
stick, a present from Mr. Redworth. She was leaning on it when the card
of Thomas Redworth was handed to her.

CHAPTER VIII

IN WHICH IS EXHIBITED HOW A PRACTICAL MAN AND A DIVINING WOMAN LEARN TO
RESPECT ONE ANOTHER

'You see, you are my crutch,' Lady Dunstane said to him,--raising the
stick in reminder of the present.

He offered his arm and hurriedly informed her, to dispose of dull
personal matter, that he had just landed. She looked at the clock.
'Lukin is in town. You know the song: "Alas, I scarce can go or creep
While Lukin is away." I do not doubt you have succeeded in your business
over there. Ah! Now I suppose you have confidence in your success.
I should have predicted it, had you come to me.' She stood, either
musing or in weakness, and said abruptly: 'Will you object to lunching at
one o'clock?'

'The sooner the better,' said Redworth. She had sighed: her voice
betrayed some agitation, strange in so serenely-minded a person.

His partial acquaintance with the Herculean Sir Lukin's reputation in
town inspired a fear of his being about to receive admission to the
distressful confidences of the wife, and he asked if Mrs. Warwick was
well. The answer sounded ominous, with its accompaniment of evident
pain: 'I think her health is good.'

Had they quarrelled? He said he had not heard a word of Mrs. Warwick for
several months.

'I--heard from her this morning,' said Lady Dunstane, and motioned him to
a chair beside the sofa, where she half reclined, closing her eyes. The
sight of tears on the eyelashes frightened him. She roused herself to
look at the clock. 'Providence or accident, you are here,' she said.
'I could not have prayed for the coming of a truer' man. Mrs. Warwick is
in great danger . . . . You know our love. She is the best of me,
heart and soul. Her husband has chosen to act on vile suspicions--
baseless, I could hold my hand in the fire and swear. She has enemies,
or the jealous fury is on the man--I know little of him. He has
commenced an action against her. He will rue it. But she . . . you
understand this of women at least;--they are not cowards in all things!
--but the horror of facing a public scandal: my poor girl writes of the
hatefulness of having to act the complacent--put on her accustomed self!
She would have to go about, a mark for the talkers, and behave as if
nothing were in the air-full of darts! Oh, that general whisper!--it
makes a coup de massue--a gale to sink the bravest vessel: and a woman
must preserve her smoothest front; chat, smile--or else!--Well, she
shrinks from it. I should too. She is leaving the country.'

'Wrong!' cried Redworth.

'Wrong indeed. She writes, that in two days she will be out of it.
Judge her as I do, though you are a man, I pray. You have seen the
hunted hare. It is our education--we have something of the hare in us
when the hounds are full cry. Our bravest, our best, have an impulse to
run. "By this, poor Wat far off upon a hill." Shakespeare would have
the divine comprehension. I have thought all round it and come back to
him. She is one of Shakespeare's women: another character, but one of
his own:--another Hermione! I dream of him--seeing her with that eye of
steady flame. The bravest and best of us at bay in the world need an eye
like his, to read deep and not be baffled by inconsistencies.'

Insensibly Redworth blinked. His consciousness of an exalted compassion
for the lady was heated by these flights of advocacy to feel that he was
almost seated beside the sovereign poet thus eulogized, and he was of a
modest nature.

'But you are practical,' pursued Lady Dunstane, observing signs that she
took for impatience. 'You are thinking of what can be done. If Lukin
were here I would send him to The Crossways without a moment's delay, on
the chance, the mere chance:--it shines to me! If I were only a little
stronger! I fear I might break down, and it would be unfair to my
husband. He has trouble enough with my premature infirmities already.
I am certain she will go to The Crossways. Tony is one of the women who
burn to give last kisses to things they love. And she has her little
treasures hoarded there. She was born there. Her father died there.
She is three parts Irish--superstitious in affection. I know her so
well. At this moment I see her there. If not, she has grown unlike
herself.'

'Have you a stout horse in the stables?' Redworth asked.

'You remember the mare Bertha; you have ridden her.'

'The mare would do, and better than a dozen horses.' He consulted his
watch. 'Let me mount Bertha, I engage to deliver a letter at The
Crossways to-night.'

Lady Dunstane half inclined to act hesitation in accepting the aid she
sought, but said: 'Will you find your way?'

He spoke of three hours of daylight and a moon to rise. 'She has often
pointed out to me from your ridges where The Crossways lies, about three
miles from the Downs, near a village named Storling, on the road to
Brasted.

The house has a small plantation of firs behind it, and a bit of river--
rare for Sussex--to the right. An old straggling red brick house at
Crossways, a stone's throw from a fingerpost on a square of green: roads
to Brasted, London, Wickford, Riddlehurst. I shall find it. Write what
you have to say, my lady, and confide it to me. She shall have it to-
night, if she's where you suppose. I 'll go, with your permission, and
take a look at the mare. Sussex roads are heavy in this damp weather,
and the frost coming on won't improve them for a tired beast. We haven't
our rails laid down there yet.'

'You make me admit some virtues in the practical,' said Lady Dunstane;
and had the poor fellow vollied forth a tale of the everlastingness of
his passion for Diana, it would have touched her far less than his exact
memory of Diana's description of her loved birthplace.

She wrote:

'I trust my messenger to tell you how I hang on you. I see my ship
making for the rocks. You break your Emma's heart. It will be the
second wrong step. I shall not survive it. The threat has made me
incapable of rushing to you, as I might have had strength to do
yesterday. I am shattered, and I wait panting for Mr. Redworth's
return with you. He has called, by accident, as we say. Trust to
him. If ever heaven was active to avert a fatal mischance it is to-
day. You will not stand against my supplication. It is my life I
cry for. I have no more time. He starts. He leaves me to pray--
like the mother seeing her child on the edge of the cliff. Come.
This is your breast, my Tony? And your soul warns you it is right
to come. Do rightly. Scorn other counsel--the coward's. Come with
our friend--the one man known to me who can be a friend of women.

'Your EMMA.'

Redworth was in the room. 'The mare 'll do it well,' he said. 'She has
had her feed, and in five minutes will be saddled at the door.'

'But you must eat, dear friend,' said the hostess.

'I'll munch at a packet of sandwiches on the way. There seems a chance,
and the time for lunching may miss it.'

'You understand . . . ?'

'Everything, I fancy.'

'If she is there!'

'One break in the run will turn her back.'

The sensitive invalid felt a blow in his following up the simile of the
hunted hare for her friend, but it had a promise of hopefulness. And
this was all that could be done by earthly agents, under direction of
spiritual, as her imagination encouraged her to believe.

She saw him start, after fortifying him with a tumbler of choice
Bordeaux, thinking how Tony would have said she was like a lady arming
her knight for battle. On the back of the mare he passed her window,
after lifting his hat, and he thumped at his breast-pocket, to show her
where the letter housed safely. The packet of provision bulged on his
hip, absurdly and blessedly to her sight, not unlike the man, in his
combination of robust serviceable qualities, as she reflected during the
later hours, until the sun fell on smouldering November woods, and
sensations of the frost he foretold bade her remember that he had gone
forth riding like a huntsman. His great-coat lay on a chair in the hall,
and his travelling-bag was beside it. He had carried it up from the
valley, expecting hospitality, and she had sent him forth half naked to
weather a frosty November night! She called in the groom, whose derision
of a great-coat for any gentleman upon Bertha, meaning work for the mare,
appeased her remorsefulness. Brisby, the groom, reckoned how long the
mare would take to do the distance to Storling, with a rider like Mr.
Redworth on her back. By seven, Brisby calculated, Mr. Redworth would be
knocking at the door of the Three Ravens Inn, at Storling, when the mare
would have a decent grooming, and Mr. Redworth was not the gentleman to
let her be fed out of his eye. More than that, Brisby had some
acquaintance with the people of the inn. He begged to inform her
ladyship that he was half a Sussex man, though not exactly born in the
county; his parents had removed to Sussex after the great event; and the
Downs were his first field of horse-exercise, and no place in the world
was like them, fair weather or foul, Summer or Winter, and snow ten feet
deep in the gullies. The grandest air in England, he had heard say.

His mistress kept him to the discourse, for the comfort of hearing hard
bald matter-of-fact; and she was amused and rebuked by his assumption
that she must be entertaining an anxiety about master's favourite mare.
But, ah! that Diana had delayed in choosing a mate; had avoided her
disastrous union with perhaps a more imposing man, to see the true beauty
of masculine character in Mr. Redworth, as he showed himself to-day. How
could he have doubted succeeding? One grain more of faith in his energy,
and Diana might have been mated to the right husband for her--an open-
minded clear-faced English gentleman. Her speculative ethereal mind
clung to bald matter-of-fact to-day. She would have vowed that it was
the sole potentially heroical. Even Brisby partook of the reflected
rays, and he was very benevolently considered by her. She dismissed him
only when his recounting of the stages of Bertha's journey began to
fatigue her and deaden the medical efficacy of him and his like.
Stretched on the sofa, she watched the early sinking sun in South-western
cloud, and the changes from saffron to intensest crimson, the crown of a
November evening, and one of frost.

Redworth struck on a southward line from chalk-ridge to sand, where he
had a pleasant footing in familiar country, under beeches that browned
the ways, along beside a meadowbrook fed by the heights, through pines
and across deep sand-ruts to full view of weald and Downs. Diana had
been with him here in her maiden days. The coloured back of a coach put
an end to that dream. He lightened his pocket, surveying the land as he
munched. A favourable land for rails: and she had looked over it: and he
was now becoming a wealthy man: and she was a married woman straining the
leash. His errand would not bear examination, it seemed such a desperate
long shot. He shut his inner vision on it, and pricked forward. When
the burning sunset shot waves above the juniper and yews behind him, he
was far on the weald, trotting down an interminable road. That the
people opposing railways were not people of business, was his reflection,
and it returned persistently: for practical men, even the most devoted
among them, will think for themselves; their army, which is the rational,
calls them to its banners, in opposition to the sentimental; and Redworth
joined it in the abstract, summoning the horrible state of the roads to
testify against an enemy wanting almost in common humaneness. A slip of
his excellent stepper in one of the half-frozen pits of the highway was
the principal cause of his confusion of logic; she was half on her knees.
Beyond the market town the roads were so bad that he quitted them, and
with the indifference of an engineer, struck a line of his own
Southeastward over fields and ditches, favoured by a round horizon moon
on his left. So for a couple of hours he went ahead over rolling fallow
land to the meadow-flats and a pale shining of freshets; then hit on a
lane skirting the water, and reached an amphibious village; five miles
from Storling, he was informed, and a clear traverse of lanes, not to be
mistaken, 'if he kept a sharp eye open.' The sharpness of his eyes was
divided between the sword-belt of the starry Hunter and the shifting
lanes that zig-tagged his course below. The Downs were softly illumined;
still it amazed him to think of a woman like Diana Warwick having an
attachment to this district, so hard of yield, mucky, featureless, fit
but for the rails she sided with her friend in detesting. Reasonable
women, too! The moon, stood high on her march as he entered Storling.
He led his good beast to the stables of The Three Ravens, thanking her
and caressing her. The ostler conjectured from the look of the mare that
he had been out with the hounds and lost his way. It appeared to
Redworth singularly, that near the ending of a wild goose chase, his
plight was pretty well described by the fellow. However, he had to knock
at the door of The Crossways now, in the silent night time, a certainly
empty house, to his fancy. He fed on a snack of cold meat and tea,
standing, and set forth, clearly directed, 'if he kept a sharp eye open.'
Hitherto he had proved his capacity, and he rather smiled at the
repetition of the formula to him, of all men. A turning to the right
was taken, one to the left, and through the churchyard, out of the gate,
round to the right, and on. By this route, after an hour, he found
himself passing beneath the bare chestnuts of the churchyard wall of
Storling, and the sparkle of the edges of the dead chestnut-leaves at
his feet reminded him of the very ideas he had entertained when treading
them. The loss of an hour strung him to pursue the chase in earnest,
and he had a beating of the heart as he thought that it might be serious.
He recollected thinking it so at Copsley. The long ride, and nightfall,
with nothing in view, had obscured his mind to the possible behind the
thick obstruction of the probable; again the possible waved its marsh-
light. To help in saving her from a fatal step, supposing a dozen
combinations of the conditional mood, became his fixed object, since here
he was--of that there was no doubt; and he was not here to play the fool,
though the errand were foolish. He entered the churchyard, crossed the
shadow of the tower, and hastened along the path, fancying he beheld a
couple of figures vanishing before him. He shouted; he hoped to obtain
directions from these natives: the moon was bright, the gravestones
legible; but no answer came back, and the place appeared to belong
entirely to the dead. 'I've frightened them,' he thought. They left a
queerish sensation in his frame. A ride down to Sussex to see ghosts
would be an odd experience; but an undigested dinner of tea is the very
grandmother of ghosts; and he accused it of confusing him, sight and
mind. Out of the gate, now for the turning to the right, and on. He
turned. He must have previously turned wrongly somewhere--and where?
A light in a cottage invited him to apply for the needed directions.
The door was opened by a woman, who had never heard tell of The
Crossways, nor had her husband, nor any of the children crowding round
them. A voice within ejaculated: 'Crassways!' and soon upon the grating
of a chair, an old man, whom the woman named her lodger, by way of
introduction, presented himself with his hat on, saying: 'I knows the
spot they calls Crassways,' and he led. Redworth understood the
intention that a job was to be made of it, and submitting, said: 'To the
right, I think.' He was bidden to come along, if he wanted 'they
Crassways,' and from the right they turned to the left, and further sharp
round, and on to a turn, where the old man, otherwise incommunicative,
said: 'There, down thik theer road, and a post in the middle.'

'I want a house, not a post!' roared Redworth, spying a bare space.

The old man despatched a finger travelling to his nob. 'Naw, there's
ne'er a house. But that's crassways for four roads, if it 's crassways,
you wants.'

They journeyed backward. They were in such a maze of lanes that the old
man was master, and Redworth vowed to be rid of him at the first cottage.
This, however, they were long in reaching, and the old man was promptly
through the garden-gate, hailing the people and securing 'information,
before Redworth could well hear. He smiled at the dogged astuteness of a
dense-headed old creature determined to establish a claim to his fee.
They struck a lane sharp to the left.

'You're Sussex?' Redworth asked him, and was answered: 'Naw; the Sheers.'

Emerging from deliberation, the old man said: 'Ah'm a Hampshireman.'

'A capital county!'

'Heigh!' The old man heaved his chest. 'Once!'

'Why, what has happened to it?'

'Once it were a capital county, I say. Hah! you asks me what have
happened to it. You take and go and look at it now. And down heer'll be
no better soon, I tells 'em. When ah was a boy, old Hampshire was a
proud country, wi' the old coaches and the old squires, and Harvest
Homes, and Christmas merryings.--Cutting up the land! There's no pride
in livin' theer, nor anywhere, as I sees, now.'

'You mean the railways.'

'It's the Devil come up and abroad ower all England!' exclaimed the
melancholy ancient patriot.

A little cheering was tried on him, but vainly. He saw with unerring
distinctness the triumph of the Foul Potentate, nay his personal
appearance 'in they theer puffin' engines.' The country which had
produced Andrew Hedger, as he stated his name to be, would never show the
same old cricketing commons it did when he was a boy. Old England, he
declared, was done for.

When Redworth applied to his watch under the brilliant moonbeams,
he discovered that he had been listening to this natural outcry of a
decaying and shunted class full three-quarters of an hour, and The
Crossways was not in sight. He remonstrated. The old man plodded along.
'We must do as we're directed,' he said.

Further walking brought them to a turn. Any turn seemed hopeful.
Another turn offered the welcome sight of a blazing doorway on a rise of
ground off the road. Approaching it, the old man requested him to 'bide
a bit,' and stalked the ascent at long strides. A vigorous old fellow.
Redworth waited below, observing how he joined the group at the lighted
door, and, as it was apparent, put his question of the whereabout of The
Crossways. Finally, in extreme impatience, he walked up to the group of
spectators. They were all, and Andrew Hedger among them, the most
entranced and profoundly reverent, observing the dissection of a pig.

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