Diana of the Crossways, v2
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George Meredith >> Diana of the Crossways, v2
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But was she holding the position by flight? It involved the challenge
of consequences, not an evasion of them.
She moaned; her mental steam-wheel stopped; fatigue brought sleep.
She had sensationally led her rebellious wits to The Crossways,
distilling much poison from thoughts on the way; and there, for the
luxury of a still seeming indecision, she sank into oblivion.
CHAPTER XI
RECOUNTS THE JOURNEY IN A CHARIOT, WITH A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF DIALOGUE, AND
A SMALL INCIDENT ON THE ROAD
In the morning the fight was over. She looked at the signpost of The
Crossways whilst dressing, and submitted to follow, obediently as a
puppet, the road recommended by friends, though a voice within, that she
took for the intimations of her reason, protested that they were wrong,
that they were judging of her case in the general, and unwisely--
disastrously for her.
The mistaking of her desires for her reasons was peculiar to her
situation.
'So I suppose I shall some day see The Crossways again,' she said, to
conceive a compensation in the abandonment of freedom. The night's red
vision of martyrdom was reserved to console her secretly, among the
unopened lockers in her treasury of thoughts. It helped to sustain her;
and she was too conscious of things necessary for her sustainment to
bring it to the light of day and examine it. She had a pitiful bit of
pleasure in the gratification she imparted to Danvers, by informing her
that the journey of the day was backward to Copsley.
'If I may venture to say so, ma'am, I am very glad,' said her maid.
'You must be prepared for the questions of lawyers, Danvers.'
'Oh, ma'am! they'll get nothing out of me, and their wigs won't frighten
me.'
'It is usually their baldness that is most frightening, my poor Danvers.'
'Nor their baldness, ma'am,' said the literal maid; 'I never cared for
their heads, or them. I've been in a Case before.'
'Indeed!' exclaimed her mistress; and she had a chill.
Danvers mentioned a notorious Case, adding, 'They got nothing out of me.'
'In my Case you will please to speak the truth,' said Diana, and beheld
in the looking-glass the primming of her maid's mouth. The sight shot a
sting.
'Understand that there is to be no hesitation about telling the truth of
what you know of me,' said Diana; and the answer was, 'No, ma'am.'
For Danvers could remark to herself that she knew little, and was not a
person to hesitate. She was a maid of the world, with the quality of
faithfulness, by nature, to a good mistress.
Redworth's further difficulties were confined to the hiring of a
conveyance for the travellers, and hot-water bottles, together with a
postillion not addicted to drunkenness. He procured a posting-chariot,
an ancient and musty, of a late autumnal yellow unrefreshed by paint;
the only bottles to be had were Dutch Schiedam. His postillion,
inspected at Storling, carried the flag of habitual inebriation on his
nose, and he deemed it adviseable to ride the mare in accompaniment as
far as Riddlehurst, notwithstanding the postillion's vows upon his honour
that he was no drinker. The emphasis, to a gentleman acquainted with his
countrymen, was not reassuring. He had hopes of enlisting a trustier
fellow at Riddlehurst, but he was disappointed; and while debating upon
what to do, for he shrank from leaving two women to the conduct of that
inflamed troughsnout, Brisby, despatched to Storling by an afterthought
of Lady Dunstane's, rushed out of the Riddlehurst inn taproom, and
relieved him of the charge of the mare. He was accommodated with a seat
on a stool in the chariot. 'My triumphal car,' said his captive. She
was very amusing about her postillion; Danvers had to beg pardon for
laughing. 'You are happy,' observed her mistress. But Redworth laughed
too, and he could not boast of any happiness beyond the temporary
satisfaction, nor could she who sprang the laughter boast of that little.
She said to herself, in the midst of the hilarity, 'Wherever I go now, in
all weathers, I am perfectly naked!' And remembering her readings of a
certain wonderful old quarto book in her father's library, by an
eccentric old Scottish nobleman, wherein the wearing of garments and
sleeping in houses is accused as the cause of human degeneracy, she took
a forced merry stand on her return to the primitive healthful state of
man and woman, and affected scorn of our modern ways of dressing and
thinking. Whence it came that she had some of her wildest seizures of
iridescent humour. Danvers attributed the fun to her mistress's gladness
in not having pursued her bent to quit the country. Redworth saw deeper,
and was nevertheless amazed by the airy hawk-poise and pounce-down of her
wit, as she ranged high and low, now capriciously generalizing, now
dropping bolt upon things of passage--the postillion jogging from rum to
gin, the rustics baconly agape, the horse-kneed ostlers. She touched
them to the life in similes and phrases; and next she was aloft,
derisively philosophizing, but with a comic afflatus that dispersed the
sharpness of her irony in mocking laughter. The afternoon refreshments
at the inn of the county market-town, and the English idea of public
hospitality, as to manner and the substance provided for wayfarers, were
among the themes she made memorable to him. She spoke of everything
tolerantly, just naming it in a simple sentence, that fell with a ring
and chimed: their host's ready acquiescence in receiving, orders, his
contemptuous disclaimer of stuff he did not keep, his flat indifference
to the sheep he sheared, and the phantom half-crown flickering in one eye
of the anticipatory waiter; the pervading and confounding smell of stale
beer over all the apartments; the prevalent, notion of bread, butter,
tea, milk, sugar, as matter for the exercise of a native inventive
genius--these were reviewed in quips of metaphor.
'Come, we can do better at an inn or two known to me,' said Redworth.
'Surely this is the best that can be done for us, when we strike them
with the magic wand of a postillion?' said she.
'It depends, as elsewhere, on the individuals entertaining us.'
'Yet you admit that your railways are rapidly "polishing off" the
individual.'
'They will spread the metropolitan idea of comfort.'
'I fear they will feed us on nothing but that big word. It booms--
a curfew bell--for every poor little light that we would read by.'
Seeing their beacon-nosed postillion preparing too mount and failing in
his jump, Redworth was apprehensive, and questioned the fellow concerning
potation.
'Lord, sir, they call me half a horse, but I can't 'bids water,' was the
reply, with the assurance that he had not 'taken a pailful.'
Habit enabled him to gain his seat.
'It seems to us unnecessary to heap on coal when the chimney is afire;
but he may know the proper course,' Diana said, convulsing Danvers; and
there was discernibly to Redworth, under the influence of her phrases, a
likeness of the flaming 'half-horse,' with the animals all smoking in the
frost, to a railway engine. 'Your wrinkled centaur,' she named the man.
Of course he had to play second to her, and not unwillingly; but he
reflected passingly on the instinctive push of her rich and sparkling
voluble fancy to the initiative, which women do not like in a woman, and
men prefer to distantly admire. English women and men feel toward the
quick-witted of their species as to aliens, having the demerits of
aliens-wordiness, vanity, obscurity, shallowness, an empty glitter, the
sin of posturing. A quick-witted woman exerting her wit is both a
foreigner and potentially a criminal. She is incandescent to a breath of
rumour. It accounted for her having detractors; a heavy counterpoise to
her enthusiastic friends. It might account for her husband's discontent-
the reduction of him to a state of mere masculine antagonism. What is
the husband of a vanward woman? He feels himself but a diminished man.
The English husband of a voluble woman relapses into a dreary mute. Ah,
for the choice of places! Redworth would have yielded her the loquent
lead for the smallest of the privileges due to him who now rejected all,
except the public scourging of her. The conviction was in his mind that
the husband of this woman sought rather to punish than be rid of her.
But a part of his own emotion went to form the judgement.
Furthermore, Lady Dunstane's allusion to her 'enemies' made him set down
her growing crops of backbiters to the trick she had of ridiculing things
English. If the English do it themselves, it is in a professionally
robust, a jocose, kindly way, always with a glance at the other things,
great things, they excel in; and it is done to have the credit of doing
it. They are keen to catch an inimical tone; they will find occasion to
chastise the presumptuous individual, unless it be the leader of a party,
therefore a power; for they respect a power. Redworth knew their
quaintnesses; without overlooking them he winced at the acid of an irony
that seemed to spring from aversion, and regretted it, for her sake. He
had to recollect that she was in a sharp-strung mood, bitterly
surexcited; moreover he reminded himself of her many and memorable
phrases of enthusiasm for England--Shakespeareland, as she would
sometimes perversely term it, to sink the country in the poet. English
fortitude, English integrity, the English disposition to do justice to
dependents, adolescent English ingenuousness, she was always ready to
laud. Only her enthusiasm required rousing by circumstances; it was less
at the brim than her satire. Hence she made enemies among a placable
people.
He felt that he could have helped her under happier conditions. The
beautiful vision she had been on the night of the Irish Ball swept before
him, and he looked at her, smiling.
'Why do you smile?' she said.
'I was thinking of Mr. Sullivan Smith.'
'Ah! my dear compatriot! And think, too, of Lord Larrian.'
She caught her breath. Instead of recreation, the names brought on a
fit of sadness. It deepened; shy neither smiled nor rattled any more.
She gazed across the hedgeways at the white meadows and bare-twigged
copses showing their last leaves in the frost.
'I remember your words: "Observation is the most, enduring of the
pleasures of life"; and so I have found it,' she said. There was a
brightness along her under-eyelids that caused him to look away.
The expected catastrophe occurred on the descent of a cutting in the
sand, where their cordial postillion at a trot bumped the chariot against
the sturdy wheels of a waggon, which sent it reclining for support upon a
beech-tree's huge intertwisted serpent roots, amid strips of brown
bracken and pendant weeds, while he exhibited one short stump of leg, all
boot, in air. No one was hurt. Diana disengaged herself from the
shoulder of Danvers, and mildly said:
'That reminds me, I forgot to ask why we came in a chariot.'
Redworth was excited on her behalf, but the broken glass had done no
damage, nor had Danvers fainted. The remark was unintelligible to him,
apart from the comforting it had been designed to give. He jumped out,
and held a hand for them to do the same. 'I never foresaw an event more
positively,' said he.
'And it was nothing but a back view that inspired you all the way,' said
Diana.
A waggoner held the horses, another assisted Redworth to right the
chariot. The postillion had hastily recovered possession of his official
seat, that he might as soon as possible feel himself again where he was
most intelligent, and was gay in stupidity, indifferent to what happened
behind him. Diana heard him counselling the waggoner as to the common
sense of meeting small accidents with a cheerful soul.
'Lord!' he cried, 'I been pitched a Somerset in my time, and taken up for
dead, and that didn't beat me!'
Disasters of the present kind could hardly affect such a veteran. But he
was painfully disconcerted by Redworth's determination not to entrust the
ladies any farther to his guidance. Danvers had implored for permission
to walk the mile to the town, and thence take a fly to Copsley. Her
mistress rather sided with the postillion; who begged them to spare him
the disgrace of riding in and delivering a box at the Red Lion.
'What'll they say? And they know Arthur Dance well there,' he groaned.
'What! Arthur! chariotin' a box! And me a better man to his work now
than I been for many a long season, fit for double the journey! A bit of
a shake always braces me up. I could read a newspaper right off, small
print and all. Come along, sir, and hand the ladies in.'
Danvers vowed her thanks to Mr. Redworth for refusing. They walked
ahead; the postillion communicated his mixture of professional and human
feelings to the waggoners, and walked his horses in the rear, meditating
on the weak-heartedness of gentryfolk, and the means for escaping being
chaffed out of his boots at the Old Red Lion, where he was to eat, drink,
and sleep that night. Ladies might be fearsome after a bit of a shake;
he would not have supposed it of a gentleman. He jogged himself into an
arithmetic of the number of nips of liquor he had taken to soothe him on
the road, in spite of the gentleman. 'For some of 'em are sworn enemies
of poor men, as yonder one, ne'er a doubt.'
Diana enjoyed her walk beneath the lingering brown-red of the frosty
November sunset, with the scent of sand-earth strong in the air.
'I had to hire a chariot because there was no two-horse carriage,' said
Redworth, 'and I wished to reach Copsley as early as possible.'
She replied, smiling, that accidents were fated. As a certain marriage
had been! The comparison forced itself on her reflections.
'But this is quite an adventure,' said she, reanimated by the brisker
flow of her blood. 'We ought really to be thankful for it, in days when
nothing happens.'
Redworth accused her of getting that idea from the perusal of romances.
'Yes, our lives require compression, like romances, to be interesting,
and we object to the process,' she said. 'Real happiness is a state of
dulness. When we taste it consciously it becomes mortal--a thing of the
Seasons. But I like my walk. How long these November sunsets burn, and
what hues they have! There is a scientific reason, only don't tell it
me. Now I understand why you always used to choose your holidays in
November.'
She thrilled him with her friendly recollection of his customs.
'As to happiness, the looking forward is happiness,' he remarked.
'Oh, the looking back! back!' she cried.
'Forward! that is life.'
'And backward, death, if you will; and still at is happiness. Death, and
our postillion!'
'Ay; I wonder why the fellow hangs to the rear,' said Redworth, turning
about.
'It's his cunning strategy, poor creature, so that he may be thought to
have delivered us at the head of the town, for us to make a purchase or
two, if we go to the inn on foot,' said Diana. 'We 'll let the manoeuvre
succeed.'
Redworth declared that she had a head for everything, and she was
flattered to hear him.
So passing from the southern into the western road, they saw the town-
lights beneath an amber sky burning out sombrely over the woods of
Copsley, and entered the town, the postillion following.
CHAPTER XII
BETWEEN EMMA AND DIANA
Diana was in the arms of her friend at a late hour of the evening, and
Danvers breathed the amiable atmosphere of footmen once more, professing
herself perished. This maid of the world, who could endure hardships and
loss of society for the mistress to whom she was attached, no sooner saw
herself surrounded by the comforts befitting her station, than she
indulged in the luxury of a wailful dejectedness, the better to
appreciate them. She was unaffectedly astonished to find her outcries
against the cold and the journeyings to and fro interpreted as a serving-
woman's muffled comments on her mistress's behaviour. Lady Dunstane's
maid Bartlett, and Mrs. Bridges the housekeeper, and Foster the butler,
contrived to let her know that they could speak an if they would; and
they expressed their pity of her to assist her to begin the speaking.
She bowed in acceptance of Fosters offer of a glass of wine after supper,
but treated him and the other two immediately as though they had been
interrogating bigwigs.
'They wormed nothing out of me,' she said to her mistress at night,
undressing her. 'But what a set they are! They've got such comfortable
places, they've all their days and hours for talk of the doings of their
superiors. They read the vilest of those town papers, and they put their
two and two together of what is happening in and about. And not one of
the footmen thinks of staying, because it 's so dull; and they and the
maids object--did one ever hear?--to the three uppers retiring, when they
've done dining, to the private room to dessert.'
'That is the custom?' observed her mistress.
'Foster carries the decanter, ma'am, and Mrs. Bridges the biscuits, and
Bartlett the plate of fruit, and they march out in order.'
'The man at the head of the procession, probably.'
'Oh yes. And the others, though they have everything except the wine and
dessert, don't like it. When I was here last they were new, and hadn't a
word against it. Now they say it's invidious! Lady Dunstane will be
left without an under-servant at Copsley soon. I was asked about your
boxes, ma'am, and the moment I said they were at Dover, that instant all
three peeped. They let out a mouse to me. They do love to talk!'
Her mistress could have added, 'And you too, my good Danvers!'
trustworthy though she knew the creature to be in the main.
'Now go, and be sure you have bedclothes enough before you drop asleep,'
she said; and Danvers directed her steps to gossip with Bartlett.
Diana wrapped herself in a dressing-gown Lady Dunstane had sent her, and
sat by the fire, thinking of the powder of tattle stored in servants'
halls to explode beneath her: and but for her choice of roads she might
have been among strangers. The liking of strangers best is a curious
exemplification of innocence.
'Yes, I was in a muse,' she said, raising her head to Emma, whom she
expected and sat armed to meet, unaccountably iron-nerved. 'I was
questioning whether I could be quite as blameless as I fancy, if I sit
and shiver to be in England. You will tell me I have taken the right
road. I doubt it. But the road is taken, and here I am. But any road
that leads me to you is homeward, my darling!' She tried to melt,
determining to be at least open with her.
'I have not praised you enough for coming,' said Emma, when they had
embraced again.
'Praise a little your "truest friend of women." Your letter gave the
tug. I might have resisted it.'
'He came straight from heaven! But, cruel Tony where is your love?'
'It is unequal to yours, dear, I see. I could have wrestled with
anything abstract and distant, from being certain. But here I am.'
'But, my own dear girl, you never could have allowed this infamous charge
to be undefended?'
'I think so. I've an odd apathy as to my character; rather like death,
when one dreams of flying the soul. What does it matter? I should have
left the flies and wasps to worry a corpse. And then-good-bye gentility!
I should have worked for my bread. I had thoughts of America. I fancy I
can write; and Americans, one hears, are gentle to women.'
'Ah, Tony! there's the looking back. And, of all women, you!'
'Or else, dear-well, perhaps once on foreign soil, in a different air,
I might--might have looked back, and seen my whole self, not shattered,
as I feel it now, and come home again compassionate to the poor
persecuted animal to defend her. Perhaps that was what I was running
away for. I fled on the instinct, often a good thing to trust.'
'I saw you at The Crossways.'
'I remembered I had the dread that you would, though I did not imagine
you would reach me so swiftly. My going there was an instinct, too.
I suppose we are all instinct when we have the world at our heels.
Forgive me if I generalize without any longer the right to be included in
the common human sum. "Pariah" and "taboo" are words we borrow from
barbarous tribes; they stick to me.'
'My Tony, you look as bright as ever, and you speak despairingly.'
'Call me enigma. I am that to myself, Emmy.'
'You are not quite yourself to your friend.'
'Since the blow I have been bewildered; I see nothing upright. It came
on me suddenly; stunned me. A bolt out of a clear sky, as they say. He
spared me a scene: There had been threats, and yet the sky was clear, or
seemed. When we have a man for arbiter, he is our sky.'
Emma pressed her Tony's unresponsive hand, feeling strangely that her
friend ebbed from her.
'Has he . . . to mislead him?' she said, colouring at the breach in
the question.
'Proofs? He has the proofs he supposes.'
'Not to justify suspicion?'
'He broke open my desk and took my letters.'
'Horrible! But the letters?' Emma shook with a nervous revulsion.
'You might read them.'
'Basest of men! That is the unpardonable cowardice!', exclaimed Emma.
'The world will read them, dear,' said Diana, and struck herself to ice.
She broke from the bitter frigidity in fury. 'They are letters--none
very long--sometimes two short sentences--he wrote at any spare moment.
On my honour, as a woman, I feel for him most. The letters--I would bear
any accusation rather than that exposure. Letters of a man of his age to
a young woman he rates too highly!
The world reads them. Do you hear it saying it could have excused her
for that fiddle-faddle with a younger--a young lover? And had I thought
of a lover! . . . I had no thought of loving or being loved. I
confess I was flattered. To you, Emma, I will confess . . . . You
see the public ridicule!--and half his age, he and I would have appeared
a romantic couple! Confess, I said. Well, dear, the stake is lighted
for a trial of its effect on me. It is this: he was never a
dishonourable friend; but men appear to be capable of friendship with
women only for as long as we keep out of pulling distance of that line
where friendship ceases. They may step on it; we must hold back a
league. I have learnt it. You will judge whether he disrespects me.
As for him, he is a man; at his worst, not one of the worst; at his best,
better than very many. There, now, Emma, you have me stripped and
burning; there is my full confession. Except for this--yes, one thing
further--that I do rage at the ridicule, and could choose, but for you,
to have given the world cause to revile me, or think me romantic.
Something or somebody to suffer for would really be agreeable. It is a
singular fact, I have not known what this love is, that they talk about.
And behold me marched into Smithfield!--society's heretic, if you please.
I must own I think it hard.'
Emma chafed her cold hand softly.
'It is hard; I understand it,' she murmured. 'And is your Sunday visit
to us in the list of offences?'
'An item.'
'You gave me a happy day.'
'Then it counts for me in heaven.'
'He set spies on you?'
'So we may presume.'
Emma went through a sphere of tenuious reflections in a flash.
'He will rue it. Perhaps now . . . he may now be regretting his
wretched frenzy. And Tony could pardon; she has the power of pardoning
in her heart.'
'Oh! certainly, dear. But tell me why it is you speak to-night rather
unlike the sedate, philosophical Emma; in a tone-well, tolerably
sentimental?'
'I am unaware of it,' said Emma, who could have retorted with a like
reproach. 'I am anxious, I will not say at present for your happiness,
for your peace; and I have a hope that possibly a timely word from some
friend--Lukin or another--might induce him to consider.'
'To pardon me, do you mean?' cried Diana, flushing sternly.
'Not pardon. Suppose a case of faults on both sides.'
'You address a faulty person, my dear. But do you know that you are
hinting at a reconcilement?'
'Might it not be?'
'Open your eyes to what it involves. I trust I can pardon. Let him go
his ways, do his darkest, or repent. But return to the roof of the
"basest of men," who was guilty of "the unpardonable cowardice"? You
expect me to be superhuman. When I consent to that, I shall be out of my
woman's skin, which he has branded. Go back to him!' She was taken with
a shudder of head and limbs. 'No; I really have the power of pardoning,
and I am bound to; for among my debts to him, this present exemption,
that is like liberty dragging a chain, or, say, an escaped felon wearing
his manacles, should count. I am sensible of my obligation. The price I
pay for it is an immovable patch-attractive to male idiots, I have heard,
and a mark of scorn to females. Between the two the remainder of my days
will be lively. "Out, out, damned spot!" But it will not. And not on
the hand--on the forehead! We'll talk of it no longer. I have sent a
note, with an enclosure, to my lawyers. I sell The Crossways, if I have
the married woman's right to any scrap of property, for money to scatter
fees.'
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