Diana of the Crossways, v2
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George Meredith >> Diana of the Crossways, v2
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In happier times, when light of heart and natural, her vogue had not been
so enrapturing. Doubtless Cleopatra in her simple Egyptian uniform would
hardly have won such plaudits as her stress of barbaric Oriental
splendours evoked for her on the swan and serpent Nile-barge--not from
posterity at least. It is a terrible decree, that all must act who would
prevail; and the more extended the audience, the greater need for the
mask and buskin.
From Lady Pennon's table Diana passed to Lady Crane's, Lady Esquart's,
Lady Singleby's, the Duchess of Raby's, warmly clad in the admiration she
excited. She appeared at Princess Therese Paryli's first ball of the
season, and had her circle, not of worshippers only. She did not dance.
The princess, a fair Austrian, benevolent to her sisterhood, an admirer
of Diana's contrasting complexion, would have had her dance once in a
quadrille of her forming, but yielded to the mute expression of the
refusal. Wherever Mrs. Warwick went, her arts of charming were addressed
to the women. Men may be counted on for falling bowled over by a
handsome face and pointed tongue; women require some wooing from their
ensphered and charioted sister, particularly if she is clouded; and old
women--excellent buttresses--must be suavely courted. Now, to woo the
swimming matron and court the settled dowager, she had to win forgiveness
for her beauty; and this was done, easily done, by forbearing to angle
with it in the press of nibblers. They ranged about her, individually
unnoticed. Seeming unaware of its effect where it kindled, she smote a
number of musical female chords, compassion among them. A general grave
affability of her eyes and smiles was taken for quiet pleasure in the
scene. Her fitful intentness of look when conversing with the older
ladies told of the mind within at work upon what they said, and she was
careful that plain dialogue should make her comprehensible to them.
Nature taught her these arts, through which her wit became extolled
entirely on the strength of her reputation, and her beauty did her
service by never taking aim abroad. They are the woman's arts of self-
defence, as legitimately and honourably hers as the manful use of the
fists with a coarser sex. If it had not been nature that taught her the
practice of them in extremity, the sagacious dowagers would have seen
brazenness rather than innocence--or an excuseable indiscretion--in the
part she was performing. They are not lightly duped by one of their sex.
Few tasks are more difficult than for a young woman under a cloud to
hoodwink old women of the world. They are the prey of financiers, but
Time has presented them a magic ancient glass to scan their sex in.
At Princess Paryli's Ball two young men of singular elegance were
observed by Diana, little though she concentered her attention on any
figures of the groups. She had the woman's faculty (transiently bestowed
by perfervid jealousy upon men) of distinguishing minutely in the calmest
of indifferent glances. She could see without looking; and when her eyes
were wide they had not to dwell to be detective. It did not escape her
that the Englishman of the two hurried for the chance of an introduction,
nor that he suddenly, after putting a question to a man beside him,
retired. She spoke of them to Emma as they drove home. 'The princess's
partner in the first quadrille . . . Hungarian, I suppose? He was
like a Tartar modelled by a Greek: supple as the Scythian's bow, braced
as the string! He has the air of a born horseman, and valses perfectly.
I won't say he was handsomer than a young Englishman there, but he had
the advantage of soldierly training. How different is that quick springy
figure from our young men's lounging style! It comes of military
exercise and discipline.'
'That was Count Jochany, a cousin of the princess, and a cavalry
officer,' said Emma. 'You don't know the other? I am sure the one you
mean must be Percy Dacier.'
His retiring was explained: the Hon. Percy Dacier was the nephew of Lord
Dannisburgh, often extolled to her as the promising youngster of his day,
with the reserve that he wasted his youth: for the young gentleman was
decorous and studious; ambitious, according to report; a politician
taking to politics much too seriously and exclusively to suit his uncle's
pattern for the early period of life. Uncle and nephew went their
separate ways, rarely meeting, though their exchange of esteem was
cordial.
Thinking over his abrupt retirement from the crowded semicircle, Diana
felt her position pinch her, she knew not why.
Lady Dunstane was as indefatigable by day as by night in the business of
acting goddess to her beloved Tony, whom she assured that the service,
instead of exhausting, gave her such healthfulness as she had imagined
herself to have lost for ever. The word was passed, and invitations
poured in to choice conversational breakfasts, private afternoon
concerts, all the humming season's assemblies. Mr. Warwick's treatment
of his wife was taken by implication for lunatic; wherever she was heard
or seen, he had no case; a jury of some hundreds of both sexes, ready to
be sworn, pronounced against him. Only the personal enemies of the lord
in the suit presumed to doubt, and they exercised the discretion of a
minority.
But there is an upper middle class below the aristocratic, boasting an
aristocracy of morals, and eminently persuasive of public opinion, if not
commanding it. Previous to the relaxation, by amendment, of a certain
legal process, this class was held to represent the austerity of the
country. At present a relaxed austerity is represented; and still the
bulk of the members are of fair repute, though not quite on the level of
their pretensions. They were then, while more sharply divided from the
titular superiors they are socially absorbing, very powerful to brand a
woman's character, whatever her rank might be; having innumerable
agencies and avenues for that high purpose, to say nothing of the
printing-press. Lady Dunstane's anxiety to draw them over to the cause
of her friend set her thinking of the influential Mrs. Cramborne Wathin,
with whom she was distantly connected; the wife of a potent serjeant-at-
law fast mounting to the Bench and knighthood; the centre of a circle,
and not strangely that, despite her deficiency in the arts and graces,
for she had wealth and a cook, a husband proud of his wine-cellar, and
the ambition to rule; all the rewards, together with the expectations, of
the virtuous. She was a lady of incisive features bound in stale
parchment. Complexion she had none, but she had spotlessness of skin,
and sons and daughters just resembling her, like cheaper editions of a
precious quarto of a perished type. You discerned the imitation of the
type, you acknowledged the inferior compositor. Mr. Cramborne Wathin was
by birth of a grade beneath his wife; he sprang (behind a curtain of
horror) from tradesmen. The Bench was in designation for him to wash out
the stain, but his children suffered in large hands and feet, short legs,
excess of bone, prominences misplaced. Their mother inspired them
carefully with the religion she opposed to the pretensions of a nobler
blood, while instilling into them that the blood they drew from her was
territorial, far above the vulgar. Her appearance and her principles
fitted her to stand for the Puritan rich of the period, emerging by the
aid of an extending wealth into luxurious worldliness, and retaining the
maxims of their forefathers for the discipline of the poor and erring.
Lady Dunstane called on her, ostensibly to let her know she had taken a
house in town for the season, and in the course of the chat Mrs.
Cramborne Wathin was invited to dinner. 'You will meet my dear friend,
Mrs. Warwick,' she said, and the reply was: 'Oh, I have heard of her.'
The formal consultation with Mr. Cramborne Wathin ended in an agreement
to accept Lady Dunstane's kind invitation.
Considering her husband's plenitude of old legal anecdotes, and her own
diligent perusal of the funny publications of the day, that she might be
on the level of the wits and celebrities she entertained, Mrs. Cramborne
Wathin had a right to expect the leading share in the conversation to
which she was accustomed. Every honour was paid to them; they met
aristocracy in the persons of Lord Larrian, of Lady Rockden, Colonel
Purlby, the Pettigrews, but neither of them held the table for a moment;
the topics flew, and were no sooner up than down; they were unable to get
a shot. They had to eat in silence, occasionally grinning, because a
woman labouring under a stigma would rattle-rattle, as if the laughter of
the company were her due, and decency beneath her notice. Some one
alluded to a dog of Mrs. Warwick's, whereupon she trips out a story of
her dog's amazing intelligence.
'And pray,' said Mrs. Cramborne Wathin across the table, merely to slip
in a word, 'what is the name of this wonderful dog?'
'His name is Leander,' said Diana.
'Oh, Leander. I don't think I hear myself calling to a dog in a name of
three syllables. Two at the most.'
No, so I call Hero! if I want him to come immediately,' said Diana, and
the gentlemen, to Mrs. Cramborne Wathin's astonishment, acclaimed it.
Mr. Redworth, at her elbow, explained the point, to her disgust. . .
That was Diana's offence.
If it should seem a small one, let it be remembered that a snub was
intended, and was foiled; and foiled with an apparent simplicity, enough
to exasperate, had there been no laughter of men to back the countering
stroke. A woman under a cloud, she talked, pushed to shine; she would be
heard, would be applauded. Her chronicler must likewise admit the error
of her giving way to a petty sentiment of antagonism on first beholding
Mrs. Cramborne Wathin, before whom she at once resolved to be herself,
for a holiday, instead of acting demurely to conciliate. Probably it was
an antagonism of race, the shrinking of the skin from the burr. But when
Tremendous Powers are invoked, we should treat any simple revulsion of
our blood as a vice. The Gods of this world's contests demand it of us,
in relation to them, that the mind, and not the instincts, shall be at
work. Otherwise the course of a prudent policy is never to invoke them,
but avoid.
The upper class was gained by her intrepidity, her charm, and her
elsewhere offending wit, however the case might go. It is chivalrous,
but not, alas, inflammable in support of innocence. The class below it
is governed in estimates of character by accepted patterns of conduct;
yet where innocence under persecution is believed to exist, the members
animated by that belief can be enthusiastic. Enthusiasm is a heaven-sent
steeplechaser, and takes a flying leap of the ordinary barriers; it is
more intrusive than chivalry, and has a passion to communicate its
ardour. Two letters from stranger ladies reached Diana, through her
lawyers and Lady Dunstane. Anonymous letters, not so welcome, being male
effusions, arrived at her lodgings, one of them comical almost over the
verge to pathos in its termination: 'To me you will ever be the Goddess
Diana--my faith in woman!'
He was unacquainted with her!
She had not the heart to think the writers donkeys. How they obtained
her address was a puzzle; they stole in to comfort her slightly. They
attached her to her position of Defendant by the thought of what would
have been the idea of her character if she had flown--a reflection
emanating from inexperience of the resources of sentimentalists.
If she had flown! She was borne along by the tide like a butterfly that
a fish may gobble unless a friendly hand shall intervene. And could it
in nature? She was past expectation of release. The attempt to imagine
living with any warmth of blood in her vindicated character, for the sake
of zealous friends, consigned her to a cold and empty house upon a
foreign earth. She had to set her mind upon the mysterious enshrouded
Twelve, with whom the verdict would soon be hanging, that she might
prompt her human combativeness to desire the vindication at such a price
as she would have to pay for it. When Emma Dunstane spoke to her of the
certainty of triumphing, she suggested a possible dissentient among the
fateful Twelve, merely to escape the drumming sound of that hollow big
word. The irreverent imp of her humour came to her relief by calling
forth the Twelve, in the tone of the clerk of the Court, and they
answered to their names of trades and crafts after the manner of
Titania's elves, and were questioned as to their fitness, by education,
habits, enlightenment, to pronounce decisively upon the case in dispute,
the case being plainly stated. They replied, that the long habit of
dealing with scales enabled them to weigh the value of evidence the most
delicate. Moreover, they were Englishmen, and anything short of
downright bullet facts went to favour the woman. For thus we light the
balance of legal injustice toward the sex: we conveniently wink, ma'am.
A rough, old-fashioned way for us! Is it a Breach of Promise?--She may
reckon on her damages: we have daughters of our own. Is it a suit for
Divorce?--Well, we have wives of our own, and we can lash, or we can
spare; that's as it may be; but we'll keep the couple tied, let 'em hate
as they like, if they can't furnish pork-butchers' reasons for sundering;
because the man makes the money in this country.--My goodness! what a
funny people, sir!--It 's our way of holding the balance, ma'am.--But
would it not be better to rectify the law and the social system, dear
sir?--Why, ma'am, we find it comfortabler to take cases as they come, in
the style of our fathers.--But don't you see, my good man, that you are
offering scapegoats for the comfort of the majority?--Well, ma'am, there
always were scapegoats, and always will be; we find it comes round pretty
square in the end.
'And I may be the scapegoat, Emmy! It is perfectly possible. The
grocer, the pork-butcher, drysalter, stationer, tea-merchant, et caetera
--they sit on me. I have studied the faces of the juries, and Mr.
Braddock tells me of their composition. And he admits that they do
justice roughly--a rough and tumble country! to quote him--though he says
they are honest in intention.'
'More shame to the man who drags you before them--if he persists!' Emma
rejoined.
'He will. I know him. I would not have him draw back now,' said Diana,
catching her breath. 'And, dearest, do not abuse him; for if you do, you
set me imagining guiltiness. Oh, heaven!--suppose me publicly pardoned!
No, I have kinder feelings when we stand opposed. It is odd, and rather
frets my conscience, to think of the little resentment I feel. Hardly
any! He has not cause to like his wife. I can own it, and I am sorry
for him, heartily. No two have ever come together so naturally
antagonistic as we two. We walked a dozen steps in stupefied union, and
hit upon crossways. From that moment it was tug and tug; he me, I him.
By resisting, I made him a tyrant; and he, by insisting, made me a rebel.
And he was the maddest of tyrants--a weak one. My dear, he was also a
double-dealer. Or no, perhaps not in design. He was moved at one time
by his interests; at another by his idea of his honour. He took what I
could get for him, and then turned and drubbed me for getting it.'
'This is the creature you try to excuse!' exclaimed indignant Emma.
'Yes, because--but fancy all the smart things I said being called my
"sallies"!--can a woman live with it?--because I behaved . . . I
despised him too much, and I showed it. He is not a contemptible man
before the world; he is merely a very narrow one under close inspection.
I could not--or did not--conceal my feeling. I showed it not only to
him, to my friend. Husband grew to mean to me stifler, lung-contractor,
iron mask, inquisitor, everything anti-natural. He suffered under my
"sallies": and it was the worse for him when he did not perceive their
drift. He is an upright man; I have not seen marked meanness. One might
build up a respectable figure in negatives. I could add a row of noughts
to the single number he cherishes, enough to make a millionnaire of him;
but strike away the first, the rest are wind. Which signifies, that if
you do not take his estimate of himself, you will think little of his:
negative virtues. He is not eminently, that is to say, not saliently,
selfish; not rancorous, not obtrusive--tata-ta-ta. But dull!--dull as a
woollen nightcap over eyes and ears and mouth. Oh! an executioner's
black cap to me. Dull, and suddenly staring awake to the idea of his
honour. I "rendered" him ridiculous--I had caught a trick of "using
men's phrases." Dearest, now that the day of trial draws nigh--you have
never questioned me, and it was like you to spare me pain--but now I can
speak of him and myself.' Diana dropped her voice. Here was another
confession. The proximity of the trial acted like fire on her faded
recollection of incidents. It may be that partly the shame of alluding
to them had blocked her woman's memory. For one curious operation of the
charge of guiltiness upon the nearly guiltless is to make them paint
themselves pure white, to the obliteration of minor spots, until the
whiteness being acknowledged, or the ordeal imminent, the spots recur and
press upon their consciences. She resumed, in a rapid undertone: 'You
know that a certain degree of independence had been, if not granted by
him, conquered by me. I had the habit of it. Obedience with him is
imprisonment--he is a blind wall. He received a commission, greatly to
his advantage, and was absent. He seems to have received information of
some sort. He returned unexpectedly, at a late hour, and attacked me at
once, middling violent. My friend--and that he is! was coming from the
House for a ten minutes' talk, as usual, on his way home, to refresh him
after the long sitting and bear-baiting he had nightly to endure. Now
let me confess: I grew frightened; Mr. Warwick was "off his head," as
they say-crazy, and I could not bear the thought of those two meeting.
While he raged I threw open the window and put the lamp near it, to
expose the whole interior--cunning as a veteran intriguer: horrible, but
it had to be done to keep them apart. He asked me what madness possessed
me, to sit by an open window at midnight, in view of the public, with a
damp wind blowing. I complained of want of air and fanned my forehead.
I heard the steps on the pavement; I stung him to retort loudly, and I
was relieved; the steps passed on. So the trick succeeded--the trick!
It was the worst I was guilty of, but it was a trick, and it branded me
trickster. It teaches me to see myself with an abyss in my nature full
of infernal possibilities. I think I am hewn in black rock. A woman who
can do as I did by instinct, needs to have an angel always near her, if
she has not a husband she reveres.'
'We are none of us better than you, dear Tony; only some are more
fortunate, and many are cowards,' Emma said. 'You acted prudently in a
wretched situation, partly of your own making, partly of the
circumstances. But a nature like yours could not sit still and moan.
That marriage was to blame! The English notion of women seems to be that
we are born white sheep or black; circumstances have nothing to do with
our colour. They dread to grant distinctions, and to judge of us
discerningly is beyond them. Whether the fiction, that their homes are
purer than elsewhere, helps to establish the fact, I do not know: there
is a class that does live honestly; and at any rate it springs from a
liking for purity; but I am sure that their method of impressing it on
women has the dangers of things artificial. They narrow their
understanding of human nature, and that is not the way to improve the
breed.'
'I suppose we women are taken to be the second thoughts of the Creator;
human nature's fringes, mere finishing touches, not a part of the
texture,' said Diana; 'the pretty ornamentation. However, I fancy
I perceive some tolerance growing in the minds of the dominant sex.
Our old lawyer Mr. Braddock, who appears to have no distaste for
conversations with me, assures me he expects the day to come when
women will be encouraged to work at crafts and professions for their
independence. That is the secret of the opinion of us at present--our
dependency. Give us the means of independence, and we will gain it, and
have a turn at judging you, my lords! You shall behold a world reversed.
Whenever I am distracted by existing circumstances, I lay my finger on
the material conditions, and I touch the secret. Individually, it may be
moral with us; collectively, it is material-gross wrongs, gross hungers.
I am a married rebel, and thereof comes the social rebel. I was once a
dancing and singing girl: You remember the night of the Dublin Ball.
A Channel sea in uproar, stirred by witches, flows between.'
'You are as lovely as you were then--I could say, lovelier,' said Emma.
'I have unconquerable health, and I wish I could give you the half of it,
dear. I work late into the night, and I wake early and fresh in the
morning. I do not sing, that is all. A few days more, and my character
will be up before the Bull's Head to face him in the arena. The worst of
a position like mine is, that it causes me incessantly to think and talk
of myself. I believe I think less than I talk, but the subject is
growing stale; as those who are long dying feel, I dare say--if they
do not take it as the compensation for their departure.'
The Bull's Head, or British Jury of Twelve, with the wig on it, was faced
during the latter half of a week of good news. First, Mr. Thomas
Redworth was returned to Parliament by a stout majority for the Borough
of Orrybridge: the Hon. Percy Dacier delivered a brilliant speech in the
House of Commons, necessarily pleasing to his uncle: Lord Larrian
obtained the command of the Rock: the house of The Crossways was let
to a tenant approved by Mr. Braddock: Diana received the opening proof-
sheets of her little volume, and an instalment of the modest honorarium:
and finally, the Plaintiff in the suit involving her name was adjudged to
have not proved his charge.
She heard of it without a change of countenance.
She could not have wished it the reverse; she was exonerated. But she
was not free; far from that; and she revenged herself on the friends who
made much of her triumph and overlooked her plight, by showing no sign of
satisfaction. There was in her bosom a revolt at the legal consequences
of the verdict--or blunt acquiescence of the Law in the conditions
possibly to be imposed on her unless she went straight to the relieving
phial; and the burden of keeping it under, set her wildest humour alight,
somewhat as Redworth remembered of her on the journey from The Crossways
to Copsley. This ironic fury, coming of the contrast of the outer and
the inner, would have been indulged to the extent of permanent injury to
her disposition had not her beloved Emma, immediately after the tension
of the struggle ceased, required her tenderest aid. Lady Dunstane
chanted victory, and at night collapsed. By the advice of her physician
she was removed to Copsley, where Diana's labour of anxious nursing
restored her through love to a saner spirit. The hopefulness of life
must bloom again in the heart whose prayers are offered for a life dearer
than its own to be preserved. A little return of confidence in Sir Lukin
also refreshed her when she saw that the poor creature did honestly, in
his shaggy rough male fashion, reverence and cling to the flower of souls
he named as his wife. His piteous groans of self-accusation during the
crisis haunted her, and made the conduct and nature of men a bewilderment
to her still young understanding. Save for the knot of her sensations
(hardly a mental memory, but a sullen knot) which she did not disentangle
to charge him with his complicity in the blind rashness of her marriage,
she might have felt sisterly, as warmly as she compassionated him.
It was midwinter when Dame Gossip, who keeps the exotic world alive with
her fanning whispers, related that the lovely Mrs. Warwick had left
England on board the schooner-yacht Clarissa, with Lord and Lady Esquart,
for a voyage in the Mediterranean: and (behind her hand) that the reason
was urgent, inasmuch as she fled to escape the meshes of the terrific net
of the marital law brutally whirled to capture her by the man her
husband.
CHAPTER XV
INTRODUCES THE HON. PERCY DACIER
The Gods of this world's contests, against whom our poor stripped
individual is commonly in revolt, are, as we know, not miners, they
are reapers; and if we appear no longer on the surface, they cease to
bruise us: they will allow an arena character to be cleansed and made
presentable while enthusiastic friends preserve discretion. It is
of course less than magnanimity; they are not proposed to you for your
worship; they are little Gods, temporary as that great wave, their parent
human mass of the hour. But they have one worshipful element in them,
which is, the divine insistency upon there being two sides to a case
--to every case. And the People so far directed by them may boast of
healthfulness. Let the individual shriek, the innocent, triumphant,
have in honesty to admit the fact. One side is vanquished, according
to decree of Law, but the superior Council does not allow it to be
extinguished.
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