Diana of the Crossways, v3
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George Meredith >> Diana of the Crossways, v3
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'Certainly, if you care to have a common buttercup.'
They reached the station, five minutes in advance of the train. His
coming manoeuvre was early detected, and she drew from her pocket the
little book he had seen lying unopened on the table, and said: 'I shall
have two good hours for reading.'
'You will not object? . . . I must accompany you to town. Permit it,
I beg. You shall not be worried to talk.'
'No; I came alone and return alone.'
'Fasting and unprotected! Are you determined to take away the worst
impression of us? Do not refuse me this favour.'
'As to fasting, I could not eat: and unprotected no woman is in England,
if she is a third-class traveller. That is my experience of the class;
and I shall return among my natural protectors--the most unselfishly
chivalrous to women in the whole world.'
He had set his heart on going with her, and he attempted eloquence in
pleading, but that exposed him to her humour; he was tripped.
'It is not denied that you belong to the knightly class,' she said; 'and
it is not necessary that you should wear armour and plumes to proclaim
it; and your appearance would be ample protection from the drunken
sailors travelling, you say, on this line; and I may be deplorably
mistaken in imagining that I could tame them. But your knightliness is
due elsewhere; and I commit myself to the fortune of war. It is a battle
for women everywhere; under the most favourable conditions among my dear
common English. I have not my maid with me, or else I should not dare.'
She paid for a third-class ticket, amused by Dacier's look of entreaty
and trouble.
'Of course I obey,' he murmured.
'I have the habit of exacting it in matters concerning my independence,'
she said; and it arrested some rumbling notions in his head as to a piece
of audacity on the starting of the train. They walked up and down the
platform till the bell rang and the train came rounding beneath an arch.
'Oh, by the way, may I ask?'--he said: 'was it your article in
Whitmonby's journal on a speech of mine last week?'
'The guilty writer is confessed.'
'Let me thank you.'
'Don't. But try to believe it written on public grounds--if the task is
not too great.'
'I may call?'
'You will be welcome.'
'To tell you of the funeral--the last of him.'
'Do not fail to come.'
She could have laughed to see him jumping on the steps of the third-class
carriages one after another to choose her company for her. In those pre-
democratic blissful days before the miry Deluge, the opinion of the
requirements of poor English travellers entertained by the Seigneur
Directors of the class above them, was that they differed from cattle in
stipulating for seats. With the exception of that provision to suit
their weakness, the accommodation extended to them resembled pens, and
the seats were emphatically seats of penitence, intended to grind the
sitter for his mean pittance payment and absence of aspiration to a
higher state. Hard angular wood, a low roof, a shabby square of window
aloof, demanding of him to quit the seat he insisted on having, if he
would indulge in views of the passing scenery,--such was the furniture of
dens where a refinement of castigation was practised on villain poverty
by denying leathers to the windows, or else buttons to the leathers, so
that the windows had either to be up or down, but refused to shelter and
freshen simultaneously.
Dacier selected a compartment occupied by two old women, a mother and
babe and little maid, and a labouring man. There he installed her, with
an eager look that she would not notice.
'You will want the window down,' he said.
She applied to her fellow-travellers for the permission; and struggling
to get the window down, he was irritated to animadvert on 'these
carriages' of the benevolent railway Company.
'Do not forget that the wealthy are well treated, or you may be unjust,'
said she, to pacify him.
His mouth sharpened its line while he tried arts and energies on the
refractory window. She told him to leave it. 'You can't breathe this
atmosphere!' he cried, and called to a porter, who did the work,
remarking that it was rather stiff.
The door was banged and fastened. Dacier had to hang on the step to see
her in the farewell. From the platform he saw the top of her bonnet; and
why she should have been guilty of this freak of riding in an unwholesome
carriage, tasked his power of guessing. He was too English even to have
taken the explanation, for he detested the distinguishing of the races in
his country, and could not therefore have comprehended her peculiar
tenacity of the sense of injury as long as enthusiasm did not arise to
obliterate it. He required a course of lessons in Irish.
Sauntering down the lane, he called at Simon Rofe's cottage, and spoke
very kindly to the gamekeeper's wife. That might please Diana. It was
all he could do at present.
CHAPTER XXI
'THE YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE'
Descriptions in the newspapers of the rural funeral of Lord Dannisburgh
had the effect of rousing flights of tattlers with a twittering of the
disused name of Warwick; our social Gods renewed their combat, and the
verdict of the jury was again overhauled, to be attacked and maintained,
the carpers replying to the champions that they held to their view of it:
as heads of bull-dogs are expected to do when they have got a grip of
one. It is a point of muscular honour with them never to relax their
hold. They will tell you why:--they formed that opinion from the first.
And but for the swearing of a particular witness, upon whom the plaintiff
had been taught to rely, the verdict would have been different--to prove
their soundness of judgement. They could speak from private positive
information of certain damnatory circumstances, derived from authentic
sources. Visits of a gentleman to the house of a married lady in the
absence of the husband? Oh!--The British Lucretia was very properly not
legally at home to the masculine world of that day. She plied her
distaff in pure seclusion, meditating on her absent lord; or else a fair
proportion of the masculine world, which had not yet, has not yet,
'doubled Cape Turk,' approved her condemnation to the sack.
There was talk in the feminine world, at Lady Wathin's assemblies. The
elevation of her husband had extended and deepened her influence on the
levels where it reigned before, but without, strange as we may think it
now, assisting to her own elevation, much aspired for, to the smooth and
lively upper pavement of Society, above its tumbled strata. She was near
that distinguished surface, not on it. Her circle was practically the
same as it was previous to the coveted nominal rank enabling her to
trample on those beneath it. And women like that Mrs. Warwick, a woman
of no birth, no money, not even honest character, enjoyed the entry
undisputed, circulated among the highest:--because people took her rattle
for wit!--and because also our nobility, Lady Wathin feared, had no due
regard for morality. Our aristocracy, brilliant and ancient though it
was, merited rebuke. She grew severe upon aristocratic scandals, whereof
were plenty among the frolicsome host just overhead, as vexatious as the
drawing-room party to the lodger in the floor below, who has not received
an invitation to partake of the festivities and is required to digest the
noise. But if ambition is oversensitive, moral indignation is ever
consolatory, for it plants us on the Judgement Seat. There indeed we
may, sitting with the very Highest, forget our personal disappointments
in dispensing reprobation for misconduct, however eminent the offenders.
She was Lady Wathin, and once on an afternoon's call to see poor Lady
Dunstane at her town-house, she had been introduced to Lady Pennon, a
patroness of Mrs. Warwick, and had met a snub--an icy check-bow of the
aristocratic head from the top of the spinal column, and not a word, not
a look; the half-turn of a head devoid of mouth and eyes! She practised
that forbidding checkbow herself to perfection, so the endurance of it
was horrible. A noli me tangere, her husband termed it, in his
ridiculous equanimity; and he might term it what he pleased--it was
insulting. The solace she had was in hearing that hideous Radical
Revolutionary things were openly spoken at Mrs. Warwick's evenings with
her friends:--impudently named 'the elect of London.' Pleasing to
reflect upon Mrs. Warwick as undermining her supporters, to bring them
some day down with a crash! Her 'elect of London' were a queer
gathering, by report of them! And Mr. Whitmonby too, no doubt a
celebrity, was the right-hand man at these dinner-parties of Mrs.
Warwick. Where will not men go to be flattered by a pretty woman! He
had declined repeated, successive invitations to Lady Wathin's table.
But there of course he would not have had 'the freedom': that is, she
rejoiced in thinking defensively and offensively, a moral wall enclosed
her topics. The Hon. Percy Dacier had been brought to her Thursday
afternoon by. Mr. Quintin Manx, and he had one day dined with her; and
he knew Mrs. Warwick--a little, he said. The opportunity was not lost to
convey to him, entirely in the interest of sweet Constance Asper, that
the moral world entertained a settled view of the very clever woman Mrs.
Warwick certainly was. He had asked Diana, on their morning walk to the
station, whether she had an enemy: so prone are men, educated by the
Drama and Fiction in the belief that the garden of civilized life must be
at the mercy of the old wild devourers, to fancy 'villain whispers' an
indication of direct animosity. Lady Wathin had no sentiment of the
kind.
But she had become acquainted with the other side of the famous
Dannisburgh case--the unfortunate plaintiff; and compassion as well as
morality moved her to put on a speaking air when Mr. Warwick's name was
mentioned. She pictured him to the ladies of her circle as 'one of our
true gentlemen in his deportment and his feelings.' He was, she would
venture to say, her ideal of an English gentleman. 'But now,' she added
commiseratingly, 'ruined; ruined in his health and in his prospects.'
A lady inquired if it was the verdict that had thus affected him. Lady
Wathin's answer was reported over moral, or substratum, London: 'He is
the victim of a fatal passion for his wife; and would take her back to-
morrow were she to solicit his forgiveness.' Morality had something to
say against this active marital charity, attributable, it was to be
feared, to weakness of character on the part of the husband. Still Mrs.
Warwick undoubtedly was one of those women (of Satanic construction) who
have the art of enslaving the men unhappy enough to cross their path.
The nature of the art was hinted, with the delicacy of dainty feet which
have to tread in mire to get to safety. Men, alas! are snared in this
way. Instances too numerous for the good repute of the swinish sex,
were cited, and the question of how Morality was defensible from their
grossness passed without a tactical reply. There is no defence: Those
women come like the Cholera Morbus--and owing to similar causes. They
will prevail until the ideas of men regarding women are purified.
Nevertheless the husband who could forgive, even propose to forgive, was
deemed by consent generous, however weak. Though she might not have been
wholly guilty, she had bitterly offended. And he despatched an emissary
to her?--The theme, one may, in their language, 'fear,' was relished as a
sugared acid. It was renewed in the late Autumn of the year, when
ANTONIA published her new book, entitled THE YOUNG MINISTER of STATE.
The signature of the authoress was now known; and from this resurgence of
her name in public, suddenly a radiation of tongues from the circle of
Lady Wathin declared that the repentant Mrs. Warwick had gone back to her
husband's bosom and forgiveness! The rumour spread in spite of sturdy
denials at odd corners, counting the red-hot proposal of Mr. Sullivan
Smith to eat his head and boots for breakfast if it was proved correct.
It filled a yawn of the Clubs for the afternoon. Soon this wanton rumour
was met and stifled by another of more morbific density, heavily charged
as that which led the sad Eliza to her pyre.
ANTONIA's hero was easily identified. THE YOUNG MINISTER of STATE could
be he only who was now at all her parties, always meeting her; had been
spied walking with her daily in the park near her house, on his march
down to Westminster during the session; and who positively went to
concerts and sat under fiddlers to be near her. It accounted moreover
for his treatment of Constance Asper. What effrontery of the authoress,
to placard herself with him in a book! The likeness of the hero to Percy
Dacier once established became striking to glaringness--a proof of her
ability, and more of her audacity; still more of her intention to flatter
him up to his perdition. By the things written of him, one would imagine
the conversations going on behind the scenes. She had the wiles of a
Cleopatra, not without some of the Nilene's experiences. A youthful
Antony Dacier would be little likely to escape her toils. And so
promising a young man! The sigh, the tear for weeping over his
destruction, almost fell, such vivid realizing of the prophesy
appeared in its pathetic pronouncement.
This low rumour, or malaria, began blowing in the winter, and did not
travel fast; for strangely, there was hardly a breath of it in the
atmosphere of Dacier, none in Diana's. It rose from groups not so
rapidly and largely mixing, and less quick to kindle; whose crazy
sincereness battened on the smallest morsel of fact and collected the
fictitious by slow absorption. But as guardians of morality, often doing
good duty in their office, they are persistent. When Parliament
assembled, Mr. Quintin Manx, a punctual member of the House, if nothing
else, arrived in town. He was invited to dine with Lady Wathin. After
dinner she spoke to him of the absent Constance, and heard of her being
well, and expressed a great rejoicing at that. Whereupon the burly old
shipowner frowned and puffed. Constance, he said, had plunged into these
new spangle, candle and high singing services; was all for symbols,
harps, effigies, what not. Lady Wathin's countenance froze in hearing of
it. She led Mr. Quintin to a wall-sofa, and said: 'Surely the dear child
must have had a disappointment, for her to have taken to those foolish
displays of religion! It is generally a sign.'
'Well, ma'am-my lady--I let girls go their ways in such things. I don't
interfere. But it's that fellow, or nobody, with her. She has fixed her
girl's mind on him, and if she can't columbine as a bride, she will as a
nun. Young people must be at some harlequinade.'
'But it is very shocking. And he?'
'He plays last and loose, warm and cold. I'm ready to settle twenty
times a nobleman's dowry on my niece and she's a fine girl, a handsome
girl, educated up to the brim, fit to queen it in any drawing-room. He
holds her by some arts that don't hold him, it seems. He's all for
politics.'
'Constance can scarcely be his dupe so far, I should think.'
'How do you mean?'
'Everything points to one secret of his conduct.'
'A woman?'
Lady Wathin's head shook for her sex's pained affirmative.
Mr. Quintin in the same fashion signified the downright negative. 'The
fellow's as cold as a fish.'
'Flattery will do anything. There is, I fear, one.'
'Widow? wife? maid?'
'Married, I regret to say.'
'Well, if he'd get over with it,' said Quintin, in whose notions the
seductiveness of a married woman could be only temporary, for all the
reasons pertaining to her state. At the same time his view of Percy
Dacier was changed in thinking it possible that a woman could divert him
from his political and social interests. He looked incredulous.
'You have heard of a Mrs. Warwick?' said Lady Wathin.
'Warwick! I have. I've never seen her. At my broker's in the City
yesterday I saw the name on a Memorandum of purchase of Shares in a
concern promising ten per cent., and not likely to carry the per annum
into the plural. He told me she was a grand kind of woman, past
advising.'
'For what amount'
'Some thousands, I think it was.'
'She has no money': Lady Wathin corrected her emphasis: 'or ought to have
none.'
'She can't have got it from him.'
'Did you notice her Christian name?'
'I don't recollect it, if I did. I thought the woman a donkey.'
'Would you consider me a busybody were I to try to mitigate this woman's
evil influence? I love dear Constance, and should be happy to serve
her.'
'I want my girl married,' said old Quintin. 'He's one of my
Parliamentary chiefs, with first-rate prospects; good family, good
sober fellow--at least I thought so; by nature, I mean; barring your
incantations. He suits me, she liking him.'
'She admires him, I am sure.'
'She's dead on end for the fellow!'
Lady Wathin felt herself empowered by Quintin Manx to undertake the
release of sweet Constance Asper's knight from the toils of his
enchantress. For this purpose she had first an interview with Mr.
Warwick, and next she hurried to Lady Dunstane at Copsley. There, after
jumbling Mr. Warwick's connubial dispositions and Mrs. Warwick's last
book, and Mr. Percy Dacier's engagement to the great heiress in a gossipy
hotch-potch, she contrived to gather a few items of fact, as that THE
YOUNG MINISTER was probably modelled upon Mr. Percy Dacier. Lady
Dunstane made no concealment of it as soon as she grew sensible of the
angling. But she refused her help to any reconciliation between Mr. and
Mrs. Warwick. She declined to listen to Lady Wathin's entreaties. She
declined to give her reasons.--These bookworm women, whose pride it is to
fancy that they can think for themselves, have a great deal of the
heathen in them, as morality discovers when it wears the enlistment
ribands and applies yo them to win recruits for a service under the
direct blessing of Providence.
Lady Wathin left some darts behind her, in the form of moral
exclamations; and really intended morally. For though she did not like
Mrs. Warwick, she had no wish to wound, other than by stopping her
further studies of the Young Minister, and conducting him to the young
lady loving him, besides restoring a bereft husband to his own. How
sadly pale and worn poor Mr. Warwick appeared? The portrayal of his
withered visage to Lady Dunstane had quite failed to gain a show of
sympathy. And so it is ever with your book-worm women pretending to be
philosophical! You sound them vainly for a manifestation of the
commonest human sensibilities, They turn over the leaves of a Latin book
on their laps while you are supplicating them to assist in a work of
charity!
Lady Wathin's interjectory notes haunted Emma's ear. Yet she had seen
nothing in Tony to let her suppose that there was trouble of her heart
below the surface; and her Tony when she came to Copsley shone in the
mood of the day of Lord Dannisburgh's drive down from London with her.
She was running on a fresh work; talked of composition as a trifle.
'I suppose the YOUNG MINISTER is Mr. Percy Dacier?' said Emma.
'Between ourselves he is,' Diana replied, smiling at a secret guessed.
'You know my model and can judge of the likeness.'
'You write admiringly of him, Tony.'
'And I do admire him. So would you, Emmy, if you knew him as well as I
do now. He pairs with Mr. Redworth; he also is the friend of women. But
he lifts us to rather a higher level of intellectual friendship. When
the ice has melted--and it is thick at first--he pours forth all his
ideas without reserve; and they are deep and noble. Ever since Lord
Dannisburgh's death and our sitting together, we have been warm friends
--intimate, I would say, if it could be said of one so self-contained.
In that respect, no young man was ever comparable with him. And I am
encouraged to flatter myself that he unbends to me more than to others.'
'He is engaged, or partly, I hear; why does he not marry?'
'I wish he would!' Diana said, with a most brilliant candour of aspect.
Emma read in it, that it would complete her happiness, possibly by
fortifying her sense of security; and that seemed right. Her own
meditations, illumined by the beautiful face in her presence, referred to
the security of Mr. Dacier.
'So, then, life is going smoothly,' said Emma.
'Yes, at a good pace and smoothly: not a torrent--Thames-like, "without
o'erflowing full." It is not Lugano and the Salvatore. Perhaps it is
better: as action is better than musing.'
'No troubles whatever?'
'None. Well, except an "adorer" at times. I have to take him as my
portion. An impassioned Caledonian has a little bothered me. I met him
at Lady Pennon's, and have been meeting him, as soon as I put foot out of
my house, ever since. If I could impress and impound him to marry Mary
Paynham, I should be glad. By the way, I have consented to let her try
at a portrait of me. No, I have no troubles. I have friends, the
choicest of the nation; I have health, a field for labour, fairish
success with it; a mind alive, such as it is. I feel like that midsummer
morning of our last drive out together, the sun high, clearish, clouded
enough to be cool. And still I envy Emmy on her sofa, mastering Latin,
biting at Greek. What a wise recommendation that was of Mr. Redworth's!
He works well in the House. He spoke excellently the other night.'
'He runs over to Ireland this Easter.'
'He sees for himself, and speaks with authority. He sees and feels.
Englishmen mean well, but they require an extremity of misery to waken
their feelings.'
'It is coming, he says; and absit omen!'
'Mr. Dacier says he is the one Englishman who may always be sure of an
Irish hearing; and he does not cajole them, you know. But the English
defect is really not want of feeling so much as want of foresight. They
will not look ahead. A famine ceasing, a rebellion crushed, they jog on
as before, with their Dobbin trot and blinker confidence in "Saxon
energy." They should study the Irish: I think it was Mr. Redworth who
compared the governing of the Irish to the management of a horse: the
rider should not grow restive when the steed begins to kick: calmer;
firm, calm, persuasive.'
'Does Mr. Dacier agree?'
'Not always. He has the inveterate national belief that Celtic blood
is childish, and the consequently illogical disregard of its hold of
impressions. The Irish--for I have them in my heart, though I have not
been among them for long at a time--must love you to serve you, and will
hate you if you have done them injury and they have not wiped it out--
they with a treble revenge, or you with cordial benefits. I have told
him so again and again: ventured to suggest measures.'
'He listens to you, Tony?'
'He says I have brains. It ends in a compliment.'
'You have inspired Mr. Redworth.'
'If I have, I have lived for some good.'
Altogether her Tony's conversation proved to Emma that her perusal of the
model of THE YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE was an artist's, free, open, and not
discoloured by the personal tincture. Her heart plainly was free and
undisturbed. She had the same girl's love of her walks where wildflowers
grew; if possible, a keener pleasure. She hummed of her happiness in
being at Copsley, singing her Planxty Kelly and The Puritani by turns.
She stood on land: she was not on the seas. Emma thought so with good
reason.
She stood on land, it was true, but she stood on a cliff of the land,
the seas below and about her; and she was enabled to hoodwink her friend
because the assured sensation of her firm footing deceived her own soul,
even while it took short flights to the troubled waters. Of her firm
footing she was exultingly proud. She stood high, close to danger,
without giddiness. If at intervals her soul flew out like lightning
from the rift (a mere shot of involuntary fancy, it seemed to her),
the suspicion of instability made her draw on her treasury of impressions
of the mornings at Lugano--her loftiest, purest, dearest; and these
reinforced her. She did not ask herself why she should have to seek
them for aid. In other respects her mind was alert and held no sly
covers, as the fiction of a perfect ignorant innocence combined with
common intelligence would have us to suppose that the minds of women can
do. She was honest as long as she was not directly questioned, pierced
to the innermost and sanctum of the bosom. She could honestly summon
bright light to her eyes in wishing the man were married. She did not
ask herself why she called it up. The remorseless progressive
interrogations of a Jesuit Father in pursuit of the bosom's verity might
have transfixed it and shown her to herself even then a tossing vessel as
to the spirit, far away from that firm land she trod so bravely.
Descending from the woody heights upon London, Diana would have said that
her only anxiety concerned young Mr. Arthur Rhodes, whose position she
considered precarious, and who had recently taken a drubbing for
venturing to show a peep of his head, like an early crocus, in the
literary market. Her ANTONIA'S last book had been reviewed obediently
to smart taps from the then commanding baton of Mr. Tonans, and Mr.
Whitmonby's choice picking of specimens down three columns of his paper.
A Literary Review (Charles Rainer's property) had suggested that perhaps
'the talented authoress might be writing too rapidly'; and another,
actuated by the public taste of the period for our 'vigorous homely
Saxon' in one and two syllable words, had complained of a 'tendency to
polysyllabic phraseology.' The remainder, a full majority, had sounded
eulogy with all their band-instruments, drum, trumpet, fife, trombone.
Her foregoing work had raised her to Fame, which is the Court of a Queen
when the lady has beauty and social influence, and critics are her
dedicated courtiers, gaping for the royal mouth to be opened, and
reserving the kicks of their independent manhood for infamous outsiders,
whom they hoist in the style and particular service of pitchforks. They
had fallen upon a little volume of verse, 'like a body of barn-door hens
on a stranger chick,' Diana complained; and she chid herself angrily for
letting it escape her forethought to propitiate them on the author's
behalf. Young Rhodes was left with scarce a feather; and what remained
to him appeared a preposterous ornament for the decoration of a shivering
and welted poet. He laughed, or tried the mouth of laughter. ANTONIA's
literary conscience was vexed at the different treatment she had met and
so imperatively needed that the reverse of it would have threatened the
smooth sailing of her costly household. A merry-go-round of creditors
required a corresponding whirligig of receipts.
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