Diana of the Crossways, v4

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[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
entire meal of them. D.W.]

DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS

By George Meredith

1897

BOOK 4.

XXVII. CONTAINS MATTER FOR SUBSEQUENT EXPLOSION
XXVIII. DIALOGUE ROUND THE SUBJECT OF A PORTRAIT, WITH SOME INDICATIONS
OF THE TASK FOR DIANA
XXIX. SHOWS THE APPROACHES OF THE POLITICAL AND THE DOMESTIC CRISIS
IN COMPANY
XXX. IN WHICH THERE IS A TASTE OF A LITTLE DINNER AND AN AFTERTASTE
XXXI. A CHAPTER CONTAINING GREAT POLITICAL NEWS AND THEREWITH AN
INTRUSION OF THE LOVE-GOD
XXXII. WHEREIN WE BEHOLD A GIDDY TURN AT THE SPECTRAL CROSSWAYS
XXXIII. EXHIBITS THE SPRINGING OF A MINE IN A NEWSPAPER ARTICLE
XXXIV. IN WHICH IT IS DARKLY SEEN HOW THE CRIMINAL'S JUDGE MAY BE
LOVE'S CRIMINAL
XXXV. REVEALS HOW THE TRUE HEROINE OF ROMANCE COMES FINALLY TO HER
TIME OF TRIUMPH

CHAPTER XXVII

CONTAINS MATTER FOR SUBSEQUENT EXPLOSION

Among the various letters inundating Sir Lukin Dunstane upon the report
of the triumph of surgical skill achieved by Sir William Macpherson and
Mr. Lanyan Thomson, was one from Lady Wathin, dated Adlands, an estate of
Mr. Quintin Manx's in Warwickshire, petitioning for the shortest line of
reassurance as to the condition of her dear cousin, and an intimation of
the period when it might be deemed possible for a relative to call and
offer her sincere congratulations: a letter deserving a personal reply,
one would suppose. She received the following, in a succinct female hand
corresponding to its terseness; every 't' righteously crossed, every 'i'
punctiliously dotted, as she remarked to Constance Asper, to whom the
communication was transferred for perusal:

'DEAR LADY WATHIN,--Lady Dunstane is gaining strength. The measure
of her pulse indicates favourably. She shall be informed in good
time of your solicitude for her recovery. The day cannot yet be
named for visits of any kind. You will receive information as soon
as the house is open.

'I have undertaken the task of correspondence, and beg you to
believe me,

'Very truly yours,
'D. A. WARWICK.'

Miss Asper speculated on the handwriting of her rival. She obtained
permission to keep the letter, with the intention of transmitting it per
post to an advertising interpreter of character in caligraphy.

Such was the character of the fair young heiress, exhibited by her
performances much more patently than the run of a quill would reveal it.

She said, 'It is rather a pretty hand, I think.'

'Mrs. Warwick is a practised writer,' said Lady Wathin. 'Writing is her
profession, if she has any. She goes to nurse my cousin. Her husband
says she is an excellent nurse. He says what he can for her. But you
must be in the last extremity, or she is ice. His appeal to her has been
totally disregarded. Until he drops down in the street, as his doctor
expects him to do some day, she will continue her course; and even
then . . .' An adventuress desiring her freedom! Lady Wathin looked.
She was too devout a woman to say what she thought. But she knew the
world to be very wicked. Of Mrs. Warwick, her opinion was formed. She
would not have charged the individual creature with a criminal design;
all she did was to stuff the person her virtue abhorred with the
wickedness of the world, and that is a common process in antipathy.

She sympathized, moreover, with the beautiful devotedness of the wealthy
heiress to her ideal of man. It had led her to make the acquaintance of
old Lady Dacier, at the house in town, where Constance Asper had first
met Percy; Mrs. Grafton Winstanley's house, representing neutral
territory or debateable land for the occasional intercourse of the upper
class and the climbing in the professions or in commerce; Mrs. Grafton
Winstanley being on the edge of aristocracy by birth, her husband, like
Mr. Quintin Manx, a lord of fleets. Old Lady Dacier's bluntness in
speaking of her grandson would have shocked Lady Wathin as much as it
astonished, had she been less of an ardent absorber of aristocratic
manners. Percy was plainly called a donkey, for hanging off and on with
a handsome girl of such expectations as Miss Asper. 'But what you can't
do with a horse, you can't hope to do with a donkey.' She added that she
had come for the purpose of seeing the heiress, of whose points of person
she delivered a judgement critically appreciative as a horsefancier's on
the racing turf. 'If a girl like that holds to it, she's pretty sure to
get him at last. It 's no use to pull his neck down to the water.'

Lady Wathin delicately alluded to rumours of an entanglement, an
admiration he had, ahem.

'A married woman,' the veteran nodded. 'I thought that was off? She
must be a clever intriguer to keep him so long.'

'She is undoubtedly clever,' said Lady Wathin, and it was mumbled in her
hearing: 'The woman seems to have a taste for our family.'

They agreed that they could see nothing to be done. The young lady must
wither, Mrs. Warwick have her day. The veteran confided her experienced
why to Lady Wathin: 'All the tales you tell of a woman of that sort are
sharp sauce to the palates of men.'

They might be, to the men of the dreadful gilded idle class!

Mrs. Warwick's day appeared indefinitely prolonged, judging by Percy
Dacier's behaviour to Miss Asper. Lady Wathin watched them narrowly when
she had the chance, a little ashamed of her sex, or indignant rather at
his display of courtliness in exchange for her open betrayal of her
preference. It was almost to be wished that she would punish him by
sacrificing herself to one of her many brilliant proposals of marriage.
But such are women!--precisely because of his holding back he tightened
the cord attaching him to her tenacious heart. This was the truth. For
the rest, he was gracefully courteous; an observer could perceive the
charm he exercised. He talked with a ready affability, latterly with
greater social ease; evidently not acting the indifferent conqueror, or
so consummately acting it as to mask the air. And yet he was ambitious,
and he was not rich. Notoriously was he ambitious, and with wealth to
back him, a great entertaining house, troops of adherents, he would
gather influence, be propelled to leadership. The vexation of a constant
itch to speak to him on the subject, and the recognition, that he knew it
all as well as she, tormented Lady Wathin. He gave her comforting news
of her dear cousin in the Winter.

'You have heard from Mrs. Warwick?' she said.

He replied, 'I had the latest from Mr. Redworth.'

'Mrs. Warwick has relinquished her post?'

'When she does, you may be sure that Lady Dunstane is, perfectly
reestablished.'

'She is an excellent nurse.'

'The best, I believe.'

'It is a good quality in sickness.'

'Proof of good all through.'

'Her husband might have the advantage of it. His state is really
pathetic. If she has feeling, and could only be made aware, she might
perhaps be persuaded to pass from the friendly to the wifely duty.'

Mr. Dacier bent his head to listen, and he bowed.

He was fast in the toils; and though we have assurance that evil cannot
triumph in perpetuity, the aspect of it throning provokes a kind of
despair. How strange if ultimately the lawyers once busy about the uncle
were to take up the case of the nephew, and this time reverse the issue,
by proving it! For poor Mr. Warwick was emphatic on the question of his
honour. It excited him dangerously. He was long-suffering, but with the
slightest clue terrible. The unknotting of the entanglement might thus
happen--and Constance Asper would welcome her hero still.

Meanwhile there was actually nothing to be done: a deplorable absence of
motive villainy; apparently an absence of the beneficent Power directing
events to their proper termination. Lady Wathin heard of her cousin's
having been removed to Cowes in May, for light Solent and Channel voyages
on board Lord Esquart's yacht. She heard also of heavy failures and
convulsions in the City of London, quite unconscious that the Fates, or
agents of the Providence she invoked to precipitate the catastrophe, were
then beginning cavernously their performance of the part of villain in
Diana's history.

Diana and Emma enjoyed happy quiet sailings under May breezes on the
many-coloured South-western waters, heart in heart again; the physical
weakness of the one, the moral weakness of the other, creating that
mutual dependency which makes friendship a pulsating tie. Diana's
confession had come of her letter to Emma. When the latter was able to
examine her correspondence, Diana brought her the heap for perusal, her
own sealed scribble, throbbing with all the fatal might-have-been, under
her eyes. She could have concealed and destroyed it. She sat beside her
friend, awaiting her turn, hearing her say at the superscription: 'Your
writing, Tony?' and she nodded. She was asked: 'Shall I read it?' She
answered: 'Read.' They were soon locked in an embrace. Emma had no
perception of coldness through those brief dry lines; her thought was of
the matter.

'The danger is over now?' she said.

'Yes, that danger is over now.'

'You have weathered it?'

'I love him.'

Emma dropped a heavy sigh in pity of her, remotely in compassion for
Redworth, the loving and unbeloved. She was too humane and wise of our
nature to chide her Tony for having her sex's heart. She had charity to
bestow on women; in defence of them against men and the world, it was a
charity armed with the weapons of battle. The wife madly stripped before
the world by a jealous husband, and left chained to the rock, her youth
wasting, her blood arrested, her sensibilities chilled and assailing her
under their multitudinous disguises, and for whom the world is merciless,
called forth Emma's tenderest commiseration; and that wife being Tony,
and stricken with the curse of love, in other circumstances the blessing,
Emma bled for her.

'But nothing desperate?' she said.

'No; you have saved me.'

'I would knock at death's doors again, and pass them, to be sure of
that.'

'Kiss me; you may be sure. I would not put my lips to your cheek if
there were danger of my faltering.'

'But you love him.'

'I do: and because I love him I will not let him be fettered to me.'

'You will see him.'

'Do not imagine that his persuasions undermined your Tony. I am subject
to panics.'

'Was it your husband?'

'I had a visit from Lady Wathin. She knows him. She came as peacemaker.
She managed to hint at his authority. Then came a letter from him--of
supplication, interpenetrated with the hint: a suffused atmosphere. Upon
that; unexpected by me, my--let me call him so once, forgive me!--lover
came. Oh! he loves me, or did then. Percy! He had been told that I
should be claimed. I felt myself the creature I am--a wreck of marriage.
But I fancied I could serve him:--I saw golden. My vanity was the chief
traitor. Cowardice of course played a part. In few things that we do,
where self is concerned, will cowardice not be found. And the
hallucination colours it to seem a lovely heroism. That was the second
time Mr. Redworth arrived. I am always at crossways, and he rescues me;
on this occasion unknowingly.'

'There's a divinity . . .' said Emma. ' When I think of it I perceive
that Patience is our beneficent fairy godmother, who brings us our
harvest in the long result.'

'My dear, does she bring us our labourers' rations, to sustain us for the
day?' said Diana.'

'Poor fare, but enough.'

'I fear I was born godmotherless.'

'You have stores of patience, Tony; only now and then fits of
desperation.'

'My nature's frailty, the gap in it: we will give it no fine names
--they cover our pitfalls. I am open to be carried on a tide of
unreasonableness when the coward cries out. But I can say, dear, that
after one rescue, a similar temptation is unlikely to master me. I do
not subscribe to the world's decrees for love of the monster, though I am
beginning to understand the dues of allegiance. We have ceased to write
letters. You may have faith in me.'

'I have, with my whole soul,' said Emma.

So the confession closed; and in the present instance there were not any
forgotten chambers to be unlocked and ransacked for addenda confessions.

The subjects discoursed of by the two endeared the hours to them. They
were aware that the English of the period would have laughed a couple of
women to scorn for venturing on them, and they were not a little hostile
in consequence, and shot their epigrams profusely, applauding the keener
that appeared to score the giant bulk of their intolerant enemy, who
holds the day, but not the morrow. Us too he holds for the day, to
punish us if we have temporal cravings. He scatters his gifts to the
abject; tossing to us rebels bare dog-biscuit. But the life of the
spirit is beyond his region; we have our morrow in his day when we crave
nought of him. Diana and Emma delighted to discover that they were each
the rebel of their earlier and less experienced years; each a member of
the malcontent minor faction, the salt of earth, to whom their salt must
serve for nourishment, as they admitted, relishing it determinedly, not
without gratification.

Sir Lukin was busy upon his estate in Scotland. They summoned young
Arthur Rhodes to the island, that he might have a taste of the new
scenes. Diana was always wishing for his instruction and refreshment;
and Redworth came to spend a Saturday and Sunday with them, and showed
his disgust of the idle boy, as usual, at the same time consulting them
on the topic of furniture for the Berkshire mansion he had recently
bought, rather vaunting the Spanish pictures his commissioner in Madrid
was transmitting. The pair of rebels, vexed by his treatment of the
respectful junior, took him for an incarnation of their enemy, and pecked
and worried the man astonishingly. He submitted to it like the placable
giant. Yes, he was a Liberal, and furnishing and decorating the house in
the stability of which he trusted. Why not? We must accept the world as
it is, try to improve it by degrees.--Not so: humanity will not wait for
you, the victims are shrieking beneath the bricks of your enormous
edifice, behind the canvas of your pictures. 'But you may really say
that luxurious yachting is an odd kind of insurgency,' avowed Diana.
'It's the tangle we are in.'

'It's the coat we have to wear; and why fret at it for being
comfortable?'

'I don't half enough, when I think of my shivering neighbours.'

'Money is of course a rough test of virtue,' said Redworth. 'We have no
other general test.'

Money! The ladies proclaimed it a mere material test; Diana, gazing on
sunny sea, with an especial disdain. And name us your sort of virtue.
There is more virtue in poverty, He denied that. Inflexibly British, he
declared money, and also the art of getting money, to be hereditary
virtues, deserving of their reward. The reward a superior wealth and its
fruits? Yes, the power to enjoy and spread enjoyment: and let idleness
envy both! He abused idleness, and by implication the dilettante
insurgency fostering it. However, he was compensatingly heterodox in his
view of the Law's persecution of women; their pertinacious harpings on
the theme had brought him to that; and in consideration of the fact, as
they looked from yacht to shore, of their being rebels participating
largely in the pleasures of the tyrant's court, they allowed him to
silence them, and forgave him.

Thoughts upon money and idleness were in confusion with Diana. She had a
household to support in London, and she was not working; she could not
touch THE CANTATRICE while Emma was near. Possibly, she again
ejaculated, the Redworths of the world were right: the fruitful labours
were with the mattock and hoe, or the mind directing them. It was a
crushing invasion of materialism, so she proposed a sail to the coast of
France, and thither they flew, touching Cherbourg, Alderney, Sark,
Guernsey, and sighting the low Brittany rocks. Memorable days to Arthur
Rhodes. He saw perpetually the one golden centre in new scenes. He
heard her voice, he treasured her sayings; her gestures, her play of lip
and eyelid, her lift of head, lightest movements, were imprinted on him,
surely as the heavens are mirrored in the quiet seas, firmly and richly
as earth answers to the sprinkled grain. For he was blissfully athirst,
untroubled by a hope. She gave him more than she knew of: a present that
kept its beating heart into the future; a height of sky, a belief in
nobility, permanent through manhood down to age. She was his foam-born
Goddess of those leaping waters; differently hued, crescented,
a different influence. He had a happy week, and it charmed Diana to hear
him tell her so. In spite of Redworth, she had faith in the fruit-
bearing powers of a time of simple happiness, and shared the youth's in
reflecting it. Only the happiness must be simple, that of the glass to
the lovely face: no straining of arms to retain, no heaving of the bosom
in vacancy.

His poverty and capacity for pure enjoyment led her to think of him
almost clingingly when hard news reached her from the quaint old City of
London, which despises poverty and authorcraft and all mean adventurers,
and bows to the lordly merchant, the mighty financier, Redworth's
incarnation of the virtues. Happy days on board the yacht Clarissa!
Diana had to recall them with effort. They who sow their money for a
promising high percentage have built their habitations on the sides of
the most eruptive mountain in Europe. AEtna supplies more certain
harvests, wrecks fewer vineyards and peaceful dwellings. The greed of
gain is our volcano. Her wonder leapt up at the slight inducement she
had received to embark her money in this Company: a South-American mine,
collapsed almost within hearing of the trumpets of prospectus, after two
punctual payments of the half-yearly interest. A Mrs. Ferdinand Cherson,
an elder sister of the pretty Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett, had talked to her of
the cost of things one afternoon at Lady Singleby's garden-party, and
spoken of the City as the place to help to swell an income, if only you
have an acquaintance with some of the chief City men. The great mine was
named, and the rush for allotments. She knew a couple of the Directors.
They vowed to her that ten per cent. was a trifle; the fortune to be
expected out of the mine was already clearly estimable at forties and
fifties. For their part they anticipated cent. per cent. Mrs. Cherson
said she wanted money, and had therefore invested in the mine. It seemed
so consequent, the cost of things being enormous! She and her sister
Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett owned husbands who did their bidding, because of their
having the brains, it might be understood. Thus five thousand pounds
invested would speedily bring five thousand pounds per annum. Diana had
often dreamed of the City of London as the seat of magic; and taking the
City's contempt for authorcraft and the intangible as, from its point of
view, justly founded, she had mixed her dream strangely with an ancient
notion of the City's probity. Her broker's shaking head did not damp her
ardour for shares to the full amount of her ability to purchase. She
remembered her satisfaction at the allotment; the golden castle shot up
from this fountain mine. She had a frenzy for mines and fished in some
English with smaller sums. 'I am now a miner,' she had exclaimed,
between dismay at her audacity and the pride of it. Why had she not
consulted Redworth? He would peremptorily have stopped the frenzy in its
first intoxicating effervescence. She, like Mrs. Cherson, like all women
who have plunged upon the cost of things, wanted money. She naturally
went to the mine. Address him for counsel in the person of dupe, she
could not; shame was a barrier. Could she tell him that the prattle of
a woman, spendthrift as Mrs. Cherson, had induced her to risk her money?
Latterly the reports of Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett were not of the flavour to
make association of their names agreeable to his hearing.

She had to sit down in the buzz of her self-reproaches and amazement at
the behaviour of that reputable City, shrug, and recommence the labour of
her pen. Material misfortune had this one advantage; it kept her from
speculative thoughts of her lover, and the meaning of his absence and,
silence.

Diana's perusal of the incomplete CANTATRICE was done with the cold
critical eye interpreting for the public. She was forced to write on
nevertheless, and exactly in the ruts of the foregoing matter. It
propelled her. No longer perversely, of necessity she wrote her best,
convinced that the work was doomed to unpopularity, resolved that it
should be at least a victory in style. A fit of angry cynicism now and
then set her composing phrases as baits for the critics to quote,
condemnatory of the attractiveness of the work. Her mood was bad. In
addition, she found Whitmonby cool; he complained of the coolness of her
letter of adieu; complained of her leaving London so long. How could she
expect to be his Queen of the London Salon if she lost touch of the
topics? He made no other allusion. They were soon on amicable terms, at
the expense of flattering arts that she had not hitherto practised. But
Westlake revealed unimagined marvels of the odd corners of the masculine
bosom. He was the man of her circle the neatest in epigram, the widest
of survey, an Oriental traveller, a distinguished writer, and if not
personally bewitching, remarkably a gentleman of the world. He was
wounded; he said as much. It came to this: admitting that he had no
claims, he declared it to be unbearable for him to see another preferred.
The happier was unmentioned, and Diana scraped his wound by rallying him.
He repeated that he asked only to stand on equal terms with the others;
her preference of one was past his tolerance. She told him that since
leaving Lady Dunstane she had seen but Whitmonby, Wilmers, and him. He
smiled sarcastically, saying he had never had a letter from her, except
the formal one of invitation.

'Powers of blarney, have you forsaken a daughter of Erin?' cried Diana.
'Here is a friend who has a craving for you, and I talk sense to him. I
have written to none of my set since I last left London.'

She pacified him by doses of cajolery new to her tongue. She liked him,
abhorred the thought of losing any of her friends, so the cajoling
sentences ran until Westlake betrayed an inflammable composition,
and had to be put out, and smoked sullenly. Her resources were tried
in restoring him to reason. The months of absence from London appeared
to have transformed her world. Tonans was moderate. The great editor
rebuked her for her prolonged absence from London, not so much because it
discrowned her as Queen of the Salon, but candidly for its rendering her
service less to him. Everything she knew of men and affairs was to him
stale.

'How do you get to the secrets?' she asked.

'By sticking to the centre of them,' he said.

'But how do you manage to be in advance and act the prophet?'

'Because I will have them at any price, and that is known.'

She hinted at the peccant City Company.

'I think I have checked the mining mania, as I did the railway,' said he;
'and so far it was a public service. There's no checking of maniacs.'

She took her whipping within and without. 'On another occasion I shall
apply to you, Mr. Tonans.'

'Ah, there was a time when you could have been a treasure to me,' he
rejoined; alluding of course to the Dannisburgh days.

In dejection, as she mused on those days, and on her foolish ambition
to have a London house where her light might burn, she advised herself,
with Redworth's voice, to quit the house, arrest expenditure, and try
for happiness by burning and shining in the spirit: devoting herself,
as Arthur Rhodes did, purely to literature. It became almost a decision.

Percy she had still neither written to nor heard from, and she dared not
hope to meet him. She fancied a wish to have tidings of his marriage: it
would be peace; if in desolation. Now that she had confessed and given
her pledge to Emma, she had so far broken with him as to render the
holding him chained a cruelty, and his reserve whispered of a rational
acceptance of the end between them. She thanked him for it; an act
whereby she was: instantly melted to such softness that a dread of him
haunted her. Coward, take up your burden for armour! she called to her
poor dungeoned self wailing to have common nourishment. She knew how
prodigiously it waxed on crumbs; nay, on the imagination of small
morsels. By way of chastizing it, she reviewed her life, her behaviour
to her husband, until she sank backward to a depth deprived of air and
light. That life with her husband was a dungeon to her nature deeper
than any imposed by present conditions. She was then a revolutionary to
reach to the breath of day. She had now to be, only not a coward, and
she could breathe as others did. 'Women who sap the moral laws pull down
the pillars of the temple on their sex,' Emma had said. Diana perceived
something of her personal debt to civilization. Her struggles passed
into the doomed CANTATRICE occupying days and nights under pressure for
immediate payment; the silencing of friend Debit, ridiculously calling
himself Credit, in contempt of sex and conduct, on the ground, that he
was he solely by virtue of being she. He had got a trick of singing
operatic solos in the form and style of the delightful tenor Tellio, and
they were touching in absurdity, most real in unreality. Exquisitely
trilled, after Tellio's manner,

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